Chasing Che (33 page)

The rain bucketed down, inevitable and careless in its power to ruin. The sawdust drawings were long gone, the parade canceled, the pilgrims depressed. Twenty or so Peruvians and a few foreigners in brightly colored synthetic clothing milled beneath the arch, letting the faint spray blow over them. The rain pulled this disparate tribe into an amiable, multilingual mob, and when a little voice penetrated our circle everyone turned at once.

A little blond girl, no more than five, stood crying. She had emerged from behind the first pillars of the church and stared about wildly, tears streaming down her face. Two fat Peruvian women descended on her with devotion in their eyes, but they could not speak to the girl. Clearly she was a foreigner, but where were her parents? Each of us was examined with searching looks. After only a moment the entire group realized this child was lost.

But the Peruvians all remained preternaturally calm as the child wailed away. They told me not to worry. Even here—perhaps especially here—they believed in each other. They were certain the little girl’s parents would show up. Everyone took turns comforting her, and indeed she eventually calmed down. It rained and rained.

Who would hurt a child?

R
esistance and survival had made Ayacucho strong, and when the rescheduled march began the next night, Thursday, the town re-emerged to display a vivid indifference to natural and man-made oppressions. The reassembled crowd packed into the side streets along the route of the bier; every single sawdust rug had been laid down in the same place again. In a world of uncertainty the rug parade was certain. It had always been done, and always would be. Pressed against the wall of an alley outside the plaza by a crush of
hundreds of people, I asked a teenager how long the parade had been held.

“It’s so old,” he said, “our parents did it.”

The procession itself proved underwhelming. A towering white bier came slowly up the street, carried on the shoulders of a dozen blue-sweatered boys in front and back, followed by the Second Infantry Division brass band. The float was covered with several hundred white candles and dressed with white bunting and white corn cobs, white birds, white pineapples, and white leaves all made of candle wax. The fruits and vegetables symbolized plentiful harvests, and the birds were doves of peace. The only thing I didn’t recognize were the decorative leaves amid all the finery, and I asked the man next to me what kind of leaves they were. “Leaves of wax,” he replied.

Jesus was on top of this wedding cake looking very unhappy. Aside from the very real possibility that the entire float would burst into flame and melt onto the sidewalk, murdering the blue-sweatered youth of Ayacucho, He was suffering as usual from a series of spectacular and bloody wounds, and had His eyes cast up to heaven. Ernesto had observed a similar procession in another town in the Peruvian Andes not far from here:

The crowd was fantastically dense and mostly female. Many of the women were crying, others tossed fistfuls of yellow petals into the street (Ernesto described red flowers), and at least two took advantage of the fact that Jesus wasn’t looking to check my pockets for a little contribution.

The second time, I caught the woman. I simply reached behind me and grabbed her fingers as they probed futilely at my buttoned
back pocket. I turned slowly; we locked eyes. She looked like a pious Indian grandmother dressed in a black shawl over cheap, dirty clothes that smelled of poverty. There were whole conversations in the second we measured each other, or at least I imagined so. She was not ashamed, and in the tightly packed crowd it was not entirely impossible to believe that her hand had been accidentally forced into my pocket, which is what I chose to pretend. I broke off the glance, secured my back pocket, and turned back to watch the float and the huffing, puffing faces of the Second Division band as they marched up the alley and turned left into the plaza, their feet completely obliterating the sand and sawdust pictures of what was supposed to be.

T
he longest day started badly with a burst of predawn rain. I waited for a hint of the sun and finally left Ayacucho at 8:30
A.M.
heading southeast, toward Cuzco. The roads were thick with mud, and the day dragged on as I climbed steadily for four hours. The world seemed empty, whole valleys unpeopled and the curves in the road marked with crosses and shrines for those who died in transit. I rode up steep switchbacks and down again, along valley floors and then up again, always up, and in one place it rained and in the next it was hot and sunny, and the crosses on the curves passed in a kind of metric rhythm, ticking off the kilometers and lives in one gesture. At one point I entered a tiny town and stopped at the police garrison. Twenty-five young soldiers poured out of the building and stood around the bike. I asked them if the town had a pharmacy. Pharmacies were the surest barometer of guerrilla activity, because before launching any big attacks the Shining Path would build up a stock of bandages and medicines through robbery. This forgettable town didn’t even have a medical outpost to rob, it turned out. The soldiers seemed calm but slightly amazed by my arrival (“How did you get here?” one asked me, unwilling to believe the obvious answer).

The air was so clear at this altitude that coming over the next pass I saw a village on the far side of the valley and guessed that it was
perhaps five miles away. It turned out to be more than thirty miles. I went down and down, turning through thirty-three switchbacks, and then over the valley floor, and then up the next mountain flank. A dog would come rushing out of each hut and pursue me, yapping and snarling ineffectively at my heels on the pegs. By the time I wore that dog out his barking would have alerted the dog in the next hut, who would come rushing out and repeat the procedure. In truth I had decided by now that there was really only one dog in all of South America, a filthy, long-furred, half-starving mutt who could change color and travel between villages at the speed of light. This dog had been after me since that first day on the pampas. I escaped him yet again, and upon finally reaching the town I ate lunch in a fly-infested cantina as children watched.

The checkpoint that finally stopped me was in the flatland across the next ridge. I saw it from half a mile away, which was more or less the point. The soldiers could also see me from half a mile away. There was none of the mountain chill here. The valley was hot and dusty, and the road carried me with geometric precision through potato fields toward a hamlet of a few thatched shacks. A single wood pole was draped across the road.

A corporal and several curious infantrymen came out of the largest hut, which appeared to be made of twigs. Lying off in the potato plants, well camouflaged in battle dress, were two more soldiers with automatic rifles that could sweep both sides of any vehicle that pulled into the checkpoint. They squinted down the barrels at me as if President Gonzalo himself had ridden out of the hills at the head of a huge Shining Path column.

Their corporal led me into a twig lean- to standing precariously close to the road. He sat down at a tiny school desk graced with a manual typewriter. Wind and dust blew in through the open wall. The lean- to had the proportions of an outhouse with the door thrown open.

“
Papeles
,” he said. I handed him the usual raft of documents—the registration, entry and exit permits, the
permiso de circulación
, the expired insurance certificate, whatever was floating around in the
tank bag. He took the
permiso
in both hands like he was gripping a steering wheel. He was holding it upside down.

I caught myself. I had been about to reach across the little desk and right the document in his hands, or perhaps I had been about to say something or even laugh. I’d only ever
read
about illiterate Third World flunkies holding documents upside down. Now that it was happening, it seemed like a joke on me, as if this rickety shack and the short soldiers with their huge rifles were all just a stage set for a parody. But I caught myself.

Nothing happened for a while, and I nervously explained in Spanish that I was en route to Cuzco. “Cuthco?” he said, pronouncing it properly. Then he added a comment I couldn’t understand. Yes, I said hopefully, that’s right. I was a foreign journalist visiting Peru to write about … tourism, actually. This was no moment to discourse on the relevance of Che Guevara to Latin American history. In truth, I could have said whatever I wanted. Not only was the young corporate illiterate, but he also could not speak Spanish. After realizing this I stood dumbly for a few minutes, disarmed of my one defense. I tried repeatedly to explain who I was; he and the privates stared at me blankly and talked among themselves in Quechua. They asked me questions in their language and tried a few words in Spanish, but very few. Our conversation consisted almost entirely of the word “Cuzco” passed back and forth as both question and answer. I tried to pronounce the word with the proper accent, and this seemed to relieve the corporal of some of his worries. He eventually righted my paperwork of his own accord and sat for some more minutes fiddling with the ledger book on the desk. Tension ebbed and flowed in the lean-to. When the privates stood over him, he was embarrassed. When they went away, he relaxed. A great deal of nothing happened.

I finally noticed his shoulder patch: the First Division. They were a notorious bunch of killers who had terrorized the highlands for years. The Shining Path guerrillas were even worse, of course, but all too often the First Division had been attacking civilians in remote villages, not hunting guerrillas. Allegations of torture, murder, and “disappearances” had followed the First Division for years.

“
Primera División es número uno
,” I said. The tops! His eyes lit up. I’d hit the right button at last.

“
Primera División es número uno
,” he repeated, and we exchanged thumbs-up. He did speak some Spanish after all.

He took the accounting ledger and, using a pencil and a laborious, crude hand, wrote “cuzco” in the first column. He stared at the various papers for a while, and at last I took the passport and, as if it were a small matter of our mutual curiosity, opened to my photo and pointed out the serial number. This he copied into the ledger over the course of ninety seconds. When he was done I gently turned the ledger to me and filled in the rest of the entries—name, vehicle type, date, and so forth. I wrote slowly, so as not to offend him. He was watching from the corner of his eye to see if his privates could see us. They couldn’t, mostly because they were busy staring at Kooky. He stood up, all five feet of him, and shook my hand. A private sat down on one end of the pole barrier, causing it to swing up and clear my way. The flankers were still out there, ready.

I rolled beneath the pole and down miles of dusty road, downhill, at a steady, flat angle. After an hour I came to the bottom, a clear blue river spanned by an ugly new steel bridge. A group of soldiers in T-shirts came out, inspected my papers, and stared at the bike. One private brought me a bottle of Inca Cola, the yellow bubble-gum soda that I’d drunk with David Medianero ages ago in Lima. They spoke Spanish, and told me that two Italians had passed by recently on motorbikes. I looked forward to meeting these fellows until the soldiers explained that by “recently” they meant last year. They could think of no more questions to ask me—not even how fast it went—so I went on.

I
t was a journey through solid light. Even the rain was luminescent at this altitude, and on the higher peaks I would simply climb up inside a cloud that glowed with the sun’s radiation, every misty raindrop a tiny moon catching and reflecting the light that pounded through the
thin atmosphere. When it stopped raining there were rainbows, one after another, sometimes double and once a triple, its three sections separated by vertical columns of colored light that flew up into the ether with rigid perfection. There would often be three kinds of light at once: a harsh, burning sunlight striking one part of a valley; a vague, soft, glowing light that came through mist and fog pouring over a peak; and then a warm yellow light that seemed to come from the moist ground itself. The clouds were divided into similar camps, with low fogs dribbling over ridges, above them a thick belt of rain clouds, and then—visible through small breaks or across the vast clear valleys and beyond some peak—a blue sky dotted with the fantastic nubs and grasping arms of cumuli.

Climbing out of a little village called Chincheros—hitching their way along this route, Ernesto and Alberto had spent an unremarkable night there—I stopped to take a few photographs. A cluster of shy children hid behind some trees, convinced I could not see them. A thick fog was beginning to pour over the top of the road, and I was hurriedly snapping pictures in the last rich golden light of sunset when I heard a faint jingling behind me. I turned. Upon the mountain a band of pilgrims was marching.

The minute they saw me, the entire procession changed course and began to close in. I idly snapped a picture before realizing that they weren’t headed in my general direction but, in fact, were aiming right at me. There were more than forty of them, highland peasants dressed in their best clothes, a mixture of traditional petticoats and sweaters on the women and sober jackets on the men. Some wore felt fedoras, and a few sported red sashes. They were led by a girl carrying a banner of the Virgin Mary on a short pole topped with a cross and a couple of small bells whose jingling had alerted me to their arrival.

Before I could say or think anything they were on me. I panicked and tried to backpedal, but it did no good. The young lady and the first man in line took positions on each side of me. They shook my hand, loudly proclaiming “Good evening.” In a confused rush, the other marchers grabbed my hand and repeated the phrase. All of
them, one after another, down the entire line. An old woman got down on her knees, kissed my hand, placed it against her forehead, and began to pray. I was frozen in a strange mixture of fear, incomprehension, laughter, and guilt: suddenly I realized they were saying not “Good evening” but “Good evening,
Father.
”