OTHER SEPTEMBERS
MANY AMERICAS

Selected provocations 1980 - 2004

THE DAY I FAILED TO BE CHE GUEVARA

Once in a while, on a particularly damp day, I am visited by a slight twinge of pain in my shins, the slightest hint of an ache that takes me back to that moment around twenty-nine years ago when somebody in my hometown of Santiago shot me. A man whose name I never knew and whose face I never saw peppered my legs with buckshot and then left me bleeding on a Chilean sidewalk, left me to wander that city looking for a friendly doctor who could extract the small pellets and not report my wounds to the police.
I had anticipated in my imagination the very scene of violence I was to experience. I was writing a short story at the time – it must have been mid-August of the year 1970 – a chapter of a book implausibly called Ten Variations on the Three Little Pigs. As a child, growing up in New York in the Forties and Fifties, I had been raised on Disney fare, and one of my earliest favorites was the cartoon version of how Practical Pig constructed a brick house that could withstand the huffing and puffing of the Big Bad Wolf who was able to blow down the precarious straw and wood houses of Practical Pig’s foolish brothers. As adults are wont to do with their most cherished childhood memories, I ripped into the bland Disney fairy tale with gusto, exploring in my variations the hidden political, sexual, even ecological meanings buried in the original cartoon. In one variation, for instance, I used the succession of the three houses to map out the evolution of humanity from straw to wood to brick and cement, from hunters to farmers to city-dwellers, telling the story from the point of view of the building materials themselves as they awaited the buzz-saw of progress, the Big Bad Wolf of modernization that incessantly tears down one house after another in its mad thrust towards the future.
But the story where I predicted my own shooting was the most iconoclastic of them all: I made the wolf one of four brother animals who is a rebel against society, I made him a hero who was on the run and wounded, seeking successive refuge in one house after another and never finding it. Behind this vision was my infatuation, and that of my generation, with Ernesto Che Guevara, the Argentine-Cuban revolutionary who had been murdered in 1967 while trying to lead a peasant uprising in Bolivia. The villain in my story was Practical Pig who, as far as I can remember, represented some bizarre cross of CIA agent and rampant capitalist, eager to kill the hunted guerilla wolf.

In my life, as in that of so many writers, fiction has a frightening way of coming true, though often in disguised and twisted ways. As I was putting the finishing touches to that subversive variation on the Three Little Pigs, a news bulletin flashed on the radio. The invented violence of my fiction was interrupted by the deadly violence of the reality of Chile: in the streets of Puente Alto, a small town on the outskirts of Santiago, two high school students had just been shot to death by the police.
I jumped out of my chair and decided it was no time to adjudicate adjectives and polish my tenses. I was a hot-blooded twenty-eight years old and I wasn’t going to stand for this sort of murder. Thousands of other Chileans obviously felt the same way and we poured into the streets to protest the killings. Chile was then a democracy, the word Pinochet was not even part of our vocabulary or our nightmares, and the police did no more than hose us down, offer up a dose of tear gas. As we scrambled away from the police ministrations, I ended up with some other protestors in front of the building that housed the Regional Headquarters of Jorge Alessandri, the right wing candidate who, in a month’s time, was going to face Salvador Allende in the Presidential Elections. Allende was going to win those elections and was going to five those of us who were now marching and chanting through the streets some more constructive things to do, but at that instant of exaltation, we did not care about the future. We were full of rage now and had to rid ourselves of that rage quickly and decided that the best way was to insult our enemies where it would hurt them most, in their headquarters, teach them a lesson or two

.
Our enemies were the ones who taught us a lesson. A group of fascist thugs suddenly emerged from the building we had surrounded. They were not armed, as we were, with caustic invective, but with shotguns. Instead of running for cover, I had insanely continued to rant at them. I can still see myself, my fist raised in the air as if I were Che Guevara himself. Or maybe, scrolling through my mind back then, I had cast myself as the star of a bizarre revolutionary film. But there was nothing celluloid about the rifle that was fired and the sudden sting in both my legs or the torn trousers or the blood that started to drip onto the pavement.

It was only bird-shot, seven small hard lead pellets that sprinkled my thighs and shins. I didn’t even collapse. I just stood there, instantly silent, shocked, in a daze. My high-sounding words had disappeared, swallowed by the bullets.
A friend of mine called Jaime Gómez pulled me away, limping, to his motorbike. As a poet, Jaime cultivated surreal images and curses a la Baudelaire, but in this case, my friend had his usually feverish head squarely on his shoulders. He knew that I needed medical attention but that I couldn’t check into a hospital or I would immediately be arrested and interrogated. For the next hours, he drove me around Santiago in search of first aid.
As we careened through the city like two bikers from Easy Rider, my sense of unreality was heightened by the sense that I had already lived this situation a few hours earlier in my fiction. Like the Che Guevara wolf of my story, I was on the run. Like him, blood was streaming down my body. Like him, in the first two places we tried, we were turned away.

But this was not Bolivia and I was not Che Guevara. Santiago was my city, the city I had made mine, with its mountains towering above us and its Mapocho river of an earthy dirty brown, Santiago with its shanty-towns where I had worked for so many years and its cafés where I had debated Sartre and García Márquez, Santiago was the city where I had fallen in love and where my first child had been born, the city that had taught me Spanish and the smell of orange trees in the summer, Santiago was the place on this planet where I wanted to be buried, and Santiago would not let me down, Santiago would find me a doctor as we raced into the wind, Santiago would take care of me.

And Santiago did keep its promise to me: I did not end up as my character. When we finally arrived at the brick house of Dr. Brodsky – was it really brick or are my memories drunkenly transforming the past to make this story even more singular and amazing? – when we arrived at his house, the Doctor, an old friend of the family, came out to greet us and pronounced my wounds minor. I would not die, like Che Guevara, stretched out on a table, captured by a camera that would turn him, for the whole world to gape at, into a Christ-life figure. On the contrary, while Dr. Brodsky dressed my wounds, he scolded me in a way that neither Che Guevara nor the wolf would have found tolerable. You really must be more careful, Ariel. Tienes que cuidarte más, he said.

He wasn’t the only one to scold me.

During the next few days, I limped conspicuously, more than I needed to. I showed off my seven wounds, I denounced the right wing ruffians who had done this to poor innocent me, I projected myself as a martyr of the Revolution but I was also absolutely aware that I was a fool. A point my wife, Angélica, made to me repeatedly. Rather than a red badge of courage, she said, I had decorated myself with seven white bandages of stupidity. I could have lost my eyes, Angélica smouldered as she ministered to my legs several times a day. The pellets could have ricocheted into my lungs or, worse still, into my genitals. All it would have taken for me to limp for life, would have been for one little bullet, just one, to have shattered into my kneecap. And what for? What had my fit of infantile indignation accomplished? The two students were dead and my wounds were not going to bring them back to life. The thug who had shot me was free and more than ready to pull the trigger again, as we would find out in the years of dictatorship to come. And my actions had certainly not influenced anybody’s opinion, drained the sorrow from the world at all.
When I was a boy in New York, it had been easy to be a hero. All you needed was finger and a mouth: wham, pow, ktchoo, bang, bang. I would run among my friends and rivals killing mercilessly and being just as mercilessly mowed down: gangster, cowboy, warrior, Indian, it was merely a matter of pointing your finger and spouting onomatopoeia.

Now I had tasted real bullets, had found that they create silence, that violence is not a game.

It was time to grow up.

The years that followed were marked by Salvador Allende’s democratic revolution and General Pinochet’s military takeover and my wandering the earth for twenty years. Those years would teach me much more about violence and survival than I had bargained for, those years would help me figure out when to run and when to stand tall, when solidarity can defeat terror, when bullets cannot impose silence, when bullets need to be answered with words.
I never got to publish my story about the Three Little Pigs and the Wolf who was shot, the story in which I had anticipated my own shooting.
But Che Guevara did not leave me alone. The methods he had used in his struggle, his revolutionary zeal, his cult of martyrdom, became increasingly out of date, unsuccessful and far from my own options, but – as I recently pointed out in an essay in Time Magazine on Che as one of the hundred most important figures of the Twentieth Century – the reasons why he had rebelled and died in the first place had not gone away. The world continued to be a place loaded with injustice, inequality, starving children, massacred Indians, unshackled greed. And so, haunted by Che Guevara, I recently incorporated him into a work of fiction: I invented a character, Gabriel McKenzie who had been conceived, according to his mother, the very day that Che Guevara was being buried in Bolivia. But I did not make the mistake of having my young character act out my fantasy as a young man of emulating Che. Instead of trying, as I had, to become Che and failing to do so, Gabriel McKenzie turned out to be cynical and cowardly, desperate to escape Che Guevara’s example, totally indifferent to the Revolution. Gabriel’s problem is not that the world is full of beggars and inequity and prejudice but that he is, at the age of twenty-three, still a virgin. His energies were not to be spent storming the barricades of heaven, but in desperate and preposterous attempts to find a different sort of heaven and haven, a girl to make love to under the stars. Among other things, I wanted to test the world that had survived Che Guevara, see how much of his rebellion was left in this world where he has become an image on a jug or on a T-shirt. I wondered if the revolutionary guerilla hero had any message from beyond death for his wayward, neurotic and virginal godson Gabriel.

So thirty years later, I did finally introduce Che Guevara into my literature. Perhaps he wouldn’t mind that he is a character in what is a picaresque comedy, a farce about icebergs and nannies and mistaken identities. Perhaps he is tired of always being portrayed in tragic stories where bullets fly and blood flows. And it is my definite hope hat he is glad, wherever he may be, that I did not imitate his life back then in 1970, that I failed to die like he did when somebody whose name I never knew shot me and I survived to tell this story, this story and so many others.