Chasing Che (32 page)

They had tried this all day yesterday and advanced about ten feet. They went at it for a few more hours while I took a nap and then adjusted my monoshock under the tutelage of every truck driver in the camp, none of whom had ever seen an adjustable shock absorber before. The more everyone prattled—How fast? That’s not fast! Put the wrench on the other way!—the angrier I got, and the angrier I got the more they seemed to close in around me, until I literally did not have enough room to work. I threw a fit, which convinced them all that I was crazy and increased the respect in their voices.

To keep them away I climbed up on a boulder with Ernesto’s diary and began reading. I had only intended to escape the drivers, but after a moment I found a passage on this section of Guevara’s itinerary. As he and Granado hitched up this road they too found it blocked:

According to the sergeant’s neat map, Anco was the very next village up the road. My head reeled for a moment with a bad case of timeslip, the grinding of the Caterpillar merging into the dynamiting that Ernesto described. Yet the coincidence that both of us would be stopped forty-four years apart on the same spot by the same problem was really no coincidence. The road was
always
falling apart here, right in the same narrow valley where the road could do nothing but clamber up the mountain faces. Anco had hosted this scene then, now, and every year in between. For travelers as for guerrillas, topography was destiny.

Around ten o’clock the machine operator finally changed his tactic and, instead of trying to fill a bottomless pit with rocks, began carving a new road out of the rock face above the cut. This was dangerous work, since debris tended to tumble down onto the tractor, but it was effective in the soft rock, and after half an hour he had almost finished the repair. The waiting drivers now reached preorgasmic heights of excitement. The whole time, as the Cat tottered on the precipice, flung itself back and forth, and churned up great billows of white powder, its every movement was shadowed by a cloud of thirty men who walked behind and alongside the thrashing, spinning treads of the machine. Every few seconds these men were on the point of being run over; they yelped and ran back, or dove to the side, or staggered about choking on dust. Yet each time they would close in again like a batch of buzzing insects. I sat there praying that the Cat would finally flatten one of them, leaving a pulpy smear as a lesson to the rest, or that the entire road would give way,
sending the whole flock of bastards spinning down into the gorge, but that wouldn’t be fair to the Cat driver and it didn’t happen.

With each shove the Cat scraped its way toward the far side of the gap, and at a few minutes before 11:00 A.M. a path the width of a motorcycle was open. There was still a Caterpillar tractor grinding back and forth in front of it, but every truck driver in the valley began shouting with a kind of fever. They wanted me to floor it up the slope, swerve around the tractor, dodge its consuming blade, and fly over the narrow, loose track. I declined to slake their boredom this way, raising a kind of murderous resentment in their eyes. All the gringos on TV drove the way a Peruvian wanted to; I had to be some sort of coward to not fly across on my immense motorcycle. They shook their heads in disgust.

Finally, at precisely 11:01, the Cat backed up, the driver turned and waved at me, and I was given the dubious honor of proofing the repair. A chorus of truck horns erupted behind me. The road was only sixty seconds old, but as far as the drivers were concerned that was fifty-nine seconds too many.

“
Vaya, gringo!
” several voices yelled, and I went over.

A
yacucho sat in a bowl surrounded by round hills, at the epicenter of the Peruvian tragedy. It was a startlingly beautiful city filled with stone churches from the earliest days of the Conquest, a syncretic gem that married high Catholicity with the final vibrant traces of Andean greatness. In the 1980s it was a charnel house, repeatedly seized and sacked by the Shining Path and the Peruvian army in exchanges of dynamite and lead. Ayacucho was where the Shining Path had come closest to achieving the dream of cell block B-4. Although there were remote villages that had been under Shining Path control for long blocks of time, Ayacucho was the heart of their rebellion for the simple reason that their leader, President Gonzalo, got his start here.

His real name was Abimael Guzmán, and he had come to Ayacucho in 1962 to teach Kantian philosophy at a new university set up to train rural people. The defining moment in his life was a long study trip to China in the 1960s while Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution was in full swing. He was enraptured by this chaotic “revolution within the revolution” and returned to Peru in slow percolation. After years of preparation, his war began in 1980, on election day, here in Ayacucho Department. A group of peasant cadres descended on a rural town called Chuschi, burned the ballot box, gave an incomprehensible speech, and went away. The attack was noted in passing in Lima newspapers as another strange occurrence in the distant
mountains. The next day they attacked in the city of Ayacucho itself; a month after that they launched four simultaneous attacks in the city.

Drawing on a mix of Marxist university students and desperate, disoriented peasants, Guzmán built a secretive guerrilla movement that spread with each year of the 1980s. Ayacucho Department as a whole was the Shining Path’s main base, while the city itself was under only tenuous military control well into the 1990s. Twice the guerrillas had seized the town square and hoisted their red flag before being pried out again by the army’s superior firepower. There was no clear way to deduce where the loyalty of the Ayacuchans really lay. Almost the entire population of Ayacucho had once turned out for the funeral of a top guerrilla, and many young Ayacucho men enlisted in the guerrilla ranks. Yet the guerrillas often forced such gestures of loyalty by assassinating their opponents and blowing up the houses or stores of businessmen who resisted. As usual, the ordinary people were forced by both sides to choose sides, and were thus both complicit and innocent by the mutually exclusive definitions of the guerrillas and the military. The only certainty was that the country bled and Ayacucho was its open wound. At night the guerrillas would light bonfires on the hills above the city, the flames tracing the shape of the hammer and sickle for all to see.

I took a cheap room in the late afternoon and parked the motorbike in the lobby where other guests could stare at it to their hearts’ content. A shower, barely warmed by an electric coil wired to the spigot, awoke me to civilization just as it began to grow dark outside. Wandering into the central plaza, I sat among hordes of food vendors operating tiny gas burners and dishing peppery stews. I drank the Ayacucho special, a cup of milky coffee laced with Peruvian brandy, and bought the local paper. I opened it to find a large picture of Che Guevara laughing. The headline shocked me: Benigno had become a worm.

“Benigno” was the code name of Daniel Alarcón, one of Che’s best soldiers. He’d fought in the Cuban revolution, then followed Che on a failed military mission to Africa, and in 1966 he’d been a
crucial participant in the Bolivian guerrilla war. Che and most of his men had died fighting there, but Benigno and just two others had survived, fighting their way through the mountains of Bolivia, escaping repeated encirclements, and finally walking across the Andes into Chile. As the only survivors of the doomed expedition, the men were welcomed in Havana as heroes, and all three survivors were promoted to positions of high visibility in the revolution. Benigno had taken over the running of the school for international guerrillas that Che himself had founded. Later he headed Fidel Castro’s personal security team. He was a colonel in the Cuban army.

Or had been. Thirty years after following Che to Bolivia, Benigno, comrade in arms to the patron saint of the revolution, had finally had enough. He now broke with the Cuban regime in the most public and embarrassing way: “Today,” he announced at a press conference in Paris, “I have taken the decision of exile to make patently clear my position as a political refugee.” He lashed out at the Cuban regime and said that if Che were still alive “he would be indignant to see how Fidel Castro has converted his image into a flag to make the people work more every day to change nothing.” He added for good measure that Che “would never have accepted or allowed a dictatorship like that under which the people now live.”

This symbol of what Cubans called “the heroic years” was now a traitor to the revolution—a
gusano
, or worm, as Castro called those who defected. The list of worms was long: most of the original leadership of the revolution had either gone into exile or served long prison terms within Cuba. The revolution has steadily eaten its children; Benigno was only the latest, and the Cuban government paid no attention to the defection. Right next to the article on Benigno was another article that reprinted some Cuban declarations on “reordering” the economy, “intensifying the struggle,” and defending socialism “tooth and nail” under the leadership of the man they just called Fidel.

Ayacucho had its own life to worry about, and Cuban politics seemed far away. It was Holy Week, the highlight of the year in a city of churches and religious pilgrims. The vendors had ringed the plaza
with their little tables, and pilgrims from all over Peru and as far as Brazil and Ecuador were gathering in, eating and laughing, expectant. They were waiting for the highlight of the week, a traditional event called the rug parade. The rugs
—alfombras
—were not woven but poured, their colors and patterns trickled directly onto the pavement of the plaza and the nearer side streets. The artisans were mostly young men, but each
alfombra
was sponsored by some piece of the civic spectrum—a youth club drew a Peruvian banner with red and white sawdust, filigreed with a white dove holding green laurel branches. Businesses sponsored the
alfombras
in front of their doors; the middle-class families in the houses closest to the plaza produced traditional family designs. As darkness settled in the creators were hustling back and forth, swapping colors with their neighbors, putting finishing touches on the elaborate drawings before the parade started. Now the entire old stone plaza was redrawn in vivid colors and texture, like an old woman with a careful makeup job. A few thousand people milled about, a delegation of priests and officials waited at the cathedral, and a group of soldiers in oversized hats tuned their brass instruments. The paraders would carry an image of Jesus up through the city, circle the plaza, and then receive a blessing by the church. The vendors were giggling at how much business they were doing; the pilgrims laughed with joy at their own luck in being present for one of the most famous religious processions in the Americas; the boys of the town darted around their artworks, proud perfectionists.

There was a sudden, crisp tearing sound in the air—an explosion—and everyone in the plaza ducked. Their response was instinctive, instant, and experienced. One moment they were standing about flirting, or trickling sawdust, or pondering the menus of the little food carts planted around the rim of things. An unendurably long millisecond later they were hunched, feet flat on the ground, ready to break for cover.

The long slow clap of thunder rolled down from the mountain, and everywhere people broke into relieved sighs. It was not a bomb, just the mountain gods who had always rattled Ayacucho. In a
breath, the city discarded the fear. I had been too ignorant to duck and cover, which promoted me to the ranks of the courageous; I saw a band of teenage boys mercilessly teasing one of their number who had dropped his bag of sawdust out of fright.

We were so busy pretending that nothing had happened that for a moment all forgot that something had happened. The first raindrops fell after two minutes. This was a mountain storm, pouring over the nearest peak with undiminished force and thoughtless ease. In seconds, the rain became a downpour accompanied by the rattle of thunder bombs and the flash of lighting fire. Fat, heavy rain plummeted down on the city. In two more minutes the plaza was empty of people, who rushed to the colonnaded cover of the surrounding promenade. Thousands packed into the too-small galleries, where they jostled and squirmed backward, trying to escape the flagrant swirls of wind and rain.

In another two minutes—just at the point that people had gotten over the excitement of the storm—the
alfombras
began to wash away. First the water in the gutters turned green and red. Rivulets cut their way through the designs. Gradually the sawdust began to float away, so that each rug was bleached of its colors, then was cut through with cracks, then lost its edges. The crowd was quiet, watching this. The rain did not stop, nor lighten. After half an hour the rugs were in ruins. After an hour there was no trace of them.

Following the example of wet skeptics everywhere, I took shelter in the cathedral. I listened to the mass, hoping to glean some meaning in the clear words, but eventually my attention wandered to the physical structure of the church, upward to the realm of arches and flying buttresses. The cathedral was grand without being great, a modest size but filled with ornate filigree. The nave was almost doused in gold, and more gold gleamed from high points on the supporting pillars, the ceiling, and the crypts lining each side of the chamber. The church literally glowed with candlelit gold, and the parishioners sat with expressions of calm relief. At least there was one place in the wilderness that not only promised the richness of eternal life but
actually showed it. There was a gap here I could not close. I had not found religion, and little suspected that it was about to find me. I rose and went back to the door to look outward.