Che Guevara (13 page)

It was from such areas that the Argentine Indians, commonly referred to as
coyas
, and the mixed-blood
cabezitas negras
(“little black heads”) fled in steadily increasing numbers, pouring into the cities in search of work and setting up shantytowns like the one in front of the Guevaras’ home in Córdoba. From their ranks came domestic servants such as La Negra Cabrera and Sabina Portugal, and the cheap labor force for Argentina’s new industries and public works projects. Theirs was the despised social class Perón had appealed to when he called upon the nation to incorporate the
descamisados
, whose noisome presence and clamor so irritated the white elites in their once-exclusive metropolitan idylls. For the first time, these people were not servants or symbols to Ernesto; he had traveled in their midst.

Ernesto returned to Buenos Aires in time for the start of the school term. In his six weeks on the road, he had traveled through twelve provinces and covered nearly 2,500 miles. He took his little bicycle engine back
to the Amerimex company, where he had bought it, for an overhaul. The delighted management proposed he do an advertisement in exchange for fixing the engine free of charge. He agreed to this, writing a letter outlining his recent odyssey and lauding the company’s Cucchiolo engine that had carried him: “It has functioned perfectly during my extensive tour, and I have noted only that toward the end it lost compression, the reason for which I send it to you for repair.”

That year, his fourth at medical school, Ernesto passed five more exams toward his degree and continued his work at the Clínica Pisani. He also kept up his rugby, and his gliding lessons with his uncle Jorge. But a hunger to explore the world had been awakened in him, and following the success of his Argentine “raid,” as he called it, he began concocting new travel plans. Then, in October, just before the end of the term, something unexpected happened. For the first time in his life, he fell in love.

One of the González-Aguilar daughters, Carmen, was to be married, and the entire Guevara clan traveled to Córdoba to attend the wedding. Among the guests was a girl Ernesto had known when he lived in Córdoba. She was a child then, but now she was a beautiful sixteen-year-old. María del Carmen “Chichina” Ferreyra belonged to one of Córdoba’s oldest and wealthiest families. A brunette with soft white skin and full lips, she made an impression on Ernesto that was, according to Pepe González-Aguilar, who was also at the wedding, “like a lighting bolt.”

The attraction was mutual. Chichina was fascinated by Ernesto’s “obstinate physique,” as Dolores Moyano later phrased it, and his playful, un-solemn character. “His messiness in his dress made us laugh and was a little embarrassing at the same time,” Moyano wrote. “We were so sophisticated that Ernesto seemed an opprobrium. He accepted our jokes immutably.”

For Ernesto, at least, the ensuing romance was serious. By all accounts, although Chichina was very young, she was not all feminine frippery. She was extremely bright and imaginative, and Ernesto apparently became convinced she was the woman of his life. It was almost a fairy-tale romance. He was from a family of aristocratic paupers. She was blue-blooded Argentine gentry, heiress to a lime quarry and factory complex, one of the Córdoba region’s few industries at the time. The Ferreyras owned an imposing, French-built château on enclosed parklike grounds at the foot of Avenida Chacabuco in Córdoba. Chichina’s grandmother, the matriarch of the Ferreyra clan, lived there. Chichina and her parents lived in another large residence nearby, only two blocks from the
Guevaras’ old home. They also owned a huge
estancia
, Malagueño, where the family summered.

The
estancia
, Dolores Moyano wrote, “included two polo fields, Arabian stallions, and a feudal village of workers for the family’s limestone quarries. The family visited the village church every Sunday for Mass, worshipping in a separate alcove to the right of the altar with its own separate entrance and private communion rail, away from the mass of workers. In many ways, Malagueño exemplified everything Ernesto despised. Yet, unpredictable as always, Ernesto had fallen madly in love with the princess of this little empire.”
*

Whatever they felt about Ernesto’s suitability for their daughter, Chichina’s parents didn’t reject him from the outset. At first, they found him endearingly eccentric and precocious. Pepe González-Aguilar, who witnessed their courtship, remembered the Ferreyras’ amusement at Ernesto’s sloppy appearance and his informality, but noticed that when Ernesto talked of literature, history, or philosophy, or told anecdotes from his travels, they listened attentively.

The Ferreyras were themselves a colorful bunch. Pepe González-Aguilar described them as cultured, worldly, and sensitive. They stuck out notably in a conservative, provincial society that idolized them as much as it envied them. Chichina’s father had traveled through the Amazon on a journey that even today would be dangerous. They had participated in car races when there were almost no roads and piloted the first planes under the watchful attention of the grandmother, who, according to family lore, urged them to “fly low.” During World War II, as he was on his way to join the ranks of General de Gaulle, one of Chichina’s uncles died on board a ship sunk by the Germans.

For Ernesto, the “Ferreyra atmosphere” must have been extremely stimulating—and challenging. He was soon making regular trips back to Córdoba to see Chichina. He became a frequent visitor to the Ferreyras’ home in the city and to Malagueño, joining Chichina and her large group of friends who assembled there.

Of all her relatives, it was Chichina’s eccentric uncle Martín who, according to her friends, was most drawn to Ernesto.
Tío
Martín was an elderly
recluse who lived at Malagueño, where he bred Arabian horses. He never left the
estancia
grounds. He also stood out for having steadfastly supported Nazi Germany during World War II, while the rest of the clan were staunch supporters of the Allied forces. He was a night owl and an accomplished classical pianist, and he played for Ernesto, Chichina, and their friends as they talked and danced, often until dawn.

María del Carmen “Chichina” Ferreyra, the wealthy girl with whom Ernesto fell in love in 1950.

Altogether too soon, Ernesto was trying to persuade Chichina to marry him and, for their honeymoon, travel with him throughout South America in a
casa rodante
, a house trailer. “This was when the conflicts arose,” said Pepe Gonzalez-Aguilar. “Chichina was only sixteen years old and she was undecided; nor did her parents view this project with kindly eyes.”

After he proposed, Ernesto’s presence began to take on a subversive quality among the Ferreyra clan. “Family opposition to him was fierce,” Dolores Moyano recalled. “At any social gathering, the directness, the candor, the mocking quality of his opinions made his presence dangerous. When
Ernesto came to dinner at my family’s, we would wait for the worst to happen with a mixture of dread and delight.”

Tatiana Quiroga portrayed Ernesto as a “hippyish and sickly” figure who appeared to seat himself at formal Ferreyra family dinners—“with his asthma and his permanent inhaler ... and wearing his horrifying dirty nylon shirt”—while his hosts watched in appalled silence. In her opinion, Ernesto was all too aware of the disapproval his appearance elicited, which provoked him to say outrageous things “so as not to feel so diminished.” Tensions reached a head one night at Malagueño during a dinner at which both Dolores Moyano and Pepe González-Aguilar were present. The conversation turned to Winston Churchill. The Ferreyras were supremely Anglo-philic, and in their home Churchill’s name was invoked with reverence. As each elderly member of the family contributed his favorite anecdote about the man, Dolores recalled, Ernesto listened with undisguised amusement. Finally, unable to contain himself, he leaped in, bluntly dismissing the venerated figure as just another “ratpack politician.” Pepe González-Aguilar remembered the uncomfortable moment: “Horacio, Chichina’s father, said: ‘I can’t put up with this,’ and left the table. I looked at Ernesto thinking to myself that if anyone had to leave, it was us, but he merely smiled like a naughty child and began eating a lemon in bites, peel and all.”

Chichina continued to see Ernesto, but secretly. Once, when she and her family traveled to Rosario to watch her father play in a polo match, Chichina arranged for Ernesto to join her there, concealed in another car with her girlfriends. While her father played, the two met clandestinely.

Chichina’s devoutly religious mother, Lola, was aware of her daughter’s feelings and had become so alarmed at the prospect of having Ernesto Guevara as her son-in-law that, according to Tatiana Quiroga, she made a vow to Argentina’s patron saint, the Virgin of Catamarca. If Chichina broke off the romance, Lola would make a pilgrimage to the Virgin’s distant shrine. (In the end, she did make her pilgrimage, but it turned into such an ordeal, with a prolonged breakdown in the hot desert, albeit in a chauffeur-driven car, that the journey itself became a favorite Ferreyra family story.)

At the end of the school term in December 1950, Ernesto did not come to Córdoba to be close to Chichina as one might have expected. Instead, he obtained a male nurse’s credentials from the Ministry of Public Health and applied for work as a “doctor” with the shipping line of the state petroleum company, Yacimientos Petrolíferos Fiscales. On the surface, Ernesto’s wanderlust would seem to have won out over the pull of Chichina’s enchantments, but more likely his shipping out was a way of earning even more “manly credit” in her eyes, perhaps an attempt to compete with the dashing exploits of her revered father and uncles.

Ernesto left for Brazil on February 9, 1951, aboard the tanker
Anna G
, and spent six weeks at sea. From then until June, when he completed his fourth and last voyage, he spent more time at sea than on dry land, traveling as far south as the Argentine port of Comodoro Rivadavia in Patagonia, and up South America’s Atlantic coast to the British colony of Trinidad and Tobago, visiting Curaçao, British Guiana, Venezuela, and Brazilian ports along the way. Chichina was never far from his mind. As soon as he was back in port he would call his sister Celia to ask if there were any letters from her. “He asked me to go running to the docks, and I ran and ran like he asked and I took him the letters,” she remembered years later.

To his friends and siblings, Ernesto conveyed the impression that he was living a romantic life, bringing them back exotic little souvenirs from his ports of call and spinning tales of life on the high seas. And he did have some adventures. He told Carlos Figueroa about a fight he had in a Brazilian port with an American sailor—his sister Celia recalled it as having been with an Englishman, in Trinidad—an incident that seemed to confirm his inherent animosity toward Anglo-Saxons. And he told Osvaldo Bidinost of performing an appendectomy on a sailor at sea with a kitchen knife because the ship’s only scalpel had been used in a fight and was embargoed as evidence.

But the sailor’s life did not live up to Ernesto’s expectations. He was frustrated that the oil tankers on which he served were not in port very long, giving him little time to see anything. In May, as classes began for his fifth term at the university, he made his last voyage. When he returned to Buenos Aires, he gave his father a notebook containing an autobiographical essay dedicated to him. It was entitled “Angustia (Eso Es Cierto)”—“Anguish (That’s Right)”—and was laced with quotations, beginning with one from Ibsen: “Education is the capacity to confront the situations posed by life.”

Written in a enigmatic cloak of dense metaphors, “Anguish” is an introspective and existentialist exploration of the causes and nature of a depression Ernesto experienced while at sea. The narrative is built around a shore leave with some shipmates in Trinidad. It was Ernesto’s first known attempt to write a short story. Although he prefaced it by stating that he had overcome his depression and could once again “smile optimistically and breathe in the air around him,” he expresses deep loneliness and seems to be anguished over his relationship with Chichina, chafing against and wanting to free himself from the constraints of society.

“I fall on my knees, trying to find a solution, a truth, a motive. To think that I was born to love, that I wasn’t born to sit permanently in front of a desk asking myself whether man is good, because I know man is good, since I have rubbed elbows with him in the country, in the factory, in the logging camp, in the mill, in the city. To think that he is physically healthy,
that he has a spirit of cooperation, that he is young and vigorous like a billy goat but he sees himself excluded from the panorama: that is anguish. ... To make a sterile sacrifice that does nothing to raise up a new life: that is anguish.”

By late June 1951, Ernesto was back in school. He was now twenty-three and still had two years to go before obtaining his medical degree, but he no longer found the routine of classes and exams stimulating. A malaise had set in: he was lovelorn and restless. His wanderlust had been whetted by his motorbike journey and the months at sea, but his hopes of marrying Chichina and carrying her off had stagnated. Now barely seventeen, Chichina was still very much her family’s girl. The weighty combination of her parent’s intractable opposition and her own youthful indecision had placed her relationship with Ernesto in an uneasy and unresolved holding pattern. This situation wasn’t helped by the fact that they were apart.