Chasing Che (23 page)

Then another, and another. Occasionally a car would pass in the
other direction, the drivers invariably staring at me with concern. After five miles I got out my camera and took some blurry pictures. After ten miles I saw a long, slow curve to the left, and swung gently through it without a hitch.

After thirteen miles, it started to rain. I put my hands back where they belonged, loosed the throttle screw, pulled over, took off my helmet, and let the warm drizzle wet my upturned face.

They said it never rained in the Atacama, ever, but obviously they were wrong. The fact was, there had never been any
recorded
rain in the Atacama. It did rain there, as the canyon washes coming out of the hills showed. The rain was simply in short and rare bursts that tended, in a big world, to miss the few measuring instruments of scientists and government monitors. That didn’t rob the Atacama of its arid beauty or its title as driest desert in the world. It did, however, make me wonder if I was getting stupider with every mile. I stood there, wet, looking at the handlebars. I was starting to do things that made no sense. The drizzle stopped after a few minutes, and when the air cleared I looked up toward the horizon and there, visible through the washed air like a dark mountain, was the mine.

A
t last, a hero I could believe in. At the firehouse in Chuquicamata I deployed the exact script that Ernesto had proudly outlined in his diary for cadging free room and board. First, I talked my way inside (“I just need a place to change my clothes,” I told the lonely eighteen-year-old caretaker), and soon enough I casually began entertaining this innocent young man with stories of my world travels. We discussed all his important questions: Was China a good place to find a job? Was America founded before Christ? Eventually he provided a glass of Chilean red to accompany such talk, but I steadfastly refused to touch the wine until he grew concerned and even insulted. “Well,” I said, having memorized Ernesto’s own line, “no offense, but in my country we’re not used to drinking without some
food to wash it down.” In no time at all the caretaker had whipped up a vast meal. He threw in a free bed for the night. Guevara knew so many ways to lead men.

In the morning I stood, slightly hung over, at the lip of the Chuquicamata copper mine. It is an astoundingly large hole in the desert, two miles long, a mile and a half wide, almost two thousand feet deep. All of this had been dug out by the ten thousand men who have labored here over the course of the century. The pit has hardly changed since 1952—it was the largest open-pit mine in the world then, and it still is—but the political terrain had shifted around it. When Ernesto stood here the mine belonged to Anaconda, the Montana copper giant. The miners were paid a dismal wage and lived in shacks.

Ernesto and Alberto toured the facilities on the strength of their medical credentials, and the former noted that while health care for the miners was bad, it would prove much better than what he would see later in the trip. The hospitals were dirty and their rates were “monuments to legalized robbery.” Much had changed since that conversation, but the realities of mining were constant and the political climate, after shifting back and forth around the mine, was now heading again toward what it had been. In 1964 the mine was partly nationalized, and not by a Marxist like Salvador Allende but by President Eduardo Frei, a centrist. During the early 1970s Allende expanded state control and gave the miners a social contract unprecedented in Latin America: housing allowances, a subsidized canteen, free medical care, and guaranteed employment for life. Chuquicamata was an immense national treasure. Even General Pinochet, the laissez-faire dictator, was careful to preserve this public ownership of the means of production. This is why some Chileans called his economic policy “right-wing socialism.”

Now President Frei—that is, the son of the earlier President Frei—was talking about “efficiency” and “new times” for Chile, which the miners interpreted to mean selling the mine back to the gringos. The men Ernesto called the “blond, efficient, arrogant managers” were already back in the desert: Australian, South African,
and American firms were behind the new, highly automated mine whose settling ponds I had visited near Antofagasta.

From the lip of the pit I could see trucks working in every direction. There were a hundred and five of them in the fleet; one of the smaller ones, parked behind me, had tires so big I could not touch their tops even with my fingertips. It took them two hours to drive from the bottom up to the rim where I stood.

Perched high above the money, I was not alone. A single miner stood nearby, gazing over the works. He was a short fellow in a dusty orange jumpsuit and a blue hard hat. From time to time a little Motorola radio in his hand cackled and he muttered something in reply. He was studiously ignoring a suitcase at his feet from which two wires ran to a disk resembling a Frisbee on a stick.

“G.P.S.,” he said when I asked, referring to the Global Positioning System. He worked for the mine’s surveying office, which tracked on a daily basis the constantly changing shape of the hole. They were testing the new GPS technology. If it worked, the surveying office would be reduced from ten men to five.

“They will find a job for me somewhere else,” he said. It might be with one of the new private subcontractors the mine has relied on more and more to cut costs. The pay was guaranteed the same, but the safety standards were much lower. “They care only for this,” he said, rubbing two fingers together. He thought Codelco—the Chilean state’s copper company—was well run. The health insurance was very good, he said, and after thirty years you could retire with a pension and a gold watch. That was the dangerous moment, he explained; after a lifetime in the desert, miners who left the region were vulnerable to humidity and would grow sick and die within five years. It sounded like silicosis was a more likely culprit than moist air. The disease finally caught up with retired miners just when they lost their health coverage.

The Spanish word for
retirement
is
jubilación
. “It’s called jubilation,” he said, “but few survive long to enjoy it.”

He’d worked here for sixteen years. One way or another, he doubted that he would make it to the gold watch. While I looked at
the tiny trucks crawling slowly up from the seventh circle, he discoursed with casual familiarity on the challenges of globalization, the benefits of added-value production, the latest rumors about privatization, and the price of Indonesian copper. The union kept them informed about these things in a newsletter.

Ernesto recounted a disturbing conversation here with a miner he called the “foreman-poet” due to his eloquence. Guevara asked how many men had died working the mine, and the man’s only reply was gratitude for Guevara’s concern in asking; no one knew how many had died at Chuqi. This was the bedrock reality beneath all ideologies and outcomes. No matter what happened, the work would still be harsh, the life of the miner squalid. Although Ernesto indirectly criticized the gringos running the mine, he did not blame the lack of hope on capitalism. Granado did, and liked to cite the glories of communism and Joseph Stalin that were rising in the East with all the historical certainty of the morning sun. But for Ernesto, this “red blaze” looked like nothing more than another false hope. He closed the chapter on Chuqi with a prescient observation:

A great cloud of dust floated up from the left, where the digging was close to some buildings that my new friend from the surveying office pointed out. “
El pueblo norteamericano
,” he said: “The American town.” The little village of white clapboard houses had been constructed long ago for the Anaconda engineers and their families. The digging had to follow the copper vein wherever it went, and right now that was toward the
pueblo norteamericano
. It would take years to cover the last few hundred yards, according to the surveyors’ calculations, but eventually the iron rule of profit meant that the copper must be taken out and the town must fall. “In 2005,” the miner said, undercutting the white houses with a swift slice of his hand, “pfft.”

Back in town, I ate lunch in the mine workers’ social club. Off-duty machine operators and electricians were drinking orange soda and watching blondes sing on television. I pestered those at tables near me about when there had last been a strike at the mine. The response from each was the same: “A strike? I don’t know … no, I can’t remember one, ever.… A strike?”

They mouthed the word as if they had never heard it before.

O
ut in the desert again, there was so little to look at that I began gazing far off the roadside and finally noticed a low brown smudge of buildings in the distance. I took a side road and then bounced down a dirt path the last few hundred yards before pulling up at the gate of a “nitrate office,” as the old mining camps were known in Chile. Like most of the nitrate mines, this one had closed decades ago. There were several dozen low barracks buildings and a couple of three-story offices. The whole place was surrounded by a wall, and on top of the wall was rusting barbed wire.

The sound of my engine roused the caretaker from his siesta. He was unshaven and seemed drunk, but agreed to show me around. A small construction crew was “restoring” one of the biggest buildings, a plan that seemed to require dismantling it.

In the mid-1970s Chacabuco had been a concentration camp in the most literal sense. A small number of high-ranking Allende aides had been concentrated here from other prisons. The old nitrate offices made useful little jails: they were far from public scrutiny, already had the ideal infrastructure of spartan barracks, and, surrounded by barbed wire and relentless desert, were essentially escape-proof. The prisoners suffered from a blazing sun by day and freezing temperatures by night. In the metaphoric eloquence of Castilian, Chileans referred to this gulag archipelago as “the red desert.”

The signs of prison life were still everywhere: a jury-rigged basketball hoop for exercise, a pile of cafeteria-style trays used during
feeding hour, a cross roughly gouged into the plaster high on one wall, making a chapel out of a small dank room. This sad little house of improvised worship with its roof falling in was the one place where Allende’s aides could escape their fate, however briefly.

There was graffiti in a couple of places, mostly just names (“Alex Acuna 10-12-76”) but also a few longer messages (“Here were tortured Chaparrón, Chacay and his loyal friend Buco González and the Doctor Dulit”). There were also fresh Nazi swastikas penned on several walls alongside cryptic initials. The keeper explained that they were made by right-wing extremist groups who considered the camp a shrine, not a shame. They were proud of what Chile had done here.

“Here Endures the Memory of the Wounded Public,” someone responded in a broad, angry hand on one wall, right above the swastikas. “Not Even Fascist Graffiti Can Erase the Red Desert.” A sign near the entrance said that this mine had been a “Patrimony of Mankind” since 1971, but the sign mentioned nothing about the red desert. As usual in Chile, official accounts of history suffered a bout of amnesia around 1973.

Power tools growled in the background, gnawing away at the buildings. The historical audit—the final accounting of what had really happened in Chile during the time of blooding—was only just beginning.

Back on the road, I again saw a low brown wall in the distance and bounced over the broken ground toward what proved to be a lonely cemetery. A sign identified it as the Rica Aventura nitrate mine. Rich Adventure; the name rang a bell, and digging in Granado’s diary—Big Che hadn’t mentioned it—I found that the boys had spent a couple of nights in the workers’ dormitory, observing some of the same miners now buried in front of me. I counted two hundred graves and then stopped, overwhelmed by how many yet remained. Entire rows were set aside for infants who had lived only a few days, they or their mothers unable to endure the poisoned mining environment. There were a few wooden crosses, their words worn away by the wind (“inconsolable parents … dust and forgetting”),
but since even plastic flowers wilt in such severe heat most of the tombs were decorated only with scraps of iron—wreaths made from barrel hoops, metal flowers blooming with rust, and vines of barbed wire. The whole boneyard rattled with the wind like an untuned orchestra.

Back on the road, a few hours of emptiness passed with monotonous speed. In a sandstorm an isolated gas station fed my tank. Moments after pulling out, I spotted what at first seemed a mirage: a lone figure walking by the side of the road in this vast emptiness. The man proved corporeal, yet unreal: he was sunburned and utterly mad, his brain baked by the heat. In a great rush of words he explained that he was patrolling the desert with ten liters of water in his backpack, speaking the secret language of trees and mountains. I tape-recorded him as he babbled about Masonic conspiracies and a Japanese/Nazi/Jewish/communist plot to wreck the world. Looking about us, I could see only hills and sand and red rock. The road was already nearly ruined, so there was little the secret masters of his world could do to make things worse. I gave the madman some bread.

“In Chile, there are only two kinds of people,” he said by way of thanks. “The innocent and the living.”

I
did not have to struggle now to Be Like Che. His lust for self-invention had seeped from the surface of my skin deep into my bones, and I had slowly come to accept that on the road we were beyond all consequence. The childish appeal of military code names and clandestine operations had a clear prologue in the glancing, slightly criminal life of the traveler.

In Arica, just before the Peruvian border, I stopped at the local newspaper in my most ragged clothes, introduced myself—or a version of myself—and wove an elaborate tale about my literary adventures in South America. I posed for a photo while trying to look dashing on the motorbike, and stole some office supplies on the way
out. I’d been particularly careful to downplay the whole Che Guevara angle to my trip; I was tired of living in his shadow, and dammit
my own trip should be good enough for these rubes
.