Che Guevara (16 page)

The Huambo leprosarium was a rudimentary compound of thatched huts with dirt floors built in a mosquito-infested jungle clearing. A small but dedicated medical staff worked there on a minuscule budget. From the doctor in charge they learned that the founder of the leprosarium, Dr. Hugo Pesce, director of Peru’s leper-treatment program, was also a prominent Communist, and they resolved to look him up when they reached Lima.

They were lodged and fed at the nearby home of a wealthy
hacendado
who explained the system he used to settle his immense wilderness land-holding. He invited poor
colonos
, or settlers, onto the land to clear a patch
of forest and plant crops. After the first harvests came in, the settlers were moved gradually to higher and less hospitable terrain. In this fashion, the
hacendado
said, his land was cleared for free.

They spent a couple of days in Huambo, but after an onset of heavy rains and a worsening of Ernesto’s asthma, they decided he needed proper hospital treatment. The
hacendado
sent one of his Indian servants with them for the trek out. “In the mentality of the rich people of the zone,” Ernesto observed, “it’s completely natural that the servant, although traveling on foot, should carry all the weight and discomfort.” Once out of sight of the rancher, he and Alberto relieved the Indian of their bags. The
cholo
’s face “revealed nothing” about what he thought of their gesture.

In the town of Andahuaylas, Ernesto went into the hospital for two days until his asthma subsided. Then they moved to the Guardia Civil barracks to wait for a truck leaving for Lima. They had little to eat except potatoes, corncobs, and yucca. The barracks also served as the local jail, and they shared the stove of the prisoners, most of whom were not criminals but Indians who had deserted from the military during their three years of obligatory service. Ernesto and Alberto were welcome there until the day Alberto complained that one of the guards was lewdly fondling the Indian women bringing food to their detained husbands. The atmosphere cooled considerably, but, fortunately, a cattle truck was leaving Andahuaylas, and Ernesto and Alberto were able to depart before they were kicked out.

For another ten days, uncomfortable and hungry, they followed an uncertain route through the Andes toward Lima. “Our trip continued in the same fashion, eating once in a while, whenever some charitable soul took pity on our indigence,” Ernesto wrote. These were the most miserable days of their entire journey, and their strategies for obtaining hospitality now verged on the desperate.

They had perfected a formula for obtaining a free meal. They would first provoke curiosity by speaking in exaggerated Argentine accents. That generally broke the ice and initiated conversation. Then, either Ernesto or Alberto would begin softly mentioning their difficulties, with his gaze lost in the distance, while the other remarked on the coincidence that today was the first anniversary of their year on the road. “Alberto, who was much more brazen than I was, would launch a terrible sigh and say, as in confidence to me, ‘What a shame to be in this condition, since we can’t celebrate it,’” Ernesto recalled. At this point their candidate for a handout invariably offered to stand them a round of drinks, over Ernesto’s and Alberto’s protests that they couldn’t possibly accept, since they couldn’t reciprocate, until finally they gave in. This was followed by Ernesto’s coup de grâce. “After the first drink I categorically refuse to accept more booze and Alberto makes
fun of me. The buyer becomes angry and insists. I refuse without giving reasons. The man insists and then I, with a great deal of shame, confess that in Argentina the custom is to drink while
eating
.”

On May 1, “penniless but content” after four months on the road, they arrived in Lima, at the foothills of the Andes. Founded by Francisco Pizarro in 1535 and once the acclaimed city of the Spanish viceroys, Lima was still a beautiful, but socially stratified, place in 1952. To Ernesto, it represented “a Peru which has not left the feudal state of the colonial era: it still awaits the blood of a true emancipating revolution.”

After a morning spent wandering from one police barracks to another until they were finally given some rice to eat, they called on the leprologist Dr. Hugo Pesce. Pesce received them warmly and arranged for them to stay in the Hospital de Guía, a leper hospital. There, his warmhearted assistant, Zoraida Boluarte, took them in hand. Before long, Ernesto and Alberto were eating their meals and having their laundry done at the Boluarte home.

For the next three weeks they ate, rested, caught up on correspondence, and explored the city. Most important, they received some money from their families. They also attended some of Pesce’s lectures and were his frequent guests for dinner, after which they talked for hours about everything from leprosy and physiology to politics and philosophy.

Alberto noted that Ernesto and the man he called respectfully
el maestro
had a special affinity. Pesce had graduated from medical school in Italy, and when he returned home he became a disciple of the the Peruvian Marxist philosopher José Carlos Mariátegui, whose pioneering
Seven Interpretative Essays on Peruvian Reality
outlined the revolutionary potential of Latin America’s disenfranchised Indians and peasantry. After Mariátegui’s death in 1930, Pesce remained a prominent member of the Peruvian Communist Party while continuing his career in medicine. In addition to earning renown as a leprologist, he was a university lecturer and a researcher in tropical diseases, with several discoveries about malaria to his credit. President Odría had exiled him to the Andes for a time but eventually allowed him to return to his teaching post in Lima. He had published a book called
Latitudes del Silencio
(Latitudes of Silence) based on his experience as an exile.

Pesce was the first man of medicine Ernesto had met who was consciously dedicating his life to the common good. He must have seemed like a Peruvian Schweitzer or Gandhi, pursuing the kind of principled life Ernesto hoped to lead himself. As for Marxism-Leninism, Ernesto was interested, but he still had to acquire more knowledge before committing
himself to a particular ideology. He needed to finish the journey with Alberto, return to Argentina, complete his exams to get his degree, and explore the world some more.

Pesce seems to have sensed the younger man’s anxiety about finding his place, and he responded by giving Ernesto a great deal of time and encouragement. A decade later, Ernesto acknowledged Pesce’s influence when he sent him a copy of his first book,
Guerrilla Warfare
. It was inscribed “To Doctor Hugo Pesce: who, without knowing it perhaps, provoked a great change in my attitude toward life and society, with the same adventurous spirit as always, but channeled toward goals more harmonious with the needs of America.”

Not all of Ernesto’s and Alberto’s time in Lima was spent on philosophical enlightenment. They played soccer with local youths near the Guía Hospital, told jokes to the lepers, and met the Boluarte youngsters’ friends. One Sunday, they went to a bullfight. It was Ernesto’s first
corrida de toros
, and he recorded his impressions in laconic style. “In the third
corrida
there was a certain degree of excitement when the bull flamboyantly hooked the
torero
and sent him flying into the air, but there was no more than that. The party ended with the death of the sixth animal, without shame or glory. I don’t see art in it; bravery, after a fashion; skill, very little; excitement, relative. In summary, it all depends on what there is to do on a Sunday.”

Now that Ernesto’s health had improved and they had some—modest—funds, they resolved to continue their journey. They had given up hope of getting to the United States but planned to reach Venezuela. First, they would travel to the San Pablo leper colony in Peru’s Amazonia region, the largest of Pesce’s three treatment centers. Pesce gave them some clothes to replace their soiled and patched garments. Ernesto inherited a tropical white suit of the doctor’s that was far too small for him, but he wore it with pride anyway. Zoraida Boluarte gave them a jar of marmalade, and the hospital patients and staff took up a collection and presented them with 100 Peruvian
soles
, the national currency, and a portable Primus stove.

A week later, after another muddy, stop-and-start bus crossing of the Andes, they were on the Río Ucayali, installed as first-class passengers on the river launch
La Cenepa
. It was bound for the old rubber-boom capital of Iquitos. Among their fellow passengers who strung hammocks on
La Cenepa
’s gangways were rubber-tappers, lumber merchants, a few adventurers, a couple of tourists, some nuns, and a seductive-looking young prostitute. The third-class passengers traveled on a barge that was towed behind and loaded with a cargo of pigs and lumber.

The journey took seven days, which they spent in conversation with the passengers and crew, playing cards, fighting off mosquitoes, and gazing
out at the muddy current and passing jungle. They flirted with the prostitute, whose loose behavior scandalized the nuns and wreaked havoc among the men on board. “Fuser and I are no exception to the rule,” confessed Alberto after several days on board. “Especially me, who has a very sensitive heart for tropical beauties.” In spite of a recurrence of his asthma, Ernesto was drawn by the prospect of a shipboard romp. Describing their second day on the river, he wrote: “The day passed without novelties, except for making friends with a girl who seemed really loose and who must have thought we might have a few pesos, despite the tears we wept every time she talked of money.”

Not ones to be defeated by talk of money, the two young Argentines found a way around it. “She is enthusiastic about our accounts of the things seen and the marvels still to see,” Alberto wrote. “She has resolved to become a traveller. As a result, without interfering, Fuser and I are trying to give her the necessary tutorials. Of course, the honorariums are paid in advance and in kind.” A couple of days later, he added: “The rhythm of the days is the same as before. The girl divides her charms amongst good talkers like ourselves, and good payers like the man in charge of the card games.”

The sexual encounters made Ernesto nostalgic. “A careless caress from the little whore who sympathized with my physical condition penetrated like a spike into the dormant memories of my pre-adventure life,” he wrote. “During the night, unable to sleep for the mosquitoes, I thought of Chichina, now converted into a distant dream, a dream which was very pleasant and whose ending leaves more melted honey than ice in the memory. I sent her a soft and unhurried kiss that she might take as from an old friend who knows and understands her; and memory took the road back to Malagueño, in the great hall of so many long nights where she must have been at that moment pronouncing some of her strange and composed phrases to her new heartthrob.”

He looked into the star-filled night sky and asked himself if it was worth it to lose Chichina for
this. S
omething in the nocturnal void told him that it was.

Arriving on June 1 in Iquitos, which was surrounded by jungle and tinged red from the laterite mud of its streets, Ernesto and Alberto made for the regional health service authorities with their recommendations from Dr. Pesce. Pending the embarkation of a boat headed down the Amazon to the San Pablo leprosarium, they bunked in the headquarters for the regional anti–yellow-fever campaign and ate meals at the Iquitos general hospital.

Ernesto’s asthma was crippling him, and he spent the six days they were in Iquitos prostrate, giving himself injections of adrenaline and writing letters home. In a letter to his aunt Beatriz, he referred to an earlier letter about their proposed route through the Amazon: “By the way, I have to make a
confession. What I wrote you about the head-hunters, etc. ... was a lie,” he said. “Unfortunately it seems that the Amazon is as safe as the [Argentine] Paraná.” He asked her to send a new asthma inhaler and ampoules of Yanal antiasthma medicine to him in Bogotá but assured her that he was well. He underlined the words,
“I don’t have asthma.”
He said he wished only to be prepared for any eventuality.

On June 6 Ernesto and Alberto set out aboard the river launch
El Cisne
, arriving two days later at the San Pablo leprosarium, which was located on the banks of the Amazon near Peru’s jungle frontiers with Colombia and Brazil. The leprosarium had 600 patients who lived in their own village, isolated from the facility’s administrators and medical staff. Here, as at the Hospital de Guía, the two Argentinians made quite an impression on everyone. They enthusiastically joined the doctors on visits to patients, played soccer, and made friends with the lepers. Alberto spent hours looking through microscopes in the laboratory while Ernesto read poetry, played chess, or went fishing. The daredevil in him also reared its head, and one afternoon he impulsively swam across the wide Amazon, taking two hours to do so and greatly unnerving the doctors, who watched from the shore.

On June 14, Ernesto’s twenty-fourth birthday, the staff threw a party that was well lubricated by
pisco
, the Peruvian national liquor. Ernesto stood up to make a speech of thanks, which he recorded in his diary under the heading “Saint Guevara’s Day.” After grandiloquently expressing his profound gratitude to his hosts, he finished up with a heartfelt “Latin Americanist” soliloquy: “We believe, and after this trip even more firmly than before, that [Latin] America’s division into illusory and uncertain nationalities is completely fictitious. We constitute a single
mestizo
race, which from Mexico to the Straits of Magellan presents notable ethnographic similarities. For this, in an attempt to rid myself of the weight of any meager provincialism, I raise a toast for Peru and for a united America.”

The party went on until three in the morning in a house on stilts where a band played Peruvian waltzes, Brazilian
shoras
, Argentine tangos, and the popular Cuban mambo. By prior arrangement, Alberto gave the tone-deaf Ernesto a poke every time a tango was played. Once, when the band struck up an agitated
shora
that had been a favorite of Chichina’s, Alberto nudged Ernesto, saying, “Do you remember?” But Ernesto, with his eye on a nurse across the room, interpreted Alberto’s nudge as a tango signal, and he took to the floor, doggedly dancing a slow and passionate tango while everyone around them jiggled to the
shora
. Alberto was laughing too hard to correct him.