Chasing Che (11 page)

Now the green diode looked wan and sickly, and when I hit the starter button the engine turned over only once and then choked on a
ga ga ga
sound from the solenoid. I pressed the button again, and this time the motor turned over and caught, and with the pepper grinder back in action I drove a block, made a right, drove a block, made a left, drove a block, and saw Oscar Von Puttkamer standing in the street, waving at me.

It turned out that both of the boys were wrong about the spelling. The Von Put Camers and Von Putnamers had never existed, but the Von Puttkamers were right here where they had always been. A barrel-chested man with a dense brown beard and a florid face, Oscar looked German enough to slip down to the beer hall in a pair of lederhosen.

Looks were deceiving. Oscar invited me inside his “city house”—he had an
estancia
outside town—and offered me a choice between coffee or
yerba mate
. Made from spare lawn clippings—or so it tasted—
yerba mate
was crammed by the fistful into a tankard, doused in boiling water, and the resulting green swamp was inhaled through an ornate filter-straw. There was no denying the ritualistic appeal of passing the
mate
gourd, but coffee seemed safer terrain for the novice. Oscar sent his wife off to make a round and let fly. He had been waiting a long time to tell someone “what happened.”

I still hadn’t mentioned Che Guevara’s name, but Oscar never doubted for a second why I was calling. Just a few years before today, Che’s
Notas de Viaje
had been published for the first time in Italy. A
friend drew their attention to the entry about the Von Puttkamer family. He had never read the actual passage and asked to see my copy, which I produced. I read him the brief passages referring to the family:

I broke out Granado’s diary to see if there was anything worth quoting. Oscar asked what I was looking at, so I told him. He had never heard of Granado, of course, but I explained who he was and mentioned that he had also written about the
estancia
visit that day in 1952. “What does it say?” Oscar asked.

Guevara had been delighted by his stay with the Von Puttkamers and even praised one of the men in the family as being “the best” despite supporting the posturing Perón. Granado’s diary was less flattering, but Oscar had a right to know what others said about his family. I read him Granado’s entry for January 30, 1952:

I looked up from the book briefly. Oscar’s face had turned red at the phrase “Nazis of course,” and the flush was rising visibly up his cheeks as I now read on. Granado went on to complain that the Argentine military junta had tacitly supported these “Nazis” in Patagonia:

I stopped there, because each sentence seemed to push Oscar’s head closer to exploding. The lower half of his face had turned a deep, sanguine purple, edging toward bright red in his upper cheeks. The skin under his sideburns was purple, but only to a precise line midway up the ear. Above that line he was pale, white, and almost sweaty. It looked as though someone had drawn a line across his face and then slowly filled him up with blood.

He couldn’t hold it in. “You know why they say this?” he burst out, and just as suddenly stopped. Neither of us could answer that question. Oscar was tongue-tied; I fixated on the thermometer of his temples. “Well,” Oscar vented, and again: “Well.” He grabbed big mouthfuls of air and then, finally, sputtered out a family résumé. “It’s true,” he began, “there were always Von Puttkamers in Germany’s highest military circles. The Von Puttkamers were one of the great military families of Prussia. But …” He fell silent for a moment, looking for something to attach to that “but …”

“You know who Bismarck was married to?” he continued. “A Von Puttkamer! Well …” Again, the pause that said he was not sure quite where he was going with his point. “It’s true there was a Von Puttkamer on the German general staff! But … but the Von Puttkamers were always on the general staff!

“But … uh … it’s true there were many Von Puttkamers in the German army during World War Two. Something like twenty-six of them! But … well.” Pause. “Yes, it’s true there was a Von Puttkamer in the room when they blew up Hitler!” Pause. “But … but the Von Puttkamers were professional soldiers!” Pause. “They were not Nazis!” Pause.

Oscar’s clipped gestures and red face were fulfilling Granado’s
caricature of a Prussian functionary. The cycle was self-reinforcing: the more he tried to defend his family history, the more he was digging himself into a hole. That just made him more desperate, which in turn made him defend things which needed no defending—he denied that the family had introduced European deer into the zone, and even became defensive over the architecture of the old “Black Forest” house that Granado had found somehow sinister.

Oscar had a point, even if he couldn’t make it. The Von Puttkamers were a great military family long before Hitler arrived on the scene, but
these
Von Puttkamers weren’t even small villains. Oscar hadn’t even been born when Hitler died, while his father and uncles and female relations had spent the war in Argentina.

Guilt flows with the steady creep of osmosis, however, and the strange association of Patagonia with Nazis was by now both popular image and old news. That the German influence here long predated Hitler did nothing to lift the cloud that shadowed the psychology of people like Oscar. German settlers had been coming to South America for generations before the war, filling up the emptiness of Patagonia with farms and sheep ranches, building towns like San Martín and Bariloche to the south into enclaves of proud Germano-Argentines.

As Adolf Eichmann learned at the cost of his life, it was wrong to assume that these Germano-Argentines were fellow fascists ready to provide fugitive Nazis with camouflage. Eichmann, the functionary who planned and directed the logistics of the Final Solution, had survived the collapse of the Nazi regime and emigrated to Argentina, where he spent several years in odd jobs—laborer, vacuum cleaner salesman, factory manager—in different parts of the country, including Patagonia. Eventually he was spotted by one of the very “Germans” he had assumed would protect him, a man who had fled the Nazis and now informed on the modest bureaucratic killer. Commandos from the new state of Israel kidnapped the fugitive and shipped him to Israel for a historic trial. Testifying from inside a bulletproof glass box, Eichmann said that he was “only following
orders” when he personally oversaw the extinguishing of millions of European Jews.

Eichmann was the most famous Nazi refugee in Argentina, but hardly the only one. Klaus Barbie, the former Gestapo officer and “butcher of Lyon,” had been a frequent visitor to Bariloche. During the 1950s and ‘60s, Barbie lived in Bolivia, where he taught his Gestapo skills to the local secret police. To escape the rigors of this employment he would head south on vacations to the comforting Alpine vistas of Bariloche. When I’d been in Bariloche years before, my hotel keepers had been a pair of elderly Slovenians with Austrian educations and pretensions. They were honorary members of Patagonia’s German community and recalled meeting Barbie on the local ski slopes in the 1960s, although he was using a false name. (“A very ordinary man,” the husband said. “We had no idea who he was.”) Barbie was finally deported from Bolivia to France in 1983 to stand trial. A few months before my arrival yet another Nazi—now in his seventies—had been plucked from the streets of Bariloche. As a young SS captain, Erich Priebke had overseen the massacre of 335 Italians in a cave beneath Rome; he had spent the subsequent decades living openly in Bariloche, and had even been president of the local German-Argentine Friendship Society. He was deported to Italy, tried for the massacre, cleared, retried, and eventually sentenced to house arrest.

Oscar hadn’t even been alive during the war. Born and raised in Patagonia, an engineer by training, he drank
mate
, spoke Spanish with an Argentine accent, and knew more English words than German. In fact, he could not conjugate one verb in that tongue. He was Argentine through and through. Yet here he was sputtering in defensive fury against charges that his family were “Nazis of course.”

I apologized and explained that I was merely repeating what someone else—this Alberto Granado character—had said about the Von Puttkamers. The temperature of Oscar’s face seemed to drop a few degrees, and we returned to the present of coffee cups and hospitality.

I still resented Guevara’s ability to cadge bed and board from
strangers. Determined, as the Cubans say, to “Be Like Che,” I screwed up my shamelessness and mentioned that I was looking for a place to stay the night. The historic parallel—Che stayed with you, and I’m following his route—apparently didn’t occur to Oscar, who merely agreed that it was very tough to find a bed in town during high season. I malingered around the house for a few minutes, but it was unlikely that he or his wife would offer me a bed after I had labeled him a Nazi.

“Why don’t you come out to the country house tomorrow at ten o’clock,” he finally said, “and I will show you where Guevara was.”

This was the best I would get. We went outside and stood around the motorcycle. Oscar was pleased that I drove a German machine, but proved he was really an Argentine by asking how fast it went. I boasted about the speed and how reliable the bike was (“Like a cockroach,” I told him, “it’s ugly but impossible to kill”), but when I turned the key the green light glimmered only dimly. Nothing happened when I pressed the starter button. I kicked over the engine, and kicked again, growing sweaty and embarrassed. For more than five minutes I tinkered with the choke, switched the key on and off, and swung the engine over without the slightest response. The green light faded and then died. Perhaps I would have to spend the night here after all.

At the last second the bike unexpectedly roared to life. Oscar looked relieved. Just as I pulled out, it started to rain again. I drove around and around the town getting soaked, but all the cheap hotels were full. Like the two G’s, I tried to camp on the lakeshore but was instantly routed by a glowering park ranger. It grew dark.

A priest charged me seven dollars to sleep on the floor of his church.

A
t 9:30 the next morning the bike died again in a gas station at the end of San Martín’s main street. Nothing I did would restart it.
The attendant gave me directions to a repair shop, and I slowly pushed the bike down the street and into a garage filled with grease-blackened pieces of engine. A young man of about twenty came over and explained that the mechanic was in Chile at a soccer tournament.

“But I might be able to help you,” he said. Not without some preparation, however. First, Manolo introduced himself; second, he asked how fast the bike went; third, he turned on and adjusted the radio; fourth, he made
yerba mate
.

While we waited for the electric kettle to boil, Manolo stuffed a
mate
gourd rim full of the grassy green herb. He offered me the first sip, a traditional sign of hospitality. I would have preferred to add some sugar—in fact, I would have preferred to toss the stuff on the ground—but I dared not antagonize a mechanic. I choked down a boiling mouthful without complaint.

Manolo sipped at the second pour and stared at the motorbike. He stared and stared at it. “What’s it called?” he finally asked. I told him the motorcycle wasn’t called anything. “It has to have a name,” he said. “You have to give it a name, like a girl.”

Gusts of moist wind blew in the open door of the garage, and I waited. Manolo sipped, stared, and sipped some more, drawing in his cheeks. He leaned against a wall beneath a cartoon of Argentina’s president sitting on a toilet. The caption read
FUCK THAT
SHITHEAD MENEM
. The minutes stretched out and the tranquillity became unnerving. Manolo poured a third dose of water over the same leaves and went back to leaning against the wall with the metal straw poked into his mouth. Finally, after ten minutes of this contemplation, he took a single step toward the bike, reached out a hand, and then froze.

“What song is this?”

My head snapped up and my ears located the sound of the radio.

The tune … the lyric … it was all a bit familiar, but not enough. An alarm tolled in my subconscious, but the jangling keyboard drowned it out. The name eluded me.

“BEE HON SHAPON,” he announced more urgently. “OOH YOO BABY!”