Che Wants to See You

by Ciro Bustos

  During those days of gloom, my mother died, peacefully and of old age. We followed the hearse, with all her brothers and sisters, cousins, nephews, nieces and grandchildren, to the cemetery, where I spied the ominous presence of secret service agents among the tombstones. As an emergency measure, the girls went to stay at the farm of Avelino’s old friend Don Ramón, while we cleared our apartment and slept in different places. Omar the Turk had some hangars full of televisions and he offered to store my things. I sorted out my books, and the novels went to Don Ramón’s farm. I filled a couple of boxes Omar lent me with other quite innocent books and my painting materials. We made a joke about him being able to sell my palettes if his business went broke.

  What happened however – it’s best to tell it straight – was that after the 1976 coup the army divided San Rafael into zones and searched them with a fine tooth comb. When Omar saw they were getting near his business, he took the boxes to his house; when the searches reached his neighbourhood, he put the boxes in his Fairlane again to take them back to the hangar. The army caught him in a pincer movement with the boxes and everything. He was ‘disappeared’ for about a year, and was badly tortured. He only survived by a miracle. Carlos Brega, another friend from San Rafael who arrived in Sweden after us, told us of Omar’s Calvary. He spent days hanging from a hook, like an animal in a slaughterhouse or freezing plant, while they destroyed his business and stole his house.

  One afternoon I was drinking maté in the duty room of the San Rafael hospital with my brother and other doctors, when a nervous nurse said a suspicious looking guy was asking for Dr Bustos. It was Alberto Burnichón, an old friend of our group of artists in Mendoza, who always had a bushy beard and tangled hair. He had gone to see the exhibition only to find it closed and the police asking questions. He suggested he could look after the paintings and our other stuff together with the architect Casnatti, so we could leave the area quickly.

  He also suggested I talk to local Communist Party leaders to guarantee our clandestinity. Avelino made the contacts and a meeting with the local party secretary, on behalf of the provincial leadership, was held in the maternity ward of another friend’s clinic. I asked for a temporary safe house in Buenos Aires while I made arrangements to leave the country. I had become a known target locally and no one would or could help me. He took my request to Mendoza personally. The following day, he gave me a contact for the national leadership in Buenos Aires.

  As soon as I arrived in Buenos Aires, I met the contact in an elegant tea room in the Recoleta, as if we were habitués of this extremely posh area. I was surprised at the name of the contact, a member of the Central Committee’s political committee. It was Carlos Alonso, but obviously not my friend the painter. I concluded in retrospect that it was a code name to simplify things. They were both painters from Mendoza and, in fact, the same type of tall, handsome, friendly man. An urgent meeting was arranged and I repeated my request for a temporary safe house. A few days later I got the Central Committee’s answer. It was negative. According to the alias Alonso, the party needed all its security resources for itself. The situation being as it was, there was no house available for us.

  The Central Committee did send a confidential message. Because of the common ties uniting us, they could give me some advice: ‘Hang in there, comrade. Don’t leave the country, wait a bit.’ And then something memorable: ‘In two months things are going to change, because the army is taking over and one of our generals will be in government.’ This was in January 1976. In March, General Jorge Videla, later guilty of genocide, took power.

  Che said urban guerrillas have no rearguard (hinterland), and without it a collective psychosis that separates the rational from the obsession that affects all revolutionary organizations. Those who planned the carnage knew it and watched how people reacted. They began to distance themselves from what was happening on their block and looked the other way. You can’t condemn this predictable attitude of self-defence but you have to take it into account. Having no means of escape generates shared resentment, and only the immediate family responds. Frankly speaking, it makes their home a target, the centre of concentric circles of repression.

  I sent the Triple A letter to Dolores in Sweden. The Swedish government took immediate action and, in less than forty-eight hours, they sent a telegram to their embassy in Buenos Aires granting visas to the four members of our family. Meanwhile, Ana María and I slept in alojamientos, service hotels which rented rooms by the hour for lovers who had no place of their own. According to Siete Dias, a popular weekly magazine, there were 400 alojamientos in Buenos Aires in those days. ‘We fuck, therefore we exist.’ They didn’t ask for documents and you could spend the whole night quite cheaply. We did this until one night, in an alojamiento in Bartolomé Mitre Street, across from the railways tracks, the porter insisted on documents because of ‘new laws’. We were in bed, looking at ourselves in the ceiling mirror, when I suddenly decided to leave. Before we turned the corner, walking casually, a patrol car was at the door.

  Luckily, Gelly Walker, an Argentine friend we had made in Chile through Payo Grondona, a journalist and singer/songwriter who I had worked with in Quimantú, came to our rescue. We had got on very well but there had been no political connection; nonetheless, she gave us the keys to her apartment while we were waiting, and moved to her mother’s. At the weekend, we went to Cholo’s house and a nephew of his asked to talk to me privately. He said: ‘The state of Israel is offering you passports and tickets to Tel Aviv. There’s no commitment to stay, so you can carry on to wherever you choose.’ I was grateful for the offer, really moved, but our papers for Sweden were almost ready.

  The Swedes seemed even keener than I was and added a sum of money to cover our immediate needs. We discussed how to leave. I did not like the idea of travelling like a normal family, and it was anyway impossible since I didn’t have a passport. So we agreed I would go first, by myself, to Rio de Janeiro. I set off by bus one afternoon to cross the Argentina-Brazil border at Paso de los Libres, in the province of Corrientes. Once I was out of the country, Ana María would follow with the girls. The trip from Buenos Aires to Rio took fifty-five hours but you could pass through customs with a simple ID card. I put my few clothes in a bag, crowning it with three LPs I was taking as a palliative to nostalgia: Troilo-Grela, the Duo Salteño and Baden Powell, the best in each of their genre. Ana María was bringing the more difficult stuff: our daughters, a few belongings – including a few paintings Burnichón had freighted to Buenos Aires – clothes, and keepsakes.

  The bus left from Plaza Once, half a block from her mother’s apartment where Ana María was staying with the girls, but I went alone. It was terribly humid so I had a beer in the bar on the corner while I waited. At a neighbouring table sat one of my former contacts in the original Trotskyist group that became the ERP, his nickname was Pelado too. The two baldies looked at each other as if they were strangers and I went to get the bus. For the ten hours to the border, I could think of nothing but that I was leaving my whole life behind for a second time, perhaps forever. Two things suggested what the future would be. My whole family was coming with me and it was time my daughters finally had somewhere to settle down. Besides, the country I was leaving appeared headed for total destruction. Just a few days earlier, the ERP had tried occupying the Arsenal Battalion barracks in an attempt to steal ten tons of weapons, with disastrous results. Someone inside had betrayed them and the army was waiting to finish them off. The wind of initiative had changed definitively.

  Three material things had connected me to Che, but only one of them, the Minox, accompanied me into exile. The second is a side story but I want to tell it now. When the EGP group was formed in Havana and we were equipped for departure during the missile crisis in 1962, Che gave us all Rolex watches. Nowadays they are more of a luxury decoration, but back then it was the only watch that worked without wires, or batteries (they didn’t exist), just the simple movement of the arm. Such advantages apart, I do
n’t know why in Cuba they came to be a sign of rank, recognition of performance, an award for merit, or some such. The fact was that comandantes, intelligence agents, people on special missions, or mere show-offs, wore Rolexes even when they were in fatigues. Masetti already had the one he got when he was made a captain, and we were given the more discreet Rolex Oyster Quartz made of stainless steel. I also don’t know why there were so many of these gems in Cuba, as if the manufacturers made bulk loads especially cheaply for Cubans, knowing they were going to scatter them round the world. Che was famous for being tight with the public purse.

  Anyhow, we left with the Rolexes, trying not to be conspicuous. My watch did not leave my wrist until, on one of my trips out of the Salta jungle, Masetti asked me to swap and take his to be cleaned at the Rolex shop in Buenos Aires. This was not as easy as it sounds, since you had to register as the owner of the gem and declare its origin, etc. – information which guaranteed, in case of theft, that the watch would be sequestered if the data did not match. I never got mine back because the guerrillas were wiped out in Salta, and Masetti’s watch, now expensively clean, remained in pride of place on my wrist. When they searched me the day I arrived in Camiri, one officer was telling me to hand over my watch just as the other one found the dollars hidden in the jacket. The ensuing commotion distracted him and miraculously I got to keep the watch. The danger passed of losing it in Bolivia, where harvesting Rolexes from dead Cubans was all the rage, and it survived the house searches in San Rafael too.

  I finally lost it one stifling January day in Buenos Aires, on the underground. The Plaza de Mayo–Liniers line, all fifteen kilometres of it, was the longest and most crowded line in the system. Getting on it at all was a feat, although what actually got on was an organic mass of people that spread through into the carriages where they regained their individuality. I was standing awkwardly, steadying myself by clinging to the vertical pole by the door. When the train was about to restart after the first stop, a guy who was propping the door open with his body, grabbed my Rolex and a good part of my skin, and fell out onto the platform as the doors closed and the train picked up speed. It is the only time in my life that I have shouted expletives in public, and to everyone’s astonishment I got out at the next stop just to be able to kick a wall silly.

  43

  Sweden, 1976 to the Present

  When I arrived in Stockholm and saw the desert of freezing snow, I discovered I had left my third material memory of Che in the house we had fled in San Rafael. It was the jacket he gave me when I left the guerrilla camp. That too I had miraculously saved throughout my odyssey, because each time I had to move in a hurry, day or night while I was a prisoner, it was the first thing I grabbed. When the moment finally came to leave Chile for Argentina, I decided I needed to have my hands free and the jacket stayed with our friends, Claudio and Lidia. They delivered it to me a year later in the middle of the San Luís pampa.

  My brother Avelino and his wife Alicia went into exile shortly after us, but they went to Mozambique so did not take the jacket. After several years in charge of health in the north of Mozambique, when democracy returned to Argentina, Avelino had gone back to San Rafael to look after Rosa, our abandoned sister. We met up once in Barcelona for a few days when we rented a house in El Masnou (a place we knew because Alberto Szpunberg lived there) to reunite the family. Avelino brought Ana María’s mother and aunt from Argentina and we brought them back to Sweden for a visit. Avelino and I did not see each other again and anyway the jacket had disappeared, probably while he was away.

  I have already told the story of the Minox, bought in Rome to photograph tiny secret documents to send to Che. But its end was quite sad. Once when our budget didn’t quite stretch to the end of the month, I took the Minox to the pawnbroker; it was at the very least a technological relic imbued with spy stories from film and literature. The guy behind the counter did not even want to look at it. ‘We’re in the digital age now’, he said.

  I caught up with various other people in Europe. In Spain I saw Gustavo Roca. He had passed through Malmö earlier but we missed each other. He put me in touch with Henry Lerner who by then was in Madrid. He and his father had disappeared in Córdoba; the Israelis managed to rescue him alive, but not his father. We sought out Héctor Jouvé in a small perfumed lavender producing valley in the French Alps where his paternal family came from. He had a stone house in a medieval building on the main square, where there was an old communal outdoor bath-house with a sloping tiled roof. Héctor said no one came out of it with their skin intact. We stayed for a few days, reminiscing about our experience. We haven’t seen each other since he went back to Argentina.

  The death squads kidnapped Petiso Bellomo, killed him and dynamited his body on some waste ground. They did the same to my friend Alberto Burnichón. In Paris, we met up with Cholo, Berta and their children, Hugo and Diana, and for several years staying in their house was the most entertaining part of our holidays, until they followed Diana to New York. In Malmö, we were visited by Payo Grondona from East Germany, Humberto Vázquez Viaña, Loro’s brother, and Alberto Szpunberg who stayed with us for a few days.

  When I arrived in Stockholm, I had to wait a month for Ana María and the girls. They were first taken to a hotel because the Immigration Office had not been able to inform me of their arrival. Like all political refugees in those days, we then went to Moheda, a luxurious ‘concentration camp’ in Småland where only the metre of snow stopped us moving around freely. The camp aimed to introduce immigrants to the customs and benefits of the Welfare State and, especially, to the morality of the consumer society which we found extraordinary: this much was given, this much we had to buy. We were equipped with clothes for the North Pole and, when the six months in the camp were over, were given an apartment, furniture, household items, kitchen utensils, student loans, pocket money and bank accounts. The whole mechanism revolved around your ID, a magic number that represented the individual’s very existence as a complex human being of some account.

  We had wanted to be as close as possible to the Mediterranean. In a country 2,000 kilometres long, the extreme south (the south of the north, as the Swedes say) is still 2,000 kilometres from Barcelona. And that was Malmö, where we ended up.

  We were desperate to know about the drama unfolding behind us. People were ‘disappearing’, but official institutions offered no protection or responded to public outcry. We needed to make two essential purchases: a powerful short-wave radio so we could listen to Argentine stations, and a family car because in a country that functions on wheels, you can’t go anywhere on foot.

  The first purchase was the first failure. We had chosen a Satellit 2000 with fifty short waves, but on all fifty we could hear nothing but Radio Moscow; it was on every imaginable frequency. It transmitted the repulsive idyll then being constructed between the Communist Parties of the socialist camp and the criminal dictatorship of the Argentine generals. It was unbelievable. Military missions went to and fro between Moscow and Buenos Aires, both ends receiving medals of merit and friendship with the ‘sacred’ names of the Liberator San Martin or Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. The Argentine Communist Party’s ‘our general’ was in power.

  The Soviet news programmes – long and detailed, especially for Latin America – began with an impassioned account of events since the coup in Chile: dramatic invented stories of a resistance that didn’t exist, with battle songs incorporated into the world top ten, making the Chilean defeat the best sung and the best seller. Then, the no less tragic news from Bolivia, where the dictator General Banzer – another member of Operation Condor – had put down the miners with brute force. Yet as 30,000 young men and women, mostly workers, students and professionals, were being ‘disappeared’, murdered, and thrown into the sea by ‘our general’ in Argentina, Radio Moscow was reporting the excellent juicy trade agreements being signed in Buenos Aires with total impunity.

  According to Radio Moscow, the political climate in Cuba and Argentina wa
s sublime. To add insult to injury, Captain Emilio Aragonés, the secretary of the Cuban Communist Party (who had been Fidel’s envoy to the Congo, sent to support – or keep an eye on – Che’s campaign), was named as Ambassador to Argentina and on his watch lucrative business deals were made between the genocidal dictatorship and the Free Territory of America. During this tragic period, of every ten dollars that entered the country to end up in the pockets of murderers, eight came from the socialist camp, including Cuba.

  ‘La Lucha Continua’, says the refrain, but what went on was life with its contingent trials and tribulations. We made friends in Malmö’s Latin American colony, the most notorious in Sweden in those days, and thirty years on we still have the same ones. Borges says the bad thing about lists is that they only emphasise what is left out, so I will refrain. But I could not have got this far in my memoirs without the support of Jonas and René, my two friends in Malmö: Juan Carlos Peirone and René Borda.

  When I first arrived in Malmö, I met a couple of Argentines, Mario and José Luís, who were voluntary migrants. Mario told me solemnly: ‘In this country, when you take your first step outside in the morning, you’ve already committed an offence.’ Not totally unfair, I must say, given the fondness for the penal code over the circumstances of the perpetrator of the offence. Both artists, and my first friends, they had connections in the immigrant substratum, which operated in the service sector. So I ended up working as a docker in the port of Malmö, on its last legs in those days. There was nothing nice about this so-called romantic activity. I unloaded dredgers, guided cranes, or cleaned floors, and there I found my brilliant future career.