Chasing Che (36 page)

It was dark outside now, and Valer made it visibly clear that the assigned time for our interview was up. I rose reluctantly and we swapped business cards. I was about to leave when Valer spoke. “He was here, you know. In Abancay.” I told Valer that Guevara had been all over Peru, and showed him
Notas de Viaje
, with its pages and pages on Cuzco.

“I’ve never heard of all this,” he said, flipping through the book. “I’m startled this hasn’t been seen or discussed here in Peru. Startled.”
He asked to borrow the diary and told me he would return it soon with something else that I should have. I asked what it was. “I’ll give you the names of some people you should talk to,” he said. “People who know more about this than I do.”

F
oreigners were required to travel to Machu Picchu on a special tourist train that rode out each morning and came back the same evening. With a few days to kill while awaiting my next interviews, however, I decided to attempt the same, slower itinerary that Guevara had followed. At dawn the next day I laid siege to the jovial station master, burying him in flattery and waving around a set of expired Peruvian press credentials while claiming to be someone important. In a few minutes I was ensconced with about a hundred Indians in a carriage of the inexpensive, slow, and crowded local train. We seesawed up a set of switchbacks above Cuzco and then began rumbling slowly down the Urubamba River Valley. Over three hours the valley grew steeper and narrower until the railroad had to cling to a reinforced shelf along the side of a cliff, with the brown water tumbling beneath my window. We stopped for a while so that the crew could clear a small slide of black earth from the track, and the Indians used the interruption to buy boiled corn on the cob and roasted guinea pig on a stick. Ernesto’s scatological eye could not help noticing that the petticoats of the Indian women were “veritable warehouses of excrement.”

I debarked at Aguas Calientes, the town nearest the site, and at 7:30 the next morning caught the workers’ bus up to the mountaintop. We debarked at a hotel built discreetly into the hillside. When they arrived here in the parking lot, Ernesto and Alberto joined a pickup soccer game with some of the hotel players. The manager was so impressed (“I admitted in all humility to having played first division football in Buenos Aires,” Ernesto wrote) that he offered these eminent Argentines free room and board while the hotel was empty.

Like Ernesto, I played goalkeeper, but it was too early to find a
match on some narrow ancient terrace. The busboys and porters went to change into their uniforms, and I set off on foot to see the ruins. When I topped the last rise between the hotel and the site I stopped. Ten thousand people had lived here, and despite the orderly walls and careful terraces, it was still the setting that overawed me. High on a saddle between peaks, the empty city sat awash in a sea of summits and wrapped in a roaring river so deep below that its foaming rapids sounded like a distant breeze.

At Machu Picchu, Ernesto confidently dove into the archaeological debate over the nature of the lost city, pointing out that the lack of defenses facing Cuzco showed that the city was built during a time of confident expansion, not as a refuge from the Spaniards. For a better view of the layout he ascended the small peak called Hauyna Picchu that towers over Machu Picchu. It seemed inescapable that I would have to climb up, and when I saw the two-car tourist train screech into Aguas Calientes far down the valley, I started up a steep path of tiny steps, wheezing for oxygen the whole way. After an hour, muddied by crawling through a small tunnel near the peak, I emerged some six hundred feet above Machu Picchu. There was a small clearing surrounded by trees, and a Peruvian woman was busy hacking her name in one trunk with a pen knife. I found the highest point, a granite promontory that had been carved into a throne, and sat down to read for a while.

The Irish-Argentine aristocrat was now suffering from recurring bouts of Pan-American solidarity. On his birthday—he turned twenty-four during the trip—he got drunk on clear
pisco
brandy with some Peruvians and launched into a rambling toast insisting that “the division of [Latin] America into unstable and illusory nations is a complete fiction. We are one single mestizo race.…” He now called the ruins “a pure expression of the most powerful indigenous race in the Americas,” which “practical” North American tourists could not appreciate. He claimed that “only the semi-indigenous spirit of the South American can grasp” the significance of the place.

Mountaintops induce hallucinations in everyone, of course. The
dream of reuniting the Spanish-speaking Americas into one single nation was as old as Simón Bolívar, and a perennial trope in Latin American politics born long before Guevara and still alive today. It was an emotional, utopian vision that he had in the Peruvian mountains, perhaps driven by the immense vista visible from this peak, and he would continue to speak of this Bolivarian dream as he moved to Cuba and then took to the world stage. The notion appealed to the worst myths of his twin ancestry—the Celtic affinity for lost causes and a Hispanic idealism realized only in full flight from reality. His best instincts contained evidence of the very flaw that would undo him: the realities of different political systems, races, and economies were “illusory,” the rivalries and distinctions among nations a “complete fiction.” He grasped for some connection to what he saw by lumping himself among the mestizos as a “semi-indigenous” South American. He was reaching for solidarity with others, but wishful thinking like this would soon kill him.

On top of Hauyna Picchu, the two semi-Argentines hid a bottle in the bushes with their signatures tucked inside. They meant to come back and reclaim it someday. I dug around in the underbrush, but the peak was full of trash now, and the woman with the penknife soon came over to ask what I was looking for.

“A souvenir,” I told her, and went down.

B
ack in Cuzco, I recovered Kooky from a garage and rode through the slippery, cobblestone plaza up to the same little hotel again. There were two notes waiting for me. Tito wrote to say the saddlebag was ready. The other was from Dr. Valer, who had made a call on my behalf, and I was instructed to be at a certain coffee shop at a certain time the next day. I was told only the name of the man I was to meet: Néstor Guevara.

Tito drove me across town the next morning in the red pickup; we went first to a workshop down an alley. Tito’s friend’s friend had
molded black fiberglass over the hole in my saddlebag. I paid him twenty dollars and held the case in my lap as we drove to the coffee shop, opening and closing it with glee. I was starting to believe I might actually make it.

In the coffee shop, Tito pointed silently to a lanky man sitting alone at a linoleum table. Néstor Guevara—no relation to Che—was approaching retirement age, a weary man dressed in a faded gray sport coat. He wore thick glasses, and his hair fell black and flat across his head and down toward one ear. We sat down and introduced ourselves. I mentioned Valer’s name, but Nestor looked vaguely displeased. “He was a Trotskyist, and still is,” he muttered.

“I trained with Che,” Néstor began, and then launched into his story. As he talked he turned over a sheet of paper—the syllabus of the economics course he now taught at a local college—and drew an outline of South America with a ballpoint pen. He sketched the rough borders of Peru and then drew a scraggly oval that represented Cuba.

“We believed that the Cuban revolution was the only way forward,” Nestor explained, and drew an arrow arcing north toward the Caribbean. Néstor was a student in 1959 when Fidel Castro had driven into Havana. By 1960, Havana was filled with young men from all over the hemisphere, eager to drink at the revolutionary wellspring itself. Che, the regime’s designated internationalist, assumed leadership of these like-minded recruits. The talk was of freedom and justice, and there was as yet little evidence of how things would go.

“We were young,” Néstor said. “We believed in the mystical Cuban revolution, the mystical Che, the mystical Fidel Castro. We thought the experience could be repeated in other places. For me—pardon me, but for me, Che was a saint.”

He spent six months training under Guevara in western Cuba, an activity he described as “hiking in the mountains.” I asked him if this was really all they had been doing. Weren’t they trained in arms? Guerrilla tactics? Ambush and recon? “A little,” he said dismissively,
“but it was more a romantic thing,” mostly physical conditioning and endless discussions about socialism.

This idyll was interrupted by the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962
(“CRISIS OCTUBRE
,” he now wrote). The foreigners were sent home. Néstor said this was done to protect them in case of a Yankee invasion, although it might also have been part of a larger retreat from the embarrassing international commitments that had brought on the crisis in the first place.

“The Guatemalans left for Guatemala,” Néstor said, “the Ecuadoreans for Ecuador, the Peruvians for Peru.” At each of these phrases, he drew an arrow out of Cuba to the appropriate destination on the page. The map was starting to fill up, but Nestor kept drawing, adding in the Argentines, Brazilians, Venezuelans, Dominicans, as they all flowed homeward with Che’s doctrines in their pockets. There were some Colombians, for example, who had gone home to form a guerrilla group called ELN, which exists to this day. Their commander cultivates a thin Che beard and likes to pose for photographers in a beret with his eyes cast upward, a precise and deliberate reenactment of the most famous image of Che. The ELN mostly lives off ransom money from kidnappings now.

Once home in Peru, Néstor joined a new guerrilla force called the MIR. There were forty-one fighters, and the group was quickly wiped out. His best friend was killed, but Néstor escaped, hid in Bolivia, and then enlisted in a second group, also called the ELN, in Ayacucho. In 1965 he “fell in battle,” he said. I looked up from my notes. The phrase meant the opposite in Spanish and English. To fall in battle in Spanish meant to fall prisoner. Disgrace was worse than death.

His huge, bony hands hovered over the paper throughout this account, filling in each detail. He wrote the Spanish initials of various groups over the body of Latin America—ELN, MIR, PCB, UMSM, MNR, COB, JPC, MTR, URJE—and then the places—Bolivia, Peru, Puerto Maldonado, Catavi, Nankawasi, Ayacucho, Concepción, Cuzco, “Battle of Puente Uceda”—and then the years—’56,
’59, ’60, ’61, ’62, ’64, ’65, ’68, ’71, ’72. There were notations on the losses in battle (“41 – 7 = 34” or “80 percent”). He wrote in “HB” and drew hash marks over Hugo Blanco’s theaters of operation. From Colombia to Chile, from Lima to Rio, all of South America had come alive with dynamite and groups competing for some new combination of the words
national, army, liberation, united, revolution
, and
party
.

In early 1966 Néstor was released from prison and fled to Bolivia. Tens of thousands of tin miners were in revolutionary ferment in Bolivia, organizing strikes and forming militias and issuing demands. Nestor sought out the most militant miner groups and tried to help them organize. “The revolution was coming,” Néstor said. “There was a lot of theory, but it was …” His thought trailed off.

Bolivia was never Che’s preferred destination. He had left Havana in secret, still loyal to Castro but fed up with the unheroic life of meetings, speeches, and Soviet-style bureaucracy. He tried to prop up a guerrilla army in the Congo but found the Africans unwilling to fight and interested mostly in scholarships to Cuba. Castro put off questions about Che’s whereabouts for almost a year (“You will find Major Guevara where he can be of service to the revolution,” he said) but then suddenly broke his silence. In late 1965 Castro read to the nation a letter addressed to “Fidel” in which Che resigned his position of leadership in the party, his ministerial rank, and his army commission. He wrote that other nations called for his “modest efforts,” and the letter ended with a maudlin promise: “If my final hour finds me under other skies, my last thought will be of this people and especially you.”

In the Congo, Che flew into a rage when he learned that Castro had read the letter aloud. After announcing his own martyrdom—the letter was obviously intended to be read only upon his death—Che could hardly return to Havana alive and defeated in Africa. He was trapped: unlike his careful cover story on the motorcycle trip of heading “only” as far as Chile, he had left himself no wiggle room this time. After five months in Africa he returned to Cuba in secret.
Committed by his own hand to pursuing revolution elsewhere, to leaving rather than arriving, he now needed an elsewhere. Thus a fatal chain of events began to get under way.

The first step was to choose a battleground. Néstor recalled a glancing conversation in Cuba when Che asked him two questions, one about Hugo Blanco, the Peruvian guerrilla, and then this: “How does Bolivia seem to you?” Unlike so many who had told me about Che but never known him, Néstor’s eyes did not glow with excitement as he recalled this moment. He did not leap from his seat or gesture wildly—in fact, other than inking his outline of guerrilla history, Néstor made no gestures at all. He didn’t even look at me as we talked.

“Poverty,” Néstor had answered. This was all that he had told Che. Even to a Peruvian the poverty of Bolivia was shocking. People lived in Stone Age conditions in many parts of the country, still enacting the ordered cycles of life, planting communally with foot plows just as they had done under the Incas half a millennium before.

Néstor did not then know how close he was to the course of history. He went back to Bolivia in 1967 to organize the tin miners—an arrow arced south again—and while there he began to hear rumors of a guerrilla cell operating in the south of the country. Eventually, there were reports—which Néstor believed—that the guerrillas were led by the famous internationalist Che Guevara.

“I told them, ‘Che is here,’ but he was received with—” Néstor searched for the words—“a bit of indifference. The peasants did not respond.”