Free The Death of Che Guevara by Jay Cantor

and read to my mother and me.
    And perhaps I confused the disease with myself, my will; to lose one was to lose the other. For I was terrified of the needle, hated and feared my father when I saw him preparing the long glass and silver syringe. To give up mysickness to my father’s cure was, or so it felt to me, to fall, to lose power over myself.
    He carefully raised the glass plunger to suck up the liquid. I promised him then that my attack would soon be over, it would be over in just a moment, it was only a little one this time. I promised that this was the last attack I’d have for a long time, if only they’d just talk to me they’d understand I was serious. I didn’t need the injection. I’d really never have another attack, if they would just not give me the shot (I was screaming now, crying from fear and the strain of breathing), I wouldn’t complain anymore, I wouldn’t have any more trouble breathing, I wouldn’t wake them up at night to help me.
    My mother held me hard against her to keep me still. She was standing by the foot of my bed, holding me to her. I was overpowered, I was falling, losing myself, falling. “Stop wriggling now,” he said; “we don’t want the needle to break inside you.” He took down my pajama bottoms and put the needle into my buttock.
    Soon my father could no longer bear to give me the shots. He was afraid that his son would be formed by this fear of him, would grow up half hating him for these injections. So a nurse—whose wages I realize now they already could not afford—was hired to watch over me, to give me my shots, preserve my love for him.
My Asthma, Their Indulgence
    Brought to the world frail, unable to tolerate its air, I bought with my infirmities all my parents’ indulgent love. Anything I wanted I was given, they were so thankful that I continued to live from moment to moment, a constant rejoicing. There was no discipline for me, not even toilet training. A child, my mother said, was naturally good, curious, and capable of learning many things for himself (given an occasional timely hint from an adult). Especially such a bright child as her own was.
    These ideas formed for her after an exhaustive study of the newest books on child rearing. She particularly enjoyed studying those new ideas that went against the common grain, that went, if possible, against common sense altogether. And she liked those ideas that required no disciplining of the child—not from laziness, for she had an uneven but fierce energy for certain kinds of work—but because she herself was in rebellion against any form of imposed discipline. (Once, when she was a child, she had been told that children learn best from pain: they learn not to touch hot things by being burned. She hated this vulgar and cruel idea, and to show that it wasn’t true she immediately puther right hand on a flaming candle, and said, “It doesn’t hurt.” Someone pulled her hand away, but it was marked, her palm was scarred, puckered all over with fine lines.)
    My mother had been born into a wealthy and aristocratic family—an ancestor of hers, of mine, was the last Spanish Viceroy of the River Plate—but she found she could not bear the tedious restraints of her class. A woman of great, if sometimes erratic, intelligence, she had come of age in the nineteen-twenties, and had set styles, been a leader of her generation. She was the first woman in Argentina to have her own bank account, the first woman to drive a car in downtown Buenos Aires (often on sidewalks according to my father, terrifying innocent people—like the Toad in an English children’s story she delighted in telling me). My mother had been an activist, a militant, of the Radical Party. She’d led demonstrations for women’s suffrage (failed: thirty years later that most hated woman, Eva Peron, would autocratically accomplish this pointless reform). She was a tall woman, often slightly stooped when she stood, as if embarrassed by her