Cally Phillips' Another World is Possible
Episode Ten – ANSWERS
Genre: Drama
Swearwords: None.
Description: 1965 Shannon – MARY
Swearwords: None.
Description: 1965 Shannon – MARY
It is a Tuesday. March thirteenth. I remember it clearly. It’s the first time I lie, seriously lie, to my mother. It’s coming up for Saint Patrick’s Day and I am off school. I can’t remember why, I’m not sick, I’m never sick but, oh, yes it’s an early lambing and all hands to the pump. And I’ve claimed a day of study leave. The vet is due out and when the phone goes I rush to it. The phone is still enough of a novelty that it only rings for serious occasions and I’m always the keenest to get to it.
He speaks in Spanish and for a minute I am confused, disoriented. I was expecting the vet after all, not ‘Hola’ from Commandante Che Guevara. I had never really expected to hear his voice again. But there he is. He tells me he is at Shannon Airport. His plane has mechanical troubles and he is stuck there overnight. Could I come and visit him?
I am stunned. This sort of thing doesn’t happen to me. Nothing ever really happens to me. I’m just a seventeen year old Convent school girl from Collinstown. How can I possibly go, on a whim, all that distance from Dublin to Limerick? It’s impossible. But while he is talking to me the tone of his gentle voice and the beauty of his character which shines through it transports me back a couple of months to when we met at Dublin airport and I feel again what I felt then. That I would and will do anything for this man. I’m going to Shannon. Somehow – whatever the cost. Even if it means telling a lie.
We speak for just a few minutes. Enough for him to tell me that he has been recommended to go to a place called Hanratty’s Hotel which is on Glentworth Street and he says he’ll wait and look out for me there. I try to explain that it is a long journey from home to Limerick and it will take me the best part of the afternoon to get there. I tell him I can’t guarantee being there and certainly not till seven or eight in the evening. It’s just about lunch time when he calls, I remember. I begin to feel that I’m putting up the barriers of reality, but he just laughs and says, in Spanish, ‘I know you will come, beautiful Mary, we are friends and I will like to see you again.’
At this, I know I will get there. I know, somehow that before the day is out I will be with Commandante Che Guevara once again. Something I never thought would happen. I don’t know how I’m going to get there but I start thinking fast. I put the phone down and tell my mum that it’s my friend Carole needing my help with some revision, that it’s urgent and that if I get a lift with the vet I can stay overnight at Carole’s and come back the next day. We’ll go to school together and I’ll come back home after school tomorrow. So the vet comes and when he goes I go with him.
Mummy isn’t keen on me leaving the lambing but Daddy isn’t keen on me staying at home when there is study to be done. After all, my exams are coming up and he believes that my education is important. The boys might all stay on the farm and work but he wants more for his ‘determined’ daughter than the life of a farmer’s wife. And he knows I want more than that for myself too.
I only have about half an hour to get myself ready, my stuff together and all my savings out of my piggy bank. I don’t know what it will cost to get from Dublin to Limerick. It’s not a journey I’ve made before but I hope I’ll have enough and really I just trust that everything will work out. If Che Guevara wants to see me, I will do whatever it takes to get there. I would have walked, barefoot, if necessary.
I leave with my overnight bag and my school bag. I don’t have time to talk to Carole and tell her she’s my cover story. I know she won’t ring anyway. Carole isn’t allowed to use the phone except in an emergency, so I know I’ll be safe as long as I’m back to school on Wednesday. No one will ever know.
The vet drops me off in Dublin, as close to the train station as I can get him to go without making him suspicious. And I literally run into the station. I know it’s a long journey of several hours and I don’t want to miss a train. I get to the window and the ticket seller looks me up and down. More so when it turns out that I don’t have enough money to cover a return ticket to Limerick. He tuts and sucks in his teeth a bit, and looks suspicious when I state firmly that I’ll be happy with a single ticket and I have enough cash for that.
‘How will you be coming home then?’ he asks.
‘I have relatives in Limerick. They will give me the fare,’ I reply, adding lie upon lie.
Not that it is any of his business, but people do like to make it their business, don’t they? Or they do in 1965 anyway. I’m not yet eighteen and people look at young girls on their own, even if they aren’t very pretty.
Anyway, luckily for me there’s a train leaving very shortly and I get on it, my heart still pounding. My brain is spinning round and round. I can’t believe I’ve got away from home without them knowing. I can’t believe I am on a train from Dublin to Limerick. Three hours ago I’d been making bread in the kitchen with my mother, thinking of nothing more than what we’d be doing for Saint Patrick’s Day that weekend, whether my brothers would all be at home and what the craic would be. How quickly everything can change. Now I am about to see Che Guevara again. And he called me. On the phone. It’s like a dream. Maybe it is a dream.
I stay in a state of excitement for the whole long train journey, trying to remember all my best Spanish, practising in my head what I’ll say to him when we meet. Trying to plan it all out in advance. Trying to make sure I’m prepared, but I don’t have a clue what I need to be prepared for.
The train arrives at Limerick about seven thirty and I have no idea how to get to Glentworth Street. I have so little money that I know I should try and get a bus but I also know I have little time and time is more important than money at this stage. My priority is to get to Che as soon as I possibly can. To keep my promise to him. The lies to everyone else don’t matter as long as I keep my promise to Che. Nothing else matters.
So I get a taxi. My reasoning is that a taxi will be able to take me to Hanratty’s directly. I have to check the price of course. Be sure I have enough money to pay for the fare. I might not care how I will get home but I don’t want to arrive at the Hotel and have to ask Che for the taxi fare. I shouldn’t imagine he’d have any Irish money anyway. I’m just thinking of how can I get there and can I afford it, so, ‘How much to Hanratty’s Hotel?’ I ask.
The taxi driver looks me up and down.
‘You want to go to The Gluepot?’ He sounds surprised and a bit shocked. In 1965 the swinging Sixties hadn’t hit Limerick. A young girl out on her own heading for a pub is still a somewhat remarkable thing, I suppose.
‘No. Hanratty’s Hotel. Glentworth Street,’ I reply in my naiveté and I think it is this that saves me.
I think the taxi driver realises that I’m a country hick and so concludes that I must have a legitimate reason for going to ‘The Gluepot’, as Hanratty’s is called; rather than that I am a suspicious young woman of dubious morality. So he agrees to take me.
‘It’s called The Gluepot,’ he laughs. ‘You aren’t from town?’
‘No, I’m from Dublin. I have to meet relatives in Limerick and they said to meet at Hanratty’s. I have to be there as soon as possible,’ I reply.
I don’t want to chatter on. I don’t feel comfortable creating more of a story than I need to. I don’t understand at this point that the more you tell of a lie, the more you make it into a kind of truth. I feel everyone can see through me when I say something that isn’t strictly true. So I try to keep as quiet as possible. But he keeps pressing me, so eventually I say, ‘We’ve had a bereavement in the family. And we are meeting for the wake. Tonight.’ I try to look like I might be about to cry, and it must have worked because he takes pity on me and stops asking questions.
He drops me off outside ‘The Gluepot’ and it’s about eight o’clock and that is the moment the full enormity of the situation really hits me. Here I am just the other side of the door from Che Guevara, a man I’d met so briefly just three months ago. I must be crazy. How would I say hello to him? How could I just walk up to him? How could I even open that door?
Somehow, I pull myself together. He asked me to come. He wants to see me. This man, this extraordinary man who travelled the world and had been responsible for a revolution and….. he wants to see me. And I am there. I won’t let him down. I open the door and walk into the smoky atmosphere of The Gluepot.
He has his back to the door, but I recognise him immediately. He is wearing the same khaki greatcoat he had on in Dublin. He has a group of burly men around him. They look so out of place, larger than life amidst the smoke and beer of Limerick. They are deep in conversation. I walk across the room, trying to look like I should be there and it feels like the longest walk of my life. I manage to pull on the sleeve of one of his entourage. The man turns round and looks blankly at me.
I say, well I hope I say, because my Spanish is always a bit questionable under pressure, especially when it’s not a classroom topic, ‘The Commandante wanted to see me, I’m Mary, I’m here.’
And then he turns round.
He smiles. He laughs. He envelops me in a huge bear hug.
‘Mary. I am so glad to see you again,’ he says in Spanish. Or words to that effect.
The sun shines. In that smoky, dirty pub, Che Guevara makes the sun shine and the world stand still. While I am there with him, I feel exactly as I did at Dublin Airport. That nothing else in the world is really real. Nothing else matters, or would ever matter again.
They make space for me and we move away from the bar. Che is drinking a Guinness, but he doesn’t look like he’s enjoying it. I don’t know what to ask for when they come to order me a drink so I ask for a ginger beer. I’m sure that I’m too young to even be in that place but I never feel I shouldn’t be there. When I’m next to Che Guevara I feel like that is the only place in the world I should ever be.
We sit at a table and we start to talk. He has to carry on two conversations because his guards, or friends or whoever they are, are constantly talking to him. So there are about three conversations going on at the same time, all in fast Spanish and it’s hard for me to keep up with it. But I can tell he wants to speak to me, and it gives me the confidence to ask him what he is doing here in Ireland again.
‘I came to see you, Mary,’ he replies, laughing. ‘But my plane couldn’t land at Dublin this time. Sorry for the journey. We are all on a long journey today.’
It turns out they are going to be kept at the airport overnight, but they had been allowed out into Limerick for a few hours.
‘We have a curfew of midnight,’ he says. ‘What about you?’
I tell him that I hadn’t thought past coming to Limerick. That it was a long trip home and I wouldn’t go till the next day.
‘You cannot stay at the airport with me,’ he says. ‘I’m sorry for that. But we can make things okay for you.’
I’m not sure what he means and he speaks very fast in Spanish to one of his men who then leaves the table. When he comes back five minutes later there is some more frenzied speaking and then they all stand up. Che takes my hand and says.
‘Mary, it is very crowded in here and we cannot really talk. I have only a few hours and I want to spend them with you, not here. Please, come with me.’
He leads me out of the bar, and towards a set of stairs.
‘Don’t worry,’ he says. ‘We have secured a private room for you. We can talk there until we return to the airport and you can stay there overnight.’
‘I don’t have the money…’
I feel the slightest embarrassment, but before I can even really feel that he laughingly replies, ‘The revolution has money for tonight. Don’t worry, Mary.’
He pauses for a moment, looking straight into my eyes. A look I would die for.
‘You are happy to be with me, alone?’
I nod my head, struggling to put emotion into words. I blurt out, ‘Yes. Yes of course.’
‘Good.’
And we go on upstairs to the hotel room.
They bring us up some food and we have coffee to drink. It’s the first time I’ve ever drunk coffee, we always drink tea at home. Che tells me that Cuba grows fine coffee, and sugar, and he talks a lot about Cuba as if it was his homeland, though he explains that he is actually an Argentine. But above it all he says he is a revolutionary and revolutionaries are children of the world.
We talk. I talk and learn more Spanish that evening than in four years study at school. But a lot of our communication doesn’t really rely on language. It’s the way he looks, the way he touches me, the way he smiles and laughs and I am absolutely besotted with him. I would do anything for him.
If he had said ‘Come with me back to Cuba and fight the revolution’ I would have had not a backward glance. But he doesn’t ask me that.
You want me to tell you everything about Che and I want to tell you everything. But there are some things that have to remain private between a man and a woman and I’m never, never going to tell anyone exactly what happens between us in that room. It’s the only thing I have that is of him and me, us, together. In a room where there was no time, no outside world, no other reality; we shared an experience and my life was changed for ever. You know the result of that experience. But I’m never going to tell details. They would sound sordid or cheap to anyone else, but it was the most beautiful night of my life. Then and now I respected and loved Che too much to ‘kiss and tell’. It is our memory, no one else’s, and I will never let anyone else share it because sharing it would take it away from us and would destroy us in the process.
Some time after eleven we are disturbed and he has to leave. He is taken from me. For the last time. I know it and I don’t want to believe it, all at the same time. I know that the present reality is that I must stay at the hotel and he must go to the airport. I feel like we’ve had our whole life together and he is being stolen from me.
As he leaves, he kisses me and says, ‘Mary, don’t cry, I have to go for the revolution. I will send you a postcard whenever I can and we will meet up again, I hope, when the fight is over and we have won. Revolutionaries have to be strong. Don’t forget me and the revolution, Mary.’
And then he is gone, into the night.
I hardly notice the rest of the night, my first night in a hotel. That day and night have been full of firsts. It is the turning point of my life. I am glad that the most significant moment of my life was being with Che Guevara. I will never, never regret that. I couldn’t. It gave me, it still gives me, something to live for. A purpose. A truth outside all of this common everyday life we have to call reality. The life I have to live. Whether I want to or not.
I do remember that I don’t sleep at all, though, and I leave very early in the morning, without having the nerve to go down for breakfast. I have just enough money to get the bus back from Limerick to Dublin, which takes the best part of six hours and I miss school that day too. I get home around my usual time and no one has even noticed. No one suspects. In one sense I’ve got away with it. But by now, I don’t even feel like I’ve told a lie. I have a secret and I intend to keep that secret, whatever the cost. The secret is more important than truth or lies, more important than anything else. I go back to the dull normality of my everyday life. School and church, dances and boys.
In June I take my exams. I pass Spanish and French, but by that time it is clear to me, though I’m hiding it from my family, that I am pregnant and I’m terrified what will happen when I start to show. So in July, I leave Ireland. Without saying a word. I leave a note, of course, saying that I’m moving to England and not to worry. I know my mum will fill in the gaps. I know my dad will be raging, but I don’t know what else to do. I can’t stay in Collinstown now, not with a baby inside me.
Che said revolutionaries are children of the world and the world is a big place. He gives me the strength to take charge of my life. To move. When I think of the world he moves in, London doesn’t seem that far from Dublin. My one worry and regret on leaving home is that he will never be able to contact me. If he phoned my home, he would never reach me.
But I have learned to trust in faith. I know that if it is the right thing, I will find him again. Or he will find me. I have his baby inside me, after all. That must mean something. What I don’t know is that in July 1965, when I’m arriving in London, he is already in the jungle in Africa fighting again and that he will never return to Dublin or London, or anywhere near me again. He was lost to the revolution, to all revolutions, and his life was to be secret and short but very significant. My revolutionary duty was to keep our secret, our love, alive.
By the time I arrive in London I have many other immediate priorities and right up until I give birth I have many pressing practical things to think about other than how I might contact Che. No one could contact him then. However hard it is to live with I know I have to learn to live with it. It’s the price I pay for the time we had. I know he would want me to get on with my life. I know I have to bring up his child on my own because that’s the only way it can be. I have to face the reality of my life as a young unmarried, homeless mother in London in 1965.
Our baby is born a year to the day from when I’d first met Che at Dublin Airport. I take it as a sign that this child, this love, is being controlled on a stage bigger than I could possibly imagine. And I learn to live with it all.
I’ve never felt like I felt that night, never ever again. Whatever I’ve done, and you know I’ve done all kinds of things, taken all kinds of drugs and lived all kinds of lies, nothing, none of them, have ever lived up to the feeling of that night I spent with Che Guevara in 1965. It changed my life. It defined my life. It ruined my life as well because nothing afterwards could ever live up to that night and that night could never, ever turn into another day. You asked. And now I’ve told you.
He speaks in Spanish and for a minute I am confused, disoriented. I was expecting the vet after all, not ‘Hola’ from Commandante Che Guevara. I had never really expected to hear his voice again. But there he is. He tells me he is at Shannon Airport. His plane has mechanical troubles and he is stuck there overnight. Could I come and visit him?
I am stunned. This sort of thing doesn’t happen to me. Nothing ever really happens to me. I’m just a seventeen year old Convent school girl from Collinstown. How can I possibly go, on a whim, all that distance from Dublin to Limerick? It’s impossible. But while he is talking to me the tone of his gentle voice and the beauty of his character which shines through it transports me back a couple of months to when we met at Dublin airport and I feel again what I felt then. That I would and will do anything for this man. I’m going to Shannon. Somehow – whatever the cost. Even if it means telling a lie.
We speak for just a few minutes. Enough for him to tell me that he has been recommended to go to a place called Hanratty’s Hotel which is on Glentworth Street and he says he’ll wait and look out for me there. I try to explain that it is a long journey from home to Limerick and it will take me the best part of the afternoon to get there. I tell him I can’t guarantee being there and certainly not till seven or eight in the evening. It’s just about lunch time when he calls, I remember. I begin to feel that I’m putting up the barriers of reality, but he just laughs and says, in Spanish, ‘I know you will come, beautiful Mary, we are friends and I will like to see you again.’
At this, I know I will get there. I know, somehow that before the day is out I will be with Commandante Che Guevara once again. Something I never thought would happen. I don’t know how I’m going to get there but I start thinking fast. I put the phone down and tell my mum that it’s my friend Carole needing my help with some revision, that it’s urgent and that if I get a lift with the vet I can stay overnight at Carole’s and come back the next day. We’ll go to school together and I’ll come back home after school tomorrow. So the vet comes and when he goes I go with him.
Mummy isn’t keen on me leaving the lambing but Daddy isn’t keen on me staying at home when there is study to be done. After all, my exams are coming up and he believes that my education is important. The boys might all stay on the farm and work but he wants more for his ‘determined’ daughter than the life of a farmer’s wife. And he knows I want more than that for myself too.
I only have about half an hour to get myself ready, my stuff together and all my savings out of my piggy bank. I don’t know what it will cost to get from Dublin to Limerick. It’s not a journey I’ve made before but I hope I’ll have enough and really I just trust that everything will work out. If Che Guevara wants to see me, I will do whatever it takes to get there. I would have walked, barefoot, if necessary.
I leave with my overnight bag and my school bag. I don’t have time to talk to Carole and tell her she’s my cover story. I know she won’t ring anyway. Carole isn’t allowed to use the phone except in an emergency, so I know I’ll be safe as long as I’m back to school on Wednesday. No one will ever know.
The vet drops me off in Dublin, as close to the train station as I can get him to go without making him suspicious. And I literally run into the station. I know it’s a long journey of several hours and I don’t want to miss a train. I get to the window and the ticket seller looks me up and down. More so when it turns out that I don’t have enough money to cover a return ticket to Limerick. He tuts and sucks in his teeth a bit, and looks suspicious when I state firmly that I’ll be happy with a single ticket and I have enough cash for that.
‘How will you be coming home then?’ he asks.
‘I have relatives in Limerick. They will give me the fare,’ I reply, adding lie upon lie.
Not that it is any of his business, but people do like to make it their business, don’t they? Or they do in 1965 anyway. I’m not yet eighteen and people look at young girls on their own, even if they aren’t very pretty.
Anyway, luckily for me there’s a train leaving very shortly and I get on it, my heart still pounding. My brain is spinning round and round. I can’t believe I’ve got away from home without them knowing. I can’t believe I am on a train from Dublin to Limerick. Three hours ago I’d been making bread in the kitchen with my mother, thinking of nothing more than what we’d be doing for Saint Patrick’s Day that weekend, whether my brothers would all be at home and what the craic would be. How quickly everything can change. Now I am about to see Che Guevara again. And he called me. On the phone. It’s like a dream. Maybe it is a dream.
I stay in a state of excitement for the whole long train journey, trying to remember all my best Spanish, practising in my head what I’ll say to him when we meet. Trying to plan it all out in advance. Trying to make sure I’m prepared, but I don’t have a clue what I need to be prepared for.
The train arrives at Limerick about seven thirty and I have no idea how to get to Glentworth Street. I have so little money that I know I should try and get a bus but I also know I have little time and time is more important than money at this stage. My priority is to get to Che as soon as I possibly can. To keep my promise to him. The lies to everyone else don’t matter as long as I keep my promise to Che. Nothing else matters.
So I get a taxi. My reasoning is that a taxi will be able to take me to Hanratty’s directly. I have to check the price of course. Be sure I have enough money to pay for the fare. I might not care how I will get home but I don’t want to arrive at the Hotel and have to ask Che for the taxi fare. I shouldn’t imagine he’d have any Irish money anyway. I’m just thinking of how can I get there and can I afford it, so, ‘How much to Hanratty’s Hotel?’ I ask.
The taxi driver looks me up and down.
‘You want to go to The Gluepot?’ He sounds surprised and a bit shocked. In 1965 the swinging Sixties hadn’t hit Limerick. A young girl out on her own heading for a pub is still a somewhat remarkable thing, I suppose.
‘No. Hanratty’s Hotel. Glentworth Street,’ I reply in my naiveté and I think it is this that saves me.
I think the taxi driver realises that I’m a country hick and so concludes that I must have a legitimate reason for going to ‘The Gluepot’, as Hanratty’s is called; rather than that I am a suspicious young woman of dubious morality. So he agrees to take me.
‘It’s called The Gluepot,’ he laughs. ‘You aren’t from town?’
‘No, I’m from Dublin. I have to meet relatives in Limerick and they said to meet at Hanratty’s. I have to be there as soon as possible,’ I reply.
I don’t want to chatter on. I don’t feel comfortable creating more of a story than I need to. I don’t understand at this point that the more you tell of a lie, the more you make it into a kind of truth. I feel everyone can see through me when I say something that isn’t strictly true. So I try to keep as quiet as possible. But he keeps pressing me, so eventually I say, ‘We’ve had a bereavement in the family. And we are meeting for the wake. Tonight.’ I try to look like I might be about to cry, and it must have worked because he takes pity on me and stops asking questions.
He drops me off outside ‘The Gluepot’ and it’s about eight o’clock and that is the moment the full enormity of the situation really hits me. Here I am just the other side of the door from Che Guevara, a man I’d met so briefly just three months ago. I must be crazy. How would I say hello to him? How could I just walk up to him? How could I even open that door?
Somehow, I pull myself together. He asked me to come. He wants to see me. This man, this extraordinary man who travelled the world and had been responsible for a revolution and….. he wants to see me. And I am there. I won’t let him down. I open the door and walk into the smoky atmosphere of The Gluepot.
He has his back to the door, but I recognise him immediately. He is wearing the same khaki greatcoat he had on in Dublin. He has a group of burly men around him. They look so out of place, larger than life amidst the smoke and beer of Limerick. They are deep in conversation. I walk across the room, trying to look like I should be there and it feels like the longest walk of my life. I manage to pull on the sleeve of one of his entourage. The man turns round and looks blankly at me.
I say, well I hope I say, because my Spanish is always a bit questionable under pressure, especially when it’s not a classroom topic, ‘The Commandante wanted to see me, I’m Mary, I’m here.’
And then he turns round.
He smiles. He laughs. He envelops me in a huge bear hug.
‘Mary. I am so glad to see you again,’ he says in Spanish. Or words to that effect.
The sun shines. In that smoky, dirty pub, Che Guevara makes the sun shine and the world stand still. While I am there with him, I feel exactly as I did at Dublin Airport. That nothing else in the world is really real. Nothing else matters, or would ever matter again.
They make space for me and we move away from the bar. Che is drinking a Guinness, but he doesn’t look like he’s enjoying it. I don’t know what to ask for when they come to order me a drink so I ask for a ginger beer. I’m sure that I’m too young to even be in that place but I never feel I shouldn’t be there. When I’m next to Che Guevara I feel like that is the only place in the world I should ever be.
We sit at a table and we start to talk. He has to carry on two conversations because his guards, or friends or whoever they are, are constantly talking to him. So there are about three conversations going on at the same time, all in fast Spanish and it’s hard for me to keep up with it. But I can tell he wants to speak to me, and it gives me the confidence to ask him what he is doing here in Ireland again.
‘I came to see you, Mary,’ he replies, laughing. ‘But my plane couldn’t land at Dublin this time. Sorry for the journey. We are all on a long journey today.’
It turns out they are going to be kept at the airport overnight, but they had been allowed out into Limerick for a few hours.
‘We have a curfew of midnight,’ he says. ‘What about you?’
I tell him that I hadn’t thought past coming to Limerick. That it was a long trip home and I wouldn’t go till the next day.
‘You cannot stay at the airport with me,’ he says. ‘I’m sorry for that. But we can make things okay for you.’
I’m not sure what he means and he speaks very fast in Spanish to one of his men who then leaves the table. When he comes back five minutes later there is some more frenzied speaking and then they all stand up. Che takes my hand and says.
‘Mary, it is very crowded in here and we cannot really talk. I have only a few hours and I want to spend them with you, not here. Please, come with me.’
He leads me out of the bar, and towards a set of stairs.
‘Don’t worry,’ he says. ‘We have secured a private room for you. We can talk there until we return to the airport and you can stay there overnight.’
‘I don’t have the money…’
I feel the slightest embarrassment, but before I can even really feel that he laughingly replies, ‘The revolution has money for tonight. Don’t worry, Mary.’
He pauses for a moment, looking straight into my eyes. A look I would die for.
‘You are happy to be with me, alone?’
I nod my head, struggling to put emotion into words. I blurt out, ‘Yes. Yes of course.’
‘Good.’
And we go on upstairs to the hotel room.
They bring us up some food and we have coffee to drink. It’s the first time I’ve ever drunk coffee, we always drink tea at home. Che tells me that Cuba grows fine coffee, and sugar, and he talks a lot about Cuba as if it was his homeland, though he explains that he is actually an Argentine. But above it all he says he is a revolutionary and revolutionaries are children of the world.
We talk. I talk and learn more Spanish that evening than in four years study at school. But a lot of our communication doesn’t really rely on language. It’s the way he looks, the way he touches me, the way he smiles and laughs and I am absolutely besotted with him. I would do anything for him.
If he had said ‘Come with me back to Cuba and fight the revolution’ I would have had not a backward glance. But he doesn’t ask me that.
You want me to tell you everything about Che and I want to tell you everything. But there are some things that have to remain private between a man and a woman and I’m never, never going to tell anyone exactly what happens between us in that room. It’s the only thing I have that is of him and me, us, together. In a room where there was no time, no outside world, no other reality; we shared an experience and my life was changed for ever. You know the result of that experience. But I’m never going to tell details. They would sound sordid or cheap to anyone else, but it was the most beautiful night of my life. Then and now I respected and loved Che too much to ‘kiss and tell’. It is our memory, no one else’s, and I will never let anyone else share it because sharing it would take it away from us and would destroy us in the process.
Some time after eleven we are disturbed and he has to leave. He is taken from me. For the last time. I know it and I don’t want to believe it, all at the same time. I know that the present reality is that I must stay at the hotel and he must go to the airport. I feel like we’ve had our whole life together and he is being stolen from me.
As he leaves, he kisses me and says, ‘Mary, don’t cry, I have to go for the revolution. I will send you a postcard whenever I can and we will meet up again, I hope, when the fight is over and we have won. Revolutionaries have to be strong. Don’t forget me and the revolution, Mary.’
And then he is gone, into the night.
I hardly notice the rest of the night, my first night in a hotel. That day and night have been full of firsts. It is the turning point of my life. I am glad that the most significant moment of my life was being with Che Guevara. I will never, never regret that. I couldn’t. It gave me, it still gives me, something to live for. A purpose. A truth outside all of this common everyday life we have to call reality. The life I have to live. Whether I want to or not.
I do remember that I don’t sleep at all, though, and I leave very early in the morning, without having the nerve to go down for breakfast. I have just enough money to get the bus back from Limerick to Dublin, which takes the best part of six hours and I miss school that day too. I get home around my usual time and no one has even noticed. No one suspects. In one sense I’ve got away with it. But by now, I don’t even feel like I’ve told a lie. I have a secret and I intend to keep that secret, whatever the cost. The secret is more important than truth or lies, more important than anything else. I go back to the dull normality of my everyday life. School and church, dances and boys.
In June I take my exams. I pass Spanish and French, but by that time it is clear to me, though I’m hiding it from my family, that I am pregnant and I’m terrified what will happen when I start to show. So in July, I leave Ireland. Without saying a word. I leave a note, of course, saying that I’m moving to England and not to worry. I know my mum will fill in the gaps. I know my dad will be raging, but I don’t know what else to do. I can’t stay in Collinstown now, not with a baby inside me.
Che said revolutionaries are children of the world and the world is a big place. He gives me the strength to take charge of my life. To move. When I think of the world he moves in, London doesn’t seem that far from Dublin. My one worry and regret on leaving home is that he will never be able to contact me. If he phoned my home, he would never reach me.
But I have learned to trust in faith. I know that if it is the right thing, I will find him again. Or he will find me. I have his baby inside me, after all. That must mean something. What I don’t know is that in July 1965, when I’m arriving in London, he is already in the jungle in Africa fighting again and that he will never return to Dublin or London, or anywhere near me again. He was lost to the revolution, to all revolutions, and his life was to be secret and short but very significant. My revolutionary duty was to keep our secret, our love, alive.
By the time I arrive in London I have many other immediate priorities and right up until I give birth I have many pressing practical things to think about other than how I might contact Che. No one could contact him then. However hard it is to live with I know I have to learn to live with it. It’s the price I pay for the time we had. I know he would want me to get on with my life. I know I have to bring up his child on my own because that’s the only way it can be. I have to face the reality of my life as a young unmarried, homeless mother in London in 1965.
Our baby is born a year to the day from when I’d first met Che at Dublin Airport. I take it as a sign that this child, this love, is being controlled on a stage bigger than I could possibly imagine. And I learn to live with it all.
I’ve never felt like I felt that night, never ever again. Whatever I’ve done, and you know I’ve done all kinds of things, taken all kinds of drugs and lived all kinds of lies, nothing, none of them, have ever lived up to the feeling of that night I spent with Che Guevara in 1965. It changed my life. It defined my life. It ruined my life as well because nothing afterwards could ever live up to that night and that night could never, ever turn into another day. You asked. And now I’ve told you.
About the Author
Cally Phillips has written fiction and drama in English and Scots, much of which is published through HoAmPresst. She also currently works as editor for Ayton Publishing Limited and runs a number of online projects, including The Galloway Raiders, which is the online hub for Scots writer S. R. Crockett. Her latest project to hit the virtual shelves is the #tobelikeche serial, which started in October 2016.
For the archive of Cally’s fiction and drama, follow this link.
For the archive of Cally’s fiction and drama, follow this link.