Brief Encounters With Che Guevara_ Stories - Ben Fountain [82]
“Je suis une femme deçue,” she told me, I’m a disappointed woman. She knew her position was tenuous; even though Ponce introduced her around as his wife, they’d never actually married, and along with her lack of legal standing she had no money, no family means, no education to speak of. Things lacked clarity, she said. I don’t know what I’m doing anymore. She kept returning to a dreamlike story about a resistance group that she and some friends had formed shortly after the coup. At first it was all blòf, just meetings and talk, but then a blan turned up and started teaching them things. How to use a gun, how to make a bomb. How to plan an ambush. How to disappear.
Who was this guy? I asked.
She shrugged. Just a man, a blan. An American.
Was he military? CIA?
Another shrug.
Where did you meet?
In Carrefour, she said vaguely, at a friend’s house. At night.
It sounded like a fantasy to me, a crude form of wish fulfillment; on the other hand there was the .38 she always carried in her purse, with which she seemed as casually proficient as your average American housewife with her cell phone. So maybe I was the one dreaming, living the fantasy. When I asked what happened to the group, she said, I quit. I got scared. One night the blan gave them a stack of Aristide posters and told them to blanket the neighborhood. They split into teams of two and slipped out the door with their sheaves of posters and pots of wallpaper glue, and within minutes she and her partner were picked up by attachés. She would have been shot if this boy hadn’t convinced the attachés that she was a stranger, just a girl who happened along and stopped to talk. So the attachés told her to go, get lost; the next morning her partner’s body was found in a sewer on Grande Rue. A few days later she met Ponce and moved in with him, in a different part of town where she wasn’t known.
“He saved my life,” she said. “He got me out of there.” When I was alone with either of them, they spoke tenderly of one another; when they were together they couldn’t stop arguing, and eventually Ponce threw some clothes in a suitcase and moved out. He gave her some money now and then, but it was never enough, and whenever I was in Haiti I’d go by to see her and bring a little cash if I was able. Sometimes when I arrived for one of my visits, Che’s speeches would be playing on the boom box. It surprised me at first, because she didn’t understand the words any more than I did, but then I realized that the sound alone was enough, that the tense, florid arabesques of Che’s Spanish served her much the same way as a torch song. This was the record she chose to play in her solitude, the music that spoke all the longing and truth and hurt that we couldn’t talk about in ordinary conversation. Those secrets we keep, even when they aren’t so secret. When I asked, half-joking, if she was learning Spanish, she just laughed and turned away.
5. Seremos Como El Che!
“Be like Che!” Fidel urged his countrymen on the day that he announced El Comandante’s death. Thirty years later Che’s unmarked grave was discovered at last, bringing an end to one of the Cold War’s more potent mysteries. For eighteen months a team of forensics experts had poked holes in the airstrip near Vallegrande, Bolivia, searching for the famous revolutionary’s remains; I followed the story with guarded interest from three thousand miles away, wary of attaching yet more personal baggage to the subject. For decades Che’s enemies had kept his shameful grave a secret, fearful of creating a shrine and rallying point for the militant left, but once he was found it seemed that everyone wanted him for themselves. The Bolivian government lobbied to keep him in Vallegrande, where he was sure to generate millions in tourist dollars. The Argentines, their savage “dirty war” safely in the past, laid claim to him as a native son. The Cubans, who had ignored Che’s pleas for help in his last desperate days, insisted on their rights as his adopted countrymen