They mouthed the word as if they had never heard it before.
Out in the desert again, there was so little to look at that I began gazing far off the roadside and finally noticed a low brown smudge of buildings in the distance. I took a side road and then bounced down a dirt path the last few hundred yards before pulling up at the gate of a “nitrate office,” as the old mining camps were known in Chile. Like most of the nitrate mines, this one had closed decades ago. There were several dozen low barracks buildings and a couple of three-story offices. The whole place was surrounded by a wall, and on top of the wall was rusting barbed wire.
The sound of my engine roused the caretaker from his siesta. He was unshaven and seemed drunk, but agreed to show me around. A small construction crew was “restoring” one of the biggest buildings, a plan that seemed to require dismantling it.
In the mid-1970s Chacabuco had been a concentration camp in the most literal sense. A small number of high-ranking Allende aides had been concentrated here from other prisons. The old nitrate offices made useful little jails: they were far from public scrutiny, already had the ideal infrastructure of spartan barracks, and, surrounded by barbed wire and relentless desert, were essentially escape-proof. The prisoners suffered from a blazing sun by day and freezing temperatures by night. In the metaphoric eloquence of Castilian, Chileans referred to this gulag archipelago as “the red desert.”
The signs of prison life were still everywhere: a jury-rigged basketball hoop for exercise, a pile of cafeteria-style trays used during feeding hour, a cross roughly gouged into the plaster high on one wall, making a chapel out of a small dank room. This sad little house of improvised worship with its roof falling in was the one place where Allende’s aides could escape their fate, however briefly.
There was graffiti in a couple of places, mostly just names (“Alex Acuna 10-12-76”) but also a few longer messages (“Here were tortured Chaparrón, Chacay and his loyal friend Buco González and the Doctor Dulit”). There were also fresh Nazi swastikas penned on several walls alongside cryptic initials. The keeper explained that they were made by right-wing extremist groups who considered the camp a shrine, not a shame. They were proud of what Chile had done here.
“Here Endures the Memory of the Wounded Public,” someone responded in a broad, angry hand on one wall, right above the swastikas. “Not Even Fascist Graffiti Can Erase the Red Desert.” A sign near the entrance said that this mine had been a “Patrimony of Mankind” since 1971, but the sign mentioned nothing about the red desert. As usual in Chile, official accounts of history suffered a bout of amnesia around 1973.
Power tools growled in the background, gnawing away at the buildings. The historical audit—the final accounting of what had really happened in Chile during the time of blooding—was only just beginning.
Back on the road, I again saw a low brown wall in the distance and bounced over the broken ground toward what proved to be a lonely cemetery. A sign identified it as the Rica Aventura nitrate mine. Rich Adventure; the name rang a bell, and digging in Granado’s diary—Big Che hadn’t mentioned it—I found that the boys had spent a couple of nights in the workers’ dormitory, observing some of the same miners now buried in front of me. I counted two hundred graves and then stopped, overwhelmed by how many yet remained. Entire rows were set aside for infants who had lived only a few days, they or their mothers unable to endure the poisoned mining environment. There were a few wooden crosses, their words worn away by the wind (“inconsolable parents … dust and forgetting”), but since even plastic flowers wilt in such severe heat most of the tombs were decorated only with scraps of iron—wreaths made from barrel hoops, metal flowers blooming with rust, and vines of barbed wire. The whole boneyard rattled with the wind like an untuned orchestra.
Back on the road, a few hours of emptiness passed with monotonous speed. In a sandstorm an isolated gas station fed my tank. Moments after pulling out, I spotted what at first seemed a mirage: a lone figure walking by the side of the road in this vast emptiness. The man proved corporeal, yet unreal: he was sunburned and utterly mad, his brain baked by the heat. In a great rush of words he explained that he was patrolling the desert with ten liters of water in his backpack, speaking the secret language of trees and mountains. I tape-recorded him as he babbled about Masonic conspiracies and a Japanese/Nazi/Jewish/communist plot to wreck the world. Looking about us, I could see only hills and sand and red rock. The road was already nearly ruined, so there was little the secret masters of his world could do to make things worse. I gave the madman some bread.
“In Chile, there are only two kinds of people,” he said by way of thanks. “The innocent and the living.”
I did not have to struggle now to Be Like Che. His lust for self-invention had seeped from the surface of my skin deep into my bones, and I had slowly come to accept that on the road we were beyond all consequence. The childish appeal of military code names and clandestine operations had a clear prologue in the glancing, slightly criminal life of the traveler.
In Arica, just before the Peruvian border, I stopped at the local newspaper in my most ragged clothes, introduced myself—or a version of myself—and wove an elaborate tale about my literary adventures in South America. I posed for a photo while trying to look dashing on the motorbike, and stole some office supplies on the way out. I’d been particularly careful to downplay the whole Che Guevara angle to my trip; I was tired of living in his shadow, and dammit my own trip should be good enough for these rubes.
When the paper came out the next morning I grabbed a copy and began flipping through it eagerly. Page after page went by with no sign of me. All sorts of stuff was judged more newsworthy than my arrival in Arica: Mia Farrow had lost the rent control on her New York apartment, and down in Valdivia a Socialist member of Parliament had been thrown into jail (admittedly, only for half an hour) for “insults to the commander in chief Augusto Pinochet.”
Finally I found it, buried on the very last page. ERNESTO GUEVARA WAS IN ARICA IN MARCH 1952, the headline roared. The article barely mentioned me.
The bulk of the text simply repeated his comments on Arica, described his adventures, and quoted his delight at meeting a border guard who liked the foul yerba mate. The piece even detailed how Che had taken one of his rare baths in the ocean, “with soap and everything.”
The photo made me look preppy, not dashing. I wandered around town for a couple of days, but no one recognized me or paid the slightest attention.
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE RED BLAZE
The night before Lima I slept in a field of bones and dreamed of a motorcycle shop full of spare parts. Because it was a dream, the glass counters in the store held only the things that I needed: a new tail-light to replace the one that had broken somewhere in the desert; the odd little screw that held the seat lock together; brake pads fresh from Bavaria. When I woke up, what I remembered was that the staff in this dream store all spoke English. That was it. That was the whole dream: a parts store with an English-speaking staff.
The dream came to me while I slept atop a mass grave in the sandy coastal desert three hundred miles south of Lima. Called Chauchilla, the cemetery was an ancient repository of bones about twenty miles from the famous “lines” of Nazca, those giant drawings of abstract geometry and dogs, birds, trees, and monkeys that had been etched in the desert floor more than a thousand years ago. There were a hundred or more old cemeteries in the same area, filled with the remains of the Paracas and the Nazcas, people who had once held sway in this region and now dwelled under its soil. All you had to do to find them was pull off the freshly paved Pan-American Highway of southern Peru—a two-lane paradise of black asphalt, the single best road I saw in all South America—and bounce over the desert for a few hundred yards. The valley floor at Chauchilla was dotted with bleached femurs and bits of smashed skulls sitting in plain sight. The dry climate had preserved an extraordinary array of burial cloths and scraps of tapestries—even mummies. Looters both ancien
t and modern had worked over the graves many times, plundering everything of value, but there was something moving in the ordinary bits of twine and tattered bundles that you could uncover here just by kicking a little sand aside.
I pitched my tent, which promptly blew away. I sprinted over the dunes to catch it and reset it in the lee of the motorcycle with the belly of the shelter filled with my saddlebags and other gear to keep it rooted. I wandered the bones for a while, watered at the nearby creek that ran out of the brown hills, and after sunset went to my disturbed sleep. Normally, I was too tired to dream. I’d wake up where I had lain down, in the same position, each night a long black nothing—sometimes ten or twelve hours—undisturbed by motions, images, or needs. I’d close my eyes and the blackness would come and stay.
Before the dream there had been other signs. On the first night after crossing the border into Peru I had found myself weeping uncontrollably and without explanation. My mouth was often dry now. I fell in love with almost every woman I met, and got drunk one afternoon with a couple of Peruvians and shot holes in things with an air rifle.
The border crossing had been slow and complex, requiring trips back and forth, hour after hour of waiting in the hot sun, and an enormous amount of paperwork. I sat on the curb for a while with a Peruvian customs broker named Pato, who specialized in moving stolen cars from Chile into Peru. We talked about women until that was exhausted and then about Che Guevara. Pato said they were still looking for Che’s bones in Vallegrande, which was “some place up there,” he said, pointing toward the Andes. They still couldn’t find the body. I feigned ignorance, and Pato said he knew all about it and would fill me in. His Life of Guevara went like this:
Well, they say he was an Argentine, but really he was from Uruguay. He was a student of medicine in Buenos Aires, but he quit medicine and started to read. A light switched on. He became leader of a socialist group, and got to know Fidel Castro, and when the revolution began in Cuba, he joined it. But afterwards he and Castro couldn’t agree on anything. When Castro saw white, Che saw black. So what did he do? He came to Peru. This was around 1974. Che came down through Nicaragua, all of Central America, Colombia, to Peru, to find the guerrillas here and give them help. He began arming them. But the Peruvian army discovered him while he still had only a small force. So that’s why he went to Bolivia. My brother knew him personally, that’s how I know so much.
Nearly every fact in this biography was wrong, which made me like Pato even more. They were all nice guys at the border. A Peruvian supervisor named Mr. Rojo was supposed to take the day off, but he spent an entire afternoon filling out paperwork for me. He completed the Relación del Vehículo y Pasajeros in triplicate, and typed the green Permiso de Circulación No. 4186 and filled in the date (Marzo 8, 1996), and even got down on his knees in the parking lot to search out the engine number on Kooky’s left cylinder head. When we were finally done with the paperwork it was dark and I realized that Mr. Rojo had spent almost six hours of his day off smoothing my way through customs, through the police, through the agricultural inspection, and through immigration. When I was finally in Peru, we said good-bye in the parking lot and I tried to hand him a ten-dollar tip for all he had done. Mr. Rojo blanched, waved away the money, and then spoke the cruelest words I had heard in months: “Te equivocaste, Patricio, te equivocaste”—“You were mistaken.”
The bones in the graveyard where I slept the next and last night before Lima had been tossed about by all the looters that the centuries could provide, and lay in disordered heaps and random collections. Only one or two intact skeletons were visible, and these featured bits of dried, leathery flesh still attached to the forearms and shins and ribs. Natural cotton bolls, stuffed into the body cavities to absorb fluid and therefore aid mummification, now tumbled loose in the shallow depressions of sand. There were bits of woven fabric, but the burial bundles had all been plundered long ago of the tools, jewelry, and personal items these small people had expected to need in the next world. They hadn’t understood that the next world was simply this same world, only without them.
These people had died long before the violent struggles between the twentieth century’s left and right; I suspected that they would still recognize Peru, however. If they were to wake up from their graves and shake off the sand they would see the same broad valley, the same stony hills, the same neighbors in the village across the creek, still tilling fields of irrigated potatoes. Even the chaos of modern Peru would seem familiar. War changed its shape and donned costumes of ambition and ideology, but the basic human urge to dispute was eternal.
The bones were nothing to take too seriously. The dead deserved and received no respect: some kids who had played in the valley before me had used twenty-three femurs and three skulls to spell out the word Buzz on the ground. This was probably the name of their favorite heavy metal band.
In the morning, with the wind drumming sand against my tent, the spare parts dream sat there in my mind, pathetically unremarkable but for the fact that I couldn’t think of another dream I’d had on the entire trip. I waved it off and rode furiously toward Lima all day.
The Scorch. I had always called Lima by that bitter, blackened name. It was a foul metropolis of dusty brown buildings and clogged streets and cold hills that had chilled my heart since the first day I had seen it. It was my least favorite place in the hemisphere, a burden of sorrow on the ground, and when the desert began to give way to the edges of the city, to its ring of hills and its outer badges of poverty, I rode Kooky with slow care and felt an emotional paralysis overwhelm me. I realized, as I rolled up a highway into the suburb of Miraflores, what was driving my strange visions and violent impulses of recent days: It was this.
Peru was what made Chile look good. The measly numbers that were death in slim, sophisticated Chile could never measure against the mass of suffering that was Peru. Sixty thousand children died here every year before the age of one, mostly for lack of clean water. Cholera raged through the land. Poverty was endemic. A fifth of the 22 million people had never seen a school. Seventy percent of children under five were malnourished. Suffering was like a tax on the living, with collections that rolled over year after year, sapping the lives of millions upon millions, steadily laying Peruvians into the ground. The uprisings against one form of oppression or another were just as routine and constant: there had been guerrillas in the mountains here almost continuously for the last seven hundred years, culminating in the psychopathic Shining Path movement and a savage civil war that had killed perhaps thirty thousand people since 1980.
Scorch was where I had first set foot in Peru. The plane arrived at dawn, and I remember the swirling dust storms that cleared just enough on our approach to show some Mi-6 attack helicopters sitting limply on the tarmac, itself half-buried under shifting drifts. On the cab ride into the city I passed through the first shantytown I had seen. I’d viewed Soweto and the favelas of Rio de Janeiro on television, of course, and had assumed that shanties in Peru would look pretty much the same. That wasn’t the case: since it never rains in Lima, adobe bricks, loose-fitting stones, and roofs of thatch or even cardboard were the building materials of choice. Corrugated tin was rare. Later, when I’d been out in the real shantytowns, I would learn that the places near the airport were practically middle class. There were shantytowns and then there were shantytowns, with gradations of desperation and success, each with its own character and qualities.
Miraflores was the best that the Scorch had to offer, and it wasn’t much, just a modest suburb along the sea with a few tall buildings and some roast chicken restaurants and pizza joints. There was a triangular park at the center that they nonetheless called “el ovalo,” and as I drove around it and over the bridge into neighboring San Isidro I saw that things had improved somewhat since my previous visits. There was less broken glass around, and the buildings that the guerrillas had once turned into empty eye sockets with their car bombs were now glazed again into mirrored privacy. Miraflores wa
s filled with business. There was a new Blockbuster Video wrapped in its own parking lot like a bunker with a clear field of fire.
The owner of a guest house let me bring Kooky inside, then closed the wrought iron gates behind me and double-locked the front doors. The outer wall was topped with broken glass. Every house was still a fortress here.
I took a long shower and washed the desert from my skin for the last time. From here I would turn inland and climb up into the mountains, leaving the dry coast behind. The mountains were dangerous. Peruvians called them “the Red Zone” because of all the guerrillas. I’d already met the guerrillas of Peru once, five years before, and once was more than enough.
That day had started with a long wait in yet another dusty field of rocks on the outskirts of Lima. It was visiting day, and two hundred women and perhaps a hundred men stood with Incan patience in the heat, slowly inching forward as each person and her or his paperwork was inspected, handled, stamped, and inked by teams of soldiers. The line began out in the street and ran in fits and busts through the stony parking lot and toward the great fortress wall of the Canto Grande prison. Soldiers with automatic rifles strolled around the scene, pestering vendors, kicking dogs, and “borrowing” newspapers from the people in line. A tiny door in the wall opened from time to time and admitted a few supplicants or expelled a few more soldiers. You were only admitted to the prison on visiting day if you had the name of a specific someone to visit: I wrote “Juan Valdez” on the little form handed to me at the first checkpoint.
At six-two, I towered over these four-foot-tall women, and inevitably the soldiers grew nervous and began watching me. A private raced off but nothing happened for a long time, and I made it to the second checkpoint before they pulled me out of line. A Chinese-Peruvian captain appeared (there were many Asian immigrants to Peru; President Alberto Fujimori’s parents were from Japan, and his nickname was El Chino). The captain listened to the explanation for my mission—to interview the guerrillas imprisoned here—and nodded curtly. A sergeant then led me straight to the head of the line. I rolled my right sleeve up and a series of corporals applied seven different purple stamps to my arms, beginning at the wrist and working up to the biceps by the seventh seal. A soldier cheerfully wrote the number “150” on my other arm in ballpoint. This, he explained, was to help identify bodies.
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