The Death of Che Guevara (28 page)

“When I came to the mountains. A boy in a big hat. I was a dandy.”

“No. I mean you seemed the most casual of fellows.”

“A style, still. A casual style.” He danced quickly on the hot sand, to the lip of the ocean, hurried mincing steps. He ran out towards a receding wave, and then, when it turned on him, scampered back. Out and back; another game.

“Look!” he said on his return. He pointed to his pants leg, where a little water had splashed up. “Have to change. My new style. Fastidious.” A dry hiccup of a laugh. Had he looked at my journal? When?

We turned back towards the house.

“What did you mean a good friend for me? Or was that just another joke?”

“Don’t misunderstand. I like him. Like me. He
used
to tell stories. And he can’t hear. I can hardly talk.” He stopped for a moment, remembering his voice, its gaiety. “He’s clear about things. Big signs of his feelings. Primary colors. Clarity. You’d like that.”

His game with the ocean again. He taunted me. And, like the ocean, I turned back, enjoying the play. “Go on.” It was what I had wanted before, when I showed him my childhood—some talk about me. Though now it created a small worry in me. I had written me, and if I’d lied, were my lies, as I’d hoped, like some psychoanalytic symptom, an indirect way back to what was central? Had I, as I thought I wished, betrayed myself? Or was it just another story, one of so many possible, with me (whoever that was) excluded, outside, just another reader of an arbitrary epic?

“Very abstract. You are. One enemy. One opposition. Always. Primary colors. Or no colors at all, only outlines.”

“Yes.” He was criticizing me, but I was not displeased. I recognized myself. “Clarity. Yes.”

Ponco smiled. “You lack certain qualities.”

“Yes. It’s necessary. To act.”

He stopped by the fence. “And the shoes!”

“What?” We smiled at each other.

“First venture of the future Minister of Industries!” He laughed, a wholehearted mirth. His laugh had been a very deep sound when his voice wasn’t. Now it sounded like the spinning flywheel of a machine. He showed his menacing teeth. I realized that I had only ever heard Ponco laugh wholeheartedly at his own jokes.

“It was like roulette,” I said. “We always thought that the next batch of shoes would make it come out right.”

“And the Indians!”

“Yes?” I enjoyed the game. The recognitions, though unkind (and how else would I have known they were genuine?), restored my confidence.

“You thought. They don’t want raincoats. Ballpoint pens. Things. Material incentives. You thought. The workers want …” He paused, put his hands against the barbed wire. “… symbols. That’s it. Rites. Communion with the spirit of the nation.”

He was quoting a speech of mine! “You disagree?”

“Touchy!” He smiled, paused, thought. “No. It’s all you. Same tune in a different key. You don’t understand that, do you?”

“I understand it, but I can’t hear it.” I turned and started back to the house. Ponco watched the men working among the older trees with big metal shears, cutting dead branches. After a while he joined me, making swimming motions in the tall grass, hands together, then thrust out and apart: a breast stroke. It shook pollen loose, which I disliked.

“I was wrong.” He’d swum up to me.

“Wrong?” No, I thought, you’re right.

“Not young Communists.”

“No?”

He smiled. His teeth are large, white, and even in front. I had pulled several in back. “It’s an insane asylum.”

“You’re kidding. Planting trees?”

He nodded. “Patients. Work therapy.”

“It looks,” I said, “just like work itself.”

“Work therapy. Work done by patients. Our theory: people
want
to work.
Communion with the nation.” He studied my face. “Lack of same makes for alienation. Madness.”

“You’re lying!”

“Yes!” He smiled at my discovery. I thought I saw a spectral hand rise towards his mouth. He would spit on it, and wipe it on his pants. Or I wanted to see that hand. But that was long ago. “Work farm. Insane asylum. Prison. See?”

“Sure. A game. Find the similarity.”

“Not a game. A poem. You inspired me.” We’d come to the porch again. He picked up his book, sat down. “One more thing. Cornfields, near La Paz? That altitude?”

“Yes, Mr. Prosecutor. I’m pretty sure. I wouldn’t lie about vegetables. Potatoes certainly. Many different kinds, big, small, blue and red skins. And I remember the taste of fresh corn in Isaias’s stew. An Argentine specialty.”

“Ah,” Ponco said, a small hot gust of wind. “Do cook it sometime.”

He went back to his reading, and I went inside to my board, my work, my work therapy.

Peru, September 1953

Dear Father:

I can’t see the horizon; the slat sides of the truck narrow our view to disjointed strips of the roadside, the vistas enjoyed by penned cattle. But the sky overhead lightens, as if paint thinner had been added to a jar of black. It’s black still, but finally I can, through the shadows, make out the darker smudge of these words in my notebook. All night I’ve wanted to write you about the curious fear that came over me this evening. I trembled with terror, like the first man to hear thunder; but this thunder was the absence of sound, the silence of the Indians who share the back of this truck with us.

Staying awake so long has, anyway, transformed my mood, given me the solidity of sensations, the purity of emotions, that come from not sleeping for a night. I remember that Mother said that these were the only times she felt as if she could write poetry. She had a name for this special state of mind: “the reward for vigilance”—for it was very important, she said, to see the process
through for the full twenty-four hours; even a nap would cloud the mind, turn the clarity to headaches. (A strange name, as if her insomnia were guard duty on some imperiled frontier.) A morning after one of her vigils, she sat at the breakfast table in her bathrobe, cried over a newspaper article, laughed uproariously at a trivial song on the radio, spoke more intimately to me, and

A truck going the other way up the mountains on this narrow road just passed. Our truck pulled off to the side, and when I heard the oncoming groaning I stood up, gripping the topmost wooden slat with my hands. A heavy rope ran from the cab of the other truck to its back gate. Six Indian men hung on this line, their arms draped across it. I could see their faces for a moment, lit by our truck’s headlights, round forms emerging suddenly from a nearly black backdrop. I shouted and waved my left hand. No one replied. Six scarecrow heads swung into my face with a rushing sound, and back, one by one, into darkness, like a fun-house device. Our trucks were less than a meter apart. Some of the Indians let their eyes pass over me, without expression; some had their eyes closed, like the oracle in Neruda’s play. Our truck started up again. I fell backward onto a sleeping body, a rancid smell, like something curdled. Hands from inside a blanket pushed me off in rapid abrupt motions, like muffled punches. I leaned back against the side of the truck, my knees up in front of me. No one talks tonight, even if you fall on them.

The warm Indians are the aristocrats of this truck. (Fifteen or so share the flatbed with us, sitting against the side, or squeezed in between the burlap sacks and crates.) After the sun set they wrapped themselves in rough woolen blankets dyed in brightly colored stripes of blue, green, and yellow. They drew their covers up over their mouths. With their woolen caps and long ear flaps, they formed limbless rounded shapes, like those toys that, however you knock them about, always come back upright. As the light faded, Soto and I tried to speak with them. I smelled DDT on the man across from me, so I asked him a question about the bogus land reform.

Silence.

Roberto turned to the man next to him and made a remark about the cost of the ride.

Silence.

About the MNR.

Silence.

One of us speaks again, a friendly inquisitive banal voice.

And again.

A chill began. I pushed one of the burlap sacks aside to see the man
opposite more clearly. His hands tied knots into pieces of red and blue string. A quipu, the Incas’ record system. I said something about the cold. His eyes, a slit between his blanket and his hat, moved across my body without recognition, not even resting momentarily on my face. He undid his knots. It was no record, no remnant, just a hand fooling nervously with some string, a man training imaginary performers, putting himself to sleep. I spoke again into his silence. He didn’t even show the mild bemusement of the auditor of a foreign language. We’re far more foreign than that. We’re landscape. His mouth under the blanket chewed constantly, slightly disarranging the folds of wool, like the creases of a masticating lizard’s skin. I could not allow this silence! I demanded to know the reason for it. He said nothing. I was a bird cawing, a strange inedible soulless bird. A hand emerged from under the skirt of the blanket, pulled it down to his chin. The skin of his lip was brown and black, eaten away by coca and ground limestone. He stood in the center and spat over the side of the truck. Droplets splashed on my face.

“You’re a careless son of a bitch,” I said, brushing the spit off my face.

He looked down at me, the long green jaws, the scaly reptilian forehead and bulging eyes of a lizard. “The woman was right,” he said, in the squeaky gutturals, the gnashing sounds of his species, “you don’t know us.” He flicked his long thin tongue towards me, then drew it back.

“I do,” I said.

“You do not. What do you know about lizards? You should study natural history. Your place in the scheme of things isn’t as big as you think.”

“What are you talking about?” Fernando asked. “Are you talking to that guy?”

“Nothing. To no one.”

The peasant fell backward, covered his nose; brought his knees up; sat.

“You sound,” Chaco said, “like foreign tourists trying to meet girls at a social club.” He was to my right. I didn’t turn to see his face, its undecipherable punctuation. “You sound like you’re reading from a phrase book. ‘How many grots do you charge to give me a hernia, please?’ ‘Can you tell me how to turn myself into a bathroom?’ ”

“Probably,” Fernando said, “they don’t speak Spanish.”

Chaco spoke French to the Indians in a high mincing voice, saying insulting things about their mothers and animals. He cackled at his own mockery, and Soto laughed with him. Soto’s omnivorous amiability couldn’t be long disturbed by a rebuke as mild as silence. “That’s it,” he said to Fernando, “they don’t speak Spanish. Of course. That’s it.”

Their silence made my armpits damp; their silence was a sign against me. I felt as if I had no voice; my mouth was stuffed with dirt; no one could hear
me. The peasants were stones; I wanted to shatter them. But my anger could hardly hide the fear that dissolved me. In their silence my worlds my words unraveled back past the present to nothing.

What terrified me hid behind the objects, the burlap sacks of leaves, the crates of Coca-Cola; it was another world another word not yet spoken; spoken and I’d shatter. The truck was too small, there were too many sacks and crates, there wasn’t enough room, I was being crushed, I!

“Look at that,” Chaco shouted. He had his eyes pressed towards the slash of roadside. We stared between the slats. A truck had overturned on the shoulder, its wheels facing us. There was a body in the cab; we could look down on the bloody face smashed against the side window. Along the road, near the back of the truck, lay three or four other dead bodies. It went by very quickly. They may have been stones. Or bags.

But it gave an image to my terror
.

“Oh shit,” Soto said, turning on me angrily. I could smell the sweat coming off him, even through his cologne. He’d been reluctant to get on this truck. “This one’s not for us,” he had said, as if considering something even he found distasteful. Our driver had drawn big eyes on his headlights, with arching eyebrows, and strung Christmas-tree lights over the top of the cab. He’d painted slogans on a board affixed to the front of the cargo area:
FAITH IN GOD! ONWARD TO FINAL VICTORY
! Antic humor, Soto said, wasn’t what we wanted from a driver. And the slogans reminded him of the mottoes you see over the stone pillars at the entrance to graveyards. He knew it was foolish to be superstitious, but he was superstitious. He got a bad feeling from this rig and this place. The truck was parked in front of a quonset hut in a vacant lot on the outskirts of La Paz. The earth, dry as ash, blew all over our clothes. Fernando defiantly led the way into the trucking office.

The driver, resting in a chair tilted back against the wall, didn’t inspire confidence in Soto. A fat man with a thick black mustache, he wore a leather vest and no shirt. “I don’t trust fat men,” Soto said, without irony. “And this guy drinks. I can tell.” This was no way, Soto moaned, to travel on thin mountain roads. One mistake—and this fat guy’s life, you could tell, was a string of mistakes—and we’d end up at the bottom of a gorge. I reassured him: Fernando and I had driven mountains just like these on a small motorcycle. It was perfectly safe.