The Death of Che Guevara (30 page)

Ponco handed me back my pages over breakfast.
His
breakfast. Attacks kept me awake last night. I took only a little mate. The reward for vigilance: I’m exhausted; the room seems vague.

He giggled. “I see what you mean, ‘you awaited
him
.’ Fidel! The sun in our sky! I like that. Boom boom boom. Enter the god! Very mystical! Very flattering!”

“Not flattery. I really was as I say. So were many others. The nationalist leaders, like Paz Estenssoro, Bosch, Prio Soccaras, they had begun something, a move towards independence. But they couldn’t complete it. Even to think of fighting the Yanquis they would have had to transform themselves, their bourgeois programs. They couldn’t call on the people to fight. What I said was true in a way: they would have to be willing to die.” I breathed shallowly. The room shimmered, bleached of color, losing substance. “We were burning with energy, a whole generation of us, disgusted with compromises. We wouldn’t compromise with imperialism.” I smiled, thinking of that purity, shining, without content. “We would destroy the whole world if we couldn’t find something that satisfied that longing.”

Ponco looked at me sadly, his head halfway down. “I know. I’m not a child. I was there.” He tore off a piece of bread, and rubbed it in some jam. “You talk like someone’s old man.”

“I’m sorry. Of course you know. Perhaps my conception was a little … abstract, grandiose. Young. I didn’t know the thing I was waiting for. I was sure I would recognize it, though, make whatever sacrifice was necessary.”

Ponco smiled at me. “Free of this world’s names. Without title. Without party. On an island. Without breakfast. I know who
that
is.”

I shrugged, barely able to lift my shoulders. “I didn’t know.”

“Still.” He looked down at his coffee cup. What was going on in that cup?

“Yes?”

“The man who acts for himself.” He got up rapidly, and walked into his bedroom. I waited. I was learning how to wait. Wait for Castro’s help. Wait for inspiration. Wait for Ponco to come back.

He returned with Debray’s book. I think he keeps a library of incriminating documents in there. He pushed it in front of me. His thumb occluded part of the paragraph, but I remembered it. “When Comrade Che Guevara once again took up insurrectional work, he accepted on an international level the consequences of a line of action of which Fidel Castro, leader of the Cuban Revolution, is the incarnation. When Che Guevara reappears, it is hardly risky to assert that it will be as the head of a guerrilla movement,
as its unquestioned political and military leader
.” Debray and I had worked on the book together. Walter knew that.

“Yes?” I scratched my ear. What was I meant to feel guilty for?

“See? The same story, different key.” Ponco stood next to me. “MNR bureaucrats don’t act for themselves. Gandhi acts for himself first. Et cetera. Action and politics.” He held up one finger. Meaning, I thought, the unity of theory and practice, political talk, and military action. “That’s you.”

Ponco sat down again, drank some of that fascinating coffee. “Your letter. I wonder. It sounds … religious.”

I laughed. “Coincidence of the metaphysical and the practical.” I was kidding around. Ponco reminded me of other accusers. Fidel. My mother.

He looked baffled, stared at me, almost angrily. “Coincidence? Accident? Not physical?”

“No. I’m sorry.” I realized I had borrowed his elliptical style. But to say that would be to remind him of his wound. “I meant that they all came together. This time. It must happen sometimes. What you call my religious urge, my psychology, and what needs to be done.”

“That sounds religious too!”

“You too!” Breathing was becoming easier.

“Me too what?”

“You sound like Fidel. He said, ‘The revolutionary who wants to become a saint.’ I was. He said.” I couldn’t stop talking like Walter.

He rose again and went to his bedroom. What text would accuse me now?

He returned with a piece of paper and a ballpoint pen. He pushed the dishes to one side, and worked away, quietly intent, while I waited.

“Here!” Like a dream figure, he pushed the paper at me. A conglomeration of stick figures, and figures that looked like sticks. He could see I was puzzled. He came over to stand behind me.

“That’s Fidel. On a big horse. That’s the horse’s tail. That’s a sword. That’s you. That’s burning wood under you. You wear monk’s robes. You can’t feel the heat. Go on reading a book. You two divide up the world. Happy
coincidence
. Use it and it’s yours.” I turned to look at him, and he pouted, sticking
out his lower lip, imitating Chaco. “You don’t like my art?” he rasped. A whimpery tone was impossible for Walter. “I think it’s profound.” He tried to deepen his voice on the word “profound”; but his voice could go no deeper, and the word disappeared.

No word from Fidel.

Ponco worries. This morning he said, “Odd. Debray hasn’t …” and then he stopped, afraid of his own dark conjectures. One expects promptness from Regis. Blue
lycée
notebooks with sharp theses. Before I came here I sent him to Bolivia to review our agreement with Monje, to locate sites. But his reports have not been forwarded to me.

Fidel is silent. Perhaps he is waiting for the July 26 speech to announce my intentions. Or

Or what will he announce?

Ecuador, September 1953

Soto and Chaco went to Lima, to the apartment of a nurse I had known in Buenos Aires. Fernando and I stopped at the Inca fortress Sacsahuaman; no longer a fortress, but walls, large smooth irregular stones, closely fitted. Our archeological project lay in our friendship, unearthing again our common interests, repairing the fissures caused by my love of political talk.

“All this stuff about leaders, Ernesto. I don’t get it. That’s not self-reliance.” We walked along the shady side of a wall that bulged in and out like a curtain. I pressed my fingertips hard against the cool stones. They had a message for me, a nourishment, if only I could press them strongly enough. The nail broke on my forefinger; the finger bled from the corner. A small but intensely painful wound. I smeared the blood against the stone, a light red trail mixing with dust; I wanted to leave my mark. Fernando looked at me, his head turned to the side. It embarrassed me. He reached into his jacket pocket and took out a small roll of gauze.

“I think you were right before,” he said. “Good is done a little at a time. Not by violence. And not by leaders. But by individuals. I mean our first task is to make ourselves independent individuals.”

I sucked on my finger, and said nothing. I didn’t know what I truly thought. My thoughts were a tottery structure, not an active unity. This farrago about leaders, words, actions, these thoughts didn’t form me; I didn’t hold them; I only
entertained
them. But what might seal them to me? And why had I shown Fernando my letter? Why had I written my father? Like Betancourt peering about in Isaias’s field, I needed the reassurance of others. I, too, stood in the field of the dead. Or worse: on the truck, writing home, I felt myself in the kitchen of my family’s second house. I saw the wicker chairs, the cups of hot drinks from a height just above the table. I was a young boy, hurtling around the glass table.

I wrapped a bit of gauze around my forefinger and ripped it free with my teeth. A man in a dark-red tasseled poncho walked out of a hut halfway up the mountainside opposite us. He carried a staff in his right hand that glinted silver in the sun. An elder; when he instructed the children on planting, he struck them with the
vara
, inscribed the knowledge on their bodies so they wouldn’t forget. He looked towards the top of the mountain. He
should
see stone terraces, low walls in regular layers, moving towards him down the mountain’s face. The priest had given them instructions, brought by messenger from the Inca, given to the Inca by the sun. Good soil had been carried to the topmost planting areas. Now different foods might be grown, each crop happy at its own proper altitude. Ditches, sluices brought water up and down the mountain, to feed the terraces. No. He saw none of that. It was all no more. Only a few of the small stones from the terracing his ancestors had built. Why had they chosen such impossible places? They must have found exultation in the challenge of making the grand and difficult landscape accept them. They had mingled their blood with the land, made it theirs and the gods’, and now they couldn’t leave it. The elder looked up at the sun. It was twelve noon. The holiest hour. Still? I looked up too. The mountain bleached away. I stumbled on a rock and caught myself on Fernando’s shoulder.

“I need to know more natural history,” I said. “I don’t know my place in things.”

“What? I don’t get it.” Fernando kicked at the dust with his snub-nosed boot, raising a little explosion. “Well, I know mine,” he said. “It’s to learn about my continent, to live simply, and to do my work with the lepers now, a little at a time.”

I stepped back a few feet and tried to run up the side of a stone wall. I imagined myself standing horizontally.

Fernando looked down at me in the dirt, indifferent to my achievement. “All your talk of sacrifice Ernesto. I don’t get that either. You remind me of the Incas. Human sacrifice. I don’t understand. Is that the unconscious of Latin America? That’s madness! I don’t want to rebuild the Inca Empire. I want to heal sick people, comfort them if I can’t heal them. You know, you’re not even an Inca, Ernesto. You’re an Aztec. At least the Incas substituted guinea pigs.”

“Oh, they offered the occasional human,” I said. “For the most hallowed times.” I spoke to the ground. Grit was embedded in my chin, and on my lips and tongue, mixed with gauze threads. I rubbed them off my tongue.

“No. You’re an Aztec. You don’t want the
occasional
human. You want hecatombs of sacrifice. You’re afraid the sun will go out.”

From the hard rocky ground I looked up at the sun. I forced myself to stare at it until it offered me a vision, until each ray stood out, distinct. Each one of us was a spoke of that wheel. Animals walked towards that center and spun about the sun—llamas, parrots, sheep, deer, owls, fishes, ducks, whippery wavery creatures formed from thin hollow lines, the vitreous bodies of my eyes. The sun had shown enough to me and forced me to close my eyes. My eyelids glowed red. I fell deeper into the ground. The sun with animals; the silver plate Monteczuma gave Cortes.

“It’s like the sacrificial stone at Machu Picchu,” Fernando said from far above me. My prone position invited accusation. “You saw it and began to wheeze. It
excited
you.”

“Don’t be silly,” I said. “It was the altitude.”

But I lied. Streams of blood had risen for me from the stone, long, thick, nearly black threads, still steaming; veins that held the sun to the earth and brought nourishment to the god. Here comes the knife! We stared. We all felt it: at the moment of sacrifice the offering’s blood became one’s own, spilled out and coursing upward from one’s veins. No. I wasn’t there.
They
were united with the god, and through him with each other. Not me; even in imagination I was excluded from their communion at the stone, their song from the truck. I lay on the ground, with eyes closed, and picked small pebbles from my chin.

“You fell down panting across the stone. You wanted to sacrifice yourself.”

“What are you talking about? That’s not true.” My body, subdued by the sun, was allowed to rise slowly to the surface of the earth. I opened my eyes. “I fell down, but I didn’t fall on the stone.”

“No, I guess you didn’t.” Fernando smiled at me, his curly head blotched
with spots of sun. “But I’ll bet you wanted to. I should have taken out my sacred Swiss pocketknife and offered you to Virachocha, the sun’s father.”

Instead he had taken a syringe from his knapsack and bent over me in the dirt, a few feet from the gray pole that yoked the earth and sun. He prepared my arm for a shot. Why am I drawn to places where breathing is impossible for me, my food so difficult to scrabble up? (But that’s everywhere!)

“You know,” Fernando said, no longer smiling, “I don’t see what you find so wonderful about people suffering and dying. I think our work, a doctor’s work, is to
stop
people from dying, not tell them what a grand and noble thing it is. I don’t think it would be very grand, I mean, I don’t want to die. I don’t know about you. I really don’t. I don’t think you know what you’re talking about.”

I got up, brushed myself off. My arm hurt. It ached still from where Ricardo had impaled me on my beliefs. “The dinosaurs died,” I said. “Big thunder lizards. All gone now. Death’s not such a big deal.”

“You’re kidding,” my bewildered friend said. He smiled at me in a warm openhearted way, shaking his blotchy head from side to side. He wanted to be in on the joke.

“Sure,” I said, and returned his smile. (So eventually we would part in bewilderment.)

“And this Soto,” Fernando said, as we continued our stroll round and round the walls. “I don’t trust him, Ernesto. He’s a careerist of the worst kind. He makes me feel soiled.”