The Death of Che Guevara (79 page)

Che didn’t say anything about gathering them up for a meeting. He doesn’t want to talk to them or
hear
them.

We worked in shifts at getting the truck out. When I stopped pushing I stood back to look at my comrades, struggling in the sun. Ricardo and Benigno jostled each other, trying to brace themselves against one wall of the ditch and
push upward on the radiator. Tuma lost his balance and fell over. Tuma looks like Che, same long face and brown beard, the same sorrowful eyes. I saw that he was Che’s double. Tuma curses everyone in his high voice, especially Ricardo, because Che
wants
to curse Ricardo. Everyone was angry with Ricardo for getting us into this.

I wanted a drink badly. It was very hot. I had a terrible taste in my mouth, like something rotting.

Willy went on pushing alone as Tuma scrambled up. Willy feels bad about Benjamin’s dying. (No one liked Benjamin, but they like me even less.) The veins on the side of Willy’s head stood out; then they broke, and blood streamed down his cheeks.

Then everything was all right again.

But we weren’t making any progress on the truck. When we stopped pushing, the truck slid farther down into the ravine with a heavy sigh from the rocks and dirt, and more cursing from the comrades.

None of the Indians laughed, though we were a funny and pitiful sight. It was like they were made of glass, and lived in painted glass huts. The ground was a big pane of glass. The bell on the church tower might be glass, too. If they rang it, it would shatter into a thousand pieces, and the fragments would pierce our hearts. “I hope they don’t ring the bell,” I said.

“What the fuck are you talking about, asshole?” Ricardo asked. “Why the fuck would they ring the bell?” Ricardo was angry with himself because this problem was his fault; he had squandered our truck, and everyone cursed him for it.

I bit my arm and of course I wasn’t glass. Ricardo wasn’t glass. I saw that we
didn’t belong
there. Ricardo’s curses were stones, and the beads of sweat on his cheek were too thick, like gravel. If they fell, they would shatter the glass earth.

I went over to help push, so we could get out of here before we destroyed everything.

“Forget it,” Che said. “It’s a lost cause.”

I laughed, because of course in the world to come he will be the Saint of Lost Causes.

Che and Coco talked with some of the Indians who stood in front of the church. Coco had ripped the brown pants he had taken from one of the prisoners, and his leg bled.

Coco asked the Indians to help with the truck, and they stared at him.

“I think they speak Guarani,” Coco told Che. “I only know a few words of Guarani.”

In Quechua Coco asked about the best routes to the river. He made an up-and-down gesture with his hands, like water flowing.

The Indians made some gestures back.

“They understand him,” Ricardo said, “when they think it will get rid of us.”

We marched off, abandoning our truck.

But now the dust on the path was glass. And when we entered the forest again the green stuff, the endless green stuff that crawls between the trees, was glass. The machete wielders shattered some of it so we could move towards the river. When I grabbed a vine it felt cold and solid, and when I ripped it it broke in my hand and sent icy green shards to the ground. If I stepped too heavily the earth broke in long spidery lines. I could see the jagged edges we had already made. The Indians of this region hate us because we are too heavy, and our steps destroy their world, crush the vegetation, shatter the ground.

I tried to speak with Che about the problem we’re having with the peasants. We don’t belong here, so we will just break things wherever we go. Che should give this up and march to a different country that isn’t made of glass. Che could take us all back to Cuba with him.

But Che didn’t want to speak with me. He said we would have more water when we reached the river, and waved me away. But I wasn’t asking for water. I was trying to tell him something.

Che doesn’t like me. That was what killed Benjamin. The lines that link all the comrades together, that had tied Benjamin to the rest of us, were broken by their hatred so he fell off the cliff and drowned.

Now they hate me
.

7/9/67: We continued moving back towards the Rio Grande. Che says that Joaquin must have remained in the south. We cannot expect immediate help from the party anymore, so we must rejoin Joaquin. With our full numbers we can at least make some demonstration to coincide with the miners’ strike. That could be decisive.

My night sweats have gotten worse. I still haven’t told anyone about them, not even my brother. As I walk, I say a prayer with each step that they will go away. I don’t want to be left with one of the peasant families.

I will keep up
. Che labors under far worse burdens, and he is always among the first.

7/10/67: This morning Barrientos again announced that he will keep faith with the nation. A joke repeated over and over, Che said, begins to sound like a threat. This afternoon we learned again what imperialism’s lackeys mean by keeping faith with our nation. Barrientos had not waited for the miners to strike. He had ordered the Air Force to bombard the barracks in Catavi. The Argentine station says that the army occupied the mining area, smashed the radio transmitters, and killed eighty-seven, including women and children.

Che said this is a temporary setback for us, but it will mean much faster progress for the Revolution in the future. The miners’ union, the Party, the Trotskyites, and all progressive forces will see that aid must be concentrated on the guerrilla movement, that there is no other way.

We had never, Che said, thought that there would be a quick victory. It will be a long arduous struggle throughout the continent. But it will now be clear to all that only a mobile force dedicated to the destruction of the army and the establishment of socialism can unite the people and make the Revolution in Bolivia.

The other Bolivians, even my brother, were grief-stricken. Especially Willy, of course, who knew many of the miners who were killed.

I feel angry and abandoned, as the others do.

7/11/67: To increase cohesion in the group—I thought—and to help us overcome our sadness about the miners and the lost opportunities, Che put an ambush on the little road leading to Abapa. A column of twenty soldiers—still stupidly using the already cut paths and the roads—fell into it. We killed four of them, and the rest ran away. I am sure I got at least one of them myself.

We withdrew immediately into the forest, our spirits considerably higher. I got ready to withdraw from that camp, but Che said that the army would not have the morale for a counterattack, so we needn’t leave the area.

At dusk the firing began. At first I couldn’t believe it, but the sharp sound of the bullets convinced me! Chunks of the trees flew at us. Mortars shattered the forest to our right, and they were moving up towards us. The sound of their bullets popping and whining seemed to come from everywhere. We were all terrified. Eusebio screamed. It was like being trapped in a cloud we couldn’t see our way out of.

Che stood up in the center of the camp and rallied us, pointing the direction the attack was coming from, and the way we would retreat. Benigno fired back with the machine gun, making a big racket, while the rest of us gathered up our things as best we could. “Retreat, too, is a kind of battle,” Ponco said to me very calmly. But I couldn’t understand him then; it just seemed like empty syllables of sound. And now it just seems like retreat to me!
And retreat was what I wanted then! The sooner the better! But I think Ponco wanted to help me calm myself.

Even as he spoke Ponco was hit in the thigh and fell down next to me. Inti and I picked him up and dragged him from the area while the rear guard covered our steps.

Throughout the night we moved up a hill. Next morning Tuma died from a mortar fragment near his neck. He was an old comrade of the Cubans and looked a lot like Che—but he had a terrible mouth, even worse than Ricardo’s though not as vicious, more like high spirits.

7/13/67:
He has changed directions. We are moving northeast, towards the jungle, that “pointless place” that even the Indians won’t bother with. This is madness! We cannot establish ourselves in a zone where no one lives.

At the beginning of the day I hung on Inti’s shoulder, but I let go of him and dragged myself forward to question Che. He said nothing. Of course he is sad about Tuma’s death, as we all are, and about his own miscalculation on the counterattack. But to me it feels worse than that. Despite his brave speech about how relying on our own resources will give a new depth to our commitment, and how the massacre of the miners clarifies the situation, what it all really means is that we are alone. We cannot reach the Party, and they have made no attempt to contact us. The city network too—if it still exists—has been ineffective in reaching us, supposing it has tried at all. Our contacts with Cuba and Argentina—if they are still alive—are in Bolivian prisons being questioned by CIA cowboys. And we have no idea how to rejoin Joaquin. The Indians don’t understand our goals, or misunderstand them, which is worse.

Camba marched with me in the afternoon, holding me up. In a desperate shocked voice he said he had to tell me a theory of his. (“Theory” was a strange word for him to use, like the Indians saying “reign.”) His “theory” was that Tuma was Che’s double, his shadow, and that he had acted out Che’s desires—such as cursing Ricardo. (I don’t know about Che, but I had wanted to curse R. for his carelessness.) What did it mean, he asked, if Tuma died? He sounded worried, unsure.

I shrugged, but I needed his arm and couldn’t walk ahead of him. Stupid man! It’s hard when I’m around him not to think in the crazy way he does.

What does it mean?

Nothing. Che will have to do his own cursing, I suppose.

My thigh burns, but Moro says it is a flesh wound and will heal rapidly.

Isle of Pines, June 1968

And it did heal, though the rough lizardskin on the outside of my thigh stretches painfully tight on days like this one, dark days, before a storm. It did heal, but Che hadn’t withdrawn to that pointless place in order to speed
my
convalescence.

And the jungle
was
a pointless place, an awful place. The air was damp and hot and thick, like having a piece of wet rubber pressed against your face. After the first few steps of the morning’s march our bodies were covered with sweat, and our faces had a dull red color, like boiled meat. My body was dissolving—or just rotting—a sickening continual dizziness. I could see why the Spaniards—or so Inti told me—had thought the air in the jungle carried disease.

But really it wasn’t the air that carried disease, Inti said, it was the mosquitoes and other insects. I could believe that, too. They were everywhere, the biting stinging boring things, on the plants, in the trees, up our asses, ticks, spiders, chiggers, ants, mosquitoes, red-and-brown things even Inti didn’t have a name for. The mosquitoes smelled my blood and hung thickly around the drippings from my wound, an ooze tainted with red. The chiggers worked hard, too, boring into my flesh. Inti told me that the chiggers didn’t want blood. They turned our tissue to liquid, and supped on that liquid. The chigger bites—Inti said—swelled into hard lumps that itched fiercely. That made me laugh, for his pompous slow tone instructing me reminded me of the little schooling I had ever had—because, of course, it was
obvious
, we all
had
those lumps, we all
knew
what itching the bites caused. Inti tried to sound disinterested as he taught me about the “flora and fauna” (I didn’t even know it was called “flora and fauna”), scholarly and distant. But all the time my teacher’s hands scratched furiously at his arms and legs, just like the rest of us.

Anyway,
the insects
didn’t need Inti’s instructions. They knew their business, and chipped away at us, day after day, taking little bits of our flesh and blood and tissue-become-liquid. We were intruders, just as Camba said. They wanted to make us disappear. “At least if we were dead,” Marcos said, “we wouldn’t itch.” The insect bites irritated Marcos more than the rest of us, because he had very thin sensitive skin. Each day his face looked lumpier and sadder—almost as lumpy as Che’s, whose body was covered with walnut-size bumps. But Marcos was wrong; the jungle didn’t want us dead, it wanted us
gone
, like the toad I watched the army ants devour till it had never been. The jungle wanted to incorporate every part of us into itself, wasting nothing.

We stuffed our pants legs inside our boots to keep the insects out, but our boots were falling apart, and the insects got in through the cracks in the leather, and crawled up our legs. Our bodies were mottled and gashed where we had dug furrows into our flesh.

And there was nowhere safe to rest in the jungle, nowhere that wasn’t
after
us. The spiders and ants were everywhere, and the plants had long thorns, thin and sharp as needles, hidden inside their leaves and on their stems. The outer edges of the leaves had poisonous spines. When we marched we innocently brushed against the plants and their scratches erupted into long red painful rashes.