Brief Encounters With Che Guevara_ Stories - Ben Fountain [81]
It was scary to think how close he’d come to real power, though the idea was good for some vengeful laughs too, because the sane politicians had made such a mess of things. But as for poor Laurent, he’d missed his chance; now he spent his days dropping in on friends and battering them with stories about his time with Che. At the Bay of Pigs he’d commanded a detachment of militia, putting his life on the line for the Revolution; he’d also been at Che’s side in the humiliating aftermath of the missile crisis, when angry Cuban crowds had chanted “Khrushchev you faggot!” There in the small, sweltering apartment without running water, Laurent would describe Che’s brilliant mind, his Herculean work habits, his love of practical jokes, and the curse of his asthma, the stories piling one on top of another until we lapsed into a sort of historical trance. Then the old man would catch himself and glance at his watch.
“Bon,” he’d say, taking a last slurp of coffee, “please excuse me, I’m due for my appointment now,” and off he’d go to meet Carter or Yeltsin or whoever was on the agenda that day, dismissing us with a wave of his empty portfolio.
4. The Consoling Voice
Throughout my thirties I kept going to Haiti, convinced that I’d found ground zero for all the stupidity, waste, and horror inflicted on the hemisphere since Columbus and the Spaniards set up shop. Meanwhile Ponce, as part of his duties for a national medical commission, made several trips to Cuba, returning with tapes of Che’s speeches that he’d play in the evenings on a cheap boom box, Che’s voice ringing through the old gingerbread mansion with the propulsive resonance of hammered sheet metal. As he rose in prestige and prominence, Ponce began to neglect his wife, a beautiful woman with piercing anthracite eyes and skin the color of brandied chocolate. She came from a poor family, but she was direct and strong-willed, and had a quick, intuitive mind that put my college degree to shame. She and Ponce had met shortly after the Aristide coup, when a ruthless military regime took control of the country; their romance had flourished amid the heady atmosphere of brutal repression and messianic resistance, but the adrenaline rush of those days was long gone. Now they spent most of their time together arguing about money. There was never enough, of course, and they spent too much, and the debts were piling up and so forth, and watching them fight I began to think that Marx, who was so wrong about so many things, had been right about money’s relentless genius for invading every aspect of human life.
Ponce, not the most practical man when it came to finance, dealt with the problem by running around on his wife, and he described his erotic adventures to me in an urgent, hissing whisper that sounded like the air leaking out of their love. He told me everything; to her he denied everything, though what he was doing was pretty obvious. “I’m going out to get some Cokes!” he’d yell, and then be gone for three hours. So she and I would sit in the dark at the kitchen table, drinking rum without Coke and talking