Brief Encounters With Che Guevara_ Stories - Ben Fountain [78]
“Dude ought to write a book, make himself some money.”
“No.” Luis was adamant. “No books. He’d just bring a lot of grief down on himself.”
They were talking about Gustavo Torres, a taciturn Bolivian whose flat Indian features and long mournful nose gave his face the moral authority of a death mask. Gus exhibited behaviors that were baffling to most North Americans—modesty, reserve, and courtesy, to name a few—and transmitted with every gesture an urbane self-assurance that made me think of the best class of movie gamblers. He had a wife and kids in Bolivia and a string of stylish lady friends here in the city, along with a Monte Carlo that he garaged at unimaginable expense. Nobody knew how he managed to live so well on a workingman’s wages, which only added to the Gustavo mystique.
Of course I asked him about Che; the question burned inside me like a lit fuse. The next time we went out on deliveries together I gathered my nerve.
“Ah, Gus,” I began, “I don’t mean to bug you or anything, but there’s these rumors going around about you, and I was just wondering—”
He brought his hand down on the dashboard, slap, then raised it as if taking an oath. “The rumors are true,” he declared.
“We’re talking about Che, right?”
He flinched like I’d thrown acid in his face. “Che Guevara, of course. The revolucionario.”
“I don’t mean to pry,” I said by way of invitation.
“That’s good,” he said curtly, eyes fixed on the street. “You shouldn’t be too curious about these things.”
“Okay,” I agreed, and then I told him about Mrs. Broun and her alleged affair with Che, because it made me feel good—more authentic and grounded, and less homesick, I suppose—to talk about Che. Gus just grunted, but a couple of days later he came up to me in the stockroom.
“It is true,” he said in a low voice. “About that lady you knew, and Che. There was an affair.”
“Yeah?”
“Yes.” Gustavo’s English was all tight corners and crisp edges. “She lived in La Habana for two years, he kept her in an apartment in the Old City. It’s a miracle she got out with her life, you know.”
“How did you—”
“Yes, well,” he said with a tidy cough. “I just thought you’d want to know.”
So that was the end of it, I thought, and I filed it away until a couple of weeks later, when a bunch of us went out drinking after work, to the sort of serious, no-frills neighborhood bar where the walls sweat tears of nicotine and the waitresses have the grizzled look of ex–child brides. I had three quick ones, drinking too fast as usual; I looked up halfway through beer number four to find Gustavo watching me with imploding eyes.
“It is like the Pietà,” he intoned. When Gus drank his face planed off like weathered drywall, and his nose seemed more commanding and ancient than ever.
“Say what?”
“The portrait of Che in death, his body lying on the table. Have you seen it?”
Of course I’d seen it, the famous Freddy Trigo image of Che laid out on a stretcher after his slipshod execution—it’s one of the iconic photographs of the twentieth century. Che’s eyes are open in the picture, fixed on some distant point, and his lips are parted in a sleepy half-smile. The tousled hair and beard give him a Christlike look; his naked torso, pitted here and there with bulletholes, seems to emanate light. In the hushed, satin tones of that black-and-white image, Che’s body has an aura of distilled transcendence.
“I’ve seen it,” I answered, trying to match Gus’s gravitas.
“The Pietà,” he repeated, “it’s so beautiful the way his eyes gaze past the camera, he seems so calm and forgiving, so much at peace. Yet for anyone who was there that day, that photo is like a curse.”
“Hunh,” I murmured, afraid of spooking him, but I didn’t need to worry. Gustavo was speaking from some deep confessional booth within himself.
“Jesus could not have been the Christ without his Judas, correct? And someone had to play the Judas for Che, too, for Che the man to be transformed into