The Death of Che Guevara (42 page)

But it wasn’t almost me.
It was me
.

No doubt the dizziness was an attack starting. I went back to my room, to lie down.

This afternoon I sat with Ponco on the porch. He read his book on whaling. I stared out across the high grass, down to the now calm ocean, lapping in short precise waves, practicing its regular stroke. My pain, too, had subsided; my breathing was a little more regular. And my mind was empty. I just stared, my face slack, the long field moving inside my head without obstacle.

Why hasn’t he spoken, “the voice of permission”?

I looked over at Ponco, for no good reason, my head just turning in the slight breeze, like a stalk of grass. He was staring at me. “Fidel,” he said.

How did he know! “Yes. Why haven’t we heard from him?” I saw a crowd of four hundred thousand people in Havana. Fidel stands alone on a high wooden platform. The stage is enormous, so that he might look isolated and vulnerable. He is alone with the masses. (The sharpshooters are on another platform, beneath him, hidden in the scaffolding.) Behind, in the crowd and on the sides of the plaza, there are towers of crisscrossed wood, to support the huge black loudspeakers. Fidel talks. But I can’t hear him. I can feel the mood of the crowd. It is October of 1962. The Soviets have abandoned Cuba. They ordered their ships to retreat. (We saw a North American film of it: A radio message. The wake of white water of a turning ship.) Their technicians have
picked up the weapons already in place as if they were the vacation toys of bored tourists. Fidel must comfort Cuba in its poverty. The crowd is filled with anger, lassitude, and a sullen fear. This last month they have been ready for invasion, for sacrifice, even for apocalypse; instead there is the dull ache of the embargo, the humiliations of a minor clown’s role. Fidel must enter their emptiness—his emptiness—and then he must rise out of it and raise them with him. Start a pratfall—and then, as they exclaim with rueful self-hatred, “That’s just the way I look,” he must catch himself in mid-careen and turn the near-fall into a dip, a glide, the most graceful tango. Having shared his clumsiness, his self-criticism, they can then soar with his grace. Fidel has done this before—by logic, by cajolery, by surprising metaphor that turns brittle earth into a dove’s wing, he has moved them from desert places. He points, he jabs at the crowd, and a low hiss forms, a wave receding over rocks. I know that he will pick up that jangle and resolve it for them into a new harmony, the next paragraph, a richer, unexpected chord. (
That
series of metaphors sounds like Ponco, if you ask me! Or whomever Ponco sounds like.) Fidel stares up at the sky, as if for inspiration. A smile just barely lifts his lips. (I know that he is pissing into a rubber bottle strapped to his leg.) He looks out at us. He has found his inspiration. He raises his hands over his head and shouts something to the crowd. But what?
I can’t hear him
.

“No,” Ponco said, recalling me to the worn wooden porch. “Not
now
. In Mexico. Our story.” But I felt the anxiety in Ponco’s voice as well. Why hasn’t he spoken?

“Ah. Mexico.
Our
story.” But my mind was still an empty space with grass waving in it.

“What was it like?”

“What? Mexico?”

“Meeting Fidel,” Ponco said, exasperated. “The man. Who might. Call the People The Words The Actions From their separate houses. I like that. I see three little houses.”

“Ah.” I made a sniffle of a laugh. Three little houses. But I couldn’t think of anything to say.

Ponco brought his chair legs down with a crack. He was beginning, I thought, to reach his hand forward to shake my shoulder. But he stopped himself, drew it back. It was not a gesture we would either of us have been comfortable with. “What did the room look like?”

“Ah,” I said. “The room.” But then it did come back to me. The kitchen of a wealthy sympathizer. (Ponco had written that!) Maria Antonia. “A lot of people standing around waiting for him. There was a big black pot on the stove. Spaghetti. His favorite. There were guns all over the room, pistols on the
kitchen table. Rifles leaning against the wall.” I stopped. The grass grew up in my mind, ripened, turned brown, scattered its seed.

“Ah,” Ponco said, after a while, mimicking me. “Let’s try another question. How did you come to be in the room?”

“I was working as a doctor in an allergy ward, an assistant, and doing some experiments of my own. On cats.” I studied Ponco’s face, to see if I might produce a tremor of surprise. He had been right this morning when he had said that he knew what I’d say. So I wanted to say something now that he wouldn’t expect. “Little pussycats. You know. The dear furry creatures.”

“Yes,” Ponco said. “I like to eat their livers. And their little pink tongues.”

I shuddered. “I paid a peso per cat. They brought them to our apartment sometimes. If Hilda got to them first she would pay them the peso to release the cat. Then the kid would capture it again, and bring it to me at the lab. I’ve always been unlucky in business.”

“Ah,” Ponco said, smiling (as if to say, All Cuba knows that). “But lucky in love.”

“Certainly.” I stretched my legs out over the porch steps. It was a hot clear day. I liked the feel of the heat on my legs. “Hilda is a very remarkable person. She found a place to hide me after I shot the man, then went back to her house. The cook had been a dedicated woman. She had betrayed Hilda. The mercenaries were already there to arrest her. And they wanted me, particularly. There had been informers in the crowd that night. The cook was shocked. I was such a good Catholic!”

“All your talk of sacrifice and self-denial! You sounded like a nun!”

“I suppose. Hilda wouldn’t tell them where I was, so they took her off to jail. I made it to the embassy the next day. She had been very good to me. And she had owed me nothing. I admired her character.”

“But Che! What about love?”

I was then still a nun, I thought (but wouldn’t say). Hilda and I were affianced by then. But I could not wholeheartedly make love to her. Was it that most common form of degradation, the Argentine macho unable to take the woman he respects? (I could imagine her at a meeting of the Central Committee more easily than in my embrace.) Anyway, the Gandhian prohibition was still in force; every time I reached out to her the world broke into shards of anxiety. “Talk of love isn’t for people like us,” I said to Ponco. “Hilda felt that, too.”

“I know: ‘Our vanguard revolutionaries must idealize their love for the people. They cannot descend with small doses of daily affection to the terrain where ordinary men put their love into practice.’ ” He smiled. At me. At his feat of memory. “Once a nun,” he said.

“Always true to the vows,” I said. I was amazed. At this odd continuity in myself (if it was real? I would have to think about that). At the length of the speech for Ponco. And that he had memorized so many bits of my work. And why? I could not believe that it was simply admiration. Ponco was a very complicated man. This wasn’t appreciation; and it wasn’t simply mockery, either. Perhaps it was to help him duplicate my style!

“No music,” he said. “No women. No fun. ‘No life outside the Revolution.’ ”

I was lost in wonder at Walter. This was not irony. It was some more profound, some angrier interrogation.

Though his next question was innocent enough. “How did you live, Che? Before the Revolution. Before Fidel?”

“In Mexico? I did odd jobs. Then Soto found me a contact who gave me the hospital job. Soto said it was to keep me till Castro arrived. He was very determined that I meet Castro.” Having killed a man I found I could work again as a doctor. Yet the work, like making love, felt distant, difficult, not my own. I, too, was waiting for something else—perhaps this Castro.

Soto had found us almost immediately after we arrived in Mexico. He came to Hilda’s boardinghouse, holding a bouquet of roses. When she saw him standing in the doorway with the flowers, Hilda broke out in laughter, as if her mirth were some sort of terrible allergy to roses. There was always something a little mechanical about Hilda’s laugh. And the extent of her hilarity here only magnified that industrial quality, the machine become diabolical, spewing out small metal parts mixed with cookie dough, beyond control. She rocked back and forth. Little flecks of spit appeared on her lips. She hiccuped with laughter.

Soto stood there bewildered, holding his flowers before him, but talking from the start, talking all the time. “I know you thought me a coward,” he said. “But time has proved me right, hasn’t it?” He looked at Hilda, not knowing what to do with his offering. He handed me the flowers.

I dropped the flowers on the floor. Hilda, overcome, sat down next to them.

“I heard you put it to them,” he said, trying a different tack. “I heard you raised a banner. I heard you kept the struggle alive. And I heard Chaco died.” Soto, too, was mechanical: a flattering machine. The last remark had come out in the same tone as the rest, as if Chaco’s death were something I should be proud of.

“Yes,” I said. “Chaco died.” That was the only part of his litany whose truth I was sure of.

“Nico said …”

“Nico wasn’t there. Nico ran away.”

Hilda tittered from the floor.

“Yes. Well. Perhaps it was the right thing to do? You can’t do for others what they won’t do for themselves.”

Hilda put her hands in front of her face. She gasped for breath.

I couldn’t reply to Soto. What would Chaco have said? I couldn’t hear his voice. I couldn’t imagine it then.

I couldn’t imagine it now. (As if, being responsible for his death, I had also killed my ability to envision him.)

“Hello,” Ponco said, waving at me from his chair.

I was grateful for his greeting (though his was not a voice for hailings).

“Before Soto came, I covered the Pan American Games,” I said, recalling Ponco’s question, “for Peron’s Latin News Agency. I sold books door to door. I worked taking photos with a Guatemalan who had fled with me. A frail, short guy. We met on the train. Penniless defeated man. Hilda and I called him Shorty.”

“Yes,” Ponco said, no longer smiling. “I knew him, Che.” I felt how all good humor had suddenly fled from Walter.

“Yes. Of course.” Why, I wondered, was Walter so angry at my forgetting? Did it make him inconsiderable? “We had a racket together. ‘What a beautiful baby,’ I’d say to some strolling couple. Shorty would walk by casually, and join me. ‘Yes. Beautiful. Beautiful. Even my child wasn’t so beautiful as yours. It’s hard for a father to admit that.’ Hard indeed! Shorty was nineteen, and he looked a sickly fifteen. ‘I wish I had a picture of my Somoza when he was younger to show you. But it never occurred to me. What a mistake! Time passes so quickly, and snatches us all away. Trujillo was so pretty then. And now, frankly, he’s revolting-looking! So bulbous! And even my memories of him have crumbled. My wife says so too. Soon time will have eaten Peron’s pretty face away, and left only the current version, a disgusting fat thing!’ ”

I stopped suddenly. Did Caceres say such things? Or am I making them up for him? As my voice speaks, it makes his uncertain, supplants it. “He was given to bizarre imagery,” I said, as if criticism proved the object had existed before me. “I suggested a simpler style to him. But Caceres was so shy he had to speak in that flowery way. Playing a part released his tongue. Anyway, then I’d point out how fortunate it was that I was a photographer, and for just one peso—”

“The cost of a cat,” Ponco said.

“—I would photograph their beautiful child.”

“No,” Ponco said, definitively, as had most of the couples. “I don’t think so. I’d rather have a nice delicious cat.”

“Yes. We did very little business.”

“But lucky in love,” Ponco said. “Caceres’s love. For you.”

“Yes.”

Adversity had made Caceres and me good friends. He had wanted to come with Fidel. But Fidel had thought that would be one too many foreigners. (And, he had said to me, wasn’t Caceres a little small?) As soon as we won, Caceres had arrived in Cuba, with his cardboard suitcase, and stayed at my house in Havana. I gave him what advice I could about guerrilla warfare, and sent him for more training. But I didn’t see much of him. I’d find him at home, studying Indian languages, eating chocolate mixed with cinnamon and nuts. “That’s bad for you,” I’d say. What would he reply? Time seems to deny me voices today.

Except for Ponco’s. “Juliao,” Ponco said, “dead in Brazil. The student group in Ecuador. Caceres in Guatemala. Blanco captured. Isolated. Dying of fever in Peru. Masetti, in Argentina. He was ours, Che, trained by us, and he never even killed a soldier. Turcios Lima dead. De la Puente dead.”

Truth; good-bye; and naming the defeated; the bleak work Walter’s voice was fashioned for. But why was he doing this? From his own anxiety? To see how far he could go with me? Or to make me shudder, killing some cats?

“We will win,” I said. “Rising all over the continent. They cannot fight that way. Here and in Asia. We will create one, two, three, many Vietnams.”

“A good phrase,” Ponco said, and he sounded genuinely thoughtful and admiring. What odd changeable moods inhabited this small man! “You should use it. In the speech for the Tricontinental.”

If I ever am allowed to give it, I thought. I moved down a step, to have something to lean my back against. A cat in the sun. “We will win,” I repeated, as mechanical in my way as Soto or Hilda.

“Who made the world?” Ponco said. “God made the world.”

I understood. My words had been catechismal. A faith. Our faith? I had no other audience now. I needed Walter’s agreement. I needed
Ponco
. “Caceres wasn’t vigilant enough,” I said. But I disliked the sound of my voice. It had the flat, acrid tone of self-justification. “He was betrayed by school friends who knew his plan. I told him not to trust anyone. He was too trusting.” Shy, he had looked at me on the train from Guatemala until I’d spoken to him. He shouldn’t have spoken to strangers.

“Too trusting! That won’t be our problem!”

“I have a lot of pictures of him.” Why did I say that? “He liked having his picture taken.” What sort of justification was there in that? As if he knew he was going to die?