Chasing Che (16 page)

On the maps this spot was called Petrohué, but it was not a town, just a single hotel built for Queen Elizabeth when she visited the region and, across the river mouth, a handful of dilapidated huts occupied by the local ferry men and fishing guides. The volcano’s snowfields glowed so brightly that it was painful to look that way. I stood a long time, examining the ring of peaks and overlapping arms of land that hinted of the passage to Argentina. It was the most beautiful view I had ever seen.

A fisherman was disrobing from his gear a few feet away, stuffing rod and vest into the trunk of a Saab. I made the usual inquiries and so did he. When he learned I was an American and a journalist he burst into an unprovoked tirade about General Augusto Pinochet. It was a pro-Pinochet tirade: the general was misunderstood by Americans; the general had saved Chile from communism; the general had built the very road we were standing on; the general had also built the magnificent Southern Highway; the general was the greatest leader in Chilean history; the general was very, very, underappreciated by Americans.

I found this argument hard to swallow, given how tightly America had worked with General Pinochet and other military men in the
past. In 1973, Pinochet had overthrown the elected president of Chile, Salvador Allende, with the direct connivance and enthusiastic backing of the CIA, Henry Kissinger, and American corporations like ITT and Anaconda, the copper giant. Pinochet’s supporters were only angry because the American public had renounced that official support as Pinochet spent the 1970s assembling a dictatorship, carrying out mass arrests, building an archipelago of prison camps, and torturing or “disappearing” thousands of his countrymen. The general then spent the 1980s beating back pro-democracy demonstrations and the 1990s retreating furiously from his image as a strongman, taking credit for civil works and standing punctiliously on points of law that had been denied his victims.

I doubted that the general had put one spade into the road we were standing on, or that this Saab-driving, fly-fishing, gear-encrusted, right-wing angler had ever actually traveled on the Carreterra Austral. But my new friend was already red in the face so I let these details slide and accepted his offer of a huge green woolly bugger fly that he had tied himself. It had a long hook shaft wrapped in tufts of green fur and thin copper wire that would sink it down deep. It looked like it would catch big fish, and a year later—on the Missouri River, in Montana—it would catch me the largest trout I had ever caught. I always thought of it as the Pinochet bugger. But neither of us knew that at the time. He was just an asshole standing by the side of a road, and he apparently had the same opinion about me. We all saw our own utopias in this landscape.

T
he two G’s arrived at Petrohué by boat. Todos los Santos was the final link in the watery chain of the Seven Lakes route, the passage that had brought Alberto and Ernesto across from Bariloche. When the ferry landed at Petrohué, the boys wrestled La Poderosa onto solid ground, probably with very tired muscles. It had taken them days to make the transit, and they’d paid their way by working the bilge pumps. Between boats, they had gone wandering in the hills, but their blue-sky days were coming to an end.

At Petrohué, “Sniper” (one of Guevara’s many nicknames, this one earned on the rugby field) took a long-overdue bath. Guevara was notorious for his indifference to filth, a habit that would annoy his comrades and fellow travelers for years to come and that even earned a special mention in his CIA file (“He is really outstandingly and spectacularly dirty,” the agency warned). Now, as Che scrubbed himself in the lake, Granado wandered off and got laid, or at least implied that he did. Granado had spent the boat ride chatting up a pair of Brazilian girls, one of them a student of biochemistry. His subsequent diary entry played coy, noting that upon arrival in Petrohué, he and his new “colleague” went off to see the lake together: “After speaking of biochemistry we passed by mutual accord to topographical anatomy.… I hope not to have arrived at embryology.”

With the motorbike on solid ground again, Guevara and Granado were able to move forward with what looked to be an easy trek up the densely settled, green flatlands of Chile. After camping a night on the far side of the lake and plucking a single long trout from a speedy run in the river, I followed their route back out into the plain and then turned north for the long run up the length of Chile. I quickly passed through the town of Osorno and made for Valdivia, a major port where I hoped to find a new battery and an end to my electrical problems.

The landscape was fat. Even Granado broke form by praising the beauty of the shade trees and the wheat fields. Soon he caught himself, however. The “exploited sharecroppers” tending the fields were victims of “usurious” and “parasitical” absentee owners.

I watched the fields rushing by, but these were planted with corn, not wheat. There was an optical illusion in the way the rows passed so quickly that you could never quite see down them. Instead of an aisle of space between the plants, there was a dark blur that was as fixed as the horizon. No matter how many times I looked away, I kept noticing that dark band again and twisting my head, sure that if I looked fast enough I would see through it.

I
bought 400 cc’s of SA40 motor oil at a mechanic’s workshop on the outskirts of Valdivia. The oil was measured from a barrel into a paper cone, which I clenched in my fist and carried back across the street as pinkish brown rivulets coated my hand. I fed the tip of the paper cone into a hole on the left side of the bike and then loosened my grip. When all the oil had disappeared down into the engine I dropped the dipstick back into place, then lifted it again and read the depth of the smear against the engraved advice to “
Nicht uber ‘max’ Auffullen!
”

It is a law of nature that old motorcycles lose a little oil from time to time. Nortons were famous for their oil leaks, and I had no doubt that La Poderosa left a stain behind every time it was parked. The thirteen-year-old Norton probably trailed blue smoke as it ran down the road, too. BMWs were supposed to be above this, but I’d been riding hard, so La Cucaracha’s thirst was nothing to worry about.

The bike ran clean when it ran. The battery seemed to be dying, although I couldn’t tell if this was caused by the battery itself, or the alternator, or a wiring problem somewhere. I checked the spark plugs from time to time but their tips were clean. There was something mysterious and frustrating in the way the bike would start only if it had been running recently. If the engine had time to cool down then the starter solenoid produced nothing but an unpleasant choking noise.

I’d stopped across from the workshop because of a little municipal museum I saw there. I’d only been inside long enough to learn they didn’t stock what I was looking for, the archives of Valdivia’s old newspaper, the
Correo del Austral
. During their visit, Guevara and Granado had stopped around the office of the paper, which had then published a “very nice” article about them. The
Correo
had gone bust years before, but the museum staff told me the 1952 issues were stored with the municipal archives in a building near the port. It was already seven in the evening, still bright out but too late for work and the end to a long day that had begun at the shores of Todos los Santos. To my surprise the road north—National Route 5, the central highway of Chile and a crucial component of the Pan-American Highway system—had been in poor shape, filled with potholes and cuts. You could make good time but it took a lot of concentration to avoid all the broken asphalt. You might be thrown off the bike at any time if you didn’t watch where you were going. Twice during the day I passed concrete retaining walls decorated in black spray paint with the phrase
TOMPKINS OUT OF CHILE!
My shoulder ached from the strain and I needed a bed, a meal, and a mechanic.

I took what consolation I could from the predicament of the Argentines. La Poderosa was falling apart beneath their butts. On February 21, Granado wrote with heartfelt exaggeration that they had crossed the “highest mountains in the world almost without brakes.” Aside from all the crashes, the alternator had given out and the rear brake had grown so weak since Bahía Blanca that “we practically have to brake with our boots.” Granado seemed to shiver with dread as he wrote that there was “little possibility of continuing the journey on the Powerful One.”

As dilapidated as the Norton sounded, the alternative—traveling on to Peru without a bike—loomed like a thundercloud. With the bike they could set their own itinerary, make plans, keep a schedule, budget expenses, and depend only on themselves; without it, the trip would take longer, cost more, and cover less ground. They would be children of happenstance, with little hope of reaching the expedition’s ultimate goal, the great land of the north.

The same unspoken question loomed over me as I remounted and drove around Valdivia looking for a guest house. If the bikes died—La Poderosa and La Cucaracha both—we travelers would be left in mid-journey, far from home and even farther from our goals. Sputtering along with a dying electrical system, the question of what to do if the bike failed at this early stage of the trip tickled at the edge of my conscience. Turn back or go on? It was a query I wasn’t prepared to answer.

I
found that bed, that meal, and that mechanic all under the same roof. The bed was in the front room of a rambling old wood house a half mile from the port of Valdivia. The meal was some rice with a can of Chilean mussels that I cooked on the kitchen stove. The mechanic was the old bald fellow who watched me eat and spent the whole meal describing what was happening on the television screen I was trying not to watch. It was an old American detective show, something from the ’70s that I didn’t recognize and didn’t want to. I spooned rice and mussels off my plate and the husband sat there, reciting what he saw: “He’s going inside … it’s dark.… There’s the lady.… They’re talking.… It’s a commercial now … another commercial … another commercial.… Wait, he’s driving along now.…” His wife wore black and followed me around the house even though I was the only guest. When I went to sleep I could hear her checking the door to my room, to see if it was locked. Later, lying in the dark, I heard the couple arguing. Their words were indistinct, but it sounded like he was defending me. I don’t know what I was accused of.

In the morning the husband listened attentively as I described Kooky’s electrical problems. “I will help you,” he said. His name was Don, so I called him Don Don out of respect. He was sixty-six and proud of the fact he had “a drop” of Mapuche blood in him. The Mapuche were tough warriors who had repeatedly driven the conquistadors out of this part of Chile. They’d learned to ride horses,
mastered the ambush, and eventually captured and killed Pedro de Valdivia, the town’s namesake. Legend had it that they poured molten gold down his throat, telling him he could finally have what he had come so far to find.

Don Don took me out the kitchen door and down a narrow path between the houses. The path cut through to the other side of the block, where it led to the back door of a large garage. This was a professional’s workshop, a tin shed big enough for four cars and filled with power tools and dusty car parts. The old man had been a mechanic before he retired. His specialty was tractor repairs, but now he worked on cars to make ends meet. Currently he was working on a 1951 Vauxhall, a ’61 Toyota Land Cruiser, a Ford Turino from the early ’70s, and a Brazilian Chrysler of unknown vintage. He said we would fix the motorcycle together. I rolled it around the block and into the garage. He pulled out a volt meter and told me to come back later.

I walked into town. It was a beautiful Saturday morning in February, the height of summer. The air was always moist here in the south; the sun burned but everything felt crisp and cool. The harbor itself wasn’t exactly busy, but there were a few small, colorfully painted wooden dories tied to the wharf and every now and then a launch would go by. The action was on land, where the walkway along the wharf was lined on both sides by vendors. They were selling seafood in riotous splendor: live blue crabs clattering in baskets; enormous and lethargic king crabs with foot-long legs; sea urchins; bundles of smoked clams, oysters, and mussels; glistening eels; blocks of pressed seaweed called
luche;
and salmon opened like butterflies to reveal red flesh and white ribs. Several vendors tried to interest me in an odd little crustacean that lay, red and quivering and alive, inside a polyp of a shell encrusted with dirt and slime. I had no idea what it was and refused to eat it when they waved samples at me on the end of a fork.

I settled into a stall instead and ate a slab of fried fish for lunch. The Chileans crowded all around me, reading newspapers and dressed in wool caps and jackets. Chileans were sometimes called
“the sweater Latins” because it was cold here and they dressed like Norwegians.

It was impossible to miss the euphoria in Guevara’s voice as he surveyed this scene in Valdivia:

Ernesto’s meditation on newness expired on the familiar note of self-deprecation. Chile might seem different to a young Argentine who’d never been anywhere before, but the two countries did share some traits, as he discovered walking at the port. The tall Ernesto had been wearing a pair of hand-me-down pants that were too short for him. Here in Valdivia, just as in Argentina, the locals took one look at his ankles and cried out “Highwater!”

City Hall was only a couple of blocks from the harbor, in a square gray modern building. I found the archivist’s office closed until Monday, but on the way out I noticed a book fair taking place on the ground floor, in a kind of interior courtyard. Booths ran around the edge of the space and I joined a dense crowd in working my way slowly along the rows. There were a lot of children’s stories and poetry collections published in various parts of the Spanish-speaking world. At the back of the room I found a booth selling textbooks. One of them was called
The History of Chile
. I opened it at the back: the last entry covered the entire span of history from 1972 to today in two pages. It mentioned in passing that there had been a constitutional reform in 1982 and that the Carreterra Austral had been pushed into the south. There was no mention of the 1973 coup by the general, nor that thousands of people had been killed, nor that hideous concentration camps had been set up in the deserts of the far north and on islands in the subarctic ocean near Tierra del Fuego.
The last entry in this factless history book was a brief mention of the country’s partial transition to democracy in 1989. Under pressure from mass demonstrations and foreign governments, the general had staged a yes-or-no vote on whether he should remain in power for another six years. To his amazement, he’d lost; to his enemies’ amazement, he had accepted the verdict and beat a partial retreat from power. In the book, this was an electoral “reform.” I quickly found another book on Chilean history, but the authors were perhaps too honest to rewrite history and simply stopped the book cold in 1972.