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At least we have one thing in common, The Revolutionary and I. Neither of us ever learned to see in color. For him, the world appears in stark black and white; for me, in only shades of gray. Both of us blind to the green of the jungle in which we’ve taken shelter, the murky blue of the Rio Mamorte that cleaves through the trees, the jewel tones of the million exotic flowers.
He will begin to see it all only on the day he sets it free. I, maybe, on the day I burn it to the ground.
Right now, he’s pacing the perimeter of our camp. He does it every night before settling in, and I’ve been watching him long enough to know that he will wake at least twice before dawn and walk a tight circle around the tents before he can sleep again.
Without looking, I can follow his progress. It’s our first fire in four nights, but still he stays back a little, in the dark. I track him by the sound his breathing makes – wet and rotten, like boots on the decay that carpets the jungle floor. For as long as he lives, he’ll have those shitty lungs; for as long as he lives, he’ll pretend they don’t pain him at all.
He passes behind me. I lose track of him for a moment when he moves to the other side of the massive Kapok tree. The roots jut out of the ground, and where they curl over themselves, you can sit and at least be off the damp ground.
I find him again when he appears on the other side of the trunk – close enough now that he must know where I am too – but I don’t look up. The edge of my combat knife slides along the wedge of hardwood in my hand. I cut the lowhanging limb a few days back, but I’ve only tonight had the time to begin shaping it. Gray bark peels back from my blade like clay. It’s good knife, and I know that I am going to ruin it this way.
I take note of the footsteps at my back. One, then another. Then he stops. He turns on his boot heels and comes towards me. He’s made up his mind about something, and he doesn’t hesitate.
He finds an arch of Kapok root and sits down across from me.
You don’t really notice it when you first meet him, but his eyes aren’t brown. It’s only later, thinking back, that you remember, maybe with a faint smile, that they’re actually as green as glass.
“What’s that?” he says.
I hold it up so he can see. I’ve finished shaping the barrel and the hilt, and I’ve begun to carve out the rolling contours of the cylinder.
“Revolver?” he says, and he smiles as though I have just shared a great secret with him. He shows his teeth- more yellow than white these days, but straight and unbroken. Betraying his bourgeois origins.
I’m starting to see why those Life photographers are so taken with him.
He holds me there for a moment, like a specimen fluttering helplessly beneath green glass. And I tell myself, I’m not really credulous, I just look it. Still young enough to seem harmless, they told me. Just get in close. Let them make you a pet.
A faithful puppy, ready to turn rabid at a word.
But there, in the firelight, with the jungle pressing in on us from all sides, I dare him, silently, to know me for what I am.
Jack would have known. I really, really think he would have known.
The Revolutionary takes my carving from me and turns it over in his hands. “My friend,” he says. “This is masterful work.”
When the work is finished, it’ll be the same size as one of my guns. It’ll be just as snug in one of the holsters; it will hug my hand just like one of the originals I modeled it from.
But it’ll never kill a man.
“It’s just a hobby,” I tell him.
“Good,” he says, and hands the carving back. “You’re young. You ought to have things you enjoy.”
Young, perhaps, but I knew him even back in the Congo, and I saw his failure there; his fall, as spectacular as a meteor. And he lets me stand behind him now, back a little, in his blind spot, and he doesn’t seem troubled by it. Age has made him complacent. He still sleeps with a Kalashnikov under his arm, but he no longer keeps one eye open.
If we could all grow old with that kind of grace, then there would be no need of men like him.
“Honestly,” he says, “I’m glad you’ve come. You’re Russian; you don’t have to be here. You don’t have a real stake in it. If you left, I wouldn’t even be able to blame you for it.”
Slow, with the tip of my knife, I hollow out one of the chambers of the pistol in my lap. A coil of wood shaving lands in the dirt between my boots, joining the others already there. Before we break camp tomorrow, I’ll bury them deep and pack the earth flat on top to make it as if no one has passed this way at all.
“What’s your stake in it?” I ask him. Because I really want to know. “You’re ten years and 20,000 kilometers from home. What are these people to you?”
The Revolutionary smiles paternally.
He used to be a doctor. He doesn’t talk much about it any more, but I know there’s still something of the failed healer in him. I’ve read his dossier so many times that sometimes I feel like I am him. Like I could become him, from one breath to the next, the way an actor becomes his study.
I am sure of one thing: even an anonymous doctor lives more comfortably than a famous revolutionary. If he had never left his cozy home, he’d be well fed and maybe graying a little less at the temples. He might have saved more lives. He might have even saved enough to put back all he’s taken.
He’s funny like that.
“This land used to belong to the people,” he says. “And the lines between them were softer then, blurred. They weren’t savages, those people. They had literature and art and architecture. They had brain surgery and astronomy. But they didn’t have gunpowder, and that’s why it was so easy to take it all away from them.”
And he tells me, “It wasn’t that long ago. A few hundred years, that’s all. Not long enough for the wound to scar over, and not long enough to lose the limb entirely. This land is still my home. These people are all my blood.”
“Even you,” he says. “Way down there, amidst the mitochondria and cells, el Gato. You and I are brothers.”
Gato. That’s what he calls me. I have so many names that sometimes I’m afraid I won’t be able to keep them all straight. And so I lay in my bedroll at night and I count them like sheep. But I always fall asleep before I get to the one I was born with.
“Then I guess I have to stay and fight,” I say. “I don’t have any other brothers.”
“It’s good to know,” The Revolutionary replies. “When a soldier disappears in the night, I don’t hate him for it. I understand. I try to. But it’s difficult sometimes, after everything I’ve done…”
I shrug. “Why not hate them? They’re too soft for this life. It’s contemptible.”
“I used to hate a lot of people,” he says. “Because I knew they hated me. Get enough men howling for your blood, and it gets harder and harder, every time you have to remind yourself that you’re doing good work. So I came to hate them. Like a city buckling down for a siege.”
I set my carving aside and move a little closer, to get a better look at him. The fire’s starting to die down. Soon, it’ll be too dark to see him. “Hate’s good, though. A man needs something to keep him warm.”
“Maybe in Russia.” His gaze glides over me. “But here, it’s hotter than hell. I wasted a lot of time, mi Gato. I was almost an old man before I realized I couldn’t fight for people I despised. And I couldn’t keep believing in something that was so frail a shift in the wind could knock it down.”
He’s quiet for a while. The last of the fire colors him, catching in the pits of his deep eyes. Turning green to red.
“I’ve killed,” he says at last, slowly. When he doesn’t know exactly what he wants to say, he never stammers, or stumbles over his words. He just talks slower, until he gets the hang of it.
“I guess I’ve killed a lot. I don’t keep count anymore. If I could choose who to sacrifice, then I would. But I can’t make that decision. The men who deserve death the most hide behind the ones whose only fault is their inability to shake off their chains. All the people who join me love freedom, but the ones who are strong enough mix inextricably with the ones who are not. I have to cull the weak. It’s necessary.”
“You don’t have to justify to me what you’ve done. Do you think I’d be here if I didn’t already know all about you?”
He smiles faintly, and he looks a little tired. More like he’s remembering past weariness than feeling it now. Though I know he must be feeling it. But I know, I know, his immediate hunger and exhaustion, frustration and lingering sickness, don’t pain him as much as his memories do. Old weaknesses are the most persistent; the ones that crop up when they’re least convenient.
“I’ve never pulled the trigger with malice in my heart. Not even the deserters, the spies, the CIA serpents. I’ve never hated a man I killed. Only pitied them a little, and felt wistful, like when you remember a particularly fine day from your youth. I know their ghosts will never find me.”
“Sounds like you’ve got everything figured out.” I’ve known people like him before, and they both repulse and compel. I feel my shoulders draw up a little, away from him. “I can’t stand people who think they know everything.”
He doesn’t notice, or just doesn’t let on if he does. “Not quite. But I’m closer now than I was before. You’d be surprised what there’s room for when you push out everything that doesn’t matter.”
And then I feel the weight of his hand on my knee.
It’s not my fault. I’ve always had a thing for older men. I let them come to me first, of course. I’ve got my pride, and I like to be approached. Powerful men usually aren’t much to look at – just a clatter of old bones inside a nice suit – and they’re lousy between the sheets. But they can have anyone they want. They can afford to be picky.
It’s knowing that they picked you that really puts the kick back into an orgasm.
The Revolutionary is different. These days there’s more white in his black hair than he can hide, and there are fine fissures in the skin around his eyes. He’s solid muscle now, a real brick wall of a man, instead of lithe and wiry and youthful. Older now than when he began this, but not old like those generals and diplomats back in Moscow. The ones who all tell you they see something remarkable about you, something special. They see something, but it’s not a quick hand or a sharp eye.
But when The Revolutionary looks at you, sometimes you can see his green eyes go a little out of focus. Like he’s looking through you instead. Whatever he sees in you then, it’s got to be the truth.
Or at least close enough for government work.
He says, “You know, I’ve never had a successful spy in my ranks. I know deceit, though it’s not something you can see or hear.” He’s looking at me hard, irises of his eyes moving like an optometrist’s lenses; drawing me into focus. “It’s something you know. Something I’ve always known.”
I won’t try to say I don’t know what fear feels like. That I’ve always been in control and never had the privilege of feeling the earth drop out from under you and the endless tumble into chaos unfurl. But it’s not about keeping control; that’s not the object of the game. What’s more important is keeping a steady hand, a steady eye, a steady tongue, even when there’s no hope at all.
The Revolutionary knows it too. And that’s why he can live perpetually on the edge of that precipice from which blows, eternally, the coldest wind you’ve ever felt. Why he’s ready, at any moment, to rest his full weight on what I like to think of as good fortune, and he as Providence.
“It’s not too late,” I tell him. “You’re more an outlaw now than you ever were before.”
And his hand moves up my thigh, fingers following the inseam of my green fatigues.
“You’re right,” he says gravely. He’s given the matter some thought. “When I was young, people used to tell me all the time that I was too honest. That I ought to learn to lie a little, at least for other people’s comfort. You seem honest too, mi Gato.”
I swallow dryly. I can’t tell exactly where his hand is anymore. Crotch to kneecap, my whole leg is a bundle of tingling nerves. “I am,” I say. “To a fault.”
“That’s a shame.”
Then his hand’s gone, and I realize the fire’s burned down to embers. I can’t even make out his face anymore. But he has no trouble navigating me, when he cups my jaw in both wide palms and holds me still so he can kiss me.
The taste of Cuban cigars is about him. In his mouth; encircling him, so like a halo. I used to think those cigars were his only luxury. Now, I’m not so sure.
My hands are gripping his wrists. I don’t know who moved first, but I’m on my back now, between the roots of the Kapok tree. The ground smells of decay, but it’s not really unpleasant. He pushes me down, and the leaves are damp enough that they don’t crunch under my weight. His knee is under mine, angling my leg back.
It’s not that I’m afraid of being caught. It’s just that I think a man ought to have a little pride, even if he can’t have any shame,
He fumbles with the buckle of my belt and I reach for my bandolier. It’s a force of habit. Everyone always wants to take it off, but it has to stay where it is. But The Revolutionary surprises me a little by batting my hand away and shoving the bandolier irritably to one side.
For a hopeless romantic, he’s actually quite practical.
I wrap my hands around one of the thick roots that arches above us. His fingers are deft and savage; he jerks each button on the crotch of my fatigues hard enough to tear, but I don’t hear even a single seam pop.
I angle my hips upward some, to make it easier for him to slide my pants down. The ground is so warm, so saturated by the humidity, that it’s practically like skin. And when he settles his weight over me, it’s like sinking into the palm of someone’s hand, or the crook of a thigh.
He’s talking fast now, and I’m not following much of it. All the Spanish I know I learned in a classroom, and it doesn’t always sound like that in real life.
“Una vida fácil es una vida vergonzosa, mi Gato. El hambre y el temor y la incertidumbre y el frío son lo que hace a una persona realmente viva. Y cuando te mueras, quizá te mueras temblando. Sí que puedes afirmar que no llorarás. Pero vas a llorar. A menos que sepas, sepas absolutamente, que has vivido de verdad…”
“Culero,” I mutter. “Shut up and do it already.”
He starts to laugh. He’s laughing when he pushes my legs back and thrusts in. The sound I make, the jungle catches it and carries it away.
You’d think that someone like The Revolutionary would only know one way to do this. Maybe you’d be right, but it still wouldn’t be the way you think. Because he goes slow, and the space between each jerk of his hips feels like hours, like days. And then I’m digging my boot heels into his ass, trying to make him move a little faster.
He is not convinced.
His lips against my ear, still murmuring to me, but the words are becoming less distinct, further apart, as his breathing turns jagged and harsh. Soon, he’s gasping for air, making wind rush against the side of my neck.
But his pace never falters. Steady, as the pit of my stomach starts to pull tight, and something stirs beneath my skin, coming to life or slowly waking from sleep.
It’s just on principle that I don’t make a sound when I come. By the time he does, I don’t think he can cry out anymore.
We lie there a while, sweat soaking though our clothes. He wheezes against my ear, trembling a little with the effort of living.
I wonder, should I tell him it was good? Better than men like us deserve? Or maybe I ought to just keep silent and let myself come to resent him. Maybe that’ll make it easier, what I have to do.
Maybe it won’t.
After a while, it starts to rain. I can hear it hitting the canopy above us, like marbles scattered on a pane of glass. It’ll be a while before they break through the leaves to reach us.
In the end, I don’t tell him anything. I don’t even try to look at him, because I know by now that it’s too dark. If the rain can’t get to us, what hope does the moonlight have?
Instead, I ask him, “Why do they call you that?”
“Hm?”
“Your name. What’s it mean?”
The Revolutionary shrugs. I can hear him catching his breath, steeling himself so he’ll be able to get it all out without choking.
“It’s just a name,” he says. “Easier than going by the real one. Practically no one does that anymore. It’s something Argentineans say sometimes. They slip it in at the end of a sentence. It doesn’t really mean anything, though. It’s just a period. Or a question mark.”
“El Che?” I say it like I’m trying it out for the first time.
He nods. “Che.”