The Death of Che Guevara (13 page)

They rise and pass, my tormentors. Long ago they beat me because I was helpless; helpless, I became arrogant so they would not dare to beat me; when I was arrogant, they waited for me to be helpless, so they might beat me for my arrogance. The game goes on. The world is running motion, cries and runs, and clots of reddish light. Someone notices me. The rugby game is stopped for a moment. My teammates carry me over to the sidelines. When I come to it will be in a hospital bed. As in my childhood my father will be sitting beside me. I’ll think, brought back to ordinary life by my father’s presence,
It couldn’t have been as I thought, so much hatred in their blows. It was asthma, it was hallucination.…

The last thing I remember from before I passed out is the sound of my own wheezing, too loud, too loud, and my father’s face, leaning close to me, too close, his features distorted, enlarged, his huge hand pulsing as it clumsily, tenderly, brushes the water and blood from my face. And he is whispering, soothingly, “Good boy, son, good boy.”

I have done my utmost.

Argentina, 1952

Dear Father, I have written this letter to you over and over this last year, my last year of school, to tell you of my decision not to join you in practice. A letter—for we cannot speak to each other anymore. Yet I never stop speaking with you. So many nights here in this damp city, or while I walked in the mountains, or picked my way among the numinous stones of Peru, I spoke with you in my mind, trying to piece these things out. And your voice was always in my mind, answering me, your voice always speaking, always

Dear Father: I write this letter to you over and over in my mind, night after night. But I can’t send it to you, I can’t let you read it, and I can’t stop writing it, explaining myself to you, accusing you, justifying my ways, justifying

Dear Father, This letter is meant for you, but it will always remain with me. That is our nature: to think more than we say, to hold back, but to let everyone know, by our distant manner, that we are holding back, observing, judging. We drop their hand a moment after shaking it. We withdraw at a party, sit in a corner, not speaking, while others bob up and down in a drunken dance. Their judge, understanding all, forgiving nothing, our verdict contained in our thin-lipped smile. (My lips do it too.) We’ll forgive the drunken dancers eventually—the kind of forgiveness extended to children and countrypeople—if they’re contrite and accept our judgment of them, our right to judge.

I do not like our character. I must change. I will find the will to change. The will to change that

I will not be like you. Not in the way that is most important to you. I will not join you in practice.

When I was a child we filled my head with visions of my future glory as a doctor. Those visions (garishly colored, like cheap pictures of the saints) now live inside me. I can’t enact them, and I can’t rid myself of them.

You and I said I would be not just a doctor, but a great doctor, a Prince of Medicine. You told me stories of our country’s sickness, the diseases inflicted by poverty, by imperialism. But that misery was opportunity, was the field for my future exploits. I would cure the sickness. When I was twelve I imagined myself featured in a series of movie serials. I saw myself unobtrusively standing in line on the dirty mosaic sidewalk outside our movie theater, buying a ticket like everyone else, and sitting anonymously among the audience. A modest smile crossed my lips as I watched the very slightly exaggerated re-enactments of my achievements. Each episode was devoted to one of my discoveries. At the age of nineteen I would be the man who discovered the cure for (I kept
dropping some diseases from the list and adding others) polio, cancer, leprosy, and—always—asthma. (It was given to me not as an affliction only, but as a sign.)

And I still believed, five years ago, when I came to medical school—already a little behind in my schedule of discoveries—that I would find out something about asthma. The pain would put me intuitively in touch with some piece of knowledge about that disease, knowledge that I would recognize, because it would speak to me a truth about my own character; it would be self-knowledge.

Now I know my asthma is my pain only; it means nothing.

from a journal 3/50
The faces in the street, “nothing, nothing you can do.” Broken, even their anger gone. And what is it I wanted really by becoming a doctor? To exercise my compassion on a princely scale for these people. To discover a cure that would save thousands. And now?

I hear my father’s voice. “You know what you remind me of, Ernesto? Those monks who keep a death’s head before them, to remind themselves that the world’s a wicked place. You hold up these poor like a memento. You say, I can’t do enough for them. So I won’t do anything at all.”

—But imperialism
is
an inferno, it is the Fire of London that consumes millions. Still, he is right, of course—one must work tirelessly to do what one can
.

Father, I worked hard at medicine, though it was very difficult for me. I felt as if I were breaking my will, memorizing, sitting quietly, sitting still and solitary with my books. It’s hard for you, you told me once a week throughout my third year here, because you don’t work steadily enough. Things came too easily for you in the past. You have no staying power when things are difficult. You give up.

That was unfair. And yet, like all your words, they cut me to the heart. Or wounded my pride. For if I accepted your lifelong judgment—that I was especially gifted, a genius—then I had to accept your reasons for my difficulty: I wasn’t trying hard enough. For I could do
anything
I really wanted to.

The other students, my competitors, made me jumpy. Within a year my old comrades from the student union had fallen away from me. The times are cold, frightening. Peron has us at each other’s throats. As Mother says, tell a group of Argentine leftists to form a firing squad and they’ll make a circle. We were isolated, sullen; we could not find an action; we turned back on ourselves,
made gestures—for a while. Soon we were terrified to do even that. We talked. Afraid to demonstrate, be beaten pointlessly, sent to jail, disappear, we hid our terror from one another, and talked. Near the university there are huge billboards, pictures of Eva and the General. No words. Just enormous pictures, lit up at night. The image of our world. Outside of them there is nothing.

from a journal 6/50
Often now I am overcome with that same madness that seized me throughout my childhood. When I am in class, or walking in the city, or at one of the political meetings, I will see someone who rubs me the wrong way: perhaps he is condescending to me, or to someone else, or I simply don’t like the way he looks. I am seized by a sudden savage lightheadedness. I want to throw myself upon him, to wrench his head back, I want to humble him utterly, to tear at his skin, smash his nose till it bleeds. My head is pushed upward by anger. All I know of myself disappears suddenly into this harsh wind that makes my body tremble. I can feel my muscles strain, feel the man’s fìesh as if I were actually tearing it. The street, the room, the whole world, shakes for me, as it does during one of my attacks. I feel as if there is a terrible force inside me; if I were to turn it outward I couldn’t control it; it would surely destroy someone. The wind would shake him, shake the world, to bits
.

I became arrogant, rude, made others nervous by my anxiety, my knifing mean sentences, my fingers twisting my hair into knots and ripping the knots away, my foot tapping out the desperation samba. My old friendships had been grounded in their admiration for me. I was hard to admire now.

from a journal 9/50 Operating
theater.
They bring patients before us as if the whole thing were a show staged for our benefit, to gratify our already bloated egos
.

And how cowed the sick are before us, the men in the white jackets. The men who will cure them. The men who will judge them. Judges like my father and I: doctors. Even if you don’t intend it the moralism invades your manner. Disease is a sign against the patient, it is his fault. We
know
better. We explain and treat the disease physically. But it always has an unacknowledged phantom dimension, a moral, a spiritual dimension: his soul. For if there weren’t this fault in the patient’s soul, if there weren’t his culpability, his complicity in his disease, then the world would be too senseless a place. The suffering would be too pointless, too out of control, for us to bear it
.

So without even knowing what we are doing we affix responsibility for his sickness on the patient, we give coherence to the world. He has sinned, he has fallen. (My asthma had to be my mother’s fault. Or it had to be a sign.
)

Perhaps the patient wants the coherence too. It gives him the illusion he has power over his own life, that somehow he did this to himself, brought this suffering on himself by his own bad character
.

In any case, the white coat, the distant, scientific manner terrify him into accepting our judgment. It’s terrified everyone in my father’s life. (Except Mother.
)

So much that I had thought of as his character is really his role. The doctors who train us are like him at his worst, cranky, bad tempered if their judgment is questioned. And like him they often fìnd things wanting. Why don’t things stay under control, obedient? Why does she chew so loudly when she knows it annoys him? Why is his home so disordered?

It has a terrible price. He’s in control of his own life, responsible. He is as exacting and severe with himself as with the patients. So many afternoons he simply withdrew from us, not speaking at meals. Or locked himself in his study, his withdrawal fìlling the house with lassitude, despair. He sat in judgment on himself: his failures were his own fault only
.

How to be a doctor without becoming like him?

from a journal 5/52
This last summer is the only decent work I have done. I wasn’t particularly useful there. Anyone could have done as well. But I was in a decent relation to things. And I was learning
.

I felt there was some warmth, some comradeship there (as if only certain knowledge of one’s death could release you from this fierceness). Their scabbed pustulant bodies filled others with disgust, had put them in exile. But they had absorbed their own disgust with themselves. They looked with dispassion on each other. All were under the same sentence. That is at least a kind of comradeship. And they didn’t concentrate so much on themselves (perhaps they couldn’t bear to, for that would mean concentrating on their own disfigurement, disease, death). They knew the shape of their death, were free of anxiety. They were released into the world
.

Alvarados and I were popular with them. We were healthy, and would touch them. (So they weren’t beyond caring about others’ opinions.) The doctors wore face masks, ate wearing gloves, stayed over on their own side of the river, rarely crossing to the colony. Alvarados and I took them on monkey hunts, toured the Indian villages. And everything had a great clarity for me then, it was all sharply outlined
.

The patients wanted our acceptance, and we could give it. A cheap trick. The other staff gave them their thermometers tied to long sticks. Alvarados and I, fearless children of the Enlightenment, put thermometers into their hands. As if that meant we did not despise them, did not judge them!

They poled themselves across the river on a raft to say goodbye to us. A farewell party. They pulled up on the shore where we lived with the other physicians. George played for us. He had been a night-club saxophone player in his other life, before his slow dying began. The music was frantic, sweet, tender, like George himself, with his quick motions, his kindness. (It was also a fire to burn his scabs, his skin, his disgrace away from his bones. He had lived a long time with self-loathing; he transformed it to this terrible heat.
)

It was foggy and raining, but we came out on the shore to dance. The doctors and the nurses dancing on the green shore. The lepers bobbed unsteadily on their log raft. (But I couldn’t dance, couldn’t tell a mambo from a tango.) The rain made small circles in the blue-green river. The raft, held steady by long poles, rocked back and forth with a light swishing sound, accompaniment for George’s tune. They were losing sensation in their hands and feet, dying from the skin to the heart, turning colors like leaves before their final paleness. My friend George, the gentle high-cheekboned Negro could no longer feel the silver keys he played
.

The lepers on the raft floated back to their quarters in the rain, grew invisible in the mist. Only sounds remained, the plunk of their poles, the raft gliding forward, the wail of George’s saxophone, still playing
.