Chasing Che (7 page)

Guevara’s account put the emphasis on something slightly less noble: he wanted to have some fun. “I was restless,” he wrote, calling himself “a dreamer and free spirit” interested in “faraway places, sailing tropical seas, traveling through Asia.”

Asia proved beyond reach, but Guevara and Granado were tinkering on the motorcycle one October morning in 1951 when they realized that their means of travel was right in front of them. Instead
of Asia, the two could make a journey across their own hemisphere as far as the roads would take them. Guevara claimed credit for the idea and said they planned to go as far as North America on La Poderosa. Granado also took credit for the plan, which he said was to go only to Venezuela. Perhaps it was inappropriate to admit that the
Guerrillero Heroico
had dreamed of making it big in the USA.

Side by side on the table in front of me, the cheap, smudged pages of Granado’s Cuban account contrasted sharply with the glossy look of the British edition of Guevara’s diary. The differences in tone were just as wide. Granado’s language was enough to kill the soul—“bourgeois-democratic freedoms” and “the suffering proletariat” leaped off the page while “capitalist exploitation” lurked behind every tree in South America. Yet Guevara, who disclaimed all higher motives, wrote like a true searcher. Where Granado offered moral certitude, Guevara embraced his own limitations and biases:

Whatever the twenty-three-year-old Ernesto was searching for—literary inspiration, adventure, or a solution to the world’s problems—he mounted the motorcycle with his eyes and mind open to the world he was about to enter. His at times brutal self-doubt was a sign of fundamental honesty, of an integrity uncontaminated by ideology or the habits of rigid thinking that political commitment required.

Guevara’s spare
Notas de Viaje
had been dressed up considerably for its debut in English as
The Motorcycle Diaries
. The rather short narrative of the trip had been padded with letters that Guevara wrote
home and long excerpts from his father’s memoirs. (“Years later, thinking back over his continuous traveling,” Ernesto Guevara Sr. wrote, “I realized that it had convinced him of his true destiny.”) The thrust of this English edition could be judged by its cover: The letters
C, H
, and
E
dwarfed everything else on the book jacket. That oversized type was something of a lie, for in fact the diaries had not been written by a famous revolutionary and Marxist superhero named Che. They were written by a young and unknown skeptic named simply Ernesto. One was a famous figure; the other was an unknown. Che was a political leader; Ernesto, I was beginning to believe, was a much more complex figure, a young man in search not of the world but of his own small place in it.

But before they could discover the world, Granado and Guevara had to get moving. They stayed a few nights with Guevara’s relatives in Villa Gesell, stocked up on food, and then rolled onward. I decided to not even spend a night, but ride hard for the south and a more important conversation awaiting me there. I tucked both oddly mismatched diaries into my saddlebags again, paid, and passed out of town by the brown ocean.

In his entry on Villa Gesell, Alberto Granado noted his astonishment at even this rather silty bit of water. The cause of his excitement was simple: raised in the mountains, this was the first time he had set eyes on the sea. Guevara also noted his friend’s discovery:

Granado was less poetic. Writing in Villa Gesell on January 6, he said the ocean and other sites “give me a material base to tell myself
how marvelous and important for our future formation this until-now hypothetical voyage is going to be.”

Riding away at almost four in the afternoon, with just a few hours of sunlight to guide me to Miramar, the difference between these two views of the same ocean sat with me, ill digested. To Guevara, the sea was something mysterious and yet personal, a confidant, a friend with whom you shared secrets. To Granado, the same ocean was a “material base” for his “future formation.” The sea itself could be incorporated into this larger mission, a crusade whose outlines I was only beginning to see in the pages of his book, and one that would come to haunt me—and perhaps Guevara, too—as the three of us rode into the months ahead.

F
or a few hours the main road to Patagonia ran southwest, following the coastline as it turned from the tropical embrace of the Rio de la Plata and bit into the pampas. From now on South America would grow narrow, pinched by the corset of two oceans eager to meet at Cape Horn. The farther south you went, the more this narrowing seemed to squeeze the blood from the land, numbing it into a pale, cold wilderness. By the end of the day I was riding almost straight into the lowering sun, racing down the empty road at eighty miles an hour, hoping to reach shelter before darkness arrived, at around 9
P.M
. in the Southern Hemisphere’s January summer.

Miramar was the great resort town where Guevara and Granado arrived on the sixth of January, 1952. It had taken them three days of travel to cover the distance I had done in eight hours, dog bite and lunch included. Modernized roads played a part, certainly, but the most important difference seemed to be in our motorcycles. Guevara and Granado were devoted to their old companion, La Poderosa, while I had bought my bike used—on a credit card—just two weeks before shipping it to Buenos Aires. I barely knew how to put gas into it and certainly hadn’t given it a name—the idea of naming my motorcycles had always seemed plain silly. They were machines, not
horses or humans, and if the BMW was really an entity of fuel, electricity, and physics, then giving it anthropomorphic qualities would be a distraction from its true nature. Alberto Granado had no such overrational qualms: the Powerful One was the perfect name for a motorbike that wasn’t. The Norton was not particularly large to start with and definitely inadequate for two riders. Thirteen years old by the time they hit the road, La Poderosa was overloaded with an assortment of luggage, including a heavy canvas tent, waterproof saddlebags filled with personal goods, a pair of camp cots, a teakettle, food, a medical kit including Guevara’s asthma medicine, a pistol, and—they being Argentines—a barbecue grill. On this underpowered, overburdened, battle-scarred machine they planned to cross the hemisphere. Or at least hoped to. Guevara was so apprehensive about their chances of success that, “to save face, just in case,” he told friends that he was only going to Chile on the bike.

My own odds looked better. The maps showed more roads, on straighter routes, in better condition, and everything about motorcycles and camping equipment had improved. Like La Poderosa, my BMW was more than a dozen years old, but I was traveling alone and therefore lightly. My engine was larger, and the technology of motors had improved immensely in the almost half-century interval since La Poderosa left its factory in England. My bike could handle the trip.

The driver was another question. I didn’t plan to reach North America, but even if I followed their route on the motorbike only as far as Peru, and then turned toward Che’s grave site in Bolivia, that was still months and thousands of miles away across various borders, the steepest mountains and driest deserts in the world, through unknown hazards ranging from dogs to thieves to guerrillas. Listening to my pepper-grinder engine all afternoon, I half wished that I had lied and told my friends that I was only out for the short jaunt to Chile. I had been singing as I rode, an occupational hazard for motorcyclists locked inside their own helmets hour after hour, with an audience of one. Having run out of gas once today, I had somehow
become fixated on an annoying Mexican folk song with its nonsensical lyrics about a cockroach that runs out of fuel and comes to a halt:

There were many versions of that song in English, all of them cleaner than the original. Back in Chihuahua, the original lyric had complained about a shortage of
marihuana
that stops the cockroach in its tracks. In my case it had been gasoline, so like many a gringo before me I cleaned up the lyric:

Just at twilight I saw Miramar rise ahead of me. The blue ocean had shouldered aside the brown estuary by now and reclaimed the coast. Wild, foaming breakers cut into a line of cliffs that seemed held in place only by the roots of the tall white apartment blocks lining the sea. The two-lane road that ran along the coast into the city resembled a camel market. Vehicles of every sort tried to move in every direction at once, a Ford Falcon jammed with an extended sunburned family backing out of a beach-side parking spot into the path of a Mercedes that was in turn swerving around a boy carrying a surfboard toward a waiting dune buggy while clouds of impossibly young motorcyclists riding impossibly loud dirt bikes swept through every channel of pavement more than a foot wide, anyone at any moment liable to be skewered on the end of a twelve-foot-long fishing rod shouldered indiscriminately by a wandering grandfather who found walking the side of the road too painful on his bare feet and therefore used the middle. The entire high-season population of the town emptied onto the beach each day and spread up the coastline,
then was inhaled back into Miramar’s trashy bars and steak restaurants at the approach of night.

I crawled through the interwoven madness until I reached a traffic circle at the very edge of town, put down the kickstand, and dismounted. I needed to orient myself, find a place to stay, and rest my aching butt. Nose-deep in a guidebook, I didn’t notice the sound at first. Then it became too loud to ignore. I looked up and saw that a half dozen dirt bikes were independently circling the roundabout. Some had two passengers; all were tiny, whiny machines without the slightest redeeming value. The drivers—not one of them wore a helmet, and several were barefoot—patrolled round and round, occasionally gunning their engines in solar flares of testosterone. They were all looking at me.

The first one stopped within seconds of my looking up. He was about sixteen and still had sand on his flip-flops. “What kind of
moto
is that?” He’d never seen a BMW motorcycle before. I told him it was German.

“How fast does it go?”

That was the same question the policeman had asked me this morning in Buenos Aires. This time, having driven eighty miles an hour at one point during the day, I had an answer to give him. He grunted and drove on.

The second bike stopped a minute later. The driver and his passenger both looked about fifteen. The kid in back was wearing another one of those
NO FEAR
T-shirts. I’d believed that line once too.

“How fast does it go?”

I added ten to the figure I’d just named. They grunted.

The third bike, the loudest yet, had a genuine grown-up for a driver. He gunned the engine every few seconds.

“What kind of bike is that?” German, I told him. “How fast does it go?” I added ten to the figure I’d just named. No grunt this time, just a grave nod. We were a couple of motorcycle guys talking motorcycle stuff. He was polite enough to ask if I needed any help, and pointed me toward a campground before roaring off in a cloud of oil-laden blue smoke.

Two more of my colleagues of the road caught me before I could leave the roundabout. Each time I added ten to the previous figure, until I was going a hundred and twenty miles an hour standing still. The last boy finally whistled appreciatively.

L
a Poderosa must have been a sight when it pulled into Miramar with its two passengers and tied-down exotica. In 1952, the city by the sea was an aristocratic reserve, a swank summering destination for the traditional elite of Argentina. Guevara was here to visit his girlfriend, María del Carmen Ferreyra, known as Chichina. She was a seventeen-year-old Córdoba girl from one of that city’s best families whom Ernesto had been courting for some time. According to
My Son El Che
(written by Ernesto Guevara Sr. after Che’s death), Chichina was “a charming young girl.… My family and I were all convinced he would marry her.”

The Guevaras did not have much money, although they still had some of the trappings of aristocrats, like a home in Buenos Aires. Ernesto Sr. had lost much of the family fortune by poorly timed investments in the cultivation of
yerba mate
, the bitter green tea consumed ritualistically by Argentines. But the Guevaras still had one thing that mattered more than money—a good name. On the father’s side, they were distantly related to various muckety-mucks, including that noted Chilean Admiral Lynch. On the maternal side, the de la Sernas were notably upper class, the source of what little money the family still had. In the hierarchical social structure of those times, the family was therefore “impoverished aristocrats,” the noun being more important than the adjective. Ernesto Guevara was still of a suitable class to court Chichina.