Brief Encounters With Che Guevara_ Stories - Ben Fountain [1]
“Yes,” the rebel answered, “ecology is important to the Revolution. As a scholar”—he gave a faint, possibly ironic smile—“you can appreciate this,” and he made a little speech about the environment, how the firmeza revolucionario had banned the multinational logging and mining “mafias” from all liberated zones.
The column reached base camp on the fourth day, trudging into the fortified MURC compound through a soiling rain. They hauled Blair straight to the Office of Complaints and Claims, where he sat for two hours in a damp hallway staring at posters of Lenin and Che, wondering if the rebels planned to shoot him today. When at last they led him into the main office, Comandante Alberto’s first words were:
“You don’t look like a spy.”
A number of Blair’s possessions lay on the desk: binoculars, camera, maps and compass, the notebooks with their microscopic Blairian scribble. Seven or eight subcomandantes were seated along the wall, while Alberto, the comandante máximo, studied Blair with the calm of someone blowing smoke rings. He resembled a late-period Jerry Garcia in fatigues, a heavy man with steel-rim glasses, double bags under his eyes, and a dense brillo bush of graying hair.
“I’m not a spy,” Blair answered in his wired, earnest way. “I’m an ornithologist. I study birds.”
“However,” Alberto continued, “if they wanted to send a spy, they wouldn’t send somebody who looked like a spy. So the fact that you don’t look like a spy makes me think you’re a spy.”
Blair considered. “And what if I did look like a spy?”
“Then I’d think you were a spy.”
The subcomandantes hawed like drunks rolling around in the mud. So was it all a big joke, Blair wanted to know, or was his life really at stake? Or both, which meant he would probably go mad? “I’m an ornithologist,” he said a little breathlessly, “I don’t know how many ways I can tell you that, but it’s true. I came to study the birds.”
Alberto’s jaws made a twisted, munching motion, like he was trying to eat his tongue. “That is for the Secretariat to decide, all cases of spying go to the Secretariat. And even if you are what you say you are, you will have to stay with us while your release is arranged.”
“My ‘release,’” Blair echoed bitterly. “You know kidnapping is a crime in most countries. Not to mention a violation of human-rights.”
“This isn’t a kidnapping, this is a retención in the sociopolitical context of the war. We merely hold you until a fee is paid for your release.”
“What’s the difference?” Blair cried, and when Alberto wouldn’t answer he came slightly unglued. “Listen,” he said, “I don’t have any money, I’m a student, okay? In fact I’m worse than worthless, I owe twenty thousand dollars in student loans. And if I’m not back at Duke in two weeks,” he went on, his voice cracking with the wrongness and rage of it all, “they’re going to give my teaching assistant slot to somebody else. So would you please just save us all a lot of trouble and let me go?”
They scanned his passport photo instead, then posted it on their Web site with a five-million-dollar ransom demand, which even the hardcore insurgents knew was a stretch. “Sixth Front gets the Exxon guys,” Subcomandante Lauro muttered, “and we get the scientist with the holes in his boots.” He became known around camp as “John Blair,” always the two names together, Johnblair, but John got mangled in the depths of their throats so that it came out as the even more ridiculous Joan. In any case they couldn’t seem to speak his name without smiling; thirty years of low-intensity warfare had