Chasing Che (2 page)

Despite the best efforts of biographers to set down a factual account of Che’s life—and the efforts of the Cuban government to curate an alternative, more palatable history—the myth of Che is essentially a living, oral tradition, an amalgam of a thousand fables, some of them true, others invented to suit the needs so clearly expressed on the bench in Santa Clara that day. I have been collecting shards of these stories ever since, writing down the tales passed through the dark of Havana nights—“I met him once,” someone would begin. I have bought up the icons of his face, pure imagery reworked for other ends. Dead for more than thirty years now, Che has become ever more useful. His image has been appropriated for political, economic, and even spiritual purposes. He is the symbol of communist destiny, and yet also beloved of anticommunist rebels; his face is used to sell beer and skis, yet an English church group recently issued posters of Jesus Christ himself recast as Che. The affluent youth of Europe and North America have resurrected Che as an easy emblem of meaningless and unthreatening rebellion, a queer blending of educated violence and disheveled nobility, like Gandhi with a gun or John Lennon singing “Give War a Chance.”

Against a tide of so many competing interpretations, I have
found it necessary here to retreat toward something approaching bedrock. Although this story has begun and will end in contemporary Cuba, it is mostly concerned with retracing the journey across South America that Che Guevara made in 1952, before he was famous, before he was known as Che, before he was anyone’s myth except his own. I have followed where his own search for stories took him, and have sought an origin point of the man as he himself understood it.

You can never know where your journey begins, nor where it will take you in the end. That day in Santa Clara I tried to return the picture of Che my new friend had handed to me. He insisted that I keep it, and then we talked for a while more, and finally he asked me to promise him something. “Promise me,” he said before we parted, “that you will tell people how it really is.”

T
wo hundred and twenty-nine miles due south of Buenos Aires the twin cylinders hesitated once, caught again, hesitated again, and then finally spun down into silence. The motorcycle coasted, ever slower, and came to rest by the side of the long ribbon of shimmery gray asphalt that stretched from one horizon to the next without interruption. The steel in the engine seethed and popped in the quiet of noon on the empty pampas.

I looked around, but there was little to see. The main tank had expired at two hundred and one miles, midway between two dots on the map. I’d reversed the petcock by my left knee while still moving, and steadily consumed another twenty-eight miles on reserve until the tank became, like the world, empty.

The Argentine pampa is a plain of near-mathematical flatness. I had departed Buenos Aires early and left behind its minor suburbs and depressing outreaches within the hour. I rode south on a two-lane tarmac that shrank away from my wheels even as the motorcycle pressed forward. Distant houses floated on lakes of light that evaporated with my rattling, wind-whipped approach. By mid-morning the houses were gone and the land approached two dimensions, a table of grass stretching out beneath a ceiling of depthless blue. This was an absurd landscape, an abstraction of emptiness that welcomed utopian projections and offered a hallucination of perfectibility. No
clouds, no buildings, no animals, no traffic, no sound. And now no gasoline.

But in an imperfect world, I have come to believe, there is always some nagging flaw in the absolute. Off in the distance, through quivering air, the road curved gently to the left, and there, at the curve, was a singularity: a thin stand of poplars. Trees here are the work of man, so I stumbled up the road in my new cowboy boots and eventually came to a barbed-wire fence, inside which were the trees, a bay horse, and a listing shack of weathered gray wood. I climbed the wire and clapped twice.

Nothing happened, so I clapped again. The arid space of the pampas has bred a culture of distance, a fetishistic appreciation of personal space. You do not simply walk up and knock on a door here. Sound travels far on this featureless terrain, and you clap twice from a distance to give warning of your approach. It was traditional in older times for a visitor to clap when first entering earshot and then wait long enough for a kettle of water to boil.

A minute went by, and I clapped twice more, and then waited a while. Eventually I shuffled around in the yard and took a sideways peek out back. Just as I had hoped, a rusted Ford Falcon sagged there beneath one of the biggest poplars. I spent another full minute weighing the sin of siphoning some gas, and just as I stepped toward the Falcon the door of the shack opened, tentatively at first and then fully. A wiry gaucho appeared, sleepy in the midday heat, shirtless, and scratching himself. He was wearing the traditional outfit of baggy
bombacha
pants, a black felt hat turned up at the front, and soft riding boots (horseback is the gaucho’s defining condition). We stood at pistol range. “
Buenos días
,” I said.

“
Encantado
,” he replied—“Enchanted.” I smiled and didn’t say anything, eager to follow his lead. Jorge Luis Borges had written a famous story about a city slicker who blunders into a fatal knife fight with a gaucho. All I could remember about the story was that it was called “The South,” and I was in no mood to become a metaphor.

“It’s very hot today,” the gaucho said, scratching his chin.

“Yes,” I answered, “very hot.”

“How are you today?”

“Fine, thank you.”

“This is my son,” he said, pointing to a face peering out from behind the door.

“Hello,” I said.

“Enchanted,” the boy said.

I was about to broach the topic of gasoline when the father spoke again: “You are from Buenos Aires.”

This comment had ceased surprising me. I’d heard one version or another several times in the last few years, while hitchhiking in Bolivia or wandering Peru in search of personal revelations and lucrative magazine stories. Although I’d found few of either, my Spanish had become smoothly generic in the process, and the locals were never quite sure what to make of me. Often enough they assumed I was from Buenos Aires. The gaucho’s assessment was less a measure of my voice than of my tangibles—my height, my blue eyes, my pink skin, my unscuffed boots, and my still-clean clothes. These were indelible marks that I came from the Other World, a place where rich, fair-skinned people lived, people with odd habits and the luxury of strangeness. Among the poor of Latin America, class trumps nationality every time. To a gaucho in a wood shack, the Other World could be that vague foreign land to the north where the gringos lived, and that seemed as close as a television set, or it could be cosmopolitan Buenos Aires, which seemed so much more distant than its two hundred and twenty-nine miles. The difference between the two is unimportant when viewed from below.

“I’m a foreigner,” I told him. “I’m going to—” I paused there, because I really didn’t know how far I was going. Chile? Peru? Bolivia? Somewhere north, or south, of there?

“I’m going to Patagonia,” I told him, since this was not only true but likely. “My motorcycle has run out of
nafta
.”

The gaucho sympathized and then spent five minutes explaining in archaic tones that while he “would be enchanted” to give me some
nafta
, the Ford Falcon had not run for three years and the tank was empty. We thanked each other profusely, exchanged opposite hopes
for the weather, and separated. I cut through his yard, gave the horse a wide berth, and then entered the stand of poplars, looking for the barbed wire fence. With my eyes raised, I missed what was in front of me and nearly put a boot down in the middle of a dusty dent in the ground. It was a small burrow filled with squirming puppies.

They were newborns, still blind, and at the last second I stutter-stepped and managed to miss crushing them but, nonetheless, their mother burst from the shade beneath the house and arrowed across the yard toward me, a yapping brown blur intent on murder. I went for the fence, and man and beast now engaged in an ancient contest, speed against speed, instinct against instinct. This race ended, improbably, in a tie: I got my left boot over the fence, and she got the right one in her mouth.

The dog held on for life, snarling and ripping at my heel. The boot was made of tough pigskin, and it held, at least for a moment. But the barbed wire fence now imprisoned me. Straddling it, one leg in safety, the other in combat, I was … exposed. With each yank and twist by the dog, one of the barbs was working its way through my denim jeans, tickling my testicles with ever greater urgency. I could feel teeth pressing on the vulnerable tendon of my right foot, while each rip and snarl drove me deeper onto the pointed steel. At some point, jiggling back and forth, the wire singing beneath me, the barb inching upward, I began to wonder just what I was doing there. It wasn’t possible to laugh at a moment like that, although I later did.

I remember having only one thought at the time, while quivering back and forth on the wire, watching the dog try to kill me. And that was: It’s only my first tank of gas.

Please, dog: It’s only my first tank of gas. It’s only my first day. It’s only my first country. Please, dog: I have so many miles to travel, so many mountains to cross, so many months to come, so many decades still to unwind.

Please, dog.

I
t is easy to grow fat in Buenos Aires. In a restaurant decorated with stuffed bulls I ate half of a bloody steak cut to the dimensions of an encyclopedia and drank a bottle of Mendoza red cultivated on the foothills of the Andes. On the gleaming pedestrian lane of Calle Florida I sipped
café cortado
and ate éclairs while being thrashed at chess in the Cafe Richmond by an old man in a tweed suit who did not like to talk. Wine, more meat, more wine, more pastries. They say an Argentine is an Italian who speaks Spanish and thinks he is German. The political implications of this formula are deadly, but it guarantees a rich diet.

At night I slept on the roof of an apartment building in a glass cubicle, and was awoken each morning by a parrot named Federico, as in Fellini. The parrot, like the doorman at the entrance eleven stories below, was a Paraguayan. If you waved at either of them, they said “
Hola
,” a trick the parrot had learned from the owner of my glass house. She was an elderly woman named Pibita, or “little girl” in Argentine slang. Little Girl would totter out to the balcony in the mornings, light a cigarette, and remove the cover from Federico’s cage. His greetings
(“Cómo te va?
” he asked relentlessly, mockingly) sent me off to another day of looking for my wheels.

The ship carrying the bike from Baltimore had arrived just after my flight, during the gap between Christmas and New Year’s. Nothing was going right. First my luggage had disappeared from the airplane somewhere between America and Argentina, and now no one could find my motorcycle. I wandered the city in a daze, exhausted by the incongruous glamour of this South American Paris, a city so steeped in the present that history could seep into the streets only with oblique gestures and concealed motives.

But it was there, this troubled memory. The first thing I saw when I stepped off the plane into a muggy December heat wave was a teenager in a red T-shirt bearing the unmistakable likeness of the man I had come to South America to find, the man known to Argentines as “
El Puro
,” the Pure One. To the rest of the world he was known simply as Che.

Argentines love nicknames, archaisms, and Italian slang, which
render their dialect of Spanish indecipherable or untranslatable on many occasions. The “Che” of a million T-shirts and dorm room posters was born here in Argentina as Ernesto Guevara Lynch de la Serna. This name meant many things. In reverse order, “de la Serna” was his mother’s maiden name, the “de la” revealing aristocratic roots; “Lynch” was his father’s patronymic, indicating the family’s descent from a noted Irish-Chilean admiral and providing just the European patina that Argentines crave; “Guevara” indicated traditional Spanish stock, the blood of the conquerors; “Ernesto” was the Christian name of his own father, indicating roots, generations, and tradition (abbreviated usually to “Ernestito,” or “Little Ernesto,” it was doubly a reminder of his place in the particular world that the young man in question came from, the petty aristocracy of Córdoba, the country’s second city, a refined town of churches, universities, and culture in the dry high plains of the northern interior).

One by one, Ernesto Guevara Lynch de la Serna would discard these various meanings until he was reduced to a single three-letter nickname that was an embarrassment to his roots: “Che.” The word is really just a verbal tic, a lower-class habit more common in rural Argentina than in the big cities. It means, alternately, “you,” or “hey, man,” or “uhm,” and can be used any number of ways. “Hey, che, come here.” “Pass me the salt, che.” “I think Avenida Roosevelt is … che … che … che … three blocks north.” It is a disreputable term.