Chasing Che (28 page)

I ended up circling the new Blockbuster endlessly, going round and round, wondering why the guerrillas always demolished the wrong symbols of American imperialism.

F
or the first time in almost three thousand miles, I turned my back on the left coast of South America. The narrow, flat strip of alluvial land that I had first glimpsed the day of my crash in southern Chile now dropped behind. A smooth divided highway ran east from Lima, out through yet more shantytowns, and then gradually began to rise. The Andes stood like a black thundercloud. In my rearview mirrors I could see the smudge of Lima and behind it the blue ocean.

After half an hour I came to a checkpoint. This was the only all-weather road connecting Lima to the sierra, and everything from potatoes to cocaine to guerrillas to tourists had to pass along this route. A somber officer inspected my papers and then asked me to dismount and bring my saddlebags inside. He was going to search me. In all the dozens of checkpoints I had passed through so far in Argentina, Chile, and Peru, no one had ever inspected my bags. Even the Chilean
carabineros
had done nothing more than confiscate the bread and cheese from a plastic bag shock-corded to the outside of my luggage. But for the Peruvian police this was a crucial frontier, a border between two worlds. The coast was a modernized wreck, where ruin and prosperity baked together under the sun. Above us were the cold and wild mountains, where Peru was more a notion than a nation.

I wanted a witness but couldn’t find one, so I went into the little room with the officer and watched his hands closely. He opened
the black plastic cases and slowly, professionally, worked his fingers through the clothing, reaching inside the plastic bags I used to keep things dry. He examined the spare clutch and brake cables; he opened the box containing my one spare inner tube; he passed over the diaries of Guevara and Granado without a glance. He closed the cases again. “Sorry,” he said. “We have to do this.”

He cleared me, but the search, the inspection of my paperwork, and the waiting still consumed an hour, and I was already behind schedule. I was determined to reach Huancayo, in the high Andes, by lunch, and I pulled out the cheap paper map of Peru that I kept folded in the inner breast pocket of my leather jacket. According to the map the pavement ended there in Huancayo, but the road south and east toward Cuzco was listed as a main component of the Pan-American Highway system, so I figured I could still make good time. I planned to be in Ayacucho by nightfall, since it was only two hundred miles from Lima. I’d allowed a generous two days to cover the last half of the distance to Cuzco. I ran my fingernail down the twisty length of the road, past names I couldn’t pronounce. I’d underlined some of the places Guevara had stayed: Huancayo, Huanta, Ayacucho, Andahuaylas, Huancarama. I’d spent an afternoon at the South American Explorer’s Club in Lima poring over its maps and the latest reports on roads and guerrillas. The club was a slightly doddery institution in an old Lima house where mountain climbers could store gear and backpackers exchanged information regarding everything from petty crime to hotel rates to the depth of the snowpack. The news wasn’t all good, and I’d added annotations to my own map of Peru: “50 in column” referred to a company of Shining Path guerrillas spotted outside Chiclayo. I’d inked the whole region behind Huancayo with frantic black lines, indicating the presence of guerrillas there. There had been an attack at Huancavelica; another near Colcabamba; south of Ayacucho was particularly bad; everything south of Cuzco was dubious. Most of the reports were quite old. The Shining Path was on the run, its leaders arrested, its rank and file decimated. The MRTA was down to a few score combatants, most of them in the coca-growing valleys around Tingo
María, where I had no intention of setting foot. Plenty of people had gone up this road. I met an American woman in the club who’d just come through on a bus. There was nothing to be afraid of.

I was surprised when I got most of the way down the map and saw, in my own handwriting, the scribbled remark “Here be dragons.” It sprawled over a swath of Peru, black ink on the page. I didn’t remember writing that, but there it was in my own hand.

U
p now, and yet farther up. The road slimmed to a humble two-lane blacktop, twisting in and out of the folds of the Andes, the steepest mountains in the world. This was Kooky’s natural terrain, and we ate up the altitude, passing hesitant cars and staggering trucks, roaring lightly upward and upward and upward. With each thousand feet of altitude the temperature dropped three degrees, and eventually a mild fog closed in. There was nothing to see but steep walls of green vegetation on my right and a depthless expanse of white vapor on my left. A flock of excited bicyclists shot past in the other direction, tears streaming from their eyes.

At around nine thousand feet the engine finally gave out. It happened slowly, just a gradual decrease in power, until I had downshifted into second gear and Kooky was clawing upward with reluctance. I pulled into the parking lot of a small police post and drew my tool roll from beneath the seat. Two officers in insulated green coats came over to watch.

The best thing to be said about the R80 G/S is that it is simple. The bike was built to be rugged, not pretty, and sacrificed some of the tweakier high-performance characteristics of a street bike for raw torque. There were no pollution controls or catalytic converters to be destroyed by leaded South American gasoline; there was no chain to catch and break in some remote place, but a solid driveshaft that would last as long as the bike. The engine was cooled by the breeze rather than a fussy radiator that could puncture easily, leaving me stranded with a pool of coolant on the ground. The front wheel was
bigger than the rear one to climb over logs, curbs, and rocks. The tool roll held an oddly incomplete set of metric crescent wrenches and just a few delicate Allen keys; these were exactly the tools needed to disassemble every part of the bike, and not one thing more.

Simplicity in engine design was admirable, but it was the streamlining of life itself that I craved. Travel was a constant act of reduction, of eliminating minutiae layer by layer until a substrate of hard reality emerged, welcome and fair, from beneath so many illusions. There were no office politics on the mountain, no ringing telephones or incessant advertising pitches, no cloying waiters or whining yuppies or monthly dunning notices. It seemed obvious from the perspective of a motorcycle seat what linked Guevara’s ramblings to his revolutionary urges: the need for the extraordinary. Travel was a series of exceptional moments, a template for the heroic life Che would later seek. Stripped of the ordinary and stuffed with adventure and longing, life on the road imitated one of the heroic quests—
gestas
—so fundamental to Spanish legends and literature.

Now entering my third month on the road, I had steadily reduced my travel kit, shedding things deliberately or by accident. My camping gear grew scant. My fishing equipment had long ago gone back to America. I threw out the necktie that I had carried through three countries just in case someone invited me to dinner, and also the old pair of sneakers I that had torn up while fishing. “Our life is frittered away by detail,” Thoreau wrote, “simplify, simplify.” This imperative had slowly shaped my saddlebags; now it seeped into my bones. I lived within myself, both emotionally and practically (“You carry your house with you, like a snail,” a Chilean policemen had informed me). The stop-and-go life of a thousand glancing friendships and the permanent instant had come to seem normal. A sense of disorientation—not knowing what day it was—yielded to a sense of reorientation—not caring what month it was. My muscles had become attuned to the long days. I was lean and hardened by the road. When Lima dropped into those rearview mirrors I recovered a serene, even smug, self-confidence.

“Galloping” Head, the English engineer who had ridden across
the pampas a century and a half before, had traveled without luggage, living exposed to the elements and sleeping on the ground for months at a time. He described the improbable result of this regimen:

Among my debits, I was behind schedule, over budget, and had so far covered eight thousand miles on a trip that I had guessed would total only seventy-five hundred. In the positive column, I had already suffered through a bout of illness in Lima, and that tended to harden my stomach against further assaults.

As I climbed up from the ruin of the capital I knew I was entering a long but final stretch, turning down the length of the Andes toward Bolivia and Che’s resting place. The papers in Lima were silent about doings there; apparently they just couldn’t find his body. I knew they would, sooner or later, but I wanted it to be later. Inevitably there would be a moment of forced answers in Bolivia, an end to all these questions.

Further progress, however, depended on the motorcycle, which lay powerless by the side of the road. The engine had simply run out of oxygen at this height. I lay down on the ground and stared up at the bottom of the machine, its two “boxer” cylinders sticking out to the sides like gull wings in classic BMW fashion. There were two carburetors, one behind each cylinder of the motor. I clicked off the small retaining clip that held the carb on the left side together. The metal underside dropped free; it was a steel bowl, filled with gasoline that spilled over my hands. Now visible inside the carb were a pair of
foam blocks the size of matchbooks. These were floats, which bobbed on the pool of gasoline inside the carb. The whole system worked on gravity. As fuel dropped into the engine, the floats fell with the level in the carburetor, pulling open a tiny jet that then fed more gasoline into the chamber, raising the floats and cutting off the jets. Now, with the floats dangling free in the mountain air, gasoline shot out and sprayed over me. I pushed the float up, cutting off the spill, and then reached up with my opposite hand and twisted the petcock beneath the fuel tank to “Zu.”

Those fuel jets were the source of what Guevara called in his diary “some carburetor problem which afflicts all engines at this altitude.” At nine thousand feet there was too little oxygen in the air to burn fuel properly, and the engine began to drown in its own fuel. The three possible solutions to this problem were to increase the amount of oxygen (by descending to lower altitudes), to “advance the spark” (I had no idea what this meant), or to decrease the amount of fuel, and it was the last course that I now took. I had been carrying two replacement jets for the carbs, tiny brass bolts with finer openings than those in the bike now. Using the smallest wrench in the tool kit, I twisted the large jet out and then put a small one in. Then I held the foam floats back in place, put the metal cover on, and clipped the whole thing shut. I went over to the other side and repeated the process.

The two policemen watched this event with verbose curiosity. They saw people fiddling with carburetors all the time, but not gringo motorcyclists. They began by asking all the usual questions about the motorcycle (“a hundred and thirty kilometers an hour … eight hundred cubic centimeters … German”) and then asked if it was true there were jobs in
los Estados Unidos
. They kept telling me how intrepid I was, and the more they said it the more nervous it made me. While I cleaned my hands and put the tool roll away, they talked about how nice it would be to drive a motorcycle across America someday, just to see it, and I nodded, hating these moments. We all knew that they would spend the rest of their lives in these cold mountains. Only a few nations are allowed to dream.

I bent the petcock back to “Auf,” checked the green light, and touched the starter button. Clutch in, click down with left toe, throttle up, clutch out, left foot up, right foot up. I gave a final wave to the two cops and then fled higher, the engine once again growling in contentment.

T
he pass was at 15,400 feet. The road curled up and gently topped a rise, but there was little to be impressed about. The first and most striking sight was another mountain rising right ahead of me, far higher than this one. Some of the peaks in this region topped 20,000 feet. The landscape was lunar and volcanic, a barren plain of rocks and pockets of snow running to the south between lines of yet higher peaks that vanished into the clouds. Two and a half hours and almost three vertical miles of climbing had served only to deliver me to the floor of a new world.

This was the
altiplano
, a word that means nothing but “high plain” yet holds profound connotations in the Peruvian mind. The
altiplano
was an alien world of ancient Incas, llamas, and lost fortresses, of guerrillas and drug traffickers, of inscrutable peasants and isolated lives. The thin wedge of flat soil that opened in front of me would steadily widen as I moved south, the ground pushing back the Andes until, by the time the
altiplano
reached Bolivia, it had become a vast commons framed by distant peaks. In places it was fertile ground, and the great population of the Inca empire had lived here and been fed by the potato and other native miracle crops—corn, sweet potatoes, yams, squash, peanuts, pineapples, tomatoes, and peppers—that the Spaniards would later spread to the rest of the world.

I paused at 15,400 feet, but not long. The wind was howling and icy. A few Peruvians jumped from their cars, ran up a little hill, and placed another stone on top of a cairn marking the pass. “Apparently,” Guevara wrote on observing this custom, “Indians deposit all
their sorrows in the form of a symbolic stone in Pachamama, or Mother Earth, when they reach the top of a mountain; these gradually accumulate to form a cairn like the one we saw.” He noted that the Spanish had tried and failed to wipe out this pagan ritual. I was equally disrespectful in all faiths, and moved on without leaving anything for Pachamama.