Chasing Che
Page 27
The earthquake struck two years before Ernesto and Alberto arrived, but they saw its legacy everywhere: their diaries noted the broken frames of paintings, the doors hanging crooked on their hinges, and particularly the toppled bell towers of the Chapel of Belén. Ernesto wrote that the chapel “lay like a dismembered animal on the hillside.”
I asked Julia if she remembered the quake. “Of course,” she said. “I was sitting down to lunch with my father in the old house. I’d won a tennis tournament that morning, and he was so proud. I’d just taken a sip of beer from the trophy cup when it happened. It was two-fifteen in the afternoon.” The house shook. Buildings around town collapsed. The church spires plunged to the ground. The streetcar tracks—and here she plucked another negative from the stack, showing exactly this scene—bent in crazed wiggles through the plaza. The photos were filled with barefoot, filthy children, and incompletely whitewashed homes, and pompous magistrates in ribbons and cornaded hats, and everywhere peasants in beautiful homespun clothes. Perhaps it was the effect of the black-and-white images, but it seemed a world of simple gestures and closed façades. Even an earthquake did not penetrate the exterior of these stoic mountain people, although their grim, unsmiling expressions betrayed a subtle amazement at the world.
After an hour of holding negatives up to the window and flipping through boxes of loose prints, I rose to leave. “Wait outside for me a moment, please,” she said, and I stepped into the anteroom. She didn’t close the door behind me, and I could see her fussing with something in one of the cabinets. She emerged with an old negative envelope, which she handed to me as she pushed me out the front door.
I turned uphill one block, made a right, and collided with a man coming around a corner. He was chewing coca. His clothes were entirely homespun, from the top of his pointy wool cap down to his knees, where his crumbling pants ended. A moment ago I had been looking at this same avenue in a glass negative; like some reverse development, my mind overlaid a black-and-white image on the colored world in front of me. Here, where the traffic divider now sat, there was once a row of dirt with trees. There, on the far hillside now settled with one-story homes, there should have been an empty slope.
Standing on the corner, I opened the envelope Julia Chambí had put in my hands. The picture slid out, a simple contact print of a five-by-seven-inch negative exposed at sunset one cold afternoon. It was a picture of a man in a white lab coat astride a beautiful V-twin Indian motorcycle, one of the legendary and extinct American brands. The rider had a jaunty smile on his face and a pair of goggles over his checked wool cap. A Peruvian flag on the handlebars snapped in the breeze, and his feet were on the pegs as though he were riding past the cobblestones and whitewashed buildings, past the barefoot boys who stared at the Indian with the expression I had seen a hundred times. When I looked closer I saw that the kickstand was down; he was posing for the photographer.
I turned the print over. On the back, she had written, “First Motorcycle in Cuzco, Marco Pérez Yañez, 1930.”
In exchange for all my worldly possessions I had been given a small slip of paper with an address, and I rode Kooky down the gentle slope of the city, past the old Temple of the Sun, its walls now the base of the Santo Domingo Church, until I reached the cheap districts. There were neither foreigners here nor things they wanted to see, just ordinary, modern, struggling Peruvians.
The address led me to a garden- and home-supply store filled with bags of cement and faucets, everything coated with the gentle dust of commerce. Tito, my curly-haired savior, was behind the counter. He led me upstairs to his apartment and prepared a pot of tea. He turned out to be a former journalist; his wife owned the garden business. He handed over the two black cases and the backpack that normally rode strapped across the back seat, tied to each saddlebag. Everything was as I had last seen it, down to the enormous hole burned in the back of one case by the rubbing of the tire, and the mud that had entered inside, coating my clothes.
Tito listened to the story of my trip and sat back in his chair. He adopted my cause as his own. There were people I would have to see, he said. He would arrange everything. Also, since my saddlebag needed fixing, he would take care of that. He had a friend who had a friend who did these things. Probably I also needed a better hotel—he knew several. Also, if I needed any garden or home supplies, he could get me a discount. There were women, too, who—
I had to flee the place before he handed over the keys to the pickup or tried to marry me to one of his cousins. I spent the afternoon in a garage he recommended on Manco Capac Avenue, surrounded by preening truck drivers who wanted to trade their transcontinental rigs for mine. They bought me the worst lunch I have ever succeeded in eating, but it was a beautiful, warm afternoon, and we stood around in the sun, a bunch of lonely men talking about tools. The sparks from the welding of the luggage rack zinged into the mud with a satisfying sizzle.
It took a couple of days, but eventually Tito arranged for me to meet with Dr. Yuri Valer, an old survivor straight from the pages of The Secret Life of Alejandro Mayta. Valer was a handsome, chubby lawyer and the top bureaucrat of the Cuzco city government. He wore a sweater vest and square glasses as he received me in his tilted, creaky office in an old wood building. Mounds of papers tied in crazed bundles covered his desk and were stacked on chairs, side tables, filing cabinets, and anywhere else flat, and there were five boxes that said IN but only one that said OUT.
“Peru used to be famous for Machu Picchu,” he said as we shook hands. “Now it’s famous for guerrillas.”
You had to offer people a way out of their past, in case it was a bad one. I began by asking Valer if he knew about the early years of the sixties, when the area around Cuzco had been crawling with various vanguard leaders in search of a movement to lead. Among them were Javier Heraud, a prize-wining poet from the upper class; the son of a prosperous land owner named de la Puente; and Hugo Blanco, the son of a lawyer. Blanco was the most credible of these would-be revolutionaries, since he was an agronomist who lived among the peasants and spoke Quechua. Sometimes they called him the Che of Peru, but his Trotskyist guerrilla cell had failed and Blanco went first to jail and then into exile.
“Of course,” Valer said, shifting in his seat a bit, “I know something about it.” Picking his words carefully, he said that he was “part of the movement” but never a guerrilla. He was almost a guerrilla, he said. Back in 1959 he went out for drinks with a friend who had just returned from Cuba. At first his friend was full of cryptic statements (“The era of words is over, the era of deeds has begun!”), but after a few more beers he coughed up the plan. Despite the fact they were Peruvians, he and some others were going to Argentina to launch a guerrilla revolution, just like Castro and Che had done in the Sierra Maestra, the mountains of eastern Cuba.
“He kept insisting, ‘We’re going, we’re going,’ but I didn’t join him. I told him, ‘I’m not joining you, but not because I’m afraid.’ A month or two later”—and, crack, Valer slapped a palm on a bundle of papers—“the group appeared.”
A few months later, crack, they were all dead. That was the history of the Uturuncos, those first guerrillas to rise in Argentina. “We were just drinking,” Valer mused quietly.
He could not remain sad at the recollection, though, because it had been such a remarkable time. From 1962 to 1964 he had been a top officer of the peasants’ union in the Cuzco area. He wasn’t a peasant, but on the other hand he’d done his law school thesis on peasant organizations. The big issue at that time—as at most times in Latin America—was land distribution. Some of the haciendas, or farms, had existed in an almost unchanged condition since their founding by the conquistadors four centuries before. The peasants were nothing more than serfs; rich families owned thirty-five thousand acres at a clip. Cuzco Province was a hothouse of land invasions, evictions, seizures, and violent demonstrations. The union, a nexus of peasants and intellectuals, became the recruiting center for Hugo Blanco’s budding war. I asked V
aler what motivated Blanco to turn to the guerrilla path.
“It’s evident Ernesto Guevara had a tremendous influence on him,” he said. “The influence of the Cuban revolution was tremendous at that time. There were three leaders—Fidel Castro, Ernesto Guevara, and that other one who died in a plane crash. The greatest influence, more than Fidel, was Guevara.” Valer talked on for a while about the man he first called “Ernesto Guevara,” then after a few minutes “Che Guevara,” and then “Che,” and finally “El Che.” His enthusiasm for the old days crested as Valer stood behind his desk, wagging his finger in the air while reenacting Guevara’s 1961 speech in Uruguay, a blistering assault on John Kennedy’s new Alliance for Progress aid program. Just months after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, with the hemisphere rapidly polarizing, Kennedy had proposed a $100 billion development program (about five times the size of the Marshall Plan for Europe) designed to counteract the growing influence of the Cuban revolution across Latin America. In reply, Che stood up—all the other delegates spoke while seated—and delivered one of his most famous orations:
We cannot stop exporting our example, as the United States wants, because an example is something spiritual that pierces all borders. What we do guarantee is not to export revolution, we guarantee that not one rifle will leave Cuba, that not one weapon will go to another country. What we cannot ensure is that the idea of Cuba will not take root in some other … country, and we can assure this conference that unless urgent social measures are taken … the Andes mountains will become the Sierra Maestra of [Latin] America.
Valer’s dramatic reenactment of the scene was interrupted by a young aide with a paper that needed signing, and the bureaucrat plopped back into his chair with a thud, struggling to regain the breath he had lost over thirty-five years. When he turned back to me, his line of thought had become more personal.
“We had a kind of fever,” he said wistfully. “A guerrilla fever. Groups sprang up in all parts of Latin America, and here in Peru. The theory behind most of them—no, all of them—was Che’s.”
He rattled off the names of Guevara’s books—Guerrilla Warfare, Man and Socialism in Cuba, and Episodes of the Revolutionary War. I let the list hang there for a moment, and then asked if it was really the theories—doctrines about mountain focos and the stages of socialism—that had created that fever. “No,” Valer said. “It was El Che. He was a symbol. A symbol of a new type of leader, of a new era. He wasn’t a bureaucrat or a union leader or a politician but a romantic type. He crossed from country to country, traveling by foot or horse or motorcycle like you, getting to know all of Latin America.”
It was dark outside now, and Valer made it visibly clear that the assigned time for our interview was up. I rose reluctantly and we swapped business cards. I was about to leave when Valer spoke. “He was here, you know. In Abancay.” I told Valer that Guevara had been all over Peru, and showed him Notas de Viaje, with its pages and pages on Cuzco.
“I’ve never heard of all this,” he said, flipping through the book. “I’m startled this hasn’t been seen or discussed here in Peru. Startled.” He asked to borrow the diary and told me he would return it soon with something else that I should have. I asked what it was. “I’ll give you the names of some people you should talk to,” he said. “People who know more about this than I do.”
Foreigners were required to travel to Machu Picchu on a special tourist train that rode out each morning and came back the same evening. With a few days to kill while awaiting my next interviews, however, I decided to attempt the same, slower itinerary that Guevara had followed. At dawn the next day I laid siege to the jovial station master, burying him in flattery and waving around a set of expired Peruvian press credentials while claiming to be someone important. In a few minutes I was ensconced with about a hundred Indians in a carriage of the inexpensive, slow, and crowded local train. We seesawed up a set of switchbacks above Cuzco and then began rumbling slowly down the Urubamba River Valley. Over three hours the valley grew steeper and narrower until the railroad had to cling to a reinforced shelf along the side of a cliff, with the brown water tumbling beneath my window. We stopped for a while so that the crew could clear a small slide of black earth from the track, and the Indians used the interruption to buy boiled corn on the cob and roasted guinea pig on a stick. Ernesto’s scatological eye could not help noticing that the petticoats of the Indian women were “veritable warehouses of excrement.”
I debarked at Aguas Calientes, the town nearest the site, and at 7:30 the next morning caught the workers’ bus up to the mountaintop. We debarked at a hotel built discreetly into the hillside. When they arrived here in the parking lot, Ernesto and Alberto joined a pickup soccer game with some of the hotel players. The manager was so impressed (“I admitted in all humility to having played first division football in Buenos Aires,” Ernesto wrote) that he offered these eminent Argentines free room and board while the hotel was empty.
Like Ernesto, I played goalkeeper, but it was too early to find a match on some narrow ancient terrace. The busboys and porters went to change into their uniforms, and I set off on foot to see the ruins. When I topped the last rise between the hotel and the site I stopped. Ten thousand people had lived here, and despite the orderly walls and careful terraces, it was still the setting that overawed me. High on a saddle between peaks, the empty city sat awash in a sea of summits and wrapped in a roaring river so deep below that its foaming rapids sounded like a distant breeze.
At Machu Picchu, Ernesto confidently dove into the archaeological debate over the nature of the lost city, pointing out that the lack of defenses facing Cuzco showed that the city was built during a time of confident expansion, not as a refuge from the Spaniards. For a better view of the layout he ascended the small peak called Hauyna Picchu that towers over Machu Picchu. It seemed inescapable that I would have to climb up, and when I saw the two-car tourist train screech into Aguas Calientes far down the valley, I started up a steep path of tiny steps, wheezing for oxygen the whole way. After an hour, muddied by crawling through a small tunnel near the peak, I emerged some six hundred feet above Machu Picchu. There was a small clearing surrounded by trees, and a Peruvian woman was busy hacking her name in one trunk with a pen knife. I found the highest point, a granite promontory that had been carved into a throne, and sat down to read for a while.
The Irish-Argentine aristocrat was now suffering from recurring bouts of Pan-American solidarity. On his birthday—he turned twenty-four during the trip—he got drunk on clear pisco brandy with some Peruvians and launched into a rambling toast insisting that “the division of [Latin] America into unstable and illusory nations is a complete fiction. We are one single mestizo race.…” He now called the ruins “a pure expression of the most powerful indigenous race in the Americas,” which “practical” North American tourists could not appreciate. He claimed that “only the semi-indigenous spirit of the South American can grasp” the significance of the place.
Mountaintops induce hallucinations in everyone, of course. The dream of reuniting the Spanish-speaking Americas into one single nation was as old as Simón Bolívar, and a perennial trope in Latin American politics born long before Guevara and still alive today. It was an emotional, utopian vision that he had in the Peruvian mountains, perhaps driven by the immense vista visible from this peak, and he would continue to speak of this Bolivarian dream as he moved to Cuba and then took to the world stage. The notion appealed to the worst myths of his twin ancestry—the Celtic affinity for lost causes and a Hispanic idealism realized only in full flight from reality. His best instincts contained evidence of the very flaw that would undo him: the realities of different political systems, races, and economies were “illusory,” the rivalries and distinctions among nations a “complete fiction.” He grasped for some connection to what he saw by lumping himself among the mestizos as a “semi-indigenous” South American. He was reaching for solidarity with others, but wishful thinking like this would soon kill him.
“A souvenir,” I told her, and went down.
Back in Cuzco, I recovered Kooky from a garage and rode through the slippery, cobblestone plaza up to the same little hotel again. There were two notes waiting for me. Tito wrote to say the saddlebag was ready. The other was from Dr. Valer, who had made a call on my behalf, and I was instructed to be at a certain coffee shop at a certain time the next day. I was told only the name of the man I was to meet: Néstor Guevara.
Tito drove me across town the next morning in the red pickup; we went first to a workshop down an alley. Tito’s friend’s friend had molded black fiberglass over the hole in my saddlebag. I paid him twenty dollars and held the case in my lap as we drove to the coffee shop, opening and closing it with glee. I was starting to believe I might actually make it.
In the coffee shop, Tito pointed silently to a lanky man sitting alone at a linoleum table. Néstor Guevara—no relation to Che—was approaching retirement age, a weary man dressed in a faded gray sport coat. He wore thick glasses, and his hair fell black and flat across his head and down toward one ear. We sat down and introduced ourselves. I mentioned Valer’s name, but Nestor looked vaguely displeased. “He was a Trotskyist, and still is,” he muttered.