Chasing Che (3 page)

Che became himself through a deliberate process of shedding his names, his past, his class, his family, and his country. Born on June 14, 1928, in Rosario, a major city on the swampy lowlands of the Parana delta, he developed asthma as a small child. Following medical advice, his family removed itself to the higher, drier ground of Córdoba. His mother, Celia, was an extraordinary figure with wealth, beauty, and brains. A political radical, she was the first woman in Argentina to open her own bank account. She filled her house with books and an endless supply of intellectuals, Spanish Civil War veterans, poor artists, rich relatives, and street children, an environment
guaranteed to stimulate a child and likely to teach him contrariness. The senior Ernesto Guevara was a genteel and lovable bum, a civil engineer who never got a business off the ground and wasted his wife’s inheritance on bad investments and keeping up appearances. As their prospects dimmed, the Guevaras moved through a series of humbler and humbler houses, eventually ending up on the edge of Alta Gracia, an airy town outside Córdoba filled with German sailors who had stayed in South America after the battleship
Graf Spee
was destroyed outside Montevideo during World War II. In this confusing crossroads of cosmopolitan provincialism, the young Ernestito learned to battle everything: his asthma, his parents, his neighbors, the ideas of his class. He grew up an impoverished aristocrat, moving from dining room debates over fascism to gang warfare among bands of poor children who lived directly across the street. He was fond of shooting at birds with a tiny rifle his father gave him, and he attacked his relentless, suffocating asthma by denying it existed: he took up rugby and taught himself to play through the pain and regular collapses.

He was restless and believed in doing everything himself. When his mother contracted cancer, the thirteen-year-old Ernesto decided to invent a cure, and he set up a basement laboratory where he subjected rodents to unspeakable “treatments” like injections of petroleum-based solutions. Unlike the guinea pigs, his mother survived, but Ernesto retained his interest in medicine and enrolled in the University of Buenos Aires medical school at the age of eighteen. His initial vocation was asthma research, a case of “physician heal thyself.”

During the summer of 1951, Guevara bought a tiny motor to attach to his bicycle and set off across northern Argentina. This month-long expedition by moped had been something of a lark, an adventure conducted entirely within the orbit of his own world, but it laid a template that I recognized. I’d begun my own wanderings with a few short journeys around New England on my father’s tiny Honda Supersport, rides that at the time were meant only as vacations but that began a process I could no longer control. I had learned to travel, to trust in the road and those along it; this was the dangerous
lesson that Guevara took away from his moped journey. From now on he would be a traveler, his relentless curiosity given a vehicle (two-wheeled or otherwise) and a course—outward but, on a spherical planet, always toward home.

By late 1951 this urge had become irresistible. In December of that year Guevara laid plans for a motorcycle trip across the hemisphere; it was a trip from which he would never come home, even when he returned. One journey leads necessarily to another, and the moped of 1951 gave way inevitably to the motorcycle of 1952. On this trip he would go deep into Patagonia and as far north as Miami, from the swamps of the Amazon to the peaks of the Andes. Guevara would return to Argentina after eight months, a changed man—a man, as he himself put it, “in transition to some other conception of life.” He was a traveler now; the act of discovery is not merely the basis of travel but is also the quintessential revolutionary act. Every long journey overturns the established order of one’s own life, and all revolutionaries must begin by transforming themselves.

Movement became the continuum of his much-examined experience: “Yes, you’ll always be a foreigner,” his mother would write him years later; “that seems to be your permanent fate.” After finishing medical school in 1954 he set off again, first for Bolivia, where he wanted to see a “peasant revolution” that he had heard about. Learning of a similar upheaval in Guatemala, he crossed Peru and transited Ecuador to reach it. He was now a sympathizer of leftist movements but still a visitor, and when that Guatemalan government fell in a 1954 coup as Guevara watched, he acquired a fixed target for his enmity: it was the CIA that had sponsored the coup, and it was the United States that he blamed for the repression he saw. Chased out of Guatemala by events, he worked in Mexico as an itinerant street photographer until he made the acquaintance of a shabby band of Cuban troublemakers and joined—as the expedition’s doctor—their foolhardy attempt to invade Cuba. Within three years he was a legendary battlefield commander and the head of Fidel Castro’s Second Column. After their triumph in 1959 he took on the role of the
official internationalist of the Cuban revolution, dashing about the globe on diplomatic missions. Even so, he grew restless with Cuba, renounced his duties, and left again in 1965 for a failed military expedition to the Congo. Committed by his own public declarations to wandering the earth until death, he made his final trip, to Bolivia, in 1966. On the eve of his departure he wrote his parents that he once again felt “the ribs of Rocinante” between his heels. Rocinante was, as everyone in Latin America knew, the horse that bore Don Quixote on his endless travels, and the line could as well have described the motorcycle between his heels in 1952 as his fatal misadventures in Bolivia fifteen years later.

On October 9, 1967, Guevara died in a schoolroom where the Andes peter out into the Argentine plains of his birth, close enough to his home to smell familiar flowers on the last breeze of his life.

The motorcycle journey of 1952 was but one episode, yet it was here, on this route, that young Ernesto had stripped away the life he had been given to expose the life he sought. His later travels would shape his character and have a more direct bearing on his ideology, but it was this first journey that interested me, simply because it was the first. This was the trip where Ernesto became Che, both figuratively and literally. He would inherit the nickname Che for the first time; he would conceive of himself as a revolutionary for the first time; he would leave behind one life and begin another.

A
lmost forty-four years later, New Year’s Day came and a blizzard of paper fell from the sky. The streets were empty of people, and I shuffled through long strips of computer printouts and reams of records that clutched at my ankles, as though I were a solitary ticker-tape parade. It is an Argentine custom on January 1 to toss paperwork from the previous year out the window, thus discarding the past with the evidence.

The first days of January crept by in a sweaty haze of this confused
paperwork and futile wandering. The motorcycle was in one warehouse or another. It hadn’t been unloaded yet, or it was waiting dockside, or it was locked up in a container. I stood in a crowd of couriers at the customs broker’s office in a chrome skyscraper high over the port. While someone typed up paperwork that would prove useless, I peered over the vast estuary of the Río de la Plata, the misnamed Silver River that ran, brown and broad, over the horizon to Uruguay. The customs broker finally gave me a note insulting the customs inspector, who replied an hour later with a note blaming the customs broker. The heat wave was relentless, my repetitive thrashings at chess were depressing, and I began to bloat from eating éclairs. The
porteños
, as natives of B.A. are known, were arrogant and amused by my poor dress. I still hadn’t recovered my luggage and was stumbling around town in the same T-shirt every day.

In the early blackness of each morning, long before first light, I would lie awake in the glass house high above the avenues, listening to the stirring of the city as it came awake. Every dawn it was the same: in darkness, the small squealing of unoiled garage doors opening eleven stories below, and then the early express buses filling the shadowy gray light with the hissing of their air brakes, and then, with the blue dawn, the rattletrap Fiat taxis shooting through the intersection tooting their horns. In time a cool half-light would fill the glass shed from all directions, and the traffic would build, the air now an orchestra of tinny, high-pitched dirt bikes and knocking diesel trucks and the unsteady idle of old cars caught in stop-and-go traffic.

Eventually, as I lay immobilized with dread, Little Girl would come onto the balcony, light a cigarette, and pluck the cover from Federico’s cage.

“
Cómo te va
?” he always asked. Roughly: “How’s it going?”

“It isn’t going at all, Fed,” I’d tell him.

I always said it in English, so he wouldn’t understand.

I
once took a bus in Buenos Aires that zigged and zagged out of the city. We turned constantly, stopped incessantly, and drove slowly. It was a local run heading out of the core at breakfast time, and since we were going the wrong way the bus wasn’t half full. It took a long time.

My companion was a young Argentine grad student named Mercedes Doretti, an attractive but grim woman who seemed to be fighting a perpetual battle to control her frustration. Given her job—poking at dead people all day—this was understandable, and we didn’t talk much on the way. We debarked at an anonymous intersection in a suburban neighborhood of low cement apartment buildings that had seen better days. I followed Doretti a block and then we came to a long, high wall and crossed through a raised, ornate gate just wide enough to admit the only kind of car that ever entered. Inside the wall was the Avellaneda Municipal Cemetery, and we walked through. It was huge, but without the glamour of Recoletta, the famous Buenos Aires cemetery where the upper classes buried their dead in elaborate, fantastical crypts that imitated Egyptian pyramids and Roman temples and Greek oracles, as if the dead were now simply confined to smaller versions of the lives they had just left. Here in the prosaic suburbs the dead were mostly underground, but a few sepulchers and crypts with hints of ornate Latin style dotted the more desirable pieces of real estate, like the side groves or the corners where two footpaths met. Location location, even here.

We came at last to the far side of the cemetery, a back corner ruled off by its own wall. It was a rectangle a few hundred feet per side, a small space in which three hundred and forty-three people had been murdered.

A grave diggers’ shed and a storage building had been confiscated and used, first by the killers, now by their pursuers. The killers had been Argentine police and military men, usually in civilian clothes. They saw themselves as clinicians purifying the country of contaminating elements. The protagonists called their crusade
el proceso
, a neatly blank euphemism for the killing that became known
to the rest of the world as “the Dirty War.” The slaughter began in 1976 when a military junta overthrew the government. The prisoners were brought here in Ford Falcons and Renaults. A few of them were Marxist guerrillas, but most were just left-wing students, union activists, members of fragmented Trotskyite/Catholic political organizations, or naive kids who had played at the romantic game of clandestine life, running food to a safe house or passing messages for someone the military didn’t like. A few of the prisoners brought here were academics or journalists or human rights advocates, but the disappearance of those types was too noticeable. The poor and forgotten bore the brunt of Argentina’s psychotic urge to purge itself, to burn out the weakness and cowardice it saw when it looked in the mirror.

There is still no telling how many died in the Dirty War. For one thing, the notion of a particular, distinct period of killing is inaccurate—even before the coup, the police and military were locked in a war with “subversives,” and police torture had been present for decades in Argentine life. But the killing began in earnest in 1976 and petered out with that decade. In that time, it was usually said, some ten thousand Argentines had “been disappeared.”

“This figure is, of course, too low,” Doretti noted caustically. To be counted in that tally, there had to be either an identified body or a credible record that someone had been seized by the military or federal police. Many prisoners had passed through the bureaucracy of the Naval Mechanics School, a torture center operated by the Argentine navy in Buenos Aires. Between four thousand and forty-five hundred suspects were brought into the school, and the great majority were tortured in one way or another, often for months, before being killed. Thousands of bodies had been tossed from airplanes into the Río de la Plata, the great sheet of water that gave Argentines their identity—they called themselves
Ríoplatense
, or “of the silver river”—and that now absorbed their dead forever. Other bodies were taken far out into the pampas for disposal. There were poor families who had no paperwork even to prove that their sons had ever existed—driver’s
licenses and school records being less common in the poorest parts of the major cities, exactly where the death squads were most active.