Chasing Che (41 page)

The doctor was a barrel-chested, handsome young man, dark in skin, eyes, and hair. He rhapsodized about the man he called “
el Guerrillero heroico
” and said plainly that he was in this village, providing care to the poor, because he wanted to Be Like Che. His medical education and salary were both funded by the Cuban government. This, too, was a legacy of Che.

The walls in the little room were decorated with posters about polio and inoculations. There was a plaque above the spot where Che died with a bad poem about him, and below that a framed pop art collage that showed his face and a section of the Argentine flag.

I handed over the fifty dollars, making sure that the boys at the door heard me explain that the money was a gift from the Dutchman for the medical care of the villagers. The doctor held the bills in front of him and then smiled—and then laughed. I asked him what he was going to spend it on. “Medicine,” he said at once. “Or supplies. We need bandages, and scalpels, and antibiotics. And needles. Also a battery for the radio.” He showed me the radio. It was a ratty two-way model, the only connection between La Higuera and the outside world. Some German leftists were raising money to install a solar panel to power it, he said. The Cubans were even talking about paying to bring electricity to the village. He took me outside and showed me a red 125 cc dirt bike that he used to make his rounds. It was in terrible shape. He said he needed new tires—but that could wait, since the dry season was here. With the Dutchman’s money he could stock up on some medicine. He would worry about tires later.

I gave him another twenty out of my own wallet. It was one of the last bills in there, but still, it is amazing how cheaply we can value our debts.

C
he came to La Higuera twice. The first time had been three days before the end, not as a captive but as a fighter. His column was half the size of when he started, but the men were still on the offensive. Arriving after dawn, they found the hamlet eerily calm and the mayor missing. Despite these bad omens Guevara ordered the column to move forward. The advance guard walked up the main road toward Pucara while Guevara and the others waited in town.

“The army started shooting from that ridge line up there,” the doctor said, pointing to the hill I had crossed to enter town. We were walking in the same direction that Che’s men had been moving when the shooting broke out. The vanguard was decimated. Three of Che’s most able men—“magnificent fighters,” he wrote in his diary—were killed at once. Two others were wounded, and two Bolivian rebels took the opportunity to desert to the enemy. The survivors retreated into the center of town, to where we now stood.

The doctor made a left down a narrow lane, signaling for me to follow. The path headed downhill and was shaded by overhanging trees and shielded by stone walls on each side. “It took some time to get the mules organized but then they came down here,” he said. “This was their route of escape.”

The ridge line was almost out of rifle range from here. The guerrillas had slipped down the lane, using the walls for excellent cover. I squatted down behind one and cocked a finger at the army troops who had been on the ridge that day. You would need a telescopic sight to hit anything from here. Following the path, laying down a barrage of covering fire from behind its walls, the survivors slowly worked their way out of the village, down the hill, into a ravine, and then eventually disappeared with the arrival of darkness. They hid in the valley below the town for three days, almost dying of thirst. A new unit of Bolivian army rangers was deployed in the area. There were two hundred of them, freshly trained by American Green Berets. They had intelligence information gathered by the CIA, including Che’s photos of himself in disguise. Listening to his radio while hidden in the underbrush, Guevara heard a broadcast about the deployment
of “hundreds” of troops to encircle him. “The news seems to be a diversionary tactic,” he wrote on October 7.

It was the last line in his last diary.

T
he good doctor took my picture while I stood next to the statue of El Che in the town plaza. La Higuera was too small to actually have a plaza, but that is what residents called the traffic circle in their one and only dirt street. There were a few trees inside the circle, and inside them a bust of Che on a white pedestal. It was the worst representation of him I had seen yet. Only the obvious adornments—the trademark beret with star and the word
Che
in red across the pedestal—made it clear who it was. In the photo my boots are streaked with oil, my jeans ripped from the crash in Chile, and my head sunburned by four months of travel. I look like I’m posing with Omar Sharif on the set of 1969’s
Che
. In that Warner Brothers production, Sharif played Guevara, of course; Jack Palance was Fidel Castro.

There had been a different and better likeness of Che in this exact spot, but one night in 1990 a jeep full of Bolivian soldiers pulled into town. They threw a lasso over the head of El Che, tied it to the back of the jeep, and then drove out of town as the bust bounced behind them like a tin can at a wedding. The replacement had been made by some art students of dubious talent. Neither the art students nor the soldiers were from around here. Nor were the young leftists who mourned here in La Higuera each October 8, just managing to miss the right date the way they just missed everything else about Che.

Which is as close as I could come to explaining the miserable mood that had settled on me with my arrival in La Higuera. We didn’t belong here. Not the soldiers nor the art students. Not Jans, the Che tourist, not Che himself. We were all meddlers, outsiders who thought we knew better. Except for the doctor with his palms
full of bloody teeth, we—Argentines, Bolivians, rightists, leftists, CIA agents, Cuban diplomats, journalists, pilgrims, and tourists—were all here as soldiers in some cause, imposing our wills on a group of people who needed rain and batteries, not a place in history.

It was mid-afternoon now, and conscious of how swiftly darkness would cover the country, I thanked the doctor and began a very long journey home. I rode slowly down through the houses, past the
EL CHE VIVE
scrawl and the pigs lying contentedly in the sun, and then went over the ridge. A few miles on the other side of Pucara I came around a corner and saw Jans striding purposefully along. When he heard the sound of my motor coming he turned and waved his arms over his head as though I might somehow miss him. I pulled over, lowered the rear foot pegs, and Jans climbed aboard. He put a stiff hand on my shoulder and sat bolt upright during the trip.

Because of the road we drove no more than fifteen miles an hour, and this made it possible to talk. I kept the visor of my helmet open to hear him better. Like all Che fans, Jans had a parable about the man, and he first apologized for his bad English and then launched into it. “I didn’t have no education,” he said. “At fourteen I am going to work. After much time I pick up a book. It is about Che Guevara. I see he is a doctor, from good family. He have everything, he could be a good life, but he give it up to fight for the poor. So I think he is a good fellow, and I read another book.” End of parable.

Jans knew everything about Che. As we rode along he mentioned Che’s birthdate, what he’d done in the Cuban war, his missions to Africa and Bolivia, what he’d said at the Tricontinental Congress, whom he’d written his farewell letters to, on and on. Back in Holland, Jans was a minor politician—a vice-mayor of a community of seventeen thousand people—and said he was known as the “Che mayor” because of his fascination with Guevara. He made me pull over long enough to show me some articles he kept in his jacket. They were from a Dutch paper and I couldn’t read them, but they showed Jans wearing a beret and a Che pin on his lapel as he stood in front of a Che poster in his home. According to Jans the first article said that Che Guevara was “the one who set Jans van Zwam right.” I
recognized the Dutch word
pelgrimage
in the text of the second piece. When we started again I asked Jans if he had read about Guevara’s 1952 motorcycle trip.

“
Ja
,” he said. “This is the trip when he begin to wake up. He start to think about how people is living.”

We didn’t talk much after that. We just rolled slowly over the ridges, one after another, and consumed the views. Somewhere that afternoon, while my eyes were busy, I passed through the ten thousandth mile since leaving Buenos Aires.

W
e flew up the valley floor and into Vallegrande, a long rooster tail of dust chasing our arrival. I slammed on the brakes seconds after we hit pavement at the outskirts. Jans tumbled forward onto my back. “It’s the hospital,” I said.

“Which hospital?” he asked.

“The one where they put his body.”

We left the bike at the curb and wandered up some stairs. It was just a small clinic, really, called Nuestro Señor de Malta, with the price of services listed on the front door. Guevara’s inert body had been lashed to the skid of a small helicopter and flown down from La Higuera to be put on display here. B
OLIVIA CONFIRMS
G
UEVARA’S DEATH
, read the lead headline in
The New York Times
the next day;
BODY DISPLAYED
. After the journalists were gone, a pair of wax death masks were cast, and then Che’s hands were sawed off so that his fingerprints could be verified later against Argentine records. Sometime before dawn on the eleventh he was stuffed into a grave dug at random near the airstrip.

The laundry shed was now surrounded by weeds and trash. It was open on one side, with a cement table in the middle that held a pair of shallow sinks with fine ridges laid into the sloped bottom. It had drains and a single dead spigot. There were rings of candle wax around the edges, and the blue plaster walls were covered with messages. The majority were in Spanish, but there were a few in Portuguese
and others in German and French. Some people just left their names on the wall (“Charito 19/1/92”), but most of the space was taken up with very personal messages, letters to Che himself, often cast in the intimate “
tú
” tense rather than the respectful “
Usted.
”

“Che: you are a star guiding us,” one said. “
El Che Vive
,” read another; and “Che Is Present”; and up high that old suspect, “Be Like Che.” I stopped counting after a hundred. The messages went up to the rafters and even covered the support column dividing the open side of the shed. Up top it said:

And lower down:

That last line
—“hasta la victoria siempre
”—was Che’s own signature exit line, a dramatic way of sending his comrades off with confidence that, ultimately, victory was theirs. There would be a final
triumph, a happy conclusion to their journeys. It made the revolution seem less like a remote possibility and more like a real condition that would come to exist—soon. If you said that the final victory would come, then it would. Then we would all live in a peaceful world populated by New Men and New Women.

Behind this illusion there might need to be a little squashing of cowards and lackeys—as there was in Cuba—but there was literally no room on the walls of the laundry shed for details. It was a place of slogans, of aspirations, and of hopes, not of asterisks. Nobody came here twice.

Jans unsheathed an enormous Bowie knife and began carving something on the wall in Dutch. He scraped at the plaster for quite a while, patiently digging each letter into the surface with the tip of the blade. White dust trickled onto his boots while he worked. When he was done, I asked him what the phrase meant.

“You are my light,” he said.

T
he last mile, something like the 10,013th in a series of them, began at the hospital shed and ran through the cobblestone streets of Vallegrande and then came down the hill, returning to dirt as it passed the entrance to the airfield and around back, ending only when it had to at a barbed-wire fence. I stopped Kooky cold by putting my thumb on the kill switch. Jans was on the back, and we sat there staring over the field while the engine dinged and pinged. The sun had gone down some time ago. Now the sky was dark blue.

Jans dismounted first, and we went through the barbed wire and across the grassy expanse, both of us stumbling a bit in the dusk. The holes were where the excavators had left them when the search had been interrupted two months before. The retired army officers had pointed, the Argentine forensic experts had dug, and the journalists had watched, but day after day the digging had produced nothing. They expanded the search; the Cubans sent help; old peasants were
interviewed; and then a ground-imaging radar was pushed over the field like a lawn mower, plumbing the clay soil for traces of history. Eventually teams of soldiers joined the dig, and finally a bulldozer turned up long tracts of the soil, peeling it back like the lid on a can of sardines that somehow proves empty. Most of the journalists left after a few weeks. The computer printer for the radar unit broke, making it impossible to interpret the results. The Argentines left, promising to come back when they had more money, which they eventually did.