Chasing Che (38 page)

The photos were, inevitably, captured. Bolivian and CIA intelligence officers used them to confirm Che’s presence, identify his fellow guerrillas, and draw vital conclusions about the strength, location, membership, and disposition of the enemy. There were other, almost childlike incidents of egotism. A local supporter named Whiskers was assigned to drive Che from La Paz to the farm in the south, and the two men rolled off in a white jeep for the two-day trip. Whiskers had no idea who his bald, silver-haired passenger was, and this apparently annoyed Guevara; near the end of the trip Che blurted out his real identity just to see what reaction he would get. Whiskers was so shocked that he literally drove over a cliff. Although this must have been quite satisfying to Guevara, the jeep was stranded on the precipice and the two men had to walk the last twenty kilometers to their base. In only the first days of his new venture, Che was endangering himself and those around him in order to document, polish, and plumb his own myth.

E
verything had changed between Cuzco and La Paz, between Guevara’s first trip and his last, between the Ernesto of 1952 and the Che of 1966. In the intervening years the world had exploded with frustrated social movements as diverse as Asian liberation wars and the sexual revolution, African decolonization and rock and roll. Armed with globe-wrecking weapons, the superpowers—a new term—engaged in a dangerous game of brinkmanship over Cuba. The Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 and the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 had put the island at the center of a maelstrom. Guevara had changed with his times. Fighting in the Sierra Maestra mountains, he had become hardened to the uses of power. When the rebels caught their very first traitor—a guerrilla who had informed on
them—Castro ordered his execution, but none of the Cubans would step forward to carry it out. Only Che volunteered, blowing the man’s brains out with a .32-caliber pistol during a thunderstorm. When he later led his own column of troops, those who were guilty of disloyalty or cowardice—in Che’s own judgment—were killed. In wartime such summary judgments can be justified, but between his dauntless attacks in battle and his harsh “revolutionary justice” behind the lines, Che left a trail of dead men wherever he passed, and he earned a reputation for cold-bloodedness. The doctor had learned to take lives as well as save them.

Administering victory proved even more difficult than promoting struggle. At the instant of triumph, Guevara was appointed commander of the La Cabaña fortress in Havana. Under the title of Supreme Prosecutor, he oversaw a bloody purge of Cuba’s regular army and police. About fifty men were shot on Che’s personal orders at La Cabaña after trials that lasted only a few hours. In the following years, Che served variously as the head of the National Bank and as Minister of Industry, but his real role was as the revolution’s roving ambassador, always traveling, the Trotsky to Castro’s Stalin. He signed the new national currency with a jaunty “Che” but insisted that Cubans, who called even Castro by his first name, had to address him always as Comandante Guevara. His personality was seen as arrogant, distant, and typically Argentine. (Cuban joke: “How does an Argentine commit suicide?” “By jumping off his ego.”)

Guevara moderated such resentment with his personal rectitude. He lived abstemiously, volunteered for hard manual labor, and gave inspiring speeches about what he called the “New Man,” his vision of a citizen motivated not by lust for money, goods, or comfort but by love of justice, sharing, and struggle. Despite the hijacking of the phrase by Castro—in practice the New Man turned out to be a secret policeman—the
idea
of the New Man remains Guevara’s one lasting philosophical legacy.

One of the New Man’s most salient characteristics, Guevara warned, had to be hardness. An abstract love of humanity left little room for love of actual human beings. His speeches were filled with
images of violence, death, and hatred. His belief in worldwide revolution was embodied in a famous statement: “How bright and wonderful the history of the peoples would be if two, three, many Vietnams appeared on the face of the earth.” But rarely did anyone cite the rest of the quote: “… with their daily quota of death, tragedy and heroism.”

“We mustn’t be afraid of violence,” he said then. And: “Hatred is an element of struggle; relentless hatred of the enemy that impels us over and beyond the natural limitations of man and transforms us into effective, violent, selective, and cold killing machines.”

The speaker was obviously not the same man as the anti-authoritarian smart-ass of 1952, yet the first trace of what Vargas Llosa would call Che’s “precursory character” was found right in the final pages of the road diary. After returning home from the motorcycle trip in late 1952, the man who now insisted on being called Che sat down to study for his medical exams and to rewrite his road journals into
Notas de Viaje
. The now-twenty-four-year-old Guevara began by drawing a clear line between the man who had left on the trip and the man who returned from it. “The person who wrote these notes,” he stated in only the second paragraph of his literary effort, “died the day he stepped back on Argentine soil. The person who is reorganizing and polishing them, me, is not the me I was. Wandering around our Americas has changed me more than I thought.”

The most curious entry in this manufactured diary was also the very last. After recounting the adventures of the trip in chronological order and setting down his lusts, hungers, illnesses, doubts, and dreams, Guevara closed the book with a final chapter only two pages in length. Titled “As an Afterthought,” the entry described a conversation around a campfire in “that little mountain town.” Granado was not mentioned; only a mysterious man who had “fled the knife of dogmatism in a European country” and now offered Guevara a “revelation.”

The revelation was revolution. The man at the campfire explained that a just society could only come about through violence, and that those who could not adapt to a new world—innocent or
not—would perish. “Revolution is impersonal,” the mystery man warned, “so it will take their lives and even use their memory as an example or as an instrument to control the young people coming after them.” The man then predicted that Guevara would die with his fist clenched, “the perfect manifestation of hatred and struggle.”

The final paragraph of the diaries acknowledged that the European exile had “foretold history,” and writing in 1953, fifteen years before it would happen, Guevara predicted his own death clearly:

Barricades and trenches. Rage and slaughter. A knife stained with blood and nostrils dilating at the smell of gunpowder. The “Afterthought” explained nothing but contained everything. He had foreseen what he would become. With its unrevealed prophet, the absence of any time or place, and a tone completely different from the rest of the diary, I could conclude only one thing: the conversation had never occurred. It was not a documentation of what had been but a declaration of what would be. Just as he had insisted on his new name, the revelation was his own willful creation, a literary transformation as much as a real one.

In 1953, home safe in Buenos Aires and reflecting on the trip, Ernesto had sat down and written a character called Che into existence. Now, as 1966 tailed into 1967, all that remained was to collect
his band of soldiers and put the prophecy of his own “Afterthought” to a final test. It was time to head south.

S
omewhere short of Mataral, Bolivia, a thick hoarfrost had settled over the land during the night, hiding everything within a crystal cloak. When I woke up in a ditch at dawn the ground around me was white; the hillsides were white; the fields were white; my sleeping bag was white. The motorcycle, dismembered and balanced on its center stand, had lost its usual blue, orange, and black tones and turned a perfect white as well.

I reached a hand out of the bag, swiped away an armful of what resembled snow, and sat up. The sun was just beginning to break the horizon at 7 A.M., and in only a few minutes the first horizontal rays injected color back into the world. The quinoa on the lower slopes was first, emerging in separate patches of red, yellow, and purple, and then the potato leaves on the upper slopes began to appear as lines of dull green tracing the contours of the hills. The frost on the flat tire next to me was among the last to clear.

I boiled a cup of water for instant coffee and stared at the tire. It had blown explosively just as I crossed a pass into this valley at the last moment of daylight. One minute I was riding by a village wedding procession, the next I was wobbling all over the road, headed for the verge of a steep ravine. I skidded to a stop and shivered with an adrenal rush that told me I was still alive.

In the last moments of dusk I had pushed Kooky off the road and dug out my tool kit. I then put the bike on its center stand and removed the rear wheel. In darkness, I had popped the worn tire off the rim, pulled out the punctured inner tube, and put in the one spare tube that I had been carrying for months. Night interrupted the work, and I lay down in a ditch and listened to the distant music of the wedding party high up the valley. Sometimes a girl would come walking down the road, followed by a mooning young man flirting
with her in Aymara. They couldn’t see me in the ditch, and I drifted off when the party ended around midnight.

By the time my morning caffeine had kicked in the frost had sublimated into the sun’s rays. I applied a pair of shims to the wheel. The black rubber slipped over the rim reluctantly and popped into place. I removed the seat from the bike and reached under the gas tank. The pump rested inside a metal tube welded to the frame of the bike, and I drew it out, applied the hose to the tire, and pumped. Nothing happened.

I tried again, with the same result. The nozzle on the pump and the nipple on the tire were not the same size. I’d come almost four months without a flat tire. I’d considered myself extraordinarily lucky so far, but all my good luck had brought me was a long way with the wrong pump. After half an hour of fierce effort I managed to force a little air in, but when I put the wheel back on it was a pitiful sight—the weight of the bike left it completely flat. There was no way it would support me, let alone the saddlebags and backpack.

I hid all the luggage in the bushes and talked to a gigantic peasant who was sorting potatoes in front of the nearest shack. He barely spoke Spanish, and his cheek bulged with a thick wad of coca leaves, his version of morning coffee. He pointed to a cloud down at the far end of the valley, where the sun had first risen to smite me. He said there was a gas station beneath that cloud. How far? “Six or seven kilometers,” he said.

The bike started on the first try. I had been dropping all day yesterday and was somewhere around eight thousand feet now. I would have to switch back to the low-altitude carburetor jets soon, but for now the bike purred like a well-fed cat. Leaving all the bags behind, I set off for the gas station, which in these parts always did tire repairs. For six or seven kilometers there was no sign of a town, let alone a fuel depot. Every now and again there was a single shack visible above the road, and once a two-room house with a pickup truck. The owner came out and told me he had no gasoline, no air pump, and no patch kit. I wobbled on. After six or seven miles the tire went flat again.

I got out the patch kit, unhitched the wheel, dismounted the tire, pulled out the tube, and glued on a patch. It was possible to force a little air into the tire by placing the pump at a certain angle, almost removing the little key inside the nipple, and putting a pebble inside the pump nozzle. I heaved like a madman for half an hour and the tire was inflated, just barely. I felt smug at the way I could solve my own problems, even here. Then the patch popped right off and the tube sighed and collapsed. I started over. The sun was up high now, and I stripped off my shirt and used the second half of the tube of glue to put on a second patch. I remounted the tire on the wheel, reinstalled the pebble in the snout of the pump, and then heaved madly for another half hour until the tire was partly inflated. This time the patch held. The tire was still soft, but better than before, and it seemed possible to drive. I remounted the wheel onto the driveshaft, donned my shirt and helmet, and then drove back up the valley, plucked my bags out of the bushes, and set off again toward Vallegrande.

After ten more miles I found a man with a pump who filled the tire up to regulation. After another ten I found a
gomería
, a roadside shop where they patched inner tubes. The trucker in line ahead of me was getting his sixteenth patch. I had both tubes neatly vulcanized, put some extra air in the wheel, and rolled on.

After another ten miles the tire blew again, and the bike wobbled all over the gravel and slid to a stop at the very edge of a ravine overlooking a beautiful valley. The mountain dropped a thousand feet down from the front tire, and my eyes had never felt sharper. I could pick out the round, smooth pebbles bouncing down to the next switchback. I was becoming habituated to adrenaline now; a kind of searing afterburn crawled through my skin.

I took off the wheel, popped the tire, extracted the tube, put in the recently patched one, remounted the tire, and pumped furiously for half an hour. The result was pathetic. I got a hundred yards before it went flat again. Now I was out of glue, patches, palms, and patience. I hid Kooky down a dry arroyo scrubbed to its red rock bottom by rain, then pulled off the wheel. I uprooted several bushes,
camouflaged everything, and began walking. After an hour, mostly walking downhill with the wheel on my back but sometimes rolling it and chasing after it, I got to the first town. There was no
gomería
. An old man told me I could find one in the next town. When I asked how I could get to the next town, he pointed back up the mountainside I had just come down. “Take that bus,” he said, and I could just see, a thousand feet above us, a bus passing the spot where the motorbike was hidden. In twenty-five minutes the bus arrived and I caught a lift to the next town, sitting amid peasants for an hour and letting the wheel rest, I later discovered, in vomit.