The night before Lima I slept in a field of bones and dreamed of a motorcycle shop full of spare parts. Because it was a dream, the glass counters in the store held only the things that I needed: a new tail-light to replace the one that had broken somewhere in the desert; the odd little screw that held the seat lock together; brake pads fresh from Bavaria. When I woke up, what I remembered was that the staff in this dream store all spoke English. That was it. That was the whole dream: a parts store with an English-speaking staff.
The dream came to me while I slept atop a mass grave in the sandy coastal desert three hundred miles south of Lima. Called Chauchilla, the cemetery was an ancient repository of bones about twenty miles from the famous “lines” of Nazca, those giant drawings of abstract geometry and dogs, birds, trees, and monkeys that had been etched in the desert floor more than a thousand years ago. There were a hundred or more old cemeteries in the same area, filled with the remains of the Paracas and the Nazcas, people who had once held sway in this region and now dwelled under its soil. All you had to do to find them was pull off the freshly paved Pan-American Highway of southern Peru—a two-lane paradise of black asphalt, the single best road I saw in all South America—and bounce over the desert for a few hundred yards. The valley floor at Chauchilla was dotted with bleached femurs and bits of smashed skulls sitting in plain sight. The dry climate had preserved an extraordinary array of burial cloths and scraps of tapestries—even mummies. Looters both ancient and modern had worked over the graves many times, plundering everything of value, but there was something moving in the ordinary bits of twine and tattered bundles that you could uncover here just by kicking a little sand aside.
I pitched my tent, which promptly blew away. I sprinted over the dunes to catch it and reset it in the lee of the motorcycle with the belly of the shelter filled with my saddlebags and other gear to keep it rooted. I wandered the bones for a while, watered at the nearby creek that ran out of the brown hills, and after sunset went to my disturbed sleep. Normally, I was too tired to dream. I’d wake up where I had lain down, in the same position, each night a long black nothing—sometimes ten or twelve hours—undisturbed by motions, images, or needs. I’d close my eyes and the blackness would come and stay.
Before the dream there had been other signs. On the first night after crossing the border into Peru I had found myself weeping uncontrollably and without explanation. My mouth was often dry now. I fell in love with almost every woman I met, and got drunk one afternoon with a couple of Peruvians and shot holes in things with an air rifle.
The border crossing had been slow and complex, requiring trips back and forth, hour after hour of waiting in the hot sun, and an enormous amount of paperwork. I sat on the curb for a while with a Peruvian customs broker named Pato, who specialized in moving stolen cars from Chile into Peru. We talked about women until that was exhausted and then about Che Guevara. Pato said they were still looking for Che’s bones in Vallegrande, which was “some place up there,” he said, pointing toward the Andes. They still couldn’t find the body. I feigned ignorance, and Pato said he knew all about it and would fill me in. His Life of Guevara went like this:
Well, they say he was an Argentine, but really he was from Uruguay. He was a student of medicine in Buenos Aires, but he quit medicine and started to read. A light switched on. He became leader of a socialist group, and got to know Fidel Castro, and when the revolution began in Cuba, he joined it. But afterwards he and Castro couldn’t agree on anything. When Castro saw white, Che saw black. So what did he do? He came to Peru. This was around 1974. Che came down through Nicaragua, all of Central America, Colombia, to Peru, to find the guerrillas here and give them help. He began arming them. But the Peruvian army discovered him while he still had only a small force. So that’s why he went to Bolivia. My brother knew him personally, that’s how I know so much.
Nearly every fact in this biography was wrong, which made me like Pato even more. They were all nice guys at the border. A Peruvian supervisor named Mr. Rojo was supposed to take the day off, but he spent an entire afternoon filling out paperwork for me. He completed the Relación del Vehículo y Pasajeros in triplicate, and typed the green Permiso de Circulación No. 4186 and filled in the date (Marzo 8, 1996), and even got down on his knees in the parking lot to search out the engine number on Kooky’s left cylinder head. When we were finally done with the paperwork it was dark and I realized that Mr. Rojo had spent almost six hours of his day off smoothing my way through customs, through the police, through the agricultural inspection, and through immigration. When I was finally in Peru, we said good-bye in the parking lot and I tried to hand him a ten-dollar tip for all he had done. Mr. Rojo blanched, waved away the money, and then spoke the cruelest words I had heard in months: “Te equivocaste, Patricio, te equivocaste”—“You were mistaken.”
The bones in the graveyard where I slept the next and last night before Lima had been tossed about by all the looters that the centuries could provide, and lay in disordered heaps and random collections. Only one or two intact skeletons were visible, and these featured bits of dried, leathery flesh still attached to the forearms and shins and ribs. Natural cotton bolls, stuffed into the body cavities to absorb fluid and therefore aid mummification, now tumbled loose in the shallow depressions of sand. There were bits of woven fabric, but the burial bundles had all been plundered long ago of the tools, jewelry, and personal items these small people had expected to need in the next world. They hadn’t understood that the next world was simply this same world, only without them.
These people had died long before the violent struggles between the twentieth century’s left and right; I suspected that they would still recognize Peru, however. If they were to wake up from their graves and shake off the sand they would see the same broad valley, the same stony hills, the same neighbors in the village across the creek, still tilling fields of irrigated potatoes. Even the chaos of modern Peru would seem familiar. War changed its shape and donned costumes of ambition and ideology, but the basic human urge to dispute was eternal.
The bones were nothing to take too seriously. The dead deserved and received no respect: some kids who had played in the valley before me had used twenty-three femurs and three skulls to spell out the word Buzz on the ground. This was probably the name of their favorite heavy metal band.
In the morning, with the wind drumming sand against my tent, the spare parts dream sat there in my mind, pathetically unremarkable but for the fact that I couldn’t think of another dream I’d had on the entire trip. I waved it off and rode furiously toward Lima all day.
The Scorch. I had always called Lima by that bitter, blackened name. It was a foul metropolis of dusty brown buildings and clogged streets and cold hills that had chilled my heart since the first day I had seen it. It was my least favorite place in the hemisphere, a burden of sorrow on the ground, and when the desert began to give way to the edges of the city, to its ring of hills and its outer badges of poverty, I rode Kooky with slow care and felt an emotional paralysis overwhelm me. I realized, as I rolled up a highway into the suburb of Miraflores, what was driving my strange visions and violent impulses of recent days: It was this.
Peru was what made Chile look good. The measly numbers that were death in slim, sophisticated Chile could never measure against the mass of suffering that was Peru. Sixty thousand children died here every year before the age of one, mostly for lack of clean water. Cholera raged through the land. Poverty was endemic. A fifth of the 22 million people had never seen a school. Seventy percent of children under five were malnourished. Suffering was like a tax on the living, with collections that rolled over year after year, sapping the lives of millions upon millions, steadily laying Peruvians into the ground. The uprisings against one form of oppression or another were just as routine and constant: there had been guerrillas in the mountains here almost continuously for the last seven hundred years, culminating in the psychopathic Shining Path movement and a savage civil war that had killed perhaps thirty thousand people since 1980.
Scorch was where I had first set foot in Peru. The plane arrived at dawn, and I remember the swirling dust storms that cleared just enough on our approach to show some Mi-6 attack helicopters sitting limply on the tarmac, itself half-buried under shifting drifts. On the cab ride into the city I passed through the first shantytown I had seen. I’d viewed Soweto and the favelas of Rio de Janeiro on television, of course, and had assumed that shanties in Peru would look pretty much the same. That wasn’t the case: since it never rains in Lima, adobe bricks, loose-fitting stones, and roofs of thatch or even cardboard were the building materials of choice. Corrugated tin was rare. Later, when I’d been out in the real shantytowns, I would learn that the places near the airport were practically middle class. There were shantytowns and then there were shantytowns, with gradations of desperation and success, each with its own character and qualities.
Miraflores was the best that the Scorch had to offer, and it wasn’t much, just a modest suburb along the sea with a few tall buildings and some roast chicken restaurants and pizza joints. There was a triangular park at the center that they nonetheless called “el ovalo,” and as I drove around it and over the bridge into neighboring San Isidro I saw that things had improved somewhat since my previous visits. There was less broken glass around, and the buildings that the guerrillas had once turned into empty eye sockets with their car bombs were now glazed again into mirrored privacy. Miraflores was filled with business. There was a new Blockbuster Video wrapped in its own parking lot like a bunker with a clear field of fire.
The owner of a guest house let me bring Kooky inside, then closed the wrought iron gates behind me and double-locked the front doors. The outer wall was topped with broken glass. Every house was still a fortress here.
I took a long shower and washed the desert from my skin for the last time. From here I would turn inland and climb up into the mountains, leaving the dry coast behind. The mountains were dangerous. Peruvians called them “the Red Zone” because of all the guerrillas. I’d already met the guerrillas of Peru once, five years before, and once was more than enough.
That day had started with a long wait in yet another dusty field of rocks on the outskirts of Lima. It was visiting day, and two hundred women and perhaps a hundred men stood with Incan patience in the heat, slowly inching forward as each person and her or his paperwork was inspected, handled, stamped, and inked by teams of soldiers. The line began out in the street and ran in fits and busts through the stony parking lot and toward the great fortress wall of the Canto Grande prison. Soldiers with automatic rifles strolled around the scene, pestering vendors, kicking dogs, and “borrowing” newspapers from the people in line. A tiny door in the wall opened from time to time and admitted a few supplicants or expelled a few more soldiers. You were only admitted to the prison on visiting day if you had the name of a specific someone to visit: I wrote “Juan Valdez” on the little form handed to me at the first checkpoint.
At six-two, I towered over these four-foot-tall women, and inevitably the soldiers grew nervous and began watching me. A private raced off but nothing happened for a long time, and I made it to the second checkpoint before they pulled me out of line. A Chinese-Peruvian captain appeared (there were many Asian immigrants to Peru; President Alberto Fujimori’s parents were from Japan, and his nickname was El Chino). The captain listened to the explanation for my mission—to interview the guerrillas imprisoned here—and nodded curtly. A sergeant then led me straight to the head of the line. I rolled my right sleeve up and a series of corporals applied seven different purple stamps to my arms, beginning at the wrist and working up to the biceps by the seventh seal. A soldier cheerfully wrote the number “150” on my other arm in ballpoint. This, he explained, was to help identify bodies.
In 1986 the Shining Path prisoners had staged a coordinated uprising in three Lima prisons, using dynamite and small arms they had smuggled inside. In the counterattack Peruvian troops had killed one hundred and twenty-four prisoners at Canto Grande; one hundred of them were shot in the head after surrendering. A hundred and thirty-five were killed at another prison, apparently in the same way. Both sides were expecting a repeat (which has since happened, twice).
The corporals ordered me to stand in the sun until the purple ink dried, which I did, and then I was pushed through the door into the pitch-black interior of the prison. A fat, sweaty sergeant fingerprinted me and ordered me to surrender my wallet, which went into a drawer. I assumed I would never see it again. The sergeant then gingerly felt me up, checking my ankles, thighs, scrotum, and armpits through my clothes. When he was done he pushed me through a confusing maze of iron bars into the inner courtyard of the prison, a sun-baked expanse that reeked of urine and sweat. The cell blocks rose up around the outside in oddly modernist shapes, rounded and swooping. It was a prison by Gaudí.
There were several hundred starving men dressed in rags in the courtyard. “Which one?” I asked the sergeant, who was safe behind his iron gate again. He pointed to the right, and I walked through the crowd trying to look like I did this all the time. The arms and legs of prisoners dangled from windows above, and the men up there hurled abuse and trash down on my head. Wires and laundry lines and improvised TV antennas tangled the sky overhead. Within seconds I was confronted by a half-naked, shivering man demanding money. I pushed him aside and threaded my way through the rest of these living dead as quickly as possible. Several men in nothing but tattered shorts chased after me, one of them carrying an enormous ship made of matchsticks and shouting prices. I hustled up the first few feet of a cement ramp, made a right where the sergeant had indicated, and came face-to-face with a closed iron grate. A dispassionate woman sat in a chair on the other side of the gate. She betrayed neither surprise nor interest as I let myself in. I had to duck my head beneath an arch of red hammer and sickle flags to enter, and when I stood up again a greeting committee of bright-faced young women in flowery blouses and slacks burst into applause and called out “Welcome, comrade!” They all shook my hand firmly, one after another, and then began to sing:
President Gonzalo, we advance with you
To final victory in the popular war!
The Peruvian Communist Party
Army of the new state!
They finished with a two-line chant:
Militarize the party for a world revolution!
Maoism in the world!
The room was clean. Red banners declared LONG LIVE THE PEOPLE’S WAR. Portraits of Marx, Mao, and Lenin were posted on the walls beside quotes from each. More slogans urged me to remember the Four Phases of Struggle, to Build World Maoism, and to Boil All Drinking Water.
Because of threats to their families, the prison guards had long ago ceded control of the block to Shining Path, and the guerrilla girls now lived independently. They cooked their own food, even raising rabbits, and days in A-1 were tightly scheduled around exercise, ideology classes, singing, mural painting, and military drills.
I borrowed a pen from a cooperative young woman and dug some paper out of my sock, where I had hidden it from the sergeant. A tall woman led me to a table in the main common room of the cell block. She had straight dark hair, Caucasian features, and an air of elegance. While attendants buzzed about her, bringing tea and bowls of fruit, she insisted in a clear, educated Spanish that she was “just an ordinary prisoner, someone with knowledge of the situation.” I asked how was she chosen as a leader.
“There are no leaders in the Shining Path,” she replied, fingering her glass of tea. “We are all equal.” Looking at the attendants hovering over her, I pointed out that she had some kind of authority. Was she elected democratically to her position? She glared at me. “The best are chosen,” she said.
Over lunch of rice and an oily stew in plastic bowls she quizzed me in detail about my politics and recent events. What was the attitude of Americans toward the Shining Path? Was the IRA a revolutionary organization or “merely” democratic? Was the Gulf War directed by American oil companies? Was the Chinese economy growing or collapsing? In exchange for my vague answers, she explained that Shining Path was the last bastion of true communism in the world, of course: Fidel Castro was a lackey of the United States; China was run by capitalist-imperialist dogs; communism collapsed not in 1989 but in 1975, when Mao died. From Tiananmen Square to the capitals of Eastern Europe, she explained, the masses were ready for a violent revolution. Peru’s other major guerrilla group, the MRTA, were not the Marxists they claimed but in fact a group of capitalists. “We have no relations with them,” she said. “They get support from Cuba. We consider the Cubans revisionists.”
As I picked at the small bones in my stew—rabbit, I hoped—the torrent of dogma continued in a vocabulary that I could hear but not comprehend. Che Guevara was a revisionist because he compromised with the retrograde forces of class domination, whatever that meant. He was a tepid captive of his own upbringing, this woman told me, a “bourgeois revisionist” and “servant of capitalism.” Her words followed a rigid internal logic that could not be translated to the world beyond these walls except through the blazing purity of violent action. Whether this logic made any sense or not was irrelevant: the language itself was the point. Revolutionary consciousness preempted and surpassed reality. In Peru, theory was fact.
Lunch came to an abrupt end when a pair of antennae emerged from my rice. Wriggling legs soon followed, property of a small cockroach who had apparently been waiting in my bowl when the rice arrived. My guide apologized and suggested a walk.
It was a prisoner’s stroll, up and down the ample courtyard attached to A–1. The walls were twenty-five feet high, providing just enough room for the huge murals of the revolution and its patron saints that the women painted. An enormous picture of Chairman Mao held pride of place behind a basketball hoop, the great helmsman beaming down benignly with his usual Cheshire cat smile. At another spot he was shown towering over a tiny column of Chinese peasants. FORWARD TO VICTORY IN THE PEOPLE’S WAR, read the slogan at his feet. Another mural showed the Shining Path’s leader, known as President Gonzalo or the Fourth Sword. He was sitting at a desk, a pudgy figure with thick glasses. Behind him were portraits of the previous three swords, Marx, Lenin, and Mao. There were six rabbit hutches under the murals.
A basketball game took over the courtyard. The women formed into two loose teams of about a dozen each, and ran up and down the yard tossing the ball haplessly and missing basket after basket. Chairman Mao watched from right behind the far hoop, and sometimes the ball would bounce off his chin. After half an hour there was still no apparent score. While my guide dutifully cheered the players I slipped out of sight, ducking through the lunch room and ascending the first set of stairs I saw. I crept down a corridor, peering into empty cell after empty cell. There were bunk beds and quilts, and the moist walls were decorated with family photographs and magazine pictures of Swiss mountains and Chinese maidens. I quickly checked under the thin mattresses for weapons or any other secrets, but there was nothing. I went up another flight silently and eavesdropped on a conversation among three women guerrillas. They were discussing sewing.
Soon I heard the heavy trod of my guide’s feet on the stairs, and she found me staring innocently from the top floor over the courtyard. She was angry that I had slipped off, but I blabbered about needing a fresh breeze and followed her downstairs. She ushered me across the main prison courtyard and handed me off to a greeter in cell block B–4, where the three hundred male Shining Path prisoners lived. It proved to be simply a larger slice of liberated territory, run on the same principles as the women’s section. The courtyard was bigger but also decorated with murals. In place of a basketball court there was an open-air bedroom, and about fifty men dozed or idled on cots in the shade of sheets strung overhead. I walked down the aisles, feeling the prisoners carefully avoiding my gaze. Eventually I spotted two young men who acknowledged my presence. They were César, nineteen, and Javier, twenty-two, both serving long sentences for terrorism. César was handsome and shy, but Javier recited doctrine aggressively. “Of course we know we are going to win. The masses reject the government,” he said. He spoke easily of feudalism, mobilization, and the means of production. Marxist logic explained everything: “You are either for the revolution or you are against it. If you are against exploitation, you are for violent revolution. When I realized that point, I joined the party.” He went on to explain the Four Phases of Struggle: (1) violent revolution, (2) class struggle, (3) the dictatorship of the proletariat, and (4) the struggle against revisionism. Javier and César immediately fell into an argument about whether we were in stage one or two, which just proved we were in stage four. We talked for a while about the Two Antagonistic Paths and the struggle against “parliamentary cretinism,” known elsewhere as elections.
Then Javier leaned in close and lowered his voice. “Just tell me this,” he said to me. “Who has the nicer murals, us or the women?”
On the way out, the tall woman reappeared and suggested strongly that a stop at the guerrilla gift shop would be appropriate. It was in the stairwell, with the gifts spread over a small table. There were various handicrafts made by the prisoners; the money went “to further the revolution,” the man running the table explained. I looked at some hairbands for women, made of leather and wood. The leather was carved with a scene of the globe exploding, with tooled flames shooting out of the various continents. There were earrings, made from coins stamped with a portrait of President Gonzalo and then decorated with microscopic slogans (LONG LIVE WORLD MAOISM!). I narrowly resisted buying a cloth shopping bag embroidered with a hammer and sickle (not the kind of item you wanted to carry around Lima) and instead bought two small paintings. The first showed Shining Path guerrillas wiping out an army garrison. The guerrillas were shooting some of the soldiers and then lecturing the survivors with clenched fists (in fact, the Shining Path almost never took prisoners). In the second painting, the glorious future had arrived. The sun set on an idealized Andean village, and happy peasants were cooking and raising their clenched fists in the air. A few of them carried rifles on their backs or large communist banners in their hands, but it was otherwise a peaceful scene, as simple as the childish hopes behind it.
The guerrilla running the stand wanted four dollars for a miniature diorama. As the tall woman looked on disapprovingly, I bargained him down to three and took it. The model was about four inches by four inches, made of cloth and painted paper in a folk-art style. It was a street scene, and showed three guerrillas machine-gunning somebody as he stepped out of his limousine. The limo was beautifully done. It was made entirely of carefully folded and glued paper. It even had tinted windows. The dolls were made of thread wrapped around wire and painted. The guns were wire.
The tall woman lowered a finger right in among the figures to show me the poor sucker who dared to thwart the Shining Path. He was bald and wore a gray suit, and his body was tumbling out the open door of the car. Lovingly painted rivulets of blood ran down the two-centimeter body. “This is a member of the reaction,” she said. “He is now a victim of the people’s war.” Then she pointed to a tiny doll on the fringe of the scene, its fist raised in the air. “This is a member of the public,” she said. “He is shown supporting us.” This was the only time I saw her smile.
We parted with an egalitarian handshake, and at the exit to B–4, I paused to watch the main courtyard, looking for a chance to cross. César appeared and offered to walk me to safety. We strolled out into the sun together, given a wide berth by the regular prisoners. César told me that before prison he had been a student at San Marcos University in Lima, a notorious recruiting ground for the Shining Path. He was arrested for bombing a store, and he hoped to go back to school after the revolution. With his slim good looks and stylish clothes, he looked as though he could be out on the street chasing girls. With a touch of shyness, he mentioned the “immense love” of the people for the revolution. “They love us very much,” he said dreamily. “Muchísimo.”
I asked him if his bomb had killed anyone. He shrugged his shoulders. “It was a capitalist store,” he said.
Back inside the fortified guardhouse the darkness enfolded me again, welcome this time. The fat sergeant reappeared and handed me everything I had given him, including the watch and my money down to the dollar. A handful of young guards gathered around to look at my souvenirs. The Chinese captain came over and put on a broad smile. “Men, look how childish it is,” he said. He held up the tiny diorama, and the guards ran their eyes over the little figures with machine guns and the street covered with blood. I showed them the painting of Peruvian soldiers being shot and blown up by heroic guerrillas. The soldiers laughed at first, but not as much as the captain wanted.
In five years some things had changed in Lima—but others had not, like the traffic. When I rode Kooky up the Avenida de Garcilaso de la Vega a few days after my arrival it was clogged with sputtering vehicles. Garcilaso was a sad historical figure known as “the Chronicler.” Part of the very first mestizo generation, he was born (he claimed) to a Spanish conquistador and an Inca noblewoman. He wandered Peru for most of his life, composing a massive letter to the king of Spain that detailed the economic and political construction of Inca society, the founding myths and the glorious lessons that the Andes could teach Spain. Garcilaso was utterly loyal to the Spanish Crown and believed with a touching innocence that His Majesty would end all the suffering and violence of the conquest if only it were drawn to his attention. Garcilaso even illustrated the book himself; the final sad drawing showed Garcilaso as an old man, trudging along with his book and his loyal dog following behind. He looked like Peru’s first travel writer. In the end the king never saw the chronicle; it was discovered only centuries later, too late to rescue the world it described.
The old city center lay at the far end of Garcilaso’s namesake avenue, and I wove in and out of the gridlocked microbuses and picked my way between Volkswagen beetles spewing black smoke, the inescapable taste of Lima. The microbuses were colectivo taxis that cost a few pennies and ran on fixed routes around the city. Each one featured a surly, macho driver and a “door boy,” a young teenager charged with collecting fares and opening and closing doors. They were a particular hazard in my narrow maneuvers because the door boys delighted in hanging far out into traffic, shouting destinations. The competition among the colectivos was intense and profit margins were razor thin, so the drivers fought a kind of war against one another, furiously swerving toward any potential passenger, cutting each other off, and flinging their battered vehicles into any open space that appeared in the roadway, including oncoming lanes where possible. The Peruvian papers were delighting in the story of a local soccer team called Sporting Cristál that had been en route to practice when a microbus cut them off. The team jumped out and beat the opposition driver senseless. Attendance at their games immediately went up.
There were soldiers everywhere. Brown-skinned draftees from highland villages clouded sidewalks outside important buildings, dwarfed by their German automatic rifles. They looked nervous, which made me nervous. Armored cars were parked in the traffic medians, green and glowering with frightful intent. Peruvians were used to the heavy military presence and went about their business normally. Vendors flooded the stalled traffic at every intersection selling lottery tickets, cigarettes, gum, windshield wipers (I no longer had a windshield to wipe), key chains, old magazines, statuettes of Jesus Christ, and soccer balls.
In 1952, Lima was still the “city of the viceroys,” as Ernesto wrote in his diary. The old city center was a sleepy gem filled with Spanish architecture, elaborate plazas, and arcaded galleries. The manner of the city was exclusively Spanish, the residents part of the white elite who had preserved their way of life without incorporating the rest of Peru. Ernesto called this Lima “the perfect example of a Peru which has never emerged from its feudal, colonial state. It is still waiting for the blood of a truly liberating revolution.”
The R word at last. It was only here, in the obsolete seat of the Spanish empire in the Americas, that Ernesto Guevara de la Serna finally had a vision of a “truly liberating” revolution. The vision was not articulated—that would come years later—but the instinct was now present. The social vistas opened by months of travel now gnawed at Ernesto and opened a gap in his life. Something would have to bridge the chasm between what was and what should be. In 1952, the word revolution was itself enough.
In the years after Ernesto passed through, the revolution had indeed come to Peru, over and over again, in every imaginable guise. The greatest of the revolutions came into sight after I swept past the presidential palace and up onto the bridge over the filthy Río Rímac; there, as far as the eye could see, were the shantytowns. They were filled with the poor who were driven from their old lives during the course of the intervening decades, pushed out of mountain villages and provincial towns by poverty, by innumerable attempts at leftist revolutions, by the military’s brutal counterrevolutionary sweeps, and by drug traffickers. There was also a pull in the simple lure of city lights, which plucked Peruvians from their devalued mountain lives as quickly as any other people who felt left behind by history. There was no Doug Tompkins to shield them from the global economy when highland agriculture collapsed under the pressure of cheap imports. Beginning in the 1950s the poor and the ambitious and the lonely and the hungry had flooded down from the hills of Peru, an army of peasant millions who built their shanties in rings around the city, each wave adding another settlement that climbed a notch higher up the slopes of the surrounding hills. The newest immigrants lived in the worst terrain, sometimes the flatlands of the coast but more often the steep slopes of the rocky, useless hills. The wealthy had fled to the suburbs, where they sneered at the cholos, and Ernesto’s city of viceroys was now dusty and neglected and ringed by the gaze of its own mestizo bastards.
I crossed the bridge and headed out into this, the true Lima. These communities were called pueblos jóvenes, or “young towns,” and it was impossible for a stranger to navigate them. Only the oldest neighborhoods from way back in the 1950s had named streets, and the farther I rode out from the bridge the younger the community, the lower the buildings, the worse the materials, the fewer the landmarks and street signs. A blue VW Beetle rocketed from behind a bus and nearly crushed me. I asked directions continually and followed vague instructions to “go past the tower” and “make a left in five minutes” and “look for the restaurant.” After half an hour of circling I finally stumbled onto the gate in a tall wall that I had been seeking, drove straight in, and killed the engine. There were a dozen buildings inside the wall, mostly small cabins and a few barracks-style buildings that were empty. Old medical supplies and rusting equipment were scattered around. Dogs wandered in profusion.
I had not even dismounted in the dusty courtyard before I was surrounded by children shouting questions. Their faces were bright and they wanted to know where I was from, and then if America was “the last country.” They wiggled their thumbs and asked if I had a Nintendo set on board; was it true that in my country you could rent Nintendo? What kind of cargo was I carrying? And would I like to see where Che Guevara had lived?
The children were the offspring of the lepers Guevara had come to see. The two Argentines arrived here at the Hospital Guía leper colony in 1952, eager to touch the untouchables. Although they had exaggerated wildly in telling the Chilean newspapers that they were international experts with “three thousand patients” in five different leper hospitals, the truth was impressive enough. Granado had worked for years in various leper colonies, and Guevara genuinely intended to do likewise when he graduated from medical school.
Guevara’s interest in medicine was a chronicle of lost hope. He’d been chasing cures since his own asthma kicked in at the age of four. The first cures were, like those he came to at the end of his life, driven by force of will. The constant sensation of suffocation drives many young asthmatics to develop an almost violent urge to live; according to Dolores Moyano, one of Ernesto’s childhood friends, this explained the young man’s ferocious determination in all physical pursuits. Little Ernesto loved dangerous stunts like walking along fence posts, and had taken up rugby, a British imperial sport, where he earned another of his innumerable nicknames, the Sniper. He was known for playing to the point of collapse, as if willing his body to fail. The psychological effect was the reverse of the physiological one: constantly pushing the limits imposed by his lungs, Ernesto overcame the crippling fear of death that accompanies near suffocation. Testing himself became a habit; pushing back against death a means of validating life. This aggressive response is so common among sufferers that it is sometimes called the asthmatic personality.
His own suffering informed Ernesto’s decision to enter medical school, but it was not the only factor. There was his mother’s cancer, which had prompted him to those gruesome basement experiments on guinea pigs. But he had also inherited an aristocratic idealism from her, a kind of noblesse oblige that required him to address injustice. He enrolled in medical school in Buenos Aires at the age of eighteen, which is normal in Argentina, and raced through his studies with precocious speed, which is not. He made and kept a public promise that he would return from the motorcycle trip and finish his medical degree.
But his rolling research had awoken something in Guevara that doomed the pursuit of medicine. He never practiced after graduation, except informally. He later said that the leper colonies of Peru had taught him that “the highest forms of human solidarity and loyalty arise among lonely and desperate men,” but his search for that very loyalty led him away from medicine, toward the desperate solidarity of combat. Although he had joined Castro’s invasion of Cuba as the team doctor, he trained with rifles, was a superb shot, and abandoned medicine as soon as he could. On their very first day of battle the rebels were routed and had to run for it. Guevara had to choose in that moment between carrying the medicine or carrying the ammunition, and he chose the latter. He mentioned this anecdote often in speeches to make sure everyone understood what he was saying: he had put down the bandages and picked up the bullets. Violent revolution was just as noble as the healing art—indeed, it was a form of healing if it was administered to a sick society by a trained specialist. This was Guevara’s own Life of Guevara.
In a letter home from Lima, Little Ernesto was still recommending less rigorous cures. Writing to his father, he explained that one of the most powerful treatments for leprosy was a firm handshake. He sat with the lepers, took their hands confidently, and played soccer and ate with them. They saw that he had no fear. “This may seem pointless bravado,” he wrote, “but the psychological benefit to these poor people—usually treated like animals—of being treated as normal human beings is incalculable.…”
The same courage was hard for me to summon. The first adult I met was named Serafino, and when we shook hands I blanched visibly at his thumbless grip. He’d lost only the tips of his other fingers to the disease. Like many lepers, Serafino also had a slightly “crazy” expression, the result of nerve degeneration in his face. His eyes were frozen in a permanent squint, and his mouth was locked in a half smile, as if he was letting me in on a joke that I couldn’t get.
Even when Ernesto came here there were medicines to arrest the disease, but poverty is its own illness, and Serafino had grown up untreated. Born in the high sierra sometime in the 1950s—he didn’t know when—he was first exiled to the San Pablo leper colony in 1961, when he was “the same size as them,” he said, pointing at the cloud of little boys surrounding us. In 1968 he was transferred to Lima to live in the Hospital Guía colony. Although leprosy is not a particularly contagious disease—only a tiny portion of people are susceptible to it—fear, rumor, and a long tradition of discrimination surrounded the lepers as surely as any wall. Leprosy was a life sentence to prison back then.
In 1976 a military government had breached the walls and allowed the lepers to leave if they wanted. There were still eighteen families here. They remained victims of popular loathing outside and knew little of making their way in the world. Here they had a doctor on call, some free food, and no rent for shanties that were as good as most outside the walls.
Despite missing both thumbs and the rest of his fingers past the knuckles, Serafino wielded a mean rake and had a stunning garden to prove it. He grew tomatoes and Chinese onions, and showed me a high sierra corn strain that he was experimenting with. “You have to work or you go crazy,” he said, picking at weeds with his rake. “That’s a big problem here. Not many work. Some go outside to work but most just stay here. I was a carpenter until someone stole my tools, my saw and hammer and so on. That was four years ago, the sons of bitches. Since then I just work on the garden and with my birds.”
There were a half dozen hens, some ducks, and several caged fighting cocks. The cock of the walk was an immense macho of Spanish-Chilean stock with black feathers tinged in iridescent green. He had survived six fights to the death and retired to father almost all the other chickens in the little cluster of wire-and-scrap hutches that Serafino tended.
“El Che was here,” Serafino suddenly said. “He slept right over there.” He pointed a half-formed digit toward a blue shack, solidly built but tiny, just a plain square of four walls. I told Serafino that yes, I had heard that Che had spent a week or two here.
“Longer than that,” he replied. “He was here for months, at least three. He lived right over there in that blue house. He worked in the hospital all day, in the lab, doing research. He only went out at night to meet with people. You know what kind of people. He was organizing his groups for Bolivia. Meetings.”
Every detail of this story was wrong: Ernesto was in Lima for only a couple of weeks; he spent his days touring museums; he wasn’t a guerrilla strategist yet; and he only visited the Hospital Guía briefly as a medical tourist, not a researcher. In the mind of Serafino, however, the story was true because it had to be true. For millions of the dispossessed all over Latin America, there were no other heroes. Che was a necessity, not a possibility; if he hadn’t existed, they would have invented him anyway, and often did. The point of the legend was always the same, and as powerful as it was simple: Che lived and died for us.
We marched over, Serafino trailing his rake in the dust. He opened the front door of the shed, which proved to be empty and clean. It was the size of a cargo elevator. “There was a photo of him on the wall for years, but they took it down in ’72 or ’74,” he said. Yes, I replied, it certainly wasn’t safe to keep a photo of Che on display during those reactionary times. “No,” Serafino countered, “they had to paint the place.” With his frozen expression it was impossible to tell if he was kidding or not.
Dusk had fallen and I thanked the lepers and left in a hurry. I didn’t want to pick my way back through the twisted streets in the dark. On the way to the motorcycle, kicking up clouds of dust with my boots, I looked up. There, gleaming on a hillside in neon splendor, was a statue of Jesus of Nazareth, arms outstretched, gazing down upon the city as champion of the humble.
After my prison visit I had to know if the Shining Path would win its battle. The future of Lima lay in the shantytowns, and I spent two days riding through them with a young leftist who agreed to show me his own revolution in the making. Our vehicle was less heroic than the motorcycle-Rocinante: David Medianero picked me up at the guest house in a dented blue Volkswagen Beetle belching smoke and lacking a speedometer, gas gauge, or radio, although it did have a tape deck on which he played Zamfir. Medianero was a lapsed communist who had found employment as a field worker for a Peruvian think tank called the Institute for Liberty and Democracy, which is where I had met him while researching an article. I liked the ILD because it was adept at siphoning the coffers of conservative American foundations by talking about free enterprise, then turning around and spending the money on Marxists. On our way out of the city that first morning we stopped at a market long enough to fill the back seat with bananas and the tank with gasoline.
Medianero was in his thirties, a man of the streets who had a poor person’s obsession with neatness and wore a short-sleeved polyester shirt. We headed out toward a rural zone on the far outskirts of Lima, where he was negotiating with some farming cooperatives. The road went out of the city center, passing a thousand more old Volkswagens exactly like our own. We kept the Río Rímac on our left and rode out a highway named for Tupac Amaru, an eighteenth-century rebel who resisted the Spanish. The Movimiento Revolucinario Tupac Amaru, or MRTA, had taken his name, but few spoke it anymore. Following Guevarist tactics, the group was steadily burning out in a series of spectacular defeats. The last of these was a 1996 attack on the Japanese ambassador’s residence during a Christmas party, where the guerrillas slipped into the event disguised as waiters carrying canapés and took more than four hundred hostages. During the long siege the guerrillas issued statements via their web page and spent most of their time watching soap operas. They allowed the hostages to conduct self-improvement seminars on topics like the benefits of kidnapping insurance, and even permitted a noted pollster—himself a captive—to survey the hostages on the first floor (surprisingly, only 87 percent felt that security at the party was “inadequate”). Their postmodern tactics collided with Peru’s premodern realities: one morning the army burst into the building and killed every single guerrilla. Their leader’s immortal last words—“We’re screwed!”—accurately described MRTA’s prospect these days. The siege eliminated the bulk of their military force, and MRTA took a back seat to the Shining Path, the Maoists who ridiculed Guevarism from the safety of their jail cells.
The slums were, along with San Marcos University, the Shining Path’s recruiting ground, the sea in which the fish swam. In 1992 their insurgency controlled perhaps a third of Peru, including many of the young towns ringing Lima. I spent a month in Lima then, and there was bomb attack almost every day I was there. That sounds worse than it really was, because many of the attacks were surprisingly pathetic: one night the guerrillas tied a stick of dynamite to a statue of John F. Kennedy and decapitated it; they launched homemade rockets at the U.S. Embassy but the missiles fizzled and crashed onto the front lawn; and they blew up power pylons, plunging the poor parts of the city into darkness. The limeños were somewhat inured to these matters, and wandered the streets full of broken glass, keeping a watchful eye on any Volkswagen Beetle that appeared abandoned—the bug was the car bomb of choice. Not all the attacks on American symbols were so ineffective: near the end of my stay the Kentucky Fried Chicken in Miramar was gutted by a lunchtime car bomb that killed several people. The quiet, personal violence was in many ways more devastating than the splashy propaganda assaults. The Shining Path specialized in assassinating activists who offered the poor an alternative to Maoism—agricultural extension experts in the countryside, priests in the small towns, and, in the city, activists like David Medianero.
Now Medianero cut off the highway and through a series of the increasingly desperate slums. There were piles of garbage in the streets, some of them burning with a greasy stink. Mangy dogs lingered on the corners. The towns piled up the increasingly steep, stony hillsides, with improvised lanes separating insubstantial shacks. Everything—roads, people, clothing, dogs, houses—was coated in a fine tan dust, a khaki powder so thick that Medianero occasionally ran the bug’s wipers in a vain effort to scrape the windshield clean.
We stopped at the farthest edge of the city. This area was once all farmland, but new slums were springing up, along with a few light manufacturing plants. The local farmers were feeling under pressure, and Medianeros’s first stop was a farm building with a dusty courtyard surrounded by narrow fields of corn that ran between the new strips of shacks. Women worked the maize in traditional felt hats that showed they had not been out of the hills long. Medianero told me to pose as a European if anyone asked. In the same breath he said that there was no danger but that “anti-imperialist” feelings were commonplace. Medianero was trying to convince these semiurban farmers to disband the co-ops and turn their land into private parcels.
Most of the farms and houses in the slums were sitting on seized land, often government land but sometimes private farmland. Families would pour their resources into building a small home, but since they did not legally own the land their lives remained precarious. When some of the older and better organized shantytowns put political pressure on the government, they were successful in getting titles. The result was a kind of economic enfranchisement as the owners poured effort into expanding their crude shacks into two- and even three-story houses. With title, you could demand social services like any other reputable homeowner. Bank loans against the title made it possible to finance repairs or a new business. Homes that were legally owned could be legally sold. An actual real estate market appeared in the slums where people had titles, and a few communities were so developed they looked like lush islands in the sea of shanties.
Medianero dropped off some sample land titles with the co-op leader and then we remounted and went farther afield, a long drive up and over steep hills that had been covered with graffiti made by piling rocks into big letters. There was supposed to be an assembly for three hundred people at another cooperative, but we sat around for two hours and no one came. Then we drove to a roadside stand and sat in the shade drinking Inca Cola, a neon-yellow soda that tastes like bubble gum and is Peru’s national drink. Medianero sulked for a while.
“Most of the young towns are aligned with political parties of the left,” he said, “like the Revolutionary Block, or the APRA, or the PUM.” Some parties were just organized around a single leader, like the former president, Velasquez. The acronyms and affiliations formed a dizzying political landscape, but Medianero knew the map intimately. For many years he had been an activist in PUM, which stood for United Party of Mariátegui. Mariátegui was an early communist leader in Peru, and his name kept coming up. In 1952 Ernesto had befriended a Lima doctor who was both a noted researcher on leprosy and a friend of Mariátegui, and they had talked about Marxism late into the night (Ernesto apparently remained skeptical). The Shining Path was actually known (to itself) as “the Communist Party of Peru for the Shining Path of José Carlos Mariátegui.”
Medianero had gotten his start in activism by organizing a grand, model land invasion. He still glowed with pride as he waved his yellow cola in the air and described the way he assembled the best, handpicked comrades—“We called everyone, even the women, comrade”—late one night. Armed with tools, ropes, building materials, and small wooden stakes, they snuck onto a piece of idle farmland in the darkness and spread out. The plan had been worked out in its smallest details, even to who would be mayor of the new settlement and where the soccer field would go. They drove stakes into the ground to mark where the streets would be, and each comrade claimed a piece of land and built a tiny lean- to out of thatched palm fronds stretched over a simple frame. By dawn there was a town—a somewhat theoretical one, but in Peru theory was fact.
Later, Medianero left the party. I asked him why. “Politics,” he replied. Even the smallest parties were afflicted with endless schisms and feuds. Factionalism simply wore him out. He kept his friends on the left, however, and observed that they were slowly drifting away from radical activism. He’d recently attended the baptism of a child born to a friend who had been a fierce communist. Medianero was surprised to hear his friend had quit the party, and asked why. “I have a child,” the man replied. “I need a cement floor in my house. I don’t have time for politics.”
After telling me this story, Medianero took a swig of his drink. “It’s too easy to blame the imperialists,” he said. “If a man needs a cement floor, he doesn’t care where it comes from.” The founders of the young towns had always been common laborers, he said, but their children were growing up as small entrepreneurs. This was a grand title for someone who sold things on the street or ran a business out of his shack, but it was a marked change in how people expected to live. Medianero said that life in Peru had changed faster than the vocabulary of politics.
“The farmers are used to old-fashioned ideological talk,” he said. “You have to speak to them in the language of the left. I can talk to them in those terms, but then we make a pilot project to show them that private property is neither leftist nor rightist, just a good idea. You give them examples. People are slow to change their minds.”
The second day was more urban than the first. We stopped at mid-morning at one of the model soup kitchens, called comedores populares. This was in Villa Salvador, itself a model slum where people were organized and had elected a local mayor and even a community assembly to speak for them. Two shy women dressed in the multiple petticoats of the Andean native showed me an empty larder. The building was adobe, about twenty feet wide and thirty feet long. It was decorated on one wall with Villa Salvador’s municipal symbol, a picture of two arms crossed, one holding a rifle and the other a shovel. There were a few wobbly benches inside, and three tables. They were hoping that some food donations from the Catholic charity Caritas (which distributes about a million rations a day in Lima) would arrive soon. When they had food, they made a watery soup and charged about twenty cents a bowl. They sat, passive, patient, and hopeful, cleaning the few pots and pans they had. Sometimes they were instructed to read aloud from a pro–Shining Path pamphlet—and they did it, because the penalty for resisting the revolution was death.
A senile beggar woman approached me outside the comedor, fetid with poverty and dressed in rags. Medianero spoke to her quietly and led her to a bench. We climbed into the car but he did not start the engine. He waited, looking at the helpless old woman. “There is always this,” he said. “Always.”
We drove farther south, down across a huge flat expanse of shanties, a disorganized and truly new young town that extended for miles. We passed two hundred women waiting in line at the community water tap. They held bright plastic buckets and shuffled slowly up the line, past the usual burning garbage and stray dogs. Still moving south, we passed a soccer field, just a rectangle of rocks lying in the brown dust. Eventually we came to where the slums began to peter out in the sand dunes along the ocean. The last outposts of Lima were those decrepit sheds with no roofs and woven mats for walls. I could crane my neck right over these feeble homes and peer inside like a giraffe. Often, there wasn’t even a cup inside. We climbed the highest dune and surveyed the slums as they ran up the coast toward central Lima. The cold blue ocean seemed impossibly beautiful.
The Uruguayan historian Eduardo Galeano had met Che during the heady, early years of the Cuban revolution, and he recounted Guevara’s intimate familiarity with the details of poverty like this. Guevara could recite statistics on illiteracy, on infant mortality, on inoculation rates. Galeano had reverently placed Guevara’s 1951 motorcycle journey in this context: “On this journey of journeys,” he wrote in a review of Guevara’s diary, “solitude found solidarity, I turned into we.” The emotional basis for Guevara’s politics, then, was here in the slums he had seen, among the untouchables that he had touched. This was where an individual had surrendered himself to the necessity of the plural, a noble vision of solidarity that had produced some very dubious results in practice, whether here or in Havana.
On the surface David Medianero had done the opposite—he had turned from the “we” of group action and party politics to the “I” of ownership and individual struggle. Perhaps the truly revolutionary act was to discard the cloak of doctrinal certainty and dare to accept the individuality of human beings again.
The battle of these slums was a struggle between paradigms—one dedicated to Marx, the other to markets. Yet both sides were on the left. The only idea coming from the right was austerity in one guise or another, which always means less for the poor. Only the left cared enough to come into the townships at all.
You could see all the way to Miraflores from on top of the dunes. Whichever way things were going, it was still a very long way.
I fell profoundly ill, as much from my hatred of Scorch as from the pathogens that inevitably crept up my intestinal tract. Lima could fell anyone. I sent my brake pads out for a recoating and spent four days lying in the guest house evacuating my innards into the toilet, first from the top and then from the bottom. I sipped rehydration solution (water, sugar, and salt) and read a book I’d found lying around, The Secret Life of Alejandro Mayta. It was by Peru’s most famous author, Mario Vargas Llosa. Mayta was a fictional revolutionary, less charismatic and decisive than Che Guevara but similar in his faith that a tiny vanguard of guerrillas could change the world. The book’s narrator was a contemporary writer, an obvious stand-in for Vargas Llosa himself, who was digging through the 1950s, looking up old revolutionaries and conspirators, interviewing fellow travelers and old friends, all in the search for Mayta’s “precursory character.” Back then Mayta sounded a lot like the young Ernesto Guevara of the 1950s, an unsullied intellectual still dwelling in “that adolescence in which politics consists exclusively of feelings, moral indignation, rebellion, idealism, dreams, generosity, disinterestedness, mysticism.”
There he was, young, slim, handsome, smiling, talkative, with his invisible wings, believing that the revolution was a question of honesty, bravery, disinterestedness, daring. He didn’t suspect and would perhaps never know that the revolution was a long act of patience, an infinite routine, a terribly sordid thing, a thousand and one wants, a thousand and one vile deeds …
While I malingered in the bathroom, turning the pages, Mayta went to his death in a small town in the Andes, leading a failed insurgency and followed only by a blind man. Che was less naïve, but knowing the sordid nature of revolutions did not protect him from the same fate in the end.
There were two Australians in the guest house who spent a lot of time watching satellite television in the little corridor outside my room. They were a cute, perky couple with a manic need to change channels every few seconds. I sat with them one night, watching the rest of the world flick by in two-second bursts of comedy, tragedy, and spectacle.
“Stop!” I burst out. I made them back up and saw that I was not having visions: there was Che on television. It was a show broadcast live from Buenos Aires on the twentieth anniversary of the military coup that had initiated the Dirty War. A vast public square was filled with tens of thousands of people chanting “Never again!” Rock bands played, and in between songs old ladies dressed in black took to the microphone to urge their children to disobey authority. These had to be the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, the only mothers who considered rebellion the highest virtue.
While the crowd sang along with an anthem by Charlie García, a South American Bob Dylan, huge banners of Che were brought forward through the crowd, tall red flags that swung over the sea of heads. There were a dozen of them, each sporting the same image of Che as always. It was the black-and-red iconic portrait, eyes fierce and uncompromising, blazing into the future—this future.
An hour later the Australian couple knocked on my door. They didn’t speak Spanish and wanted help arranging a taxi for the airport, so I placed the call. Out of gratitude they handed me a little paper bag containing all their leftover cocaine. After they were gone I flushed it down the toilet. I needed to test the new brake pads, so around midnight I rode Kooky into town—without a helmet, for some reason—and circled the ovalo. Scorch didn’t look so bad now that I was leaving. I kept driving, a final tour that lasted an hour, and for once all the avenues were clear.
I ended up circling the new Blockbuster endlessly, going round and round, wondering why the guerrillas always demolished the wrong symbols of American imperialism.