Loving Che (19 page)

Cuban! Ah, Cuba hermosa. My favorite country. Yes. Yes. Wait here.

He disappeared into a back room and emerged with yet another packet of photos. He flipped through them, and this time all the vistas were familiar: the royal palms flanking roads, a man on a tractor, the lush leaves coming through even in black and white. He must have noted the pleasure the photographs gave me, because he disappeared several more times to the back, each time emerging with another clutch of photos. We flipped through them all together. I was becoming conscious of the time and worrying about returning to my packing when one of the photos that he was turning onto the table caught my eye.

I held up my hand and dug through the pile again before finding it. I held it under the light.

I stood for some time holding this thin image in my hands. Already I was dreading the flight home: the sound of the engines beneath me, the liftoff, the sudden tearing weightlessness, the falling away of the earth.

And to come upon this photo now, so far from home. Surely I walked with ghosts. There he stands for all eternity, the young soldier with a yearning to record the world that lies
before him, his hands light on the camera, his eyes searching ahead.

I handed the man my money and noticed that my hands were cold where they met his. After a moment, I said, For my mother. The man made a small bow with his head, but kept looking at me. Then he smiled to himself and nodded. He took my money, gave me my change and began to carefully wrap the photo, slipping it first into a plastic sleeve, then carefully sealing it shut before finally hiding it beneath layer on layer of brown paper.

Afternoon was ending by the time I returned to the hotel. I turned on the small light on the desk and stood at the window looking down into the street below. After a moment, I thought I heard a radio playing. Whether because of the conversation with the old man or because of the faint music now drifting through the walls, I thought for the first time in many months of my grandfather. I remembered the song that had been playing all those years ago when we had sat out on the porch together,
Still I see you in my dreams, and every sigh brings me back to you.
My grandfather with his silences and quiet gestures. How little I knew him, how lost the years now when I might have understood.

I stood by the window until the lights came on in the street below. I watched a couple walk along and stop under a street sign to kiss. Two boys ran past, throwing a ball between them. Then it was quiet. The street emptied. I turned from the window
and back to the little room, now warm and yellow after the chilled blue of the street. Slowly, thinking of nothing, I began to pack my bag: my travel clothing, my books, a few pages of loose notes. And when I was done, I lay across the top the tightly wrapped photograph of a man standing alone with his camera, the future not yet a darkened plate; a beautiful stranger who, in a different dream, might have been the father of my heart.

Though allusions to real people, living and dead, abound in the book, it remains a work a fiction. Teresa's story draws on the portraits of Ernesto Guevara in Jorge G. Castañeda's
Compañero,
Jon Lee Anderson's
Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life,
and Paco Ignacio Taibo II's
Ernesto Guevara También Conocido Como El Che.
Many of Guevara's quotes come from these works and his own writings. In addition, the author wishes to thank Ileana Oroza; Raúl Chibás; Gustavo Pérez Firmat; Dara Hyde; and her tireless agent Amy Williams and editor Elisabeth Schmitz, a magician if there ever was one. The author is especially grateful to her family in Miami: Saul, Maria, and Rose whose love is immeasurable; her family in Havana: Lourdes, Amarilys, Guillermo, and Laurita; uncle Dionisio Martínez, always the master of words; and her good friends Judy Battista and Anthony McCarron who have kept her well-fed and watered for many years. She is most indebted to her husband Dexter Filkins who, while covering the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, still found time to read more versions of this story than anyone should be subjected to and read them more attentively than anyone would ever care to, and who very often managed to return with tattered and mud-stained manuscripts that kept all things in their proper perspective.

A GROVE PRESS READING GROUP GUIDE

Loving Che

Ana Menéndez

ABOUT THIS GUIDE

We hope that these discussion questions will enhance your reading group's exploration of Ana Menéndez's
Loving Che.
They are meant to stimulate discussion, offer new viewpoints, and enrich your enjoyment of the book.

More reading group guides and additional information, including summaries, author tours, and author sites, for other fine Grove Press titles, may be found on our Web site,
www.groveatlantic.com
.

1. Who is the hero of the novel? The narrator? Teresa, the other narrator? The eponymous Che? Is the concept of “hero” relevant to this book?

2. Do you think the book is a reliable window into Cuban politics, particularly the revolution? Teresa says that “it was the strange and dreadful excitement of a world turning, of everything staid and ordinary being swept away” (p. 50). What points of view, other than Teresa's, provide us with information about the Cuban revolution and its aftermath?

3. What other works of literature, art, or film have opened up Cuba for you?
Buena Vista Social Club?
Ana Menéndez's earlier book
In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd?
Do these works make you want to go to Cuba? How do these works make you feel about Cuba? Have they, in any way, changed your concept of that country?

4. Do you see a connection between Teresa recapturing Ernesto through her portrait of him and the narrator trying to retrieve her mother through memory and imagination?

5. Why did Teresa send her daughter away? Are her explanations on page 154 credible? “Someday I would give you a good life. Someday when my lover returned … I was waiting. How could I have been of help to you? Already, I read him in every move of your hands, smelled him on your sweet baby's breath. When you cried at night, I lay remembering the lost afternoons, how time had wrapped its eternity around us.” Is it her passion for Che as well as for art that leaves her no space to be a mother? When Teresa speaks of a divided heart, she is referring to her married love as well as her adulterous love. Could her divided heart also describe her love of her child at the same time that she persists in rejecting her?

6. How do we decide what is truth in the book? The narrator's grandfather scorns her need for documented proof about her mother? Why? The book is filled with transitory lives and relationships, as though names were written in water. What are some of these shifting, disappearing names and relationships?

7. How does the narrator's being a nervous flier relate to her story? She explains that rummaging in junk stores for old magazines and faded photographs assuages her fears on the eve of a departure. Is this just fear of flying or is it larger existential angst?

8. What motivates the quest of the narrator? Is it the need to fill the void her mother left? Is it an odyssey she needs to provide purpose in her life? To become more truly Cuban?

9. What kind of person is the Che who emerges both in Teresa's memories and in the occasional, more objective observations? Did you like the device of photographs interspersed? Why or why not? Do you think all of us construct and revise our own histories through “scraps of memory” (p. 48)?

10. What are the consequences of loving someone bigger than life, someone whose “first desire is to wear furrows into the earth” (p. 113)? Che offers his own view: “No, he says, and his hands are already over my skin. No matter how much we try, we will always love some things more than others. And some things we will love so much that we will honor them until death” (p. 119). Is he speaking of love for a person? Or for an idea, a revolutionary ardor? Both?

11. How are exile and madness linked? See the early pages, and consider the results of passion, nostalgia, and obsession. Does exile need to be geographic? Or can it be internal disassociation? Think of Caridad and her sense of floating and inexplicable paralysis.

12. What are some clues, true or false, that make the reader wary about reality in the story? For instance, “Even after all these years, I remember everything with a supernatural precision, with a certainty that is not given to actual life” (p. 130). How has Menéndez created simultaneously a mystery or ghost story, a love story, and a tantalizing game with aesthetics?

13. Do you end by believing Teresa's story? Is it possible that the whole Che love story was an elaborate justification for rejecting her daughter? Again, her overriding need to be an artist? Could even her artist life have been a fabrication? There seems to be no outside evidence of
Teresa's art, according to Ileana. What, however, does she say on pages 168–169 that leaves the door open? What does the narrator seem to believe by page 215?

14. Do you feel the narrator becomes her mother in the end? As she begins to see Che in every bush and palm tree, she wonders if “he was seeking me out; I began to wonder if the dead, too, have memory” (p. 221).

15. What are some memorable images in Menéndez's writing? One example is “a black Chevrolet sequined with the reflection of street lamps” (p. 22). How would you describe her style? Does she use evocative imagery to foreshadow and propel plot and character development? For instance, “But even before all that, even before I knew him, that day in my studio, I could see the death that gently draped him” (p. 66). Can you find other examples?

Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life
by Jon Lee Anderson;
The African Dream: The Diaries of the Revolutionary War in the Congo
by Ernesto “Che” Guevara, translated from Spanish by Patrick Camiller;
Back on the Road: A Journey Through Latin America
by Ernesto “Che” Guevara, translated from Spanish by Patrick Camiller;
Five Decades: A Selection
—
Poems: 1925-1970
by Pablo Neruda, translated from Spanish by Ben Belitt;
Selected Poems
by Pablo Neruda, edited and translated from Spanish by Ben Belitt;
Old Rosa and the Brightest Star
by Reinaldo Arenas, translated from Spanish by Ann Tashi Slater and Andrew Hurley;
Leaving Tabasco
by Carmen Boullosa, translated from Spanish by Geoff Hargreaves;
Remember Me
by Trezza Azzopardi

Ana Menéndez is the daughter of Cuban exiles who fled to Los Angeles in the 1960s before settling in Miami in the 1980s. She worked as a journalist for six years, first at
The Miami Herald
where she covered Little Havana, and later with
The Orange County Register
in California. Menéndez is a graduate of NYU's creative writing program, where she was a
NewYork Times
fellow.
Loving Che
is her first novel and has been translated into eleven languages. Her story collection
In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd
has also been translated into eleven languages. She lives in Miami Beach.