Chasing Che (15 page)

I never got my interview. Having eaten his food, caught his fish, and listened to his music, on the fourth morning I followed the Chileans down to the fjord and boarded the little green ketch again. We had all taken something we needed from him: the musicians were happy and well fed, and I’d rested my ribs and reached the point that I could get out of bed in the morning without yelping. We sailed up the narrow inlet for an hour together, as happy a band of mariners as there ever was. The sun even came out. The mountains were truly magnificent.

While we stood on deck, feeling the ocean drawing closer, one of the musicians told me that
el patrón
was “a nice man, but he’s being very stubborn about the televisions.” I asked what he meant. The villagers of Reñihué had, it turned out, petitioned Tompkins to get a satellite dish so they could see television. He had turned down their request.

Many of the musicians had left their instruments inside the
cabin and now sat on deck listening to portable cassette players with tiny headphones. As we pitched up the fjord toward Caleta Gonzalo, I went around the boat, peering surreptitiously at their musical choices. Most of them were listening to American rap.

I had to wonder if Che would be an environmentalist by now.

T
here is nothing so dispiriting on a long, difficult journey as being forced to backtrack. But now I waited in the cold at the ferry ramp at Caleta Gonzalo and contemplated a small retreat. The waves lapping on cement called me north—if I waited here I could eventually catch a ferry to Puerto Montt—but there was business behind me, back to the south. I didn’t even know what day of the week it was anymore, but I knew I had to retrace my steps and recover what I could from the accident. When the
micro
arrived a dozen of us piled in and began bouncing south.

The road was paved with a mixture of gravel and ground seashells. There were a lot of potholes and gullies. The bridges were tiny and primitive—six logs bolted into a raft and thrown over a gully. The driver had an unlit cigarette sewn to his mustache, and the cigarette bobbed up and down and grew soggy with spittle as we rattled along. He drove too fast and informed us with studied cheer that two people had been killed on the road last night. They had driven off a bridge in the rain. The bridges were only about four feet off the ground, so I didn’t see how fatal that could be, but maybe they were going fast.

After a while we pulled over to have a birthday party for someone on board the bus. The dozen of us dismounted, stood in the road, and passed a single large bottle of beer clockwise while singing “Happy Birthday” and a Chilean song I didn’t recognize. Then we got back in the van. As we were starting up, a red pickup came along in the other direction. It had California plates. I leaned out the window, which put me right next to the driver, who was leaning out his window.

“You’re a long way from home,” I said to him.

“So are you,” he said, and drove on.

Chaitén was such an important metropolis that it had pavement, although not much. Squeezed between a bay with a massive tidal swing and a range of steep hills, the town had a few thousand people and was a typical transit center, either full or empty depending on the movements of ferries and the migrations of fish and tourists arriving or departing, heading south toward Tierra del Fuego or east to Argentina. There were some half-decent restaurants, a dozen hotels, a supermarket, and a waterfront office full of blond wood and nature photography designed to draw visitors to Tompkins’s park, just north.

The bus dropped me by an empty lot in the center of town, and I began walking toward a hostel called La Watson. I heard a distant beep and then a motor and turned to see the same bus coming back around the block in a hurry. The bus pulled to a halt, and a woman in the back passed a small camera through the window. It was my own; it had fallen on the floor as I dozed during the return trip. Those thieving Latins in action again.

This was not my first visit to La Watson. When I left the scene of my crash a week before, I had done so with paralyzing reluctance. My problem was not technical—to my amazement the bike sprang to life the instant I hit the starter button. I had let it idle for a while in that drizzle, and then turned it off. I sat under a bush for a bit, walked around, inspected the road for evidence of what made me crash (there was nothing, not even the pothole I thought I’d hit), and then sat under a bush again. My breathing was already painful, and my head still tasted of smoke, although I later realized there had been no smoke, only the bitter chemical backwash of the violent jolt spinning through my brain. I wiped the blood off my knuckles and forehead and waited a long time alone. Then I got on the bike, started it again, and drove on. There had been nothing else to do, no choice about it all. After the friendly trucker and his daughter left, I was alone in the wilderness in the rain. So I went on.

After a couple of hours I found a fancy inn beneath a glacier and ate an expensive meal while telling the waiter, the cook, and the
innkeeper that I had just crashed. They said nothing and served me quickly, as if eager to get rid of me. I realized later that I was coated with mud.

By nightfall I staggered into a tiny village called Santa Lucia, rented a room behind the general store, and fell asleep. When I woke up a day later my left ribs were giving me a sharp pain at each inrush of breath. I kept my respiration shallow and asked the landlady about a doctor. She directed me to an army outpost three blocks away—that is, all the way on the other side of town. Only a few hundred people lived here in wet wood houses. Horses roamed loose in the gravel streets. The military base was a triangular stockade fresh-carved from the wilderness, with a guard tower at each corner. A Chilean soldier wearing a rain cape and cradling an automatic rifle stood at the front gate. The lieutenant came out and told me that there was no doctor in the town. He offered to radio for a truck that would arrive in the morning, take me up the coast to a doctor by afternoon, and then return me the next day. It was a generous offer considering the circumstances, but I decided to sleep it off. It rained for two days. Eventually, my saddlebags still held shut with duct tape, I struggled on toward Chaitén, where I took a room at La Watson and fell asleep.

Now the Kent family welcomed me back to the same bed in their son’s old room. I called them the Kent family because their favorite show was a dubbed version of
Lois and Clark
, the Superman spinoff. The show came in only dimly, drifting at the edges of the frame and filled with snow by the long trip from a transmitter up the coast, but the Kents considered themselves lucky to have TV. When I’d been sitting around their house a few days before, wheezing and complaining, they had been glued to a telethon raising money for some illness. Telethons were a recent phenomenon in Chile, and there seemed to be a new one every week shilling for some cause, asking Chileans to solve a social problem by sending a small check. Their other favorite show was
Sábado Gigante
, an epic variety program broadcast from Miami and popular all over Latin America. The host, Don Francisco, was a right-wing Chilean Jew who could sing and dance, and if you were into leering at salsa starlets and watching housewives chase balloons
for prizes it was pretty entertaining. I liked the commercials, which were built into the show. Don Francisco himself would stand there with a box of detergent, telling you how clean it would make your life.

“That’s what America is like,” Mr. Kent told me. He was pointing at the TV screen, at
Lois and Clark
. I peered through the static to check his bearings. Lois and Clark were both very beautiful and wore incredibly expensive clothes. Mr. Kent pointed out how short her skirts were. “You must have a good time in America,” he said, wink wink, making sure his wife heard. I liked him, though. Now back from my healing sojourn at Reñihué, I set my bags down in La Watson and was greeted enthusiastically by Mr. Kent. He took me outside to the tool shed and threw open the door with ill-concealed satisfaction. There was La Cucaracha.

We had bonded, of course, in the grip of accident. The motorcycle was now covered with scars—streaks in the tank, dings on the handlebars, cracks in the orange turn signal lamps, and a whole set of vicious scabs on the front fender, which had twisted straight upward in the impact. The windshield was gone; its support bars and clamps sat empty and rigid on the front of the bike.

But it actually
did
still run. La Cucaracha was uglier than ever but impossible to kill. From my lyrical obsession I had gradually begun, despite my efforts, to think of the bike as La Cucaracha. Inevitably the short form, just Kooky, took over in my mind. Kooky, as in nuts, which I was if I talked to my motorcycle. All my rationalizations about the cold nature of machines were forgotten during the terrifying four-second journey down that embankment.

“Hello, Kooky,” I said, and stroked the tank softly, fawning over the machine turned companion. Mr. Kent had done everything he’d promised: the mirrors were welded back on, the mudguard bent back into place, the crack in the turn signal glued up. Most remarkably, he’d
managed to fix the left saddlebag, which had been crushed by the impact. Mr. Kent had worked patiently with a rubber hammer, bending the aluminum hinges into alignment and fitting the two halves of the plastic clamshell against each other. It wasn’t perfect—water would get into the case from now on—but I was out of duct tape and thought this was heaven. Mr. Kent refused any payment except for ten dollars to reimburse his neighbor, the welder. The banging and gluing were all free. He was retired and wanted to be useful.

The next night I ate an early dinner of fried eel along the waterfront, where I met a Chilean traveling south on a BMW motorcycle. He lived near Santiago and gave me his phone number with instructions to call when I needed a place to stay. After dinner, when it was just starting to get dark, I rode the fully loaded Cucaracha out past the end of town to the municipal wharf, where a long line of trucks was waiting for the tide to rise. When the water came in, the ferry to Puerto Montt came in, too: the short trucks growled and spewed black smoke as they pulled their heavy loads back and forth, inching their way onto the boat under the direction of a grimly competent load master. Fifty or sixty Chileans had gathered to watch the proceedings. This was the best entertainment going in Chaitén, and they cheered the truckers and hoped something would go wrong. I sat on the bike looking downhill at the proceedings. A policeman told me I would be the last one to board. The ferry was completely reserved by trucks and a few minivans, but there was usually room for a motorbike.

The tide kept rising, and the ferry filled, and the sun set. The last trucks were loaded at around 10
P.M
. under a perfect black sky littered with crisp stars. When the ramp came flat with the dock there was no more time: the ferry master squeezed a minivan into the spot between two timber trucks, looked up the hill, and gave a final wave. The policeman blew his whistle, the entire crowd cheered, and I rolled down the hill, over the ramp, and into the ferry, slipping between a beer truck and a bulkhead. Hands from the darkness helped me tie down the bike.

It was difficult to see anything after the loading ramp came up. The ferry jolted and pulled back, and I could feel the great metal box
begin to spin and slide forward over an unstable surface. I climbed up a gangway and watched the town and then the harbor shrink away. We headed out to sea at a tremendous clip. Down below a dozen trucks were cheek to jowl, the drivers already trying to sleep across their seats. The tiny lounge inside the superstructure smelled of metal, paint, and vomit, its few seats taken by screaming children. I went forward, climbed a ladder, and stood for a while examining the stars. Eventually I just lay down on the half-inch-thick steel plate and fell asleep under my leather jacket, my head braced on a coil of rope.

Five hours later the sun came up, Puerto Montt hauled over the horizon, we docked, the ramp went down, and the dozen truckers blew their horns while I heaved on the kick starter again and again. There was no green light at all. I rolled La Cucaracha down the ramp and, leaning into the weight, pushed the bike through the quiet, early-morning streets of Puerto Montt.

A
cabdriver in a gas station gave the bike a jump start. I let the engine charge itself as I looked back over the port, drinking bad instant coffee—Chileans call all coffee “Nescafé”—and read a paper that I had bought in the gas station. Under the headline
WHERE IS CHE
GUEVARA?
I learned the news from Bolivia:

The port was ringed with immense, sodden piles of wood chips bound for Japan. This wood pulp, once forests like those Tompkins
hoped to protect, was going to be converted into specialty papers and rayon for clothes. The whole town stank of sawdust, and with the bike idling I felt an urge to leave right away.

I rolled over the narrow, flat green floor that was Chile’s coastal plain and then up an increasingly twisty valley into the Andes. The road turned to dirt and a raging green river appeared alongside. I followed road and water upstream, eventually coming under the slopes of Mount Osorno, a perfectly shaped volcanic cone. Osorno was theoretically still active, but the tablecloth-white snowfields running upward at an even, 45-degree pitch showed that it was dormant and cold right now. The road ended on the far side of the volcano, overlooking a wide lake ringed with mountains. The lake was called Todos los Santos, or All the Saints, and from the spot where my kickstand landed there did seem to be as many visible peaks as there were saints in the Catholic panoply.