The Death of Che Guevara (59 page)

Then, clearly, he regretted speaking. He worked his lips nervously, sucking them in and out, looking at the ground. “Well,” he said finally, in a calm voice, “you’ve won their hearts, Comandante. I hope Jorge and the others are more obedient to your orders, to this commitment, than they were to the Party’s. And you may find that the countrypeople don’t know your name as well as Party militants do.” He smiled, and everyone else smiled as well, relieved. “This is a historic moment, isn’t it?” Monje said. “The beginning of this great enterprise?”

“Yes,” I said. “Let’s have a drink.”

Ponco poured rum into the tin cups, and I personally gave each man his drink. I raised my cup. “This marks the beginning of a new War to the Knife, the Continental Revolution, the liberation of our continent. Our lives, the lives of any man among us, mean nothing, nothing when compared with the importance of making the Revolution, the deeds of revolution.”

The men raised their glasses and we all drank down the sweet burning liquid.

Coco said, “Let’s have another.”

So we did.

Later, by the fire, after Monje had left, we tossed in the dregs of rum, making little hisses and flicks of flame. Ricardo served up the coffee. Camba said, “We should mingle blood.” He extended his wrist and made a light cutting motion across his vein with a finger of his other hand. “It would show that we’re all comrades, and that when one man’s blood is spilled, so is everyone’s.” Camba is the youngest of the men. His face is thin, his eyes intense, his movements angular, jerky. Maybe he was drunk on the rum and the beer from dinner.

“We don’t need rituals to prove that,” Joaquin said paternally. “It’s true.”

Camba said, “I think the Party’s position is disgraceful. Monje is going
back on his word to us. I think he should be killed, and his blood will serve as an exemplary punishment for his vacillation. We could follow him right now and shoot him in the head, or we could have someone in the city do it.” He made a pistol with his finger and shot himself in the head. “Pow.”

He still wanted a blood ritual; Monje’s blood this time. His desire to kill Monje, a party leader, a comrade, proved his commitment to me, to the others, to himself.

Several of the men, though, nodded. I was surprised to see Mustache among them. I suppose they felt abandoned by the Party at a time when individually they each faced great danger.

“No,” I said. “The Party will support us at some point. Once they see that we will win.”

Tania agreed. “Yes. Che was right. I hadn’t seen it before. This way the Party won’t be a brake on your actions. And when you win victories the Party will support you.”

12/30/66: I am sad. Today I am very sad. There is clearly some problem with my friend’s, our chief’s, character. All this talk of purity! Who cares about purity? Only saints and crazy people who wash themselves over and over. Gandhi! He should have compromised with Monje, made some deal. Or lied to him. Or best of all, gotten men from him, taken Monje on the march with us as “political chief” and killed him. Not the way that Camba said, to make an example. That’s like Che, more purity crap, making examples to the world. No, it should have been sneaky, the way Fidel would have done it. Why does Che have to draw the line, be right, appear before everyone as an example, with clean hands, get us in bad difficulties?

I spoke to him about it. “You should have made a deal with him.”

“There was no deal possible.” He looked angry at me. He’s changed; he doesn’t want a “devil’s advocate” anymore. Or any opposition. But I am his friend, so I went on.

“You got angry,” I said, “you consigned him to the flames. All right, he is no
revolutionary
, yes, I agree. But you could have lied to him. You could have let him think more highly of himself. You could have neutralized him.”

“No, that would have muddled the situation. This way our stand is clear and sharp. Tania agrees with me.”

“Who knows what she thinks!”

“We will be an example to be emulated, a rallying point. Everyone knows what we stand for.”

“I could have stood the ambiguity.”

“No. By making our position clear we’ll attract better people, ones who are truly committed to us. The situation will organize itself around us. We will ring like a bell.”

“Ding-dong!” It was all I could think of to say.

Che laughed at me, and walked away.

That was our conversation. It made me sad. It makes me scared, too.

From Guevara’s Journal

12/31/66: I laughed this morning to think of my conversation with Monje. It should have gone:

But then, this afternoon, I had a troubling conversation with Inti that was far from comical. (Inti is a profoundly serious young man, perhaps a little melancholy. I like him. I will make him political commissar over the Bolivians, to settle the uncertainties and doubts that are bound to develop about the line we are following—once the worm of hunger starts gnawing in their guts. There is nothing like hunger to improve the workings of the critical faculties. They will wonder if guerrilla warfare is mass enough, or is it adventurist, or is Guevara simply a madman. Once we win victories and gain recruits it will all seem clear to them again. But for the time of uncertainty and anguish, Inti can provide the necessary clarity, the necessary discipline.) Inti thinks that Monje knew—from conversation with Debray and Coco—that I would never agree to relinquish leadership of the guerrilla to the Party. He came with that demand, knowing it would force a rupture and leave him with clean hands, as if he’d tried to make a deal. That’s why he wasn’t disturbed by my insults. There had been no hurt on his face; I’d imagined it. I needed him but he didn’t want anything from our conversation.

This was especially troubling: Monje’s reports to Fidel and Debray had been crucial in our decision to come to Bolivia (whatever we may have thought of him personally). He had described Bolivia as ripe for rebellion. Inti thinks this was a ploy to get Fidel’s money.

But Inti says that he himself is unshakable in his conviction that ours is the right course, and that this is the right time to begin. Victory or death.

Ise of Pines, May 1968

Even then I knew it would become a story!

September 7: “Notes for the beginning of a book,” and “A name for the book of the Bolivian Expedition: The Revolution of the Weak Lungs.” I didn’t think of writing a book in Vietnam or in the Congo. But in Bolivia, it seems, I knew from the first. (I don’t remember
knowing
—yet there it is in my journal. I kept thinking of titles!)

Again the dark of the room closes around me! Did thinking of titles, of making a story—was that evil? How stupid!
I
didn’t kill
him
so that I would have something to tell! I didn’t kill him at all!
He
nearly killed
me!

Anyway, his mother knew first. It’s in the manuscript he wrote before we left for the Congo to train the men. “You’ll make a story out of yourself.”

He said once that I reminded him of his mother!

No more today.

The
worst
thing is: sometimes it makes me happy. I look at the piles of papers, his, theirs, mine, the photos from U.S. magazines, the new pile that I’m making by copying out sections from their journals—and I’m filled with joy. I wish there were a mirror in this place: I want to dance in front of it! It’s mine, I think, it’s mine! That’s a terrible thing to think! To be happy for his—I can’t write it!—for his
death
—isn’t that what it means? Not
“it’s
mine”—but
“he’s
mine”!

I didn’t kill him!
He
almost killed
me!

I’m thinking of my conversation with him after Monje left. Why did he speak to Monje that way? To be pure? To make an example?

In his manuscript he said that
they
made examples of their victims. They were terrorists. What if
he
made an example of
himself?
Was he a terrorist, with himself as victim?

He wasn’t his only victim. Just five of us escaped. Five!

In the book I was reading on this island last time, a thousand years ago, when I was a child, the mad captain threw his sextant overboard. He wanted to read his boat’s position from the stars. (What’s a sextant? Some way of finding out where you are? I need a dictionary.) Why does he do it? Was it like Che with Monje? (In the book it was called
“dead
reckoning.”) The captain wanted to make it hard on himself. (But it wasn’t just himself he was hard on. The whole boat went down. Only five survived.) So he could feel it was himself only,
his
will, uncompromised, shining purely, like a flare. Hilda was right. Purity makes bad politics. Like Quixote. Ahab. Bad politics but good stories. I think Che would have liked it better if we hadn’t used rifles! They would have had fancy weapons, and we would have just our will and the purity of our motives. (He hadn’t changed! He still hated technology!)

Talking like this means no dinner tonight. I have to punish myself, send myself to bed.

Bolivia, 1967

1/2/67: In the late afternoon, after a day’s work cutting trails, I gathered the men in the “amphitheater” for Joaquin to talk to them about Masetti. I wanted to reinforce my speech about the difficulties to come, the trials we would face;
I wanted the men to have something to test their green commitment against.

Joaquin stood stiffly by the lectern. He is a huge man, with arms like steam shovels. He stared straight ahead as he spoke, not even looking from face to face. Public speaking must make him uncomfortable; and the mobility I remembered in his face has been gone since his return from Argentina. The only motion he made was the bobbing up and down of his giant Adam’s apple.

It began as a lecture, in his deep paternal voice. “Before the guerrillas are established among the people is the most difficult, the most dangerous time for them. We must all be very careful that we are not seen, or that we have a good story for whoever sees us. This is what happened to us in Argentina: we were discovered before we could begin killing the soldiers. The zone we operated in didn’t have enough people. It was poor. And that made it difficult to get food.

“The first thing our commander, Jorge Masetti, did, when we arrived in the mountains of Argentina, was to issue a proclamation of our existence, of our strategy, and our goals. He wanted the people to rally to us. He wanted to make our stand clear. This was a mistake. Before we were ready to face the army, the army knew all about us. Many people did come to join us, dedicated people, good people, people who were eager to fight. I remember a boy named Growald. He had his toenails extracted so they wouldn’t become ingrown and hobble him on the march.

“But we never really saw the army. There were no victories. The guerrillas began to turn on each other.” Joaquin’s eyes were unfocused, sunk into himself; he wasn’t looking at any of us; he wasn’t talking to us anymore. He had told the story many times, he was telling it again. The images were made to pass through his mind and he tried to feel nothing. To feel nothing, he had to be far from the images. His face, I noticed, was covered with perspiration, but he didn’t touch it. He wouldn’t, or couldn’t, move his hands; they lay by his sides. I wanted to wipe the sweat from him.

His voice became slower and slower, as he tried to keep from sinking into his dream, his nightmare. “There were fights constantly, just constantly. Men began to talk about whether guerrilla struggle was the right course. Maybe it was elitist or adventurist. Maybe we had begun too early. Maybe we should have prepared the ground more. Masetti should have stopped such talk; he should have been stronger. But maybe he had doubts himself, too many doubts. Everyone thought of a reason. The boy Growald was tried for lack of morale. That wasn’t the answer. He was tried for being too critical, for spreading dissension. I didn’t understand that. Everyone was doing it. And he hadn’t stolen food from others. The tribunal was undecided. But Masetti ordered him
shot. I was ordered to carry out the sentences. I didn’t understand it. But I did it. The boy died shouting, ‘Long live the Revolution!’ ”