Chasing Che

by Patrick Symmes

  The tropics are mercilessly consistent in the measure of days and nights. It grew equatorially dark by 6:30, and there was, of course, no electricity here. On foot I splashed through the ford, wandered a hundred yards up the road, and found the three women in another collapsed hut, sharing the rice I had given them with a half-dozen filthy, shoeless children and an old man. One of the youngest children spoke a little Spanish: in baby talk, I learned that they came from a village that was “a day” up the creek. They had walked out of that narrow cut between hills and had been waiting three days now with no food, hoping for a lift to a place whose name I didn’t recognize.

  Ernesto wrote with plain delight of seeing the descendants of the Incas: “We were in an enchanted valley where time had stopped several centuries ago, and which we lucky mortals, until then stuck in the twentieth century, had been given the good fortune to see.” Watching this clan gather around the fire and eat my rice, I was overwhelmed with a similar joy, but also despair. They were the most pure example of untrammeled indigenous life I had ever seen, but this essentially meant they were extremely poor: Their clothes were homemade, their feet bare, and they owned none of the necessities of life as I knew it. My wristwatch was to them a sign of enormous wealth. Yet for all their muddy deprivation, they were living lives determined by their own culture and history. They had none of the deadly anomie that plagued the shantytowns of Lima, or the psychotic alienation that fed the Shining Path. These were people living in their own time, speaking their own language, not yet ripped from the womb of their own world. For them, the stars still marched in order through the cosmos.

  They fed me spoonfuls of plain boiled rice and stared at me with an artless gaze that quickly grew unbearable. I was used to doing the staring, and travel unwrapped an endless vista for me to appreciate. My all-consuming curiosity was a luxurious First World habit—the rudeness of a people used to evaluating everything with a distancing eye. Now the tables had turned; the traveler become the travel. This was fair, but it also grew old quickly, and I returned across the ford, where Franz and I decided to go to sleep on top of the truck. The driver agreed this was a good idea—we would be safer there if someone came during the night, he said, and none of us wanted to discuss who that might be. The sick Austrian did not want to move. I told him in the goriest possible detail about the vinchuca beetles that live in thatched roofs; how they crawl down at night and bite you, infecting you with Chagas disease, which eats away at the walls of your heart for years without any symptoms, until one day you drop dead while eating a pastry in Vienna. He rolled over and went to sleep. The driver locked himself in his cab and went to sleep, too. Franz and I scaled the side of the truck with our most valuable possessions and sleeping bags.

  The canvas on top was stretched tight as a cot. Beneath us were 1,200 cases of pilsner. We settled down and said good-night like an old married couple. Slowly, under the pressure of our combined weight, the canvas began to stretch. Every few minutes I noticed that I had sunk lower. Eventually I was touching the beer; after a bit longer I was lying on a bed of beer caps. At twelve bottles a case that made 14,400 bottles, not one of them soft enough to sleep on. Franz had an air mattress and by 7:40 was snoring away. I lay awake on this bed of metal dimples and imagined Shining Path guerrillas sneaking into the settlement, intent on stealing Kooky. In my fantasies I routed the Western Hemisphere’s most fanatical guerrilla force with a rain of beer bottles. The stars were spectacular. I sang under my breath:

  Fourteen thousand four hundred bottles of beer on the wall

  fourteen thousand four hundred bottles of beer,

  you take one down, pass it around,

  fourteen thousand three hundred and ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall.

  Fourteen thousand three hundred and ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall …

  I woke up at 5:45 with rain on my face. My back was buttoned with the indentations of beer caps. I looked around. It was still dark, but I was glad to be awake because I saw through the rain that I was now in Washington, D.C. I woke Franz up and explained where we were. He climbed down to the cab with me and I drove the beer truck down Massachusetts Avenue (we were about half a mile below the traffic circle where Letelier, the Chilean exile, was blown up), clattering the stick shift while looking for an all-night coffee shop. That’s the problem with Washington: no all-night coffee shops.

  Somehow, despite the windshield, rain was blowing onto my face as I drove around pointing out Congress and various monuments to Franz. I turned on the wipers, but the rain kept coming. I had to reach up and wipe the rain off my face.…

  I woke up rubbing my face. It was still 5:45, it was still dark, and it was still Peru. It was raining on my face—real rain, not dream rain. I climbed down without waking Franz and went to boil some water. In the lifting gray I set up my little camping stove on the bank of the stream above the ford, where it braided in rivulets. I laid out my instant coffee, my red plastic cup, my spoon, and my cigarette lighter. The water boiled but was not hot, so I kept cooking it. Franz soon joined me, rubbing sleep from his eyes, and laid out his cup, his spoon, and his instant coffee.

  “Do you got any sugar?” he asked. I did, and traded a little sugar for a little of his powdered milk, a wary exchange by two men who measured their remaining supplies in grams. I hadn’t had milk powder in my coffee in ages, and the smell threw me back in a reverie to a time ten years before when I had traveled over China by train. There are no dairy products in the Chinese larder, and after a couple of months of doing without I bought three packets of Nestlé powdered milk in a tourist store and began mixing cups in any samovar I could find. Late in the trip I’d spent a night high on the Tibetan plateau with a clan of horse nomads on a pilgrimage. They served me yak butter tea and I made them powdered cow milk. They shared many of the physical features and even habits of dress and hairstyles with the Peruvian Indian, who was a first cousin. They too lived in a world whose cosmos spun overhead as it always had.

  The same three women I’d fed with rice last night appeared again and squatted down on the opposite bank of the stream, which was very narrow here. It was light now. They talked among themselves, pointing shyly at the various devices: there were no words in Quechua for powdered milk, for butane/propane fuel canisters, or for gorp, which Franz issued in a precious dribble from a plastic bag that he did not want me to get my hands on. While we stirred and sipped the women watched intently.

  After my own dose of caffeine it was time to be ambassadorial, and I stirred up a fresh serving in the red plastic cup. I reached halfway across the stream and gestured toward the women. The boldest reached tenderly across to meet me, took the cup, emptied the coffee onto the ground, and put the cup in her pocket.

  After some gentle prying I was able to get the cup back and, using sign language, explain that I meant for her to have the coffee in the cup, not the cup itself. Not only was she distraught at losing the cup—everyone had seen it, I had handed it right to her!—but she was also terrified of coffee, and reeled back when I approached with a second cup. Eventually I persuaded one of the other women to try it; she took a sip and spit it out on the ground with disgust.

  I turned down their offer to buy my camp stove, which convinced them only that I was a tough negotiator. They came back twice in the next half hour with higher and higher offers, eventually totaling three dollars. I resisted.

  All this time the women had spoken only Quechua, and in their attempts to buy my cookstove they had taught me the word for pot (manco). At the end, when I was packing up to leave, the youngest woman suddenly spoke in halting Spanish, with an accent so thick she sounded Russian.

  “There are … beautiful things … in your country,” she said.

  I wished Franz luck, smashed through the ford, and drove up to the washout. It was much bigger than I had expected, some three hundred feet across. The last mile of road ascending to the cut was lined with the same colorful trucks and buses that had nearly killed me over the
last two days. The passengers waited by the vehicles, but the drivers had all gone up to see the action.

  The road passed across a cliff face here, or at least it had. When the rains came a huge chunk of road had slid down into the river. It was a spectacular spot, the drama spiced by the rusted hulk of a bus resting on the valley floor below. It was an old wreck; you take what consolation you can. I pulled right to the head of the queue, dismounted, and noticed the little goat path across the gap that Franz and his partner had transited while carrying their bicycles. The slope was made entirely of round, loose rocks, angling down at about forty degrees. They were brave men.

  There was a mass outbreak of stupidity under way. Immediately on my arrival all the truck drivers began whooping and shouting for me to ride straight across the gap. They had seen too many episodes of Knight Rider and were gravely disappointed that the supergringo would not leap with snarling engine through the air. The repair crew also consisted of morons. Their method for fixing a washed-out road was simple and totally ineffective. First, they got three Caterpillar D-9 bulldozers, then parked two of them on the road and had the drivers fall asleep in their seats, mouths open to the heavens. The third Cat then began shoveling rocks and dirt into the gap, where they promptly slid down a thousand feet and made a nice addition to the pile already at the bottom.

  They had tried this all day yesterday and advanced about ten feet. They went at it for a few more hours while I took a nap and then adjusted my monoshock under the tutelage of every truck driver in the camp, none of whom had ever seen an adjustable shock absorber before. The more everyone prattled—How fast? That’s not fast! Put the wrench on the other way!—the angrier I got, and the angrier I got the more they seemed to close in around me, until I literally did not have enough room to work. I threw a fit, which convinced them all that I was crazy and increased the respect in their voices.

  To keep them away I climbed up on a boulder with Ernesto’s diary and began reading. I had only intended to escape the drivers, but after a moment I found a passage on this section of Guevara’s itinerary. As he and Granado hitched up this road they too found it blocked:

  … we were told there was a landslide up ahead and we would have to spend the night in a village called Anco … we reached the landslide and had to spend the day there, famished yet curious, watching the workmen dynamite the huge boulders which had fallen across the road. For every laborer there were at least five officious foremen, shouting their mouths off and hindering the others, who were not exactly a hive of industry either.

  According to the sergeant’s neat map, Anco was the very next village up the road. My head reeled for a moment with a bad case of timeslip, the grinding of the Caterpillar merging into the dynamiting that Ernesto described. Yet the coincidence that both of us would be stopped forty-four years apart on the same spot by the same problem was really no coincidence. The road was always falling apart here, right in the same narrow valley where the road could do nothing but clamber up the mountain faces. Anco had hosted this scene then, now, and every year in between. For travelers as for guerrillas, topography was destiny.

  Around ten o’clock the machine operator finally changed his tactic and, instead of trying to fill a bottomless pit with rocks, began carving a new road out of the rock face above the cut. This was dangerous work, since debris tended to tumble down onto the tractor, but it was effective in the soft rock, and after half an hour he had almost finished the repair. The waiting drivers now reached preorgasmic heights of excitement. The whole time, as the Cat tottered on the precipice, flung itself back and forth, and churned up great billows of white powder, its every movement was shadowed by a cloud of thirty men who walked behind and alongside the thrashing, spinning treads of the machine. Every few seconds these men were on the point of being run over; they yelped and ran back, or dove to the side, or staggered about choking on dust. Yet each time they would close in again like a batch of buzzing insects. I sat there praying that the Cat would finally flatten one of them, leaving a pulpy smear as a lesson to the rest, or that the entire road would give way, sending the whole flock of bastards spinning down into the gorge, but that wouldn’t be fair to the Cat driver and it didn’t happen.

  With each shove the Cat scraped its way toward the far side of the gap, and at a few minutes before 11:00 A.M. a path the width of a motorcycle was open. There was still a Caterpillar tractor grinding back and forth in front of it, but every truck driver in the valley began shouting with a kind of fever. They wanted me to floor it up the slope, swerve around the tractor, dodge its consuming blade, and fly over the narrow, loose track. I declined to slake their boredom this way, raising a kind of murderous resentment in their eyes. All the gringos on TV drove the way a Peruvian wanted to; I had to be some sort of coward to not fly across on my immense motorcycle. They shook their heads in disgust.

  Finally, at precisely 11:01, the Cat backed up, the driver turned and waved at me, and I was given the dubious honor of proofing the repair. A chorus of truck horns erupted behind me. The road was only sixty seconds old, but as far as the drivers were concerned that was fifty-nine seconds too many.

  “Vaya, gringo!” several voices yelled, and I went over.

  CHAPTER TEN

  HOLY WEEK

  Ayacucho sat in a bowl surrounded by round hills, at the epicenter of the Peruvian tragedy. It was a startlingly beautiful city filled with stone churches from the earliest days of the Conquest, a syncretic gem that married high Catholicity with the final vibrant traces of Andean greatness. In the 1980s it was a charnel house, repeatedly seized and sacked by the Shining Path and the Peruvian army in exchanges of dynamite and lead. Ayacucho was where the Shining Path had come closest to achieving the dream of cell block B-4. Although there were remote villages that had been under Shining Path control for long blocks of time, Ayacucho was the heart of their rebellion for the simple reason that their leader, President Gonzalo, got his start here.

  His real name was Abimael Guzmán, and he had come to Ayacucho in 1962 to teach Kantian philosophy at a new university set up to train rural people. The defining moment in his life was a long study trip to China in the 1960s while Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution was in full swing. He was enraptured by this chaotic “revolution within the revolution” and returned to Peru in slow percolation. After years of preparation, his war began in 1980, on election day, here in Ayacucho Department. A group of peasant cadres descended on a rural town called Chuschi, burned the ballot box, gave an incomprehensible speech, and went away. The attack was noted in passing in Lima newspapers as another strange occurrence in the distant mountains. The next day they attacked in the city of Ayacucho itself; a month after that they launched four simultaneous attacks in the city.

  Drawing on a mix of Marxist university students and desperate, disoriented peasants, Guzmán built a secretive guerrilla movement that spread with each year of the 1980s. Ayacucho Department as a whole was the Shining Path’s main base, while the city itself was under only tenuous military control well into the 1990s. Twice the guerrillas had seized the town square and hoisted their red flag before being pried out again by the army’s superior firepower. There was no clear way to deduce where the loyalty of the Ayacuchans really lay. Almost the entire population of Ayacucho had once turned out for the funeral of a top guerrilla, and many young Ayacucho men enlisted in the guerrilla ranks. Yet the guerrillas often forced such gestures of loyalty by assassinating their opponents and blowing up the houses or stores of businessmen who resisted. As usual, the ordinary people were forced by both sides to choose sides, and were thus both complicit and innocent by the mutually exclusive definitions of the guerrillas and the military. The only certainty was that the country bled and Ayacucho was its open wound. At night the guerrillas would light bonfires on the hills above the city, the flames tracing the shape of the hammer and sickle for all to see.

  I took a cheap room in the late afternoon and parked the motorbike in the lobby where other guests could stare
at it to their hearts’ content. A shower, barely warmed by an electric coil wired to the spigot, awoke me to civilization just as it began to grow dark outside. Wandering into the central plaza, I sat among hordes of food vendors operating tiny gas burners and dishing peppery stews. I drank the Ayacucho special, a cup of milky coffee laced with Peruvian brandy, and bought the local paper. I opened it to find a large picture of Che Guevara laughing. The headline shocked me: Benigno had become a worm.

  “Benigno” was the code name of Daniel Alarcón, one of Che’s best soldiers. He’d fought in the Cuban revolution, then followed Che on a failed military mission to Africa, and in 1966 he’d been a crucial participant in the Bolivian guerrilla war. Che and most of his men had died fighting there, but Benigno and just two others had survived, fighting their way through the mountains of Bolivia, escaping repeated encirclements, and finally walking across the Andes into Chile. As the only survivors of the doomed expedition, the men were welcomed in Havana as heroes, and all three survivors were promoted to positions of high visibility in the revolution. Benigno had taken over the running of the school for international guerrillas that Che himself had founded. Later he headed Fidel Castro’s personal security team. He was a colonel in the Cuban army.

  Or had been. Thirty years after following Che to Bolivia, Benigno, comrade in arms to the patron saint of the revolution, had finally had enough. He now broke with the Cuban regime in the most public and embarrassing way: “Today,” he announced at a press conference in Paris, “I have taken the decision of exile to make patently clear my position as a political refugee.” He lashed out at the Cuban regime and said that if Che were still alive “he would be indignant to see how Fidel Castro has converted his image into a flag to make the people work more every day to change nothing.” He added for good measure that Che “would never have accepted or allowed a dictatorship like that under which the people now live.”