Chasing Che (29 page)

The road dropped, but only slightly, and then it began to snow. It had been eighty degrees when I left Lima at breakfast, two and a half hours before. At three degrees per thousand feet, at least forty-five degrees of warmth had fallen behind. Given the way the snow was already sticking to the ground, it was close to freezing here.

The snow was a surprise and a problem, though it shouldn’t have been a surprise, since snow was right there in Ernesto’s notes on his own first ascent into high Peru:

My gloves were one of the things that had fallen by the wayside, a month ago in some desert canteen. I rode on, hopeful that the snow was just a momentary squall, as my fingers turned cold, then icy, and finally to ice. The road was now white and slick, and I was busy cursing that idiot Thoreau when a truck coming the other way around a curve lost control and slid wide, turning sideways as it came toward me. There was plenty of time to consider this event—I was riding slowly as a precaution—but none to act, since a quick turn or hard braking was out of the question on the iced pavement. I remember thinking how ridiculous it would be to end up splashed like a bug
across the side of the only perfectly white truck in South America. At the last moment the truck’s tires bit again on a patch of clear pavement and the whole vehicle shot past me, dousing me in slush.

I pulled over, but there was no point to it. There was not a single tree to shelter me, nor any building. There wasn’t even a rock large enough to sit behind. I stood there for a while, beaten by the snow as it turned slowly to hail and began drumming on the gas tank. It was pointless to stay, so I went on again, and gradually the road descended and the air warmed and the hail turned back to rain and then stopped and the sun uncoiled its rays and touched the floor of the long valley. There was corn as far as the eye could see, and the road dried to black and I picked up speed. I passed a farm cooperative whose tall front gate was emblazoned with a slogan:

This was the law of the Incas, the moral code they had exported up and down the Andes during their five hundred years of conquest. It was virtually their entire legal structure, and all it said was “DO NOT STEAL; DO NOT LIE; DO NOT BE LAZY.”

With these three rules the Incas had become the Romans of South America. Like the Romans, they were predominantly interested in power and had a strong pragmatic streak. The wealth of the empire was its people, who belonged to the Inca (as the supreme ruler was known) himself. The various tribes of the Andes were subdued and then integrated into an utterly authoritarian system of communal property and group identity. Princes of a defeated people were sometimes taken to Cuzco, the capital and “navel of the world,” to serve as hostages and be coopted by Quechua culture. They built a network of roads from Colombia to Chile and from the Pacific coast to the Amazon jungle (an area equivalent to Italy, Switzerland, France, Belgium, and Holland combined); they developed practical engineering and abstract mathematics; they built fortresses and temples;
and they created a vast network of storehouses for surplus weapons, clothing, and food. Although they lacked writing and found no use for the wheel, their roads and irrigation systems were proof of their sophisticated civilization, especially given that they had to overcome the most seismically active region in the world. Built to standardized widths, with regulated post houses along the routes and engineered bridges and supports where necessary, the 12,000-mile road network was the basis of their empire and connected the four quarters of the known world to the imperial seat. The roads sped messengers across their realm so quickly that the Inca Atahuallpa, ruler of the north, could eat fish fresh from the ocean. When strange, pale-faced men with beards landed on his coast in 1532, Atahuallpa learned of it almost immediately.

The strange men were a tiny band of impoverished noblemen and mercenary adventurers led by an illegitimate swineherd named Francisco Pizarro. The Spaniards encountered an empire of great wealth, but one also divided and weakened by a recent civil war between half brothers who each aspired to the throne. The runners told Atahuallpa, who was winning this civil war from a base in the north, that the odd foreigners carried magic “fire sticks” that could kill a man from a great distance, but the invaders were so small in number—just 179 men—that Atahuallpa felt they could not possibly threaten his kingdom of millions. Eager for allies in war against his half brother’s army in the south, and perhaps hoping that Pizarro was the god Viracocha predicted in Inca legends, Atahuallpa agreed to meet the newcomers. Pizarro and his men approached on foot, feigning fear, and then ripped the ruler of the known world from his bier. In the hands of 179 men, Toledo steel, gunpowder, and horses were more than enough to overcome thousands of Inca soldiers who had left their spears and war clubs behind as a gesture of peace. In a moment, the supreme ruler was a hostage and the Spanish seed had been planted in the Andes. The catalog of cruelties and injustices and plunderings, of battles, murders, feuds, reprisals, betrayals, and rapes that flowed from this conquest was so extensive it defeated even a lifelong chronicler like the itinerant Garcilaso de la Vega. The
results of this forced marriage of cultures—Andean and Iberian, polytheistic and Christian, static and dynamic—were all around me, the aftershocks still rippling through the mountains like a buried temblor.

It was Ernesto, of course, who conceived a plan right here in these mountains for putting an end, once and for all, to the world that had been born that day in 1532. But I had not yet come to that chapter in his diary. There were still a few hills between me and his revelation.

T
he day ran out before the pavement did. I reached Huancayo not by lunch but well after nightfall, some eight hours behind schedule and only halfway to Ayacucho. The town was dark but lively, the streets full of people buying and selling beneath unlit street lamps. The crowds were a sign that the guerrillas were weak or entirely absent from the zone now. I found a room in a cheap guest house and pushed the motorbike through the front door and into the interior courtyard. Although I’d been reluctant to do this at first, South American hotel keepers considered it the most normal thing in the world. They often insisted that I store the bike at night in the lobby, or the courtyard, or even my bedroom if it would fit, which it usually wouldn’t. Certainly nothing as valuable as a motorcycle—“And what a motorcycle,
Señor
, we have never seen anything like it!”—should be left on the street.

Over dinner I read in the local paper that thirty terrorists had been transferred yesterday to the prison here in Huancayo. They were a mix of Senderistas and members of MRTA, twenty-seven men and three women. Their trials would be in a secret military court where the judges wore wool ski masks to conceal their identities. I had a brief heart attack when I saw a headline on a back page of the newspaper,
TOMB OF FIGHTER DISCOVERED
, but it turned out to be a seventeen-hundred-year-old tomb, containing the mummy of a warrior from the Moche culture of northern Peru.

I slept lightly in the thin mountain air, and when I woke up
Kooky was waiting loyally in the courtyard just outside my door. I stared for a while at the bike, wondering how far we could go. I was turning south now, away from home. There was always the temptation of the road north, of the long trip through Central America and Texas and then the speedy highways of the East Coast. Guevara and Granado had gone north after they were done with Peru; nearing the end of the trip, Che was so exhausted that he wrote only a few pages of notes on their final two weeks in South America as the pair flew from a small Amazonian town to Colombia and then ventured into Venezuela. Granado found a job at a hospital there; they said goodbye, and Che flew home on a plane belonging to someone he knew in Argentina. One of the oddest details of this trip was not even mentioned in the diaries. The plane developed engine trouble during a stopover in Miami; instead of a few hours, the young Guevara was forced to spend a month in Florida, living on credit at a cheap hotel owned by an Argentine. There wasn’t a single entry about this part of his trip; he’d recorded no impressions of the country that would come to dominate his thinking. It was a lost episode—and a tantalizing mystery. According to friends, he’d spent the time going to the beach. What else had Guevara seen and done for a month? Did he go to the track, or flirt with girls, or consider the implications of the American way of life? Did he hate the swampy heat and the low-slung architecture of pre-Cuban Miami? He’d said at the start of the trip that he was heading for North America, but having reached his goal he was silent. Whatever had happened to him during that last month was lost, and deliberately. When the plane was repaired he flew home to Argentina and the future course he had mapped in South America. It was as if the United States did not—could not—exist in any actual state for him. America was a state of mind.

In the early morning in Huancayo I missed all the things he might have hated about us—the wide highways lined with doughnut shops, the fat cars, the endless entertainment, the unspectacular, unheroic, grandly petty life of prosperity and wraparound comfort. Life on the road was spare and beautiful, full of clarity and delight, but when I roused myself at dawn in Huancayo I could not help but
consider the last chance I would have to turn away from all this. I inserted the key in the dashboard and turned it to the right. The green light glowed, and I tried not to think too much as I headed south toward Ayacucho.

A
police officer flagged me down on the outskirts of town and explained that for reasons of national security I had to give him a lift. He had a gun and a badge, so I lowered the rear foot pegs and let him climb on board. We rode south, and the pavement ended abruptly after a mile. It was all dirt from there on. The bike felt heavy with a passenger, and we bounced up and down on the dusty track that my map called the Pan-American Highway. After a while we came to the police barracks, a one-story house. The cop got down and stood there in his baggy, worn-out uniform, watching me drive away.

Ayacucho was about a hundred miles southeast of me, the same distance I had planned to cover yesterday afternoon. The country here was dry and fairly flat, but as the morning wore on the road grew twistier and the valleys tighter. The traffic declined to a few short trucks per hour, with the occasional microbus loaded with peasants. There were no villages for a long time, but you could tell there were people about because of the neatly cultivated plots of potatoes on the hillsides. The climate changed every few miles, dry and hot in one valley, foggy in the next, then dry, then rain. If I killed the engine and listened carefully I could hear goats and sheep up higher somewhere, and once I passed a dead horse rotting on the roadside and later a single, live llama chewing a mouthful of grass with dromedarian dignity. The herders of these animals were startled children of seven or nine years standing barefoot in the potato fields, their heads wrapped in pointed wool caps and their eyes fixed on the motorcycle as it passed.

The Andes are young mountains and have not had time to melt into the gentle valleys and smooth slopes that made my beloved Blue Ridge of Virginia seem so welcoming. The heavens worked on the Andes as fast as they could, however, and now the river on the valley
floor was wild and red with earth. The narrow plain around it was heavily cultivated.

I was nearly run off the road by a truck whose bumper declared, in florid colors,
YOU CAN LOOK BUT YOU CAN’T TOUCH
.

I was trying to make good time and raced through a series of villages, but I skidded to a stop in one called Acostambo. My map showed the road going to the right when clearly it went to the left. I forged out of town to investigate and immediately came up behind a patrol of Peruvian soldiers dressed in black uniforms of a type I had never seen before. These were not the same ill-equipped, half-trained troops I had seen in Lima. The patrol was spread out in two columns on each side of the road, with enough space between the men to keep casualties down in an ambush. Each man carried a shiny automatic rifle. The young lieutenant was leading sensibly from the rear. He ran a cold eye over my papers.

“We’re looking for a few bandits,” he said.

“Where?”

“Just up ahead.”

I turned around and rode back into the village. The people wore a mixture of traditional and Western clothes, and many were barefoot. At the general store, I bought some gasoline, which was measured out in an old coffee cup and poured sloppily over my bike by a girl of about twelve. The engine was very hot, and when the gas ran down the outside of the tank and dripped onto the cylinders I expected an explosion, but nothing happened, just like the previous forty or fifty times I’d spilled gasoline onto the hot engine. I took over from the twelve-year-old and finished spooning the gas myself, and once Kooky was fed I ate a lunch of soup in a canteen buzzing with flies. I was stalling.

The town mechanic came around to look at the motorbike, and then another group of soldiers in the odd black uniforms pulled up in a jeep. They were young and enthusiastic and wanted to know all about the bike and where I’d been and where I was going. They told me not to worry about the
bandidos
, who hadn’t killed anyone in over a week. The last incident had been on the high road, and all I had to
do was stick to the low road. Their sergeant examined my map with growing curiosity—“This is all wrong,” he said—and then took a piece of paper from the canteen and drew me a beautiful map of where the road really went. The high road, which ran at thirteen thousand feet, was sometimes preferable, he said, because it was drier, but last week a bus driver had been pulled off his vehicle and shot. It was probably just robbery, he explained, not guerrillas, although the two ways of life were so intermingled now—as the final, desperate columns of Shining Path robbed to stay alive and the robbers pretended to be guerrillas to deflect blame—that who could tell anyway. The important thing was to stay off the high road.