Brief Encounters With Che Guevara_ Stories - Ben Fountain [3]
During the day Blair was free to wander around the compound; for all their talk of his being a spy, the rebels didn’t seem to mind him watching their drills, though at night they put him in a storage hut and handcuffed him to a bare plank bed. His beard grew in a dull sienna color, and thanks to the high-starch, amoeba-enriched diet he began to drop weight from his already aerodynamic frame, a process helped along by the chronic giardia that felt like screws chewing through his gut. But these afflictions were mild compared to the awesome loneliness, and in the way of prisoners since the beginning of time he spent countless hours savoring the lost, now-clarified sweetness of ordinary days. The people in his life seemed so precious to him—I love you all! he wanted to tell them, his parents and siblings, the biology department secretaries, his affable though self-absorbed and deeply flawed professors. He missed books, and long weekend runs with his buddies; he missed women so badly that he wanted to gnaw his arm. To keep his mind from rotting in this gulag-style sump he asked for one of his blank notebooks back. Alberto agreed, more to see what the gringo would do than out of any humane impulse; within days Blair had extensive notes on countersinging among Scaled Fruiteaters and agnostic displays in Wood-Rails, along with a detailed gloss on Haffer’s theory of speciation.
Alberto fell into the habit of chatting with Blair whenever they happened to cross paths in the compound. He would inquire about his research, admire the sketches in his notebook, and generally humor Blair along like a benevolent uncle. It came out that Alberto was a former banker, a burgués city kid with advanced degrees; he’d chucked it all twenty years ago to join the MURC. “It was false, that bourgeois life,” he confided to Blair. “I was your typical social parasite.” But no matter how warm or frank these personal exchanges, Blair couldn’t shake the sense that Alberto was teasing him, holding back some essential part of himself.
“You know,” Alberto said one day, “my grandmother was also very fond of the birds. She was a saint, this woman—when she walked into her garden and held out her arms, the birds would fly down from the trees to perch on her hands.”
“Amazing,” said Blair.
“Of course I was just a kid, I thought everyone’s grandmother could do this trick. But it was because she truly loved them, I know that now. She said the reason we were put here on earth was to admire the beauty which God created.”
“Ah.”
Alberto’s lips pooched out in a sad, nostalgic smile. “Beauty, you know, I think it’s nice, but it’s just for pleasure. I believe that men should apply their lives to useful things.”
“Who says beauty and pleasure aren’t useful?” Blair shot back, sensing that Alberto was messing with his mind again. “Isn’t that what revolutions are ultimately about, beauty and pleasure for everyone?”
“Well,” the comandante laughed, “maybe. I’ll have to think about that.”
So much depended on the rebels’ goodwill—whether they lived by the ideals they so solemnly sloganized. Blair knew from the beginning that their honor was the best guarantee of his life, and with time he began to hope that he’d found a group of people with a passion, a sense of mission, that equaled his own. They seemed to be authentic concientizados, fiercely committed to the struggle; they were also, to Blair’s initial and recurring confusion, loaded with cash. They had the latest in laptops and satellite phones, fancy uniforms, flashy SUVs, and a potent array of high-tech weapons—not to mention Walkmen and VCRs—all financed, according to the radio news, by ill-gotten gains from the cocaine trade.
“It’s a tax!” the rebels screamed whenever a government spokesman started railing on the “narcoguerrillas” of the MURC. “We tax coca just like any other crop!” A tax that brought in six hundred million dollars a year, according to the radio,