Chasing Che (10 page)

“This is the airplane that brought you here,” he said. I turned and saw he was pointing at one of the last things I packed, the book of outdated hotel listings and dubious restaurant recommendations that was supposed to be guiding me across South America. It lay open to the very first page, an advertisement for SAETA, the Ecuadorean airline. Like all airline ads it showed a clean jet rising up in a blue sky. I told David that I had come on a different airplane.

“From where?” he said. I turned to the map of Argentina in the guidebook and showed him the Valdés Peninsula and how it lay far to the south of Buenos Aires.

“Is Buenos Aires in your country?”

This was serious. I unpacked my big map of South America and explained that Buenos Aires was in his country, while mine lay still farther to the north. He pointed to the north of Argentina: “Here?” Farther north, I replied. He looked slightly defeated by the news that there was more than one airplane, but I gave him a set of batteries for his transistor radio, which had died months ago. Now, like his father, he could have a one-way conversation with the world. I said good-bye to Florio, who looked relieved to see me go and asked that I send David a book, which I did.

Driving out the peninsula, the wind knocked me over twice more, sending me into knee-scraping mounds of pebbles. When the bike blew over the second time the windshield cracked. Gasoline leaked from the carburetors again; I watched the liquid evaporate from the stones in horror, quickly righting the bike each time but losing several pints that I could not afford to lose. Yesterday’s trip to the north shore suddenly seemed a foolish waste of fuel. I hit the reserve tank with an hour still to go. Somehow I made it to the steep ridge of hills at the neck of the peninsula, but the motor began to cough and hesitate on the way up the last hill. I threw the petcock from
Res
. back to
Auf
and got one last burst of power that pushed me up to the crest at a wobbly five miles an hour. It was two paved miles from there to the gas station, but all downhill, and I eventually coasted into the little settlement of Puerto Pirámides like some pathetic bicyclist. I mailed a postcard to my girlfriend and bought a vanilla milk shake and a full tank of gas, and then sat on a chair on the beach drinking the milk shake, watching the tide surge right past the No Parking signs, up and over the legs of the chair, and while I sipped my milk shake the water ran forth and back beneath me, chilling the aluminum. I said over and over to no one in particular that this was a very fine town indeed. Six days, and already I was talking to myself.

S
everal weeks evaporated in a selfish blaze. I rode west, up the Chubut Valley, heading toward the Andes and circling slowly north toward San Martín. The valley was a green ribbon in a red world. The wind blew so strongly that I began to read the landscape of low mesas for its aerodynamic qualities. Wherever a break appeared to the south—a wide arroyo or an expanse of unvegetated sandy stone between hills—the wind would be waiting in ambush. I learned to hike out like a sailor in a small boat, shifting my weight almost off the left side of the bike and stretching that knee wide to give me some balance and control. I managed to stay upright through several days of travel up the valley, but once, when I dismounted to take a photograph,
a gust carried the bike right off its kickstand, snapping the right mirror and cracking the windscreen again. I put some duct tape on the Plexiglas fault lines and had the mirror welded back on in a truck stop.

The towns here were settled in the last century by wandering Welshmen, a breed celebrated in Bruce Chatwin’s legendary
In Patagonia
. The Welsh had come to this land to escape the English imperium then obliterating their homeland, and Chatwin’s 1979 book had painted a melancholic portrait of a lost colony, a dying experiment in national survival. South America had been home to many such experiments: defeated Confederate soldiers built a slavers’ colony in the Brazilian interior; and the flatlands of Paraguay had been settled by blue-eyed Mennonites fleeing modernity. Chatwin’s book had the odd effect of fetishizing exactly what the Welsh had been fleeing: their Englishness. The valley now attracted tourists who studied the red-brick houses, walked through the small-gauge railroad tunnel the colonists had dug, and visited an excellent little museum full of agricultural implements from the Industrial Revolution. These were all emblems of European culture, and it was their situation in this distant land that created such an appealing contrast.

I wasn’t sure what there was to mourn. The Welsh had come, and built, and never disappeared. Their language had mostly died out, but the original colonists had always been eager to find their place in this new world. They had studied Spanish and posed for photographs clutching the blue-and-white banner of their new homeland, proudly Argentine. They themselves had not died out but merely changed, and this was a triumph, not a failure. Chatwin’s book had infuriated some of the remaining Patagonian Welsh, and even two decades later the
Buenos Aires Herald
, the English-language paper in the capital, carried occasional acrimonious letters accusing the author of condescension. In Gaiman, I ate cake in a red-brick teahouse run by a white-haired matron who inquired hopefully if I was myself Welsh. We spoke in Spanish, naturally.

At the head of the Chubut Valley the Andes appeared, looming sharply in the distance. The green suddenly spread out, filling fields
to the horizon. I followed the smell of rain up into those mountains and began to dissolve myself in their waters for days at a time, fishing pole in hand. I slept on the ground, alone in valleys and forests or sometimes in small campgrounds where kids from Buenos Aires tugged guitars at night and hiked by day. The waters absorbed whatever was put into them, an alchemy that transformed a thousand wants and a million particulars into one constant. For days and then weeks, I passed ten or twelve hours a day immersed to my waist in water that was cold and clear like iced gin. It flew through fuming channels, it swirled over deep bubbled pools, it gathered in slow wide draws running green with weeds, it curved left and right, and if you climbed up a stream, slowly shuffling over the rocks to keep your footing in a pair of cheap sneakers, you would move up from pool to pool during the course of a day, stopping sometimes to drink straight from the waters or to pull one lonely sandwich from the sling over your shoulder, and eventually when you looked up from reading the stream you would see that your eyes had climbed level with some vast sheet of a lake, as though you were now a fish yourself, rudely waking to the dry world.

Rivers cut through the dust, and I simply disappeared. I remember nothing of three days spent on one river except that once, as I stood immersed in a deep bend, hidden by the bank, a pair of silent gauchos cantered by herding a dozen unbridled chestnuts and leaving a fine golden dust suspended in the sunset long after they passed without noticing me. When I slept by a ford, with my head against a tree, I was awoken twice in the night by wet horses tromping blithely on each side of my prone form, their hooves scattering dust in my face as water rained from their bellies. There was that afternoon when I taught a dozen lonely Korean teenagers—youth missionaries carrying the word of Christ through Patagonia—how to fish. But mostly there were hours and days of silence, punctuated by a passing gaucho tipping his hat or a nun filling a water truck or a violent explosion of small life. A cloud of ducks settling into a run around me; a hooked rainbow trout yanking and leaping angrily; twenty thousand nymphs clambering up through the water column one noon and floating past or lodging on my legs, struggling to shake off
their own skins. I cupped one of these struggling shape-shifters from the passing river while the trout slapped at the surface around me, feasting without mercy on the helpless. The black nymphal shuck split open, and a tan caddis fly emerged, fluttering unsuccessfully at first as its wings dried, but eventually achieving its first flight and ascending from the pool in my palms toward a brief residence in the sky.

I often returned long distances through the woods at ten or eleven at night, trying to follow the Southern Cross toward my camp and wade fast rivers in darkness. These were the moments of hard alertness within my calm joy; to mistake one crossing in the moonlight for another, to pick the wrong footing in the boiling, chest-deep currents, to be swept alone from a deep rapid in the dark, all these were possible a dozen times each night. But the waters did not betray me.

Inevitably, I closed on San Martín. In a place without calendars or clocks, I sensed that February had arrived, and with it came a cold rain that finally washed me out of the hills and down a steep road that traced its way between a mountainside and the shore of a tremendous lake, Lago Lacar. I paused in the rain long enough to survey the view from a high overlook. Deep blue and cold, five hundred yards wide and twenty miles long, the lake had the same effect on Guevara that the mountains were having on me. Camping on its edge, he and Granado were captured by the dreamy beauty of the place:

Looking down on the lake, I could almost see him half a century later, bent with age, a respectable citizen retired from his medical practice at the lakeside, a car parked in the driveway instead of the dreamed-of autogiro, but otherwise a model of contentment.

Maybe he’d be out there now, sitting in a rowboat, waiting patiently in the rain in the middle of the lake. If you were a dreamer, it was easy to believe that eventually something would bite.

E
ven in 1952 San Martín de Los Andes had been a tourist destination, and when I finally rolled out of the hills with my fingers frozen to the handlebars I found a town without a trace of indigenous color or life, only windsurfing shops and clouds of soaked backpackers lingering under the eaves of the main street. San Martín breathed in the mobile pesos of those Argentines who could afford to sit by a lake and stare at the mountains. Like every resort town, it was a transient place, with a summer population that swelled with busboys and chambermaids and from which the life ebbed each fall in slow disappointment.

In a coffee shop I thawed my fingers around a
cortado
and borrowed a phone book to search for a name that did not exist. In their diaries, both Guevara and Granado had mentioned a notable night spent at the
estancia
, or ranch, of a local family. I hoped to find the family, but neither diarist had noted where they lived except to say it was a short distance outside the town. The chance of finding them was reduced by the fact that the two G’s had each spelled the family
name differently. Granado’s diary mentioned them as the “Von Put Camers” while Guevara, in a letter to his mother, had spelled it “Von Putnamer.”

Neither name was listed in San Martín, and I patiently worked my way through the subdirectories for the surrounding rural communities without luck. I even checked combinations of the name (Putnamer, Put Camer, Von Put Namer, Camer, Vonputnamer, Von Camer Put) but it was a dry hole. San Martín was a land of transients. Time, no doubt, would have wiped away much of the trail left by the motorcyclists. I handed the phone book back to my waiter with a sour look.

“You didn’t find what you were looking for?” he said with evident sympathy.

To be polite, I explained that I was searching for an old German family from the region, the Putnamers or Putcamers or Von something-or-others. It had all been long ago.

He closed his eyes tightly, like he was on a game show. “25260, I think. Yes, 25260.”

I went over to the house phone, picked it up, and dialed. Mr. Oscar Von Puttkamer answered on the first ring. Caught unprepared, I had no reasonable explanation for my call. I didn’t know how to spring on him the odd bit of news that a young man his family had briefly entertained in their home forty-four years before had turned out to be of some great importance to Latin American history. Rather than mention Che Guevara’s name, I simply mumbled a not-untrue explanation that I was a North American journalist, researching the history of the region.

“Be here in five minutes,” the voice said. “I will tell you everything you want to know about it.”

His house was four blocks away. I took down the directions.

I was still replaying the conversation in my head—what did he mean that he would tell me about “it”?—when I reached the motorcycle, plugged in the key, and twisted it clockwise. The green neutral light gave off a faint glow—very faint.

As soon as I had unloaded the bike in Buenos Aires, I had
noticed that the battery was weak. I put this down to carelessness by the longshoremen, who had probably left the ignition on during the day or two that the bike had waited in a warehouse. On my journey down the Argentine coast it had run well enough, but once I turned inland the green light had begun to fade. Each morning the bike was harder and harder to start. During three weeks of inland travel, I’d burned up battery juice by driving with the headlight late into the night. Sometimes, on the cold mornings when I had set off to fish some high mountain stream, even heaving on the kick starter was barely sufficient to start the bike.