The Death of Che Guevara (80 page)

And walking in the jungle made the inside of my head hurt, it made a kind of painful fuzzy sound in my head, a staticky sound from the buzz of the mosquitoes and flies near my ears, from the lack of food and water, from the
senselessness of everything
.

Inti told me that the jungle
wasn’t
senseless. He had studied botany (which is plants, or “flora”) and biology (which is animals, or “fauna”) in college (which was far away from the jungle). He knew things about the jungle, and he tried to take our minds off our pains by teaching us about it. He tried to show me “the intricate harmony” of the place, how a tree with feathery leaves and long thorns “lived cooperatively” with red ants. He tore off a branch and displayed the ants clustered near the bottom of the leaf. The ants lived at the base of the thorns, and ate sugar sweetly provided by the glands at the stems. The ants were “partners” with the tree: it gave them food, and they protected the tree, by cutting away at the vines that attacked it, by eating insects that wanted to devour it, by biting any larger animals that brushed against its sheltering leaves. They even patrolled the perimeter of the trunk, and gathered up seeds scattered by other plants, seeds that might grow into competing plants that could block
their
tree’s access to the sun. (They were patriots, these ants.)

Inti pointed out a tree that looked to me like a man twisted in agony. There had once, he said, been another tree there, but a vine had grown up around it, and strangled it. The vine had taken root, and grown thick as a tree. The twisted shape we saw was the vine. (The tree had rotted away, had
disappeared.
) Now new vines curled about this vine-become-tree, and by and by would take
its
place. (As the bourgeoisie had replaced the feudal aristocracy, as we replaced the bourgeoisie. Count on it, I thought, there will be further revolutions.)

I stuck one leg behind me and leaned over to listen to Inti’s many many many lectures on the ants. He showed me “leaf cutters” walking home from
a demolishing job with little bits of greenery in their mouths. A meal, I thought. But no, they didn’t eat the leaves, they buried them in special underground chambers. Delicious fungus grew on the green bits, and that was what the ants ate. Fungus and mold grew everywhere, tangles of thin white fibers like spiders’ legs in a jumble. Mold grew on the surface of my bandage, though Moro cleaned and changed it every day. Mold sneaked inside the telescopic sights of our rifles, and ate away at the protective coating on the lenses. And one night it grew on Eusebio’s eyes, and in his nose, on the bodies of some insects he had swatted as he slept (for his hands moved even when he was unconscious). When he felt the mold holding his eyes closed, Eusebio thought he had died, and he screamed and screamed until Moro decided on the prescription for hysteria, and hit him.

But on with the lecture: Inti showed me army ants, battalions marching in close-order formation (all that hup-two-three shit, Che had called it when we watched the new Cuban Army drill). They cleared the ground before them, scouring it clean, attacking a fat red toad who waited one moment too long before jumping away, sinking their pincers into his stomach and eyes, pushing him over, devouring him utterly. One minute there was a pile of ants moving forward towards a toad, towards a lump of flesh, then there was a little mound of ants, and then there was nothing. (I saw it when I closed my eyes that night. I was terrified of
going away
, terrified that my soul wouldn’t die, but would be spread out among a million army ants.)

The ants were nomadic, marauders, bivouacking during the nights, then setting off on a march at sunlight, leveling some new piece of ground. They rested three weeks at a time. “Their bite is fierce,” Inti said—though we all knew that, too. The Indians, he said, had used the soldier ants to suture wounds. When the “doctor” squeezed the ant’s body, its jaws clamped the flesh, closing the wound. Then the body was pinched off, making a “stitch.” “If you were an Indian,” Ricardo said, “your thigh would have little ant jaws hanging from it.”

Army ants, by the way, form their lines by smelling the ant in front of them. (Every ant was the care of every other, the one forever in his nostrils, the one who smelled him. What revolution could use
that
metaphor?) Inti smeared a little of our useless bug repellent on the branch in front of their line of march. The odor disrupted their close-order drill—about the only thing the stuff ever did accomplish—and the ants milled about confusedly, tripping over each other.

The maddened ants swirled about in a daze that looked like the inside of my head. No matter what Inti said the jungle had no harmony for me. “No species dominates or grows too large,” he concluded. “Each holds one of the
other species in check. Each has a place. The jungle forms one big organism.”

“A giant toad,” Camba said. “I feel like I’m in the intestines of a giant toad.”

But more than that I felt like I was inside a fire. The fuzziness in my head was the continual high-pitched crackling that I was sure you would hear if you lived inside a fire. The sharp leaves ripping my face, the thick vines that rubbed against my wound and inflamed my leg, the poisonous red trail left by the spines of a serrated leaf I had brushed with my hand were flames licking at me, the fire of hell that burns but doesn’t devour.

It wasn’t as noisy as I thought it would be in a jungle, really. The sound of our boots crushing the loam and thick ferns, the mosquitoes’ buzz, Camba’s high unmusical voice singing his little song of the vegetables, that was all the noise there was most times, except for the blessed days when we heard the chattering of a monkey swinging overhead, and held our breath, praying that Inti or Benigno might shoot it for our dinner. It was quiet enough sometimes to hear a rustling sound from the ground near us, the lady of the jungle giving a little shaking to her garments. “Ants,” Inti said. The other insects made the leaves rustle as they leapt from their homes, running away from the indifferent implacable marauders. The rustling sound was the jungle in panic, it was the insects screaming.

A few Indian families, the advance guard of an MNR project to settle the wild places, still lived inside the fire, though the center guard of that march had never arrived. The government had brought the families here, helped them clear a little land, given them some seed and tools, and then—more than a decade ago—had abandoned them. The government in La Paz (where was that?) had been overgrown by Yanqui mold, they had long ago given up on this brave project in favor of other projects, like resettling Switzerland with the profits from the cocaine trade, the money from the mines, the bribes from the oil companies.

The peasant families lived in houses made of thin pieces of wood lashed together with vines and copper wire and string. We ate that month by stumbling from family to family, following the smell of the man in front, resting during the night, and marching during the day. Often there was three days’ march between families, between meals. And they couldn’t spare much, just some potatoes. We paid them well—though it would be a long walk for them to be able to spend our money.

They told us not to eat anything in the jungle, no matter how good it looked. The jungle, they said, wouldn’t help us. The demons filled the fruits with poisons. There were certain terrible trees inhabited by devils; we must not even stand under them, for if the rain washed their sap into our eyes we would
go blind. (I looked to Inti and smiled. But he nodded.
There were such trees!
) The jungle was filled with the cleverest of demons, and we must be constantly vigilant not to be deceived by their tricks. This man had seen a sorcerer’s caterpillars sent to eat leaves while he watched so he would think the leaves were safe. But they had twisted up in his stomach and nearly killed him. He had shaken and sweated and vomited for days.

“Cyanide in the leaves,” Inti said. “There are species of caterpillars that have adapted so they can eat such things.”

The settler just stared. After all, what did this add for him? He still couldn’t eat the leaves.

“What about the monkeys?” Coco asked. “Surely we can eat them?”

“If your brother could kill them,” Ricardo added dourly, by way of criticizing Inti’s shooting.

The settler was horrified. How could we think of such a thing! Were we like the ants? he asked. Would we eat anything in our path? To kill a monkey was evil, the devil’s work! The monkeys were the souls of children not yet born, souls on their way through the trees, on their way to becoming human. Couldn’t we see that they had human faces?

We could, of course. But we were hungrier than the settlers.

Some days we passed through parts of the jungle where huge leaves grew overhead, like giant ears, and kept the ground dark. Nothing grew too thickly there; we only had to push the lianas away to move forward, and kick the snaky vines with our feet. Other parts of the jungle we had to tear our way through. The machete wielders went ahead of the main group, hacking at things, but they could only mark a path for us, not make one. And the jungle had nearly grown back around the marking before we could put our feet down. In those parts of the jungle they used the machetes like long fingers, not cutting things but picking the material up, tearing it away. And we finished the job with our hands, ripping at the vines as we went, pushing into the thick tangle of leaves, and feeling it close behind us as we stepped forward into more long leaves, and thick poisonous vines that tore back at the side of my thigh and my bandage. (Once, at night, I saw Eusebio, asleep, exhausted, but with his hands swimming above his head, pushing dream leaves aside, tearing at fairy vines.) The crawlers grew in a dense pattern like a madwoman’s senseless weaving. What was she weaving?

A net.

Why did he do it? It felt to me like despair and confusion. His. Mine. We couldn’t find Joaquin as long as we stayed in the jungle. We couldn’t make
contact with the city network—that is, if
they
were trying to find
us
. But the army couldn’t find us there, either, we were safe.
And I think Che was suddenly afraid of the army
.

We had inflicted bad losses on the army, we had shaken the Barrientos government, we had begun to bring the Yanquis into the conflict, just as planned; and we had only taken a few losses ourselves. (Rolando, El Rubio, Tuma, Benjamin, from our group.)

But we didn’t need to take many.
In eight months in Bolivia we hadn’t made one new recruit
. Every one of our dead was a weight attached to our waists dragging us farther under the water. If we didn’t make new recruits we would drown. We could kill a hundred soldiers for every one of us they killed, but eventually they would put another hundred into the field, and kill just one more of us, and then, by and by, there wouldn’t be any of
us
left. We would have killed two thousand soldiers or so.
And we would have lost
. I ran through the sad mathematics as I marched, trying to hold on to numbers that scurried off into the buzz in my head. It was a way of marking time, keeping my mind off the terrible itching, the hot pain of my wound, my swollen feet surrounded by rags of fabric and leather. (I was one of the fortunate ones; I had a pair of the new boots we’d taken off the last batch of Rangers. U.S. boots, Vietnam issue, they let more water in through the drainage holes and fabric sides than they released. Mud clung thickly to the lugged rubber sole, adding extra weight to every painful step.) And being in the jungle was a way of marking time. But I didn’t know what we were marking time for? Until what? I ran through the figures again, trying to get my courage up to speak to him.

Two weeks went by in the jungle, and there was little to eat—mostly mealy potatoes from the settlers. Sometimes, on the best days, Inti or Benigno bagged a monkey, a fibrous bitter thing that we grilled on a spit. At first they
were
difficult to eat, almost human-looking, but after a few days in the jungle they looked less and less human.

There wasn’t much water. The settlers carried it into the jungle, for the only natural water was in stagnant pools covered with green slime. As we stared, black clouds of mosquitoes drifted up towards us, like our own unhappy fears.

We got weaker. Coco, when he was asleep at night and couldn’t help himself, moaned. During the day, though he tried to hide it, his body shook. I told Che, who had Moro treat him as best he could. Anyway, Coco stopped getting worse, though he didn’t get any better.

After the second week there were faintings, almost every day, from fatigue, malnutrition, and dehydration. And sometimes I had to be carried.

Che’s asthma grew worse, too. After a week in there he had no real medicine for it. Bad as the jungle air was for all of us, it was worst for him. He could barely suck the air in through the rubber mask of humidity.

Half the entries for his journal for this time are about his lungs, and the lack of medicine:

Why were we there?

I heard the jungle chattering and roaring, even when it really wasn’t making any sound at all. I just expected it would, and, as my hunger grew, my expectations made me dream those sounds. It was the fuzz in my head, that static on the radio that obscured more static, growing louder and louder.