Chasing Che (35 page)

A
kibutznik
who missed his motorcycle offered to buy Kooky on
the spot but settled for a free ride around the plaza. He went around and around, crying out “
Thank you!
” each time he passed, while I sat on a bench and had a ten-year-old bootblack clean my footwear. He carried a little wooden box filled with polish and rags, and scrubbed ferociously. I asked him who Che Guevara was. “Who?” he replied. I ate pizza in a five-hundred-year-old temple and later that night drank beer in an African disco thrumming on top of some old Incan building. There were beautiful women everywhere; I fell for a Dane, and then three different Quebecois girls in a row. At 4
A.M.
, entirely beyond myself, I scrambled up a hill and then down an obscure cobblestone alley and then stood there in the dark, running my fingers around the edges of the twelve-angle stone, a huge and precisely fitted masterpiece of Incan engineering that was replicated on the label of Cusqueño beer.

Very late the next morning I calmed down and went looking for 1952. My first stop was a battered doorway in a collapsing Spanish home on Márquez Street, which led to the studios of Martín Chambí, the photographer laureate of Peru. Chambí had patrolled the mountains, villages, and society weddings of the province with an enormous bellows camera and a box full of glass plate negatives. He died in 1973, but his elderly daughter, Julia—dressed in a checked wool skirt and jacket, wizened and tottering but still vain enough to dye her hair brown and conceal her age from me—answered the door. She was glad for a visitor, and led me through a series of wooden portals to a small dim room in the back lined with filing cabinets. These were the archives, tens of thousands of images. Most of his pictures were either landscapes printed as postcards (his early series on Machu Picchu helped popularize the ruins; it took him a month each way on foot to reach the site) or formal portraits for the wealthy. Yet his silvery, composed images transcended their antique appearance and local content to offer a genuine vision of the human condition. (“It is dangerous to dwell too long on the documentary value of his photographs,” Vargas Llosa warned.) Chambí’s portraits of the Cuzco demimonde alternated between sympathy and malice, while his eye for emotion—in a mistreated street urchin, a group of arrogant
cavalrymen, or a coca-chewing peasant working a foot plow—was universal.

I told Julia Chambí that I wanted to see the Cuzco of 1952. “Oh,” she said, slightly disappointed. Her father’s best works were from the ’20s and ’30s; he seemed to lose his bearings right around the time Ernesto and Alberto passed through town. She began rifling through the cabinets, squinting and plucking at the brown Agfa envelopes, each containing a single five-by-seven-inch glass negative. She held one of the negatives up toward the window. “Ah, here it is,” she said, and passed it to me. It was called “After the Cuzco Earthquake,” and it showed a front loader clearing a street of rubble while men in shapeless felt hats watched.

The earthquake struck two years before Ernesto and Alberto arrived, but they saw its legacy everywhere: their diaries noted the broken frames of paintings, the doors hanging crooked on their hinges, and particularly the toppled bell towers of the Chapel of Belén. Ernesto wrote that the chapel “lay like a dismembered animal on the hillside.”

I asked Julia if she remembered the quake. “Of course,” she said. “I was sitting down to lunch with my father in the old house. I’d won a tennis tournament that morning, and he was so proud. I’d just taken a sip of beer from the trophy cup when it happened. It was two-fifteen in the afternoon.” The house shook. Buildings around town collapsed. The church spires plunged to the ground. The streetcar tracks—and here she plucked another negative from the stack, showing exactly this scene—bent in crazed wiggles through the plaza. The photos were filled with barefoot, filthy children, and incompletely whitewashed homes, and pompous magistrates in ribbons and cornaded hats, and everywhere peasants in beautiful homespun clothes. Perhaps it was the effect of the black-and-white images, but it seemed a world of simple gestures and closed façades. Even an earthquake did not penetrate the exterior of these stoic mountain people, although their grim, unsmiling expressions betrayed a subtle amazement at the world.

After an hour of holding negatives up to the window and flipping
through boxes of loose prints, I rose to leave. “Wait outside for me a moment, please,” she said, and I stepped into the anteroom. She didn’t close the door behind me, and I could see her fussing with something in one of the cabinets. She emerged with an old negative envelope, which she handed to me as she pushed me out the front door.

I turned uphill one block, made a right, and collided with a man coming around a corner. He was chewing coca. His clothes were entirely homespun, from the top of his pointy wool cap down to his knees, where his crumbling pants ended. A moment ago I had been looking at this same avenue in a glass negative; like some reverse development, my mind overlaid a black-and-white image on the colored world in front of me. Here, where the traffic divider now sat, there was once a row of dirt with trees. There, on the far hillside now settled with one-story homes, there should have been an empty slope.

Standing on the corner, I opened the envelope Julia Chambí had put in my hands. The picture slid out, a simple contact print of a five-by-seven-inch negative exposed at sunset one cold afternoon. It was a picture of a man in a white lab coat astride a beautiful V-twin Indian motorcycle, one of the legendary and extinct American brands. The rider had a jaunty smile on his face and a pair of goggles over his checked wool cap. A Peruvian flag on the handlebars snapped in the breeze, and his feet were on the pegs as though he were riding past the cobblestones and whitewashed buildings, past the barefoot boys who stared at the Indian with the expression I had seen a hundred times. When I looked closer I saw that the kickstand was down; he was posing for the photographer.

I turned the print over. On the back, she had written, “First Motorcycle in Cuzco, Marco Pérez Yañez, 1930.”

I
n exchange for all my worldly possessions I had been given a small slip of paper with an address, and I rode Kooky down the gentle slope of the city, past the old Temple of the Sun, its walls now the
base of the Santo Domingo Church, until I reached the cheap districts. There were neither foreigners here nor things they wanted to see, just ordinary, modern, struggling Peruvians.

The address led me to a garden- and home-supply store filled with bags of cement and faucets, everything coated with the gentle dust of commerce. Tito, my curly-haired savior, was behind the counter. He led me upstairs to his apartment and prepared a pot of tea. He turned out to be a former journalist; his wife owned the garden business. He handed over the two black cases and the backpack that normally rode strapped across the back seat, tied to each saddlebag. Everything was as I had last seen it, down to the enormous hole burned in the back of one case by the rubbing of the tire, and the mud that had entered inside, coating my clothes.

Tito listened to the story of my trip and sat back in his chair. He adopted my cause as his own. There were people I would have to see, he said. He would arrange everything. Also, since my saddlebag needed fixing, he would take care of that. He had a friend who had a friend who did these things. Probably I also needed a better hotel—he knew several. Also, if I needed any garden or home supplies, he could get me a discount. There were women, too, who—

I had to flee the place before he handed over the keys to the pickup or tried to marry me to one of his cousins. I spent the afternoon in a garage he recommended on Manco Capac Avenue, surrounded by preening truck drivers who wanted to trade their transcontinental rigs for mine. They bought me the worst lunch I have ever succeeded in eating, but it was a beautiful, warm afternoon, and we stood around in the sun, a bunch of lonely men talking about tools. The sparks from the welding of the luggage rack zinged into the mud with a satisfying sizzle.

I
t took a couple of days, but eventually Tito arranged for me to meet with Dr. Yuri Valer, an old survivor straight from the pages of
The
Secret Life of Alejandro Mayta
. Valer was a handsome, chubby lawyer and the top bureaucrat of the Cuzco city government. He wore a sweater vest and square glasses as he received me in his tilted, creaky office in an old wood building. Mounds of papers tied in crazed bundles covered his desk and were stacked on chairs, side tables, filing cabinets, and anywhere else flat, and there were five boxes that said
IN
but only one that said
OUT
.

“Peru used to be famous for Machu Picchu,” he said as we shook hands. “Now it’s famous for guerrillas.”

You had to offer people a way out of their past, in case it was a bad one. I began by asking Valer if he knew about the early years of the sixties, when the area around Cuzco had been crawling with various vanguard leaders in search of a movement to lead. Among them were Javier Heraud, a prize-wining poet from the upper class; the son of a prosperous land owner named de la Puente; and Hugo Blanco, the son of a lawyer. Blanco was the most credible of these would-be revolutionaries, since he was an agronomist who lived among the peasants and spoke Quechua. Sometimes they called him the Che of Peru, but his Trotskyist guerrilla cell had failed and Blanco went first to jail and then into exile.

“Of course,” Valer said, shifting in his seat a bit, “I know something about it.” Picking his words carefully, he said that he was “part of the movement” but never a guerrilla. He was
almost
a guerrilla, he said. Back in 1959 he went out for drinks with a friend who had just returned from Cuba. At first his friend was full of cryptic statements (“The era of words is over, the era of deeds has begun!”), but after a few more beers he coughed up the plan. Despite the fact they were Peruvians, he and some others were going to Argentina to launch a guerrilla revolution, just like Castro and Che had done in the Sierra Maestra, the mountains of eastern Cuba.

“He kept insisting, ‘We’re going, we’re going,’ but I didn’t join him. I told him, ‘I’m not joining you, but not because I’m afraid.’ A month or two later”—and,
crack
, Valer slapped a palm on a bundle of papers—“the group appeared.”

A few months later,
crack
, they were all dead. That was the history of the Uturuncos, those first guerrillas to rise in Argentina. “We were just drinking,” Valer mused quietly.

He could not remain sad at the recollection, though, because it had been such a remarkable time. From 1962 to 1964 he had been a top officer of the peasants’ union in the Cuzco area. He wasn’t a peasant, but on the other hand he’d done his law school thesis on peasant organizations. The big issue at that time—as at most times in Latin America—was land distribution. Some of the
haciendas
, or farms, had existed in an almost unchanged condition since their founding by the conquistadors four centuries before. The peasants were nothing more than serfs; rich families owned thirty-five thousand acres at a clip. Cuzco Province was a hothouse of land invasions, evictions, seizures, and violent demonstrations. The union, a nexus of peasants and intellectuals, became the recruiting center for Hugo Blanco’s budding war. I asked Valer what motivated Blanco to turn to the guerrilla path.

“It’s evident Ernesto Guevara had a tremendous influence on him,” he said. “The influence of the Cuban revolution was tremendous at that time. There were three leaders—Fidel Castro, Ernesto Guevara, and that other one who died in a plane crash. The greatest influence, more than Fidel, was Guevara.” Valer talked on for a while about the man he first called “Ernesto Guevara,” then after a few minutes “Che Guevara,” and then “Che,” and finally “El Che.” His enthusiasm for the old days crested as Valer stood behind his desk, wagging his finger in the air while reenacting Guevara’s 1961 speech in Uruguay, a blistering assault on John Kennedy’s new Alliance for Progress aid program. Just months after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, with the hemisphere rapidly polarizing, Kennedy had proposed a $100 billion development program (about five times the size of the Marshall Plan for Europe) designed to counteract the growing influence of the Cuban revolution across Latin America. In reply, Che stood up—all the other delegates spoke while seated—and delivered one of his most famous orations:

Valer’s dramatic reenactment of the scene was interrupted by a young aide with a paper that needed signing, and the bureaucrat plopped back into his chair with a thud, struggling to regain the breath he had lost over thirty-five years. When he turned back to me, his line of thought had become more personal.

“We had a kind of fever,” he said wistfully. “A guerrilla fever. Groups sprang up in all parts of Latin America, and here in Peru. The theory behind most of them—no, all of them—was Che’s.”

He rattled off the names of Guevara’s books—
Guerrilla Warfare, Man and Socialism in Cuba
, and
Episodes of the Revolutionary War
. I let the list hang there for a moment, and then asked if it was really the theories—doctrines about mountain
focos
and the stages of socialism—that had created that fever. “No,” Valer said. “It was El Che. He was a symbol. A symbol of a new type of leader, of a new era. He wasn’t a bureaucrat or a union leader or a politician but a romantic type. He crossed from country to country, traveling by foot or horse or motorcycle like you, getting to know all of Latin America.”