Chasing Che (22 page)

“Is this place called La Gioconda?” I asked the room.

“No,” the fat woman said.

One of the lessons I had learned from newspaper reporting was that sooner or later, if you said nothing, someone else would speak. It took a lifetime, but eventually, from the darkest corner of the bar, I heard the sound of a chair shifting.

“La Gioconda?” said a voice that was attached to a man in a green acrylic sweater. He clutched at a memory in the darkness, and eventually grabbed it.

“It’s up there,” he said, dragging a finger toward the uphill wall of the bar. “It’s a business. They sell children’s clothing.” This didn’t sound like the right place at all. I was after …

“
Antiguamente
,” he said (or, in old times), “
antiguamente
it was a restaurant.” When I prompted him, he said the old place was “two turns up.” In a city full of switchbacks, you gave directions by saying how many times the road doubled back.

He put his right hand over his face and fell permanently silent. I followed his pointed finger up the hill but found nothing at the first, second, or third turns that resembled a bar, a former bar, or even a children’s clothing store. There were a lot of shuttered, unmarked buildings. Any one of them could have been the place.

Daylight was burning up fast, and I had a long, very long, way to go. I went back to the bar, but the old man in green was gone. I gave up after a while. I wasn’t sure what I had hoped to see in the wreck of the old café anyway.

T
he road became unbearably straight. The Pan-American Highway—a grand name for two half-decent lanes of blacktop—uncoiled itself from the horizon in endless monotony, and I rolled steadily north at seventy miles an hour, leaning into the wind hour after hour, day after day. The landscape began to atrophy and desiccate. Scrub brush faded and then disappeared. I ate lunch in a whorehouse while an Argentine trucker shagged the waitress in his cab. Late in the afternoon of the second day the first cactuses shot by, but these were rare. There was sheer desert by dusk, a wasteland of red rock and dust devils. I kept moving into dusk with nothing to see but the occasional dirt road splitting off toward the horizon and a plume of dust that marked a mining operation. It grew dark, but there was no place to stop, no towns or motels or campgrounds or houses or inviting copses or anything but nothing, and so I kept moving. It grew black. Oncoming trucks were visible from miles away. My own headlight carved a fixed oasis of light around me, while the vibration of the motor, the battering of the wind, and the endless pain of clutching the throttle ten and eleven hours a day lulled me into a neurological daze.

Around ten at night I saw a tiny orange glow far off the road, and pulled over. A dirt driveway led up to a tiny settlement of houses. Most of them were made of wood from packing crates, and the tallest
building was a one-and-a-half-story evangelical church. The orange light (the only light in the entire hamlet) came from a gas lantern sitting in the general store, which was also the living room of someone’s house. The front door was open, and I could see a family of three dining around a battered wood table. The shelves were lined with eggs, rice, bouillon cubes, and candy. I knocked on the door frame just to be polite, and the father came forward. I asked him if there was any place around the town where I could spend the night.

He looked briefly over his shoulder at his wife, then said, “Here.”

Helped by his son, the man moved the table aside. I slept on the floorboards. At dawn, as I was preparing to ride away, they gave me a pineapple. I tried to pay for it, but they would not accept my money because the whole point for this transaction was in the gesture of sharing.

The poor are no more noble at heart than the rich, I suppose, but they certainly look that way. Their generosity is deeper precisely because it is so constricted by circumstance and so necessary to their collective survival. To give is to live.

I strapped the pineapple onto the back of the bike and drove out into the desert again, worried that I was slowly turning into a commie.

T
welve hours later I pulled off the road and slept in a cave over a beach. The ocean reeked of rotten shellfish and seaweed. To Guevara’s horror, Granado had insisted on eating raw shellfish from the rocks somewhere along this coastline; the food must have been really terrible if the ever-famished Guevara had been repulsed. Someone had painted
CAVE OF THE GRINGOS
on a rock. Apparently we were drawn to this bleak spot like kitchen knives to a magnet.

There was no more landscape after this, just desert. The Atacama is said to be the driest place on earth: some scientific sources
claim that no rain has ever been recorded here. The cold current of the South Pacific yielded an occasional fog but no refreshment. By the end of the fourth day I came to Antofagasta, where I could once again pick up the trail of the Argentines.

Ernesto and Alberto had done everything in their power to avoid traveling the route I had just crossed. As hitchhikers, they knew enough to avoid such a relentlessly long, lightly traveled route. They left Valparaíso by hitching, but hitching a boat. A friendly sailor snuck them onto a cargo ship headed for Antofagasta, and they hid in a bathroom until the boat was at sea, then presented themselves as stowaways and volunteered to work their passage. Ernesto didn’t regret this trick for a moment, and the feeling of being carried over the limitless sea awoke a flight of “sentimental nonsense” in him:

The surface was enough. At least for now.

Antofagasta was a mean town, dirty, colorless, rumbling with trucks. The municipal motto could be “Looks good after two hundred miles of desert.” The city was dominated by the military and a few big mining companies, which created sympathies not found everywhere in Chile. A monument at the harbor celebrated the military coup of 1973 on an equal footing with the 1810 War of Independence against Spain. The only explanation for Antofagasta—for the streets, the colorless apartment blocks, the military barracks, the port, the railway—lay out in the hard soil of the Atacama. The desert
was full of minerals, nitrate (for fertilizer and explosives), and copper (for wiring the information age). Between war and gossip there was a heavy demand for the products of Antofagasta, and Chile had seized these lucrative northern territories from Bolivia and Peru in a war before the turn of the century. The Peruvians were still sore about their defeat—the Chileans had even occupied Lima at one point—but the Bolivians were truly traumatized. They’d lost their coastline and now huddled in isolation in the mountains, blaming their poverty on their lack of access to the sea. They were serious about this: Bolivia still had a navy department, just in case, and its army kept rumbling about reconquering the lost lands. The Chilean military relished the challenge, and I would sometimes see army troops moving through the far desert, training or digging emplacements. I watched three Jaguar jet fighters leap off the local runway and smear the sky with black exhaust. Despite the pressure of an arms embargo and the poverty of everyone involved, the Pinochet regime had promoted an arms race with its neighbors. The Jaguars could be equipped with cluster bombs and even fuel-air explosives, an obscure technology so powerful it was sometimes called the poor man’s atomic bomb.

I spent a few days interviewing people around Antofagasta. An environmentalist told me that the main problem at the copper mines was the ignorance of the workers. The corporations had adopted fairly responsible environmental policies, he explained, which the older workers routinely ignored. They wouldn’t wear their safety masks and were used to dumping anything from trash to oil to chemical leaching agents into the thirsty ground.

A new mine had opened in the area five and a half years ago, and I went to see a display on copper production. Chilean copper ore is of low grade, but since the Atacama holds the largest deposits in the world, quantity makes up for quality. The ore was crushed into a fine grit and then sprayed into “concentrators,” huge tanks where a chemically induced reaction allowed the stone to sink and the copper to rise. A thick scum of bluish slurry was visible across the top of the
tank, and that contained the copper. Almost all the copper left Chile by boat and was then made into useful things, many of which were sold back to Chile at a huge markup (Chile still imports copper telephone wire, for example). The public relations officer balked when I asked him how many men had died at the mine. “To ask how many died, that is a very hard question,” he said. “Explosives, trucks that weighs many tons, heavy machinery; it’s always possible to have accidents.”

I asked again how many had died. “Two,” he said. “That’s how many workers have died in five and a half years of operation. Two.” It sounded like a statistic the way he said it, and I suppose it was.

R
oaming the waterways of the world for ever proved impossible, of course. The boys couldn’t even get out of Antofagasta. They tried their stowaway trick once more but were discovered and angrily tossed off a ship before it left the harbor. They set out the hard way for the north, spending most of the first day lying by the side of the road hoping for a lift. Finally a van carried them as far as a little town called Banquedano, which wasn’t far at all. Because of the important commerce in the area—the copper industry provides forty percent of Chile’s export earnings—the state invested heavily in the local roads, and a smooth, fresh blacktop swept me to Banquedano in thirty minutes.

Ernesto and Alberto spent a freezing night here covered by a single thin blanket. They had two, but loaned the second to a couple they met in the railway station who were in even worse shape. The man had just spent three months in jail on suspicion of communist activities; his wife was now loyally following him as he searched for work in the mines, where the conditions were so dangerous that they would hire anyone, regardless of politics. Both of the boys noted in their diaries the powerful effect this encounter had on them. Granado was struck by the wife, who endured desperate circumstances without complaint, but Ernesto—perhaps because he had
spent less time thinking about it than his friend—was fascinated by the man’s communist beliefs, by his purposeful dedication to an abstract ideology that seemed to be breaking over the world. In 1952 the Soviet Union was a rising power and Mao’s Red Army had seized control of China, but communism was still a remote notion in Latin America, a strange doctrine that had yet to be tested in practice in the region. Ernesto noted rumors that some Chilean communists were being abducted by the military, killed, and dumped into the sea. This seemed so obviously impossible in a civilized country like Chile that he discounted it as a rumor. Still, the communist under his blanket awoke Ernesto’s sympathy:

Obviously, this was not Cuban Comandante Che Guevara writing, but an uncommitted observer, inspired more by basic hopes of justice and dignity—bread for the poor—than by specific plans for realizing them. The benefits or costs of communism had not been calculated yet. Ernesto was still not Che.

They watched the sun rise over the desert, one of those moments when the earth seems revealed for the first time and all life is compressed into a transient instant. The spectacle moved Ernesto to quietly recite several Pablo Neruda poems that he had memorized.

Alberto countered by reciting the only Neruda poem he knew, one that the poet, a dedicated communist, had written during the dark days of World War II when his usual subjects, love and nature, seemed too frivolous:

For Alberto, the sunrise was red in more than one sense.

I rode on toward the next stop on our mutual itinerary—the great mine at Chuquicamata.

K
ooky was equipped with an adjustable throttle screw on the right handle grip that you could tighten down to keep the motor racing as you warmed it up on cold mornings in Bavaria. I had always resisted the temptation of using this screw as a poor man’s cruise control—until now. The desert was so immensely boring, and I had been holding the throttle with my hand for so long—two months now—that I couldn’t resist. Flying down the road at seventy miles an hour, I twisted the screw inward until it pushed hard on the throttle and locked the speed in place. Then I let go.

I went along like this for quite a while, steering with my left hand while my right rested comfortably on my lap. The screw worked well as long as I didn’t need to slow down, which I didn’t. Chuquicamata was somewhere up ahead, but I figured on plenty of warning before hitting it.

After a few minutes I decided that using one hand to ride a motorcycle was one hand too many. The road was straight and in beautiful condition, and as long as I didn’t move suddenly, hit anything, or miscalculate how smart I was, I would be able to steer by balance alone. I took my left hand off the handlebar, tentatively at first, but then with confidence. I put both hands in the pockets of my black leather jacket. I thought I might be able to do it for a mile, and a mile went by.