Che Guevara (18 page)

In the midst of the first round of exams, in November, Ernesto fell seriously ill, not from his asthma this time, but from a fever contracted by exposing himself to diseased human viscera. Doctor Pisani had acquired a machine designed to grind viscera for research purposes, and, impatient to use it, Ernesto had obtained some infected human remains from the Medical Faculty and began grinding them up without using a protective shield. Afterward he felt ill and took to his bed with a high fever. His father found him there. Alarmed, and seeing him appear to worsen by the minute, Ernesto senior offered to call Dr. Pisani. Ernesto refused. Some time passed; his father waited by his side, watching his son closely. “All of a sudden he made me a sign and, when I drew near, he told me to call a hospital to bring him a cardiac stimulant immediately, and to call Dr. Pisani,” Ernesto Guevara Lynch recalled.

Within minutes of Ernesto senior’s call, Pisani and a nurse arrived, and Pisani took charge of the situation, staying alone with Ernesto for several hours. When he left, he told the family to buy certain medicines and ordered complete rest for the paitent. The anguished family stayed up with him the whole night. It was one of many such episodes—caused, his father thought, by Ernesto’s “imprudence”—that they had suffered over the years.

“At about six in the morning,” his father recalled, “Ernesto had improved, and, to our great surprise, we saw that he began to get dressed. I didn’t say anything. I knew he was very stubborn, but in the end, seeing he was dressing to go outside, I asked him: ‘What are you going to do?’ ‘I’ve got an exam, the examiners arrive at eight in the morning.’ ‘But don’t be an animal,’ I replied. ‘Don’t you see you can’t do that?’ All the objections I made to him at that moment were in vain. He had decided to take his exam that day and he had to do it. And that is what he did.”

Ernesto passed three exams in November and ten more the next month. He had only one remaining examination to pass in April before he qualified for his medical degree and could return to Venezuela. In the
meantime, he spent as much time as possible on his research at the Pisani Clinic. He was finding it exciting, for he could not only apply himself to the cases of actual patients afflicted by allergies but also attempt to isolate their causes and find antidotes in the laboratory.

Pisani encouraged him as much as possible and began giving him credit in some published findings. One, which appeared in the scientific quarterly
Alergia
for November 1951–February 1952, listed Ernesto’s name along with Dr. Pisani’s and several others as coauthors of a paper entitled “Sensibilization of Guinea Pigs to Pollens through Injections of Orange Extract.”

On April 11, 1953, Ernesto sat for his final exam. His father remembered the occasion: “I was in my studio when the telephone rang. I picked it up and instantly recognized his voice, which said: ‘Dr. Ernesto Guevara de la Serna speaking.’ He put emphasis on the word Doctor.”

“My happiness was great,” his father wrote. “But it lasted only a short time.” Ernesto would not be staying in Buenos Aires to work. He and his old friend Calica Ferrer were going to take a trip. They planned on traveling through Bolivia so that Ernesto could revisit the Incan ruins he had studied. As for their longer-range plans, Ernesto spoke of going to India, while Calica, more interested in the good life, saw himself in Paris, well dressed at cocktail parties, with pretty women on his arm. “Our goal, as I recall it,” Calica said later, “was to get to Venezuela, work a little, as little as possible, and then go to Europe.”

Ernesto’s family knew they couldn’t persuade him to stay. And they knew the trip would be physically rigorous. “He didn’t even remotely consider his asthma or his state of health,” his father said. But “he was no longer the child or the youth, but Dr. Ernesto Guevara de la Serna, who did whatever he wanted.” When Ernesto informed Dr. Pisani that he was leaving, the doctor offered him a paying job, an apartment at the clinic, and a future at his side in allergy research. Ernesto refused. His mind was made up; he didn’t want to “stagnate” like Pisani.

In June, Ernesto received a copy of his medical degree, and a few days later he celebrated his twenty-fifth birthday. He and Calica set about getting their visas and assembling funds for the trip. As Calica recalled: “First, we asked our aunts. All our aunts, grandmothers ..., whoever we could ask for a loan. And as we went along, Ernesto and I made our calculations. ‘Did you hit up so-and-so?’ ‘Yes, I asked her for so much.’ ‘My grandmother’s going to give me some, and Mama is also going to give me money.’”

Soon, they had collected the equivalent of $300 each and all the visas they needed, except for the one for Venezuela. With its oil-boom economy, Venezuela had become a magnet for thousands of foreign job-seekers and had clamped down on visas. When they presented themselves at the Venezuelan
consulate, they were refused visas because they didn’t have return airplane tickets. Ernesto told Calica not to worry; they would get the visas in another country along the way. Meanwhile, he turned the incident into a humorous anecdote for his friends. To Tita Infante, he said it had all been a simple misunderstanding. The consul had mistaken one of his asthma attacks, which contorted his features, for anger and became frightened for his own safety.

Calica had been designated the “economist” of the trip—that is, he would carry the money. His mother made him a money belt to wear inside his underwear, and when Ernesto saw it he immediately dubbed it the “chastity belt.” They bought second-class tickets for the July 7 train to Bolivia leaving from Belgrano station. They were ready to go.

A large crowd of family and friends gathered at the station to see them off. Ernesto was dressed in military fatigues, a gift from his brother Roberto. They had brought far too much baggage. Ernesto had packed more books than clothes. As they sat down on the wooden benches in a second-class compartment that was crowded with Indians and their bundles, both young men were painfully aware of the contrast between their humble fellow passengers and their own well-dressed relatives and friends. At the last minute, a plethora of gifts and packages of goodies were pressed into their hands: cakes from Calica’s mother, sweets from someone else.

Watching from the platform, Ernest’s mother, Celia, clutched the hand of Roberto’s fiancée, Matilde, and said forlornly: “My son is leaving; I won’t see him again.” The conductor whistled and the train began to move out of the station. Everyone shouted good-bye and waved.

As the train pulled slowly away, a lone figure separated itself from the throng and ran alongside the compartment where Ernesto and Calica sat. It was Celia, waving a handerchief in the air. She said nothing, but tears ran down her face. She ran alongside the train until the station platform ended and she could run no more. Then the train was gone.

Ernesto Guevara, medical doctor and veteran road gypsy, was off again. “This time, the name of the sidekick has changed,” he wrote in a new journal he entitled “Otra Vez” (Once Again).
*
“Now Alberto is called Calica, but the journey is the same: two disparate wills extending themselves through America without knowing precisely what they seek or which way is north.”

Ernesto’s train had not been gone long when his cousin Mario Saravia made a surprising discovery. Returning to the Guevara home, where he was staying, Saravia noticed that his three new silk shirts were missing. He suspected Ernesto of taking them, and he told Celia
madre
as much. She was shocked and disbelieving, but when Saravia wrote to Ernesto to ask if he had taken the shirts, Ernesto replied that he had. Not to worry, he said, the shirts had been put to good use. He had sold them and used the money to “eat and sleep for fifteen days.” In revenge, Saravia wrote back to inform him, falsely, that he’d sold the prized microscope Ernesto had left with him for safekeeping, and used the money to go “on a holiday.”

Ernesto and Calica languished in the dusty border post of La Quiaca for three days, recovering, and continued their journey into Bolivia by train.
But at Calica’s insistence, they now traveled in a first-class sleeping compartment. Two days later, they descended from the freezing brown altiplano and into the great natural crater where the city of La Paz huddled like some kind of experimental lunar colony. The setting was impressive. At the city’s far edges the clean lines of the crater broke up into eroded badlands of giant white stalagmites that jutted out like daggers. Above them, the land climbed into a swooping rise of alpine rock and glacial ice to form the blue and white volcano of Mount Illimani.

Ernesto was enthralled. “La Paz is the Shanghai of the Americas,” he wrote enthusiastically in his journal. “A rich gamut of adventurers of all the nationalities vegetate and flourish in the polychromatic and mestizo city.”

After checking into a dingy hotel, they set out to explore the steep cobblestoned streets thronged with colorfully costumed Indians and groups of armed vigilantes. This was revolutionary Bolivia, Latin America’s most Indian of nations and also one of its poorest, with a notorious history of exploitation. The majority indigenous population had languished as virtual serfs for centuries while a few ruling families were made extremely wealthy from their tight control of the tin mines—Bolivia’s prime source of income—and the productive agricultural land. But now the long-standing state of affairs appeared to have been overturned. Since seizing power in a popular revolt a year earlier, the Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (MNR) had disbanded the army and nationalized the mines. A hotly debated agrarian reform law was due to come into effect in a few weeks’ time.

Bolivia remained unsettled, with many political forces still at odds and threatening the regime’s stability. In the countryside, impatient peasants were forcing the land-reform issue by attacking private haciendas, while miners led by the newly created independent trade union federation, the Central Obrera Boliviana (COB), marched in displays of force to extract further concessions from the government. Armed people’s militias roamed the streets, and rumors flew of countercoups by disgruntled elements of the disbanded army. One conspiracy had already been quelled in January. At the same time, right- and left-wing branches within the ruling MNR coalition pursued opposing agendas, with the Communists calling for a total handover of power to the workers while the center-right wing, including President Víctor Paz Estenssoro, sought to follow a middle road that isolated both the Communists and the local oligarchs.

While prowling around town, Ernesto and Calica bumped into a young Argentinian they had met on their train ride. He was visiting his father, Isaías Nogues, a prominent politician and sugar-mill owner from the province of Tucumán who was now in exile as an an opponent of Perón. It soon emerged that Nogues was acquainted with both their families, and he
invited Calica and Ernesto to his home for an elaborate dinner, at which they met other members of La Paz’s expatriate Argentine community. Ernesto described their host as a hidalgo, a nobleman. “Exiled from Argentina, he is the center of the [expatriate] colony, which sees in him a leader and a friend. His political ideas have been outdated in the world for some time now, but he maintains them independently of the proletarian hurricane that has been let loose on our bellicose sphere. He extends a friendly hand to any Argentinian without asking who he is or why he has come, and his august serenity throws over us miserable mortals his eternal, patriarchal protection.”

They also met Nogues’s visiting playboy brother, “Gobo,” just back from the good life in Europe. A social high roller with an open wallet and a great many contacts, Gobo claimed to be a friend of the Greek shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis. He took a liking to the young travelers and introduced them to the city’s bars and restaurants. With him they discovered the Gallo de Oro, an Argentine-owned cabaret where politicians, exiles, and adventurers mingled with La Paz’s fast set over drinks. The Gallo de Oro soon became one of their regular hangouts. Here they were able to see a different Bolivia from the one pullulating on the streets outside. Once, suffering from diarrhea, Ernesto made a dash to the Gallo’s men’s washroom, returning a few minutes later to tell Calica in a shocked tone that he had just observed two men snorting cocaine.

Another hangout was the terrace of the Hotel La Paz, where Argentine exiles dallied over drinks and coffee while discussing the politics of home and the Bolivian revolution. It was a good aerie from which to observe the daily processions of Indians marching by on their way to the presidential palace, demanding this or that from the government. One day, looking out at the crowd on the sidewalk, Calica spotted a pair of pretty girls and ventured down to see if he could pick one of them up. The girls were accompanied by an older man who turned out to be a Venezuelan general named Ramírez who was serving in “gilded exile” as his country’s military attaché. Showing good grace in spite of Calica’s blatant intentions, the general invited him for a drink, and before long Calica had extracted Ramírez’s promise to grant his and Ernesto’s previously denied Venezuelan visas.

General Ramírez not only secured visas for Ernesto and Calica. He invited them out on the town. Calica paired off with one of the girls he’d met with the general on their first encounter, and one evening Ernesto also met someone who seemed promising. “Something undulating and with a maw has crossed my path,” he wrote in his diary. “We’ll see.” The “something undulating” turned out to be Marta Pinilla, the rich daughter of an aristocratic family whose lands extended for miles outside the capital.

On July 22, 1953, buoyed by the upturn in their fortunes, Calica wrote his mother a spirited letter. Thanks to Nogues, they had been able to move out of their hotel and were now being well looked after as paying guests in the home of an affluent Argentine family. They were living “an intense social life,” he said. “The best people of La Paz invite us to lunch. ... All the Argentines here are very united, they have behaved fantastically with us. All the time it’s tea, meals in the Sucre and the Hotel La Paz, the two best ones. ... This afternoon we’re having tea with a couple of rich girls and tonight we’re going to a dance.”