Chasing Che (39 page)

I got off at the town and pushed my flat wheel toward the
gomería
. This is when I discovered the vomit. The mechanic let me wash my hands in his toolshed. He got to work and within seconds had destroyed my inner tube. He hadn’t noticed that the air valve was held on by a nut, and when he went to pull out the tube he yanked so hard that he ripped the tube right out, but not the valve, which stayed attached to the metal wheel.

I blew up. I threw one of those gringo fits that I despised in others, sputtering away in my best Spanish about what a complete and utter ass he was. I explained, in carefully enunciated tones, that in my country we were very careful with tires, and didn’t pull stupid stunts like ripping the valves out. I was still shouting at him about how he’d just ruined my only spare tube when he reached inside the now-empty tire, poked around with his fingers, and extracted a thin, rusted nail.

The nail that had given me four flats in twenty-four hours. The nail I had never thought to check for. He patched the hole in the old tube perfectly, reinstalled it in the tire, and then inflated it to load-bearing hardness. Since I couldn’t bring myself to apologize, I vowed to keep my mouth shut.

Long after nightfall I caught a ride on a truck filled with potatoes and peasants chewing coca. The truck loitered in the first village, and I rode on with two Bolivian policemen in an open jeep who were heading off to investigate a rumored bus crash. They dropped me high on the mountain again, and I rolled the now-firm wheel down the arroyo.
Kooky was unmolested beneath the camouflage of bushes. I slept on the stones of the wash, next to the bike. Off through the dark air you could see a few lights of the first town and then, way beyond that, at the far end of the valley, a single light marking the second.

In the morning there was no frost, only a few loose feathers leaking from the rotted sleeping bag. I made a cup of instant coffee and put the wheel back on and then drove down into the valley and through the first town and into the second. The same mechanic I had yelled at was sitting outside his shop.

He asked me what country I was from. “Canada,” I said.

T
he road alternated between dirt and gravel as it ran south. As the altitude dropped the llamas gave way to cows and the headgear of peasants in the distance switched from the pointy wool caps of the Andes to the straw cowboy hats of the
vaqueros
. It took two more days, but eventually a long valley yielded to a minor set of ridge lines, and I went up and down and in the early afternoon came around a bend and there was a gas station and the beginnings of a town of red roofs and white walls. This was Vallegrande.

It was a matter of habit now to pull into any and every gas station, regardless of how much was in my tank, and I did. The attendant came out, wiping his hands with a rag. “
Qué tal, Che?
” “How’s it going, Che?”

I asked him why he called me that. He looked surprised: “You are from Argentina, right?” Like Ernesto, I’d been exposed as an outsider the instant I arrived. After topping up, I reached for the key and my hand passed over the odometer. After a look in my notebook I did some quick math. The result was hard to believe: I’d ridden more than 9,900 miles since departing Buenos Aires four months ago. I rode up the last hill and into Vallegrande. A couple of men sitting in the plaza watched while a pair of black dogs chased me around and around. I found the hotel that all the journalists had stayed in when they were watching the excavations. It cost four dollars a night, was
clean, and had hot water and a view of the valley. I lay down on the bed and thought about staying here for the rest of my life.

I was almost the only foreigner in town—there was one resident Peace Corps volunteer—and the news of my arrival rippled through the streets. Even before I had time to wipe the dust off, the president of the local civic council came around to ask me why I was there. When I told him, he said, “Of course. El Che. We assumed that was the case.”

We took a walk. His name was Calixto, but everyone in the street called him “Professor” because he had once been a teacher. Calixto took me to his municipal office, which turned out to be a tiny school desk in the back of the general store he now ran. The room was stacked high with eggs, noodles, candy, and toilet paper. The desk was covered by a foot-high pile of papers that Calixto pushed toward me. There were newspaper clippings from as far back as 1967, files on the recent search for Che’s bones, and a few books, including
My Son El Che
by Ernesto Guevara Sr. Flipping through the stack, I came across a worn little booklet that resembled one of the ration books that Cubans carry. Inside was a neat photograph of a young man—Calixto himself—in uniform. It was his military service
libreta
, dated 1967. He’d been a private in the army at the time of Che’s campaign, but, he hastily added, he’d been stationed right here in Vallegrande, where he spent the months of the insurgency pushing paper on a desk and standing guard duty in the middle of the night. Calixto took the little booklet and gazed at the picture of himself as he had been. The paper was wrinkled and worn soft. So were his hands as they held it. A tiny transistor radio played in the background.

“The people are still living the psychosis of those times,” he said, popping open a liter of lemon soda from the store’s cooler. “They won’t talk. Somebody comes forward with a story once in a while: ‘I saw three people buried over there. It was El Che.’ But there’s nothing there, or it turns out to be somebody else. We found four like that.”

The search had been quite an affair, the biggest thing to hit Vallegrande since 1967, the last time somebody was looking for Che here. When the retired military officers came to lead the search for the body there had been forty or fifty journalists with them, and the Cuban ambassador had shown up with two coal-black bodyguards whom Calixto called, with a kind of hushed awe, “
los Burundi.
” A news crew from Globo, the Brazilian television conglomerate, had arrived in their own airplane, making an even greater impression. Most of the journalists left after a week or so, but a hard core of fifteen or twenty had stayed for two months while the Argentine forensic experts dug and dug. Calixto showed me some pictures of a party the journalists threw on January 26, a month into the search and while I was deep in Patagonia. The guest of honor was Loyola Guzmán, a Bolivian woman who had briefly joined Che’s guerrillas and survived to an old age of dancing salsa with foreign correspondents. Calixto remembered it as a fun time. “Look,” he said, pointing at the photo, “that’s the man from radio in La Paz.”

Everyone used Che for something. The journalists wanted headlines or, in my case, a mirror. The Cubans and Argentines wanted the body. In Vallegrande, the civil council had hoped, briefly and naively, that the remains would stay right in town and attract tourists like some Lourdes of the left. There was already a smattering of Che tourism. For years young people—mostly Latin Americans but also some European socialists—had been coming to town on pilgrimages, usually for the official anniversary of Che’s death, October 8.

“The young people that come here,” Calixto said, “talk about taking up arms, going into the hills. I hope it’s only talk. But there is great misery, it’s true.” He said the province was slowly stagnating. They were in the sixth year of a drought and there were no more harvests. People were fleeing for the big cities: the school system had declined from two thousand to one thousand students. I asked him what the young people should do if they wanted to Be Like Che and put an end to injustice. “Learn,” he replied. “Study. Help someone. But to go into the hills with a rifle doesn’t serve anything. What good is a rifle when the government has so many more?”

We were still flipping through the papers, and I came to a photograph, the famous shot of Che lying dead in a laundry shed behind the local hospital. The Bolivian military had put his body on display to prove to the world that the famous invader was really dead. The photograph showed Che, shirtless and disheveled, stretched out on a cement table used for scrubbing blood out of surgical gowns. His arms were thrown out to the sides, and his lifeless eyes seemed to stare at the camera. There were small cuts in his torso where the bullets had gone in. It was an obviously Christ-like image (in fact, Dr. Valer, back in Cuzco, had referred to it as “the image of Christ”).

“I was there, you know,” Calixto said, taking the photo from my fingers. Calixto had joined a line of two hundred people waiting to see the body that day. Some of the women ahead of him clipped small bits of Che’s hair. I asked if the mourning and memorializing showed that the people in the area had genuinely supported Che.

Calixto shook his head. “No,” he said. “They didn’t know who El Che was.” Many local families had actually informed on the guerrillas. It was only curiosity that brought them to see the body, he explained. Like the tin miners, they’d never known or loved their would-be savior until he was dead.

Che proved more influential in his afterlife. “The people up in La Higuera, when they have an illness now, they light a candle to El Che and say it cures them, like a miracle. Students here in Vallegrande do it when they have an exam.” We walked down the hill to the airfield. We passed a small parking lot, and on the gate was a faded red graffito:
VIVO COMO NO TE QUERÍAN GUEVARA
. I couldn’t understand the phrase and asked Calixto what it meant. “I don’t know,” he replied, stumped. The wording was ungrammatical in Spanish, and meant, loosely, “Guevara, you are more alive now than ever.” Calixto said it must have been painted by a foreigner.

He was a brooding man, and as we passed beyond the last buildings and saw first the windsock and then the grass landing strip his mood grew even heavier. It was a huge field, far larger than I had ever understood from reading the news reports. There was a hangar built like a Quonset hut, and inside it was a small plane owned by a family
of American Pentecostal missionaries. They didn’t live here, but occasionally flew in to witness for Christ. On the far side of the field was a high wall containing the town cemetery, but in most directions the field simply ran under a split rail fence and kept going, out into the valley floor. They always said that Che had been buried “under the airfield” at Vallegrande, but that meant nothing. The airfield was just a swath of valley floor. He could be anywhere.

“Where in all this are you going to find El Che?” Calixto asked.

I
n the morning I went to see the Che museum. Calixto took me to the plaza, where we marched up the front steps of the municipal building, climbed up the second floor, and went into the main room that overlooked the plaza. There was a desk, and Calixto opened it and took out a Plexiglas case about the size of a typewriter. Inside it was a pair of old leather sandals.

That was the Che museum. “We are hoping to get some more things to add to this, but right now this is all we have,” he said. These were the sandals worn into the grave by one of the four guerrillas whose bodies had been recovered so far. It was the footwear of someone who served under Che. A piece of the true cross.

Out on the steps of the municipal building a Bolivian man in a blazer and jeans did a double take as he passed me, and Calixto stopped and introduced us. He was the town’s radio reporter, responsible for broadcasting a daily show on the provincial station. The station was headquartered just across the plaza, and he dashed off and minutes later returned with a microphone and a cassette deck. He put on a pair of headphones and stuck the microphone in my face.

“Who are you and what is the purpose of your trip?” he asked once the tape was rolling. I rambled on for a while about how I was heading up to La Higuera tomorrow to see the place where Che Guevara died, how I was studying the life of the young Ernesto Guevara and what people thought of Che now. Since the radio host didn’t stop
me, I kept talking. I had been spending a lot of time alone and apparently needed to get a few things out. In the end I talked continuously for half an hour about where I’d been, what people had told me about Che, how I thought he had started out great but gone wrong, terribly wrong, and how everything was lousy in Cuba and, in the end, violence got you nowhere. The revolution always ate its children, and so on. I explained that the
foco
guerrilla strategy was a dim-witted notion, a foolish attempt to refight the battles of the Cuban war in a radically different political context. At the end I said that it was understandable that people admired Che because nobody else seemed to give a damn about the poor. At last he snapped off the tape recorder.

An hour and a half later, I sat down to lunch in the town’s only restaurant. There was an article in an old newspaper about the Zapatista guerrillas in Mexico. They’d held a meeting with the French author Régis Debray, one of Che’s old advisers. Debray had once written books about the inevitable triumph of Marxist guerrillas around the world; now he advised the Mexicans that their strategy of propaganda stunts and Internet dispatches was “more realistic” than Che’s plan of recruiting a guerrilla army from Bolivian peasants.

All this time, as I read, the radio in the restaurant was on. I was into my soup when I head a familiar voice: “
… investigación del joven Ernesto Guevara, antes de que el fue conocido como ‘Che’ … que opinión tiene la gente … empezó bien pero al final … opresión en Cuba … cada revolución come sus hijos … un plan idiótica.
”

It was me and I sounded like a moron. My entire speech on the steps of the municipal building—visible out the door of the restaurant—was on the radio, run not in the edited snippets I had expected but stem to stern, thirty minutes long. I slowly spooned through my soup and then waited for my fried steak. You could hear only two things: me blabbing on the radio in ungrammatical Spanish and the forks and knives of a half dozen customers as they ate. They listened and watched me surreptitiously. It was the longest meal I have ever eaten.