The Death of Che Guevara (82 page)

I knew what
that
meant—so I came back to this little house, and our board.

It is different
(he wrote)
from what we faced in Cuba. Some darker force resists us here. It is as if, when we came to Cuba, the peasants were empty-handed. We came, and they looked down, and we had placed a powerful tool in their hands. Here they turn aside, they evade us, as if their hands were already full. Yet I cannot see what it is they have; it is present to them, but ghostly to me
.

They do not listen to our story, and certainly they refuse to take their place in it. Instead they make one of their stories out of us
.

But their story is nonsense, evasions, the twists and turns taken by cowardice! Perhaps cowardice, their deep soft cowardice, is all that we have fallen into—nothing darker or more mysterious than that! The magic rings, and cars, and thunderous farts, are all so much cowardice. The Indians put us above them, supernatural, so that they can retreat back into their burrows, and yet save their self-respect. How—they can say to themselves—could they dare to join us, or even to help us? For we have the magical protections—the ones that they have imagined for us
—
and they are just Bolivians, they are just … shit. So they are wise to watch us
.

And we die
.

1) I cannot yet see a way to use their magic stories against their cowardice. To agree to magic powers—and invite them to share in them—would only eventually retard the Revolution’s development. But in every speech I must stress my own physical weakness, the asthma, etc. Thus: Even the weakest of them can be terrible. (And so my childhood fantasy might be realized: my asthma given to me as a sign.
)

It was amazing to us then: each rest period, as we lay in our hammocks, or on our ground covers, our
tablecloths
where we were the food, we looked over and wondered, wondered what he was writing, wondered how he
could
write when we had to bend all our willpower just to suffering the jungle.

I see now that
he
was the static in my head.
He
was what didn’t make sense. We had given all our soul stuff, our will, into his keeping, and he had wandered into that pointless place; that didn’t make sense, and so our world didn’t make sense. Since the first battle I had a special radio; I could tune in the thoughts of the men we captured. I didn’t pick up Che’s thoughts; he was the air the radio waves moved through. Now that air took my words and turned them into buzz. And behind that buzz there was only more buzz.

That static was the place he had told me about in his note to me here, a hundred years before, on our dinner table. That time was the thin band of white, the time between the frames on a motion-picture film, the time when he didn’t know what to do, when his stomach was upset and the world a jumble.
But now it was our stomachs, too
.

Daily fights broke out among the men. Marcos hit Pacho again, with the handle of his machete, breaking his nose. (Pacho, hit so many times, was beginning to look like a prizefighter—a losing one.) One day Camba sang, and Eusebio screamed at him to shut up, and then began to weep.

Che meted out punishment as necessary, and restored discipline.

But his thoughts were elsewhere.

Should we call attention to their cowardice?

Is it cowardice?

Chaco’s voice: “You want to say no to History, but your no is just another note in the chorus.”

That no is the shadow, the darkness that resists us: They want to say no to History
.

They must take our instruction, we must show them what I learned in Guatemala, when Chaco died, that all the time, behind their backs, history goes on, wears away at them, takes their children, corrodes their bodies with
the acids of work and malnutrition. History destroys their way of life, unravels the pattern of their weaving
.

But we cannot shout at them to wake them into history, for they won’t even hear us, won’t shout back at us. They will live their refusal in their stupid dogged unending repeated unchanging suffering. They will live their no to History in the twisted stories they tell about themselves and us, the ones that make a spectacle of us; their myths and magic refuse not just our action but History itself. Their refusal is their constant work, the sacrifice of their own lives
.

“The last shall be first, and the first last, and it will begin again. Each day has enough sin. World without end.” And the Marxist, with his
Manifesto
beneath an Inca rock, said, “It all returns. The Messiah comes over and over again.”

That is their dream, the dream of an over and over again, an end to history, to linear time, the dream of a circle of endless recurrence. Marxism is the dream that history itself has of its own ending, the Revolution, the expression of its always unsatisfied desire for rest, a fiery consummation. But that is not their dream. Theirs is Gandhi’s dream, the dream of those who would refuse History, the dream of jumping over history and back to the past, to their way
.

But their way is endless suffering!

And what was
our
way, those months, but endless suffering? Che, unable to suck up enough air to live on, sat and wrote those
philosophical theses
in his journal.—And by that time I could not have counted consecutively, without mistake, to a hundred! Yet Che wrote. Flies laid their eggs in scratches on Marcos’s and Camba’s legs. Maggots hatched out and burrowed under their skin. They screamed in agony as the maggots crawled inside them. We had to cut slashes in their arms and legs to burn the white things.

Meanwhile Che continued his line of thought, his new line:

Clearly the Indians despise us, despise what we represent to them.
I am an ambitious man
. I see now that they are horrified by that. I have a bloody hand that offers them change, progress—the things they have bent all of their imagination to refusing. Ambition which had no place in the Inca way. The Inca—that is the deepest shadow of their dark implacable resistance: the Inca way: recurrence, stability, without progress, without change. Everything in its place, changing only to begin again as before. The King over all, keystone to the arch. Ambition is a threat to them. They wish their life to be a continual recurrent task—the only thing settled once and for all is the rules of the game
.
“Final victories are the imaginings of violent men; apocalypse; fìery consummation. Gandhi’s way must be the will’s slow patient work. It requires serenity, and that comes from Ending one’s place in the larger scheme.” That was the Inca way; and that is the darkness, the opposition to History that we confront here. Even they hardly remember the meaning of their words. The fag-end of Empire—they only had a garbled sentence from the center, the god who spoke from afar, the Inca. The Conquest crumbled that world. And then the modern world fell like an atomic bomb on the rubble that was left. Only the imperfect memory of already broken fragments is left. They want to take their place in an endless recurrent pattern. We must offer to restore, to remake that pattern. We cannot drag them into the modern world, but we can lead them into it, if we offer it in the image of their desire
.

They refuse the Revolution as the progressive consummation of History, the History that jolts and jars and fìnally destroys them now. We must offer them the Revolution not as an end to work, not as rest, but as shared work that will never end, shared continual suffering. Now they are the pointless sacrifìce, wasted by others, by the imperialists, in the name of a progress that never comes and that they do not desire. They want, and we must offer them, the chance to sacrifìce themselves not once and for all, but continually
.

Around this time, our third week in the jungle, Che began to speak with Camba alone. They walked together, or sat to one side in camp, talking in low voices. Che listened intently, his chest thrust forward, his head bent towards our loony bird’s chirping. Camba, I saw, read to Che from his “special notebook,” the one I’d asked about, the one where he recorded “maps”—the Indians’ “secret paths” out of the forest. Those were the paths Che now wanted to follow, or bend into his new directions. They continued talking until dusk, when the bats came out of the trees, and Camba heard the disgusting whirring sound of their wings. Bats horrified Camba. He sat frozen with terror, unable to talk.

Socialism, and even industrialization, as the continual sacrifice of ourselves, as a way to honor the ancestors whose land this is, by our shared labor
.

Their past refuses us if we seem like a continuation of the awful present that wears away at them now, that wastes them meaninglessly. Their dream is recurrence. So we must join that past to the future we offer them, leaping over the present. The Inca way has resisted us as it did the conquistadors. Gandhi was right! They do not want History, Western civilization. It was all
contained in my first dream, the notebook I kept with me,
The Discovery of Latin America
.

Almost every day on the march through—or was it around?—the jungle, Camba sang to us. The melody wandered about unsteadily, as we did. Sometimes Camba stopped in the middle of an old verse and simply started a new one. And sometimes he began a sentence and then sang nonsense syllables, as if he’d suddenly become a baby again. Or he would bawl out some imperious need.

So we couldn’t sing along. But we generally enjoyed the performance.

The song was about a garden full of vegetables, happy with their vegetable existence, and the Chili Pepper, who wanted them to revolt against the gardener. I have put the verses together as best as I can remember them:

(“I’m hungry!” Camba suddenly shouted, interrupting his own song.

No one said anything for a while, as we tore at the vines. After about five minutes Ricardo spoke, “So are we all, asshole, so are we all.” And that closed the complaining. Camba, as the Pepper, sang again.)

(“I have a feeling,” Coco whispered, “that this has an unhappy ending.”

“Bolivian stories,” Inti said, echoing a thought I had once shared with him.)

(“Camba couldn’t think of a rhyme,” Ricardo said, flaunting his critical abilities. “The asshole.”)