Ernesto Che Guevara
This is one of several short stories Che Guevara wrote for Aleida during 1965 while he was in the Congo, Africa. While mourning the loss of his mother, he imagines the circumstances of his own death.1
He gave me the news in the way such things should be told to a tough guy, a man in charge, and I was grateful for this. He didn’t hide his concern or his distress, and I tried not to show mine. It was as simple as that!
Besides, I had to wait for confirmation before I could mourn properly. I wondered if it was okay to cry a little. No, no, it was not possible. The leader cannot have personal feelings. It’s not that he’s denied the right to have personal feelings, he simply must not show them like his soldiers might.
“It was a friend of the family who called to say she was seriously ill, but I wasn’t there that day.”
“It’s serious—you mean she’s dying?”
“Yes.”
“Be sure to tell me if you hear anything else.”
“As soon as I hear anything... But I don’t think there’s any hope.”
Death’s messenger left but I had no confirmation. The only thing I could do was to wait. When the news became official, I would decide whether or not I had the right to show my grief. I was inclined to think not.
The morning sun struck hard against the rain. There was nothing strange in this; it rained every day and then the sun would come out, making itself felt and removing the dampness. In the afternoon, the stream would be crystalline once again, although not much rain had fallen in the mountains that day. This was pretty normal.
“They said it stopped raining on May 20 and wouldn’t rain again until October.”
“That’s what they said... but they say so many things that aren’t true.”
Would nature adhere to the calendar? I didn’t care whether it did or not. In general, I didn’t care much about anything at all—this forced idleness, this stupid war without a purpose. Well, maybe the war had a purpose, but it was all so vague, so diluted. Whatever its aims were, they seemed unattainable, like some surrealist inferno where tedium is the eternal punishment. It mattered to me. Of course it mattered.
I have to find a way of breaking out of this, I thought to myself. It was easy to work things out in one’s head. You could make a thousand plans, each as tempting as the next, put two or three of the best together, simplify them, put them down on paper and deliver it. That was the end of it and then one started anew. Theirs was an unusually clever form of bureaucracy: instead of filing anything, they made it disappear. My men said they smoked it—any bit of paper can be smoked if there’s something inside it.
There was an advantage to my mental pondering. What I didn’t like could be changed in the next plan. Nobody would notice. It seemed like this could go on for eternity.
I felt like a smoke and took out my pipe, which, as usual, was in my pocket. Unlike my soldiers, I never lost my pipe. It was very important to me. One can travel any distance along paths of smoke—I would say plans can be created and victory imagined without it seeming like a dream, but more like reality made vaporous with the distance and the mist that is always present in smoke trails. It’s a good companion, the pipe. How could they lose something so essential? What brutes!
They were not really brutes. They had done their work and were exhausted. So they didn’t have to think, and what use is a pipe if not for thinking? One can dream. Yes, one can dream. The pipe is important when one dreams from afar, dreaming toward a future whose only path is smoke, or dreaming back to a past so distant it is necessary to retrace one’s steps. Urgent yearnings are felt elsewhere in the body. They have vigorous feet and keen eyes and don’t need the aid of smoke. My soldiers lost their pipes because they were not essential to them: things that are important are not lost.
Do I have anything else like that? Ah, the gauze scarf—that was different. She gave it to me in case I injured my arm, in which case it would make an amorous sling. The problem was if I were to crack open my nut. But then there would be a simple solution: it could be wound around my head to tie up my jaw and I would take it with me to the tomb. Loyal even unto death. But if I was left lying on the mountainside, or if somebody else picked me up, there would be no gauze scarf. I would decompose on the grass or they might exhibit me; maybe I would even appear in Life magazine, my desperate death gaze fixed at a moment of extreme fear. Because everyone is afraid. Why deny it?
Through the smoke, I followed old trails and reached into the most intimate corner of my fears. These were always linked to death, that disturbing and inexplicable nothingness. Inexplicable, however much we Marxist-Leninists like to describe death, with conviction, as just nothingness. What is this nothingness? Nothing. The simplest and most convincing explanation possible. Nothing is nothing. Shut down your brain, dress it in black robes, with a sky of distant stars if you please; that is what nothingness is—nothing. The equivalent of infinity.
One survives in the species, in history, that mystified form of life, in actions, in memories. Have you never felt a shiver run down your spine when reading of Maceo’s machete charges?2 That is life after nothingness. And our children? I would not want to live through my children. They don’t even know me. I am just a foreign body that occasionally disturbs their peaceful existence, getting between them and their mother.
I imagine my oldest child, and she, now with gray showing in her hair, is saying, “Your father wouldn’t have done this, or that...” Inside myself, the child of my father, I feel a tremendous sense of rebellion. As a son, I would not know whether or not it was true that, as a father, I would not have done such-and-such a thing, or had done something badly. But I, as my son, would feel vexed and betrayed by this memory of I, the father, being rubbed in my face all the time. My son had to become a man, nothing more, not better or worse, just a man. I was grateful to my father for his sweet and un-selfrighteous displays of affection. And my mother? Poor old dear. Officially, I did not yet have the right to mourn her and still had to wait for confirmation.
I was wandering like this along the trails of smoke when a soldier interrupted me, pleased to be useful.
“You haven’t lost anything?”
“Nothing,” I said, associating this particular nothing with the other of my reverie.
“Check.”
I felt my pockets. Everything was in order. “Nothing.”
“And this little stone? I saw it on your key ring.”
“I’ll be damned!”
I was hit by savage self-reproach. One loses nothing essential, nothing vital. Is one alive if things are no longer necessary? As a vegetable, yes, but as a moral being, no—at least I don’t believe so.
I felt the chill of memory. I found myself, rigorous, meticulous, feeling my pockets while the water flowed past, opaque with the mountain soil, hiding its secret from me. The pipe—first of all, the pipe—it was there. The papers or the scarf would have floated. The vaporizer present; pens here; notebooks in their nylon covers, yes; the matchbox, also present. All in order. The chill melted.
I had brought only two small keepsakes with me into battle, the gauze scarf my wife had given me and the key ring with the little stone in it from my mother, an inexpensive, ordinary thing. The stone had come loose and I kept it in my pocket.
Did that stream flow with mercy or vengeance, or was it simply dispassionate, like the leader? Does one not cry because one must not, or because one cannot? Is there no right to forget, even in war? Is it necessary to disguise a lack of feeling as machismo?
I don’t know. I really don’t know. I know only that I feel a physical need for my mother to be here so that I can rest my head in her bony lap. I need to hear her call me her “dear old fella” with such tenderness, to feel her clumsy hand in my hair, caressing me in strokes, like a rag doll, the tenderness streaming from her eyes and voice, the broken channels no longer bearing it to the extremities. Her hands tremble and touch rather than caress, but the tenderness still flows from them. I feel so good, so small, so strong. There is no need to ask her for forgiveness. She understands everything. This is evident in her words “my dear old fella...”
“Do you find it pretty strong? It affects me, too. Yesterday I nearly fell over when I tried to stand up. They probably didn’t dry it properly.”
“Yeah, this tobacco is shit. I’m waiting on the order to see if they bring some cut tobacco that’s half-way decent. One has a right to smoke, even just a quiet and pleasant-tasting pipe, don’t you think.?”
1. See Ernesto Che Guevara: Congo Diary. Episodes of the Revolutionary War in the Congo (Ocean Press, 2011) for his fascinating account of Cuba’s assistance to the liberation movement in the Congo.
2. Antonio Maceo was a Cuban independence fighter against the Spanish.