Che Guevara (20 page)

Ernesto saw Dr. Pesce a couple of times and enjoyed “a long and amiable discussion on a wide range of topics.” But afterward he and Calica were detained and interrogated, and their hostel room was turned upside down by Peruvian detectives, who apparently mistook them for a pair of “wanted kidnappers.” Although the misunderstanding was cleared up, Ernesto decided to avoid further contact with Pesce in case the police still had them under scrutiny.

Ernesto wasn’t entirely convinced that their brush with the police was simply a matter of mistaken identity. There had been the fuss over his “Red” literature confiscated at the border, and his and Calica’s names were probably on file as suspicious characters. With Peru’s dictator Manuel Odría still in power and undoubtedly worried about Bolivia’s left-wing revolution “contaminating his chicken coop,” as Ernesto put it to Calica, there was no point in encouraging the authorities to draw undue links between them and the Communist Dr. Pesce. Ernesto also gave up hope of retrieving his confiscated books. Pursuing the issue could only complicate their stay in Lima.

On September 17, Ernesto received a letter from his mother, who informed him that she had arranged for them to be “put up” by the president of Ecuador when they arrived there. The next day, Calica wrote to his
mother to give her the news, crowing jubilantly that he and Ernesto anticipated “a beautiful panorama in terms of room and board.” They also bumped into their exiled Argentine friend Ricardo Rojo again. He was on his way to the Ecuadoran port city of Guayaquil, where he hoped to board a boat for Panama, on his way to Guatemala. Rojo gave them the name of a pension in Guayaquil where they could find him.

Ernesto was again suffering from asthma when they traveled by bus up the Peruvian coast. After entering Ecuador on September 28 and waiting for transportation in the border town of Huaquillas, he complained of “losing a day’s traveling, which Calica took advantage of by drinking beer.” Another day and night of boat travel down a river, into the Gulf of Guayaquil, and across its swampy delta brought them to the tropical city of Guayaquil itself. They were met at the pier by Ricardo Rojo and three law-student friends from Argentina’s Universidad de La Plata who led them back to the pension where they were staying. Rojo’s companions were Eduardo “Gualo” García, Oscar “Valdo” Valdovinos, and Andro “Petiso” Herrero. Like Rojo, they were heading next to Guatemala, and trying to have a bit of an adventure along the way.

The pension was a crumbling colonial mansion with a canoe dock on the muddy banks of the Río Guayas in a run-down quarter called the Quinta Pareja. Its large rooms were in the process of being subdivided into tiny cubicles fashioned from wooden shipping crates. Ernesto and Calica joined the four others in a cavernous room as the house’s internal dimensions gradually shrank around them.

The pension’s hard-pressed owner was a good-hearted woman named María Luisa. Life in her rustic establishment was like being part of a large, chaotic family going through hard times. María Luisa ran the place with her mother, Agrippina—an ancient crone who spent her days swinging in a hammock in the foyer, endlessly smoking cigarettes—and her husband, Alexander. He too had been a guest, so the story went, but his debts had grown so high he had been forced to marry María Luisa.

In the end, they didn’t have to go to Quito to call upon President Velasco Ibarra. He was visiting Guayaquil, and Ernesto and Calica got dressed up and went to throw themselves on the mercy of his private secretary. On October 21, Ernesto wrote to his mother to tell her, mockingly, how his interview had gone. “He told me that I couldn’t see Velasco Ibarra, that the disastrous personal economic situation I had painted for him was one of life’s low points, adding in a philosophical tone: ‘For life has highs and lows,
you are in a low one, have spirit, have spirit.’” Ernesto and Calica were back where they had been, virtually broke, and so were their companions. Meanwhile, their debts with María Luisa were mounting. They pooled their funds and instituted a strict economic regimen that Ernesto enforced. Calica may have started out the trip as the wearer of the “chastity belt,” but their time on the road had made it all too clear who was the better economizer. Ernesto established a system of “absolute thrift,” which he himself broke only to buy the occasional banana, practically all he was eating at the time.

In mid-October, Ricardo Rojo and Oscar Valdovinos shipped out to Panama on a boat belonging to the United Fruit Company; the others were to follow on the next available ship. For now, Ernesto and Calica remained camped out with Gualo García and Andro Herrero. While they pondered their next move, enjoying the camaraderie and unwilling quite yet to depart for Venezuela, Ernesto explored Guayaquil. In the pension he played chess and conversed with his new friends. They were all a little homesick for Argentina, and they talked of their families, their past, and their hopes for the future.

A swimming break while on the road in Central America in 1953. Ernesto is in the foreground. Eduardo “Gualo” García is standing behind him. Ricardo Rojo is on the right.

There was nothing compelling to prolong Ernesto’s stay in Guayaquil. He dismissed it as “a pretend city almost without its own life, which revolves around the daily event of ships coming and going.” But he didn’t leave. He hung around, counting his pennies and sharing the poverty of his marooned friends. He confessed to Andro Herrero that he had never previously enjoyed the experience of unconditional comradeship, where everyone shared what they had without misgivings and faced common problems together. The closest he had come to it was when he played rugby; his fellow players were good “mates,” they were fine to go out for a drink with, but none of them was really close, and off the pitch their kinship had ended. His closest friend, he said, was Alberto Granado. Calica was a good guy whom he had known since childhood, but the truth was they had little in common.

True camaraderie, Ernesto told Andro, had eluded him. It was something he had always craved but felt lacking in his own family, which was fragmented and overrun with adopted outsiders. He spoke a lot about his mother. It was obvious that they had a special relationship, but Ernesto blurted out that she had surrounded herself with poets and frivolous literary types, women who were “probably lesbians.” A few years older than Ernesto, Andro understood his remarks as expressing feelings of emotional exclusion. He thought that Ernesto was lonely and in great need of affection.

“Guevara was a very particular guy,” Andro recalled. “At times he seemed inexpressive, with a demeanor that was almost disagreeable. But it was because of his asthma. The effort to breathe caused him to contract, and he could appear
hard
. Afterward, he would relax and his eyes smiled; the sides of his eyes wrinkled.”

The severity of Ernesto’s asthma attacks had come as a shock to his new companions, and they responded by helping him as much as they could. “I remember waking up in the night with Guevara trying to reach his Asmapul [medicine] but not having the strength. One of us had to get it for him,” Andro recalled.

While he reveled in this newfound fraternal atmosphere, Ernesto was torn by conflicting feelings about what to do next. He had a path that was laid out for him; before he had left Buenos Aires, Alberto Granado had written to say a job awaited him at the leprosarium. If he needed money to get there, not to worry, Alberto would lend it to him. Ernesto had some emotionally powerful motives for going. He told Andro that he wanted to earn enough money to send his mother to Paris for medical treatment. He feared that she still had cancer, and he wanted her to receive the best treatment possible.

But then Gualo García threw out a casual invitation to come along with him and Andro to Guatemala. They were going off to observe a leftist revolution that had challenged the might of the United States. Guatemala’s struggle might determine the future of Latin America. And just like that, Ernesto accepted the invitation, abandoning his plans and throwing all his promises out the window.

It was one thing to have decided to go to Guatemala, another to actually get there. They would need visas for Panama, which required proof of paid arrangements to leave. Since they were broke and this was impossible, they would have to persuade friendly ship captains to vouch for them with the Panamanian authorities while agreeing to take them for free. It was a tall order, and they knew it, but they doggedly began making the rounds of the docks. Their first attempts met with failure, and the days wore on in a penny-pinching tedium.

Ernesto made friends with the crew of an Argentine scrap vessel that was making a port call. It brought back fond memories of one of the ships he had worked on in 1951, and after he went on board to eat and drink red wine a few times, he returned to the pension loaded down with American cigarettes and
yerba mate
. An Argentine diplomat on the ship who knew his family gave Ernesto unexpected news from home, informing him “almost in passing” of the recent death of his aunt Edelmira Moore de la Serna. With an almost cruel bluntness that was beginning to characterize his correspondence with his family, he sent a condolence letter to his uncle and cousins. “It is very hard to send words of hope in circumstances like these and it is even more so for me,” he wrote, “who for reasons emanating from my position toward life, cannot even insinuate the religious consolation that so helped Edelmira in her final years.”

By now, Calica was impatient to make a move, and he decided to proceed alone as far as Quito, Ecuador’s inland capital. Ernesto would wait a few more days, and if the situation didn’t improve, he would send a telegram to say that he was on the way to meet Calica. A few days after Calica’s departure, the captain of a small boat, the
Guayos
, vouched for their onward passage from Panama and they obtained their visas. But no sooner had Ernesto telegraphed Calica, saying
not
to wait for him, than the
Guayos
’s sailing date was postponed “indefinitely.”

Ernesto had an asthma attack made worse by medicine that caused nausea and diarrhea. He and his friends had a huge unpaid bill at María Luisa’s pension, and every day their debt grew larger. They discussed dodging out without paying but abandoned this plan after realizing it would impossible to get past the indomitable Agrippina in the foyer. They began to sell their possessions.

On October 22, Ernesto wrote to his mother to announce his “new position as a 100 percent adventurer.” Breaking the news that he was going to Guatemala, he told her that he had sold the new suit she had given him as a farewell gift. “The pearl of your dreams died heroically in a pawnshop, and the same fate befell all the unnecessary things of my luggage.” He had even decided to sell his treasured camera, but “the bourgeois remnants of my proprietorial hunger” made him balk when a buyer appeared. A few days later, Ernesto noted in his diary, with desperation, “There’s practically nothing left to sell, and so our situation is really precarious: we don’t have a peso on us and our debt is 500 [Ecuadorean sucres], possibly 1,000, that’s the thing.”

It was Andro who came up with a solution. He would stay behind as guarantor for their debts, and the others would try to send him funds so he could leave and join them. Ernesto argued against this plan, saying that after all
he
was the newcomer, and if anyone should stay behind, it was himself. But Andro was firm about it, and the matter was settled when a friend of his, a food buyer for the elegant Hotel Humboldt, agreed to pay off most of their debts if Andro went to work for him.

After further delays, the
Guayos
was ready to sail. Ernesto traded his seaman’s duffel bag to Andro for a bigger suitcase in which to lug his books. On October 31, Andro saw Ernesto and Gualo off on a wharf that was piled with coconuts. Ernesto’s account of their leave-taking is detached: “The instant of the farewells as usual cold, always inferior to one’s hopes, finding oneself in that moment incapable of showing deep feelings.” But Andro remembers the normally reserved Ernesto “crying like a child,” saying how much he valued Andro’s friendship. Andro was touched by this display of feeling and, overcome with emotion himself, turned away and left the dock before the
Guayos
sailed.

In the end, Andro was never able to rejoin his comrades. He remained for months in Ecuador working at a variety of odd jobs, including one as a “human cannonball” in a circus. Calica reached Caracas, contacted Alberto, and found a job. He lived in Venezuela for almost ten years before returning home. Neither he nor Andro would ever see Ernesto again.

As he sailed north to Central America, Ernesto knew he was about to enter a region “where the countries were not true nations, but private
estancias
” belonging to dictators. A few years earlier, his favorite poet, Pablo Neruda, had written a poem called “The United Fruit Co.,” damning the company for creating a slew of subservient “banana republics” ruled by local despots. “The Tyrannical Reign of the Flies,” Neruda called it. “Trujillo the fly, and Tacho the fly, the flies called Carías, Martínez, Ubico ... the bloody domain of the flies.”