The Death of Che Guevara (32 page)

“Is this Christian, is this justice, is this fair play, is this civilization?” Do you know what would happen if we said this to a North American? He’d rub his head, look at us quizzically, and say “Hnnh?” Do you know how the police will react when you show them your nakedness dear? Do you think if you offer your body to the animals, the North Americans, they won’t take it? We’re their food! You make a big drama out of your anger, Tete. You ask yourself should you start a fight in a bar, should you hit an opportunist like Betancourt with a soupspoon. Tete, who cares? You should ask yourself why you make such a big drama out of it! By concentrating on
your
anger you don’t have to look at what is going on all the time around you, the terrible slaughter of the innocents, the poor children. (And the masses are children, Tete! You must help them.) You have to do something (I don’t know what But something) I think Gandhi liked being on the losing side He didn’t want to win. Are you like that too? Are you sure you don’t like Gandhi because like your father you want to be too good for this world, a victim, a saint? Gandhi should become a museum for tourists, a shrine for the poor (permanently poor if their little minds are so fuddled that they still visit shrines) and a vegetarian restaurant. Gandhi had one good idea in his life: What to do with shit!

Let us hear no more about him
.

Dear Tete you cannot imagine how I long for one intelligent voice to converse with! Please, I beg you do not desert the party of Reason Most
people of all sorts—the masses! the masses!—are almost unbearably stupid! They need strong rational thinkers to lead them—people like yourself! Affirm yourself!

Much love to you my dear Child
,
Many Many embraces, from
       
Celia de la Serna Guevara
,         
“child of the conquistadors”
       

My mother’s company left me exhausted, exhilarated, angry, unprepared for sleep; the caffeine, the dissatisfaction, had run from her veins into mine. I lay rubbing the flesh around the row of large red bites—quietly, so that Chaco wouldn’t be disturbed. The pain, the activity, rubbing the flesh into moist little gray balls, was a relief from the itching, a relief that hurt. My mother’s activity, ripping away at things, at an itch (for what? for recognition? power? for change?) never pacified, never cured—that, too, was a pleasant pain; an active tearing at one’s own flesh that affirmed oneself through its being an activity, its being one’s own intelligence that did the world in, ripped it to pieces, even as it ripped the self up with it. And these all seemed thoughts in her style. I didn’t want to think in her style.

My mother was a lucid armed sharp uncertainty, turning this way and that, an uncomfortable body, unable to sleep, burdened with too much energy, more life than this place could bear. She was a vivid splintering disorder, formed into a collage only to splinter again. It was her art to make one feel during this performance as if there were no possible activity except this endless criticism, this tearing and laceration.
But she was wrong
. A housewife, she was bloody-minded because she had never seen blood. (Where was her crowd, ready to follow the leader who stood back and made important plans, the dictatorship of reason, a leadership without an action—for action would open it to mockery.) Isolated, sitting in her kitchen, she could not see the dignity of nonviolence; excited by fantasies, she screamed for adventure, for blood. Her marriage had made a squint to her vision; she confused her husband’s sulks with the exalted sacrificial actions that had united the Indian masses against imperialism!

My angry thoughts rocked me this way and that beneath the sticky sheet.

“Be still child!” Chaco complained. “Let us sleep!”

The next day, though, Guayaquil seemed my mother’s state of mind, a world covered in shit, destroying itself for someone’s bitter amusement. Outside
our room, mangrove thickets grew, half in the river water. Children played there, hopping back and forth among the tangled roots. The children played barefoot; worms entered through the soles of their feet. This morning Chaco found the carcass of a child by the root of a tree. He motioned me to come over, and with the side of his boot he pressed the child’s thin cheek. Small white worms came slithering out of the corpse’s mouth and nostrils. The child’s feet dangled in the water, and the flesh slowly fell away, moldy bits of matter, shades of gray and brown, almost iridescent in decay.

“Squishy squishy squishy,” Chaco said, smiling emptily at me. This was worse than the defeat he longed for. He looked like he was about to throw up. “Not the sort of world …”he said faintly, and stopped, as if to say, where one would care to go on living. And then, sadly, “where a person can take his shoes off.”

I knew what he meant. I thought, angrily, there aren’t enough antibiotics for these children, my mother’s right. Was this what I avoided seeing with my talk about Gandhi and idyllic villages? Did I dream of apocalyptic changes in people’s souls rather than see the work that as a doctor I had been given to me to do?
Yet Gandhi was right:
it would take a deep change for our people to learn even the principles of hygiene.
But he was wrong:
they also needed to wear shoes—even if they stumbled! They needed not hand looms, but factories to produce shoes. Then a doctor wouldn’t do them much good?
I
wasn’t what was needed.… And so my confusion continued around like my mother’s sentences.

We walked by the docks. Men without shirts lined up for Guayaquil’s only work, loading bananas from the United Fruit plantations onto the cargo boats. Bananas lay piled on the rafts near the ships, and in the warehouses by the docks; the place stank of bananas, sweet mixed with decay; green bananas, rotting bananas. (Bananas beyond repair were tossed into the river.)

After the loading crews were chosen, crowds converged on the riverbank, those who hadn’t gotten work, and more men and women from the town. They chanted the name of the ex-mayor, Carlos Guevara Moreno. A charismatic man, my mother’s voice said, a petty devil, a fraud who they believe will end their misery, bring jobs for all.

“The leader you wait for,” Francisco said.

I was silent. My mother’s voice had silenced me.

“Yes, Guevara,” Chaco said, “tell us, how shall we know a true god from a false one in these thirsty times?”

Mo-re-no! Mo-re-no! Mo-re-no! They hurled the syllables out. Men and women pressed together, rushed towards the loading docks to stop the work.
Police formed lines by the boats, guarding the workers and the produce. The crowd stopped a few hundred meters away and chanted Mo-re-no! Mo—re—no!

“It’s like a movie,” Chaco said. “Regular performances.”

An Indian in a dirty white shirt and no shoes, his hair cut into sharp lines along his cheekbones, like a helmet, taunted the police, running towards them, shouting, then darting back when they tried to hit him with their clubs. Then another man, a red kerchief wrapped around his forehead, joined him. They vied with each other. The kerchiefed one went too far, ran up to the police to vault their line. His feet went up the side of one of the policemen, as if he wanted to run up over his head. (Perhaps he imagined himself standing horizontally.) They both fell to the ground. One of the other policemen took out his revolver and shot the kerchiefed man in the head. The rest of the crowd gasped, a long intake of breath. They moved towards the wounded man, and then away, suddenly silent, like plants waving slowly in the wind. The other police formed a circle around the wounded man, trapping him in the circle of their legs. The policeman he’d knocked down, knelt and pulled on the wounded man’s hair, to wrench his head off. The police, their revolvers drawn, stood around the angry man, and the dying man; blood poured from the man’s head onto the kneeling policeman’s shoes.

My body shook. This must not happen. Too much blood! Irrational, stupid. An open vein. There must be no more blood! I saw myself between the two men, kneeling, tending the man’s wound. What did she know of blood?
She understood nothing
. I ran forward, towards the dock. Someone grabbed me around the chest and knocked me to the ground. The air left me like a shot.

Chaco’s beak pressed into my cheek.

“This must be love,” he said. He was crying. I could feel his tears on my face. I could smell him. Fear had made him stink.

I tried to throw him off, to rise.

“Be still child! You can’t enter a movie.” He hugged me harder. I gasped.

The policeman stood up, holding the red kerchief aloft, as if this had all been a game and this were the prize. The crowd moved off in every direction, down the streets, into buildings, into the air; a vision dissolving. They had done no more damage than a mist, a mist that bled, an opium dream, a demagogue’s fancy. “The crowd lacks leadership,” I heard Soto say to the nodding lawyers-who-couldn’t-practice-law. Chaco wouldn’t move off me.

I smelled things rotting, rotting wood, rotting fruit, rotting flesh. It was the smell of my mother’s letter. It would rot my certainty if I let it, take away my vivid speech, the clear outlines of a vision of independence and chastity. I would not let it. Her mind was the joy of breaking glass, a harmless hoodlum’s
activity to no conclusion, to no purpose but the pleasure of the sound.

But I, too—lying under Chaco!—was going nowhere. We were going nowhere. A teacher who wouldn’t teach. Doctors who didn’t want to practice. Lawyers who wouldn’t appear in court. Too good for this world? Too weak? Sheets of acrid black smoke filled the sky in the east. (Did we long for a leader who would never come, safe to long for because always absent? The leaders who spoke would always be judged wanting.
Where was my action?
) Fire engines screeched to rescue a building that couldn’t be rescued. The fire engines of Guayaquil always arrived too late, appearing not to put out fires, but to take away the wrapped remains of bodies. And the crowds formed like this every afternoon after the crews were hired, and pushed, tumbled, chanted a magical name without magic, frenzied lovers of Moreno who had promised them jobs, Moreno who told them how to live, or anyway how to die, for him. (I heard her: They freely took on this voluntary sacrifice! This exultation of the will!) Taunts, screams, people eddying down side streets. Moreno—the name of a sporting event in hell. Mo—re—no! Mo—re—no! Day after day, world without end.

The last policeman left the dock. The crews returned to work.

Chaco let me up.

That evening, as the others slept, I dragged myself to the wall, by the window, and leaning against it, read my father’s neatly typed letter.

Dear Ernesto:

I was very interested to read that you, too, are once more involved with Gandhi’s teaching, and that you found your imagination of him to be a comfort during that foolhardy ride in the Andes. Perhaps it is a sign that you are meant to follow his teachings of nonattachment, and nonviolence (though I do not think you have understood his teachings yet in their full depth).

I, too, have been thinking of Gandhi’s way, and even more have tried to immerse myself in the difficult tradition from which he comes. Since your departure I find that my activities here in Cordoba, the practice of medicine, the discussions of politics with your mother and her friends (as you know, I have no friends here) are of very little interest to me. Now it is as if these things occurred on the other side of a partition; soon they will, I am sure, drift away from me utterly. Perhaps I detach myself from life in order to ready myself for my death. I would not want you to think, though, that this turn of events bothers me. I am content with my lot. I want nothing.

To reduce one’s wants, Gandhi taught, is the secret of contentment. All
my life I have sought for this feeling of nonattachment, but my commitment to you and your mother have time and again pulled me back into the concerns of life. Perhaps your departure was a godsend to me, for it helped me to sever my last attachments to life. I do not engage in useless plotting in anyone’s behalf, certainly not in my own. Each day I practice the exercises for breathing and posture from a book I tried to share with you in your childhood,
The Hindu Science of Breath Control
It is hard for an old man to sit with his legs crossed. But I lie down absolutely straight, with my arms at my side, my palms facing upward, in what is called “the corpse position.” I let my mind quiet itself. Your mother comes in at such times, to annoy me, often with worries about you. But I remain uninvolved. She seems to be standing at a great distance above me, and I can hardly make out her voice. It is as if I were already enjoying the peace of the grave. I see during those evening meditations that life is just a play of images, and not something for a man my age to take seriously.

You are quite right in your admiration of Gandhi’s teaching, and its way of nonviolence. Your mother, of course, mocks me for this, wondering how I can eat anything at all, even vegetables, or wash myself, and kill microbes. It is not so comical as she thinks. It
is
a contradiction. We must do violence in order to live, but it is a beautiful thing if we can keep that violence to a minimum. Nonviolence is a very high ideal, for true aristocrats of the Spirit, men of intelligence and morality. To follow Gandhi, to be nonviolent, is a continual task, not something settled once and for all. Final victories are the imaginings of violent men; apocalypse; fiery consummation. Gandhi’s way must be the will’s slow patient work. It is a difficult path, and requires the utmost courage from those who follow it. One cannot experience that courage without the serenity of nonattachment. One must be attached to nothing, not even to one’s family, not even to one’s own life, if one is to have the courage not to take another’s life when one’s own is threatened.

Nonattachment comes from performing the correct action at each stage of our life. It does not come from following our particular fears and desires, but from finding our place in a much larger scheme, from understanding the stage of life that you find yourself incarnated in. One does not
choose
that state according to one’s whims. One finds oneself there as part of a family, a profession. These circumstances, and not one’s own wishes, determine to the last detail our conduct.