Chasing Che (8 page)

Alberto Granado was not. Granado was a short, husky fellow with few social graces, a long history of political radicalism, and enough talent to become a biochemist, a position similar to pharmacist that in Argentina comes with the medical title “Doctor.” Granado carried this humble background on his shoulder. A self-declared
Marxist, he put his training in class analyses to work as soon as he met Chichina and her friends in Miramar.

“The stay here has been very beneficial,” he wrote with characteristic gravity in his diary. “I have gotten to know many people of a social level that I have never encountered before, and frankly it makes me feel proud of my own class origin. Never in my life have I met, much less rubbed elbows with, this type of people. It is incredible how they think, how they reason. They are types who believe that by divine right or something similar that they deserve to live unconcerned with everything but their social position.…”

Granado spared Chichina from his disdain, noting that she was unusually intelligent and open-minded for a member of the oppressor class. Then he raged on for a full page about the spoiled rich kids surrounding her. Granado’s didactic tone broke for a moment when he fell into a rare description of the sea at night, its dimensions and infinite movements still new to him. Yet even this was part of the struggle to Granado.

“What alienates me,” he wrote, summarizing the night scene, “is the way all these people who accompany us, and claim to feel profoundly the beauty of the night and of the sea, don’t feel like I an enormous desire that all the world would be able to admire and enjoy so much beauty.”

After a make-out session with Chichina, Guevara also indulged in a little class analysis. The couple fled the cold (and in those days, deserted) beach and apparently took shelter and pleasure in a car. “[I]n the great belly of the Buick,” Guevara wrote with relish, “the bourgeois side of my universe was still under construction.”

My own night in Miramar was thoroughly proletarian. The campground was jammed, and in the belly of my tent I tried to sleep despite the blaring competition among three cassette players and the gas lanterns hissing around me. The dusty campground was filled with the improvised rigs of Argentine families on vacation. A group of Boy Scouts approached and tried to buy my tent out from under me, but fled when I named what I’d actually paid for it.

Times were always hard in Argentina, but now they were hard in
some new ways. The reigning economic doctrine was the same here and across the Third World: neoliberalism, which simply means loosening capital and tightening belts. The IMF had forced Argentina to cut a billion dollars from its government budget—an austerity visited largely on the poor through education cuts and higher prices for food. The minimum wage was $325 per month—or about one third the basic cost of living over the same period. Social spending, traditionally the highest in Latin America, had been cut sharply. Almost half the children in Argentina under fourteen lived in extreme poverty. Unemployment was officially less than 20 percent, but unofficially somewhere north of there. Nonetheless, Argentina had certain things other countries in Latin America could only imagine—an enforced minimum wage, for example, and social programs of any kind, however reduced. One result was that Miramar was now a bastion of pudgy parents in ill-fitting swimsuits, young couples sleeping in tube tents, and sullen kids affecting the look of the American underclass while bobbing to rap.

This middle class had risen over the last decades, partly rooted in the policies of the Peróns—the bombastic Juan and the diamond-encrusted Evita. They had won their popularity in the late 1940s by tossing economic promises to the people in my campground—the ordinary working poor, the “shirtless ones.” Even though the welfare state they promised was incomplete and partly responsible for bankrupting Argentina, it created pensions for the old and jobs for the young. An Argentine auto industry thrived behind protectionist walls, producing obsolete Ford Falcons into the 1980s: this was inefficiency by free-market standards, but not to the factory workers who took home First World industrial wages year after year. Argentina was still not a First World country, but ownership of even a battered old Fiat was a stunning achievement measured against the economic conditions in Peru or Brazil. Meat was cheap, university was almost free, and people could now afford, once in a while, a trip to the beach.

The throngs in my discotheque/campground were proof that Granado’s “enormous desire” had come true, that ordinary people were now able to enjoy the one-time reserves of the elite. Egalitarian
reforms are not nearly so chic as the high societies they displace. If you were part of the elite, you could regret the crowded conditions at formerly quiet beach resorts. You could be horrified by the noise, the trash in the streets, and the poor taste in music. But even an aristocrat would have to concede that this was a small price to pay for a more just society. Argentina had changed, and for the better.

This thought comforted me until 3
A.M.
, when the last radio went dead and I quickly followed its example.

O
ne of the women who grew up around Chichina remembered Alberto Granado as “an unpleasant young man, someone you didn’t want to be seen with.” That was the worst thing you could say about someone in Córdoba society.

According to Granado, that kind of class snub was beneath Chichina, and I had to agree after meeting her. I had traveled to Córdoba without knowing quite what I would find, but Chichina agreed to meet me for a half-hour discussion on the steps of the city cathedral at 10
A.M
. She was slim, dressed in a pants suit, with neat brown hair and a grace undiminished by six decades. Chichina was a biologist by training but now worked in Córdoba’s municipal archives as a historian.

We strolled through the leafy center of the city past churches, libraries, and convents. The half hour easily became an hour as we chatted comfortably on topics from religious art to sculpted fountains, then viewed local architecture designed by various relatives. We discussed the latest newspaper article by Jorge Castañeda, a Mexican biographer of Che, and reviewed her life during the Dirty War. We agreed on the cult of Evita Perón, disagreed on economic globalization, and pondered, at least briefly, the fate of Africa, the Internet, Cuba’s health care system, Greenwich Village, the publishing industry, and race relations in Peru. In short, she talked about everything except Ernesto Guevara. She had warned me about this in advance. During a phone conversation while I was still in New York she said
that I was wasting my time coming to see her. (“No,” was how she put it, “I won’t talk about it.”) Now, repeatedly and with growing steeliness, she brushed aside my questions about Ernestito Guevara.

Yet
Che
Guevara she would talk about. The difference was important to her: Ernestito was an item from her own past that she wanted to forget or at least control. Che, however, was an abstraction, a political generality that her historian’s mind could not resist. We stopped for a
café cortado
, and she spoke with ease about this famous man called Che. She was fascinated by the ongoing search for his body in Vallegrande, Bolivia, and quizzed me on the latest theories about where the corpse had gotten to. “We have a tradition with corpses, you know,” she said, ticking off a frighteningly long list of Argentines who had been posthumously dug up, moved, mutilated, or otherwise denied their long rest (Juan Perón, for example, had posthumously traveled the globe). She liked the theory, already being advanced by some Bolivians, that the CIA had secretly stolen the body, and she was horrified by the cultish behavior that had sprung up around El Che. “Che Guevara is now a consumer product; it’s incredibly ironic,” she said with a long, passionate laugh. And she was confident that he went to Bolivia to kill himself, aware that his was an impossible mission. “Don’t you think it was suicide?” she asked me. But all this seemed totally unrelated to Ernesto Guevara, the young man with whom she had been in love. She had deliberately set aside that part of her life, that romance of youth that happened to make her a tangent of history. She wanted her own history, and had it. She had married, raised children, become a biologist and historian, done things that were worthy in their own right, become a figure in her own right, not simply someone’s girlfriend from long ago.

But her relaxed tone was really not so relaxed. It was a device, as if to say that this talk of Che Guevara was just another topic of conversation, an abstract set of data for the historian in her to consider. Her own stake in it was hidden away, sunk beneath the depths of a carefully constructed life. Only two accidents parted those waters.

The first came when I asked for her address, to send her a copy of any articles I wrote about Guevara. Searching for a blank piece of
paper, she began flipping through my notebook, and there stumbled on a list of questions I had written the night before, when I still hoped she would break her promise and speak freely. There were three questions in the notebook. Chichina spoke English, but she handed the notebook back and asked me to translate them.

I read them out as I had written them. “Number one: What did Guevara say about purpose of 1952 trip?”

“He just wanted to travel, that’s all. Young people always want adventure. Nothing more. He wanted to go. So he went.”

“Number two: How did he seem different after the trip?”

“I don’t know,” she said immediately. “I only saw him twice afterwards.” She was agitated now, feeling ambushed.

“Number three: What specific memories do you have of his departure?”

“No,” she said, cutting the air with her hand as if slapping away the question. She got up from the table and left the coffee shop. She was too polite to run away, however, and I caught up to her quickly and apologized. This did not fool her for a second, but it did restore some form and manner to a day that had stretched from an assigned thirty minutes to four hours. We began walking back into the center of town. She wanted to show me one more local site that she was particularly proud of, the University of Córdoba law school building, which had recently been redesigned by a relative who was a noted architect. Entering a long, dark passageway, we pushed against a current of outgoing students to reach a traditional Spanish interior courtyard, which had now been joined to a large modern building with an asymmetric staircase that pierced a series of floating walls. We stood side by side, admiring the bold work. Then we turned around to leave.

That’s when she saw the sign. It was handmade, filled with urgent exhortations to the student body. The topic was obscure, but the message was not. Across the top, in foot-high letters, it read
VENCEREMOS
, or “We will win.” This had been his slogan. And below that, taking up most of the poster, there was the picture of him.

The same picture as always, the relentlessly pure gaze into history
crowned by the militant beret. He looked very youthful, a handsome young man. It was the face she had once kissed in the belly of the Buick. We both stopped cold.

“It is an icon,” she said acidly. “It has nothing to do with him.” The students milled past us. “It’s just a way of saying which side you are on, that’s all.” And then, as she slipped out into the darkness of the passageway, so faintly that I could barely hear her, she spoke one last time. “They don’t even know who he was,” she muttered.

A
s is customary in Latin America, I had left the motorbike parked on a sidewalk in Córdoba during the interview. I was fiddling with the lock a few minutes later when a handsome man in a beautiful long wool overcoat and a beret stopped, eyed my American license plates, dirty clothes, and strapped-on luggage, and asked some friendly questions about where I was from and where I was going. I told him I was retracing a motorcycle journey that Che Guevara had once made.

“I knew him,” the man said plainly. “The last time I saw him was when he got back from that motorcycle trip.”

Like most people, the fellow mixed up old dates—he placed the trip in the late ’40s, not the early ’50s—but I believed him because he emphasized that he had barely known Guevara. They were just casual acquaintances, he said. Years after schooling together, he’d seen Guevara on the street “a few blocks from here.”

“I said to him, ‘What have you been up to?’ and he said he’d been all over South America on a motorcycle, crossing the Andes to Chile, all the way to Peru.” The man recalled two things about this conversation. The first was that when he congratulated Guevara on the trip, saying how proud he was that an Argentine had crossed South America, Guevara had immediately replied, “
No soy argentino; soy americano.
”

To be
americano
doesn’t mean to be from the U.S. of A. It means to be Pan-American, “of the Americas,” and sounds just as awkward and politically correct in Spanish as it does in English. The implication
was clear: the trip had made him an internationalist. “Before, he never—never—spoke of politics to me,” the man said with a shrug.

The second surprise came when, midway through their conversation, the man referred to Guevara as he had always called him: Ernestito, or Little Ernesto. Guevara rejected his own name for a new one. “He said, ‘You know what they called me on the trip? Che.’ He was proud of it!”

Five minutes later, after a lecture on the sin of letting Madonna play Evita on film, the man in the beret was gone. “She wasn’t a whore!” were the last words he called out to me.

I
n Miramar, Guevara wrote, “The two days I’d planned stretched like elastic into eight.” His tone was at once self-mocking (“the bittersweet taste of the goodbye mingling with my inveterate halitosis”) and self-conscious. Every voyager conceives his own departure, a place and moment that often differs greatly from the physical point of departure because it is the demarcation of another frontier entirely. Up to this point, the motorcyclists were still within their home orbit. They had stayed with Granado’s relatives in Rosario, at the Guevara house in Buenos Aires, with Guevara’s relatives in Villa Gesell, and then in Miramar they were introduced into Chichina’s comfortable society. Now, on the outskirts of Miramar and their familiar world, the true voyage began, the enormity of the Southern Hemisphere at once summoning and cautioning them. There would be no more Buick bellies, no relatives handing them stocks of canned food. In leaving Chichina finally, painfully alone, Guevara had also severed himself from his own desires. It was time to submit himself to the discipline of chance, to confront expectation with reality, to conform years of hope to some version of the actual earth.