The road alternated between dirt and gravel as it ran south. As the altitude dropped the llamas gave way to cows and the headgear of peasants in the distance switched from the pointy wool caps of the Andes to the straw cowboy hats of the vaqueros. It took two more days, but eventually a long valley yielded to a minor set of ridge lines, and I went up and down and in the early afternoon came around a bend and there was a gas station and the beginnings of a town of red roofs and white walls. This was Vallegrande.
It was a matter of habit now to pull into any and every gas station, regardless of how much was in my tank, and I did. The attendant came out, wiping his hands with a rag. “Qué tal, Che?” “How’s it going, Che?”
I asked him why he called me that. He looked surprised: “You are from Argentina, right?” Like Ernesto, I’d been exposed as an outsider the instant I arrived. After topping up, I reached for the key and my hand passed over the odometer. After a look in my notebook I did some quick math. The result was hard to believe: I’d ridden more than 9,900 miles since departing Buenos Aires four months ago. I rode up the last hill and into Vallegrande. A couple of men sitting in the plaza watched while a pair of black dogs chased me around and around. I found the hotel that all the journalists had stayed in when they were watching the excavations. It cost four dollars a night, was clean, and had hot water and a view of the valley. I lay down on the bed and thought about staying here for the rest of my life.
I was almost the only foreigner in town—there was one resident Peace Corps volunteer—and the news of my arrival rippled through the streets. Even before I had time to wipe the dust off, the president of the local civic council came around to ask me why I was there. When I told him, he said, “Of course. El Che. We assumed that was the case.”
We took a walk. His name was Calixto, but everyone in the street called him “Professor” because he had once been a teacher. Calixto took me to his municipal office, which turned out to be a tiny school desk in the back of the general store he now ran. The room was stacked high with eggs, noodles, candy, and toilet paper. The desk was covered by a foot-high pile of papers that Calixto pushed toward me. There were newspaper clippings from as far back as 1967, files on the recent search for Che’s bones, and a few books, including My Son El Che by Ernesto Guevara Sr. Flipping through the stack, I came across a worn little booklet that resembled one of the ration books that Cubans carry. Inside was a neat photograph of a young man—Calixto himself—in uniform. It was his military service libreta, dated 1967. He’d been a private in the army at the time of Che’s campaign, but, he hastily added, he’d been stationed right here in Vallegrande, where he spent the months of the insurgency pushing paper on a desk and standing guard duty in the middle of the night. Calixto took the little booklet and gazed at the picture of himself as he had been. The paper was wrinkled and worn soft. So were his hands as they held it. A tiny transistor radio played in the background.
“The people are still living the psychosis of those times,” he said, popping open a liter of lemon soda from the store’s cooler. “They won’t talk. Somebody comes forward with a story once in a while: ‘I saw three people buried over there. It was El Che.’ But there’s nothing there, or it turns out to be somebody else. We found four like that.”
The search had been quite an affair, the biggest thing to hit Vallegrande since 1967, the last time somebody was looking for Che here. When the retired military officers came to lead the search for the body there had been forty or fifty journalists with them, and the Cuban ambassador had shown up with two coal-black bodyguards whom Calixto called, with a kind of hushed awe, “los Burundi.” A news crew from Globo, the Brazilian television conglomerate, had arrived in their own airplane, making an even greater impression. Most of the journalists left after a week or so, but a hard core of fifteen or twenty had stayed for two months while the Argentine forensic experts dug and dug. Calixto showed me some pictures of a party the journalists threw on January 26, a month into the search and while I was deep in Patagonia. The guest of honor was Loyola Guzmán, a Bolivian woman who had briefly joined Che’s guerrillas and survived to an old age of dancing salsa with foreign correspondents. Calixto remembered it as a fun time. “Look,” he said, pointing at the photo, “that’s the man from radio in La Paz.”
Everyone used Che for something. The journalists wanted headlines or, in my case, a mirror. The Cubans and Argentines wanted the body. In Vallegrande, the civil council had hoped, briefly and naively, that the remains would stay right in town and attract tourists like some Lourdes of the left. There was already a smattering of Che tourism. For years young people—mostly Latin Americans but also some European socialists—had been coming to town on pilgrimages, usually for the official anniversary of Che’s death, October 8.
“The young people that come here,” Calixto said, “talk about taking up arms, going into the hills. I hope it’s only talk. But there is great misery, it’s true.” He said the province was slowly stagnating. They were in the sixth year of a drought and there were no more harvests. People were fleeing for the big cities: the school system had declined from two thousand to one thousand students. I asked him what the young people should do if they wanted to Be Like Che and put an end to injustice. “Learn,” he replied. “Study. Help someone. But to go into the hills with a rifle doesn’t serve anything. What good is a rifle when the government has so many more?”
We were still flipping through the papers, and I came to a photograph, the famous shot of Che lying dead in a laundry shed behind the local hospital. The Bolivian military had put his body on display to prove to the world that the famous invader was really dead. The photograph showed Che, shirtless and disheveled, stretched out on a cement table used for scrubbing blood out of surgical gowns. His arms were thrown out to the sides, and his lifeless eyes seemed to stare at the camera. There were small cuts in his torso where the bullets had gone in. It was an obviously Christ-like image (in fact, Dr. Valer, back in Cuzco, had referred to it as “the image of Christ”).
“I was there, you know,” Calixto said, taking the photo from my fingers. Calixto had joined a line of two hundred people waiting to see the body that day. Some of the women ahead of him clipped small bits of Che’s hair. I asked if the mourning and memorializing showed that the people in the area had genuinely supported Che.
Calixto shook his head. “No,” he said. “They didn’t know who El Che was.” Many local families had actually informed on the guerrillas. It was only curiosity that brought them to see the body, he explained. Like the tin miners, they’d never known or loved their would-be savior until he was dead.
Che proved more influential in his afterlife. “The people up in La Higuera, when they have an illness now, they light a candle to El Che and say it cures them, like a miracle. Students here in Vallegrande do it when they have an exam.” We walked down the hill to the airfield. We passed a small parking lot, and on the gate was a faded red graffito: VIVO COMO NO TE QUERÍAN GUEVARA. I couldn’t understand the phrase and asked Calixto what it meant. “I don’t know,” he replied, stumped. The wording was ungrammatical in Spanish, and meant, loosely, “Guevara, you are more alive now than ever.” Calixto said it must have been painted by a foreigner.
He was a brooding man, and as we passed beyond the last buildings and saw first the windsock and then the grass landing strip his mood grew even heavier. It was a huge field, far larger than I had ever understood from reading the news reports. There was a hangar built like a Quonset hut, and inside it was a small plane owned by a family of American Pentecostal missionaries. They didn’t live here, but occasionally flew in to witness for Christ. On the far side of the field was a high wall containing the town cemetery, but in most directions the field simply ran under a split rail fence and kept going, out into the valley floor. They always said that Che had been buried “under the airfield” at Vallegrande, but that meant nothing. The airfield was just a swath of valley floor. He could be anywhere.
“Where in all this are you going to find El Che?” Calixto asked.
In the morning I went to see the Che museum. Calixto took me to the plaza, where we marched up the front steps of the municipal building, climbed up the second floor, and went into the main room that overlooked the plaza. There was a desk, and Calixto opened it and took out a Plexiglas case about the size of a typewriter. Inside it was a pair of old leather sandals.
That was the Che museum. “We are hoping to get some more things to add to this, but right now this is all we have,” he said. These were the sandals worn into the grave by one of the four guerrillas whose bodies had been recovered so far. It was the footwear of someone who served under Che. A piece of the true cross.
Out on the steps of the municipal building a Bolivian man in a blazer and jeans did a double take as he passed me, and Calixto stopped and introduced us. He was the town’s radio reporter, responsible for broadcasting a daily show on the provincial station. The station was headquartered just across the plaza, and he dashed off and minutes later returned with a microphone and a cassette deck. He put on a pair of headphones and stuck the microphone in my face.
“Who are you and what is the purpose of your trip?” he asked once the tape was rolling. I rambled on for a while about how I was heading up to La Higuera tomorrow to see the place where Che Guevara died, how I was studying the life of the young Ernesto Guevara and what people thought of Che now. Since the radio host didn’t stop me, I kept talking. I had been spending a lot of time alone and apparently needed to get a few things out. In the end I talked continuously for half an hour about where I’d been, what people had told me about Che, how I thought he had started out great but gone wrong, terribly wrong, and how everything was lousy in Cuba and, in the end, violence got you nowhere. The revolution always ate its children, and so on. I explained that the foco guerrilla strategy was a dim-witted notion, a foolish attempt to refight the battles of the Cuban war in a radically different political context. At the end I said that it was understandable that people admired Che because nobody else seemed to give a damn about the poor. At last he snapped off the tape recorder.
An hour and a half later, I sat down to lunch in the town’s only restaurant. There was an article in an old newspaper about the Zapatista guerrillas in Mexico. They’d held a meeting with the French author Régis Debray, one of Che’s old advisers. Debray had once written books about the inevitable triumph of Marxist guerrillas around the world; now he advised the Mexicans that their strategy of propaganda stunts and Internet dispatches was “more realistic” than Che’s plan of recruiting a guerrilla army from Bolivian peasants.
All this time, as I read, the radio in the restaurant was on. I was into my soup when I head a familiar voice: “… investigación del joven Ernesto Guevara, antes de que el fue conocido como ‘Che’ … que opinión tiene la gente … empezó bien pero al final … opresión en Cuba … cada revolución come sus hijos … un plan idiótica.”
It was me and I sounded like a moron. My entire speech on the steps of the municipal building—visible out the door of the restaurant—was on the radio, run not in the edited snippets I had expected but stem to stern, thirty minutes long. I slowly spooned through my soup and then waited for my fried steak. You could hear only two things: me blabbing on the radio in ungrammatical Spanish and the forks and knives of a half dozen customers as they ate. They listened and watched me surreptitiously. It was the longest meal I have ever eaten.
I spent the afternoon looking for Che memorabilia, but there was none. No postcards, no T-shirts, no lapel pins, no books of any kind. I marched from one general store to the next, but the merchants all said that they had never seen such things and asked if it would be a good way to make money.
That night the village was stilled by a soccer game between Bolivia and Argentina. The Argentines were heavily favored, but when Bolivia scored early the streets of Vallegrande erupted. You could hear people screaming, car horns tooting, and teenagers running around the plaza whooping. In the end the Bolivians were crushed by their neighbors. They’d lost their empire to the Spanish, their coastline to Chile, and their soccer game to the ches. That’s how it went in Bolivia. They were used to losing. In Latin America there are many things worse than defeat.
On the morning of the third day I drove south out of Vallegrande, through the dusty fields, heading for La Higuera to see the last of what Che had seen. It was a dry, clear morning. Calixto had drawn me a little map on a cocktail napkin. It showed two intermediate towns, and all I had to do was make a right, a left, and then another left.
The first right was ten miles down the road, and following the new track I climbed up and over a series of ridges, each higher than the next, until I had left the flatlands far behind. The ridges ran in long parallel lines, as though Pachamama, the Earth Mother, had dragged the tines of her golden rake across the face of the world. There was not a house or a line of smoke as far as the eye could see, just dark green and brown hills rippling off toward the curve of the earth.
There was supposed to be a town along here somewhere, and when I came to a house I asked the sole resident—a shirtless teenage boy—where El Cruce was. He looked about him. “This is it,” he said. The road branched right and became even thinner. Snarling up and down the hills for another half hour, I came up a particularly steep set of switchbacks and entered Pucara, a village made entirely of stone. I circled once around the cobblestone plaza, counterclockwise, looking for the exit, but by the time I had come back around to my entrance point a lean young man in blue jeans was standing in the road, arms folded, blocking my path. I stopped.
“First of all,” he said, handing me an envelope, “take this letter up to La Higuera. Second of all, I heard what you said on the radio yesterday, and you are wrong.” He turned out to be the local schoolteacher, which also made him the postmaster and village administrator. He invited me inside and produced a mason jar full of moonshine that we passed back and forth across a desk while debating socialism, the New Man, and the Bolivian political scene in 1966.
After half an hour I left drunk. I flailed at the kick starter for a while before realizing that I had forgotten to turn the key on, and no sooner had I veered out of the plaza and bumped a few hundred yards down the road than an old man in a straw hat came running out of a shack, flapping his arms with excitement.
“You must be the gringo on the radio!” he shouted toothlessly. “I talked to Che Guevara right on this spot thirty years ago!” I sat astride the bike, chatting with him. He recalled—suspiciously well—how he and some other peasants were rounded up by the guerrillas and Che gave a talk about the coming revolution. The man claimed that he had given food to the guerrillas, but as I departed after ten minutes, leaving the thrilled fellow in the middle of the road, I recalled that Che had complained bitterly in his diary about how the peasants were overcharging him for supplies.
Relations between the guerrillas and the peasants they had come to liberate were terrible. The expected support “does not exist,” Che confided in his notes. “Not one person has joined up with us.” There were all too many reasons for the failure that was now enclosing him. Unlike in Cuba, many peasants in Bolivia had plenty of land and identified with the country’s president, a brown-skinned military strongman who spoke Quechua. Although Che had been careful to “Bolivianize” the struggle by recruiting a slim majority of Bolivian guerrillas before starting his operations, casualties and desertions quickly whittled his force down to a hard core dominated by Cuban combat veterans. Instead of swimming through the peasant sea, these guerrillas flopped about like fish out of water. None of them could speak the local dialects, and some of the Cubans were black, a skin color most Bolivian peasants had never seen before. Perhaps even more important, the guerrillas were led by a white man, and an Argentine to boot—exactly the kind of person who had been exploiting brown-skinned peasants in this region for centuries. Che’s skin marked him in a way no ideology could: he was what rural Bolivians call la rosca, a bitter term for a white outsider with power and wealth. With typical realism, the peasants often fled whenever this motley band of foreigners and sun-burned city boys appeared. Morale in the guerrilla column plunged. Once, they seized the town of Alto Seco, just up the road from here, and Che gave a propaganda lecture on Yankee imperialism and Marxist liberation, and then asked for volunteers. Only one local man stepped forward, but he was told quietly by one of the guerrillas, “Don’t be silly; we’re done for.”
In his diary, Che wrote coldly and with little sympathy for his men, but the facts were clear even to him. The Bolivian volunteers were deserting. One guerrilla drowned while crossing a river. The rear guard got lost, wandered through the hills for weeks, and was then wiped out in an army ambush. By July, Che was down to twenty-two fighters, “three of whom are disabled, including myself.” In August their base camp was uncovered, cutting them off from supplies, including the last doses of precious asthma medicine (“A black day,” he wrote). They were surviving on rotten anteater carcasses and horse meat—eating Rocinante, rather than riding her. Two diary entries for August use the word desperate in their opening sentences—August was “without doubt the worst month we have had so far in this war.” But then September proved even worse. The situation on the ground was “a big mess,” Che conceded to himself.
The insurgents wandered aimlessly through this barren landscape, often lost, usually thirsty, sometimes starving. Che’s tactics were curiously passive: instead of attacking vital infrastructure, like the oil fields in nearby Camiri, he staged small ambushes and then listened to the radio to see if the world had noticed. The high-water mark came when the guerrillas briefly seized a small town on the main highway through the region, sending the Bolivian government into a panic. In La Paz, they didn’t know that Che had ordered the attack only because he hoped to steal some asthma medicine from the town pharmacy. His condition had become so severe by then that he could no longer walk; he was leading the revolution from a lame mule.
When he learned from the radio that a Budapest daily had criticized him for engaging in guerrilla warfare, Che’s frustrations finally exploded. “How I would like to rise to power just to unmask cowards and lackeys of every sort,” he wrote, “and squash their snouts in their own filth.”
The New Man was running out of hope.
The road dropped for a while and then off to the right you could see the Río Grande, far down in the valley bottom. I had to refocus my eyes before I realized what I was looking over: there, a half mile down the hillside in the same vista, was a meadow filled with tall white and yellow crucifixes. They were death markers. This was where the final battle had taken place—the guerrillas trapped in a shallow ravine without cover as the army rained bullets on them from above. The crosses marked where Che’s men had fallen. Che knew that the only way out of an ambush is to attack, not retreat, and he tried to push his few remaining soldiers up the hill to a position with better cover. But the time of theoretical tactics was over. Che had been hit once already in the leg, and was wounded again when the rifle was literally shot out of his hands, burying splinters in his arm. A loyal guerrilla named Simón Cuba tried to lead his commander to safety, but the army troops charged down the hill. Wounded, disarmed, and defeated, the “world’s No. 1 guerrilla” was captured. In the confusion, three guerrillas crawled through the underbrush and escaped, led by Benigno, the same man who had recently defected from Cuba and denounced Castro for abusing Che’s image.
It was a sad spot, and I fled it, but I had bounced no more than a hundred yards down the road when I came over a small hill and there he was, Che himself, alive and well and a little shorter than I had imagined. Also his beard was red, but other than that it was definitely him. He was marching up the hill toward me, the jaunty beret cocked on his head, the little star clearly visible on his brow. I pulled to a halt, convinced that the moonshine was responsible for this vision, but the figure only grew more solid with each step. Che approached steadily, and as he came closer I noticed he was wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt. I sat on the motorcycle, frozen in fear.
“Hallow!” he said in an approximation of English, and then burst into tears and handed me fifty dollars. The fellow’s real name was Jans van Zwam, and he was a Dutch tourist in his forties. He was just returning from a morning in La Higuera. He shoved the two twenties and a ten in U.S. currency at me and said, “Please, you will take for the doctor in the town,” and then burst into tears again.
When all the crying was over I asked him what he was doing here. “For twenty years I dream of coming to Bolivia,” he said. He had passed through four airports in two days, jumped into a taxi and come straight to La Higuera. Against his driver’s advice—which Jans did not fathom, since he did not speak any Spanish—he dismissed the taxi. He had planned on catching a bus back to Vallegrande, but there were no buses or taxis on this road, so now he was walking.
He had about fifty kilometers to go. With the exception of Pucara, five kilometers up the road, there was no shelter along the route, nor any place to find food and water. I told him to flag down any trucks that passed, although there would almost certainly be none, and promised to pick him up on my return if he was still afoot.
He rolled up his sleeve and showed me his left biceps. There was a tattoo of Che on it. When he made a muscle Che’s face bulged a bit and the eyes of the “world’s No. 1 guerrilla” surveyed the future even more intensely than usual. I asked him how to get to La Higuera.
“You will see it easy,” he said. I pulled away, and indeed, the route wasn’t missable. Downhill a half mile the road forked. A tall pole stood at the divide with a crude hand-lettered sign attached.
CHE, it said; 10 KM.
Twenty-nine years too late, I followed a grassy path over the hills. Aside from a weekly truck no vehicles came this way. A tiny bridge of rotten logs spanned a dry creekbed, and then the road went up and over one last ridge line and there it was, down below me.
La Higuera was not a town or even a village, but just a hamlet, a cluster of brown, one-story buildings draggled along the sides of the only street. The settlement sat on the slopes of a vast, gentle valley, guarded on the left and at the far end by a steep, brush-covered ridge. Below it were sloping fields of tall, golden grass, some trees, and far, far below that the Rio Grande. I powered slowly up the main street, looking into the empty houses. A coupe of immense pigs slept against a wall beneath a slogan in red paint that said EL CHE VIVE.
The letter I had been handed in Pucara was addressed to the most substantial house in La Higuera. The building was made of cement and had a chain-link fence around it to keep out thieves. The schoolteacher lived inside. She was a rather elegant white woman with dark hair down to her waist, and she made me tea. She did not ask why I was there, since there was only one reason foreigners came to La Higuera. She talked for a while about life in the village, which had no electricity. There were only twenty-two families left now, she said, about half the number who lived here when El Che came. They mostly raised cattle and were slowly going broke. About half the people in the area had Chagas disease, the heart-eating condition spread by beetles. I left the letter with her and set off on foot to find the doctor Jans had mentioned.
His office was in a long, low hut at the top of the hamlet. This was the same building where Che had been murdered. In 1967 the army had carried its wounded captive to La Higuera and put him in the hut, which was then a schoolhouse. At one point several Bolivian soldiers took Che outside and posed for a picture with their trophy—he looks wildly disheveled, and his captors are leaning in toward him like guests squeezing into the frame at a party. A local woman was allowed to feed him some soup. He sat on the floor, his back to the wall, his wounds bleeding but not fatal.
Via radio, the soldiers received a coded order from headquarters in La Paz: “Fernando 700.” Decoded, this meant “Kill Che Guevara.” The Bolivian government did not want to risk a show trial full of posturing and speeches. The date was now October 9, 1967. A sergeant was given two cans of beer to fortify his courage and was then sent into the schoolhouse where Che was waiting. There are various accounts of what Guevara did or didn’t say at the end. Supporters claimed that his final words were “Shoot, coward, for you kill a man!” Enemies said it was “I am worth more to you alive than dead.” There were also claims that he denounced Castro, or refused to speak at all, or sent a farewell to his family, or cried out “Long live the revolution!”
It doesn’t really matter what was said; the sergeant put an end to words by shooting nine bullets into Guevara.
Now there were a few children standing outside the door of the former schoolhouse, which had been fixed up and whitewashed. They were brown-skinned boys with ratty sweaters and shorts. They loitered, listening to the screams of agony coming from inside. The doctor had his hands in the mouth of an old peasant woman in a black-and-blue poncho. She sat in a chair, her head tilted back. The doctor was prying at her teeth with a set of sharpened pliers like those used to pull nails out of horse hooves. He gave a great heave, and a bloody tooth came sliding out while the old woman twitched in her chair and pleaded for mercy. “Dios mío!” she cried out in a muffled, wet voice. The doctor added the tooth to a collection of saliva-damp molars in his left hand. There were five of them glistening there in his palm. “Well,” he said to the woman, after spotting me, “why don’t we get the rest in a few days?”
The doctor was a barrel-chested, handsome young man, dark in skin, eyes, and hair. He rhapsodized about the man he called “el Guerrillero heroico” and said plainly that he was in this village, providing care to the poor, because he wanted to Be Like Che. His medical education and salary were both funded by the Cuban government. This, too, was a legacy of Che.
The walls in the little room were decorated with posters about polio and inoculations. There was a plaque above the spot where Che died with a bad poem about him, and below that a framed pop art collage that showed his face and a section of the Argentine flag.
I handed over the fifty dollars, making sure that the boys at the door heard me explain that the money was a gift from the Dutchman for the medical care of the villagers. The doctor held the bills in front of him and then smiled—and then laughed. I asked him what he was going to spend it on. “Medicine,” he said at once. “Or supplies. We need bandages, and scalpels, and antibiotics. And needles. Also a battery for the radio.” He showed me the radio. It was a ratty two-way model, the only connection between La Higuera and the outside world. Some German leftists were raising money to install a solar panel to power it, he said. The Cubans were even talking about paying to bring electricity to the village. He took me outside and showed me a red 125 cc dirt bike that he used to make his rounds. It was in terrible shape. He said he needed new tires—but that could wait, since the dry season was here. With the Dutchman’s money he could stock up on some medicine. He would worry about tires later.
I gave him another twenty out of my own wallet. It was one of the last bills in there, but still, it is amazing how cheaply we can value our debts.
Che came to La Higuera twice. The first time had been three days before the end, not as a captive but as a fighter. His column was half the size of when he started, but the men were still on the offensive. Arriving after dawn, they found the hamlet eerily calm and the mayor missing. Despite these bad omens Guevara ordered the column to move forward. The advance guard walked up the main road toward Pucara while Guevara and the others waited in town.
“The army started shooting from that ridge line up there,” the doctor said, pointing to the hill I had crossed to enter town. We were walking in the same direction that Che’s men had been moving when the shooting broke out. The vanguard was decimated. Three of Che’s most able men—“magnificent fighters,” he wrote in his diary—were killed at once. Two others were wounded, and two Bolivian rebels took the opportunity to desert to the enemy. The survivors retreated into the center of town, to where we now stood.
The doctor made a left down a narrow lane, signaling for me to follow. The path headed downhill and was shaded by overhanging trees and shielded by stone walls on each side. “It took some time to get the mules organized but then they came down here,” he said. “This was their route of escape.”
The ridge line was almost out of rifle range from here. The guerrillas had slipped down the lane, using the walls for excellent cover. I squatted down behind one and cocked a finger at the army troops who had been on the ridge that day. You would need a telescopic sight to hit anything from here. Following the path, laying down a barrage of covering fire from behind its walls, the survivors slowly worked their way out of the village, down the hill, into a ravine, and then eventually disappeared with the arrival of darkness. They hid in the valley below the town for three days, almost dying of thirst. A new unit of Bolivian army rangers was deployed in the area. There were two hundred of them, freshly trained by American Green Berets. They had intelligence information gathered by the CIA, including Che’s photos of himself in disguise. Listening to his radio while hidden in the underbrush, Guevara heard a broadcast about the deployment of “hundreds” of troops to encircle him. “The news seems to be a diversionary tactic,” he wrote on October 7.
It was the last line in his last diary.
The good doctor took my picture while I stood next to the statue of El Che in the town plaza. La Higuera was too small to actually have a plaza, but that is what residents called the traffic circle in their one and only dirt street. There were a few trees inside the circle, and inside them a bust of Che on a white pedestal. It was the worst representation of him I had seen yet. Only the obvious adornments—the trademark beret with star and the word Che in red across the pedestal—made it clear who it was. In the photo my boots are streaked with oil, my jeans ripped from the crash in Chile, and my head sunburned by four months of travel. I look like I’m posing with Omar Sharif on the set of 1969’s Che. In that Warner Brothers production, Sharif played Guevara, of course; Jack Palance was Fidel Castro.
There had been a different and better likeness of Che in this exact spot, but one night in 1990 a jeep full of Bolivian soldiers pulled into town. They threw a lasso over the head of El Che, tied it to the back of the jeep, and then drove out of town as the bust bounced behind them like a tin can at a wedding. The replacement had been made by some art students of dubious talent. Neither the art students nor the soldiers were from around here. Nor were the young leftists who mourned here in La Higuera each October 8, just managing to miss the right date the way they just missed everything else about Che.
Which is as close as I could come to explaining the miserable mood that had settled on me with my arrival in La Higuera. We didn’t belong here. Not the soldiers nor the art students. Not Jans, the Che tourist, not Che himself. We were all meddlers, outsiders who thought we knew better. Except for the doctor with his palms full of bloody teeth, we—Argentines, Bolivians, rightists, leftists, CIA agents, Cuban diplomats, journalists, pilgrims, and tourists—were all here as soldiers in some cause, imposing our wills on a group of people who needed rain and batteries, not a place in history.
It was mid-afternoon now, and conscious of how swiftly darkness would cover the country, I thanked the doctor and began a very long journey home. I rode slowly down through the houses, past the EL CHE VIVE scrawl and the pigs lying contentedly in the sun, and then went over the ridge. A few miles on the other side of Pucara I came around a corner and saw Jans striding purposefully along. When he heard the sound of my motor coming he turned and waved his arms over his head as though I might somehow miss him. I pulled over, lowered the rear foot pegs, and Jans climbed aboard. He put a stiff hand on my shoulder and sat bolt upright during the trip.
Because of the road we drove no more than fifteen miles an hour, and this made it possible to talk. I kept the visor of my helmet open to hear him better. Like all Che fans, Jans had a parable about the man, and he first apologized for his bad English and then launched into it. “I didn’t have no education,” he said. “At fourteen I am going to work. After much time I pick up a book. It is about Che Guevara. I see he is a doctor, from good family. He have everything, he could be a good life, but he give it up to fight for the poor. So I think he is a good fellow, and I read another book.” End of parable.
Jans knew everything about Che. As we rode along he mentioned Che’s birthdate, what he’d done in the Cuban war, his missions to Africa and Bolivia, what he’d said at the Tricontinental Congress, whom he’d written his farewell letters to, on and on. Back in Holland, Jans was a minor politician—a vice-mayor of a community of seventeen thousand people—and said he was known as the “Che mayor” because of his fascination with Guevara. He made me pull over long enough to show me some articles he kept in his jacket. They were from a Dutch paper and I couldn’t read them, but they showed Jans wearing a beret and a Che pin on his lapel as he stood in front of a Che poster in his home. According to Jans the first article said that Che Guevara was “the one who set Jans van Zwam right.” I recognized the Dutch word pelgrimage in the text of the second piece. When we started again I asked Jans if he had read about Guevara’s 1952 motorcycle trip.
“Ja,” he said. “This is the trip when he begin to wake up. He start to think about how people is living.”
We didn’t talk much after that. We just rolled slowly over the ridges, one after another, and consumed the views. Somewhere that afternoon, while my eyes were busy, I passed through the ten thousandth mile since leaving Buenos Aires.
We flew up the valley floor and into Vallegrande, a long rooster tail of dust chasing our arrival. I slammed on the brakes seconds after we hit pavement at the outskirts. Jans tumbled forward onto my back. “It’s the hospital,” I said.
“Which hospital?” he asked.
“The one where they put his body.”
We left the bike at the curb and wandered up some stairs. It was just a small clinic, really, called Nuestro Señor de Malta, with the price of services listed on the front door. Guevara’s inert body had been lashed to the skid of a small helicopter and flown down from La Higuera to be put on display here. BOLIVIA CONFIRMS GUEVARA’S DEATH, read the lead headline in The New York Times the next day; BODY DISPLAYED. After the journalists were gone, a pair of wax death masks were cast, and then Che’s hands were sawed off so that his fingerprints could be verified later against Argentine records. Sometime before dawn on the eleventh he was stuffed into a grave dug at random near the airstrip.
The laundry shed was now surrounded by weeds and trash. It was open on one side, with a cement table in the middle that held a pair of shallow sinks with fine ridges laid into the sloped bottom. It had drains and a single dead spigot. There were rings of candle wax around the edges, and the blue plaster walls were covered with messages. The majority were in Spanish, but there were a few in Portuguese and others in German and French. Some people just left their names on the wall (“Charito 19/1/92”), but most of the space was taken up with very personal messages, letters to Che himself, often cast in the intimate “tú” tense rather than the respectful “Usted.”
“Che: you are a star guiding us,” one said. “El Che Vive,” read another; and “Che Is Present”; and up high that old suspect, “Be Like Che.” I stopped counting after a hundred. The messages went up to the rafters and even covered the support column dividing the open side of the shed. Up top it said:
AT THE FEET OF
OUR DEAD
A FLOWER IS
WHAT GROWS
OUR HAND
PICKS IT
OUR RIFLE
PROTECTS IT
CHE LIVES
And lower down:
For the liberty of
all the Latin American people
El Che lives
and the struggle continues.
The commander of the Americas
has not died
until the final victory.
That last line—“hasta la victoria siempre”—was Che’s own signature exit line, a dramatic way of sending his comrades off with confidence that, ultimately, victory was theirs. There would be a final triumph, a happy conclusion to their journeys. It made the revolution seem less like a remote possibility and more like a real condition that would come to exist—soon. If you said that the final victory would come, then it would. Then we would all live in a peaceful world populated by New Men and New Women.
Behind this illusion there might need to be a little squashing of cowards and lackeys—as there was in Cuba—but there was literally no room on the walls of the laundry shed for details. It was a place of slogans, of aspirations, and of hopes, not of asterisks. Nobody came here twice.
Jans unsheathed an enormous Bowie knife and began carving something on the wall in Dutch. He scraped at the plaster for quite a while, patiently digging each letter into the surface with the tip of the blade. White dust trickled onto his boots while he worked. When he was done, I asked him what the phrase meant.
“You are my light,” he said.
The last mile, something like the 10,013th in a series of them, began at the hospital shed and ran through the cobblestone streets of Vallegrande and then came down the hill, returning to dirt as it passed the entrance to the airfield and around back, ending only when it had to at a barbed-wire fence. I stopped Kooky cold by putting my thumb on the kill switch. Jans was on the back, and we sat there staring over the field while the engine dinged and pinged. The sun had gone down some time ago. Now the sky was dark blue.
Jans dismounted first, and we went through the barbed wire and across the grassy expanse, both of us stumbling a bit in the dusk. The holes were where the excavators had left them when the search had been interrupted two months before. The retired army officers had pointed, the Argentine forensic experts had dug, and the journalists had watched, but day after day the digging had produced nothing. They expanded the search; the Cubans sent help; old peasants were interviewed; and then a ground-imaging radar was pushed over the field like a lawn mower, plumbing the clay soil for traces of history. Eventually teams of soldiers joined the dig, and finally a bulldozer turned up long tracts of the soil, peeling it back like the lid on a can of sardines that somehow proves empty. Most of the journalists left after a few weeks. The computer printer for the radar unit broke, making it impossible to interpret the results. The Argentines left, promising to come back when they had more money, which they eventually did.
But for now, beneath the planets and stars of the blue night, the only signs of this excruciatingly slow exhumation were the coffin holes. There were just over a hundred of them in the field. Many had filled with rainwater. Already one child had fallen in, and the villagers were demanding that the government refill the holes before someone got seriously injured.
Jans stood around, peering into some of the holes and taking pictures. After a while he burst into tears again. I sat down, thoroughly uncompassed by this moment of arrival. It was hard to look at the holes and not feel cheated, somehow. I had to accept that the farther I traveled to see him, the less close I got. He was here, certainly, cornered one last time but still holding out a bit longer, as uncompromising as ever. It felt like a fine resting place, and I wished they would just leave him here, but they wouldn’t. They had long ago absconded with his life; now they would take his death, too.
Before coming here, Che had explained his actions—his various wars, departures, and sacrifices—to his children in a careful letter of farewell. He wrote to his three sons and daughter that the revolution was more important than any individual, that service to the cause stood above any one life. “Each one of us, alone,” he told them, “is worth nothing.” Now, sitting in the falling darkness amid the holes that had swallowed all the ideals, all the blood, and all the bodies, this seemed to me exactly backwards. Each one of us, imperfect and little and terribly alone, is worth everything. People are ends, not means.
Like La Higuera with its doctor, however, Vallegrande did get one inadvertent benefit from Che’s efforts. Because of Che—because Che came here, and then the army came after him, and then the tourists like Jans also after him, and now me, too, after him or whatever was left of him—the government had been shamed into installing electricity in the town. Now up on the hillside, as the black night settled on us, Vallegrande glowed white with streetlamps. The town seemed to bask in this privilege amid so much darkness.