Chasing Che (25 page)

There were several hundred starving men dressed in rags in the courtyard. “Which one?” I asked the sergeant, who was safe behind his iron gate again. He pointed to the right, and I walked through the crowd trying to look like I did this all the time. The arms and legs of prisoners dangled from windows above, and the men up there hurled abuse and trash down on my head. Wires and laundry lines and
improvised TV antennas tangled the sky overhead. Within seconds I was confronted by a half-naked, shivering man demanding money. I pushed him aside and threaded my way through the rest of these living dead as quickly as possible. Several men in nothing but tattered shorts chased after me, one of them carrying an enormous ship made of matchsticks and shouting prices. I hustled up the first few feet of a cement ramp, made a right where the sergeant had indicated, and came face-to-face with a closed iron grate. A dispassionate woman sat in a chair on the other side of the gate. She betrayed neither surprise nor interest as I let myself in. I had to duck my head beneath an arch of red hammer and sickle flags to enter, and when I stood up again a greeting committee of bright-faced young women in flowery blouses and slacks burst into applause and called out “Welcome, comrade!” They all shook my hand firmly, one after another, and then began to sing:

They finished with a two-line chant:

The room was clean. Red banners declared
LONG LIVE THE PEOPLE’S WAR
. Portraits of Marx, Mao, and Lenin were posted on the walls beside quotes from each. More slogans urged me to remember the Four Phases of Struggle, to Build World Maoism, and to Boil All Drinking Water.

Because of threats to their families, the prison guards had long ago ceded control of the block to Shining Path, and the guerrilla girls now lived independently. They cooked their own food, even raising
rabbits, and days in A-1 were tightly scheduled around exercise, ideology classes, singing, mural painting, and military drills.

I borrowed a pen from a cooperative young woman and dug some paper out of my sock, where I had hidden it from the sergeant. A tall woman led me to a table in the main common room of the cell block. She had straight dark hair, Caucasian features, and an air of elegance. While attendants buzzed about her, bringing tea and bowls of fruit, she insisted in a clear, educated Spanish that she was “just an ordinary prisoner, someone with knowledge of the situation.” I asked how was she chosen as a leader.

“There are no leaders in the Shining Path,” she replied, fingering her glass of tea. “We are all equal.” Looking at the attendants hovering over her, I pointed out that she had some kind of authority. Was she elected democratically to her position? She glared at me. “The best are chosen,” she said.

Over lunch of rice and an oily stew in plastic bowls she quizzed me in detail about my politics and recent events. What was the attitude of Americans toward the Shining Path? Was the IRA a revolutionary organization or “merely” democratic? Was the Gulf War directed by American oil companies? Was the Chinese economy growing or collapsing? In exchange for my vague answers, she explained that Shining Path was the last bastion of true communism in the world, of course: Fidel Castro was a lackey of the United States; China was run by capitalist-imperialist dogs; communism collapsed not in 1989 but in 1975, when Mao died. From Tiananmen Square to the capitals of Eastern Europe, she explained, the masses were ready for a violent revolution. Peru’s other major guerrilla group, the MRTA, were not the Marxists they claimed but in fact a group of capitalists. “We have no relations with them,” she said. “They get support from Cuba. We consider the Cubans revisionists.”

As I picked at the small bones in my stew—rabbit, I hoped—the torrent of dogma continued in a vocabulary that I could hear but not comprehend. Che Guevara was a revisionist because he compromised with the retrograde forces of class domination, whatever that
meant. He was a tepid captive of his own upbringing, this woman told me, a “bourgeois revisionist” and “servant of capitalism.” Her words followed a rigid internal logic that could not be translated to the world beyond these walls except through the blazing purity of violent action. Whether this logic made any sense or not was irrelevant: the language itself was the point. Revolutionary consciousness preempted and surpassed reality. In Peru, theory was fact.

Lunch came to an abrupt end when a pair of antennae emerged from my rice. Wriggling legs soon followed, property of a small cockroach who had apparently been waiting in my bowl when the rice arrived. My guide apologized and suggested a walk.

It was a prisoner’s stroll, up and down the ample courtyard attached to A–1. The walls were twenty-five feet high, providing just enough room for the huge murals of the revolution and its patron saints that the women painted. An enormous picture of Chairman Mao held pride of place behind a basketball hoop, the great helmsman beaming down benignly with his usual Cheshire cat smile. At another spot he was shown towering over a tiny column of Chinese peasants.
FORWARD TO VICTORY IN THE PEOPLE’S WAR
, read the slogan at his feet. Another mural showed the Shining Path’s leader, known as President Gonzalo or the Fourth Sword. He was sitting at a desk, a pudgy figure with thick glasses. Behind him were portraits of the previous three swords, Marx, Lenin, and Mao. There were six rabbit hutches under the murals.

A basketball game took over the courtyard. The women formed into two loose teams of about a dozen each, and ran up and down the yard tossing the ball haplessly and missing basket after basket. Chairman Mao watched from right behind the far hoop, and sometimes the ball would bounce off his chin. After half an hour there was still no apparent score. While my guide dutifully cheered the players I slipped out of sight, ducking through the lunch room and ascending the first set of stairs I saw. I crept down a corridor, peering into empty cell after empty cell. There were bunk beds and quilts, and the moist walls were decorated with family photographs and magazine pictures of Swiss mountains and Chinese maidens. I quickly checked
under the thin mattresses for weapons or any other secrets, but there was nothing. I went up another flight silently and eavesdropped on a conversation among three women guerrillas. They were discussing sewing.

Soon I heard the heavy trod of my guide’s feet on the stairs, and she found me staring innocently from the top floor over the courtyard. She was angry that I had slipped off, but I blabbered about needing a fresh breeze and followed her downstairs. She ushered me across the main prison courtyard and handed me off to a greeter in cell block B–4, where the three hundred male Shining Path prisoners lived. It proved to be simply a larger slice of liberated territory, run on the same principles as the women’s section. The courtyard was bigger but also decorated with murals. In place of a basketball court there was an open-air bedroom, and about fifty men dozed or idled on cots in the shade of sheets strung overhead. I walked down the aisles, feeling the prisoners carefully avoiding my gaze. Eventually I spotted two young men who acknowledged my presence. They were César, nineteen, and Javier, twenty-two, both serving long sentences for terrorism. César was handsome and shy, but Javier recited doctrine aggressively. “Of course we know we are going to win. The masses reject the government,” he said. He spoke easily of feudalism, mobilization, and the means of production. Marxist logic explained everything: “You are either for the revolution or you are against it. If you are against exploitation, you are for violent revolution. When I realized that point, I joined the party.” He went on to explain the Four Phases of Struggle: (1) violent revolution, (2) class struggle, (3) the dictatorship of the proletariat, and (4) the struggle against revisionism. Javier and César immediately fell into an argument about whether we were in stage one or two, which just proved we were in stage four. We talked for a while about the Two Antagonistic Paths and the struggle against “parliamentary cretinism,” known elsewhere as elections.

Then Javier leaned in close and lowered his voice. “Just tell me this,” he said to me. “Who has the nicer murals, us or the women?”

On the way out, the tall woman reappeared and suggested
strongly that a stop at the guerrilla gift shop would be appropriate. It was in the stairwell, with the gifts spread over a small table. There were various handicrafts made by the prisoners; the money went “to further the revolution,” the man running the table explained. I looked at some hairbands for women, made of leather and wood. The leather was carved with a scene of the globe exploding, with tooled flames shooting out of the various continents. There were earrings, made from coins stamped with a portrait of President Gonzalo and then decorated with microscopic slogans (
LONG LIVE WORLD MAOISM!
). I narrowly resisted buying a cloth shopping bag embroidered with a hammer and sickle (not the kind of item you wanted to carry around Lima) and instead bought two small paintings. The first showed Shining Path guerrillas wiping out an army garrison. The guerrillas were shooting some of the soldiers and then lecturing the survivors with clenched fists (in fact, the Shining Path almost never took prisoners). In the second painting, the glorious future had arrived. The sun set on an idealized Andean village, and happy peasants were cooking and raising their clenched fists in the air. A few of them carried rifles on their backs or large communist banners in their hands, but it was otherwise a peaceful scene, as simple as the childish hopes behind it.

The guerrilla running the stand wanted four dollars for a miniature diorama. As the tall woman looked on disapprovingly, I bargained him down to three and took it. The model was about four inches by four inches, made of cloth and painted paper in a folk-art style. It was a street scene, and showed three guerrillas machine-gunning somebody as he stepped out of his limousine. The limo was beautifully done. It was made entirely of carefully folded and glued paper. It even had tinted windows. The dolls were made of thread wrapped around wire and painted. The guns were wire.

The tall woman lowered a finger right in among the figures to show me the poor sucker who dared to thwart the Shining Path. He was bald and wore a gray suit, and his body was tumbling out the open door of the car. Lovingly painted rivulets of blood ran down the two-centimeter body. “This is a member of the reaction,” she said.
“He is now a victim of the people’s war.” Then she pointed to a tiny doll on the fringe of the scene, its fist raised in the air. “This is a member of the public,” she said. “He is shown supporting us.” This was the only time I saw her smile.

We parted with an egalitarian handshake, and at the exit to B–4, I paused to watch the main courtyard, looking for a chance to cross. César appeared and offered to walk me to safety. We strolled out into the sun together, given a wide berth by the regular prisoners. César told me that before prison he had been a student at San Marcos University in Lima, a notorious recruiting ground for the Shining Path. He was arrested for bombing a store, and he hoped to go back to school after the revolution. With his slim good looks and stylish clothes, he looked as though he could be out on the street chasing girls. With a touch of shyness, he mentioned the “immense love” of the people for the revolution. “They love us very much,” he said dreamily. “
Muchísimo.
”

I asked him if his bomb had killed anyone. He shrugged his shoulders. “It was a capitalist store,” he said.

Back inside the fortified guardhouse the darkness enfolded me again, welcome this time. The fat sergeant reappeared and handed me everything I had given him, including the watch and my money down to the dollar. A handful of young guards gathered around to look at my souvenirs. The Chinese captain came over and put on a broad smile. “Men, look how childish it is,” he said. He held up the tiny diorama, and the guards ran their eyes over the little figures with machine guns and the street covered with blood. I showed them the painting of Peruvian soldiers being shot and blown up by heroic guerrillas. The soldiers laughed at first, but not as much as the captain wanted.

I
n five years some things had changed in Lima—but others had not, like the traffic. When I rode Kooky up the Avenida de Garcilaso de la Vega a few days after my arrival it was clogged with sputtering vehicles.
Garcilaso was a sad historical figure known as “the Chronicler.” Part of the very first mestizo generation, he was born (he claimed) to a Spanish conquistador and an Inca noblewoman. He wandered Peru for most of his life, composing a massive letter to the king of Spain that detailed the economic and political construction of Inca society, the founding myths and the glorious lessons that the Andes could teach Spain. Garcilaso was utterly loyal to the Spanish Crown and believed with a touching innocence that His Majesty would end all the suffering and violence of the conquest if only it were drawn to his attention. Garcilaso even illustrated the book himself; the final sad drawing showed Garcilaso as an old man, trudging along with his book and his loyal dog following behind. He looked like Peru’s first travel writer. In the end the king never saw the chronicle; it was discovered only centuries later, too late to rescue the world it described.

The old city center lay at the far end of Garcilaso’s namesake avenue, and I wove in and out of the gridlocked microbuses and picked my way between Volkswagen beetles spewing black smoke, the inescapable taste of Lima. The microbuses were
colectivo
taxis that cost a few pennies and ran on fixed routes around the city. Each one featured a surly, macho driver and a “door boy,” a young teenager charged with collecting fares and opening and closing doors. They were a particular hazard in my narrow maneuvers because the door boys delighted in hanging far out into traffic, shouting destinations. The competition among the
colectivos
was intense and profit margins were razor thin, so the drivers fought a kind of war against one another, furiously swerving toward any potential passenger, cutting each other off, and flinging their battered vehicles into any open space that appeared in the roadway, including oncoming lanes where possible. The Peruvian papers were delighting in the story of a local soccer team called Sporting Cristál that had been en route to practice when a microbus cut them off. The team jumped out and beat the opposition driver senseless. Attendance at their games immediately went up.