The Death of Che Guevara (93 page)

The dancers, the white wall, my comrades shook. I wanted to tell someone how I felt, but if I tried to speak to Che or Ricardo I would stammer uncontrollably, I was that frightened. I hated the old man with his cloudy rheumy eyes. I hated all these people who set us apart.

The old man dipped the lip of an empty Coca-Cola bottle half under the chicha, and it made thick bubbles filling up. I tried a trick that has worked in the past, concentrating on one small thing: I tried to imagine myself inside one of the bubbles, but it broke, and spilled me out into the liquid where I was gasping for air, inside the bottle, drowning. He offered us the bottle with me inside it. But before Che could reach out, I took it and had a big swallow. It had a raw taste that set little fires in the desert of my throat. But it did nothing for my fear. I wanted to throw up.

When I handed the bottle back to the old man
he wiped the lip of the bottle on his shirt
. We were heroes. Kings. Gods. But we were lepers, too. He drank, and passed the bottle to Che.

The dancers bobbed up and down, their hands on each other’s shoulders. A saint was brought from the church, and set in the center of the clearing. A plaster figure, a store dummy, like a parody human being. If it moved, I thought, it would be in spastic jerks, like Benjamin before he fell off the ledge; into the river. And if it talked it wouldn’t be a sacred text, but a horrible dirty joke told by a man with a speech impediment, a stutterer who said the last line of the joke over and over, unable to complete it, until the words became unintelligible and terrifying. You would end up on your knees in fear before him.

The saint, a North American face, was dressed as an Indian, in a hat made of light-brown rushes with red ribbons on it. His pants were painted on him, and strings of dried fruit had been tied around his neck, with bits of bright red-and-gold cloth. He looked particularly stiff with all the swirling motion around him, sitting in a small light wooden chair, a child’s chair, with long poles attached to the seat in front and back. The dancers picked him up and carried him aloft on their shoulders, passed him about, and moved around and under him, each person with his arm on another’s shoulder, up and down. The band ran through its Che chords, the same ones over and over.

“Run the maze,” Che said to me. “Coca music. Life will never change, life must never change. Not just a complaint, but a dream. They
want
, finally, not this life but a life that doesn’t change.”

I didn’t know what he was talking about. I don’t understand him anymore,
and I knew, sadly, that my incomprehension would pain him. But how the fuck would he know what it sounded like? “It’s a very complicated tune, actually,” I said, lying, to annoy him. “It changes all the time.”

Che ignored me. The crowd swirled around its center, the saint. Camba, our little crazy one with the eyebrows that met above his nose, came bobbing by, on the outside of the crowd, not far from where we stood. “Where’s his rifle?” Che said—but not angrily, almost musingly.

No one had an arm about Camba. His big eyes looked sickly huge in his skull. He sang his own little song to himself in Spanish. “We must dance!” he shouted. He put his foot down hard in the litter of leather tatters that is all that is left of his boots. His ripped pants leg flapped in the wind as he went. “We must dance!” he shouted to us, by way, maybe, of offering Che further instruction. He lifted each foot very high, up to his waist, and then slammed it down to earth; I winced to watch. “We must
dance!”
he sang. “We
must
dance!
We
must dance! We must
dance!”

I loved crazy Camba then, for I was fascinated by him in a way that distracted me from my terror. And it made me feel better to watch his high-stepping, as if his boots crushed the sharp-toothed weasel in my stomach. I wanted to give him a hug.

He looked at us looking at him.

“Why the long face?” he said to Che.

“What are you doing?” Che asked, stupidly.

Camba laughed—too fast, mechanically, more like someone imitating someone laughing, the way their saint would laugh, if he ever cared to. “We’re dancing, Che. Can’t you see? We
must
dance!” This time it sounded like an obligation, a curse even. Some of the other Indians smiled at him. “What did you think we were doing? You must join us!”

“No,” Che said. He pointed to his feet wrapped in their rags and pages of Lenin’s writings.

“Ah, Che,” Camba said, “you know you lack a certain feeling. If you had your way there wouldn’t be any dancing in the world to come.”

One of Camba’s lucid moments.

“Camba,” Che said, “you’re the giddy one. You do the dancing. Give them a new dance. The Camba.”

9/28/67: … Further notes. His authors finish the hero’s work, that he must leave undone. Only when he is not can they be. Are they taking his blood for their dreams, or offering him their blood, so that he might live?
A hundred shapes are given to the hero’s life, by a multitude of authors.

An Indian imagines a store dummy, festooned with strings of dried fruit, speaking Quechua. But there will be psychoanalytic versions (the hero as case history). A movie—even a Hollywood movie! And other tellings, too, from northern climates.

But the best of my authors, beyond question, will be my one true friend, Walter Villamil Tulio, called Ponco

He didn’t write that. I did. But he knew it was true. I see that now! He knew it long ago, on this island, where he trained me to imitate his style, so that I might change things, add things to his journals and manuscripts, as if in his own words, give the proper shape to his story, the one he would have wanted, the one it already has but no one knows it has until I say it
.

NO! I AM LYING TO MYSELF! HE DIDN’T AUTHORIZE ME! HE DIDN’T CARE IF I WAS KILLED. HE LEFT ME, PART OF THE REAR GUARD, COVERING HIS RETREAT, CERTAIN TO DIE!

9/29/67: La Higuera. We arrived in the morning, yet there were no men in the town, and only a few women. A town populated by ten or twelve small children. Coco went to the mayor’s house—which was empty—and to the telegraph office. He came back with a message: “Guerrillas in the zone. Wire news to Vallegrande.”

We stood in the empty dirt street. La Higuera has fifteen crumbling mud houses, covered with flaking white paint.

Inti found the mayor’s wife, hiding in the fireplace of her house. She said that the mayor hadn’t told on us, he had gone to the next town, to Jaquey, for their fiesta. Inti asked why she hid from us. She wasn’t hiding, she said, just sitting in the fireplace.

I sent the vanguard towards Jaquey at one o’clock and they left, followed by a group of small children. A woman ran after them, shouting.

A merchant arrived and was brought to me in the main square, by the well. He bought and sold coca, and had just come from Vallegrande, where he hadn’t seen anything—not even any soldiers. This was nonsense, of course.

“What’s wrong?” I asked. “Why are you so nervous?”

“The guns,” he said, pointing to my rifle.

“We never use them against the people,” Coco said.

“Though they have often betrayed us,” I added, staring at him. “We fight for them. But we accept their betrayals.”

At about one-thirty I led the center guard to the summit of a barren hill right outside the town so that we might have a better view of the field. As we neared the summit there were shots from all over the open field beyond, but some distance away. The soldiers weren’t visible. They may be in the woods by the dirt road, or in the ravines beneath. It may be that they were firing on the vanguard group farther on.

I led the men back to the town and set up our defenses, planning to wait there for survivors and then take the road we came on back to the Rio Grande.

A few moments later Benigno arrived, wounded. Then Marcos and Ricardo. Marcos had his arm around Ricardo’s shoulder, for Marcos had been shot in the foot. But Ricardo had been shot in the chest, and was dying. They reported that Miguel and Coco had been killed.

We went down the road, leading our two mules. Those in the rear were fired on at close range. The rear guard stopped to return fire and was delayed. Inti lost contact. I waited for him for half an hour in a small ambush we set up, at the edge of a ravine near the town.

But the hillside opened fire in our direction, so I decided to leave Inti behind and moved down the ravine. I sent the mules down another canyon to mislead the army. Our ravine had some bitter water in it. We slept.

9/30/67: I lay with Ricardo during the night. He is my oldest comrade. He was making a terrible racket, moaning, and I grew afraid that the army would hear him, and find us. I wanted him to shut up, even to die, and I held him more tightly.

“Did you ever do it with a man?” I asked him.

“Only with your father,” he said, and tried to laugh. Blood came to his lips.

I kissed him on his lips to show him it was all right with me that he was queer like my poor dear uncle who raised me, and to keep him quiet. I even put my tongue in his mouth. His mouth was filled with blood, and soon after our kiss he died.

During the night, by a miracle, Inti found us, thank God. Marcos told him about Coco’s death. Marcos had dragged him away from the army as best he
could, by his legs. Coco didn’t want to fall into their hands. They were getting very close. Marcos was still holding on to his legs when Coco shot himself. “I could feel them shiver.”

Marcos had taken Coco’s knapsack. He gave it to Inti, in case there were some personal things.

Inti wandered off for a while.

10/1/67: Inti didn’t speak today; the gloom that has surrounded him as long as we have known him now has a name.

In the evening he distributed the contents of both Coco’s knapsack and his own to the comrades. I took Coco’s journal, for the time being, I said, for “safe keeping,” until Inti wants it back. He smiled at me in that closed-lipped way he too has imitated from Che, and I felt like a son of a bitch.

But I wanted Coco’s journal
. When Inti was dividing up the things I put my hand on it, to keep it out of sight, and at the end I pushed it towards the dirt, as if it were a thing of no matter, and said I would take care of it. I didn’t want to seem too avid, for it felt ghoulish to desire it so.

10/1/67: The area—hills with a few clumps of trees, and a series of ravines, thick with growth near the bottoms, bare near the tops of each side—is covered with soldiers. If we can escape detection we can perhaps move down ravines, as far as they go, and then cross to new ones, until we find a way back to the Rio Grande.

At dusk a peasant and a soldier climbed a hill opposite us, past the dirt track, and kicked a soccer ball back and forth.

Tonight I sent scouts to explore the area. Towards morning the scouts brought water in. The whole forested hill in front of us is marked by trails, and there are peasants riding on them.

10/2/67: Forty-six soldiers moved down the road at ten, with their knapsacks. There are twenty-two of us.

At twelve another group of soldiers appeared. Seventy-seven men in all. A shot was heard. Perhaps one of our scouts had been seen. The soldiers took positions on the road, and an officer said, “Go down into the ravine.”

We thought he meant the one we hid in. Then voices were heard over the radio, a mixture of Spanish and English, and they started marching again. Our refuge has no defenses against attack from above.

•  •  •

Later in the afternoon, a soldier who had fallen behind his buddies passed by with a tired brown dog. He pulled the dog’s rope to make him walk, half choking him from the look of it. The peasant we had spotted farther up the hill returned after a while, going down the road towards La Higuera on a white mare.

The soldiers with their knapsacks may have been withdrawing from the area. This would give us a possibility for escape. There were no fires seen outside the town, and when night came, and the sun set, there were no shots heard. This adds to the evidence that the soldiers have withdrawn, for they usually fire off their rifles at sunset, just shooting up at the sky.

10/3/67: In the morning there were soldiers, Rangers, without knapsacks, traveling in both directions, like a bad dream, and other soldiers leading empty donkeys. The donkeys returned loaded with packs.

Inti, our scout, said the donkeys went down the trail into the farmland below us to the right and couldn’t be seen anymore.

It is impossible to use the road, though that is the easiest and most direct route, for the soldiers may be in ambush along it, and there are dogs in the houses we would pass who would bark at us and give us away. Tomorrow I will send scouts to go out across the farmland and into the next ravines, to see if there is another way out of this area.

10/4/67: Inti and Willy returned with news that the Rio Grande is two kilometers straight down. We will have to move between ravines, but we can make camp in places that can’t be seen from the side. We got some water, and at ten o’clock began a tiresome march to the end of this ravine. El Chino wandered off, delaying us. He is useless in the darkness.

10/5/67: No soldiers, but some little goats, led by a shepherd dog, passed by our position. No food or water today.

10/6/67: Benigno, today’s scout, heard some peasants passing by on the road say, “Those are the ones we heard talking last night,” and pointing towards our positions.

At three we began the march across the hill that leads to the ravine selected, which again has no water. Some of the brush by the sides is broken, indicating that the soldiers have already been here. I found a red-and-white cigarette package.

•  •  •

The radio gave news of where I will be tried when captured, though I told the men that this is nonsense, if I am captured I won’t be tried.

The men are exhausted because of lack of water. Eusebio cried, saying he needed just one mouthful or he couldn’t continue. But we haven’t one mouthful. The march was very bad, with all the men complaining, so that we had to stop frequently, despite the danger.