Chasing Che (12 page)

“
Grande en Japón
,” I announced.

“Quick, tell me what the words say,” he ordered, and began waving his hands to encourage me. “SING!”

I had no choice—I was immobile without his help—so I sang along as fast as I could, trying to follow the tune while conducting instantaneous translation, neither of which I did very well.

The song faded out, and Manolo’s animation died with it. His disappointment was palpable: why did such great songs have to end!

“I’ve been to Japan,” he said after a moment. He’d never been out of Rio Negro Province before or since, he explained, but one time he had traveled with the provincial Kung Fu team all the way to Tokyo. “At the tournament, they played this song all the time. I love this song.” He crooned out again, “BEEHON SHAPON, OH IS TEN SEE SO BOO.”

He went over to the bike and crossed his arms. “Take out the spark plugs,” he ordered. I did. The thin elements at the ends of both plugs were blackened, covered with thick carbuncles of soot. The plugs were only a month old, but they looked like they had been in the bike for years.

“This is your problem,” he said. I carried a spare set, so I screwed them in under his supervision (“Careful! Like it’s a girl!”) and turned the key. The green light burst into life. The engine turned over cleanly on the first try and ran smoothly.

I pushed the bike backward out of the garage, letting the engine idle to recharge the battery. We stood around, looking at each other fondly. I asked what I owed him. He declined any pay.

“Thank you for translating that song,” he said, and shook my hand.

I
t was almost one o’clock by the time I found the Von Puttkamers’
estancia
.

It wasn’t much of an
estancia
. The original parcel that Guevara and Granado visited had been divided among the three sons. The old Black Forest mansion had gone to the oldest brother, who, just two years before, had sold out. The new owners, apparently agreeing
with Granado that the house was suspicious, knocked it down and put up a new, very ordinary ranch house. The second brother kept his land but leased it out and lived in the city. Only Oscar kept his feet on the soil.

And what soil it was. The land lay along a valley floor, golden hills ranging up and down each side while a blue river bisected the view. There is an arid, spare beauty to Patagonia, a kind of spartan perfection that I have never seen better represented than in this land. The slim strand of barbed wire cutting through a field; the scarce, tough scrub brush and low bunches of tawny grass; the transparent, icy blue of a river sparkling through the branches of the drooping willows that feasted on its banks and nowhere else. I sang on my way up the road, first a verse of “
Bee hon sha pon
” and then the old reliable “
La cucaracha
,” as the landscape unfurled its perfection and filled me with anticipation. I stood on the pegs, rising to meet the wind, yelping with joy and delirious with my smooth-running, green-lighted speed through the winding valley, up its gentle hills and down again to the sweeping curves of its yellow, dusty floor.

The Von Puttkamers’ house and outbuildings appeared out of a science fiction tale about the colonization of Mars. First I saw a few quick-growing poplars waving from the distance; inside their embrace was a very modest, one-story home and a few utilitarian outbuildings. As I pulled in the driveway I saw that the surrounding half dozen acres were planted with potatoes and young fruit trees and cut everywhere with irrigation canals. The whole place felt wrested from the grip of the earth.

Oscar came trundling out of the house, his plaid work shirt whipping in the inevitable wind. “We thought you were coming earlier,” he said with a touch of resentment. I told him of my mechanical difficulties and he became understanding. Farmers knew the uncontrollable whims of machinery and therefore of time and travel.

The living room was filled with cheese sandwiches, Germanic bric-a-brac, and children, and there was a great deal of confusion at the start as the family tried to feed me and I was subjected to examples of the English language. This ritual had become familiar to me
after much practice. Latin Americans suffer from an inferiority complex, a feeling (largely correct) that they come from one of the forgotten regions of the world. When a gringo like me said that Argentina was one of the forgotten regions of the world they were profoundly insulted; nonetheless, they could say it themselves and often did. They knew what “First World” meant more than First Worlders did. It meant that movie stars came from Hollywood, that music came from New York and London, that machinery came from Japan and Korea, that fashion and old buildings came from France and Italy. It was in Washington and Geneva and Peking and Moscow where the fate of nations was decided, where wars were started and stopped, where the stage was lit and the curtains raised and lowered. Argentina produced wheat.

This is not entirely fair, but Latin Americans are not entirely fair to themselves, either, and I had never met a people who belittled themselves more than Argentines. You were ill-advised to answer “I love it” when taxi drivers asked what you thought of Argentina. The correct answer was the one they gave: “
Argentina es mierda.
” I was amazed at the number of shopkeepers who ventured the English phrase, “Arhentina ees booshit.” Everyone was nationalist, everyone was patriotic, everyone loved Argentina—and yet they hated it with a passion. The level of self-loathing was only slightly lower in the rest of Latin America.

Thus the ritual of accented English, which could happen anywhere from the Café Richmond to the Von Puttkamers’ little
casa
in Patagonia. Argentines asked for respect from others that they did not give themselves, and they asked for it in English. People in Buenos Aires loved to go to Disneyland on vacation, or at least Europe (Little Girl had been to France four times but had never set a foot in Patagonia). Oscar’s son, about thirteen, was brought forth to mutter in memorized English, but the main show came from Mrs. Von Puttkamer, who taught English at a local school. She spoke correctly, with a slight Minnesota accent earned by spending a year in the land of snowbound Scandinavians.

I was into the cake when at last Oscar got to break in. He had
been a toddler of only one or two when Guevara visited, he explained, too young to remember it himself. I showed him a line in Guevara’s diary (“one of the owner’s sons seemed to think these disgustedly dressed and apparently famished ‘doctors’ a bit odd …”) that might have described him. “Just think,” Oscar roared, “Che Guevara probably looked into my crib!” He laughed, but after only a moment the joy died on his face. “Of course,” he added, “I hate everything that son of a bitch did to us.

“
Hijo de puta
,” he said. Oscar began ticking off the guerrilla groups that had appeared in Argentina on the heels of the Cuban revolution. The Uturuncos; the Revolutionary Popular Army, the Montoneros; no matter how many times the army wiped out one cell another appeared, until bombs were roaring in the cities and policemen were gunned down on street corners. Like most of the Argentines I’d met, Oscar remembered this public madness better than the silent terror that followed the military coup of 1976. He knew in an abstract way that the death squads of the right had killed ten (or was it twenty?) thousand Argentines, not Che or his followers on the left. Some of these groups weren’t even followers of Che’s specific ideology, but despite the statistical burden of responsibility on the right, somehow Oscar could not help but blame Che. “He provoked the greatest conflict in Argentine history,” he said. “Look at us now.”

The remark was explained only by his sad tone. Oscar limned the problems of Patagonian life, from irrigation and the planting of windbreaks to the cost of tractor parts. He was soon complaining about how much he paid in taxes and how this prevented him from expanding production on the ranch or building a bigger house. Yet he was not Granado’s evil landlord exploiter, either. He had the broad shoulders and massive forearms of a man who did manual labor all day. He had built this small but comfortable house with his own hands (“My son helped,” he announced, making the boy beam), and he showed me the practical workmanship. Nothing fancy about it; it wasn’t even German in styling. Alberto Granado would have liked it because it wasn’t that much grander than the shack nearby where the two
peones
, or farmhands, lived.

In private later, these two elderly men would tell me that the boss was
muy simpático
and the Von Puttkamers were
buena gente
, accolades that would fill several pages if translated from the gaucho’s spare idiom of loyalty to the American vernacular of empty praise. Forty-four years before, Granado had taken a dim view of the work arrangements on the Von Puttkamer
estancia
, calling it capitalist exploitation. As was proving usual, Guevara drew a more subtle lesson from the life of the
peones
. In an evocative sketch of the predawn rituals of the farm, he wrote of the gauchos who crowded around the kitchen stove. These hard men took their
yerba mate
straight and laughed at the visitors who added sugar, a custom of northern Argentina considered unmanly in the south. When Guevara described them as typical of the “subjugated Araucanian race,” it lacked the hollow ring of Granado’s lecturing, for Guevara saw in that dark kitchen that it was his own kind—the white outsiders—rather than some abstract economic doctrine that subjugated the men. The
peones
were:

The motorcyclists had slept that night on the floor of the Von Puttkamers’ kitchen, and, given a second chance in my moping presence, Oscar now lived up to the tradition of hospitality. The family had to rush away to a nearby city for a few days, but he offered to let me stay alone at the
estancia
. I accepted with two conditions. The first, that I would camp outside rather than use their house; the second, that I be allowed to fish in the Río Chimehuin, flowing across the valley floor.

Guevara and Granado had fished there, although how much luck they had was subject to opinion. Ernesto wrote that Alberto “cast his line, and before he knew what was happening, he had a fleeting form glinting in the sunlight jumping about on the end of his hook.” The
future guerrilla prince went on to detail the cooking of this one fish and noted with hungry precision that “Alberto cast his line again and again, but he didn’t get a single bite despite hours of trying.”

When I turned to Granado’s diary, however, the fishing had suddenly improved: “we” had caught “various” trout, he stated vaguely.

I knew a harmless fisherman’s lie when I heard it. Yet this made me recall a series of these discrepancies I’d seen in the two diaries, differences of both fact and tone. The fishing was bad or it was good. The Von Puttkamers were “wonderful” or “Nazis of course.” Where Ernesto noted the beauty of the landscape, Alberto wrote of “the ferocious face of capitalism.” The two diarists couldn’t even agree on how they ended up at the Von Puttkamer
estancia
in the first place. Granado described it as an accidental encounter while searching for something to eat, but Guevara’s diary mentioned his tramping uncle who had stayed with the Von Puttkamers before, and a few days later, in a letter to his mother, he mentioned staying “at the Von Putnamers’ estancia, friends of Jorge’s,” as if the family was well known to the Guevaras (although not well enough known to spell their name right). These were small differences, but given how intimately the two men had experienced the same moments—they were as close as the two ends of a motorcycle seat—it was surprising.

Oscar showed me where to get water, gave me a key to the front gate, and hurried off, a curious man who radiated a mixture of gratitude, excitement, social awkwardness, patriotism, self-loathing, pride, and guilt all at once.

I threw my bags under a tree, changed into fishing clothes, and strolled across the valley and into the glinting waters of the Chimehuin. All evening the trout rolled out of their lies beneath the willow branches and slashed at a brown, feathery fly. I pulled in seven of the rainbows, but I can only see the last one in my mind’s eye now, shining silver in my hand in the darkness. I built a fire, roasted the fish, and ate under the stars.

I
n Bariloche I put up with the same Slovenian couple from five years before; they didn’t remember me but said they did. Guevara had come here after San Martín, moving once again and chipper after casting off the seductive spell of both Lago Lacar and all the wine and beef he and Granado were cadging from a series of visits with friends of friends in the area. When finally frustrated in a plan to steal five bottles of wine from a barbecue they were working at, the boys knew they were getting rusty from sitting around. They made the trip to Bariloche along winding roads past one enormous lake after another, fingers of water reaching up toward the mountains and the Chilean border. Their business in Bariloche was simple: check for letters at the post office—Guevara had asked his mother for mail—and then get over the border.