The Death of Che Guevara (89 page)

Sometimes Ernesto stays up all night, till daybreak, watching TV, nights when the temperature in the warm bath of his life seems to have gotten a little tepid. The stations here never go off the air, so there must be, Ernesto thinks, a lot of people who sometimes feel as he does. There are Spanish broadcasts
late at night—but he doesn’t care for those. He wants to learn about the United States of America. He is always learning, mostly from his children. Sometimes he feels that he and his children are the life forms of different geological epochs. They are the more evolved creatures, and he is a dinosaur. Everything gets reversed in the land of Cockaigne: the children know more about the U.S. than he does, about the essence of the place, how to dress and talk, and what to think about the popular music (it’s easier for him than the complicated Latin tunes. 1, 2, 3, 4, like an army marching). A land of Cockaigne where the children teach the adults; the performer, the speaker, is the child; the audience are the adults. It makes leadership impossible.

Exterior. Night. Medium shot of the riverbank. The guerrillas and Ispaca embrace.

The captain’s point of view. Medium long shot. Braulio walks into the river, a machete held in his right hand and an automatic weapon with a curved bullet clip in his left. His body is struck by the current and he staggers. Close-up of Braulio’s face. The current was unexpected. Why had Ispaca led them to such a tricky crossing? But he walks on.

Medium shot. The water is up to his calves. He stops, puts machete and rifle in the same hand for a moment, bends over, and takes a drink. Close-up of his face as his hand brings the water to his mouth. The water is cool and delicious.

A card comes on the screen, filling the frame with big black letters: THE END.

Ernesto understands: the point of the movie is this: a man is about to die, and he tastes some water, and it is very cold and good. Why isn’t the sensual world and the pleasures it offers us enough? My father, Ernesto thinks, would have liked that point. His father had thought that that would be the way to live, enjoying each moment—for just like this Braulio, we’re always on the point of death, and we don’t know when it’s coming. That was his father’s
theory
. His father had had the theory of enjoyment instead of enjoyment. That would have been his fate, too, if he hadn’t found both Tamara (Tania, he thinks. But he only calls her that when they make love, and only in a whisper) and this country.
A veritable land of Cockaigne, where all is beautiful, rich, tranquil, honest; where luxury is pleased to mirror itself in order; where life is rich and sweet to breathe; where disorder, turmoil and the unforeseen are
excluded; where happiness is married to silence; where the cooking itself is poetic, rich and stimulating at once; where all resembles you, my dear Angel
. He touches her braids, plays them between his fingers like the edges of a blanket, and she smiles, still looking at the screen.

Really it isn’t the end. The movie goes on.

The river. Nighttime. The captain’s p.o.v. Medium long shot. Braulio goes a little bit farther on, walking towards the center of the screen. The water is suddenly deep moving and extremely turbulent. Close-up of Braulio’s face. He is very suspicious now. He looks around, but doesn’t see anything.

Medium long shot. He walks forward.

The riverbank, behind some rocks. The captain and the lieutenant.

And his men, unlike some other men, somewhere, obey him.

The camera moves in a slow tracking shot towards Braulio as he walks forward, the water sloshing around him.

Braulio looks towards the camera, which is to say, towards the Captain’s p.o.v. Cut to Braulio’s p.o.v. He looks directly at the clump of rocks where the captain hides. We should feel for a moment that they look into each other’s eyes. But the guerrilla doesn’t see anything, for he continues to move forward, to the rocks and the shore.

Or does he? Perhaps he knows what he is moving towards, perhaps he has survived too many comrades and wants to die.

Tight close-up of Braulio’s face and neck. We see his Adam’s apple, prominent, bobbing up and down as he swallows.

Medium long shot. Braulio walks to the right of the captain’s rocks. Braulio raises his machete as a signal for the others to come across.

Braulio’s and the captain’s p.o.v., which are virtually identical now. The guerrillas, spread out in a line as they enter the water. The woman carrying a knapsack, rolls her blue pants up to her knees. She is last. The camera pans across the line of guerrillas.

•  •  •

The guerrillas are all in the river, some close to the shore. The water is up to the woman’s waist where she stands in the middle. The current pulls at her, and she loses her footing, putting her hands out into the water, as if it were solid. She regains her footing and stands.

A high-angle shot of the whole scene. The guerrillas halfway across the river. The soldiers hidden here and there in the foliage and rocks. They look like children playing hide-and-seek.

A wider higher angle still, and the people are little more than dots in the cartoon quilt of the landscape.

A wider higher angle still and you can’t see the people at all, just mountains and deserts and rivers, the landscape of Bolivia, looking like a relief map.

A helicopter shot, Ernesto thinks, at first—in the know—laughing at himself for taking satisfaction, yet still taking satisfaction in knowing. But the highest angle of all, how did they get that?

A card comes on the screen, filling the frame with big black letters: THE END.

His father would have liked this part too, Ernesto thinks. Finding our place—our not-too-significant place—in the natural order. His father’s emotions, his anxieties, his dissatisfactions with his life, they must have been terrible things, if he had to find such complicated ways to convince himself that they didn’t matter.

High-angle shots were something you could do in the movies, but not in life. And Marxism? That was an impossible high-angle shot, too, on one’s own petty concerns.

He squeezed Tania’s hand.

“It
must
be near the end,” she says, sighing reassuringly. “The
real
end.”

For the movie has gone on.

Medium shot. From the bank of the river. The firing begins, a tremendous sound made up of a thousand little sounds. It should drown out the roar of the river. The guerrillas fire back towards the camera, but it is clear that they can’t
find any targets, they are firing in all directions, at the bank where they came from, at the far shore, even into the river or up at the sky.

Captain Vargas’s point of view. Braulio is running towards the ambush. He comes face to face with the lieutenant. A close-up of Braulio’s face, mad with rage and terror. A close-up of the lieutenant’s, soft and scared. Braulio’s machete blade starts at the upper-right corner of the frame and comes down in slow motion, splitting the boy’s head. Blood gushes out.

The captain fires directly into Braulio’s face.

Ernesto thinks about shooting a photo and shooting a man. Is the filmmaking a comment on that? Why is the word the same? But he finds he cannot think about it, he has to watch the screen, as if someone won’t let him think, won’t let him distract himself.

Close-up of the river water, a multitude of little red spots that turn into purple swirls.

THE END.

What does that close-up of the spotted water mean? Perhaps that even terrible events can release something beautiful if only we have eyes to see. He wants to make love to Tania/Tamara. He wants to feel her press her breasts into his hand. Could she have been so passionate with him lately if she were having an affair? Or does that mean that she
is
having an affair? He hopes that she’ll be in the mood after all this carnage.

He remembers their first movies here, in this country. He had stood in front of the candy stand just staring, unable to believe the number of things offered, all beautifully packaged in bright colors. He had wanted to get the high-school kid behind the counter to describe each one to him. The people in line behind him had grown restless. Now he wondered if they had thought he was on drugs, for he has since then seen young people in a similar sort of stupor at the candy counter. Tamara had suggested that he try a new one each time, and he had found, to his disappointment, that most of the candies were variations on the same, a sugar and gelatin mixture, with coloring added. “A singular land,” he thought, “superior to others as art is superior to nature, where nature is revised by dreams, where it is corrected, embellished, reworked.” Now he always got the chocolate-covered raisins—a pitifully small number of them, considering the price.

In those days he and Tamara had gone to the movies just to practice their English. They still usually went to American movies, trying to learn about their country, to keep up with their children. He hoped Tania enjoyed hearing the German tonight.

Medium shot. The captain’s point of view. The woman waves a bit of white cloth torn from her blouse as a signal that the guerrillas want to surrender. The sounds of screaming now drown out the sounds of firing. The screams are so loud that they are painful to hear.

Medium close-up of Vargas’s face. He is shaking his head no to his men. He isn’t interested in surrender. The firing continues.

Medium long shot. Joaquin has gotten back to the bank they had started from. He runs along the edge, a fleeing shadow. The camera tracks him. He gets almost to the edge of the screen, as if he has outrun the camera, where he is shot and killed.

The river, from above. The dead, the wounded, the knapsacks are dragged along indifferently by the current. Medium long shot: the soldiers fire at everything that moves, killing the dead over and over.

We see that one of the smaller guerrillas, Paco, let himself be carried downstream, and another guerrilla, Freddy, swims over to join him. They get out and hide behind rocks, watching their dead comrades float by, swept past by the current.

The army p.o.v. Freddy’s head is seen peering out from behind the rocks. Bullets begin to chip at the rocks. Screams. Close-up of Freddy as he is hit twice, once in the right forearm, and once below the shoulder, in the armpit.

Close-up of Paco, with his arm around Freddy.

F
REDDY
: Stop firing! Stop firing! We surrender! I am a doctor! For Christ’s sake stop firing!

Medium shot. Three soldiers approach the rocks, shouting: “Come out with your hands up!”

Soldiers’ p.o.v. Paco rises with his hands up. Then he bends down again, to hold Freddy up.

•  •  •

Medium shot. The soldiers enter the frame. They kick at the two guerrillas to separate them. They push them. The camera moves in to watch. They knock them down, and then order them to get up again.

When the soldiers stop, Paco tries to give Freddy first aid, ripping his own dirty shirt to get cloth to bind Freddy’s wounds.

First soldier kicks at Paco.

S
ECOND
S
OLDIER
: Leave him alone!

First soldier is from Paco’s home town.

F
IRST
S
OLDIER:
you murdering son of a bitch!

He kicks at Paco’s legs, trying to get him in the crotch.

Paco covers his genitals with his hands and tries to dance out of reach.

“Bolivians
are
funny,” Ernesto says.

P
ACO
(crying): Leave me alone.

F
IRST
S
OLDIER
: Sure. (He shoots Paco in the arm.)

THE END.

“It will never end,” Tamara says with mock anger. “It goes on forever.” She gives Ernesto’s arm a squeeze.

It’s impossible, he thinks. She couldn’t be having an affair. He has never loved anyone so much, never perhaps loved anyone before. He hasn’t tried to remain in touch with his former wives, children, lives. Better to make a clean break. But he couldn’t stand to lose Tania. Sometimes when he comes home before her, he sees a pair of her shoes on the floor, little blue ones, like ballet slippers; they come from Hong Kong. How dear they look.

As the soldiers torment Paco we hear Vargas’s voice off screen, shouting: “Bring the prisoners here!”

Medium shot. The two prisoners are half dragged over to where the other corpses have been laid out on the riverbank.

Vargas in close-up. It is clear that there is a certain name he is greedy for.

Freddy collapses next to the dead bodies, as if he wanted to join them. Shot from above of Freddy writhing on the ground.

F
REDDY
: I’m being bitten! My arm is being bitten!

Medium shot. Paco tries to kneel down beside Freddy but is restrained. A corpsman bends over him.

The captain leans down and shoots Freddy in the chest and head with a burst of automatic fire.

P
ACO
, in medium close-up: And that was Freddy, our doctor.

A card comes on and fills the frame with big black letters: THE END.

Then the whole thing starts again. The guerrillas come to the edge of the river. Braulio enters the cold water. But this time in the form of a drawing. Then it is as if someone were rubbing away at the drawing, blurring the outline to a dirty smudge. Then all the deaths—Braulio shot in the face, Joaquin falling by the riverbank, Paco shot in the chest—are clipped together. Hands reach up. A woman’s body hits the water. Braulio’s machete opens a man’s head. A small boy, his head shaved for lice, lies arms akimbo in an open field. Braulio’s head is blown off.