Brief Encounters with Che Guevara: Stories

Near-Extinct Birds of the Central Cordillera

I extended to the comandante the opportunity to walk the floor of the exchange with me, and he seemed reasonably intrigued.

—RICHARD GRASSO, CHAIRMAN, NEW YORK STOCK EXCHANGE, BOGOTÁ, COLOMBIA, JUNE 26, 1999

No way Blair insisted to anyone who asked, no self-respecting bunch of extortionist rebels would ever want to kidnap him. He was the poorest of the poor, poorer even than the hardscrabble campesinos pounding the mountains into dead slag heaps—John Blair, graduate assistant slave and aspiring Ph.D., whose idea of big money was a twenty-dollar bill. In case of trouble he had letters of introduction from Duke University, the von Humboldt Institute, and the Instituto Geográfica in Bogotá, whose director was known to have contacts in the Movimiento Unido de Revolucionarios de Colombia, the MURC, which controlled unconscionable swaths of the south west cordilleras. For three weeks Blair would hike through the remnant cloud forest, then go back to Duke and scratch together enough grants to spend the following year in the Huila district, where he would study the effects of habitat fragmentation on rare local species of parrotlets.

It could be done; it would be done; it had to be done. Even before he’d first published in a peer-reviewed journal—at age seventeen, in Auk, Field Notes on the Breeding and Diet of the Tovi Parakeet—Blair had known his was likely the last generation that would witness scores of these species in the wild, which fueled a core urgency in his boyhood passion—obsession, his bewildered parents would have said—for anything avian. Full speed ahead, and damn the politics; as it happened they grabbed him near Popayán, a brutally efficient bunch in jungle fatigues who rousted all the livestock and people off the bus. Blair hunched over, trying to blend in with the compact Indians, but a tall skinny gringo with a big backpack might as well have had a turban on his head.

You, said the comandante in a cool voice, you’re coming with us.

Blair started to explain that he was a scholar, thus worthless in any monetary sense—he’d been counting on his formidable language skills to walk him through this very sort of situation—but one of the rebels was into his backpack now, spilling the notebooks and Zeiss-Jena binoculars into the road, then the Leica with the cannon-barrel 200x zoom. Blair’s most valuable possessions, worth more than his car.

He’s a spy, announced the rebel.

No, no, Blair politely corrected. Soy ornitólogo. Estudiante.

You’re a spy, declared the comandante, poking Blair’s notebooks with the tip of his gun. In the name of the Secretariat I’m arresting you.

When Blair protested they hit him fairly hard in the stomach, and that was the moment he knew that his life had changed. They called him la merca, the merchandise, and for the next four days he slogged through the mountains eating cold arepas and sardines and taking endless taunts about firing squads, although he did, thanks to an eighty-mile-a-week running habit, hold up better than the oil executives and mining engineers the rebels were used to bringing in. The first day he simply put down his head and marched, enduring the hardship only because he had to, but as the column moved deeper into the mountains a sense of possibility began to assert itself, a signal too faint to call an idea. To the east the cordillera was scorched and spent, rubbled by decades of desperate agriculture. The few mingy scraps of surviving forest were eerily silent, but once they crossed the borders of the MURC-controlled zone the vegetation closed around them with the density of a cave. At night Blair registered a deep suck and gurgle, the engine of the forest’s vast plumbing system; mornings they woke to the screams of piha birds, then the mixed-species flocks started in with their contrapuntal yammerings and groks and crees that made the forest sound like a construction site. In three days on the trail Blair reliably saw fourteen species on the CITES endangered list, as well as an exceedingly rare Hapalopsittaca perched in a fern the size of a minivan. He was amazed, and said as much to the young comandante, who eyed him for a moment in a thoughtful way.

Yes, the rebel answered, ecology is important to the Revolution. As a scholar—he gave a faint, possibly ironic smile—you can appreciate this, and he made a little speech about the environment, how the firmeza revolucionario had banned the multinational logging and mining mafias from all liberated zones.

The column reached base camp on the fourth day, trudging into the fortified MURC compound through a soiling rain. They hauled Blair straight to the Office of Complaints and Claims, where he sat for two hours in a damp hallway staring at posters of Lenin and Che, wondering if the rebels planned to shoot him today. When at last they led him into the main office, Comandante Alberto’s first words were:

You don’t look like a spy.

A number of Blair’s possessions lay on the desk: binoculars, camera, maps and compass, the notebooks with their microscopic Blairian scribble. Seven or eight subcomandantes were seated along the wall, while Alberto, the comandante máximo, studied Blair with the calm of someone blowing smoke rings. He resembled a late-period Jerry Garcia in fatigues, a heavy man with steel-rim glasses, double bags under his eyes, and a dense brillo bush of graying hair.

I’m not a spy, Blair answered in his wired, earnest way. I’m an ornithologist. I study birds.

However, Alberto continued, if they wanted to send a spy, they wouldn’t send somebody who looked like a spy. So the fact that you don’t look like a spy makes me think you’re a spy.

Blair considered. And what if I did look like a spy?

Then I’d think you were a spy.

The subcomandantes hawed like drunks rolling around in the mud. So was it all a big joke, Blair wanted to know, or was his life really at stake? Or both, which meant he would probably go mad? I’m an ornithologist, he said a little breathlessly, I don’t know how many ways I can tell you that, but it’s true. I came to study the birds.

Alberto’s jaws made a twisted, munching motion, like he was trying to eat his tongue. That is for the Secretariat to decide, all cases of spying go to the Secretariat. And even if you are what you say you are, you will have to stay with us while your release is arranged.

My ‘release,’ Blair echoed bitterly. You know kidnapping is a crime in most countries. Not to mention a violation of human-rights.

"This isn’t a kidnapping, this is a retención in the sociopolitical context of the war. We merely hold you until a fee is paid for your release."

What’s the difference? Blair cried, and when Alberto wouldn’t answer he came slightly unglued. Listen, he said, I don’t have any money, I’m a student, okay? In fact I’m worse than worthless, I owe twenty thousand dollars in student loans. And if I’m not back at Duke in two weeks, he went on, his voice cracking with the wrongness and rage of it all, they’re going to give my teaching assistant slot to somebody else. So would you please just save us all a lot of trouble and let me go?

They scanned his passport photo instead, then posted it on their Web site with a five-million-dollar ransom demand, which even the hardcore insurgents knew was a stretch. Sixth Front gets the Exxon guys, Subcomandante Lauro muttered, and we get the scientist with the holes in his boots. He became known around camp as John Blair, always the two names together, Johnblair, but John got mangled in the depths of their throats so that it came out as the even more ridiculous Joan. In any case they couldn’t seem to speak his name without smiling; thirty years of low-intensity warfare had given the rebels a heightened sense of the absurd, and Blair’s presence was just too fertile to ignore, a gringo so thick, so monumentally oblivious that he’d walked into the middle of a war to study a bunch of birds.

So tell me, Joan Blair, one of the subcomandantes might say, pointing to a manakin spouting trills and rubatos or the tanagers that streaked about like meteor showers, what is the name of that species, please?

He knew they were testing him, nominally probing for chinks in his cover, but more than that they were indulging in the fatuous running joke that seemed to follow him everywhere. Which he handled by coming right back at them, rattling off the Latin and English names and often as not the Spanish, along with genus and all the natural history he could muster before the rebel waved his arms and retreated. But an implacable sense of mission was rising in Blair. He eyed the cloud forest lapping the compound’s walls and knew that something momentous was waiting for him.

If you let me do my work, he told Comandante Alberto, I’ll prove to you I’m not a spy.

Well, Alberto answered, perhaps. A man of impressive silences and ponderous speech, who wore his gravitas like a pair of heavy boots, he had a habit of studying his hands while he spoke, slowly turning them back and forth while he declaimed Marxist rhetoric in the deep rolling voice of a river flowing past giant boulders. First the Secretariat must review your case.

Always the Secretariat, MURC’s great and powerful Oz. In the evenings the officers gathered on the steps of their quarters to listen to the radio and drink aromática tea. Blair gradually insinuated himself onto the bottom step, and after a couple of weeks of Radio Nacional newscasts he understood that Colombia was busily ripping itself to shreds. Gargantuan car bombs rocked the cities each week; judges and journalists were assassinated in droves; various gangs, militias, and guerrillas fought the Army and the cops, while the drug lords and revanchists sponsored paramilitary autodefensa squads that seemed to specialize in massacring unarmed peasants. In their own area Blair could hear shooting at night, and the distant thud of helicopters during the day. Rebel patrols brought in bodies and bloody autodefensa prisoners, while U.S. Air Force planes gridded the sky overhead, reconnoitering the local coca crop.

Where, Blair asked during a commercial break, is this Zone of Disarmament they’re always talking about?

You’re in it, Subcomandante Tono answered, to which Lauro added with a mocking snarl: You mean you couldn’t tell?

Some evenings Alberto joined them, usually when one of his interviews was being broadcast; he’d settle onto the steps with a mug of tea and listen to himself lecturing the country on historical inevitability or the Bolivarian struggle or the venemous strategies of the World Bank. After one such broadcast he turned to Blair.

So, Joan Blair, what do you think of our position?

Well, Blair said in his most formal Spanish, of course I support these things as general principles—an end to poverty, an equitable education system, elections where everyone is free to participate. The officers murmured patronizingly and winked at each other; amid the strenuous effort of articulating himself, Blair barely took notice. But frankly I think you’re being far too timid in your approach. If you really want to change society you’re going to have to start thinking in more radical terms.

The group endured several moments of intense silence, until Alberto cleared his throat. For example, Joan Blair?

Well, you’re always going on about agrarian reform, but face it, you’re just evading the real issue. If you really want to solve the land problem you’re going to have to get away from the cow. They’re too big, they overload the whole ecosystem. What we have to do is forget the cow and switch over to a diet of mushrooms and insects.

Mushrooms and insects? Lauro cried. You think I’m risking my ass out here for mushrooms and insects?

But Alberto was laughing. Shut up Lauro, he gave an honest answer. I like this guy, he doesn’t bullshit around—with a hundred guys like him I could take Bogotá in about two weeks.

During the day Blair was free to wander around the compound; for all their talk of his being a spy, the rebels didn’t seem to mind him watching their drills, though at night they put him in a storage hut and handcuffed him to a bare plank bed. His beard grew in a dull sienna color, and thanks to the high-starch, amoeba-enriched diet he began to drop weight from his already aerodynamic frame, a process helped along by the chronic giardia that felt like screws chewing through his gut. But these afflictions were mild compared to the awesome loneliness, and in the way of prisoners since the beginning of time he spent countless hours savoring the lost, now-clarified sweetness of ordinary days. The people in his life seemed so precious to him—I love you all! he wanted to tell them, his parents and siblings, the biology department secretaries, his affable though self-absorbed and deeply flawed professors. He missed books, and long weekend runs with his buddies; he missed women so badly that he wanted to gnaw his arm. To keep his mind from rotting in this gulag-style sump he asked for one of his blank notebooks back. Alberto agreed, more to see what the gringo would do than out of any humane impulse; within days Blair had extensive notes on countersinging among Scaled Fruiteaters and agnostic displays in Wood-Rails, along with a detailed gloss on Haffer’s theory of speciation.

Alberto fell into the habit of chatting with Blair whenever they happened to cross paths in the compound. He would inquire about his research, admire the sketches in his notebook, and generally humor Blair along like a benevolent uncle. It came out that Alberto was a former banker, a burgués city kid with advanced degrees; he’d chucked it all twenty years ago to join the MURC. It was false, that bourgeois life, he confided to Blair. I was your typical social parasite. But no matter how warm or frank these personal exchanges, Blair couldn’t shake the sense that Alberto was teasing him, holding back some essential part of himself.

You know, Alberto said one day, my grandmother was also very fond of the birds. She was a saint, this woman—when she walked into her garden and held out her arms, the birds would fly down from the trees to perch on her hands.

Amazing, said Blair.

Of course I was just a kid, I thought everyone’s grandmother could do this trick. But it was because she truly loved them, I know that now. She said the reason we were put here on earth was to admire the beauty which God created.

Ah.

Alberto’s lips pooched out in a sad, nostalgic smile. Beauty, you know, I think it’s nice, but it’s just for pleasure. I believe that men should apply their lives to useful things.

Who says beauty and pleasure aren’t useful? Blair shot back, sensing that Alberto was messing with his mind again. Isn’t that what revolutions are ultimately about, beauty and pleasure for everyone?

Well, the comandante laughed, maybe. I’ll have to think about that.

So much depended on the rebels’ goodwill—whether they lived by the ideals they so solemnly sloganized. Blair knew from the beginning that their honor was the best guarantee of his life, and with time he began to hope that he’d found a group of people with a passion, a sense of mission, that equaled his own. They seemed to be authentic concientizados, fiercely committed to the struggle; they were also, to Blair’s initial and recurring confusion, loaded with cash. They had the latest in laptops and satellite phones, fancy uniforms, flashy SUVs, and a potent array of high-tech weapons—not to mention Walkmen and VCRs—all financed, according to the radio news, by ill-gotten gains from the cocaine trade.

It’s a tax! the rebels screamed whenever a government spokesman started railing on the narcoguerrillas of the MURC. We tax coca just like any other crop! A tax that brought in six hundred million dollars a year, according to the radio, a sum that gave Blair a wifty, out-of-body feeling. On the other hand there were the literacy classes and crop-rotation seminars which the rebels sponsored for the local campesinos, who looked, however, just as scrawny here as in the nonliberated areas. So was it a revolution a conciencia, or just a beautifully fronted trafficking operation? Or something of both—Blair conceived that the ratio roughly mirrored his odds of coming out alive.

The notebook became his means of staying clued to reality, of ordering time which seemed to be standing still or maybe even running backward. The only thing the guerrillas would say about his ransom negotiations was that Ross Perot might pay for his release, which Blair guessed—though he could never be sure—was some kind of inside joke. A group of the younger rebels took to hazing him, los punketos, ruthless kids from the city comunas who jittered the safeties of their guns whenever Blair walked by, the rapid click-click-click cascading in his wake like the prelude to a piranha feed. Sometimes he woke at night totally disoriented, unsure of where or even who he was; other nights it seemed that he never really slept, sinking instead into an oozing, submetabolic trance that left him vague and cranky in the morning. One night he was drifting in just such a haze when a punketo burst into the shed, announcing through riffs of soft hysterical laughter that he was going to blow Blair’s head off.

I wouldn’t recommend it, Blair said flatly. The kid was gig gling and twitching around, literally vibrating—hopped up on basuco was Blair’s guess. He’d probably been smoking for hours.

Go fuck yourself, said the kid, jamming his gun into the notch behind Blair’s left ear. I’ll kill you if I want.

It’ll be thrilling for a minute, just after you pull the trigger. Blair was winging it, making it up as he went along; the main thing, he sensed, was to keep talking. Then it’ll be like having a hangover the rest of your life.

Shut up you cocksucker, just shut the fuck up. Shut up so I can kill you.

But it’s true. I know what I’m talking about.

"You? You never killed anybody in your life."

"Are you kidding? The United States is an extremely violent country. You must have seen the movies, right? Rambo? Die Hard? Where I come from makes this place look like a nursery school."

You’re a liar, the kid said, though less certainly.

Why do you think I’m here? I have so much innocent blood on my hands, I was ready to kill myself I was so miserable. Then it came to me in a dream, the Virgin came to me in a dream, he amended, remembering how the rebels fell to their knees and groveled whenever the Spanish priest came to say mass, and the punketos were always the worst, weeping and slobbering on the padre’s ring. ‘Follow the birds and you’ll have peace,’ that’s what she told me in the dream. ‘Follow the birds and your soul will know peace.’

Bullshit, the kid hissed, clanking his gun into the back of Blair’s head.

I’m here, aren’t I? You think anyone other than a desperate man would come to this place? I came for the birds, Blair continued in a lulling voice, the most incredible birds in the world live here, and they do the most amazing things. For instance, did you know that the bellbird’s call can be heard several kilometers away? In contrast to the puffbird’s soft, heavenly whistle, which he sings just once a day, right before dawn. Then there’s your famous oilbird who flies only at night, navigating with his headful of radar equipment… And Blair talked on in the most hypnotic, droning voice imaginable, cataloging the wonders of Colombian avifauna until the punketo finally staggered off into the night, either entranced or stupefied, it was hard to say which. But when dawn broke and Blair was still alive a weird peacefulness came over him, along with the imperatives of an irresistible conviction. As soon as the cuffs were off he strode across the yard to Complaints and Claims, brushed past the guard, and walked into Alberto’s office without so much as a knock. Alberto and Tono were spreading maps across the jefe’s big desk; when the door flew open they went