Chasing Che (6 page)

“Get it out of here,” the foreman barked, but when I inserted and turned the key nothing happened. The green diode on the tiny dash should have glowed brightly, indicating that the clutch was in neutral and that the bike was ready to run. Instead, the diode was dark. I heaved at the kick starter for several minutes as he watched without patience, and just when I had given up hope, the bike caught,
faintly, and ran with a low, hesitant gurgle, as if still nauseous from a month at sea.

I repacked the saddlebags and rolled out of the port. I had not brought a helmet to my chess game, and so I set out into traffic bareheaded, like a true
porteño
. The great avenues were filled with sprinting taxis and messengers on dirt bikes, and I raced along until my eyes began to water and the battery regained some strength. When an ambitious Renault shot across four lanes of traffic, nearly flattening me into a grease smudge—I remember only the rear window, with its
NO FEAR
sticker—I turned onto smaller streets. I began carving a series of turns at random, testing brakes and acceleration, adjusting the mirrors, throwing the bike from side to side on the straightaways to relearn its balance and gain confidence in its purchase on the ground. After a period of aimless dodging I looked up and saw that I had entered La Boca, the Brooklyn of Buenos Aires. Boca is a tough, working-class Italian neighborhood paved with cobblestones. The locals are guarded against outsiders and believe only in the invincibility of the Boca soccer team and the divinity of Eva Duarte Perón. Like Guevara, she had been subjected to several exhumations since her death long ago, both literal excavations of her body and cultural renovations of her image.

I sprinted out of one intersection and a hundred feet later hit the brakes, hard, sliding deliberately over the slick cobblestones. You had to know the bike instinctively, even in its flaws. As I sat playing with the controls—the red kill switch, the headlight, the horn, the turn signals—I noticed that I had come to rest in front of a construction site. Someone had daubed the corrugated fencing with a spray-painted message for foreigners who came to tamper with old myths:
MADONNA IS A WHORE
.

The next morning Little Girl stood on the sidewalk, waving and crying out “
Ciao, ciao
” in her smoker’s rasp. The Paraguayan doorman waved too; perhaps somewhere up above, Federico cried out his final “
Cómo te va?
” I made it five minutes down the road before being pulled over by the first cop I saw. He was a motorcycle policeman with shiny jackboots and an Italian Ducati. He took my papers in one
hand but only pretended to read them while actually running his eyes over my bike.

“How fast does it go?” he said. This stumped me. What can you say to a policeman who asks how fast you have driven? “I don’t know,” I replied. We had a lengthy discussion by the roadside about German engineering, the reliability of driveshafts versus chains, and the torque problems generated by a monoshock. Neither of us could explain the monoshock.

On the day his trip began, Guevara had pulled away from the house with family and friends watching. As he turned to wave farewell, he lost control and nearly collided with a trolley car. He was almost finished with his hemispheric journey before leaving the block. I expected better luck, and got it when the trooper let me go.

I still don’t know if this was a reasonable expectation.

F
ive hours and two hundred and twenty-nine miles later, I forced my right heel down into the dust, the brown bitch still firmly attached. I pushed down on the barbed wire with both palms and then pirouetted, bringing my left leg backward over the wire in a high arc and swinging it down in a trajectory that the dog understood only when it was too late. My boot heel connected with her neck just as she let go, and with a long, aggrieved yelp the mother of puppies went flying tail over tooth into a thorn bush. We mustn’t be afraid of a little violence.

Limping back to the bike, I assumed the worst, but when I yanked off the boot there was only a slight scrape that had not drawn blood. My brother had thrust the boots on me, just hours before my departure, to replace the sneakers I had foolishly planned to wear.

My preparations for this trip had been shoddy by any standard. I’d spent only a few months conceiving a plan, and I didn’t have a Swiss Army knife, enough money, a motorcycle license or insurance, a repair manual, shirts with epaulets, a photojournalist vest with twenty-two pockets, any arranged interviews, a good map, a sleeping bag suitable for ascending Mount Everest, a stove that burned four
kinds of fuel, or, it would turn out months from now, a tire pump that actually worked. The things I did carry included a spare clutch cable and spark plugs, one inner tube (for some reason I thought only the rear tire would go flat), a six-year-old Macintosh PowerBook 100, a pair of $18 rain pants, a stove whose fuel cannot be purchased in South America, and a rotten Korean War surplus sleeping sack that dribbled feathers. My girlfriend had handed me a compass at the last minute. I was ill prepared and underfunded, but I had decided to go anyway.

The last-minute boots were like a forecast of good weather. If people kept taking care of me, I would come through. I pulled the right boot on and looked around, and although there was still nothing to see out here, nothingness has inviting qualities. I’d been reading one of the first travelogs ever set in Argentina, an 1826 tract by an English captain of engineers known as Francis “Galloping” Head. He earned his nickname by riding vast distances over the pampas, and he came to love their spareness:

Sometimes a few drops of gasoline trickle down the walls of an empty tank to fill the carburetors again. I reached for the tiny dashboard, the size of a paperback book, and twisted the key. The little green neutral light glowed like an emerald. The procedure was always the same, an ingrained routine for every motorcyclist: choke on; hit the starter button and wait for the roar; choke off; left foot up on the peg; left hand pulling in on the clutch; left toe knocking the shift peg
down one click into first gear; check the neutral light is out; ease the clutch out with the left hand while twisting the right wrist for throttle; right foot up on the peg as you pull away and gain speed.

Seven tenths of a mile later the bike died again and coasted to a stop, and I set off to look for the next gaucho. I found a white fence and followed it to a driveway, which led to a boxlike one-story house with a bright red roof. Halfway to the house I stopped and clapped twice. Nothing happened, so after a few moments I covered half the remaining distance, clapped twice, and waited. I felt ridiculous standing in the sun at noon in the middle of a field covered with horse shit while clapping, but I waited. Again nothing, and I advanced a third time—close enough now to hear a radio blaring inside the house. I went up and banged hard on the door.

In time the gaucho appeared, wearing the usual baggy
bombacha
trousers and black hat turned up in front. We went around back to a shed where, hidden behind enough bridles and saddles to outfit a squad of dragoons, there was yet another dusty Ford Falcon. The gaucho cut a yard of garden hose, retrieved a sun-bleached two-liter Coke bottle from the trash ditch beyond the tomato plants, lay down on the ground, and methodically began sucking gas out of the Falcon’s tank. For some reason the gas would not keep flowing after each pull on the tube, as if gravity were weak.

I insisted on taking a few mouthfuls myself, but the gas hit me like a drug. I spat a few ounces of fuel into the Coke bottle and then fell about the floor, hacking and wheezing and spitting. “It is not easy,” the gaucho said, and took another mouthful. Eventually he filled the bottle halfway with a mixture of gas and spit. The next gas station was four miles down the road, he told me. The math looked good: half of a two-liter bottle would last about ten miles. He refused payment of any kind, and I stumbled back to the bike, fed it, and set off again.

The miles rolled by. After five there was no sign of the town, just the same unrelieved flatness and the sky overhead. Six miles passed, and seven. At eight miles I saw something on the horizon and grew hopeful; at nine I saw it was just a tollbooth; at ten I drove through it
without slowing. The bike shuddered once, then again, but kept running on gaucho spit.

The road bent around another windbreak of poplars and there was the town, a half mile away. Then the engine died. I was going about seventy miles an hour when it quit, and now the math didn’t look so good. I lay down on the tank to cut wind resistance and drifted silently sixty, fifty, forty, thirty, twenty miles an hour. The gas station was at the far end of town. It was going to be close.

I drifted down the main street, wobbled the last few yards, and curled up at the pump like an old dog on his bed. I bought nineteen liters of gas and one of Quilmes beer. I rode all the way back and left the beer on the gaucho’s front step—because I had to, and because in the end the dog did let me go.

L
ike Guevara, my first stop on an itinerary filled with larger things was a forgettable beach town called Villa Gesell, where I arrived with a sore ankle around three in the afternoon. The South Atlantic was an unappetizing brown here, discolored by the coast-hugging outflow of the great Río de la Plata estuary, which drains an enormous swath of the flatlands of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay. The streets of Villa Gesell were filled with sand, and I steered my way tentatively around the drifts and past the vacationing surfer boys from Buenos Aires dressed in the same
NO FEAR
T-shirts as their California cousins. I picked an empty restaurant for a late lunch and, wary of thieves, carried my saddlebags inside. I read while I ate.

That was a diary entry describing Guevara’s departure forty-four years before, but not the one written by Guevara himself. This was from the road diary of a man named Alberto Granado, the other half of that “us.” Guevara did not make his trip alone; his
Notas de Viaje
was filled with references to Granado, who had shared the motorcycle seat and all his adventures with him. But I had learned
only a few months before that Granado too had kept a diary of the trip, describing the same events, the same places, and even the same conversations. Like Guevara’s diary, which had languished in obscurity with the Guevara family for decades, Granado’s diary had been forgotten for decades, and then finally published in Cuba in 1986, thirty-five years after their trip. I had a friend visiting Havana purchase a copy, which I now laid before me on the table beside my lunch. The edition was printed on flimsy paper with smudgy ink, under the grand title
Testimony: With El Che Across South America
. It had arrived just two days before my own departure, and this was literally the first chance I had had to crack the pages. This parallel account of the young Ernesto Guevara’s travel experiences would allow me to corroborate basic facts about the trip and flesh out the picture of how travel had changed Ernesto.

Aside from a few qualities these two fellow-travelers shared—both men were from Córdoba and both were pursuing medicine—there was one overwhelming reason why Guevara wanted Alberto Granado along for the trip: Granado owned the motorcycle they were traveling on. The dilapidated 1939 Norton was mockingly named La Poderosa, or “the powerful one.” (Actually, the Norton was named La Poderosa II; the original La Poderosa had been Granado’s bicycle.)

This fourteen-year-old English bike was to carry both men into what they understood would be the greatest undertaking of their young lives. The twenty-nine-year-old Granado’s friendship with the twenty-three-year-old Guevara was intense and would become the bookmark of the former’s life. Not only did Granado journey across South America with Guevara, but Granado was already in 1952 a devoted Marxist who would play a crucial role in crystallizing the revolutionary instinct of his younger companion. Years later, when Guevara was the famous Che and living in Havana, Granado would move there to be near his friend and lend his help in the building of socialism. Forged in the experience of travel, their friendship would endure until Guevara’s death in 1967.

Granado’s account of the trip ran parallel to Guevara’s own
notes, but I was only halfway through my
milanesa
sandwich and just one page into Granado’s account when I realized that the two volumes were different in some important ways. The divergence began with the fundamental question of why the two Argentines were undertaking the trip in the first place.

Unlike Guevara, whose motorcycle “diaries” were, in fact, a polished memoir he had written after returning home, Granado’s account was raw, a live diary written each night, filled with immediacy, sometimes eloquent, often dogmatic, usually hasty, and always larded with the obscure practical details that seem of enormous importance at the time. If Guevara had never become famous as the
Guerrillero Heroico
of the 1960s, no one would have plucked these scribbled entries from a desk drawer and given them their grand title.

In Cuba, the myth of the man they called the
Guerrillero Heroico
is an elaborate and official cult. Granado, a devoted supporter of the Cuban regime, was careful to do his part by heightening the noble motives behind Che’s motorcycle journey. In his introduction, Granado wrote that he and Guevara traveled with political goals: