The Death of Che Guevara Read online

  The teacher didn’t notice. I was called on to recite. I stood by my desk and rolled my eyes around while I spelled out my word, to show I was in distress. I beat my hand against my thigh, sending out the S O S in Morse code. The teacher didn’t pick it up.

  In fact, nothing out of the ordinary happened the rest of the day. Only a slight dizziness; and that came from imagining angels, their wings beating rapidly, as they hovered in place overhead, waiting to gather me to their bosom.

  The Regimen

  As I grew stronger from our walks my father started me running, more and more distance each day. He held a gold watch in his palm, and clocked off my time per block as I ran through the streets near our house. I was twelve, filled with a fierce energy. (I liked experimenting with my body, feeling pain. Pain sheared me from my body: I watched myself, and so gained a power over my fate.) He charted my progress on a large piece of brown paper that we’d ruled off together and tacked to the wall by my bed. It was the first thing I saw when I woke up.

  Each afternoon in my bedroom, embarrassed at being naked before my father, I quickly put on my running costume: white tennis shorts, a plaid scarf, a sweatshirt, and a heavy blue sweater (worn in all weathers, to protect my throat and chest).

  He passed his hands back and forth over my head, in small circles. “Shazam,” he said, the word that transformed small, asthmatic Ernesto Guevara into strong Captain Amazing, the man whose exploits transfixed us both every Sunday at the movies.

  I was finishing primary school then, was nearly grown up; and despite my father’s magical incantation, I could not become someone else, could not mime my father’s, or an actor’s, indifference to my audience. I felt a fool running down the unpaved streets in wide white shorts that were much too big for me. Groups of children from the slums nearby came to watch me. These children had once been guests at our house, and I was painfully conscious of their laughter, their mocking gestures.

  Sometimes one of them ran alongside me for a few steps, imitating my loud puffing sound. His rags flapped in the wind, his face was as emaciated as mine was, his legs bowed out, thinner, ricketier than mine. A bad smell came from him. I said to myself, as my father would have, Do these people never wash?

  But it was an attack starting. Soon the scratchy feeling in my lungs took away all self-consciousness, and I coughed and retched at once. My father would not relent on the day’s running until this happened, and so I ran always until I could not go on running. (Nor would I relent. How far could I go? How much pain could I stand? It was an experiment; we would chart it; I would know the truth.) The doctor held his son’s shaking body, and beyond self-consciousness, I threw up in the street.

  My father tied a tin can to a tree branch in our back yard. I was to shoot at it with a .22 rifle. “It will teach you to concentrate,” my father said, “and how to remain calm. It will train your eye and hand for surgery.”—For that was the promised end of all our work for me. Someday I would join him in practice.

  The man shouted encouragement. “Make that can dance, son! Make it hop!” And I enjoyed the shooting. There was something powerful in those rare times I hit the metal, something beyond my control, and yet—for I pulled the trigger—done by me (it was as if grace, or the gods, had entered into it). Usually I missed. The rifle was too heavy. It made my arms tremble.

  “Hold your breath,” my father instructed from behind me. “And count to eight.” (He had read a book: The Hindu Science of Breath Control.) “Now gradually let it out as you squeeze.” I took another breath before pulling the trigger. The rifle wavered again. I was becoming dizzy. I waited for the dizziness to pass and took another breath. By the end of a half-hour of this I was ready to pass out. My arms ached and I wanted to cry.

  But my father did not relent. I grew stronger, calmer, better able to control my demonic energies. The doctor added a new aspect to our workout: swimming. I was terrified of water. And the vision of undressing with other people in a cold white tile room made my bowels hurt. They’ll see me naked, my chest exposed. They’ll see how weak I am, naked, open, small.

  My mother encouraged me. She spoke of the pleasures of swimming, the water resisting you and yet holding you up. “You move without effort Tete. The water takes care of you, supports you. It’s cold at first. But don’t panic. Just let yourself go. You’ll float. And you’ll have a wonderful time.” I was not convinced.

  But my father insisted, and I was ashamed to show fear before him, to disobey him. He was so jolly, so matter of fact about it. We went to the country club swimming pool.

  But at the edge of the pool I buckled. Panic possessed me. “I’ll go tomorrow. Let’s come back tomorrow. Okay? I’m just not ready yet. I promise I’ll go tomorrow though. I just don’t feel like it now. Please don’t make me go. I can’t. Please.” I hated being nearly naked like this. I wanted to go away from there.

  He was my father; I was his son.

  The man threw me in.

  I swallowed water. It burned my nose. My hands beat frantically. He won’t let me die. He couldn’t. But what if he’s angry at me because I cried? I was too panicked even to scream for help, scared of dying, of failing my father. I had made some terrible mistake, like the time he had written my insults on the door. A hole had opened in the world. He didn’t care about me anymore!

  The people on the chairs alongside the pool laughed good-naturedly. My father appeared through a blur of water, a little apart from the others. The man in blue boxer shorts, his chest covered with curly hair, smiled at me, shouted encouragement. But I was nearly rigid in the water, sure that if I relaxed my vigilance even for a moment I would go under, fail him utterly, and die.

  Encouraged by my parents to test my new skills I organized a soccer team. (I was their captain, had to be, had to be their leader, have that distance between us, that distance that was my safety, my protection. It might happen as I was playing soccer with them; I might have an attack. They would see again what they could do to me. They would turn again into my tormentors. They had taken me by the hair, had pulled my face down into an iron trough. Their legs had gathered around me. They had gaped at me as I writhed on the ground. What more would they do? They’d done nothing more: to see me gasp was all they wanted, all they could imagine to want. But imprisoned by their bare legs I had known: I was helpless. I remembered this often, could not keep myself from remembering it: it was an image, a confusion, an anxiety that gnawed at my side, that I had to act constantly to resolve.) The other players were the children from our little street, and from the slum near our house. I arranged matches against the country-club kids. I was their captain. (Remembering, I felt as if I were naked, stretched out on a board where anyone could touch me. I had to have a distance.) These games were a joy for me, for I loved to strain my body, loved the concentration on movement, delighted in the rasping pain in my chest as I gasped down air. I could stand it. I was great with it.

  The boys I led were quicker to violence than our opponents were. I led them in this also. (I had to make a distance between us, hold them off by the exercise of my will on myself, by the actions I might improvise that they were afraid to perform.) Our violence inspired fear, created a hesitancy of movement in the other children that we could exploit. Usually we won.

  And when we won we followed the losers home, to the best residential sections of Cordoba, the paved streets—where my parents could no longer afford to live.

  “Time to go home and cry.”

  “Have your mama wash you and put you to bed.”

  I danced at the head of this raggedy army of mine, abusing their mothers in my mother’s voice. We were crows, we had raucous voices, we pursued the birds of rare plumage through the gilded evening air.

  “Have her get in bed with you.”

  “Send us your mamas next time.”

  Oh, I was gay, I was giddy with triumph and exhaustion (for both were sweet to me). The sweat chilled on my skin. I was so tired I could barely breathe. We had won. A phrase ca
me into my head as we walked home. I have done my utmost. The big houses and lawns were sharply outlined still. Every blade of grass was itself, was clear to me. The world had a message for me, was on the edge of speaking. My legs were heavy, and I had to will them to take each step. I have done my utmost I smiled at the other children, my comrades. It was evening. The world would slowly grow dark around us. Their dirt and sweat were beautiful. I loved them.

  Adversaries

  So, for a time, my strength, my leadership, had no limits. I was confident in myself, my power, my hold on the others. But gradually, in my late adolescence, I found that my magic was waning, for I was divided within myself, and so brought my own power to an end. I have three memories (a man with no legs; a boy in jail; a game of rugby) of what taught me of my limits.

  For the first memory I must remind you that in the town where I grew up the different classes often lived close together. Society is still, in many of its forms, feudal: each class knew its proper, its fated role. No matter how near our bodies might be to each other, our spirits would remain untouched; my class’s natural superiority would remain undiminished. The block where we now lived was a row of neat bourgeois houses. Not in the best section of town anymore, but each house had a garden, and there were servants and gardeners. Across the street—an unpaved one that had to be watered by the gardeners to keep down the dust—there was a waste land, an open tract of dirt. Scattered over it were dozens of shacks made from scraps of cardboard and tin.

  My wealthier friends and I sat on the grass near our houses, to watch what went on across the street (for the poor did much of their living in public). Only one of the slum dwellers was more painful than interesting to see, even for young boys. He was called No Legs. Groups of kids used to follow him around when he was drunk and sing songs about him. Such as: “No Legs / Hard Luck / Has to Beg / Can’t Fuck.”

  “Want me to bring Jesus’s mother by, so you can fuck her, No Legs?”

  And sometimes No Legs would say, “I can fuck her with my tongue,” and leer amiably, and lick his lips. Sometimes he cursed at the children, with the inhuman coldness of someone who has too often repeated a prayer for vengeance. Sometimes he cried and went back to his shack.

  To get around No Legs had made a flat wooden cart. He strapped himself to the floor, and his dogs were attached to the whole by a leather harness. It was hard for the dogs to drag him from his hut, for the ground had been worn away by years of their use and had turned his home into a hole, a burrow. They howled as he beat them to make them pull harder, lift him up over the ridge.

  When he appeared above the ridge, outside, his face was constricted from rage and effort. His leather thong rose and fell powerfully on the dogs in time to his litany of insults. He had a terrible fury about him. A frightening man.

  One cold fall morning when I was working outside our front door, adjusting the brakes on my bicycle, I heard the whine of the dogs from inside No Legs’ hut, and the man’s dark abuse. A gang of slum kids suddenly gathered at the sound, like blackbirds coming down for scattered grain. No Legs was on his way out to beg his living in front of the church in the main square. Many families in the slum lived from his earnings. This, perhaps, made the children hate him more. When he emerged at the rim of the hole they hurled stones at their benefactor, sang their songs about him, offered to go down to the store for spare parts.

  The stones hit the little man on his chest as he struggled to get over the rim. The dogs whined, and tried to turn in the harness. The man bellowed with pain, trying to keep his balance on the cart. He wouldn’t go back to his burrow. He couldn’t raise an arm to protect himself for he would have had to let go of the reins, and the dogs would have turned and tipped him over on the ground. He had to whip them harder, for they were his chance of escape.

  The man’s animal bellowing shook me. I knew that feeling. Being driven back to that point where you are no longer human, but only a consciousness of pain and a will to continue. His vulnerability reminded me of myself, and so moved me. My chest and stomach filled with that sweet giddy feeling of self-righteous anger, of being just in someone else’s cause.

  I ran across the street, my white oil rag flapping from my hand as I went, shouting, “Goddamn it stop that!” The children ran away as I came across the dirt. Perhaps they fled because I was their captain, and they were ashamed before me. Or perhaps they were used to taking orders from people who shouted at them with authority, people like me. Something about the ease with which I could dismiss them unsettled me.

  After the children fled, the man got his cart up over the rim of the hole. He pulled the leather reins and stopped the cart in front of me. He looked me up and down, his misshapen face filled with a hatred, something worse than winter in his eyes. I shivered under the examination. I had helped him. Why did he hate me so? He stared at me. The man had been handsome once, but now his face was eaten away, pocked, reddened by drinking, the veins broken. The shiny black sports jacket he wore looked comical on him—it reminded you that he had no lower half. He was a stump tied to a wooden cart by leather thongs. I could brush him into the dirt with a sweep of my hands. My hands balled into fists. My tender protectiveness, refused, soured into resentment and anger. The man looked at me a moment more and then spat into my face. Slowly he whipped his dogs and drove away.

  The son of a bitch, I thought, he’s counting on my honor, his weakness to protect him. Well, I have no honor, I told myself, stepping after him. But I couldn’t. I was rooted. I wiped the spit from my face with my white oil rag, wanting to kill the runt, destroy him utterly, knock his little stumpy body into the dirt and kick it around like a soccer ball, a soccer ball with a mouth that would scream for mercy but get none from me. I contained my rage. It sank to my stomach, a painful heat.

  I was shaking, my body shimmered with anger. I was indifferent to the dirt I crossed, the children watching me walk back to my house. My mother, when she heard my story, insisted on immediately scrubbing my face herself, to calm me.

  “Well, what did you expect,” she said, working away roughly with a white washcloth, as though the half-man’s spit were dangerous, infectious, “that he’d be grateful? You fool! Of course not! They can’t think, Ernesto, can’t reason. None of them. It’s like this Peron business. They think their friends are their enemies, and their enemies are their friends. They’re deluded. You know that. When you want to be a friend, and offer your hand, they bite it. But if you treat them like dogs, the way Peron does, they lick your hand and fawn on you.” She was rubbing at my face, so worked up—as she often was when angry—that I think she’d forgotten what she was doing. I remembered that on one of her rare cooking nights I’d seen her vengefully hack a chicken to bits while insulting the Fat Man and the Self-righteous Cripple, the Allied war leaders. “Scions of wealthy families,” she said contemptuously (forgetting the origin of a certain Celia de la Serna), “who pretend to be the little fathers of the common man, so they can send common men off to die for them.” They were stinking imperialists, who wanted to win the war so they could divide up the world! Chicken bits flew about the tiled counter till there was nothing to do with the bird but make a tasteless soup of it. I worried for my cheeks.

  I was sitting in one of the wicker chairs in the kitchen. A piece of wicker had unraveled and its sharp edge was sticking into my back. I twisted my body a bit.

  “Sit still, child,” she said. “Oh, it was a perfectly natural thing for him to do.” She drew out the word “natural.” “Perfectly natural, once you understand that they’re all crazy nowadays. We are the last sane people in this insane country, in my opinion. He was like those others exactly, can’t think, can’t reason.”—“Those others” were some people at a rally for Peron in our town’s central square. My mother and her sister—reunited by Peron—had gone to shout some sense into them. In return several Peronistas had tried to grab them and tear them to pieces. If it hadn’t been for the police they would have! she said, when she returned home (pretend
ing to be not merely hysterical, but a little amused, incredulous). Can you imagine that! I was going to hit a policeman with my pocketbook when I realized he was protecting me! Your mother! Reduced to being protected by the police!

  “Ernesto,” she concluded, giving my red cheeks a final dab, “this whole country has gone crazy. Complètement fou! Out of its mind!”

  “I can see the newspapers now,” I said, catching her manic mood. My mother and I rarely touched each other. Even this rough tenderness with a washcloth made us both a little uncomfortable. When we were alone together we usually put our energy into a kind of wit, a kind of caring, of playing with each other. “It’s sure to make the newspapers. Banner headlines for the Peronist press: Heroic Resistance with Spit. Subhead: Crippled Beggar Shows Upper Class Busybody a Thing or Two. Or for La Prensa we can have something more genteel: Beggar Hurls Spitball Without Ball at Young Soccer Captain.” I ran on for a bit in the same way, puerile stuff. It wasn’t very witty, I knew, but it was in the right style. It worked to transform the heat that still rose in waves from my stomach into a feeling more controlled. It made me feel for a moment the master of events, able, like my mother, to make epigrams—of a sort—out of them.

  And yet I felt, even then, that her wit, my imitation of it, was somehow missing the point. Outside on the field I had come close to learning something. But as my mother scrubbed me, spoke with me, that revelation was obscuring itself, going into hiding again. For a moment I was irritable, about to cry. I gripped the glass edge of the table hard in my hand. Then my mother said something more; and I replied; and she laughed; and I was pleased with and delighted in her laughter. Soon I forgot what had annoyed me. The stumpy man went back into his burrow. I was happy in our irony.

  My Irony

  We are the last sane people in this insane country. I believed that then and it delighted me. I was circumstance’s superior, ironic, understanding others better than they understood themselves. In school, or as I walked about the town with friends, I often had a supercilious smile. I knew. I had the goods on others. A doctor in a madhouse. I was sane; I understood history; and by understanding it stood outside it, though it dragged others down. By irony I was saved. My sanity was more than sanity; it was a kind of genius.