Brief Encounters With Che Guevara_ Stories - Ben Fountain [79]
While we drank he described the military operation for me, how his unit—most of them Indians—had harassed and tracked the guerrillas for weeks, finally cornering the survivors in the Churo Gorge. They captured Che after a firefight and marched him into the tiny village of La Higuera, where they locked him in the schoolhouse overnight. When the order came the next day to execute him, the junior officers drew lots to determine who would do the shooting. “I talked to him early that morning,” Gus said. “I brought him a cup of coffee and we chatted for a minute, I told him I was the guy who’d tracked him all this time through the mountains. Che was a human wreck by then—he was starving and sick, his feet were a bloody mess, and his asthma was like a snake crawling up and down his throat. But still fighting—that son of a bitch was still fighting his war. He just stared at me for a minute, and then he said, ‘Look around you, Lieutenant. Look at this village—what do you see? There’s no doctor, no running water, no electricity, no decent road, they have nothing, the lives of these people are shit. So all that time you were trying to kill me, brother, did you ever stop to think what this war is about?’”
“It’s a conversation I have sometimes in my dreams,” Gus went on. “We’re in the schoolhouse there in La Higuera, and he’s sitting on the floor in his filthy clothes, his feet sticking out in their bloody rags. But he’s already dead! His skin is a pale blue color, and his shirt is torn and bloody where the bullets went in. We talk for a while, and he says he’s not angry with me. I ask him if it hurts very much to be dead, and he says, No, not very much. And then I get up the nerve to ask him about heaven and hell, whether they’re real, and where exactly he is in all that. He always smiles a little when I ask him that, and then he says, ‘You know, Gustavo, it’s a very interesting thing I’ve learned here, I had no idea God and the Devil live so close together. They’re neighbors, in fact, their houses are right beside each other, and sometimes when they’re sitting around with nothing to do they play cards, just as a way to pass the time. But they never wager money—what good is money to them? No, it’s only souls they’re interested in, the souls of all these sinners running around the Earth. It’s us they bet on when they sit down to cards.’
“‘So what about me?’ I ask him then. ‘Have they ever bet on me?’
“‘Of course,’ he says, but when I ask him who won, the Devil or God, he never answers. He just sits there staring at me.”
3. Comrades-in-Arms
In my early thirties I began making trips to the beleaguered island nation of Haiti. With the recent fall of the Duvalier regime, it struck me as an interesting place to be, and I had credentialed, more or less credible reasons for going—to write articles and, hopefully, a book—but my true motives seemed to have more to do with being Southern, and white, and having a natural affinity for the quagmire of race. By this time I had a beautiful wife and two wonderful children, a loving family which I’d done nothing special to deserve, but I’d leave them for weeks at a time to go messing around a place that was perpetually on the verge of devouring itself. After several trips I met a young Haitian, a doctor, with whom I became friends; Ponce, incidentally, was rather Che-like himself, an intense, good-looking, often disheveled mulatto who practiced near one of the downtown slums and treated most of his patients for free. Because he made so little money, he had to live with his wife and their two sons in a cramped, buggy apartment in the middle of Port-au-Prince, a few rooms carved out of an ancient