Chasing Che (26 page)

There were soldiers everywhere. Brown-skinned draftees from highland villages clouded sidewalks outside important buildings, dwarfed by their German automatic rifles. They looked nervous,
which made me nervous. Armored cars were parked in the traffic medians, green and glowering with frightful intent. Peruvians were used to the heavy military presence and went about their business normally. Vendors flooded the stalled traffic at every intersection selling lottery tickets, cigarettes, gum, windshield wipers (I no longer had a windshield to wipe), key chains, old magazines, statuettes of Jesus Christ, and soccer balls.

In 1952, Lima was still the “city of the viceroys,” as Ernesto wrote in his diary. The old city center was a sleepy gem filled with Spanish architecture, elaborate plazas, and arcaded galleries. The manner of the city was exclusively Spanish, the residents part of the white elite who had preserved their way of life without incorporating the rest of Peru. Ernesto called this Lima “the perfect example of a Peru which has never emerged from its feudal, colonial state. It is still waiting for the blood of a truly liberating revolution.”

The
R
word at last. It was only here, in the obsolete seat of the Spanish empire in the Americas, that Ernesto Guevara de la Serna finally had a vision of a “truly liberating” revolution. The vision was not articulated—that would come years later—but the instinct was now present. The social vistas opened by months of travel now gnawed at Ernesto and opened a gap in his life. Something would have to bridge the chasm between what was and what should be. In 1952, the word
revolution
was itself enough.

In the years after Ernesto passed through, the revolution had indeed come to Peru, over and over again, in every imaginable guise. The greatest of the revolutions came into sight after I swept past the presidential palace and up onto the bridge over the filthy Río Rímac; there, as far as the eye could see, were the shantytowns. They were filled with the poor who were driven from their old lives during the course of the intervening decades, pushed out of mountain villages and provincial towns by poverty, by innumerable attempts at leftist revolutions, by the military’s brutal counterrevolutionary sweeps, and by drug traffickers. There was also a pull in the simple lure of city lights, which plucked Peruvians from their devalued mountain lives as quickly as any other people who felt left behind by history.
There was no Doug Tompkins to shield them from the global economy when highland agriculture collapsed under the pressure of cheap imports. Beginning in the 1950s the poor and the ambitious and the lonely and the hungry had flooded down from the hills of Peru, an army of peasant millions who built their shanties in rings around the city, each wave adding another settlement that climbed a notch higher up the slopes of the surrounding hills. The newest immigrants lived in the worst terrain, sometimes the flatlands of the coast but more often the steep slopes of the rocky, useless hills. The wealthy had fled to the suburbs, where they sneered at the
cholos
, and Ernesto’s city of viceroys was now dusty and neglected and ringed by the gaze of its own mestizo bastards.

I crossed the bridge and headed out into this, the true Lima. These communities were called
pueblos jóvenes
, or “young towns,” and it was impossible for a stranger to navigate them. Only the oldest neighborhoods from way back in the 1950s had named streets, and the farther I rode out from the bridge the younger the community, the lower the buildings, the worse the materials, the fewer the landmarks and street signs. A blue VW Beetle rocketed from behind a bus and nearly crushed me. I asked directions continually and followed vague instructions to “go past the tower” and “make a left in five minutes” and “look for the restaurant.” After half an hour of circling I finally stumbled onto the gate in a tall wall that I had been seeking, drove straight in, and killed the engine. There were a dozen buildings inside the wall, mostly small cabins and a few barracks-style buildings that were empty. Old medical supplies and rusting equipment were scattered around. Dogs wandered in profusion.

I had not even dismounted in the dusty courtyard before I was surrounded by children shouting questions. Their faces were bright and they wanted to know where I was from, and then if America was “the last country.” They wiggled their thumbs and asked if I had a Nintendo set on board; was it true that in my country you could rent Nintendo? What kind of cargo was I carrying? And would I like to see where Che Guevara had lived?

The children were the offspring of the lepers Guevara had come
to see. The two Argentines arrived here at the Hospital Guía leper colony in 1952, eager to touch the untouchables. Although they had exaggerated wildly in telling the Chilean newspapers that they were international experts with “three thousand patients” in five different leper hospitals, the truth was impressive enough. Granado had worked for years in various leper colonies, and Guevara genuinely intended to do likewise when he graduated from medical school.

Guevara’s interest in medicine was a chronicle of lost hope. He’d been chasing cures since his own asthma kicked in at the age of four. The first cures were, like those he came to at the end of his life, driven by force of will. The constant sensation of suffocation drives many young asthmatics to develop an almost violent urge to live; according to Dolores Moyano, one of Ernesto’s childhood friends, this explained the young man’s ferocious determination in all physical pursuits. Little Ernesto loved dangerous stunts like walking along fence posts, and had taken up rugby, a British imperial sport, where he earned another of his innumerable nicknames, the Sniper. He was known for playing to the point of collapse, as if willing his body to fail. The psychological effect was the reverse of the physiological one: constantly pushing the limits imposed by his lungs, Ernesto overcame the crippling fear of death that accompanies near suffocation. Testing himself became a habit; pushing back against death a means of validating life. This aggressive response is so common among sufferers that it is sometimes called the asthmatic personality.

His own suffering informed Ernesto’s decision to enter medical school, but it was not the only factor. There was his mother’s cancer, which had prompted him to those gruesome basement experiments on guinea pigs. But he had also inherited an aristocratic idealism from her, a kind of noblesse oblige that required him to address injustice. He enrolled in medical school in Buenos Aires at the age of eighteen, which is normal in Argentina, and raced through his studies with precocious speed, which is not. He made and kept a public promise that he would return from the motorcycle trip and finish his medical degree.

But his rolling research had awoken something in Guevara that
doomed the pursuit of medicine. He never practiced after graduation, except informally. He later said that the leper colonies of Peru had taught him that “the highest forms of human solidarity and loyalty arise among lonely and desperate men,” but his search for that very loyalty led him away from medicine, toward the desperate solidarity of combat. Although he had joined Castro’s invasion of Cuba as the team doctor, he trained with rifles, was a superb shot, and abandoned medicine as soon as he could. On their very first day of battle the rebels were routed and had to run for it. Guevara had to choose in that moment between carrying the medicine or carrying the ammunition, and he chose the latter. He mentioned this anecdote often in speeches to make sure everyone understood what he was saying: he had put down the bandages and picked up the bullets. Violent revolution was just as noble as the healing art—indeed, it
was
a form of healing if it was administered to a sick society by a trained specialist. This was Guevara’s own Life of Guevara.

In a letter home from Lima, Little Ernesto was still recommending less rigorous cures. Writing to his father, he explained that one of the most powerful treatments for leprosy was a firm handshake. He sat with the lepers, took their hands confidently, and played soccer and ate with them. They saw that he had no fear. “This may seem pointless bravado,” he wrote, “but the psychological benefit to these poor people—usually treated like animals—of being treated as normal human beings is incalculable.…”

The same courage was hard for me to summon. The first adult I met was named Serafino, and when we shook hands I blanched visibly at his thumbless grip. He’d lost only the tips of his other fingers to the disease. Like many lepers, Serafino also had a slightly “crazy” expression, the result of nerve degeneration in his face. His eyes were frozen in a permanent squint, and his mouth was locked in a half smile, as if he was letting me in on a joke that I couldn’t get.

Even when Ernesto came here there were medicines to arrest the disease, but poverty is its own illness, and Serafino had grown up untreated. Born in the high sierra sometime in the 1950s—he didn’t
know when—he was first exiled to the San Pablo leper colony in 1961, when he was “the same size as them,” he said, pointing at the cloud of little boys surrounding us. In 1968 he was transferred to Lima to live in the Hospital Guía colony. Although leprosy is not a particularly contagious disease—only a tiny portion of people are susceptible to it—fear, rumor, and a long tradition of discrimination surrounded the lepers as surely as any wall. Leprosy was a life sentence to prison back then.

In 1976 a military government had breached the walls and allowed the lepers to leave if they wanted. There were still eighteen families here. They remained victims of popular loathing outside and knew little of making their way in the world. Here they had a doctor on call, some free food, and no rent for shanties that were as good as most outside the walls.

Despite missing both thumbs and the rest of his fingers past the knuckles, Serafino wielded a mean rake and had a stunning garden to prove it. He grew tomatoes and Chinese onions, and showed me a high sierra corn strain that he was experimenting with. “You have to work or you go crazy,” he said, picking at weeds with his rake. “That’s a big problem here. Not many work. Some go outside to work but most just stay here. I was a carpenter until someone stole my tools, my saw and hammer and so on. That was four years ago, the sons of bitches. Since then I just work on the garden and with my birds.”

There were a half dozen hens, some ducks, and several caged fighting cocks. The cock of the walk was an immense
macho
of Spanish-Chilean stock with black feathers tinged in iridescent green. He had survived six fights to the death and retired to father almost all the other chickens in the little cluster of wire-and-scrap hutches that Serafino tended.

“El Che was here,” Serafino suddenly said. “He slept right over there.” He pointed a half-formed digit toward a blue shack, solidly built but tiny, just a plain square of four walls. I told Serafino that yes, I had heard that Che had spent a week or two here.

“Longer than that,” he replied. “He was here for months, at
least three. He lived right over there in that blue house. He worked in the hospital all day, in the lab, doing research. He only went out at night to meet with people. You know what kind of people. He was organizing his groups for Bolivia. Meetings.”

Every detail of this story was wrong: Ernesto was in Lima for only a couple of weeks; he spent his days touring museums; he wasn’t a guerrilla strategist yet; and he only visited the Hospital Guía briefly as a medical tourist, not a researcher. In the mind of Serafino, however, the story was true because it had to be true. For millions of the dispossessed all over Latin America, there were no other heroes. Che was a necessity, not a possibility; if he hadn’t existed, they would have invented him anyway, and often did. The point of the legend was always the same, and as powerful as it was simple: Che lived and died for us.

We marched over, Serafino trailing his rake in the dust. He opened the front door of the shed, which proved to be empty and clean. It was the size of a cargo elevator. “There was a photo of him on the wall for years, but they took it down in ’72 or ’74,” he said. Yes, I replied, it certainly wasn’t safe to keep a photo of Che on display during those reactionary times. “No,” Serafino countered, “they had to paint the place.” With his frozen expression it was impossible to tell if he was kidding or not.

Dusk had fallen and I thanked the lepers and left in a hurry. I didn’t want to pick my way back through the twisted streets in the dark. On the way to the motorcycle, kicking up clouds of dust with my boots, I looked up. There, gleaming on a hillside in neon splendor, was a statue of Jesus of Nazareth, arms outstretched, gazing down upon the city as champion of the humble.

A
fter my prison visit I had to know if the Shining Path would win its battle. The future of Lima lay in the shantytowns, and I spent two days riding through them with a young leftist who agreed to show me
his own revolution in the making. Our vehicle was less heroic than the motorcycle-Rocinante: David Medianero picked me up at the guest house in a dented blue Volkswagen Beetle belching smoke and lacking a speedometer, gas gauge, or radio, although it did have a tape deck on which he played Zamfir. Medianero was a lapsed communist who had found employment as a field worker for a Peruvian think tank called the Institute for Liberty and Democracy, which is where I had met him while researching an article. I liked the ILD because it was adept at siphoning the coffers of conservative American foundations by talking about free enterprise, then turning around and spending the money on Marxists. On our way out of the city that first morning we stopped at a market long enough to fill the back seat with bananas and the tank with gasoline.

Medianero was in his thirties, a man of the streets who had a poor person’s obsession with neatness and wore a short-sleeved polyester shirt. We headed out toward a rural zone on the far outskirts of Lima, where he was negotiating with some farming cooperatives. The road went out of the city center, passing a thousand more old Volkswagens exactly like our own. We kept the Río Rímac on our left and rode out a highway named for Tupac Amaru, an eighteenth-century rebel who resisted the Spanish. The Movimiento Revolucinario Tupac Amaru, or MRTA, had taken his name, but few spoke it anymore. Following Guevarist tactics, the group was steadily burning out in a series of spectacular defeats. The last of these was a 1996 attack on the Japanese ambassador’s residence during a Christmas party, where the guerrillas slipped into the event disguised as waiters carrying canapés and took more than four hundred hostages. During the long siege the guerrillas issued statements via their web page and spent most of their time watching soap operas. They allowed the hostages to conduct self-improvement seminars on topics like the benefits of kidnapping insurance, and even permitted a noted pollster—himself a captive—to survey the hostages on the first floor (surprisingly, only 87 percent felt that security at the party was “inadequate”). Their postmodern tactics collided with Peru’s premodern
realities: one morning the army burst into the building and killed every single guerrilla. Their leader’s immortal last words—“We’re screwed!”—accurately described MRTA’s prospect these days. The siege eliminated the bulk of their military force, and MRTA took a back seat to the Shining Path, the Maoists who ridiculed Guevarism from the safety of their jail cells.