The Death of Che Guevara (16 page)

Opening her pocketbook on the table, she gave me fifteen dollars in pesos. If I got as far as the United States, I was to buy her a lace dress and bring it back to her on my return. But I felt that she was playing this out for my father, and knew better herself; I felt, in fact, that she, who knew something of traps, for I myself had been hers—was giving me her blessing. “You will come back with my dress.”

“Of course I will, Celia,” I said.

And of course I never did.

Isle of Pines, June 1965

Yesterday evening, after our beans and rice, I gave Ponco my account, a hundred handwritten pages. He took it back to his room immediately, and spent the rest of the night reading. I could see his light, a thin strip underneath the door.

That light kept me awake, fidgeting in my bed, twisting the sheets about my body to cover myself. I couldn’t get comfortable; either the sheet stuck to my skin, or, kicking it away, I was too chilly, too exposed. It was not exactly, I think, a writer’s vanity that made me turn in my bed, not “What does he think of my work, my talent?” not even “What does he think of me, how does
he, knowing these secrets, judge me?” But I felt as if I weren’t in my own hands anymore; I wondered, what does he
make
of me? Behind that door, in that light, he was reading me; I was entering his imagination; he was creating
a version
of me.

I was up before Ponco, sitting at the table, drinking mate when he came in, waiting for him. I wanted his version; I wanted to gaze at that funny reflection of myself. “What did you think of it?” I asked. “I’ve written history before but never in this way. Before I was writing from the outside, an observer, describing battles I was at. You know, you’ve read them. I acted in those battles, but I never spoke of how they formed me. But this is different, a history that cuts across and into me, that forms me. I feel as if I haven’t given you an account, but my childhood itself.” I was pompous from embarrassment. I was ashamed to say with real directness what I wanted: let’s tell a story about me.

Ponco smiled, the peculiar way he has when nervous, quickly lifting his lips over his teeth, then letting them drop as if a switch had been thrown. “I enjoyed it very much.”

I was disappointed. I wanted him to present myself to myself. “Say something more.” My curiosity was a deep desire; it made me rude, imperious.

It only made Ponco more agitated. He bit the edge of a finger. “It’s a good story,” he said. “It made me wonder what happens next.”

“It’s all right. You can be critical.” That wasn’t what I meant either. I didn’t want his artistic judgment on my plotting. I wanted to know his construction of me.

“Something critical,” Ponco said, and paused. He then made a gesture that I had never before seen on this earth: he put one hand in his ear, palm out, and one on his head, like the comb of a rooster. He stuck his tongue out at me, and waggled his hands.

“What in God’s name does that mean? Is it a Cuban thing?”

“No. It’s critical. Called a Bronx cheer. Never seen one. Only read it.”

“I don’t think you have it right. I’ve seen one. Once, when I was in Miami, when I was twenty-one, I was mouthing off to old men in a cafeteria, and the FBI took me in for questioning. I told them what I thought of the United States, and one of the agents gave me a Bronx cheer.” I did it for Walter. A fleck of spit landed on my mate gourd. Ponco laughed: dry husks scraping each other. “The agent had a fat face, and with his cheeks bulged out he looked obscene, as if he were shitting his thumb. But don’t you have anything more to say about my story, my life?”

Walter fidgeted in his chair. (I saw my body turning in bed the night before and thought, that’s what my account is good for, to make people fidget.) He
scratched his face, pulled the smooth skin tight. He was nervous; he wanted to go read, to be somewhere else entirely. But I didn’t care. Walter was silent for a while, scratching under his arm, up and down his chest, a breach of his fastidiousness. Then: “Nuh wdgmmugh.”

Sometimes Ponco’s voice is so low and so harsh it is hard to make out the words. I leaned more closely towards him. “What?”

“No women?”

“My mother.”

“Yes. But no women. Didn’t you have women? Or think about them? I heard Che was a ladies’ man before the Revolution. A Don Juan.”

“It’s not a story about women.”

“I suppose not.” He drank some coffee. “Do you think often about your family?”

“What do you mean?”

He put his hands to his head, on each side, and pushed them together like a vise.

I understood. “You mean psychology. Psychoanalysis? Oedipus complex? Freud?”

He drew his lips up, clicked them shut, nodded.

A party game: charades. The loss of his voice had opened into new languages. “I thought you read only fiction.”

“A fellow told me about it. Good story. Demons.”

“I used to think a lot about it once, in that way. I was absorbed by Freud when I was in medical school, and after, until the beginning of the Revolution. Until I met Fidel. Hilda and I used to argue about psychoanalysis. She thought it was a bourgeois idea.” Walter had met Hilda a few times, when she came to Havana with the baby, after the Revolution. I was not always comfortable seeing her after the divorce, and I sometimes sent Walter with gifts for the child, my child. “We used to argue in Guatemala about Freud and Sartre. It was during my existentialist period. Sartre, she said, was bourgeois, too. All that talk of
anxiety
, she’d say disgustedly, as if the word were dirty. Anxiety was a luxury item, more expensive than Paris perfume. It was only for Europeans. Latin Americans didn’t have the spare change for it. For us the only choice was unremitting struggle, or having your face shoved in shit, not whether to commit suicide or not. With so many people trying to kill you, why give them the satisfaction? Of course, you know, she would never have said ‘shit.’ She doesn’t talk like that. She doesn’t speak ironically. She spoke of the struggle for social justice, the fight against exploitation, hunger, bad health, illiteracy, that’s the way she talked, very clearly, very directly, not bitterly, not ironically. When we met in Guatemala she was in exile. Not self-chosen exile, like mine.
She had led the APRA group at the university in Lima, and after the coup she had had to flee. She had the right to talk the way she did. Is this interesting you?”

Ponco nodded happily, a real smile. “Very. I’ve never heard you talk like this.”

“It’s the writing. Once you begin explaining yourself there’s no end to the process. In any case, Hilda believed in Pavlov, not Freud. He explained people’s behavior in a way more acceptable to her. You know Pavlov? The dog trainer? Sartre and Freud paid too much attention to individuals, she said, not enough to the social struggle. And she found Freud disgusting. Nothing but sex drives and dirty thoughts! She said it wasn’t a complete picture of a human being. I remember that phrase of hers. Political fighters were not sick men acting from frustrated sex drives. They were normal human beings, acting as we all should, freely accepting their responsibility to society. Very contradictory to Pavlov’s poor doggies. She only liked Pavlov, really, because of her sympathy with the Soviets. I pointed that out to her. It was late at night, in her boardinghouse in Guatemala. Time for me to go she would say.”

Out of my reverie, expelled from Hilda’s house, I looked at Walter and saw (or imagined) the sidelong glance, the tightened lips of a leer. “No,” I said emphatically. “Not a Don Juan. Not a conquest. Hilda was very serious, almost stern. There was nothing
light
about her. As I say, she was unironic, she didn’t want to play, usually, only to get at the truth and act on it. She was not at all like my mother. I suppose that’s a point against Freud. You know if she hadn’t been pregnant she would have asked Fidel to let her join the expedition. Instead she went to my parents’ house to wait for me. Each night she wore a flannel bathrobe I’d left behind. When she came after the victory of the revolution I told her immediately about Celia. I couldn’t wait. I felt like dung. I said, ‘It would be better if I’d died in battle.’ I know: very self-dramatizing. Very self-pitying. She stopped crying immediately. ‘No,’ she said, ‘the Revolution needs you.’ You see what I mean?”

“Yes. You were made for each other.” He was smiling at me; talking of my life, I had opened myself to this tender irony in others.

I paused, remembering her, going deeper into my trance. A boardinghouse in Guatemala. She was plump, with a round face, her mouth turned down, her eyes thin, Indian-looking. She wasn’t pretty in the ways I was familiar with, but her looks fascinated me. I couldn’t get them to come out right, and I felt there was something valuable there I didn’t understand, as if, if I could learn to find her beauty, I would have deepened myself, changed for the better, solved a problem. Sometimes I knew she wasn’t attractive, sometimes I thought everyone would think her beautiful, and sometimes I knew she was
beautiful and knew also that no one else would see it. “I remember sitting in her living room, with our friends and her roommates. They were giddy things by comparison with Hilda. She always had fresh fruit for me, for my asthma, and hot water for my mate. In the days before the mercenaries invaded, I slept on a golf course, and I would come over in the morning to wash up. She took care of me. I think that was why she liked me, at first, because I needed her attention, because of my asthma. I wasn’t like other Argentines, she said, stuck up, with overdeveloped European ways. I wasn’t like other men. I think she meant I had a visible weakness, though I tried to hide it. After we were married she told me that at first she had thought I was haughty because of the way I stuck out my chest like a rooster. But when she found out from Soto that it was to ease the pain of my asthma, she found it touching, I was like a little boy bravely hiding his illness. That’s a deep part of her nature: she’s a very compassionate person. And very courageous. After the invasion of Guatemala she went to prison rather than tell the police where I hid. And in prison she went on a hunger strike because they denied her the rights of a political exile. It was an amazing performance.”

“You gave up Freud for her?”

“What?” Walter meant well, but he was calling me back for no reason, for a silly joke. “No. Because of Hilda’s arguments? No. Then we would have nothing to fight about. I only explained things to her in a Freudian way to tease her. It was a way of talking to her about sex—it was many, many months before we made love. She was right in a way. Freud may help us to see what parts of ourselves need changing. Then we must find the material conditions that must be changed to change ourselves. So Freud becomes Marxism. And then Gramsci’s right: the revolutionary must be his own psychoanalyst. It is a matter of freeing the will to act.”

Walter looked away. He didn’t care for theory unless he could read it allegorically, make characters out of the abstractions, battles of Spirit, Will, Heart, Head.

“You must stop me talking,” I said. “What do you think of my childhood?” He owed me something—not for my theory, but for my reminiscences.

And finally I goaded a response. “You were a violent child.”

“I was? I thought your childhood more violent than mine.”

“No. Mine had more hitting. All kinds of hitting. My mother and uncle raised me. Don’t doubt. He was a fag, he didn’t wear socks. You don’t know?”

“About socks? No.”

Ponco laughed. At me. “Yes. Much of Cuba is figures to you. The ones who wear sandals without socks are making a statement. He embarrassed me. Started my career as a liar. And he hit me. Often. When I was fourteen he
knifed someone, and ran to the United States. I shot him at Playa Giron.”

“Figuratively you mean.” I thought his old ways were returning, brought back by my pressuring him to speak. (Or by my example.)

“No. Literally. Or someone did. He was in the group that landed from the
Travis
. My area. He died there. My mother hated him. Her brother. Now she calls a fag a ‘Travis.’ She calls her late brother Travis. See. He doesn’t have a name anymore. He’s dead for her. When she’s angry at me, she says I’m like Travis. I’m a Travis.” He stopped to drink some coffee, as if he could moisten that dryness. “See, in my family, if you were angry at someone, you hit. As hard as you could. Really angry, you killed. Bam! Pow! You people, you carried it around inside you. It becomes personal. Sharp.” He paused, waiting for the right words. “Icy,” he said in his hot, harsh voice.

“I suppose. At night, in high school, before sleep, I imagined shooting people from the windows of the house. Bad people. Fascist police. They had the house surrounded. I shot at them from the windows. Where could I stand where the bullets wouldn’t hit me? My first strategic problem. I found it soothing.”

Ponco laughed, a long time, the merest sound, warm breath coughed up from his chest, grating the roof of his mouth.

“This is strange talk,” I said. “I’ve written more about my life than I ever wanted to. Or so I thought. And now we’re talking, as you say, in a way we never have before.”