The Death of Che Guevara (39 page)

“But Hilda’s wrong, Nico. It’s because the people won’t kill. They only watch. They aren’t transformed by that, only shocked into silence. Castro lifts himself away from you by all this killing. He kills, you think, but you ran away!” Nico, bewildered by this madman, looked imploringly at me. I could see the cords in his neck. They were just a show. As Chaco had once said, You can’t enter a movie. And who would want to? I had no desire to interrupt them. Nico saw my indifference. He turned back to his accuser.

“You ran away, not because you’re a coward, but because you’re better than he is! It’s all just killing, killing killing. And that’s all that will ever come of it! Not justice! Just more killing! Ernesto’s right, Nico.
You
should listen to
him
. We don’t need more death. We need to change ourselves.”

Chaco released him.

It was
Fidel
, Nico began after a moment, who had rallied the people in Colombia when Gaitan was murdered.

We walked on. If Nico had been shaken by the clown’s outburst, then clearly a rapid repetition of the magical name was the remedy.

Fidel
had been there for the Pan American Conference. Peron had paid for the Cuban Student Delegation, for Peron had known that
Fidel
would stand up to the Yanquis.

Nico looked about in the dusk. He took longer strides; he wanted to be sure he was a good distance ahead of Chaco.

Then, when Gaitan had been shot, the people had gone wild. A spontaneous outburst. “The sort of thing,” Nico said over his shoulder to me, “that Hilda talks about.”

And it had been a real uprising. Police stations had been blown up! Shops had been looted!

Yes, I thought. Yes. Go on. Get to the deaths.

Fidel had gone on radio. He had said his own name. Fidel hadn’t been afraid to say his own name. He had called on the people to revolt. And the people had responded to his voice. And Fidel himself had fought.

“I have heard,” Nico said, “that he killed thirty-two people himself.”

Chaco stopped again, stood with his hands on his own cheeks, pulling them downward, curving his mouth. “I want to throw up,” he said.

But I,
I
wanted these deaths. They felt a barrier to my grief. As if I could bury his death in so many!

Nico went on and on in the dusk. More rant delivered in reverent tones. Something about marching towards death. Smiles. Supreme Happiness. Great Joy. On their lips. The Call of Duty.

I couldn’t concentrate on it. Nico’s churchy tone, Castro’s empty rhetoric, always sent me far away. And my lungs hurt. I needed to sit down. I needed a shot. I couldn’t keep up with Nico.

Nico stopped. We formed a little line in the empty street. “But I failed him.” Perhaps he would cry?

“Of course,” Chaco said. “Of course you did, de—” He stopped himself theatrically, putting his hand across his own mouth. “Of course you did, Meo.”

A smile of joy on their lips? Why? They looked like zombies going into that dark land. When he raised the gold crown they all might die. But they smiled. They wanted it. The call to a great sacrifice.

“Do you need a shot?” Chaco asked, touching my arm lightly. “You’re wheezing badly.” I had taught my friend to give me the necessary injection.

“No,” I said, though I did. I wanted to collapse in front of Hilda’s chair, have her tend me.

“Do you want to hear my song then?” He looked beneficently on both of us, and spread his arms like a crooner. “It’s called ‘Fidel Is a Horse.’ ”

“No!” Nico shouted furiously. He spat on the pavement in front of Chaco’s shoes.

“No,” I said. It was dark now. I couldn’t see the globule of spit on the pavement. The air felt moist. The rain was coming down hard on the roof. “We were at Hilda’s.”

“What?”

I had spoken aloud, interrupting his reverie as well as my own. Ponco sat beside me reading his thick book.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I forgot where I was.” I sipped some mate. It was cold. And Ponco had cleaned up the dishes.

“Me, too,” Ponco smiled amiably. “I’m on a stove boat. The captain’s grand, but he’s not trustworthy. He has odd ideas.”

What boat? Did he mean me? I half clung still to the skirts of my story. He showed me the book jacket.
Moby Dick
. Men, their faces disfigured by fear, leapt into the sea from a small boat. A shadow menaced them from behind. A vengeful railroad train? In the ocean?

“You should read it,” he said. That growl—it was indeed a voice to give orders in.

“I don’t like North American books,” I said. “Too crude. It is North American, isn’t it?”

Ponco smiled and nodded at me.

“What’s it about?”

“It’s about …” He paused, staring at me openly, as if he were trying to read some hidden word in my face. Or perhaps he wondered what my response would be if he risked a sally. “… it’s about whales.”

“I’m not interested in whales.”

Ponco said no more, but went on staring, no longer smiling. It was like a small sun gone down. What sad message had he found in my features? I allowed him this silent interrogation, casting my eyes down at his book jacket. I could see now that this shadow was a whale, not a railroad engine. Do whales, I wondered, eat flesh? (“Fidel Is a Captain”? “Fidel Is a Whale”?)

“Perhaps,” Ponco said, at the conclusion of his study, “you should write down what you were dreaming about. Hilda?”

“No. Not precisely. No. Yes. Perhaps so. In a way.” I was fuddled, still walking the empty terrified streets of Guatemala City, waiting for the attack to begin.

I went to my board. I couldn’t yet stop to write down all that came before. I had to go through with it, to its conclusion, the paratrooper I killed.
I killed a mercenary in Guatemala
. A man who needed killing? Yes. No …

Yes.

Guatemala, June 1954

I heard the radio playing from behind Hilda’s door. It was the Voice of America (
their
America. We were static on the airwaves, a noise between the true articulations, their civilized speech). The announcer indifferently crumbled the Guatemalan Revolution. Four thousand dead. Castillo Armas promised more bombing of the capital. The city would suffer, he said, until Arbenz and his Communist agents capitulated. (The city would suffer for decades after, until the end of time. Until Yon Sosa and the guerrillas liberate Guatemala.
It will come
.) The mercenaries claimed the rail junction to El Salvador, the railroad town of Chiquimula. And this evening Puerto Barrios celebrated its freedom from Communist tyranny. White flags hung from the windows. Church bells chimed; they would ring their joy all night long.

Guatemala City was cut off, its connection severed. Betrayed. Its hands empty at its sides. In corpse position.

We entered. I couldn’t see anyone there in the dusk. Perhaps Hilda had left the radio playing and fled, gone into hiding. Our friends had all fled. How would she leave a message for me? I gasped for breath.

But she was there! Sunk deep into her large chair. I saw the outline of her calves first, by the pale green light of the radio dial. The candle was out. Or it hadn’t been lit yet. She didn’t rise to greet me.

There was nothing to do. We argued about what to do. Outside we could hear the drone of the planes; the bombs dropped near the air base first; and then, like rolling thunder, they came forward. I lifted the corner of a newspaper page that we had pasted over the window, and saw the red spots, the fires. There weren’t any fire engines tonight. A large explosion shook the glass, and a giant column of fire with a corona of black smoke tongued the air on the edge of the city. They had hit an oil storage tank.

“We must act!” Nico implored us from the couch. There was a sobbing sound to his voice, a fear, a longing. “We can’t just sit here. We have to fight. We have to keep the idea of resistance alive.”

No one responded. He looked loony, banging his hands together; and his words seemed more pointless discharge, another heavy thwacking sound.

Hilda had let her long black hair down and was braiding it slowly. I could
see her hands as they moved towards the green glow; too intimate an act, I thought, for others to witness. “The government came from above,” she said. “It was never the people in power. It was only Arbenz,
a friend
of the people.” But her pronouncements lacked the stonecutter’s force; her voice was hollow. She wasn’t judging really, but letting go, accommodating to loss. She undid the braid, and slowly began to braid her hair up again.

My lungs felt a little better here, for the moment, though the room seemed very stuffy. I sat down on the couch with my companions. Perhaps I only needed to rest. “They haven’t struggled,” I said. There was a jagged metallic aspiration to my words, the asthmatic’s overtone. It was a clear formulation; it had logic; but it was very distant—and it was hardly mine to speak. “They haven’t been transformed,” I said slowly. My grief closed about each word, engulfed it. Gandhi’s thought disappeared from me. “They haven’t become men yet.”

Hilda laughed. “If you can keep your head when all about are losing theirs …”

“…  and blaming it on you,” I said. “If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you …”

“…  but make allowance for their doubting too.” Her voice grew high and solemn when she recited poetry.

And this was our favorite poem; it was pass and counterpass of a small secret society; it was a way we had found each other one afternoon a few weeks ago as I lay struggling for breath on the couch. I had wanted very much for her to know me, to think well of the direction of my life. Something she had said reminded me of “If,” and I had said a line or two of it to her. And she had finished it; for she, too, had once memorized it, taken heart from it. (It was, she said, a favorite poem of Gramsci’s. He became a part of our curriculum.) And “If” became a sign between us, another field of play.

The glass shook. The bombing moved closer to our neighborhood.

“Do you want to hear my poem?” Chaco asked. His voice had a tremor. “It’s a song really. It’s called ‘Fidel Is a Horse.’ ” His fingers, as if by their own will, moved slowly towards his wrist, and the repeated comfort of his own pulse.

“No!” Nico shouted.

“No,” Hilda said. “Please. Not now.” It was too painful, she said, to think of us sitting in the dark, squabbling, while the planes destroyed the city.

We sat quietly, counting our rapid pulse beats, drawing our painful breaths, listening to Nico’s anxious empty assertion. Thwack. Thwack. Thwack.

Then Chaco spoke, his voice quieter now, not nervously playful, but insistent, chastened by Hilda’s rebuke. Hilda was right, he said. There should have been mass struggle.

The tremor was gone from his voice. As once with me, the thought of the masses in motion, of action that all might join in, the symbol raised—the feeling that by imagining its necessity one had already joined in the struggle—all this brought courage. There should have been, he said, the kind of struggle Hilda and Ernesto both talked about. But not more killing. She was wrong about that. Our masses would not kill. Killing only made the revolutionary powerful, turned him into a priest. It should have been as Ernesto had said: noncooperation.

“Nonviolence!” Nico turned to shout the word contemptuously into Chaco’s big ear. “Listen, Chaco!”

We thought a quotation from Fidel—that Horse—would follow. But Nico said nothing more. Listen, he meant, not to words, but to the sounds of the explosions destroying the workers’ houses, terrifying them back into their burrows. I thought of Hilda’s brother’s milder lesson, raising my arm behind my back till I stammered with pain. (My muscles felt that still, a spectral discomfort.) I saw the windows of this house explode inward, the harsh wind slamming us against the light-pink walls.

“Nonviolence!” Nico shouted over the roar of the planes. He spat on the carpet.

A small old woman stepped suddenly through the swinging door to the kitchen. She was dressed in her best long black wool skirt, to greet the invaders. “I saw that!” she screamed. “You filthy pig! You disgusting man! And I heard what you’ve been saying all these nights!” She came forward quickly into the room, as if she had little uneven wheels beneath her, and stood fronting Hilda, her palsied head rocking back and forth. “I saw what that black man of yours just did!” She pointed towards Nico, a tiny bony hand from under her black shawl. How did she dare? But she thought her righteousness, her rage, would protect her. “You are animals, filthy filthy animals! You are disgusting people! Only this poor Catholic,” she said, pointing to me, “is a good man. The rest of you should die! You are bad people! You are Communists! I’ve told the right people about you! They’ll come to get you! They’ll kill you! You should die!” There was ecstasy in her final words. She saw our blood.

No one spoke. She was an apparition, she was Death itself, the sour-milk woman, the bad witch who waits in the cellar to bite your head off. Her shrill voice, her small black figure, barely visible in the dark, made me bring my arms against my sides. Hilda pulled her brightly colored shawl about herself.