Che Guevara (12 page)

The next business scheme was Carlos Figueroa’s brainstorm. It involved buying shoes cheaply at a wholesale auction, then selling them door-to-door at higher prices. It seemed like a good idea, but after successfully bidding
for a lot of shoes—sight unseen—they discovered they had bought a great pile of remaindered odd and ends, many of them mismatched. When they had sold the matching pairs, they began peddling the shoes that merely
resembled
each other. Finally, they were left with a series of right- and left-footed shoes with no pairs at all. They sold a shoe to a one-legged man who lived down the street, and this gave rise to a suggestion by family and friends that they should track down as many one-legged people as they could find and sell off the rest. Memories of the episode endured because for some time afterward Ernesto himself—no doubt relishing the stares his appearance provoked—wore two of the unsold shoes, each one a different color.

Apart from his moneymaking enterprises, Ernesto began conducting medical experiments at home. For a time, he kept on his bedroom balcony caged rabbits and guinea pigs, which he injected with cancer-causing agents. He also practiced, although with less lethal ingredients, on his friends. Carlos Figueroa allowed himself to be injected by Ernesto one day, and when he swelled up in reaction to the shot, Ernesto happily exclaimed, “That was the reaction I was expecting!” and then gave him another injection to alleviate the symptoms.

A medical school classmate of Ernesto’s recalled that they carried a human foot onto the Buenos Aires subway. They had cadged the foot from assistants at the anatomy theater in order to “practice” on it at home, then wrapped it clumsily in newspaper for the journey. Ernesto relished the terrified looks of commuters.

The high jinks of Ernesto’s childhood were reflected in his behavior at medical school, in sports activities, and on hitchhiking trips. For a while, the new sport of gliding, which he took up on weekends at an airfield on Buenos Aires’s outskirts with his free-spirited uncle, Jorge de la Serna, fulfilled the urge to test the unknown.
*
But it was on Ernesto’s travels away from home that he experienced the most freedom. Carlos Figueroa was his companion on many of his hitchhiking jaunts. They often went back to Córdoba, a journey that was normally ten hours by car. It would take Ernesto and Carlos seventy-two, usually in the backs of trucks. They sometimes had to earn their way by unloading cargo.

Ernesto longed to extend his horizons farther. On January 1, 1950, at the end of his third year in medical school, he headed into Argentina’s interior on a bicycle outfitted with a small Italian Cucchiolo engine. This was
his first real trip alone. Before leaving, he hammed it up for a photograph. It shows him seated on his bike, legs poised on the ground and hands gripping the handlebars as if at the starting line of a race. He wears a cap, sunglasses, and a leather bomber’s jacket. A spare bicycle tire is looped over his neck and shoulder like a
pistolero
’s bandolier. He planned to go to Córdoba and then to San Francisco del Chañar, about ninety-five miles farther north, where Alberto Granado was now working at a leprosarium and running a pharmacy on the side.

Ernesto setting out on his solo motorbike trip on January 1, 1950. This photograph was later used as an advertisement by the company that sold him the engine.

Ernesto set off from home in the evening, using the little motor to get himself quickly out of the city, and then he began pedaling. Before long, a bicyclist caught up with him, and they cycled together until morning. Passing through Pilar, a town outside Buenos Aires that he had set as his first goal, and which some people at home had predicted would mark the end of his adventure, he felt “the first happiness of one who triumphs.” He was on his way.

Ernesto’s journey broke new ground for him in terms of two activities that were to become lifelong rituals: traveling and writing a diary. For the first
time in his life he felt inspired to keep a running account of his day-to-day life.
*
He was twenty-two years old.

On the second night he reached his birthplace, Rosario, and by the next evening, “forty-one hours and seventeen minutes” after setting out, he came to the Granado family’s home in Córdoba. Along the way, he had adventures. First, after allowing himself to be pulled along by a car at forty miles an hour, his rear tire burst and he ended up in a roadside heap, awakening a
linyera
, or hobo, who happened to be sleeping where he fell. They struck up a conversation, and the hobo companionably prepared an infusion of
mate
“with enough sugar in it to sweeten up a spinster.” (Ernesto preferred his
mate
bitter.)

Ernesto spent several days in Córdoba visiting friends, and then took off with Alberto’s brothers, Tomás and Gregorio, to camp at a waterfall north of the city, where they climbed rocks, dived from great heights into shallow pools of water, and nearly got swept away by a flash flood. Tomás and Gregorio returned to Córdoba, and Ernesto went on to join Alberto at the José J. Puente leprosarium, on the outskirts of San Francisco del Chañar. With Alberto investigating the immunological susceptibilities of lepers, and Ernesto involved in allergy research at the Clínica Pisani, the two now had more in common than rugby and books. To Granado, the world of medical research “was a kind of conductive thread for us both, in what seemed at the time would be our future.”

Greatly interested in Alberto’s work, Ernesto followed him on his rounds. But they soon had a disagreement. It arose over Alberto’s treatment of a pretty young girl named Yolanda who did not yet exhibit the symptoms of leprosy—large spots of deadened flesh—except on her back. Granado knew that every time a new doctor arrived, the girl tried to convince him of the injustice of her internment. “Ernesto was no exception to this rule, and, visibly impressed by the beauty of the girl and the pathetic presentation of her case, he came to see me,” Granado recalled. “Soon an argument erupted between the two of us.”

Ernesto felt that more care should be taken in the decisions leading to the internment and isolation of the sick. Alberto tried to explain that the girl’s case was a desperate one, and highly contagious. He proved his point by jabbing a long hypodermic needle into the flesh of the girl’s back. She didn’t feel it and was unaware of what he was doing. “I looked triumphantly
at Ernesto, but the look he gave me froze the smile,” Granado said. “The future Che ordered me brusquely: ‘Míal, tell her to go!’ And when the patient had left the room, I saw a contained rage reflected in the face of my friend. Until that moment I had never seen him like this and I had to withstand a storm of reproaches. Petiso, he said to me, ‘I never thought you could lose your sensitivity to such an extent. You have fooled that young girl just to show off your knowledge!’” Finally, after more explanations by Granado, the two friends made up, and the incident was over, if never forgotten.

After several days at the leprosarium, Ernesto was anxious to be off again. By now, he had decided to extend his journey even farther, “with the pretentious intention” of reaching Argentina’s remote and little-traveled northern and westernmost provinces. He persuaded Granado, who owned a motorcycle, to accompany him on the first leg of the trip.

The two friends made their departure, Granado pulling Ernesto behind his motorcycle with a rope. The rope kept breaking, and after some distance they agreed it was better if Ernesto continued on alone. Alberto turned back to San Francisco del Chañar. “We gave each other a not very effusive hug, as between two
machitos
, and I watched him disappear like a knight on his bike, saying good-bye with his hand,” Ernesto wrote.

Crossing the “silver-dyed land” of the Salinas Grandes, the Argentine Sahara, without problems, Ernesto arrived in Loreto, a small town where the local police put him up for the night. Discovering that he was a medical student, they urged him to stay on and become the town’s only doctor. Nothing could have been farther from his mind at that moment, and the next day he hit the road again.

In Santiago del Estero, the provincial capital, a local correspondent for a Tucumán daily interviewed him—“The first article about me in my life,” Ernesto wrote exultantly—then he headed toward Tucumán, the next city north. On the way, while repairing his umpteenth tire puncture, he met another itinerant
linyera
, and they fell into conversation. “This man was coming from the cotton harvest in the Chaco and, after vagabonding awhile, thought to go to the grape harvest in San Juan. Discovering my plan to travel through several provinces and after realizing that my feat was purely recreational, he grabbed his head with a desperate air: ‘
Mama mía
, all that effort for nothing?’”

Ernesto could not have adequately explained to the hobo what he hoped to gain from his travels, apart from repeating that he wanted to see more of his own country. But the man’s remark made him reflect. In his journal, until then a rendition of facts and glib descriptions laced with anecdotes, he began examining himself and his feelings more deeply. In a forested region north of Tucumán, on the road to Salta, he halted and got off
his bike to walk into the dense foliage. He experienced a kind of rapture at the natural world surrounding him there. Afterward he wrote: “I realize that something that was growing inside of me for some time ... has matured: and it is the hate of civilization, the absurd image of people moving like
locos
to the rhythm of that tremendous noise that seems to me like the hateful antithesis of peace.”

Later that same day, he met a motorcyclist riding a brand-new Harley-Davidson. The man offered to pull him on a rope, but, remembering his recent mishaps, he declined. He and the motorcyclist shared some coffee before going on their separate ways. A few hours later, arriving in the next town, he saw a truck unloading the Harley-Davidson and was informed that its driver had been killed. The incident, and his own close escape from the same fate, provoked a new bout of introspection: “The death of this motorcyclist doesn’t have the impact to touch the nerve endings of the multitudes, but the knowledge that a man goes looking for danger without even the vaguest of heroic intentions that bring about a public deed, and can die at a bend in the road without witnesses, makes this unknown adventurer seem possessed of a vague suicidal ‘fervor.’”

At Salta, Ernesto presented himself at the hospital as a medical student and asked for a place to sleep. Allotted the seat of a truck, he “slept like a king” until being roused by the driver early the next morning. After waiting out a torrential rain, he headed off through a beautiful green landscape of dripping wet foliage toward Jujuy, Argentina’s northernmost city. When he arrived, “anxious to know the value of the province’s hospitality,” he made his way to the local hospital, where he once again made use of his medical “credentials” to obtain a bed. He was granted one, but only after paying his way by picking a complaining little Indian boy’s head clean of lice.

It was as far north as he would go on this trip. He had wanted to go all the way to the rugged frontier with Bolivia, but, as he wrote to his father, “several flooding rivers and an active volcano are fucking up travel in the area.” Also, his fourth term of medical school was due to begin in a few weeks’ time.

Turning back to Salta, he reappeared at the hospital and was asked by the staff what he had seen on his journey. “In truth, what
do
I see?” he reflected. “At least I am not nourished in the same ways as the tourists, and I find it strange to find, on the tourist brochures of Jujuy, for example, the Altar of the Fatherland, the cathedral where the national ensign was blessed, the jewel of the pulpit and the miraculous little virgin of Río Blanco and Pompeii. ... No, one doesn’t come to know a country or find an interpretation of life in this way. That is a luxurious façade, while its true soul is reflected in the sick of the hospitals, the detainees in the police stations or
the anxious passersby one gets to know, as the Río Grande shows the turbulence of its swollen level from underneath.”

For the first time in his adult life, Ernesto had witnessed the harsh duality of his country. He had left its transported European culture, which was also
his
, and plunged into the ignored, backward, indigenous heartland. The injustice of the lives of the socially marginalized people he had befriended along his journey—lepers, hobos, detainees, hospital patients—bore witness to the submerged “turbulence” of the region that lay “underneath” the “Río Grande.” This enigmatic reference to the Río Grande—not among the rivers he crossed on his journey—may be significant, for it appears to refer to the river that has long been a politically symbolic dividing line between the rich north and poor south along the U.S.-Mexican border. If so, this is an early glimmering of an idea that would come to obsess him: that the United States, as an expression of neocolonial exploitation, was ultimately to blame for perpetuating the sorry state of affairs he saw around him.

In Argentina’s northern provinces, the vast uninhabited land gave way to a few old cities, still run by a handful of landowning families of immense wealth and privilege. For centuries they and the colonial structures their forefathers erected had coexisted alongside a faceless “alien” indigenous majority over which they held power. It was the region of strongmen such as Catamarca’s Senator Robustiano Patrón Costas, the despotic sugar mill owner who, as the handpicked successor of President Castillo, had been prevented from taking office by the Perón-backed army coup of 1943. Justifying that coup years later, Perón accused Patrón Costas of being an “exploiter” who ran his sugar mill like a “feudal estate,” the representative of an “inconceivable” system that had to be done away with if Argentina was to take its place in the modern age.