Brief Encounters With Che Guevara_ Stories - Ben Fountain [76]
“She looks surprised,” said one of my sisters.
“She’s holding her breath,” said another sister.
“She hates her husband,” said my oldest and wisest sister.
As the youngest, and the only boy, I was expected to say nothing, but an opera went off in my head whenever I saw Mrs. Broun. That opera, of course, was the sound of sex, and the news that she hated her husband gave me a secret thrill, though hate was probably too strong a word—by then the Brouns had likely burned through enough high drama to have exhausted all the more flamboyant emotions. Years before, in the very early sixties, they’d lived in Cuba as part of an academic exchange, one of the last before diplomatic relations were broken. Either inspired by the Revolution, or sick of her husband, or both—maybe she’d met the dashing Che and already become entangled—Mrs. Broun remained in Cuba when her husband left. Her defection was a news sensation for a couple of weeks, a Cold War scandal of the human interest sort and a public humiliation for Dr. Broun, who returned to campus more abstracted and aloof than ever. He took up his old position in the sociology department and refused to speak to the press; when Mrs. Broun abruptly rejoined him several years later, she, too, maintained a stone wall of silence, resuming the life of a conventional faculty wife with no more fuss than if she’d spent a long weekend at the beach. Given material like that, the community had no choice but to glut itself with gossip. She’d been brainwashed, people said, or she was a spy, or had been switched out in Havana for a surgically altered double, but the steamiest and most persistent rumors concerned the affair she’d allegedly had with Ernesto “Che” Guevara, the famous revolutionary.
According to the orthodoxy of the times, Che was high in our pantheon of national enemies, but for me he was a clue, a key player in some essential human mystery that linked us both to Mrs. Broun and therefore to one another. In any case, I was consumed; at faculty receptions I couldn’t take my eyes off of her. I watched her eat, her graceful juggling of purse and plate, and how she’d tap her ears from time to time to make sure that her earrings were still in place. I studied her clothes, the high heels and snug-fitting suits, the sleek bulge of her bottom underneath her skirt. She rarely spoke, preferring instead to be a poised and careful listener, though even when she seemed at her most engaged there was an air of distraction or restlessness about her, as if she sensed someone standing too close to her shoulder, an intimate, vaguely hostile presence to whom she would momentarily turn. I know now that this was her tragic aura following her around, though at the time I had only the coarsest sense that she would never be happy again. Certainly I couldn’t make her happy, and that, for me, was part of the tragedy.
The fact that she ended up exactly where she started, as a faculty wife at a small, conservative Southern college, strikes me now as the sort of peculiarly specific hell that life has a way of devising for us. I remember my alarm on hearing the news that Che had been killed—what were we going to say to Mrs. Broun? It didn’t occur to me that people could act as if nothing had happened, but when I saw her at the Christmas party later that year, she looked absolutely the same. She moved about the room as she always did, saying little, eating less, seeming to blink about once every ten minutes. I kept trying to make passionate eye contact with her, to convey some urgent message of solidarity or love, but my best chance came when she approached the table for a cup of punch. I was trembling as I filled the cup and reverently passed it to her, and as the punch changed hands, her eyes met mine. She froze, staring at me as if I’d just that moment materialized, and the next instant she seemed to know everything—she understood, at the very least, what I wanted to say, because little lightning strikes started going off behind her eyes. I think she would have slapped me if I’d opened