Che Guevara (17 page)

When Ernesto and Alberto felt ready to push on, after a stay of a fortnight, the lepers and staff built them a raft they called the
Mambo-Tango
. They received presents of clothes, pineapples, fishhooks, and two live chickens. The
evening before they embarked, a lepers’ orchestra came by canoe to the staff compound dock and serenaded them. In a letter to his mother, Ernesto described the scene. “In reality it was one of the most interesting spectacles we’ve seen until now. The singer was blind and the accordionist had no fingers on the right hand and had replaced them with some sticks tied to his wrist.” The other musicians were similarly deformed and appeared as “monstrous figures” in the lights of the lanterns and torches reflected on the river. The serenade was followed by good-bye speeches and shouts of “three hurrahs for the doctors.” Alberto thanked them with outstretched arms and a display of rhetoric so purple, Ernesto wrote, that he seemed like “Perón’s successor.”

The next day, Ernesto and Alberto pushed their raft into the Amazon’s current. Feeling a little more like explorers, they steered the
Mambo-Tango
downriver, entertaining the notion of traveling all the way to the city of Manaus, in Brazil. From there, they had been told, they could reach Venezuela through its back door, along the Amazon’s tributaries. Three days later, however, having been swept downriver past the tiny Colombian port of Leticia, and after losing their fishhooks and their remaining chicken, they decided to give up their ambitious intentions. After persuading a riverside
colono
to row them back upriver in exchange for their raft and provisions, they made for Leticia, where a twice-monthly plane flew to the Colombian capital of Bogotá.

Scroungers again, they secured free room and board with the police as well as the promise of a 50 percent discount on the next airplane out. Argentina’s reputation for having Latin America’s best soccer players served them well in the interim. The local soccer team was facing a series of playoff matches, and Ernesto and Alberto were hired as coaches. They showed the players the latest Buenos Aires footwork and
were
able to improve the team’s performance. Although their team didn’t win the tournament, it came in a respectable second, and everyone was pleased.

On July 2, settled in comfortably with a cargo of virgin rubber, military uniforms, and mailbags, they took off from Leticia in an ancient twin-engine Catalina hydroplane that Ernesto compared to a cocktail shaker. The airplane ride marked another euphoric first for Alberto, who had never flown before, and his excitement led him to wax poetic for their fellow passengers about his vast flying experience.

Ernesto and Alberto found Bogotá unfriendly and unsettling. The city was a tense island of rigidly enforced law and order with a vicious civil war swirling around it in the countryside. They were given lodging at a hospital,
thanks to another letter from Dr. Pesce, and were able to eat their meals at the university, where they made friends among the students; but, as Ernesto wrote to his mother, “Of all the countries we have traveled through, this is the one in which individual guarantees are the most suppressed; the police patrol the streets with their rifles on their shoulders and constantly demand one’s passport. ... It is a tense calm that indicates an uprising before long. The plains are in open revolt and the army is impotent to repress it; the conservatives fight among themselves and can’t agree on anything; and the memory of the 9th of April 1948 weighs like lead over everyone’s spirit. ... In summary, an asphyxiating climate, which the Colombians can stand if they want, but we’re beating it as soon as we can.”

Ernesto was referring to the April 1948 assassination of the popular Liberal Party leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, which had led to the violent breakdown of Colombia’s political system. Suspecting the incumbent Conservative government of having ordered his death, Gaitán’s supporters had taken to the streets of the capital in three days of bloody rioting that became known as “El Bogotazo.” The riots occurred during a summit meeting of hemispheric foreign ministers who, under U.S. auspices, had gathered to sign the charter of the Organization of American States. At the same time, an “anti-imperialist” Latin American students’ conference had been convened to protest the summit. Student leaders from all over the region had come for the event. Among them had been a twenty-one-year-old Cuban law student named Fidel Castro Ruz. He took up arms in the uprising that followed Gaitán’s killing, but avoided arrest after escaping to the Cuban embassy. He had returned to Cuba, became increasingly active in politics, and was now secretly plotting an armed uprising against the recently installed regime of Fulgencio Batista.

In Colombia, the violence spawned by the Bogotazo had been polarizing. The Liberal Party had refused to participate in the 1949 presidential elections, and the ruling Conservative Party’s candidate, Laureano Gómez, who was supported by the military, was elected unopposed. Many Liberals had found allies among Colombia’s fledgling Communist guerrilla groups based in the countryside. As anarchy spread, the army and groups of armed peasant vigilantes led by Conservative political bosses took reprisals, and massacres became commonplace. The bloodshed was called simply “La Violencia,” a euphemism for what had become a national plague, and in 1952 there was no end in sight.

Before they could get out of Bogotá, Ernesto and Alberto found themselves in trouble with the police. One day, on their way to the Argentine consulate to pick up letters from home, they were stopped, questioned, and searched by a suspicious police agent. The agent confiscated Ernesto’s knife,
a silver replica gaucho’s dagger that had been a going-away gift from his brother Roberto. When the policeman found his asthma medicine, Ernesto tactlessly taunted him: “Be careful, it’s a very dangerous poison.” They were promptly arrested and hauled to several police stations until finally they were brought before a judge and accused of “making fun” of the authorities. The incident was defused after they showed identification. But for Ernesto, the matter hadn’t ended. It was a question of honor for him to get back his knife, which the arresting police agent had kept for himelf. The knife was finally returned to him, but he had raised the policemen’s hackles. Ernesto’s student friends urged him and Alberto to leave Colombia immediately. They even took up a collection of money to help them depart.

Without regrets, they left Bogotá by bus, heading to the Venezuelan border. Ernesto’s asthma had not bothered him since Iquitos, but as they descended into the tropical lowlands, it returned. Alberto had to give Ernesto so many adrenaline injections that he began worrying about the effects on his friend’s heart.

At a pit stop a day’s journey from Caracas, they discussed their prospects. Both of them were enthusiastic about forging on to Central America and Mexico. On the other hand, they had no money to continue traveling. They reached an agreement. Ernesto’s uncle Marcello, who bred horses, had a business partner in Caracas. If he would let Ernesto on the plane they used to transport the horses, he would return to Buenos Aires to finish his medical studies. Alberto would try to stay on in Venezuela, working either at a leprosarium or for one of the universities to which he carried letters of recommendation. If neither of these plans worked out, they would try to continue as far as Mexico.

The next day, July 17, they reached Caracas, a bustling city rich from the country’s oil boom and swollen with migrants. Ernesto had rarely been around black people. They were a rarity in Argentina but common on South America’s Caribbean coast, and after meandering through a Caracas
barrio
, he made observations that were rather stereotypical and reflected white, especially Argentine, arrogance and condescension. “The blacks, those magnificent examples of the African race who have conserved their racial purity by a lack of affinity with washing, have seen their patch invaded by a different kind of slave: the Portuguese,” he wrote. “The two races now share a common experience, fraught with bickering and squabbling. Discrimination and poverty unite them in a daily battle for survival but their different attitudes to life separate them completely: the black is indolent and fanciful, he spends his money on frivolity and drink; the European comes from a tradition of working and saving which follows him to this corner of America and drives him to get ahead, even independently of his own individual aspirations.”

They installed themselves in a shabby pension, but after they contacted Margarita Calvento, the aunt of a friend of Ernesto’s, their lives improved. She fed them and found them lodging at a Catholic Youth hostel, and from there they set out on their respective missions: Ernesto to look for his uncle’s partner, and Alberto to look for a job. With a letter of recommendation from Dr. Pesce, Alberto was offered, and accepted, a well-paying position at a leprosarium near Caracas. Ernesto was granted a seat on the next plane transporting his uncle’s racehorses from Buenos Aires to Miami. When it stopped for refueling in Caracas, Ernesto would get on board, and after the cargo was unloaded in Miami, he would fly home.

The two friends’ last days in Caracas together were weighed down by sadness over their impending separation. Both tried to hide their feelings by discussing the immediate future. Ernesto would get his degree and rejoin Alberto in a year’s time. If all went well, he could also get work at the leprosarium, and after saving some money they would go off on new adventures together.

On July 26, Ernesto boarded the plane with its equine cargo and flew to Miami. Upon landing, however, the pilot discovered an engine fault. They would have to lay over until it was repaired. Expecting a delay of a few days, Ernesto went to stay with Chichina’s cousin Jaime “Jimmy” Roca, who was in Miami finishing up at architecture school. Roca was as broke as Ernesto, but he had made a deal to eat his meals on credit at a Spanish restaurant until he sold his car. Ernesto’s meals were now added to his bill.

As the repairs on Ernesto’s plane dragged on, and the days turned into weeks, the two youths devoted themselves to having as good a time as possible without cash, going to the beach every day and roaming the city. A friendly Argentine waiter at the Spanish restaurant gave them extra food, and at a bar another friend of Roca’s slipped them free beers and french fries. When Roca learned that Ernesto was still carrying the fifteen dollars Chichina had given him to buy her a scarf, he tried to persuade him to spend it. Ernesto refused. Chichina might have broken up with him, but he was determined to keep his promise, and despite Roca’s entreaties he bought her scarf.
*

Finally, Roca arranged for Ernesto to earn some pocket money cleaning the apartment of a Cuban airline stewardess he knew. This was a disaster, since Ernesto didn’t have a clue how to go about his task. After his one attempt, the stewardess told Roca not to send him again. Instead of
cleaning it, she said, Ernesto had somehow managed to leave her place dirtier than it was before. In spite of this, she had taken a liking to him and she helped him get a temporary job washing dishes at a restaurant.

Ernesto was finally in the United States, that “country to the north” whose exploitative presence in Latin America had rankled him so during his journey. What he saw there evidently confirmed his negative preconceptions, for he later told friends in Buenos Aires that he had witnessed incidents of white racism against blacks and had been questioned by American policemen about his political affiliations. Roca would recall only that Ernesto once spoke to him about the need for low-income housing for Latin America’s poor. They didn’t talk politics, he said, but just tried to enjoy themselves.

Ernesto returned to an Argentina that had been altered in his absence. On July 26, 1952, five days before his arrival in Buenos Aires, Evita Perón succumbed to cancer at the age of thirty-three. Her body was to lie in state for two weeks before the funeral, which was the occasion for an unprecedented public display of grief. A monument larger than the Statue of Liberty was being planned for her. Juan Domingo Perón, her grieving husband, carried on with his presidential duties while his courtiers whispered and his enemies conspired. It was politics as usual in Argentina, but to those around him, Perón seemed adrift, less whole.

Ernesto’s private life had its own drama. He had to pass examinations in thirty subjects to get his medical degree; he had sixteen under his belt before taking off with Alberto Granado, but if he wanted his diploma in the coming school year, he needed to pass fourteen more by May. He had little time to waste. The first round of exams was scheduled for November. He began studying furiously, barricading himself behind his books at his aunt Beatriz’s apartment and sometimes at his father’s studio on Calle Paraguay, coming home only for the occasional meal. Despite the pressure, he also put in time at the allergy clinic, where Dr. Pisani was glad to have him back.

He began to take stock of the journey he had made with Alberto by expanding the material in his travel diary. He knew that the journey had changed him: “The person who wrote these notes died upon stepping once again onto Argentine soil. The person who edits and polishes them, me, is no longer. At least I am not the person I was before. The vagabonding through our ‘America’ has changed me more than I thought.”

At home, things were much the same. His father continued to struggle with the construction and property-rental business. His mother, the
distracted queen bee of Calle Araoz, played solitaire and looked after Juan Martín, who was now nine and still in grade school. Roberto had finished high school and was doing his compulsory military service, while Celia and Ana María were both studying architecture at Buenos Aires University. Celia
madre
’s salon had grown, and some new personalities had attached themselves to the Guevara clan. Ana María had formed a study-circle of student friends. Among them were Fernando Chávez and Carlos Lino, both of whom were vying for her attentions. For now, she was dating Lino, but she would eventually marry Chávez. The Guevaras were pleased that Ernesto was home, hoping he had rid himself of his wanderlust and that he would settle down in Buenos Aires as a doctor or allergy researcher.