In these travel notes, several Quixotic or Chaplinesque episodes — such as the already cited theft of the wine, the nocturnal pursuit of the two young men “by a furious swarm of dancers,” their enlistment in a corps of Chilean firefighters, the delectable escapade of the melons and their trail over the waves, and the enigma of the impossible photo in a miserable hut on a hill near Caracas — are wrapped in a similar silence.
La Poderosa’s near to last stand is told with cinematographic effect and we seem to be watching it all amid a film-like silence:
I threw on the hand brake which, soldered ineptly, also broke. For some moments, I saw nothing more than the blurred shape of cattle flying past us on each side, while poor Poderosa gathered speed down the steep hill. By an absolute miracle we managed to graze only the leg of the last cow, but in the distance a river was screaming toward us with terrifying efficacy. I veered on to the side of the road and in the blink of an eye the bike mounted the two-meter bank, embedding us between two rocks, but we were unhurt.
These youthful adventures — veined with cheerfulness, humor and frequently self-directed irony — seek the spirit of the landscape rather than merely the scenery. That “spirit” was found in the sudden appearance of the deer: “We walked slowly so as not to disturb the peace of the wild sanctuary with which we were now communing.” Che writes with none of the sarcasm he dedicates to the topic of religion: “Both [of us] assistants waited for Sunday [and the roast] with a kind of religious devotion.” So while being unbelievers, they were able to feel the metaphorical presence of a “sanctuary” in nature, where they were in close rapport with its “spirit” — immediately reminding us of analogous images from the freethinking Martí, such as this from his Simple Verses: “The bishop of Spain seeks / Supports for his shrine. / On wild mountain peaks / The poplars are mine.”7
On March 7, 1952, in Valparaíso, they came face to face with injustice: its victim was an asthmatic old woman, a customer in a small shop by the name of La Gioconda:
The poor thing was in a pitiful state, breathing the acrid smell of concentrated sweat and dirty feet that filled her room, mixed with the dust from a couple of armchairs, the only luxury items in her house. On top of her asthma, she had a heart condition.
After completing a picture of total ruin, and further embittered by the animosity of the sick woman’s family, Che — who felt helpless as a doctor and was approaching the awakening of conscience that would trigger his other, definitive vocation — wrote these memorable words:
It is there, in the final moments, for people whose farthest horizon has always been tomorrow, that one comprehends the profound tragedy circumscribing the life of the proletariat the world over. In those dying eyes there is a submissive appeal for forgiveness and also, often, a desperate plea for consolation which is lost to the void, just as their body will soon be lost in the magnitude of the mystery surrounding us.
Unable to continue their journey any other way, the pair decided to stow away on a ship that would take them to Antofagasta, Chile. At that moment, they — or, at least, Che — did not see things so clearly:
There [looking at the sea, leaning side by side on the railing of the San Antonio], we understood that our vocation, our true vocation, was to move for eternity along the roads and seas of the world. Always curious, looking into everything that came before our eyes, sniffing out each corner but only ever faintly — not setting down roots in any land or staying long enough to see the substratum of things; the outer limits would suffice.
The sea held a greater attraction than the voyagers’ “road,” because where land demands that even those in passing take root, the sea represents absolute freedom from all ties. “And now, I feel my great roots unearth, free, and…” The verse that heads the chapter on his liberation from Chichina says it all. All? Che tore up another root in the presence of the old asthmatic Chilean woman. And soon his chest would be stung again when he made friends with a married Chilean couple, communist workers who had been harassed in Baquedano.
The couple, numb with cold, in the desert night, huddling against each other in the desert night, were a living representation of the proletariat in any part of the world.
Like good sons of San Martín,8 they shared their blankets with them.
It was one of the coldest times in my life, but also one which made me feel a little more brotherly toward this strange, for me at least, human species.
That strangeness, that deep separation and intrepid solitude in which he was still wrapped, is curious. There is nothing lonelier than adventure. Until he was filled with pity for the galley slaves and for the whipped child, Don Quixote was alone, surrounded by strangeness, by the craziness of the world around him. In his Meditations on Quixote, José Ortega y Gasset wrote, as the center of his reflections, “I am myself and my circumstances,” which has usually been understood as the sum or symbiosis of two factors. It may also be understood as a dilemma in which the “I” or “myself” expresses those two factors as separated, distanced, though intensely related. This dilemma appeared in Che’s memoirs of his first “departure,” when he said:
Although the blurred silhouette of the couple was nearly lost in the distance separating us, we could still see the man’s singularly determined face and we remembered his straightforward invitation: “Come, comrades, let’s eat together. I, too, am a tramp,” showing his underlying disdain for the parasitic nature he saw in our aimless traveling.
Whose was this secret disdain: the humble worker’s or Che’s? Or perhaps neither, but that the meeting “in the desert night,” the sharing of the mate, bread, cheese and blankets, caused a spark which lit up a painful separation.
At any rate, they were in Chuquicamata, with the mine and the miner from the south:
Cold efficiency and impotent resentment go hand in hand in the big mine, linked in spite of the hatred by a common necessity to live, on the one hand, and to speculate on the other…
An imposing suggestion appeared, and the leap to a kind of idea which would achieve its context, its possible meaning, years later in Cuba:
…we will see whether some day, some miner will take up his pick in pleasure and go and poison his lungs with a conscious joy. They say that’s what it’s like over there, where the red blaze that now lights up the world comes from. So they say. I don’t know.
In fact, in Cuba in 1964, Che would link these ideas with the words of the poet León Felipe (I don’t know if Che was familiar with them when writing the lines above): “No one has yet been able to dig to the rhythm of the sun… no one has cut an ear of corn with love and grace.”
I quote these words because today we could tell that great, desperate poet to come now to Cuba; to see how human beings, after passing through all of the stages of capitalist alienation and after thinking of themselves as beasts of burden harnessed to the yoke of the exploiter, have rediscovered their path and have found their way back to play. Now, in our Cuba, work is acquiring a new meaning and is done with a new joy.9
Yet in March 1952, Che simply wrote, “we will see.” The harsh lessons continued in the chapter “Chuquicamata,” named after the mining town that was “like a scene from a modern drama,” and which he soberly described with a balance of impression, reflection and data. Its greatest lesson was “taught by the graveyards of the mines, containing only a small share of the immense number of people devoured by cave-ins, silica and the hellish climate of the mountain.” In his note of March 22, 1952, or some time later revising his notes, Che concluded: “The biggest effort Chile should make is to shake its uncomfortable Yankee friend from its back, a task that for the moment at least is Herculean.” The name Salvador Allende stops us in our tracks.
On the motorcycle, on trucks or in vans, on a ship or in a little Ford; sleeping in police stations, under the stars or in occasional shelters; Che struggling almost constantly with his asthma, the two friends crossed Argentina and Chile. They entered Peru on foot. The Peruvian Indians had a huge impa
ct on them, just as the Mexican Indians had impressed Martí:
These people who watch us walk through the streets of the town are a defeated race. Their stares are tame, almost fearful, and completely indifferent to the outside world. Some give the impression they go on living only because it’s a habit they cannot shake.
They come to the kingdom of defeated stone, Pachamama’s kingdom, Mother Earth, who receives the spat-out “chewed coca leaves instead of stones” with their accompanying “troubles.” The center or navel of the world, where Mama Ocllo dropped her golden wedge into the earth. The place Viracocha chose: Cuzco. And there, in the middle of the baroque procession of Our Lord of the Earthquakes, “a brown Christ,” they find an eternal reminder of the north which can only be seen from South America, its fatal and denouncing antithesis:
Standing over the small frames of the Indians gathered to see the procession pass, the blond head of a North American can occasionally be glimpsed. With his camera and sports shirt, he seems to be (and in fact, actually is) a correspondent from another world…
The cathedral of Cuzco brought out the artist in Che, with such observations as this: “Gold doesn’t have the gentle dignity of silver which becomes more charming as it ages, and so the cathedral seems to be decorated like an old woman with too much makeup.” Of the many churches he visited, he was particularly struck by the lonely, disreputable and “pitiful image of the bell towers of the Church of Belén, toppled by the earthquake, lying like dismembered animals on the hillside.” But his most penetrating judgment of Peruvian colonial baroque is found in the lines of his sharply contrasting description of Lima’s cathedral:
There in Lima, the art is more stylized, with an almost effeminate touch: the cathedral towers are tall and graceful, maybe the most slender of all the cathedrals in the Spanish colonies. The lavishness of the woodwork in Cuzco has been left behind and taken up here in gold. The naves are light and airy, contrasting with those dark, hostile caverns of the Inca city. The paintings are also bright, almost joyous, and of schools more recent than the hermetic mestizos, who painted their saints with a dark and captive fury.
Their visit to Machu Picchu on April 5 served as the subject for a newspaper article that Che published in Panama on December 12, 1953, in which there is a careful gathering of data and historical information, and a didactic intention that was absent from his personal notes.
Something similar occurred in an article entitled “A Glance at the Banks of the Giant of Rivers,” which was also published in Panama, on November 22, 1953, though in this Che placed greater emphasis on experience, describing his journey down the Amazon on a raft. The raft, humorously christened Mambo-Tango — so they wouldn’t be accused of being fanatics about the latter — enabled Che and Alberto, with a lot of hard work and danger, to learn about the harsh reality of the Amazonian Indians.
From the solitary heights of the “enigmatic stone blocks” to the debilitating neglect they witnessed on the banks of the Amazon, it was like traveling through a genetic map of the Americas. Celebrating his 24th birthday in the leper colony of San Pablo, Che spoke, in a style reminiscent of Bolívar and Martí: “We constitute a single mestizo race, which from Mexico to the Magellan Straits bears notable ethnographic similarities. And so, in an attempt to rid myself of the weight of small-minded provincialism, I propose a toast to Peru and to a United Latin America.”
There was no hint of solemnity in these words; rather, pretending his words were merely rhetorical, he spoke with a confidence that placed them outside all convention: “My oratory offering was received with great applause.” He did the same in a letter that he wrote to his mother from Bogotá on July 6, 1952, (included here to complete the description of his Colombian experiences), when he referred once again to his “Pan-American speech,” which won “great applause from the notable, and notably drunk, audience,” and when he commented, with affectionate sarcasm, on Granado’s own words of gratitude: “Alberto, who believes he is Perón’s natural heir, delivered such an impressive, demagogic speech that our well-wishers were convulsed with laughter.” But he spoke in a very different tone of the lepers and their lives, using moderation to try — in vain — to hide his own suffering. Writing about their departure from the San Pablo leper colony, Che said:
That night an assembly of the colony’s patients gave us a farewell serenade, with lots of local songs sung by a blind man. The orchestra was made up of a flute player, a guitarist and an accordion player with almost no fingers, and a “healthy” contingent helping out with a saxophone, a guitar and some percussion. After that came the time for speeches, in which four patients spoke as well as they could, a little awkwardly. One of them froze, unable to go on, until out of desperation he shouted, “Three cheers for the doctors!” Afterwards, Alberto thanked them warmly for their welcome…
Che described the scene in detail in the letter to his mother, (“an accordion player with no fingers on his right hand used little sticks tied to his wrist” and “almost all the others were horribly deformed, due to the nervous form of the disease”), trying unsuccessfully not to sadden her too much, comparing it with a “scene from a horror movie,” but the tearing beauty of that farewell was clear:
The patients cast off and to the sound of a folk tune the human cargo drifted away from shore; the faint light of their lanterns giving the people a ghostly quality.
From his notes on their experiences with the lepers, for whom they surely did much good, not only by treating them but also by playing soccer and talking with them in the spirit of unprejudiced, fraternal, intense humanity — explaining the lepers’ immense gratitude — we can perceive the origins of the budding revolutionary in Che. I emphasize these words: “If there’s anything that will make us seriously dedicate ourselves to leprosy, it will be the affection shown to us by all the sick we’ve met along the way.” Impossible to imagine at the time how serious and deep that dedication would be, understanding “leprosy” to mean all of human misery.
Having read these notes, filled with so many contrasts and teachings, with so much comedy and tragedy, like life itself, and having commented — not exhaustively, but only as suggestions — I conclude with the joyous image of Che arriving in Caracas, wrapped in his traveling blanket, staring around him at the Latin American panorama, “muttering all sorts of verses, lulled by the roar of the truck.”
I’ll leave you with no further commentary, because, in its terrible, unadorned majesty, that exceptional final chapter “A Note in the Margin” neither needs nor tolerates it. In fact, I’m not sure whether this unfathomable “revelation” should be placed at the beginning or the end of these “diaries”; the revelation Che saw “printed in the night sky”; his own fate; waiting for “the great guiding spirit to cleave humanity into two antagonistic halves”; the Great Semí who, in Martí’s view of Our America, would go “astride its condor, spreading the seed of the new America through the romantic nations of the continent and the sorrowful islands of the sea.”10 It is an inexorable chapter that, like a tragic flash of lightning, illuminates for us the “sacred space” in the depths of the soul of one who called himself “this small soldier of the 20th century.” Of one who, in our invincible hope, always takes “to the road” again, shield on his arm and feeling “the ribs of Rocinante”11 beneath his heels.
1. Simón Bolívar led several armed rebellions, helping to win independence from Spain for much of Latin America. His vision was for a federation of Spanish-speaking South American states.
2. The ravine in which Che’s guerrilla unit was ambushed on October 8, 1967, and Che himself taken hostage. He was murdered the following day.
3. José Martí, Cuban national hero and noted poet, writer, speaker and journalist. Martí founded the Cuban Revolutionary Party in 1892 to fight Spanish rule and oppose U.S. neocolonialism. He launched the 1895 independence war and was killed in battle.
4. José Martí, Obras completas (Complete Works), Havana: Editorial Nacional de Cuba, 1963–73
, vol.7, pp.289–90.
5. From Ernesto Che Guevara, Episodes of the Revolutionary War, forthcoming from Ocean Press, 2004. Also in Ernesto Che Guevara, Che Guevara Reader, Ocean Press, 2003, p.37.
6. Ezequiel Martínez Estrada, Martí revolucionario (Martí the Revolutionary), Havana: Casa de las Américas, 1967, p.414, no.184.
7. José Martí, Op. cit., vol.16, p.68.
8. José de San Martín, Argentine national hero who played a major role in winning independence from Spain for Argentina, Chile and Peru.
9. Ernesto Che Guevara, Obras, 1957–67 (Works, 1957–67), Havana: Casa de las Américas, 1970, vol.II, p.333.
10.José Martí, José Martí Reader, Ocean Press, 1999, p.120.
11.Che Guevara Reader, p.384.
the motorcycle diaries
NOTES ON A LATIN AMERICAN JOURNEY
ENTENDÁMONOS
so we understand each other
This is not a story of heroic feats, or merely the narrative of a cynic; at least I do not mean it to be. It is a glimpse of two lives running parallel for a time, with similar hopes and convergent dreams.
In nine months of a man’s life he can think a lot of things, from the loftiest meditations on philosophy to the most desperate longing for a bowl of soup — in total accord with the state of his stomach. And if, at the same time, he’s somewhat of an adventurer, he might live through episodes of interest to other people and his haphazard record might read something like these notes.