The Death of Che Guevara (7 page)

I might be lying in bed, watching the shadows pass back and forth over the cracks in the cream-colored ceiling—a map, a land rich with wide rivers
that I might dreamwalk. Waiting for sleep, I passed my two friends, Left and Right, the red tassels of the blanket edges, back and forth between my fingers, telling myself a story about them: they were being trained by my fingers, their captain, to do fantastic feats, ones that would make them much-admired performers. My eyes closed to a trapeze, a crowd in wooden stands. Men in white coats passed back and forth selling candy and small whips that whistled sharply when cracked in the air. Then it was that the air might thicken on my skin, a cream curdling around me.
I had not been careful enough, vigilant enough!
My upper lip was wet with snot; I coughed; and soon, as the attack grew worse, a bad smell, and the worst pain came. My parents, in the kitchen discussing the evening newspapers with each other, heard me, and ran to my bed—for whenever they spoke together they were listening also for that third voice, their son’s anguished breathing.

Or an attack might come late at night, when my parents were asleep (the nights, with their chill, were the worst time for me, especially if there were any dampness in the air, any sign of storm). I woke to my own clangorous breathing; dazed; uncertain for a moment whose sound it was; woke to a constriction in my chest that was a big hand inside me, holding my lungs in its palm while it balled into a fist. I thought:
No one will hear me, no one will come to me
. Bumping against the walls, I made my way down the long hall to my parents’ room.

The heavy air at the foot of their bed made me sway from side to side. My mother was repeating odd sounds to herself, over and over, in a hoarse voice. A different spirit was inside her at night. The bedroom smelled strange, musty. Fascinated by my parents’ bodies, turning jerkily under the sheets, dimly illuminated by the pale light from the windows, I forgot, almost forgot, my pain. I thought:
I must be sure I’m having an attack, I mustn’t wake them unless I’m having an attack
. I stood in my pajamas in the darkness at the foot of their bed, listening to my own breathing, listing my symptoms to myself, concentrating inwardly, and biting my fingers to keep from crying out and waking them before I was certain I was having an attack.

And often I waited too long, no longer had the strength to tug at my father’s beard, or pull his shoulder and wake him. I pushed the air to beat it back from me, I took small steps forward towards them, trying to break the air’s encirclement; I stood still, in a last attempt to hide from it. But then I could do no more; it took all my strength to get the thick stuff, the air, inside me. I gasped, my thin body shook with a continuous tremor from the effort, the terrible effort, of breathing. I was brought to my knees. My mind, tormented animal, was panicked towards one sharp thought,
I must breathe, I have
to breathe!
My arms, my legs, every muscle was strained, trying to breathe. The air pushed back, formed itself into a hand that brought me down, till I rolled from side to side on the floor by the foot of my parents’ bed.

My wheezing—how loud it was for such a small boy!—entered their dreams, woke them.
It wasn’t my fault though, it was my pain that disturbed them
. And unless my consciousness was flickering out, reduced to the animal movement of my throat and lungs, I was filled with joy at my father bending over me in his loose white nightshirt. The feeling of rescue flooded me, a buoyant light.

But really there was no rescue, very little anyone, even he, could do. My father picked me up from the floor. My head lolled against the man’s sleep-warmed shoulder. He carried me back to my bed.

But by then the bad air was in the bedroom too, and it was impossible to rest. I lay in bed clutching the blanket edges, squeezing them rhythmically in my palms. The cracks in the ceiling moved about, the ceiling wavered, breathed in and out as I did. It grew intolerably light in the room, though there was only one lamp (made from a blue toy train engine), and its single bulb was softened by a square yellow shade. Still, the rays of light were thick, they had a nauseating substance. The light overwhelmed the furniture, washed at the wooden bureau, the large mirror, the light was a sickening acid fog that took away all contours.

I wiped my nose on the sheets. The cotton was cool against my lips, gave me a momentary sense of comfort, a reassurance that the world would not be washed away. But then I grew sweaty again, and again a hand was pressing down on me, crushing me into the bed. I gasped for air, my lungs fluttered painfully. The room shook with my effort to breathe; the painted nursery-rhyme figures on the wall, the bureau, vibrated, went fuzzy. The sheet I held against my cheek for reassurance thickened, till I felt all the fibers crawling like hard tiny worms against my skin. Convulsively I threw the bedclothes down around my waist. They bunched there like the folds of a statue’s drapery, pressing into my waist with dull heavy edges.

My father stayed by me throughout the night, to tend me as best he could. A muscular short man of great energy and strength, he sat quietly in a child’s wooden chair by the head of the bed, unable to act, to use his strength. My father’s eyes were set deep in his face, under bushy brows; he had a large straight nose, a large face, and a brown beard; he was, if he wished, a fierce-looking man. Now, his empty hands resting on his thighs, he watched me tenderly, until, I think, his consciousness was only an adumbration of his son’s shaking body, his son’s difficult breathing, until his own lungs strained within him. My pain took away my father’s moralism, his deepest habit (where was
the fault here? where was the lesson?). He was a doctor, but he could do nothing for his son; there was no action to take, no use for his fortitude, his fierceness, his love. He could do nothing but make gestures: hold my arm, wipe my forehead with a washcloth. There were no injections yet for asthma, only a black powder that was burnt in a cup by my bedside. It made a thick foul smoke that did little to help. But it was burnt anyway, another gesture, a rite more than a medicine.

As the night went on the air began to stink to me, not only heavy but dank, bad smelling, like rotting meat. The attack clawed at my chest constantly, my body moved in spasms. My father held my body against his own (for once I’d told him that that made the pain less) and rocked me back and forth.

I was dazed. My father’s large neatly manicured fingers, his thick veins that showed clearly beneath the skin on the back of his hand, looked monstrous to me then, they pulsed and changed in shape, as if I were seeing, grotesquely enlarged, the life of the cells in his hand. With my own hand I grabbed at the tight scratchy curls of his beard, squeezed them weakly to tell him—though it accomplished nothing—when the pain was worst. Then he spoke to me soothingly—if only he could take the pain into himself! He told me of all the things we would do when I was better. But I was gagging, without will or thought, my throat and lungs moving in insistent, agonizing, frantic spasms, trying to bring up, to spit out, the thick black and yellow knots of sputum that had suddenly flowered inside my chest, that were choking the life out of me. My body arched upwards from the bed; the strain ran through me like a current. I was behind walls of pain: I heard distorted fragments of sound, saw my father’s lips move (they were too large now, rubbery, clownish) but I couldn’t understand what the man was saying to me.

And then, a little later, when I was six, shots were discovered that were effective for asthma, an injection of epinephrine that, if administered at the beginning of an attack, would, after a time, become a hand smoothing out the inside of my chest. But I barely connected the injections with the relief that came later. I hated the shots, hated them more than I hated the attacks.

Perhaps I was attached to the concern, the love, that my pain made for me in my parents. During the hard days my mother sat on the end of my bed and drew pictures with me on a big pad. And in the late afternoon my father left his paying patients to come sit with us in the small wooden chair. He put a book across his lap, so I could see the pictures, and read to my mother and me.

And perhaps I confused the disease with myself, my will; to lose one was to lose the other. For I was terrified of the needle, hated and feared my father when I saw him preparing the long glass and silver syringe. To give up my
sickness to my father’s cure was, or so it felt to me, to fall, to lose power over myself.

He carefully raised the glass plunger to suck up the liquid. I promised him then that my attack would soon be over, it would be over in just a moment, it was only a little one this time. I promised that this was the last attack I’d have for a long time, if only they’d just talk to me they’d understand I was serious. I didn’t need the injection. I’d really never have another attack, if they would just not give me the shot (I was screaming now, crying from fear and the strain of breathing), I wouldn’t complain anymore, I wouldn’t have any more trouble breathing, I wouldn’t wake them up at night to help me.

My mother held me hard against her to keep me still. She was standing by the foot of my bed, holding me to her. I was overpowered, I was falling, losing myself, falling. “Stop wriggling now,” he said; “we don’t want the needle to break inside you.” He took down my pajama bottoms and put the needle into my buttock.

Soon my father could no longer bear to give me the shots. He was afraid that his son would be formed by this fear of him, would grow up half hating him for these injections. So a nurse—whose wages I realize now they already could not afford—was hired to watch over me, to give me my shots, preserve my love for him.

Brought to the world frail, unable to tolerate its air, I bought with my infirmities all my parents’ indulgent love. Anything I wanted I was given, they were so thankful that I continued to live from moment to moment, a constant rejoicing. There was no discipline for me, not even toilet training. A child, my mother said, was naturally good, curious, and capable of learning many things for himself (given an occasional timely hint from an adult). Especially such a bright child as her own was.

These ideas formed for her after an exhaustive study of the newest books on child rearing. She particularly enjoyed studying those new ideas that went against the common grain, that went, if possible, against common sense altogether. And she liked those ideas that required no disciplining of the child—not from laziness, for she had an uneven but fierce energy for certain kinds of work—but because she herself was in rebellion against any form of imposed discipline. (Once, when she was a child, she had been told that children learn best from pain: they learn not to touch hot things by being burned. She hated this vulgar and cruel idea, and to show that it wasn’t true she immediately put
her right hand on a flaming candle, and said, “It doesn’t hurt.” Someone pulled her hand away, but it was marked, her palm was scarred, puckered all over with fine lines.)

My mother had been born into a wealthy and aristocratic family—an ancestor of hers, of mine, was the last Spanish Viceroy of the River Plate—but she found she could not bear the tedious restraints of her class. A woman of great, if sometimes erratic, intelligence, she had come of age in the nineteen-twenties, and had set styles, been a leader of her generation. She was the first woman in Argentina to have her own bank account, the first woman to drive a car in downtown Buenos Aires (often on sidewalks according to my father, terrifying innocent people—like the Toad in an English children’s story she delighted in telling me). My mother had been an activist, a militant, of the Radical Party. She’d led demonstrations for women’s suffrage (failed: thirty years later that most hated woman, Eva Peron, would autocratically accomplish this pointless reform). She was a tall woman, often slightly stooped when she stood, as if embarrassed by her height. I think she was a beauty, with a fine face, long and thin, sharp, but lively and engaging features, a mouth that curved interestingly (if a little critically), downward. I think, from certain hints that my father gave in arguments (ones I didn’t understand but were charged enough for me to remember), that she had done some drinking, and had several affairs (though after her marriage her friends were mostly women, and I never saw her drink anything but quantities of black bitter coffee).

My mother believed that people could, should, do what they wished. The world could be remade according to our desires. (It would be easy enough to mock her and add, if you have the money. But I mocked her often enough during my childhood—following my father’s lead—and now I’d like to say something in her favor. For bound though she was to the ideas of her class—so thoroughly bound that she did not see how they betrayed her project, made it look stylish, a little eccentric—
yet she wished to be free.
)

So, a rebel herself, she never imposed any discipline on her son. I ate what I wanted, dressed as I pleased, rarely brushed my teeth (Oh, once every few weeks perhaps, when I was suddenly seized by a fear that they were rotting out of my mouth). Her pale son could ride his tricycle from the front door, through the long carpeted living room, past our guests, and out the back, if that was the quickest route.

And I was always en route, by preference the quickest, somewhere. I was a child possessed by an enormous amount of nervous energy. When I wasn’t in bed with an attack—and especially just after I’d recovered—I couldn’t sit still, had to move around. If I was excited, or frustrated—particularly if I didn’t understand something my parents were saying to each other—I had to use my
body, to fling myself about until I came to an understanding, until the tension, the knot, had been worked out through my motion. At dinner in the Guevara home it was perfectly allowable for me to skate round and round the marble floors of the dining room in my stockinged feet. And while still eating my food—kept chipmunk-like in pouches in my cheeks—I carried on a gay conversation with my amused parents. They leaned back laughing in their carved wooden armchairs.