Chasing Che

by Patrick Symmes

  This symbol of what Cubans called “the heroic years” was now a traitor to the revolution—a gusano, or worm, as Castro called those who defected. The list of worms was long: most of the original leadership of the revolution had either gone into exile or served long prison terms within Cuba. The revolution has steadily eaten its children; Benigno was only the latest, and the Cuban government paid no attention to the defection. Right next to the article on Benigno was another article that reprinted some Cuban declarations on “reordering” the economy, “intensifying the struggle,” and defending socialism “tooth and nail” under the leadership of the man they just called Fidel.

  Ayacucho had its own life to worry about, and Cuban politics seemed far away. It was Holy Week, the highlight of the year in a city of churches and religious pilgrims. The vendors had ringed the plaza with their little tables, and pilgrims from all over Peru and as far as Brazil and Ecuador were gathering in, eating and laughing, expectant. They were waiting for the highlight of the week, a traditional event called the rug parade. The rugs—alfombras—were not woven but poured, their colors and patterns trickled directly onto the pavement of the plaza and the nearer side streets. The artisans were mostly young men, but each alfombra was sponsored by some piece of the civic spectrum—a youth club drew a Peruvian banner with red and white sawdust, filigreed with a white dove holding green laurel branches. Businesses sponsored the alfombras in front of their doors; the middle-class families in the houses closest to the plaza produced traditional family designs. As darkness settled in the creators were hustling back and forth, swapping colors with their neighbors, putting finishing touches on the elaborate drawings before the parade started. Now the entire old stone plaza was redrawn in vivid colors and texture, like an old woman with a careful makeup job. A few thousand people milled about, a delegation of priests and officials waited at the cathedral, and a group of soldiers in oversized hats tuned their brass instruments. The paraders would carry an image of Jesus up through the city, circle the plaza, and then receive a blessing by the church. The vendors were giggling at how much business they were doing; the pilgrims laughed with joy at their own luck in being present for one of the most famous religious processions in the Americas; the boys of the town darted around their artworks, proud perfectionists.

  There was a sudden, crisp tearing sound in the air—an explosion—and everyone in the plaza ducked. Their response was instinctive, instant, and experienced. One moment they were standing about flirting, or trickling sawdust, or pondering the menus of the little food carts planted around the rim of things. An unendurably long millisecond later they were hunched, feet flat on the ground, ready to break for cover.

  The long slow clap of thunder rolled down from the mountain, and everywhere people broke into relieved sighs. It was not a bomb, just the mountain gods who had always rattled Ayacucho. In a breath, the city discarded the fear. I had been too ignorant to duck and cover, which promoted me to the ranks of the courageous; I saw a band of teenage boys mercilessly teasing one of their number who had dropped his bag of sawdust out of fright.

  We were so busy pretending that nothing had happened that for a moment all forgot that something had happened. The first raindrops fell after two minutes. This was a mountain storm, pouring over the nearest peak with undiminished force and thoughtless ease. In seconds, the rain became a downpour accompanied by the rattle of thunder bombs and the flash of lighting fire. Fat, heavy rain plummeted down on the city. In two more minutes the plaza was empty of people, who rushed to the colonnaded cover of the surrounding promenade. Thousands packed into the too-small galleries, where they jostled and squirmed backward, trying to escape the flagrant swirls of wind and rain.

  In another two minutes—just at the point that people had gotten over the excitement of the storm—the alfombras began to wash away. First the water in the gutters turned green and red. Rivulets cut their way through the designs. Gradually the sawdust began to float away, so that each rug was bleached of its colors, then was cut through with cracks, then lost its edges. The crowd was quiet, watching this. The rain did not stop, nor lighten. After half an hour the rugs were in ruins. After an hour there was no trace of them.

  Following the example of wet skeptics everywhere, I took shelter in the cathedral. I listened to the mass, hoping to glean some meaning in the clear words, but eventually my attention wandered to the physical structure of the church, upward to the realm of arches and flying buttresses. The cathedral was grand without being great, a modest size but filled with ornate filigree. The nave was almost doused in gold, and more gold gleamed from high points on the supporting pillars, the ceiling, and the crypts lining each side of the chamber. The church literally glowed with candlelit gold, and the parishioners sat with expressions of calm relief. At least there was one place in the wilderness that not only promised the richness of eternal life but actually showed it. There was a gap here I could not close. I had not found religion, and little suspected that it was about to find me. I rose and went back to the door to look outward.

  The rain bucketed down, inevitable and careless in its power to ruin. The sawdust drawings were long gone, the parade canceled, the pilgrims depressed. Twenty or so Peruvians and a few foreigners in brightly colored synthetic clothing milled beneath the arch, letting the faint spray blow over them. The rain pulled this disparate tribe into an amiable, multilingual mob, and when a little voice penetrated our circle everyone turned at once.

  A little blond girl, no more than five, stood crying. She had emerged from behind the first pillars of the church and stared about wildly, tears streaming down her face. Two fat Peruvian women descended on her with devotion in their eyes, but they could not speak to the girl. Clearly she was a foreigner, but where were her parents? Each of us was examined with searching looks. After only a moment the entire group realized this child was lost.

  But the Peruvians all remained preternaturally calm as the child wailed away. They told me not to worry. Even here—perhaps especially here—they believed in each other. They were certain the little girl’s parents would show up. Everyone took turns comforting her, and indeed she eventually calmed down. It rained and rained.

  Who would hurt a child?

  Resistance and survival had made Ayacucho strong, and when the rescheduled march began the next night, Thursday, the town re-emerged to display a vivid indifference to natural and man-made oppressions. The reassembled crowd packed into the side streets along the route of the bier; every single sawdust rug had been laid down in the same place again. In a world of uncertainty the rug parade was certain. It had always been done, and always would be. Pressed against the wall of an alley outside the plaza by a crush of hundreds of people, I asked a teenager how long the parade had been held.

  “It’s so old,” he said, “our parents did it.”

  The procession itself proved underwhelming. A towering white bier came slowly up the street, carried on the shoulders of a dozen blue-sweatered boys in front and back, followed by the Second Infantry Division brass band. The float was covered with several hundred white candles and dressed with white bunting and white corn cobs, white birds, white pineapples, and white leaves all made of candle wax. The fruits and vegetables symbolized plentiful harvests, and the birds were doves of peace. The only thing I didn’t recognize were the decorative leaves amid all the finery, and I asked the man next to me what kind of leaves they were. “Leaves of wax,” he replied.

  Jesus was on top of this wedding cake looking very unhappy. Aside from the very real possibility that the entire float would burst into flame and melt onto the sidewalk, murdering the blue-sweatered youth of Ayacucho, He was suffering as usual from a series of spectacular and bloody wounds, and had His eyes cast up to heaven. Ernesto had observed a similar procession in another town in the Peruvian Andes not far from here:

  Towering above the groups of small Indians gathered to see the procession pass by, you can occasionally glimpse the blond head of a North American, who with h
is camera and sports shirt seems like (and in fact is) an emissary from another world in this lost corner of the Inca Empire.

  The crowd was fantastically dense and mostly female. Many of the women were crying, others tossed fistfuls of yellow petals into the street (Ernesto described red flowers), and at least two took advantage of the fact that Jesus wasn’t looking to check my pockets for a little contribution.

  The second time, I caught the woman. I simply reached behind me and grabbed her fingers as they probed futilely at my buttoned back pocket. I turned slowly; we locked eyes. She looked like a pious Indian grandmother dressed in a black shawl over cheap, dirty clothes that smelled of poverty. There were whole conversations in the second we measured each other, or at least I imagined so. She was not ashamed, and in the tightly packed crowd it was not entirely impossible to believe that her hand had been accidentally forced into my pocket, which is what I chose to pretend. I broke off the glance, secured my back pocket, and turned back to watch the float and the huffing, puffing faces of the Second Division band as they marched up the alley and turned left into the plaza, their feet completely obliterating the sand and sawdust pictures of what was supposed to be.

  The longest day started badly with a burst of predawn rain. I waited for a hint of the sun and finally left Ayacucho at 8:30 A.M. heading southeast, toward Cuzco. The roads were thick with mud, and the day dragged on as I climbed steadily for four hours. The world seemed empty, whole valleys unpeopled and the curves in the road marked with crosses and shrines for those who died in transit. I rode up steep switchbacks and down again, along valley floors and then up again, always up, and in one place it rained and in the next it was hot and sunny, and the crosses on the curves passed in a kind of metric rhythm, ticking off the kilometers and lives in one gesture. At one point I entered a tiny town and stopped at the police garrison. Twenty-five young soldiers poured out of the building and stood around the bike. I asked them if the town had a pharmacy. Pharmacies were the surest barometer of guerrilla activity, because before launching any big attacks the Shining Path would build up a stock of bandages and medicines through robbery. This forgettable town didn’t even have a medical outpost to rob, it turned out. The soldiers seemed calm but slightly amazed by my arrival (“How did you get here?” one asked me, unwilling to believe the obvious answer).

  The air was so clear at this altitude that coming over the next pass I saw a village on the far side of the valley and guessed that it was perhaps five miles away. It turned out to be more than thirty miles. I went down and down, turning through thirty-three switchbacks, and then over the valley floor, and then up the next mountain flank. A dog would come rushing out of each hut and pursue me, yapping and snarling ineffectively at my heels on the pegs. By the time I wore that dog out his barking would have alerted the dog in the next hut, who would come rushing out and repeat the procedure. In truth I had decided by now that there was really only one dog in all of South America, a filthy, long-furred, half-starving mutt who could change color and travel between villages at the speed of light. This dog had been after me since that first day on the pampas. I escaped him yet again, and upon finally reaching the town I ate lunch in a fly-infested cantina as children watched.

  The checkpoint that finally stopped me was in the flatland across the next ridge. I saw it from half a mile away, which was more or less the point. The soldiers could also see me from half a mile away. There was none of the mountain chill here. The valley was hot and dusty, and the road carried me with geometric precision through potato fields toward a hamlet of a few thatched shacks. A single wood pole was draped across the road.

  A corporal and several curious infantrymen came out of the largest hut, which appeared to be made of twigs. Lying off in the potato plants, well camouflaged in battle dress, were two more soldiers with automatic rifles that could sweep both sides of any vehicle that pulled into the checkpoint. They squinted down the barrels at me as if President Gonzalo himself had ridden out of the hills at the head of a huge Shining Path column.

  Their corporal led me into a twig lean- to standing precariously close to the road. He sat down at a tiny school desk graced with a manual typewriter. Wind and dust blew in through the open wall. The lean- to had the proportions of an outhouse with the door thrown open.

  “Papeles,” he said. I handed him the usual raft of documents—the registration, entry and exit permits, the permiso de circulación, the expired insurance certificate, whatever was floating around in the tank bag. He took the permiso in both hands like he was gripping a steering wheel. He was holding it upside down.

  I caught myself. I had been about to reach across the little desk and right the document in his hands, or perhaps I had been about to say something or even laugh. I’d only ever read about illiterate Third World flunkies holding documents upside down. Now that it was happening, it seemed like a joke on me, as if this rickety shack and the short soldiers with their huge rifles were all just a stage set for a parody. But I caught myself.

  Nothing happened for a while, and I nervously explained in Spanish that I was en route to Cuzco. “Cuthco?” he said, pronouncing it properly. Then he added a comment I couldn’t understand. Yes, I said hopefully, that’s right. I was a foreign journalist visiting Peru to write about … tourism, actually. This was no moment to discourse on the relevance of Che Guevara to Latin American history. In truth, I could have said whatever I wanted. Not only was the young corporate illiterate, but he also could not speak Spanish. After realizing this I stood dumbly for a few minutes, disarmed of my one defense. I tried repeatedly to explain who I was; he and the privates stared at me blankly and talked among themselves in Quechua. They asked me questions in their language and tried a few words in Spanish, but very few. Our conversation consisted almost entirely of the word “Cuzco” passed back and forth as both question and answer. I tried to pronounce the word with the proper accent, and this seemed to relieve the corporal of some of his worries. He eventually righted my paperwork of his own accord and sat for some more minutes fiddling with the ledger book on the desk. Tension ebbed and flowed in the lean-to. When the privates stood over him, he was embarrassed. When they went away, he relaxed. A great deal of nothing happened.

  I finally noticed his shoulder patch: the First Division. They were a notorious bunch of killers who had terrorized the highlands for years. The Shining Path guerrillas were even worse, of course, but all too often the First Division had been attacking civilians in remote villages, not hunting guerrillas. Allegations of torture, murder, and “disappearances” had followed the First Division for years.

  “Primera División es número uno,” I said. The tops! His eyes lit up. I’d hit the right button at last.

  “Primera División es número uno,” he repeated, and we exchanged thumbs-up. He did speak some Spanish after all.

  He took the accounting ledger and, using a pencil and a laborious, crude hand, wrote “cuzco” in the first column. He stared at the various papers for a while, and at last I took the passport and, as if it were a small matter of our mutual curiosity, opened to my photo and pointed out the serial number. This he copied into the ledger over the course of ninety seconds. When he was done I gently turned the ledger to me and filled in the rest of the entries—name, vehicle type, date, and so forth. I wrote slowly, so as not to offend him. He was watching from the corner of his eye to see if his privates could see us. They couldn’t, mostly because they were busy staring at Kooky. He stood up, all five feet of him, and shook my hand. A private sat down on one end of the pole barrier, causing it to swing up and clear my way. The flankers were still out there, ready.

  I rolled beneath the pole and down miles of dusty road, downhill, at a steady, flat angle. After an hour I came to the bottom, a clear blue river spanned by an ugly new steel bridge. A group of soldiers in T-shirts came out, inspected my papers, and stared at the bike. One private brought me a bottle of Inca Cola, the yellow bubble-gum soda that I’d drunk with David Medianero ages ago in Lim
a. They spoke Spanish, and told me that two Italians had passed by recently on motorbikes. I looked forward to meeting these fellows until the soldiers explained that by “recently” they meant last year. They could think of no more questions to ask me—not even how fast it went—so I went on.

  It was a journey through solid light. Even the rain was luminescent at this altitude, and on the higher peaks I would simply climb up inside a cloud that glowed with the sun’s radiation, every misty raindrop a tiny moon catching and reflecting the light that pounded through the thin atmosphere. When it stopped raining there were rainbows, one after another, sometimes double and once a triple, its three sections separated by vertical columns of colored light that flew up into the ether with rigid perfection. There would often be three kinds of light at once: a harsh, burning sunlight striking one part of a valley; a vague, soft, glowing light that came through mist and fog pouring over a peak; and then a warm yellow light that seemed to come from the moist ground itself. The clouds were divided into similar camps, with low fogs dribbling over ridges, above them a thick belt of rain clouds, and then—visible through small breaks or across the vast clear valleys and beyond some peak—a blue sky dotted with the fantastic nubs and grasping arms of cumuli.

  Climbing out of a little village called Chincheros—hitching their way along this route, Ernesto and Alberto had spent an unremarkable night there—I stopped to take a few photographs. A cluster of shy children hid behind some trees, convinced I could not see them. A thick fog was beginning to pour over the top of the road, and I was hurriedly snapping pictures in the last rich golden light of sunset when I heard a faint jingling behind me. I turned. Upon the mountain a band of pilgrims was marching.