Che Guevara (4 page)

In late 1929, the family packed up once more for the long trip downriver to Buenos Aires. Their land was cleared and their
yerbatal
had just been planted, but Celia was about to give birth to their second child, and Ernesto’s presence was urgently needed at the Astillero San Isidro. During his absence, business had gone badly, and now one of the company’s investors had withdrawn. They planned to be away only a few months, but they would never return as a family to Puerto Caraguataí.

Back in Buenos Aires, Ernesto rented a bungalow on the grounds of a large colonial residence owned by his sister María Luisa and her husband, located conveniently near his troubled boatbuilding firm in the residential suburb of San Isidro. They had not been there long when Celia gave birth, in December, to a little girl named after her. For a time, while Ernesto went to work at the shipyard, family life revolved around outings to the San Isidro Yacht Club, near the spot where the Paraná and Uruguay rivers join to form the Río de la Plata estuary.

The yacht-building company was on the edge of bankruptcy, purportedly because of the incompetence of Ernesto’s second cousin and business partner, Germán Frers. For Frers, who was independently wealthy and a sailing regatta champion, the shipyard was a labor of love. Such was his enthusiasm for nautical works of art that he had poured money into fine craftsmanship and expensive imported materials, which often cost the company more than the agreed-to selling prices of the boats it produced. Ernesto’s investment was in serious risk of evaporating. Then, soon after his return, a fire destroyed the shipyard. Boats, timber, and paint all went up in flames.

If the shipyard had been covered by insurance, the fire might have been a fortunate event. But Frers had forgotten to pay the insurance premium, and Ernesto lost his inheritance overnight. All he had left from his investment was the launch
Kid
. As partial compensation, Frers gave Ernesto the
Alá
, a twelve-meter motor yacht. The
Alá
was worth something, and Ernesto
and Celia still had their Misiones plantation, which Ernesto had placed in the hands of a family friend to administer in his absence. It was hoped that they would soon see annual revenues from its harvests. In the meantime, they had the income from Celia’s Córdoba estate. Between them, they had plenty of family and friends. They weren’t going to starve.

In early 1930, Ernesto certainly didn’t seem unduly worried about the future. For some months he lived the sporting life, spending weekends cruising with friends aboard the
Alá
, picnicking on the myriad islands of the delta upriver. In the hot Argentine summer (November to March), the family spent the days on the beach of the San Isidro Yacht Club, or visited rich cousins and in-laws on their country
estancias
.

One day in May 1930, Celia took her two-year-old son for a swim at the yacht club, but it was already the onset of the Argentine winter, cold and windy. That night, the little boy had a coughing fit. A doctor diagnosed him as suffering from asthmatic bronchitis and prescribed the normal remedies, but the attack lasted for several days. Ernestito had developed chronic asthma, which would afflict him for the rest of his life and irrevocably change the course of his parents’ lives.

Before long, the attacks returned and became worse. The boy’s bouts of wheezing left his parents in a state of anguish. They desperately sought medical advice and tried every known treatment. The atmosphere in the home became sour. Ernesto blamed Celia for imprudently provoking their son’s affliction, but he was being less than fair. Celia herself was highly allergic and suffered from asthma. In all likelihood, her son had inherited the same propensity. His siblings also developed allergies, although none was to suffer as severely as he did. Exposure to the cold air and water had probably only activated his symptoms.

Whatever its cause, the boy’s asthma ruled out a return to the damp climate of Puerto Caraguataí. It was also evident that even San Isidro, so close to the Río de la Plata, was too humid for him. In 1931, the Guevaras moved again, this time into Buenos Aires itself, to a fifth-floor rented apartment near Parque Palermo. They were close to Ana Isabel, Ernesto’s mother, and his sister Beatriz, who lived with her. Both women showered affection on the sickly boy.

Celia gave birth for the third time in May 1932, to another boy. He was named Roberto after his California-born paternal grandfather. Little Celia was now a year and a half old, taking her first steps, and four-year-old Ernestito was learning how to pedal a bicycle in Palermo’s gardens.

For Ernesto Guevara Lynch, his elder son’s illness was a kind of curse. “Ernesto’s asthma had begun to affect our decisions,” he recalled in his memoir. “Each day imposed new restrictions on our freedom of movement
and each day we found ourselves more at the mercy of that damned sickness.” Doctors recommended a dry climate to stabilize the boy’s condition, and the Guevaras traveled to the central highlands of Córdoba province. For several months, they made trips back and forth between the provincial capital of Córdoba, Argentina’s second-most important city, and Buenos Aires, living briefly in hotels and temporarily rented houses, as Ernestito’s attacks calmed, then worsened again, without any apparent pattern. Unable to attend to his affairs or get a new business scheme going, Ernesto senior became increasingly frustrated. He felt “unstable, in the air, unable to do anything.”

Doctors urged them to stay in Córdoba for at least four months to ensure Ernestito’s recovery. A family friend suggested they try Alta Gracia, a spa town in the foothills of the Sierras Chicas, a small mountain range near Córdoba. It had a fine, dry climate that had made it a popular retreat for people suffering from tuberculosis and other respiratory ailments. Thinking of a short stay, the family moved to Alta Gracia, little imagining it would become their home for the next eleven years.

In the early 1930s, Alta Gracia was an appealing little resort town of several thousand people, surrounded by farms and unspoiled countryside. The mountain air there was fresh, pure, and invigorating. At first, the family stayed in the Hotel de La Gruta, a German-run sanatorium on the outskirts of town. The Hotel de La Gruta took its name from a nearby chapel and grotto built to venerate the Virgin of Lourdes. Most of its clients suffered from lung ailments.

Life in Alta Gracia was an extended holiday for Celia and the children. She took them on hikes to swimming holes or on mule rides and began meeting the locals. Her husband didn’t go with them. As their funds began to dwindle, his sense of frustration at being unable to work deepened to despair. He felt isolated, hemmed in by the surrounding hills. He suffered from insomnia. During the long nights awake in the hotel, he grew increasingly depressed.

Young Ernesto’s asthma improved in Alta Gracia, but he still had attacks, and the Guevaras’ concern for his health would continue to chart their path as a family, dominating their lives to an extraordinary degree. Before long, they had decided to stay on in Alta Gracia indefinitely. The attacks had become intermittent rather than the chronic affliction they had been in Buenos Aires. Ernestito was now a lively, willful five-year-old who joined in the
barras
, the gangs of local children who played games of trench warfare and cops and robbers and rode their bicycles pell-mell down Alta Gracia’s hilly streets.

Ernesto Guevara Lynch found an unoccupied villa to rent, on Calle Avellaneda, in the neighborhood of Villa Carlos Pellegrini, only five minutes’ walk from the town’s social hub, the opulent Sierras Hotel, an imitation of a landmark Raj hotel in Calcutta. The family’s new home was called Villa Chichita. It was a two-story Gothic chalet that Ernesto senior likened to a lighthouse. Virtually surrounded by overgrown fields, it looked out to the sierras on one side and the open yellow plains spreading toward Córdoba on the other.

Ernesto Guevara de la Serna with his parents, Ernesto Guevara Lynch and Celia Guevara de la Serna, in Alta Gracia, Argentina, in 1935.

In January 1934, Celia gave birth to her fourth child, a girl they named Ana María after her paternal grandmother. Although he fought frequently with his sister Celia and his brother, Roberto, young Ernesto would become solicitous of his youngest sister, taking her for walks when she was still a toddler and telling her stories. When his wheezing fatigued him, he rested his weight on her shoulder.

Family photographs show Ernestito as a full-faced, stocky five-year-old with pale skin and unruly dark hair. He was dressed invariably in short pants and sandals with socks, wearing a variety of hats to shield him from the mountain sun. His expressions were private and intense, his moods not easy to capture on camera. In photos taken two years later, he has thinned out, and his face is sallow and drawn, no doubt as a result of a prolonged bout of asthma.

When Ernesto was seven, the Guevaras moved from Villa Chichita to a more comfortable house directly across the lane. Their new home, Villa Nydia, was a one-story chalet shielded by a tall pine tree, with three bedrooms, a study, and servants’ quarters. It was set in two and a half acres of land. Their landlord was “El Gaucho” Lozada, the owner of Alta Gracia’s church and mission house. During their years in Alta Gracia, the Guevaras would live in several seasonally rented villas, but Villa Nydia was where they lived longest, and it was the place they most considered home. The rent was low, only seventy pesos a month, the equivalent of about twenty dollars. Even so, Ernesto Guevara Lynch, who was broke much of the time, frequently found himself unable to pay it. He was in a real bind. Because of Ernestito’s health, he couldn’t return to Buenos Aires, but he hadn’t been able to find work locally. His main hope for an income had been the Misiones plantation, but the market prices for
yerba mate
had plummeted, and a prolonged drought had adversely affected the revenues from Celia’s
estancia
in southern Córdoba province.

Over the coming years, the Guevaras would continue to depend upon the revenues from their farms, but climate and market conditions fluctuated, and the income the farms produced was erratic and generally small. According to both family and friends, it was Celia’s money, presumably what remained of her cash bonds, that carried the family through the 1930s. “They were really bad times for us,” Ernesto Guevara Lynch wrote in his memoir. “So full of economic difficulties. The children were getting bigger; Ernesto
still had his asthma. We spent a lot on doctors and remedies. We had to pay for domestic help, because Celia couldn’t manage alone with the kids. There was school, rent, clothes, food, trips. It was all outgoing costs, with little coming in.”

But at least some of their economic woes were due to the fact that neither Ernesto nor Celia was practical with money. They insisted on maintaining a lifestyle that was far beyond their means. They gave dinner parties, owned a riding trap and an automobile, and employed three servants. Each summer, depending on the condition of their pocketbook, they spent time at Mar del Plata, the exclusive Atlantic seaside resort favored by Argentina’s wealthy, or at Ernesto’s mother’s
estancia
at Santa Ana de Irineo Portela.

The Guevaras became fixtures of the social scene at the Sierras Hotel. They may not have had money, but they belonged to the right social class and had the right bearing and surnames. The Guevaras had “style.” They were blessed with the innate confidence of those born into affluence. Things would turn out all right in the end. When they didn’t, friends and family bailed them out. Carlos “Calica” Ferrer, the fun-loving son of a well-to-do lung physician in Alta Gracia who treated young Ernesto’s asthma, recalled going on a holiday with the Guevaras one summer. Ernesto Guevara Lynch had brought no money with him, and he asked Calica to lend him the pocket money
his
parents had given him for the vacation.

It was some time before Ernesto senior made good on his newfound social connections in Alta Gracia and obtained paying work. In 1941, using his brother Federico’s credentials as an architect and his own as a “master of works and general contractor,” he won a contract to expand and improve the Sierras Golf Course. Money came in while the job lasted, but apart from this enterprise there is no record of Ernesto working during the family’s long stay in Alta Gracia.

Because of his asthma, young Ernesto didn’t go to school regularly until he was nearly nine years old. Celia patiently tutored him at home, teaching him to read and write. This period undoubtedly consolidated the special relationship that formed between them. The symbiosis between mother and son was to acquire dramatic resonance in the years ahead as they sustained their relationship through a rich flow of soul-baring correspondence that lasted until Celia’s death in 1965. Indeed, by the age of five, Ernesto had begun to reveal a personality that reflected his mother’s in many ways. Both enjoyed courting danger; were naturally rebellious, decisive, and opinionated; and developed strong intuitive bonds with other people. Already, Ernesto had
his “favorite” parent, and he had favorite relatives as well—his unmarried aunt Beatriz and his paternal grandmother, Ana Isabel. The childless Beatriz was especially fond of Ernesto, and she spoiled him by sending him gifts. One of Ernesto’s first letters, in which he tells Beatriz that his asthma has improved, dates from 1933. Obviously written by one of his parents, it was signed laboriously in a five-year-old’s scrawl, “Teté.” That was Beatriz’s pet name for Ernesto, and it had been adopted by the family as his nickname.