Chasing Che (19 page)

They were just like the lawmen who filled Che’s diary: polite, generous, correct in all their behavior. This might have seemed obvious in 1952, but in retrospect—given what the
carabineros
had done in Chile—it was disconcerting.

I went around the Paula two days in a row, but I never saw Pedro or Ricardo again.

T
he poet Pablo Neruda grew up in Temuco, which is about all I knew of the place when I pulled into town just before noon after an easy
ride up from Valdivia. I circled the large town plaza and parked Kooky on the sidewalk in front of the local newspaper,
El Diario Austral
. A gray-haired rental cop trundled out to shoo me away but his heart wasn’t in it. When I said I was actually going into the newspaper on business he agreed to look after the machine and me. I left the luggage tied on, smoothed my clothes, and went inside. The elevator was sparkling, and I looked at myself in the reflective doors—greasy, dusty, and dubious. Six weeks of Patagonian austerity had shaken off the bloat of B.A. I was lean, sunburned, and needed a shave. The doors opened on the newsroom.

It was like newsrooms everywhere. Desks were scattered about in clumps and there was paper on every surface. Phones jangled incessantly. It looked like twenty or so people worked in the room, but only a few were present and none of them looked up when I came in.

A secretary told me to wait, and I set my helmet on the bench beside me. The archivist came out and listened to my request. He led me to the back of the room, to a reading table tall enough to stand at. In a moment he produced a heavy, bound volume of back issues from 1952. He was not interested in me and went away. Buried in the back pages, near a political gossip column and the news of an insecticide campaign, was a photograph of two Argentine motorcyclists who had just arrived in Temuco. With their disheveled hair and soiled jumpsuits even the short Granado looked rather dashing while Guevara resembled a movie star. Translated literally, which is how I was reading it, the article went like this:

Not quite. At the very moment they were supposed to be rattling toward Concepción the “scientist raiders” were actually ensconced safely at the breakfast table, engaged in Ernesto’s favorite pastime: eating.

The previous day had gone badly for the boys. Shortly after leaving the newspaper and Temuco, La Poderosa got a flat tire; then it
began to rain. Wet and miserable, they were rescued by a veterinary student named Raúl, who put La Poderosa on his truck and drove them back to town. The bike was left in a garage on the outskirts.

Raúl was their type of guy. He had a semblance of education (Raúl was “not a very serious” veterinary student, Guevara noted admiringly) and a fondness for food, drink, and chasing girls. Ernesto knew just how to play his new friend. Raúl was soon boasting about how much money he spent at the local “cabaret”; shortly thereafter he invited the Argentines to join him there, at his own expense. The cabaret, of course, was a whorehouse. Ernesto called it “that very interesting place of entertainment.”

In the end, Raúl withdrew his financial backing, a move that only seemed to increase Ernesto’s respect for him. Too broke to pay for their own sex, the boys accepted the lesser satisfaction of food. At one in the morning Raúl took them home, fed them everything they could eat, and put them both in one bed. It wasn’t who they had wanted to sleep with, but they were old friends by now.

In the morning, Che put on his boots—the only things he had removed for sleep—and went to find the newspaper. He must have felt a growing tension as he flipped through the paper (he noted how many more pages there were than he expected) and then relief when he finally spotted the article about two Argentine raiders.

Just as he had hoped, the publicity changed everything. The family suddenly discovered that the motorcycle bums in their midst were actually famous medical authorities. The visitors were “no longer just a pair of reasonably likable bums with a bike in tow. No, we were now ‘the experts,’ and that’s how we were treated.” Everywhere they walked in town they were recognized and lauded, thanks to the article. They spent the rest of the day working on the bike while “a little dark maid” brought them snacks.

The publicity scam they had first attempted in Valdivia had now been perfected. Aside from having its desired effect—acting as a letter of introduction to the region’s public—the article suffered from a few inaccuracies. Alberto Granado had gained an
s
while sitting in
someone’s notebook, but such mistakes are virtually required in journalism. The real changes in the story were the work of Che, as he boasted that morning in his diary. Here is my favorite entry of his whole journal:

Emphasis mine. It was impossible not to laugh the first time I read this. Ernesto had inflated his résumé to a gullible local journalist, leavening the minor sin with acute self-mockery. In exchange he got what he needed: a complimentary article that, displayed like a set of credentials, led directly to a free meal or three.

I had to wonder what had happened to that self-mocking tone. The young man had been skeptical of his own urges in a way the older self would forget.

I
stood around the
Diario Austral
newsroom for a while, left, came back in, left again, went down in the elevator, went up again, went down and across the street to eat lunch, and, fortified by a beer, went back into the newsroom. I asked to speak to the editor. A heavy man in a tie and sweater vest trundled into the room.

“I’m a famous American writer,” I said, and when he didn’t blink I added that I was a special correspondent to
The New York Times
, a columnist at
The Washington Post
, a contributor for various
magazines, and editorial director of the
Express
, which sounded like a good name for either a paper or a magazine.

I told him about the purpose of my trip, showed him Che’s diary, and took him to the reading table, which was still open to the clip from 1952. “I want you to write an article about me,” I said. He stared at me blankly and said nothing that I can remember, but gestured for me to wait in the conference room. A moment later a beautiful dark-haired reporter named Pilar and a photographer joined me. I answered all their questions, exaggerating wildly, and was careful to put the helmet where it would show in photographs. (If you want to Be Like Che, you really have to Be Like Che.)

I went downstairs, unsure what I had wrought, and prepared to ride away on Kooky.

“Good luck,” the rent-a-cop at the entrance said.

I
spent the night on a patch of dust beside the Bío Bío river. I’d pulled in just as it was getting dark. As a camping spot, the riverbank offered few amenities—a grove of fragrant conifers, water for cooking rice, and the softness of the powdery ground—but it had the advantage of being neither legal nor illegal. Late at night a Chilean family in an old station wagon pulled into the grove, spread out a few blankets, and went to sleep, too.

In the morning I brushed dust and a few loose feathers from the sleeping bag and looked at the river. It was broad and slow moving, shallow but with a few deep pools and undercut banks that might hold trout. I pulled the rod case from where it had been resting on the back of the bike and began jointing the four pieces together. Just then a group of four female Mapuche Indians—two women and two girls, in peasant dresses, with long braided hair—came wading down the river. They set up shop on a gravel bar in front of me and began scrubbing their laundry on rocks. They were the poorest people I had seen in Chile, and the darkest. I disassembled the rod, slipped the pieces back into their cloth sleeve, and tied the case back onto the side
of my backpack. I knew it was the last time I would handle the rod. The road ran north now for thousands of miles, and the farther I went the worse things would be.

There were many reprieves between me and the desperate Latin America that loomed closer with each mile. A little town called Los Ángeles, just a half hour up the road, was the first. It was an unremarkable place with the low buildings that this earthquake-prone region demanded, but I bought a cup of Nescafé for breakfast and circled around town until I found the firehouse, the place where Ernesto became Che and Alberto inadvertently revealed something.

I had circled the name “Los Ángeles” on my map of Chile months before, because the two travelers had here what Granado called “one of the most unimaginable and most interesting adventures of the trip.” Their second attempt to leave Temuco had ended even worse than the first. There was another flat tire, and then their spare went flat as well. They were saved from spending a night in the open by their newspaper fame: “We weren’t just anybody now,” Ernesto wrote, “we were the experts; we soon found a railway worker who took us to his house where we were treated like kings.” They spent the next day fixing the tires and eating, finally departing at the crack of sunset. They spent that night with a forest warden and, early the next morning, set off for what should have been a long, easy day of travel. But after a few miles “the bike suddenly veered sideways and threw us off.” It sounded just like my accident on the Carretera Austral—the unexpected twisting of the bike from side to side that motorcyclists call a “tank slapper.”

The boys were unhurt, but La Poderosa was nearly ruined. The steering column and gearbox were both smashed. As they waited by the side of the road, more passersby recognized them from the newspaper. For a couple of days they exploited their media fame to cadge food and help with the bike. They slept in what Ernesto called the “local barracks,” apparently the police station, possibly the jail cells in it. Overconfident, they got extremely drunk at a Chilean party and Ernesto made a forceful pass at the wife of one of the local mechanics. Since he did this in the middle of the dance floor, there was a fight.
The wife somehow ended up on the floor; Ernesto and Alberto ended up running for their lives, chased by a crowd of angry Chileans.

Fleeing the now-hostile village on La Poderosa, the pair made only a few kilometers before disaster struck. Ernesto was driving when, rounding a bend, the back brake came apart; seconds later, the front brake also snapped. It was the worst possible scenario: they were shooting down a steep hill, on a road blocked by a herd of cows, behind which was a river. Fighting for control, Ernesto struck one of the cows, then avoided the river by slamming up a two-meter embankment. Everything came to rest in a pile. They tried to continue, but the bike was ruined and gave out at once.

La Poderosa was dead. They hauled the Norton to the nearby town of Los Ángeles, stored it in the local firehouse, and sat back to consider the situation. Ernesto predicted trouble in his diary: “It was our last day as ‘motorized bums,’ ” he said. The next stage “looked … more difficult.”

I
left Kooky on the sidewalk that had once hosted La Poderosa and scouted the building to make sure it was the same: there was the bell tower the boys mentioned, and the second story was home to the resident firemen, just as they described. A couple of old-fashioned pumpers with the rounded look of 1950s machines were parked outside the building, ready to roll, and there was a beautiful, new squared-off engine inside. The two G’s had mentioned that one of the trucks of 1952 had been christened “Chile-España” but none of them had names now.

I found a back door open and wandered past a small kitchen, went upstairs, and stumbled directly into the fire chief, who had just arrived at work. In Chile, as Ernesto noted with admiration, the firemen are traditionally volunteers and the job is considered highly prestigious and attracts the best men in any town. The fire chief certainly seemed to fit this mold: he looked like a politician, conventionally handsome with a fierce helmet of gray hair topping a resolute
chin and a compact, strong body. After he had taken care of some routine business—checking the roster to make sure duty assignments like cleaning the station and engines were under way—he invited me into his office. We sat down and, with several other firemen watching from the doorway, I told him that the famous revolutionary Che Guevara had once stayed in this very firehouse.