Che Guevara (9 page)

Another Córdoba youth who found himself caught up in the Guevara magic was Roberto “Beto” Ahumada, a school friend of Ernesto’s brother Roberto. Ahumada recalled many occasions when the family members unblinkingly divided up their meal into smaller portions so that he could join them. “Nobody was worried about eating a little less because one of the kids had brought friends,” he said. “They brought who they wanted and nobody cared.” Not surprisingly, in this rollicking home replete with children, itinerant guests, and conversation, Ernesto found it difficult to read or study undisturbed, and he acquired the habit of reading for hours on end in the bathroom.

One day, an old childhood
barra
mate named Enrique Martín bumped into Ernesto in Alta Gracia. Enrique was surprised to see him there: it was a weekday, and the school year was not over. Swearing Enrique to secrecy, Ernesto said he had rented a small back room in the Cecil Hotel, near the bus station, a place where nobody knew him. “I’m here to isolate myself from everybody,” he said. Exactly what Ernesto wanted isolation for, Enrique Martín didn’t ask, and he loyally guarded his friend’s secret for many years. Whether Ernesto wanted a place to think and study, or to rendezvous with one of Alta Gracia’s promiscuous
mucamas
, remains unknown. In any case, this was clearly not the extroverted madcap Loco, Chancho, or Pelao known to his friends in class and on the rugby pitch, but a distinctly private youth.

By the beginning of 1946, Juan Perón had survived a brief ouster from office by rival military officers and a brief exile on Martín García island in the Rio de La Plata estuary. Then, after a huge popular demonstration demanding his release, he made a triumphant comeback to win the presidency in the general elections.

Perón was no longer on his own. Months earlier he had married his mistress, a young, blond radio actress named Eva Duarte.

Nineteen-forty-six was Ernesto Guevara’s final year of high school. He celebrated his eighteenth birthday in June, just ten days after the Peróns assumed office. While continuing with his studies, he also had a paying job for the first time in his life, in the laboratory of Córdoba’s Dirección Provincial de Vialidad, a public works office that oversaw road construction in the province. His friend Tomás Granado was with him. The two youths, similarly adept in subjects such as math and science, were already discussing plans to study engineering at the university the following year. They had obtained their jobs, which offered useful practical experience for future engineers, after Ernesto’s father asked a friend to allow them into a special course given for field analysts at Vialidad. They successfully passed the course and now they were “soils specialists,” examining the quality of materials used by the private companies contracted to build roads. In the lab, where they worked part-time, Ernesto made everyone fruit shakes in the blender used for mixing soils.

When they graduated from Dean Funes, Ernesto and Tomás began working full-time and were assigned to jobs in different parts of the province. Ernesto was sent to inspect the materials going into roadworks at Villa María, ninety miles to the north. His contract came with a modest salary, the use of a company truck, and free lodging.

In March 1947, with Ernesto still in Villa María, his family moved back to Buenos Aires after an absence of fifteen years. It was not a triumphant return. Ernesto senior and Celia had decided to split up, and they were once again in very bad shape economically. Ernesto senior’s building business had floundered, and he had been forced to sell the summer house in Villa Allende. Soon he would have to sell the Misiones plantation as well. There was little money coming in from it, and for the last couple of years he had fallen behind in paying the property taxes.

In Buenos Aires, the family moved into the fifth-floor apartment owned by Ernesto senior’s ninety-six-year-old mother, Ana Isabel, at the corner of Calles Arenales and Uriburu. In early May, Ana Isabel fell ill, and the Guevaras sent a telegram to Ernesto to advise him of her delicate state. On May 18, he wrote back, asking them to send another telegram with more details of her condition, and saying that if she worsened, he was prepared to resign his job and come immediately to Buenos Aires.

Within days, the bad news came. Ernesto’s grandmother had suffered a stroke. He quit his job and raced to Buenos Aires, getting there in time for the deathwatch. He was with her for seventeen days. “We could all see that her illness was fatal,” his father wrote. “Ernesto, desperate at seeing that
his grandmother didn’t eat, tried with incredible patience to get her to take food. He entertained her and didn’t leave her side. He remained there until my mother left this world.”

When his grandmother died, Ernesto was disconsolate. His sister Celia had never seen her self-contained older brother so grief-stricken. “He was
very
sad,” she recalled. “It must have been one of the great sadnesses of his life.”

Ernesto on the balcony of his family’s home on Calle Araoz in Buenos Aires, 1948 or 1949.

Immediately after his grandmother’s death, Ernesto informed his parents that he had decided to study medicine instead of engineering. He applied for admission to the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Buenos Aires.

The Faculty of Medicine building is an early modern monolith: unremittingly gray, all straight lines and small box windows. Here and there, bronze bas-reliefs on stone tablets depict surgeons operating on patients. A chilly monument to medical science, the building thrusts fifteen stories into the sky in an otherwise elegant district of late-nineteenth-century town houses with vaulted ceilings, ornately grilled balconies, and French windows. It overlooks an open square that is dominated by the handworked dome of an old Catholic chapel.

Ernesto never spelled out his reasons for having chosen a medical career, except to say, years later, that he had been motivated by a desire for a “personal triumph”: “I dreamed of becoming a famous researcher ... of working indefatigably to find something that could be definitively placed at the disposition of humanity.” He had shown himself to be adept at sciences, and a career in engineering had been an easy choice, but he wasn’t passionately interested in engineering. In medicine, at least, he could do something that was worthwhile. His family thought his decision was due to his frustration at the inability of doctors to lessen the agonies of his dying grandmother. The shock of her death, despite her advanced age, may have helped spur Ernesto’s decision to switch careers, but as his choice of specialties soon revealed, he was also obsessed with finding a cure for his own medical condition.

Along with his studies, Ernesto held a number of part-time jobs, but of all of them, the work he did at the Clínica Pisani, an allergy-treatment
clinic, was the most absorbing as well as the longest-lasting. He had met Dr. Salvador Pisani as a patient, and his quick intelligence and curiosity led to a post as an unpaid research assistant. It was a privilege for a young medical student to be involved in a new field of medical research. Pisani had pioneered a system for treating allergies with vaccines concocted from partially digested food substances. Ernesto was so pleased with the positive results of his own treatment and his laboratory work that he decided to specialize in allergies.

The Pisani clinic became a kind of surrogate home. Dr. Pisani, his sister Mafalda, and their mother lived together next door, and they quickly developed a strong affection for Ernesto. The women fed him a special diet of carrot juice, corn bread, and oat cakes and put him to bed when he suffered asthma attacks. Ernesto responded favorably to the mothering, and Dr. Pisani began looking upon him as a protégé who might go far one day. To his father, meanwhile, Ernesto became a fleeting figure, always in a hurry, with never enough time. “Active and diligent, he ran from one place to the other to fulfill his obligations,” Ernesto senior wrote. “And how could he not be in a hurry? He had to work to support himself, because I helped him little, and also because he didn’t want me to give him a cent. He took care of things as best he could.”

Ernesto’s industrious outward appearance concealed an inner world of turmoil. Months earlier, back in Villa María, he had confronted his crowded feelings in a free-verse poem written on four pages of small notepaper. The poem provides a rare look into the unsettled emotions of Ernesto Guevara at a crucial moment in his life. On January 17, 1947, he wrote:

I know it! I know it!
If I get out of here the river swallows me
....
It is my destiny: Today I must die!
But no, willpower can overcome everything
There are the obstacles, I admit it
I don’t want to come out
.
If I have to die, it will be in this cave
.
The bullets, what can the bullets do to me if
my destiny is to die by drowning. But I am
going to overcome destiny. Destiny can be
achieved by willpower
.
Die, yes, but riddled with
bullets, destroyed by the bayonets, if not, no. Drowned, no ...
a memory more lasting than my name
Is to fight, to die fighting
.

Ernesto is writing not about anxieties over family problems or about which college to choose but about questions of inner strength. The references to drowning, “the deep well,” may have been allusions to his asthma, which had imposed limitations on his life and must have seemed to pose a predetermined route to death. It was a condition he had to fight to overcome. Without his own explanation, however, it is probably best to accept this piece of writing for what it certainly was: a melodramatic outpouring by a confused and self-absorbed eighteen-year-old.

The previous months had been traumatic for Ernesto. His parents’ marital and economic collapse, the forced move to Buenos Aires, and then the death of his beloved grandmother had brought his sense of family security crashing down around him. As the eldest son, he must have felt an obligation to help out. His future was suddenly mortgaged. Even before the news about his grandmother had brought him to Buenos Aires, he had expressed a new sense of family duty. Just before leaving Villa María, he had written to his mother: “Tell me how you have sorted out the question of housing, and if the kids have schools to go to.”

Now they were all in Buenos Aires, but because they had no money, finding a home remained a problem. For the time being they were stuck, and for the next year, the entire family lived in the late Ana Isabel’s apartment. Then Ernesto senior sold the Misiones plantation and gave Celia the money it brought in to buy a house. She found an ugly old place at 2180 Calle Araoz that came with unwelcome elderly tenants who occupied the ground floor, but it was well situated, at the edge of the parklands and playing fields of the Palermo district. They had their own home again, but things were different. The older children had to find paying jobs. Ernesto senior still lived with them, but now he slept on a sofa in the living room.

The altered family circumstances brought about a fundamental shift in the relationship between Ernesto and his father. “We joked with one another as if we were the same age,” Ernesto senior wrote. “He teased me continuously. As soon as we found ourselves at the table in our house, he would goad me with arguments of a political character. ... Ernesto, who at the time was twenty years old, surpassed me in this area, and we argued constantly. Those who overheard us might have thought we were fighting. Not at all. Deep down there existed a true camaraderie between us.”

During his first year at the university, Ernesto was called up by Argentina’s military draft, but he was rejected on grounds of “diminished physical
abilities”—his asthma. He was overjoyed, telling friends he “thanked his shitty lungs for doing something useful for a change.”

One of the first friends Ernesto made at the school was a young woman named Berta Gilda Infante, the daughter of a Córdoba lawyer and politician whose family had recently moved to the capital. Tita, as she was known, was immediately attracted to Ernesto. She recalled later that he was “a beautiful and uninhibited young boy.” A rather gruesome photograph from 1948 shows Ernesto and Tita, one of only three girls, standing among a group of white-coated medical students arrayed behind the naked body of a man lying on a slab. The cadaver’s shaved head hangs over the edge of the slab and his chest cavity gapes open. Most of the students in the picture look grave. Ernesto is the only one beaming toothily straight at the camera.

Ernesto and Tita had a deep, platonic friendship. She was someone he could trust and confide in at an emotionally unstable time in his life, and it was a role she was glad to fulfill. Both of them were lonely and hungry
for affection; both came from broken homes—Tita’s father had died three years earlier—and were relative newcomers to the city. Every Wednesday, they met in the Museum of Natural Sciences for a class on the nervous system, cutting up fish under the guidance of an elderly German professor. They sat in cafés and at her home, talking about their classes or personal problems; they swapped books and discussed them; and they recited favorite poems to each other. Their relationship was long-lasting; after Ernesto left Argentina, the two maintained contact through a stream of letters almost rivaling the correspondence that he carried on with his mother and his aunt Beatriz.