The Death of Che Guevara (68 page)

I talked over this latest development with the men. Our victories, I said, are having an effect. But it is deeds that matter from the Party, not words.

Inti is skeptical that there will ever be deeds. He thinks the Party is only interested in Fidel’s money, and that they will never make contact with us, blaming circumstances.

Time will tell.

5/17/67: Today Monje was interviewed on Chilean radio. Coexistence, he said, is for the United States and the Soviet Union. Thermonuclear powers must avoid war. But Communists must not give up on the war against imperialism within our countries. That is why the Bolivian Party gives its wholehearted support to the guerrilla movement in Bolivia.

Inti now doubts his own skepticism. And Coco thinks we should choose someone to return to the city, contact the Party, and arrange for incorporating their cadres.

That, I said, is impossible. It would be certain death for the messenger, and too great a risk for the rest of us if he fell into the enemy’s unkind hands.

I cannot have the men dreaming of a possible escape into the cities for any of us. They must realize that we stand or fall together now; here; there is no life for any of us outside the Revolution. Victory or death.

5/18/67: There was nothing to eat today except some lard-flavored water. We sat in the darkness of the forest, listening to the radio and drinking the stuff. Barrientos admitted that there are Yanqui advisers. The Chilean station said that the guerrillas are forcing the cities to take defensive measures. The U.S. has sent more helicopters, napalm, planes, arms, and another contingent of Green Beret advisers.

Che was pleased by this, and of course I am too. I guess we are doing very well. But all those weapons! I saw the forest in flames and helicopters landing on the road near here, and I was scared.

5/9/67: The men showed me—by their slow pace, slumped shoulders—their reluctance about walking today. There hasn’t been enough food for the machete wielders, and none at all for the rest of us. The solution is to set a better example.

René Doré has been arrested. The radio said that Doré was a mastermind of the revolution, a bloodthirsty guerrilla who led many ambushes against the Bolivian Army. A thoroughly bad character, Doré, in Cuba, had feasted on delicacies while Guevara directed mass executions in the Havana city square—for Doré’s amusement, presumably.

“A movie villain,” Inti said.

“No,” Ponco said, “more like a comic book.” As an illiterate Walter loved cartoons. They were his only stories.

“I can’t go any farther,” Benigno said, indifferent to the proper medium for my portrayal. He has to carry one of the heavy guns.

Doré, the radio said, was captured in the woods as he hid trembling behind a tree. Bustos, too, was arrested, and Wolfe. As it turned out, then, it was the army that no longer believed in Wolfe’s credentials. But he at least will soon be released.

How did they know about Bustos and Debray so immediately?

5/20/67: Nothing to eat today but more lard soup—without the additional beans. We are nearing one of the food caches. The situation will indeed be desperate if the army has discovered our supply caves.

5/21/67: Doré became Debray today. In the last two days he has been transformed from co-leader to political commissar to intellectual author of the guerrilla movement—to mere combatant. Today, along with his proper name, he assumed his real position: courier. It is easy to imagine that each of these demotions represented many hours of the torturer’s work, beatings, bullets fired in the dark, electrodes on Regis’s genitals, etc. I heard Ricardo elaborating some of these educational methods to his group, to add emphasis to my points about the necessity for cohesion and the dangers of falling into army hands.

In Debray’s case the torturers failed, for they must have begun with the
grand story they wanted, and revised only very reluctantly, marking the revisions on Debray’s body. The admission they desired was that he, and we, are Castro’s agents. Debray denies all still, and says that he was a reporter. By now he is probably in a coma from his beatings.

Our messages to Fidel, about the Bolivian Party—and the ways, under his supervision, that they must show their good faith by resupplying us—are lost.

5/22/67: Bear Camp, Nancahuazu. The army had been to the camp, which gave us some bad moments. Their footprints were everywhere. The board for the latrine had been smashed, and the cooking site covered with dirt. As I walked through the camp I could feel the emptiness form in my stomach.

But the caches were untouched! We had eight cans of milk—a stunningly good breakfast. And we ate the last of the dehydrated soup, and the canned meats. We have still more lard in the caves.

Tuma, our scout, reports that the soldiers have occupied the little farm and trampled the corn.

5/23/67: A small patrol of about twelve soldiers came down the river, picking their way among the rocks, and fell into our ambush. Marcos shot the lieutenant, and we all called for their surrender, but they went on firing. I shot one of the soldiers, who fell on the rocks, and then rolled into the river. Most of the soldiers ran away, but six were captured by the rear guard of the ambush, as they ran directly towards our guns. One of them fell on the rocks as he tried to escape, and he broke his leg.

We assembled our prisoners near the river. “Let’s not fuck around with them this time,” Ricardo said. “Let’s just kill them.” I don’t think he was serious. He asked the major what his last wish was. The major spat near Ricardo’s foot. I thought Ricardo would hit him, but he just laughed and touched the spit with his boot, rubbing it along the gray-and-brown rock.

“I want my body to be given to my men to bury,” the major said. The major had a broad face. His nose looked out of joint, like a brawler’s. “So that it can be taken back for a Christian burial.”

Ricardo stopped smiling. He doesn’t like to talk about Christianity. “Why do you say that’s all you want? Are you an idiot? You
look
like an idiot.”

“I don’t want the same thing to happen to my body that happened to my dead comrades.” The major seemed very angry. I suppose that was what he did with his fear.

Ricardo was too furious to speak, so I told the major that he was wrong,
that the unburied bodies weren’t our fault. We had made it very clear to the officers that they could come back the next day, unmolested, to get the men’s bodies. But the officers had left their men to rot.

I said this loudly so the other prisoners would hear.

“You are savages,” the major said, just as if I hadn’t spoken. He was making me angry, too. I saw how he must have gotten into a lot of fights.

“You’re a lucky man,” Marcos said. Marcos was covered with sweat from the battle. He perspires more than the rest of us, and he has to wipe himself dry or he breaks out into a bright rash. “In the Congo, when the guerrillas kill an enemy, they rip open the skin of the dead man’s chest with their long knives. And they pluck out the nut, the man’s heart. Then they eat it. Perhaps, if you aren’t more polite, we’ll let our Congolese friend work on you.” He gestured towards Ponco, who stood on one of the rocks by the river, smiling in the sunlight. “Do you have your long knife, Ponco?”

“You betcha Ponco have long knife,” Ponco said, dancing from foot to foot gleefully. “Man look very good. Very good fruit for Mponco. He skin and eat mighty quick now!”

“You disgust me,” the major said to Marcos. But his voice had the jitters. It was obviously a joke—or so I thought—but Ponco’s performance had scared him. I think it must have been that very strange sound Ponco makes.

“You not disgust Mr. Ponco,” Ponco said, smiling with delight. “Delicious Thing You Are.” He walked across the rocks to the major, batting his eyelashes. This was too much for the major, who took a step backward, and started to fall from his rock. Marcos grabbed him by the shoulder, and the major screamed at his touch—a little high-pitched sound. Everyone laughed at him. Ponco then talked to the other prisoners in an ordinary way, about troop locations, and began collecting the food from their knapsacks. I think they liked the way we had made a fool of their major.

Later I asked Ponco whether what Marcos had said about the Congo was true. He said yes, that the Congolese soldiers did sometimes eat the dead mercenaries’ hearts. Che had been horrified, of course, and tried to teach them better manners—to show more respect for the dead. But the Congo people said that
their
way showed the most respect. They didn’t waste anything—they acquired the soldier’s courage by eating his heart. If you ate a lot of hearts you were sure to become a great warrior.

I told Ponco that I didn’t think his story would usually have bothered me so. But I had been thinking of the man I’d shot leaving a trail of blood on the gray rocks, as he rolled over them into the river. I could taste the salty blood on my tongue, and I felt nauseous.

Ponco said that he understood how I felt. During battles he sometimes had that same strange taste in his mouth, like his saliva had turned to blood. But he could see the Congolese point of view. At least they made it a personal matter. The imperialist forces, in the Congo and Vietnam, dropped bombs whose metallic hearts fragmented to a thousand slivers. The bombs didn’t ruin property, but the slivers entered soft things, like bodies. The fragments were coated in plastic, so that X-rays wouldn’t show their location. The victims hemorrhaged and died.

It was the waste of a good heart, Ponco said. The pilots couldn’t even see their victims, let alone lunch on them. Ponco thought it was better to taste the man’s blood. He thought it was too bad we couldn’t develop an appetite for their hearts.

I don’t know. I saw what he was saying. But I thought, as he talked to me of those sorcerers’ weapons,
Dear God, what are we beginning here?
I thought of the rum I drank in this camp many months ago, when we toasted a new Vietnam in Latin America. Is that what we want for our continent? I saw our villages on fire, and I felt a sliver of smooth metal enter my chest, moving towards my heart, something no X-ray could see.

And later, when I thought over the battles I’d been in, I thought that I would rather have been flying an airplane myself, and killing soldiers I couldn’t see—from a safe distance!

But Che is right
We are doing what is necessary.

5/24/67: We seized a few loads of toasted corn from the soldiers, and some sugar and coffee. We also took their boots. Ours are worn through by the combination of the damp and the rocky terrain. The leather flakes away far more rapidly than I had expected. We also exchanged our rags for their fatigues.

According to Marcos’s interrogation of the prisoners, the army is encamped on the grassy flat hunting plain, half burned away now by their napalm. We will move north. I had bottles filled with lard from the caves for the march.

I think it is likely that Joaquin’s group will have moved north also.

5/25/67: On the Bolivian radio station today it was reported that Michael Wolfe, an admitted guerrilla, and Guevara’s liaison with Chile, had hanged himself in his cell, using his own belt.

Apparently Tania was right; it is better to have a secret.

•  •  •

5/27/67: The solid foods were gone, and the lard soup made everyone sick. Fortunately, yesterday we came upon a small farm, an adobe house, with a sewing machine. We bought some roast pig, chicken, squash, and corn, all at the usual outrageous prices. Coco, Inti, and Ricardo had a few empty conversations with the merchant farmer.

5/27/67: I listened to Coco, Ricardo, and Inti talk to the farmer we encountered, an old man in a thin dirty sweater and a soft brown felt hat. He had glittery eyes that kept darting about, and a quizzical ironic expression.

He welcomed us as great bandits, the greatest in memory, great bandits with special powers.

“What?” Coco said, as if the man had poked him. “We aren’t bandits.”

The man laughed amiably at Coco’s comic attempt to confuse him.

We were the best bandits, he said again, the greatest bandits. We paid for what we took from the poor. (And it was certainly true that we had paid him very well for the corn and squash he had sold us—enough money so that he wasn’t so poor anymore!)

“But we are not bandits!” Inti insisted. Inti sounded like someone had struck him hard. The two brothers were like Che:
everyone must get things right:
No opportunity for instruction should be lost.

“But of course you are great bandits!” The man was still amiable, despite the brothers’ attempt at deception.

After all, he said, if we weren’t bandits why did the army chase after us? And why did we carry guns? It was because we wouldn’t join the army! All the other bandits had joined the army by and by. It was so much easier to join the army and steal from the peasants that way.

He stopped suddenly, and looked off into the forest. Maybe he worried that he’d put ideas in our heads.

Inti insisted that we were guerrillas who fought the army because it stole from the peasants. We would help him and the others to set up tribunals to judge soldiers who stole. And whatever sentences the peasants decided we would carry out with our rifles.

“Yes?” the man said musingly, stroking his lip. He was relieved that he hadn’t inadvertently convinced us to rob him.

There was a bandit, he said, who had set up as judge over the army. In the thirties. He couldn’t remember the man’s name, but he thought that his wife
probably could—she remembered everything. He had known a woman once who people said had slept with that bandit, the one whose name he couldn’t remember. He had joined the army eventually.

Coco said that we would never join the army. We would fight until the guerrillas became a new army, made up of all the people of Bolivia. An army that served the nation.

“Yes?” he said. “That would be nice.” But he had lost interest in Coco and Inti, for they distorted the basic fact: that we were bandits.