Inevitably, I closed on San Martín. In a place without calendars or clocks, I sensed that February had arrived, and with it came a cold rain that finally washed me out of the hills and down a steep road that traced its way between a mountainside and the shore of a tremendous lake, Lago Lacar. I paused in the rain long enough to survey the view from a high overlook. Deep blue and cold, five hundred yards wide and twenty miles long, the lake had the same effect on Guevara that the mountains were having on me. Camping on its edge, he and Granado were captured by the dreamy beauty of the place:
There, in the shade of the huge trees, where the wilderness had held back the advance of civilization, we made plans to set up a laboratory when we got back from our trip. We imagined enormous windows looking out over the lake, while winter painted the ground white; an autogiro to get from one side to the other; fishing from a boat; endless excursions into the almost virgin forest. Often on our travels, we longed to stay in some of the wonderful places we saw, but only the Amazon jungle had the same strong pull on the sedentary part of ourselves as this did. I now know, by a fatalistic coincidence with fact, that I am destined to travel, or rather, we are destined, because Alberto is just like me. All the same, there are moments when I think with profound longing of those wonderful areas in the South of Argentina. Maybe one day when I’m tired of wandering, I’ll come back to Argentina and settle in the Andean lakes, if not indefinitely at least in transit to another conception of the world.
Looking down on the lake, I could almost see him half a century later, bent with age, a respectable citizen retired from his medical practice at the lakeside, a car parked in the driveway instead of the dreamed-of autogiro, but otherwise a model of contentment.
Maybe he’d be out there now, sitting in a rowboat, waiting patiently in the rain in the middle of the lake. If you were a dreamer, it was easy to believe that eventually something would bite.
Even in 1952 San Martín de Los Andes had been a tourist destination, and when I finally rolled out of the hills with my fingers frozen to the handlebars I found a town without a trace of indigenous color or life, only windsurfing shops and clouds of soaked backpackers lingering under the eaves of the main street. San Martín breathed in the mobile pesos of those Argentines who could afford to sit by a lake and stare at the mountains. Like every resort town, it was a transient place, with a summer population that swelled with busboys and chambermaids and from which the life ebbed each fall in slow disappointment.
In a coffee shop I thawed my fingers around a cortado and borrowed a phone book to search for a name that did not exist. In their diaries, both Guevara and Granado had mentioned a notable night spent at the estancia, or ranch, of a local family. I hoped to find the family, but neither diarist had noted where they lived except to say it was a short distance outside the town. The chance of finding them was reduced by the fact that the two G’s had each spelled the family name differently. Granado’s diary mentioned them as the “Von Put Camers” while Guevara, in a letter to his mother, had spelled it “Von Putnamer.”
Neither name was listed in San Martín, and I patiently worked my way through the subdirectories for the surrounding rural communities without luck. I even checked combinations of the name (Putnamer, Put Camer, Von Put Namer, Camer, Vonputnamer, Von Camer Put) but it was a dry hole. San Martín was a land of transients. Time, no doubt, would have wiped away much of the trail left by the motorcyclists. I handed the phone book back to my waiter with a sour look.
“You didn’t find what you were looking for?” he said with evident sympathy.
To be polite, I explained that I was searching for an old German family from the region, the Putnamers or Putcamers or Von something-or-others. It had all been long ago.
He closed his eyes tightly, like he was on a game show. “25260, I think. Yes, 25260.”
I went over to the house phone, picked it up, and dialed. Mr. Oscar Von Puttkamer answered on the first ring. Caught unprepared, I had no reasonable explanation for my call. I didn’t know how to spring on him the odd bit of news that a young man his family had briefly entertained in their home forty-four years before had turned out to be of some great importance to Latin American history. Rather than mention Che Guevara’s name, I simply mumbled a not-untrue explanation that I was a North American journalist, researching the history of the region.
“Be here in five minutes,” the voice said. “I will tell you everything you want to know about it.”
His house was four blocks away. I took down the directions.
I was still replaying the conversation in my head—what did he mean that he would tell me about “it”?—when I reached the motorcycle, plugged in the key, and twisted it clockwise. The green neutral light gave off a faint glow—very faint.
As soon as I had unloaded the bike in Buenos Aires, I had noticed that the battery was weak. I put this down to carelessness by the longshoremen, who had probably left the ignition on during the day or two that the bike had waited in a warehouse. On my journey down the Argentine coast it had run well enough, but once I turned inland the green light had begun to fade. Each morning the bike was harder and harder to start. During three weeks of inland travel, I’d burned up battery juice by driving with the headlight late into the night. Sometimes, on the cold mornings when I had set off to fish some high mountain stream, even heaving on the kick starter was barely sufficient to start the bike.
Now the green diode looked wan and sickly, and when I hit the starter button the engine turned over only once and then choked on a ga ga ga sound from the solenoid. I pressed the button again, and this time the motor turned over and caught, and with the pepper grinder back in action I drove a block, made a right, drove a block, made a left, drove a block, and saw Oscar Von Puttkamer standing in the street, waving at me.
It turned out that both of the boys were wrong about the spelling. The Von Put Camers and Von Putnamers had never existed, but the Von Puttkamers were right here where they had always been. A barrel-chested man with a dense brown beard and a florid face, Oscar looked German enough to slip down to the beer hall in a pair of lederhosen.
Looks were deceiving. Oscar invited me inside his “city house”—he had an estancia outside town—and offered me a choice between coffee or yerba mate. Made from spare lawn clippings—or so it tasted—yerba mate was crammed by the fistful into a tankard, doused in boiling water, and the resulting green swamp was inhaled through an ornate filter-straw. There was no denying the ritualistic appeal of passing the mate gourd, but coffee seemed safer terrain for the novice. Oscar sent his wife off to make a round and let fly. He had been waiting a long time to tell someone “what happened.”
I still hadn’t mentioned Che Guevara’s name, but Oscar never doubted for a second why I was calling. Just a few years before today, Che’s Notas de Viaje had been published for the first time in Italy. A friend drew their attention to the entry about the Von Puttkamer family. He had never read the actual passage and asked to see my copy, which I produced. I read him the brief passages referring to the family:
Late in the afternoon we stopped at an estancia whose owners, very welcoming Germans, had in the past put up an uncle of mine, an inveterate old traveler whose example I was now emulating. They said we could fish in the river flowing through the estancia. …
I broke out Granado’s diary to see if there was anything worth quoting. Oscar asked what I was looking at, so I told him. He had never heard of Granado, of course, but I explained who he was and mentioned that he had also written about the estancia visit that day in 1952. “What does it say?” Oscar asked.
Guevara had been delighted by his stay with the Von Puttkamers and even praised one of the men in the family as being “the best” despite supporting the posturing Perón. Granado’s diary was less flattering, but Oscar had a right to know what others said about his family. I read him Granado’s entry for January 30, 1952:
A few kilometers along we encountered a road leading to an estate. We entered to try
to buy some kind of meat to lunch on. Fate put us on the path to this establishment, which demonstrates the extent of the penetration by German Junkers, Nazis of course, in Patagonia.
I looked up from the book briefly. Oscar’s face had turned red at the phrase “Nazis of course,” and the flush was rising visibly up his cheeks as I now read on. Granado went on to complain that the Argentine military junta had tacitly supported these “Nazis” in Patagonia:
They spoke of this in the first years of the Second World War, but later the news was silenced. The owner of this place is a relatively young German, with the typical appearance of a Prussian official. His last name says it all: Von Put Camer.
The construction of the central house of the estate imitates the buildings of the German Black Forest. They have brought deer here, which over the years have adapted and reproduced in the surrounding zones.
I stopped there, because each sentence seemed to push Oscar’s head closer to exploding. The lower half of his face had turned a deep, sanguine purple, edging toward bright red in his upper cheeks. The skin under his sideburns was purple, but only to a precise line midway up the ear. Above that line he was pale, white, and almost sweaty. It looked as though someone had drawn a line across his face and then slowly filled him up with blood.
He couldn’t hold it in. “You know why they say this?” he burst out, and just as suddenly stopped. Neither of us could answer that question. Oscar was tongue-tied; I fixated on the thermometer of his temples. “Well,” Oscar vented, and again: “Well.” He grabbed big mouthfuls of air and then, finally, sputtered out a family résumé. “It’s true,” he began, “there were always Von Puttkamers in Germany’s highest military circles. The Von Puttkamers were one of the great military families of Prussia. But …” He fell silent for a moment, looking for something to attach to that “but …”
“You know who Bismarck was married to?” he continued. “A Von Puttkamer! Well …” Again, the pause that said he was not sure quite where he was going with his point. “It’s true there was a Von Puttkamer on the German general staff! But … but the Von Puttkamers were always on the general staff!
“But … uh … it’s true there were many Von Puttkamers in the German army during World War Two. Something like twenty-six of them! But … well.” Pause. “Yes, it’s true there was a Von Puttkamer in the room when they blew up Hitler!” Pause. “But … but the Von Puttkamers were professional soldiers!” Pause. “They were not Nazis!” Pause.
Oscar’s clipped gestures and red face were fulfilling Granado’s caricature of a Prussian functionary. The cycle was self-reinforcing: the more he tried to defend his family history, the more he was digging himself into a hole. That just made him more desperate, which in turn made him defend things which needed no defending—he denied that the family had introduced European deer into the zone, and even became defensive over the architecture of the old “Black Forest” house that Granado had found somehow sinister.
Oscar had a point, even if he couldn’t make it. The Von Puttkamers were a great military family long before Hitler arrived on the scene, but these Von Puttkamers weren’t even small villains. Oscar hadn’t even been born when Hitler died, while his father and uncles and female relations had spent the war in Argentina.
Guilt flows with the steady creep of osmosis, however, and the strange association of Patagonia with Nazis was by now both popular image and old news. That the German influence here long predated Hitler did nothing to lift the cloud that shadowed the psychology of people like Oscar. German settlers had been coming to South America for generations before the war, filling up the emptiness of Patagonia with farms and sheep ranches, building towns like San Martín and Bariloche to the south into enclaves of proud Germano-Argentines.
As Adolf Eichmann learned at the cost of his life, it was wrong to assume that these Germano-Argentines were fellow fascists ready to provide fugitive Nazis with camouflage. Eichmann, the functionary who planned and directed the logistics of the Final Solution, had survived the collapse of the Nazi regime and emigrated to Argentina, where he spent several years in odd jobs—laborer, vacuum cleaner salesman, factory manager—in different parts of the country, including Patagonia. Eventually he was spotted by one of the very “Germans” he had assumed would protect him, a man who had fled the Nazis and now informed on the modest bureaucratic killer. Commandos from the new state of Israel kidnapped the fugitive and shipped him to Israel for a historic trial. Testifying from inside a bulletproof glass box, Eichmann said that he was “only following orders” when he personally oversaw the extinguishing of millions of European Jews.
Eichmann was the most famous Nazi refugee in Argentina, but hardly the only one. Klaus Barbie, the former Gestapo officer and “butcher of Lyon,” had been a frequent visitor to Bariloche. During the 1950s and ‘60s, Barbie lived in Bolivia, where he taught his Gestapo skills to the local secret police. To escape the rigors of this employment he would head south on vacations to the comforting Alpine vistas of Bariloche. When I’d been in Bariloche years before, my hotel keepers had been a pair of elderly Slovenians with Austrian educations and pretensions. They were honorary members of Patagonia’s German community and recalled meeting Barbie on the local ski slopes in the 1960s, although he was using a false name. (“A very ordinary man,” the husband said. “We had no idea who he was.”) Barbie was finally deported from Bolivia to France in 1983 to stand trial. A few months before my arrival yet another Nazi—now in his seventies—had been plucked from the streets of Bariloche. As a young SS captain, Erich Priebke had overseen the massacre of 335 Italians in a cave beneath Rome; he had spent the subsequent decades living openly in Bariloche, and had even been president of the local German-Argentine Friendship Society. He was deported to Italy, tried for the massacre, cleared, retried, and eventually sentenced to house arrest.
Oscar hadn’t even been alive during the war. Born and raised in Patagonia, an engineer by training, he drank mate, spoke Spanish with an Argentine accent, and knew more English words than German. In fact, he could not conjugate one verb in that tongue. He was Argentine through and through. Yet here he was sputtering in defensive fury against charges that his family were “Nazis of course.”
I apologized and explained that I was merely repeating what someone else—this Alberto Granado character—had said about the Von Puttkamers. The temperature of Oscar’s face seemed to drop a few degrees, and we returned to the present of coffee cups and hospitality.
I still resented Guevara’s ability to cadge bed and board from strangers. Determined, as the Cubans say, to “Be Like Che,” I screwed up my shamelessness and mentioned that I was looking for a place to stay the night. The historic parallel—Che stayed with you, and I’m following his route—apparently didn’t occur to Oscar, who merely agreed that it was very tough to find a bed in town during high season. I malingered around the house for a few minutes, but it was unlikely that he or his wife would offer me a bed after I had labeled him a Nazi.
“Why don’t you come out to the country house tomorrow at ten o’clock,” he finally said, “and I will show you where Guevara was.”
This was the best I would get. We went outside and stood around the motorcycle. Oscar was pleased that I drove a German machine, but proved he was really an Argentine by asking how fast it went. I boasted about the speed and how reliable the bike was (“Like a cockroach,” I told him, “it’s ugly but impossible to kill”), but when I turned the key the green light glimmered only dimly. Nothing happened when I pressed the starter button. I kicked over the engine, and kicked again, growing sweaty and embarrassed. For more than five minutes I tinkered with the choke, switched the key on and off, and swung the engine over without the slightest response. The green light faded and then died. Perhaps I would have to spend the night here after all.
At the last second the bike unexpectedly roared to life. Oscar looked relieved. Just as I pulled out, it started to rain again. I drove around and around the town getting soaked, but all t
he cheap hotels were full. Like the two G’s, I tried to camp on the lakeshore but was instantly routed by a glowering park ranger. It grew dark.
A priest charged me seven dollars to sleep on the floor of his church.
At 9:30 the next morning the bike died again in a gas station at the end of San Martín’s main street. Nothing I did would restart it. The attendant gave me directions to a repair shop, and I slowly pushed the bike down the street and into a garage filled with grease-blackened pieces of engine. A young man of about twenty came over and explained that the mechanic was in Chile at a soccer tournament.
“But I might be able to help you,” he said. Not without some preparation, however. First, Manolo introduced himself; second, he asked how fast the bike went; third, he turned on and adjusted the radio; fourth, he made yerba mate.
While we waited for the electric kettle to boil, Manolo stuffed a mate gourd rim full of the grassy green herb. He offered me the first sip, a traditional sign of hospitality. I would have preferred to add some sugar—in fact, I would have preferred to toss the stuff on the ground—but I dared not antagonize a mechanic. I choked down a boiling mouthful without complaint.
Manolo sipped at the second pour and stared at the motorbike. He stared and stared at it. “What’s it called?” he finally asked. I told him the motorcycle wasn’t called anything. “It has to have a name,” he said. “You have to give it a name, like a girl.”
Gusts of moist wind blew in the open door of the garage, and I waited. Manolo sipped, stared, and sipped some more, drawing in his cheeks. He leaned against a wall beneath a cartoon of Argentina’s president sitting on a toilet. The caption read FUCK THAT SHITHEAD MENEM. The minutes stretched out and the tranquillity became unnerving. Manolo poured a third dose of water over the same leaves and went back to leaning against the wall with the metal straw poked into his mouth. Finally, after ten minutes of this contemplation, he took a single step toward the bike, reached out a hand, and then froze.
Chasing Che Page 8