Astiz was back in the news because the French government was attempting to prosecute him for the murder of the two French nuns. Argentina refused the French request, and the gesture would later come to nothing. It was merely a coincidence of timing that Astiz was in the papers during the same weeks that Che’s burial site had been identified, yet there was something oddly symbolic about their mutual return to prominence. There they were next to each other in the news columns, two such different men—Marxist guerrilla and navy officer—yet both Argentine, both sons of the cultured leadership class, both combatants in a secret war. They were opposites in theory but startlingly close in origin, men who had lived clandestine lives in the service of political warfare, men obsessed with honor who nonetheless made the many compromises that a commitment to violence requires. They shared in a heroic subculture, in the rituals of extreme danger, intrigue, and secrecy. Like warriors everywhere, Astiz gained stature through the existence of his enemy; the radical left and the radical right existed in a kind of symbiosis, flip sides of the same coin, the one necessary to the other. This point was not lost on Astiz, of all people. In the text accompanying the photo, he was quoted as saying that he “admired” Che Guevara for his idealism and unwillingness to compromise. He might have been a communist subversive, but he was still El Puro, the pure one.
I had come to South America to find some youthful, original Guevara, perhaps a young man who predated the various encrustations of legend, the Ernesto who came before the Che. But with even a right-wing military murderer declaring himself a fan of the man, it was beginning to seem I had set myself an impossible task. You could ride across South America, you could see what he had seen, you could even reach all the way to his grave site in Bolivia. But if everyone agreed that Che was a hero—right-wing killers, Hollywood executives, guerrillas in the field, marketing experts, Fidel Castro, and church fathers—then no one really agreed on anything. Who, really, was Ernesto Guevara Lynch de la Serna? And who is Che?
“Oh, it’s a very bad moment for Che,” the T-shirt salesman told me. “Nothing but smalls.” He was a rotund, mustachioed fellow who cared more for rock bands than politics. It was lunchtime now, and en route to the Richmond for my daily defeat I’d spotted his shop in a commercial gallery and paused long enough to see how the Che shirts were moving.
“I sell three or four of these an afternoon,” he went on, “five on Saturdays. There’s a Che mania right now. It started a couple of years ago when a few bands that are fashionable with very young people—Los Fabulosos Cadillacs, Rage Against the Machine—started having Che banners at their concerts and so on. Then it really picked up with the search for his remains in Vallegrande. Now, with Antonio Banderas coming to town, forget it.”
I asked him what the movie would be like. “They say he isn’t going to be Che Guevara, just a typical Argentine Che. But I don’t believe it. It’s going to be just like when I saw the musical in London, Che and Evita dancing together. I have some Che backpacks if you want.”
I didn’t want. My own clothes and luggage had reappeared mysteriously at the airport, and I no longer needed shirts or gear, however iconic. I walked to the Richmond, but the man in tweed was absent from his usual seat. I let a coffee burn into my stomach and read the papers. Above the fold was an article detailing the triumphant march of stock prices on the Argentine bolsa. Below the fold an intrepid reporter had settled the mystery of Argentina’s disappearing cats. As a rather gory photo showed, the children of the new shantytowns were roasting them over trash fires. With a kind of routine reluctance I called the customs broker from the house phone. “It’s here,” he said. I glanced at my watch: their office closed at three, and with luck I might just have time to do the paperwork and ride away. I jumped into a yellow-and-black Fiat cab and headed for the port, a route that passed behind the Casa Rosada. The taxi was running fast—this is a nation of frustrated Formula One fans—and up at the Plaza de Mayo I caught a sudden glimpse of a tiny crowd, some banners, and a cloud of smoke drifting through the air.
“Tear gas,” the driver announced. “Roll up your window.”
We barreled along toward the port, passing a dark green beast lumbering the other way up the avenue. It was an armored truck topped with a comically tiny spout for shooting water at the delincuentes. I asked the driver what cause had brought peaceful Argentina back to the brink of civil unrest.
“Well,” he said, meditating for a moment while cutting off a bus. He looked in the mirror, not to check the bus but to see my face. “What day of the week is it?” he asked. Thursday, I said. “I think on Thursday it’s the teachers.”
Across Latin America, for the first time in a generation, the left had gone silent, reduced to these clockwork motions of the If-it’s-Thursday-they-must-be-teachers variety. Once upon a time the ratio of missing cats to rising stocks would have provoked a guerrilla movement or at least the magical-realist flights of rhetoric upon which the hemisphere’s left depended for life. But even the Spanish language had been captured by the values of capitalism now. Regional debate bristled with financial acronyms like NAFTA, GATT, and MERCOSUR. Latin America had become a net importer of capital for the first time in decades, hyperinflation was almost forgotten, and the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund dictated endless cuts in social spending to governments throughout the region. Even Fidel Castro was talking about efficiency and profit repatriation, and you could earn a master’s of business administration at the University of Havana. It was a moment of transition in Latin America, when generations of history were being undone, when old arguments fell silent. This did not mean that the suffering and deprivation across Latin America were lessened, as the missing cats demonstrated. Global capitalism generated great wealth and then distributed it with blind indifference to need. Worldwide there were one and a half billion people living on less than a dollar a day; that number increased by about two hundred million in 1993. “People who find themselves at the juncture of worlds passing and worlds coming.” Henry Adams noted long ago, “tend to be crushed like insects.”
Latin America got the good along with the bad, and the world coming was in heavy evidence at the port, where the docks were so crowded with European luxury cars—Range Rovers for the estancia set and Alfa Romeos for the soccer players—that it took half an hour of wiggling between mirrors to find the dock foreman. He grunted when he heard what I wanted and led me into a long brick warehouse, up a ramp, and into a garage filled with new cars. In the corner was a motorcycle covered with plastic. He whipped off the cover with a great flourish to reveal a gleaming Honda chopper.
It was a lovely motorcycle, but not mine. The foreman implied that I should just shut up about my BMW dirt bike and take the Honda, but I persuaded him to keep looking, and we rode a passing forklift down the waterfront a block, each of us clinging to a side of the machine until it reached a prefabricated steel hangar. Inside were pallets of shrink-wrapped VCRs and, behind them, a twelve-year-old, blue-and-orange BMW R80 G/S that looked familiar. The saddlebags were still attached, which astonished the foreman (like most Argentines I’ve met, he felt that his countrymen were a race of thieves). I rifled quickly through the contents—a tent, sleeping bag, fishing rod, and a six-month-old copy of Notas de Viaje, or “Notes of a Trip,” written by none other than Ernesto “Che” Guevara. The book was his own road diary from the 1952 trip, a guide to where he had been, what he had seen, how he had felt. It was to be my road map to the past and present of South America.
“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 roll
ed 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.
Five 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:
[I]t is beautiful to see the effect which the wind has in passing over this wild expanse of waving grass; the shades between the brown and yellow are beautiful—the scene is placid beyond description—no habitation nor human being is to be seen, unless occasionally the wild and picturesque outline of the gaucho on the horizon.… The country has no striking features, but it possesses, like all the works of nature, ten thousand beauties. It has also the grandeur and magnificence of space, and I found that the oftener I crossed it, the more charms I discovered in it.
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 anot
her 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.
CHAPTER TWO
FELLOW TRAVELERS
Like 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.
Chasing Che Page 4