Chasing Che (20 page)

“Impossible,” he said.

I pulled out the diaries. In a passage headlined “Los Ángeles, February 28 1952,” Granado detailed how two women introduced the Argentines to the then-chief of the fire department. I explained to the current chief how his predecessor had first agreed to store the broken motorbike in the garage, then allowed the vagabonds to sleep next to the fire engines; how Granado had later climbed upstairs to find more room, and had been awakened in the night by a head-splitting alarm (he had inadvertently gone to sleep in the station’s cupola, a few feet beneath the alarm bell); and how the two new “volunteers” pleaded to attend that midnight fire. As the chief and the other men listened, I read Granado’s account of what happened next:

I also read them Guevara’s account, which was the same but for one crucial detail: in his diary, it was Alberto Granado who had saved the cat and been cheered. According to Ernesto:

Simple error could not account for this rather striking misalignment between the diaries. After all, it’s not as though you could forget whether you had rushed into a burning building to save a cat. Alone, the story of the kitten meant nothing—but I couldn’t help but remember the different accounts of why they had set out on the trip, and who had gone fishing and caught how many, and whether the Von Puttkamers were friendly or Nazis. The discrepancies were sometimes of fact, sometimes of opinion, but they were beginning to seem less than coincidental. Guevara’s diary was, as he stated in his introduction, not a true diary at all but a “random account” of the trip done for literary purposes shortly after he returned home. Granado’s diary was much rougher and clearly contemporaneous: its long passages were filled with the unedited, unabridged details that seemed so important at the time (precise accounts of bedding, lists of repairs and expenses, and cryptic notes to himself on the types of medicines he found available along his route). But decades later this text had been edited for publishing in Cuba. Granado’s unvarnished thinking and dependence on the hospitality of the Cuban regime could easily have persuaded him to “enhance” his portrait of the now-famous Che. It would have required only an hour’s revision of his original road diary to make the young Ernesto look as cool in a 1952 house fire as El Che had supposedly been in a 1958 firefight.

There were other comments in the diary that stood out as disingenuously worshipful of Ernesto. Granado’s rather straight account
of the final crash of La Poderosa, for example, was introduced with this:

This was a funny way to describe someone crashing and destroying your motorbike. Ernesto’s own account of the crash emphasized not his “serenity” but his comic incompetence and remarkable luck (“By an absolute miracle, all we touched was the leg of the last cow”).

The literary detective in me suspected that the Ernesto appearing in Granado’s diaries had been polished and “cleaned up” for political reasons. The incentives for doing this were obvious: Granado was living in Cuba, where his status was derived entirely from his testimony about Che’s life. If he made Che seem retroactively heroic, how would anyone know otherwise? The only witness to these incidents was Che himself, long dead, and there wasn’t—in 1986—any inkling that a contradictory account by Che himself would emerge.

Admittedly, the reverse was also possible. Ernesto’s own diary was full of literary embellishment and tale-telling, as he conceded in the opening. There was no definitive way to settle which man had really saved the cat and then tried to make the other look good. I was only sure of one thing: one of the two Argentines was fibbing.

A
nother curiosity from these same entries was the matter of names, for it was here in Los Ángeles that Che apparently became known as Che for the first time in his life. Like most Argentines, Guevara and Granado sprinkled “che” through their conversations. To the Chileans in the Los Ángeles firehouse, this odd habit of speech branded both travelers right away (indeed, a Chilean newspaper I’d seen the previous week had referred to the forest fires across the
border with the headline
CHE FIREFIGHTERS BATTLE BLAZES
). In Los Ángeles, Ernesto proudly noted, the Chileans called them “Big Che” and “Little Che.” Granado, who was the shorter of the two by far, might not have been as enchanted with his nickname; he didn’t mention it in his diary. But apparently it struck the ears of his tall partner quite well, and he recorded the firemen calling out their farewells to “Big Che and Little Che” when the two finally left. As the man on the sidewalk in Córdoba had noted, it was upon his return from this trip that Ernestito had insisted on keeping at least half that nickname, styling himself a regular-size Che.

I explained all this to the fire chief as I showed him the diaries, spreading them out on his desk and pointing out the different passages. “This is impossible,” he said again. “Che Guevara here? No. I was never told about this.” He grew agitated when I suggested that the guru of Marxist guerrilla warfare had earned his signature nickname right in this very building. “Impossible,” he kept sputtering. I countered by suggesting that the proof might lie in his own hands: the station caretaker, a kind of night watchman, kept a daily logbook of comings and goings. The old logbooks went back to the 1940s and might show entries referring to the presence of the boys, or at least to the storage of a motorcycle inside the station. I had the exact dates of their visit—

“The caretaker is on vacation,” the chief interrupted. “I can’t open his office without permission.” There were three other firemen still watching the discussion from the doorway, and one of them burst out, “I have the keys!” The chief glowered at him and repeated, in three different formulations, that he absolutely could not under any circumstances pry into the old firehouse records without the caretaker’s permission. The other firemen were visibly unimpressed with this argument—they were unpaid volunteers and didn’t take the chief too seriously. They argued on my behalf and offered to search the old books themselves.

“Impossible,” the chief kept muttering, and then, “Che Guevara? Impossible. Nobody told me about this. Impossible.”

After an hour I left reluctantly, unsatisfied and frustrated. Of all
the possible reactions denial had seemed the least likely, but there were obviously some things the chief—like a lot of Chileans—didn’t want to consider.

I walked downstairs and turned a corner into the hallway that led toward the street and Kooky. My approach had been almost silent, so the two firemen standing in the hallway had not heard me coming. They were both very young.

“Is it true?” the shorter one asked his friend.

“Yes,” the taller one replied. “El Che was here.”

They were both beaming.

T
wo hundred and eight miles later, night caught me an hour short of Santiago, in a city called Rancagua. I don’t know what Rancagua looks like, since I arrived after dark and left before sunrise. I’d been carrying the phone number of the Chilean motorcyclist I had met weeks before in Puerto Montt. He had offered to put me up when I reached Rancagua, but when I called the number his wife answered.

“Another motorcyclist.” She sighed. “Well, I’m sorry, but he’s in Argentina right now.”

A friendly policeman suggested that I try camping in a certain park, which I could not find, and while lost, wandering from street to street, I stopped to chat with a motorcyclist at the entrance to an industrial area. No one helps out a stranger, so I made myself known. We fell into a now-practiced routine: I described the length of my trip, mentioned how fast Kooky went, and praised his battered dirt bike as a fine machine. I heaped praise on Chile until he started criticizing it, at which point I agreed the country was awful. The motorcyclist accepted our essential brotherhood and spoke to the guard at the industrial park on my behalf. They were friends, and after hearing the same story the guard made a phone call. The conversation went on a long time in rapid Chilean Spanish, which I could not follow. Finally he hung up and told me to go down the access road, past
the construction, to the golf course, where I could stay with Carlos, the night watchman.

Carlos was an old man, more in body and mind than in years. Perhaps fifty, he had a broken life that required description, and he invited me to sleep in the toolshed if I promised to leave before six, when the construction crews began arriving. The shed had a plywood floor, was lined with power saws, levels, and hammers, and had the sawdust smell that I always associated with my father. I put my things inside, pushed the bike out of sight, and fell in with Carlos.

He was a Seventh-Day Adventist, he explained, and life was wonderful. His wife had left him, of course, but life was wonderful because he had Christ. He didn’t know how to cook and hadn’t had a hot meal in the weeks since she left, he said, but thank goodness he had Christ. The job didn’t pay much, and his children never helped him at all, but there was always Jesus Christ.

“Salads and fruit.” Carlos sighed. “I am almost one hundred percent vegetarian now. They say it is very healthy.”

I knew a mooch when I heard it, and broke out the nesting aluminum pots. I showed him how to boil water, pointed out the instructions on the back of the noodles, and we cut up an onion. We talked about his wife while the stove whispered, and how good life was anyway thanks to Jesus Christ, and when the noodles were ready all Carlos said was “Hot food at last.” Although we had only one set of utensils, he swore it was the best meal he had eaten in weeks.

While washing the dishes under a lawn spigot I asked him if he knew who this Che Guevara character in the papers was. “Yes, yes,” he said, lifting his head enough to stare into the distance. “I know who he was. He was a guerrilla. Born in Bolivia. Some people say he was really a European or a North American, but I doubt it. He died in … oh, I don’t remember. You know Noriega? General Manuel Noriega in Panama? He was just like that. A drug trafficker.”

Later I was walking back to the toolshed alone when the entire golf course erupted. With a pop, automatic sprinklers shot out of their holes and blasted huge arcs of water in slow, stuttering swings
across the night. It was a clear, moonless sky. The water caught the glow of a single distant arc light and spat high into the darkness.

I stood there a long time watching the water burn up into the night and then drop out of sight, disappearing into the black, heading forever beyond any place I would go.

L
ike the boys, I passed through Santiago too quickly for it to leave much of an impression on me. Their diary entries were just a few paragraphs. Having hauled the corpse of La Poderosa all the way to the capital on a truck, they sold the remains for traveling money and walked the city for a few days. Ernesto described a chance encounter with some young men he knew from Córdoba, members of a water polo team who were touring the city in the company of Chilean society ladies. These were Ernesto’s own people—gentlemen athletes and debutantes—and his finely tuned class instincts jumped to the ready. The young men were “embarrassed” by his ragged appearance, he said—one wonders if it was really they who were most embarrassed—but “were very friendly—as friendly as people could be from worlds as far apart as theirs and ours at that particular moment in our lives.”

From worlds far apart, my girlfriend flew down from New York to join me for a week. We luxuriated in a clean hotel that served breakfast in bed, then went hiking in the Andes and saw a filthy glacier. At 10:40 on the morning of February 22 we were caught in a long, rattling earthquake that knocked me off the can while I was reading the paper. We spent a couple of days at the beach eating fish, drinking beer, and staring at the cold water. The bourgeois side of my universe was definitely under construction.

After she left, I drove Kooky over to the barracks of the Chilean presidential guard. Guevara had spent a lot of time hanging around police barracks like this, which had the feel of a military encampment with sweaty
carabineros
cleaning their gear and radios squawking. There were a lot of women
carabineros
now, and these Amazons strutted around confidently in their jackboots and jodhpurs, pistols dangling off their hips. The squad rode BMWs as it ushered the president on his rounds, almost the only BMW motorcycles in South America. A sergeant undertook to give Kooky a full tuneup and purge the electrical system using the squad’s microfiche wiring diagrams. He showed me a few tricks about BMWs I’d never noticed before and told me not to remove the bash plate from the bottom of the oil pan. “Where you are going, the single biggest danger is breaking the oil pain open on a rock. I’ve seen foreigners go up into the Andes on motorcycles and come down again on foot.”