Che Guevara is abandoned and dying. During the clandestine moments that he and Ofelia have with each other, each discovers the possibility for love in a time of terrible war.
Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Her mother Alma had told her about him, how he deserved being hunted down by the soldiers out there in the Yuro Ravine. And so Ofelia had thought quite a bit about Señor Guevara.
She had even dreamt of him, that he had been thrown out of heaven and was falling through the increasingly darkening flames to Hell. As he fell, his hair and beard caught fire and swirled about his face. The flames resembled water. He beat at them with his hands, until the hands caught fire as well. The expulsion took a very long time, so that Ofelia was able to study Señor Guevara’s disgrace, the way his clothing fell away from him in ashes, long strings of ash left floating above, carried away on the air. He tumbled, his skin bubbling. It tightened and split into pieces, curling away from the musculature underneath, which itself began to sear with the increasing heat. One of Señor Guevara’s feet was bloodied, and both were badly scratched, as though he had had to walk for miles, for days, over rocks and through the thorny underbrush of the hills around the village.
The señor was not alone in his descent. Many soldiers fell with him, all falling separately, quickly and without order. Their uniforms caught fire, and the lines of sweat seemed to conduct the flames through their clothing and to adhere them to the soldiers’ skin, as though the flames were made of thick, acid-filled petroleum.
CHAPTER 2
When they had brought Señor Guevara into La Higuera, Ofelia hid in the kitchen of her mother’s house, terrified that he might kill her. This is the way Communists were, she knew, especially Communist guerillas, and she didn’t want to have anything to do with the señor. They ate people’s hearts. They took your house away and gave it to rapists. The worst of it was that they wouldn’t let you go to Mass. So she worried about poor Father Javier, the travelling priest who came to La Higuera once a month, who was so skinny and whose gums oozed blood from around his teeth, and with whom Ofelia loved to eat lunch because he was always so grateful to her when she served him.
She sat at one of the wooden tables in her mother’s kitchen, staring at the doorway that led out to the track between her house and the schoolhouse, where the army had put Señor Guevara.
There had been four men, actually. Señor Guevara and Willy, who had helped him walk up the path into the village. Willy had appeared very frightened, a bum dressed in rags, his old boots scuffed with age and long use, muddied. His left arm extended across Señor Guevara’s back, who would be taller than Willy were he able to straighten himself up. Señor Guevara was hunched over as though he were having trouble breathing. He appeared younger and even more frightened than Willy, as though he didn’t know what to do and was horrified by the soldiers. Señor Guevara had been shot in the leg. His walking was hardly walking at all. As his eyes had moved from right to left, frightening Ofelia with the intensity of their murderousness, his scummy hair decorated with twigs and dirt, and his feet, in their ragged sandals, cut and bruised so that he could barely walk at all, she had retreated to the doorway of her house, where she had stood with her mother.
The third prisoner — she learned a few minutes later that his name was Pacho — was very badly wounded, and was carried to the schoolhouse on a stretcher. Blood dripped to the mud from the canvas, and his face had been burned. The fourth prisoner followed behind the stretcher, a Chinese man to whom one of the soldiers spoke with quite evident anger, pushing him into the schoolhouse with the butt of his rifle.
“Hurry it up, chinito,” the soldier grumbled.
It was just as the radio had said. Señor Guevara was the devil. He was so dirty and possessed that he could only be The Malignant One, The Demon. “Shit itself,” as one of the soldiers had said. His eyes had been electric with the intention of torturing his captors. Tossed into one of the schoolrooms by himself, he was the worst person on earth.
But why are they putting him in my schoolroom? Ofelia asked. How could they jail him in so respectable a place, the place she went every morning with her mother, where she prayed and said the pledge of allegiance to the President of her own sacred Bolivia?
Where she read the few books that they had, such interesting books, about elves in snowy forests, about numbers and how to spell, about pretty gringas awakened by the lump of a single pea, about jet planes and enormous dams and the United States in general.
Read more about A Kiss For Señor Guevara and Terence Clarke HERE.
Copyright 2010 Terence Clarke. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.
{ 5 } Comments
This story starts with Chapter 2. It’s evocative hook in the first sentence grabs the reader. Dump Chapter 1, or revise it and move it somewhere else. There’s nothing wrong with a dream sequence, but it’s not powerful enough as written to convince the reader to buy the book.
It’s stunning to see a good book so roundly dismissed by someone who hasn’t read it. bateswriter’s critique of this fine piece of writing by Terence Clarke condemns it for its first 250 words. That shortsightedness relieves bateswriter of the task of reading a quite moving novel about the search for affection and forgiveness on the part of two people whose lives have gone very badly awry. Don’t miss this book, the way bateswriter has. You’ll find in it a picture of Che Guevara that is unlike any I’ve read. And in Ofelia you’ll find a young girl whose tortuous loss of her father has led her to the edge of madness…madness set right by her conversations with the dying Guevara.
Francis Javier
Review of A Kiss For Señor Guevara
Rare and beautiful are two of the adjectives that certainly could be applied to Terence Clarke’s latest novel, but there are many more superlatives for which A Kiss For Señor Guevara is well deserving.
It’s a slim book with short chapters, and together it reads like a long poem with perfectly appointed stanzas. Every word strikes home. The persona of Ernesto “Che” Guevara is one that will always elude us. Unfortunately, in contemporary society, there are those who love to build up celebrities and then tear them down. It isn’t hard, given the length and breath of human frailty, but the enigma and charisma of Guevara is a riddle never to be unraveled. And so his legend goes on, shored up by some, denigrated by others.
Now, for the first time, we see el Che in an entirely different light, thanks to Clarke and his major character, Ofelia, a Bolivian girl. I can’t say enough for a male author who takes on the daunting and dangerous task of seeing the world through the eyes of an adolescent girl. It would be so easy to unwittingly fall into the traps of caricature and small sentimentality, but Clarke never does. Instead he shows a sensitivity and understanding I’ve never before encountered.
Ernesto Guevara has come to the last tragic chapter in his life. He and what’s left of his rebel band have been captured by Bolivian soldiers and brought to a small village where they are shackled and imprisoned in a primitive school house. One by one Guevara’s comrades are executed, leaving only him. Ofelia has been assigned the task of bringing food to el Che and at first their relationship is tenuous. She is frightened by the dark man, dirty and wheezing from chronic asthma. She has heard the many tales of his exploits, the man who would take over the world in the cause of communism and, like others, she sees him as the devil incarnate. But then by degrees both parties soften. Ofelia reminds Che of his own daughters and the two begin to share brief, tender moments of conversation.
Clarke’s descriptions of Guevara are spellbinding. The smallest details of his horrible condition, his asthma, his wounds, the condition of his torn clothes goes farther than any writer could reach. It is as if we are in the rundown school house with him and we can smell, feel and even taste the slightest change in the wretchedness.
Meanwhile, Ofelia is abused by one of the Bolivian soldiers, Daniel, the only one in the group that seemed to her to possess kindness. It comes as a double blow, and we’re reminded of a strange parallel, thinking of Ernesto Guevara when he first started out to right the injustices of the poor only to be brutalized by the killing that he saw as essential to victory. Albert Camus comes to mind when we remember his book The Rebel. The revolutionary discovers some truths, and having done so thinks he has discovered all truth. On the path to insurrection, as the idealist faces and does violence, does he remain the same man he was at the beginning? Can anything be resolved by violence?
Ofelia has known her own tragedies. Her beloved father and brother were killed in a tragic storm, leaving her and her mother alone. The isolation of loss becomes real in the tiny room in which Señor Guevara is imprisoned as Ofelia and he search for solace from each other.
Then the climactic moment comes. Che is executed and his final words are those actually spoken by him at that time. “Shoot, coward!” he says to his executioner. “You only kill a man!” The words couldn’t be more prophetic, and Clarke uses them artfully. The author leaves us with a deeper understanding of what has happened to this strange, violent man…helped to his end by the kindness of a young girl.
Jack Deveny
Just a remarkable book. Given all the noise over so many years about Che, it’s refreshing to read a serious novel that really has something new to say about him. And Ofelia…a sad, marvelous girl.
This story is such a humanizing vignette of a visionary who wished to change the world. How ironic that Bolivia, today, is a socialist country and part of ALBA (The Bolivarian Alliance for The Americas), which includes Cuba and Venezuela. Sadly, Obama recently renewed the embargo against Cuba…I was looking forward to brushing up on my rumba in Havana. A Kiss For Señor Guevara motivated me to look at old footage of Che, and I found myself looking at the face of an enthusiastic idealist, very much alive and compelling in his demeanor…quite moving. His daughter Aleida says,”To be a proper revolutionary, you have to be a romantic.” Good stuff !!!
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