Chasing Che

by Patrick Symmes

  Later, Medianero left the party. I asked him why. “Politics,” he replied. Even the smallest parties were afflicted with endless schisms and feuds. Factionalism simply wore him out. He kept his friends on the left, however, and observed that they were slowly drifting away from radical activism. He’d recently attended the baptism of a child born to a friend who had been a fierce communist. Medianero was surprised to hear his friend had quit the party, and asked why. “I have a child,” the man replied. “I need a cement floor in my house. I don’t have time for politics.”

  After telling me this story, Medianero took a swig of his drink. “It’s too easy to blame the imperialists,” he said. “If a man needs a cement floor, he doesn’t care where it comes from.” The founders of the young towns had always been common laborers, he said, but their children were growing up as small entrepreneurs. This was a grand title for someone who sold things on the street or ran a business out of his shack, but it was a marked change in how people expected to live. Medianero said that life in Peru had changed faster than the vocabulary of politics.

  “The farmers are used to old-fashioned ideological talk,” he said. “You have to speak to them in the language of the left. I can talk to them in those terms, but then we make a pilot project to show them that private property is neither leftist nor rightist, just a good idea. You give them examples. People are slow to change their minds.”

  The second day was more urban than the first. We stopped at mid-morning at one of the model soup kitchens, called comedores populares. This was in Villa Salvador, itself a model slum where people were organized and had elected a local mayor and even a community assembly to speak for them. Two shy women dressed in the multiple petticoats of the Andean native showed me an empty larder. The building was adobe, about twenty feet wide and thirty feet long. It was decorated on one wall with Villa Salvador’s municipal symbol, a picture of two arms crossed, one holding a rifle and the other a shovel. There were a few wobbly benches inside, and three tables. They were hoping that some food donations from the Catholic charity Caritas (which distributes about a million rations a day in Lima) would arrive soon. When they had food, they made a watery soup and charged about twenty cents a bowl. They sat, passive, patient, and hopeful, cleaning the few pots and pans they had. Sometimes they were instructed to read aloud from a pro–Shining Path pamphlet—and they did it, because the penalty for resisting the revolution was death.

  A senile beggar woman approached me outside the comedor, fetid with poverty and dressed in rags. Medianero spoke to her quietly and led her to a bench. We climbed into the car but he did not start the engine. He waited, looking at the helpless old woman. “There is always this,” he said. “Always.”

  We drove farther south, down across a huge flat expanse of shanties, a disorganized and truly new young town that extended for miles. We passed two hundred women waiting in line at the community water tap. They held bright plastic buckets and shuffled slowly up the line, past the usual burning garbage and stray dogs. Still moving south, we passed a soccer field, just a rectangle of rocks lying in the brown dust. Eventually we came to where the slums began to peter out in the sand dunes along the ocean. The last outposts of Lima were those decrepit sheds with no roofs and woven mats for walls. I could crane my neck right over these feeble homes and peer inside like a giraffe. Often, there wasn’t even a cup inside. We climbed the highest dune and surveyed the slums as they ran up the coast toward central Lima. The cold blue ocean seemed impossibly beautiful.

  The Uruguayan historian Eduardo Galeano had met Che during the heady, early years of the Cuban revolution, and he recounted Guevara’s intimate familiarity with the details of poverty like this. Guevara could recite statistics on illiteracy, on infant mortality, on inoculation rates. Galeano had reverently placed Guevara’s 1951 motorcycle journey in this context: “On this journey of journeys,” he wrote in a review of Guevara’s diary, “solitude found solidarity, I turned into we.” The emotional basis for Guevara’s politics, then, was here in the slums he had seen, among the untouchables that he had touched. This was where an individual had surrendered himself to the necessity of the plural, a noble vision of solidarity that had produced some very dubious results in practice, whether here or in Havana.

  On the surface David Medianero had done the opposite—he had turned from the “we” of group action and party politics to the “I” of ownership and individual struggle. Perhaps the truly revolutionary act was to discard the cloak of doctrinal certainty and dare to accept the individuality of human beings again.

  The battle of these slums was a struggle between paradigms—one dedicated to Marx, the other to markets. Yet both sides were on the left. The only idea coming from the right was austerity in one guise or another, which always means less for the poor. Only the left cared enough to come into the townships at all.

  You could see all the way to Miraflores from on top of the dunes. Whichever way things were going, it was still a very long way.

  I fell profoundly ill, as much from my hatred of Scorch as from the pathogens that inevitably crept up my intestinal tract. Lima could fell anyone. I sent my brake pads out for a recoating and spent four days lying in the guest house evacuating my innards into the toilet, first from the top and then from the bottom. I sipped rehydration solution (water, sugar, and salt) and read a book I’d found lying around, The Secret Life of Alejandro Mayta. It was by Peru’s most famous author, Mario Vargas Llosa. Mayta was a fictional revolutionary, less charismatic and decisive than Che Guevara but similar in his faith that a tiny vanguard of guerrillas could change the world. The book’s narrator was a contemporary writer, an obvious stand-in for Vargas Llosa himself, who was digging through the 1950s, looking up old revolutionaries and conspirators, interviewing fellow travelers and old friends, all in the search for Mayta’s “precursory character.” Back then Mayta sounded a lot like the young Ernesto Guevara of the 1950s, an unsullied intellectual still dwelling in “that adolescence in which politics consists exclusively of feelings, moral indignation, rebellion, idealism, dreams, generosity, disinterestedness, mysticism.”

  There he was, young, slim, handsome, smiling, talkative, with his invisible wings, believing that the revolution was a question of honesty, bravery, disinterestedness, daring. He didn’t suspect and would perhaps never know that the revolution was a long act of patience, an infinite routine, a terribly sordid thing, a thousand and one wants, a thousand and one vile deeds …

  While I malingered in the bathroom, turning the pages, Mayta went to his death in a small town in the Andes, leading a failed insurgency and followed only by a blind man. Che was less naïve, but knowing the sordid nature of revolutions did not protect him from the same fate in the end.

  There were two Australians in the guest house who spent a lot of time watching satellite television in the little corridor outside my room. They were a cute, perky couple with a manic need to change channels every few seconds. I sat with them one night, watching the rest of the world flick by in two-second bursts of comedy, tragedy, and spectacle.

  “Stop!” I burst out. I made them back up and saw that I was not having visions: there was Che on television. It was a show broadcast live from Buenos Aires on the twentieth anniversary of the military coup that had initiated the Dirty War. A vast public square was filled with tens of thousands of people chanting “Never again!” Rock bands played, and in between songs old ladies dressed in black took to the microphone to urge their children to disobey authority. These had to be the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, the only mothers who considered rebellion the highest virtue.

  While the crowd sang along with an anthem by Charlie García, a South American Bob Dylan, huge banners of Che were brought forward through the crowd, tall red flags that swung over the sea of heads. There were a dozen of them, each sporting the same image of Che as always. It was the black-and-red iconic portrait, eyes fierce and uncompromising, blazing into the future—this future.

  An hour later the Aus
tralian couple knocked on my door. They didn’t speak Spanish and wanted help arranging a taxi for the airport, so I placed the call. Out of gratitude they handed me a little paper bag containing all their leftover cocaine. After they were gone I flushed it down the toilet. I needed to test the new brake pads, so around midnight I rode Kooky into town—without a helmet, for some reason—and circled the ovalo. Scorch didn’t look so bad now that I was leaving. I kept driving, a final tour that lasted an hour, and for once all the avenues were clear.

  I ended up circling the new Blockbuster endlessly, going round and round, wondering why the guerrillas always demolished the wrong symbols of American imperialism.

  CHAPTER NINE

  THE ROAD TO ROME

  For the first time in almost three thousand miles, I turned my back on the left coast of South America. The narrow, flat strip of alluvial land that I had first glimpsed the day of my crash in southern Chile now dropped behind. A smooth divided highway ran east from Lima, out through yet more shantytowns, and then gradually began to rise. The Andes stood like a black thundercloud. In my rearview mirrors I could see the smudge of Lima and behind it the blue ocean.

  After half an hour I came to a checkpoint. This was the only all-weather road connecting Lima to the sierra, and everything from potatoes to cocaine to guerrillas to tourists had to pass along this route. A somber officer inspected my papers and then asked me to dismount and bring my saddlebags inside. He was going to search me. In all the dozens of checkpoints I had passed through so far in Argentina, Chile, and Peru, no one had ever inspected my bags. Even the Chilean carabineros had done nothing more than confiscate the bread and cheese from a plastic bag shock-corded to the outside of my luggage. But for the Peruvian police this was a crucial frontier, a border between two worlds. The coast was a modernized wreck, where ruin and prosperity baked together under the sun. Above us were the cold and wild mountains, where Peru was more a notion than a nation.

  I wanted a witness but couldn’t find one, so I went into the little room with the officer and watched his hands closely. He opened the black plastic cases and slowly, professionally, worked his fingers through the clothing, reaching inside the plastic bags I used to keep things dry. He examined the spare clutch and brake cables; he opened the box containing my one spare inner tube; he passed over the diaries of Guevara and Granado without a glance. He closed the cases again. “Sorry,” he said. “We have to do this.”

  He cleared me, but the search, the inspection of my paperwork, and the waiting still consumed an hour, and I was already behind schedule. I was determined to reach Huancayo, in the high Andes, by lunch, and I pulled out the cheap paper map of Peru that I kept folded in the inner breast pocket of my leather jacket. According to the map the pavement ended there in Huancayo, but the road south and east toward Cuzco was listed as a main component of the Pan-American Highway system, so I figured I could still make good time. I planned to be in Ayacucho by nightfall, since it was only two hundred miles from Lima. I’d allowed a generous two days to cover the last half of the distance to Cuzco. I ran my fingernail down the twisty length of the road, past names I couldn’t pronounce. I’d underlined some of the places Guevara had stayed: Huancayo, Huanta, Ayacucho, Andahuaylas, Huancarama. I’d spent an afternoon at the South American Explorer’s Club in Lima poring over its maps and the latest reports on roads and guerrillas. The club was a slightly doddery institution in an old Lima house where mountain climbers could store gear and backpackers exchanged information regarding everything from petty crime to hotel rates to the depth of the snowpack. The news wasn’t all good, and I’d added annotations to my own map of Peru: “50 in column” referred to a company of Shining Path guerrillas spotted outside Chiclayo. I’d inked the whole region behind Huancayo with frantic black lines, indicating the presence of guerrillas there. There had been an attack at Huancavelica; another near Colcabamba; south of Ayacucho was particularly bad; everything south of Cuzco was dubious. Most of the reports were quite old. The Shining Path was on the run, its leaders arrested, its rank and file decimated. The MRTA was down to a few score combatants, most of them in the coca-growing valleys around Tingo María, where I had no intention of setting foot. Plenty of people had gone up this road. I met an American woman in the club who’d just come through on a bus. There was nothing to be afraid of.

  I was surprised when I got most of the way down the map and saw, in my own handwriting, the scribbled remark “Here be dragons.” It sprawled over a swath of Peru, black ink on the page. I didn’t remember writing that, but there it was in my own hand.

  Up now, and yet farther up. The road slimmed to a humble two-lane blacktop, twisting in and out of the folds of the Andes, the steepest mountains in the world. This was Kooky’s natural terrain, and we ate up the altitude, passing hesitant cars and staggering trucks, roaring lightly upward and upward and upward. With each thousand feet of altitude the temperature dropped three degrees, and eventually a mild fog closed in. There was nothing to see but steep walls of green vegetation on my right and a depthless expanse of white vapor on my left. A flock of excited bicyclists shot past in the other direction, tears streaming from their eyes.

  At around nine thousand feet the engine finally gave out. It happened slowly, just a gradual decrease in power, until I had downshifted into second gear and Kooky was clawing upward with reluctance. I pulled into the parking lot of a small police post and drew my tool roll from beneath the seat. Two officers in insulated green coats came over to watch.

  The best thing to be said about the R80 G/S is that it is simple. The bike was built to be rugged, not pretty, and sacrificed some of the tweakier high-performance characteristics of a street bike for raw torque. There were no pollution controls or catalytic converters to be destroyed by leaded South American gasoline; there was no chain to catch and break in some remote place, but a solid driveshaft that would last as long as the bike. The engine was cooled by the breeze rather than a fussy radiator that could puncture easily, leaving me stranded with a pool of coolant on the ground. The front wheel was bigger than the rear one to climb over logs, curbs, and rocks. The tool roll held an oddly incomplete set of metric crescent wrenches and just a few delicate Allen keys; these were exactly the tools needed to disassemble every part of the bike, and not one thing more.

  Simplicity in engine design was admirable, but it was the streamlining of life itself that I craved. Travel was a constant act of reduction, of eliminating minutiae layer by layer until a substrate of hard reality emerged, welcome and fair, from beneath so many illusions. There were no office politics on the mountain, no ringing telephones or incessant advertising pitches, no cloying waiters or whining yuppies or monthly dunning notices. It seemed obvious from the perspective of a motorcycle seat what linked Guevara’s ramblings to his revolutionary urges: the need for the extraordinary. Travel was a series of exceptional moments, a template for the heroic life Che would later seek. Stripped of the ordinary and stuffed with adventure and longing, life on the road imitated one of the heroic quests—gestas—so fundamental to Spanish legends and literature.

  Now entering my third month on the road, I had steadily reduced my travel kit, shedding things deliberately or by accident. My camping gear grew scant. My fishing equipment had long ago gone back to America. I threw out the necktie that I had carried through three countries just in case someone invited me to dinner, and also the old pair of sneakers I that had torn up while fishing. “Our life is frittered away by detail,” Thoreau wrote, “simplify, simplify.” This imperative had slowly shaped my saddlebags; now it seeped into my bones. I lived within myself, both emotionally and practically (“You carry your house with you, like a snail,” a Chilean policemen had informed me). The stop-and-go life of a thousand glancing friendships and the permanent instant had come to seem normal. A sense of disorientation—not knowing what day it was—yielded to a sense of reorientation—not caring what month it was. My muscles had become attuned to the long days. I was lean and hardened by
the road. When Lima dropped into those rearview mirrors I recovered a serene, even smug, self-confidence.

  “Galloping” Head, the English engineer who had ridden across the pampas a century and a half before, had traveled without luggage, living exposed to the elements and sleeping on the ground for months at a time. He described the improbable result of this regimen:

  [A] fter I had been riding for three or four months, and had lived upon beef and water, I found myself in a condition which I can only describe by saying that I felt no exertion could kill me.… At first, the constant galloping confuses the head, and I have often been so giddy when I dismounted that I could scarcely stand; but the system, by degrees, gets accustomed to it, and it then becomes the most delightful life which one can possibly enjoy.

  Among my debits, I was behind schedule, over budget, and had so far covered eight thousand miles on a trip that I had guessed would total only seventy-five hundred. In the positive column, I had already suffered through a bout of illness in Lima, and that tended to harden my stomach against further assaults.

  As I climbed up from the ruin of the capital I knew I was entering a long but final stretch, turning down the length of the Andes toward Bolivia and Che’s resting place. The papers in Lima were silent about doings there; apparently they just couldn’t find his body. I knew they would, sooner or later, but I wanted it to be later. Inevitably there would be a moment of forced answers in Bolivia, an end to all these questions.

  Further progress, however, depended on the motorcycle, which lay powerless by the side of the road. The engine had simply run out of oxygen at this height. I lay down on the ground and stared up at the bottom of the machine, its two “boxer” cylinders sticking out to the sides like gull wings in classic BMW fashion. There were two carburetors, one behind each cylinder of the motor. I clicked off the small retaining clip that held the carb on the left side together. The metal underside dropped free; it was a steel bowl, filled with gasoline that spilled over my hands. Now visible inside the carb were a pair of foam blocks the size of matchbooks. These were floats, which bobbed on the pool of gasoline inside the carb. The whole system worked on gravity. As fuel dropped into the engine, the floats fell with the level in the carburetor, pulling open a tiny jet that then fed more gasoline into the chamber, raising the floats and cutting off the jets. Now, with the floats dangling free in the mountain air, gasoline shot out and sprayed over me. I pushed the float up, cutting off the spill, and then reached up with my opposite hand and twisted the petcock beneath the fuel tank to “Zu.”