Chasing Che by Patrick Symmes Read Free Book Online

excavations of her body and cultural renovations of her image.
    I sprinted out of one intersection and a hundred feet later hit the brakes, hard, sliding deliberately over the slick cobblestones. You had to know the bike instinctively, even in its flaws. As I sat playing with the controls—the red kill switch, the headlight, the horn, the turn signals—I noticed that I had come to rest in front of a construction site. Someone had daubed the corrugated fencing with a spray-painted message for foreigners who came to tamper with old myths: MADONNA IS A WHORE .
    The next morning Little Girl stood on the sidewalk, waving and crying out “
Ciao, ciao
” in her smoker’s rasp. The Paraguayan doorman waved too; perhaps somewhere up above, Federico cried out his final “
Cómo te va?
” I made it five minutes down the road before being pulled over by the first cop I saw. He was a motorcycle policeman with shiny jackboots and an Italian Ducati. He took my papers in onehand but only pretended to read them while actually running his eyes over my bike.
    “How fast does it go?” he said. This stumped me. What can you say to a policeman who asks how fast you have driven? “I don’t know,” I replied. We had a lengthy discussion by the roadside about German engineering, the reliability of driveshafts versus chains, and the torque problems generated by a monoshock. Neither of us could explain the monoshock.
    On the day his trip began, Guevara had pulled away from the house with family and friends watching. As he turned to wave farewell, he lost control and nearly collided with a trolley car. He was almost finished with his hemispheric journey before leaving the block. I expected better luck, and got it when the trooper let me go.
    I still don’t know if this was a reasonable expectation.
    F ive hours and two hundred and twenty-nine miles later, I forced my right heel down into the dust, the brown bitch still firmly attached. I pushed down on the barbed wire with both palms and then pirouetted, bringing my left leg backward over the wire in a high arc and swinging it down in a trajectory that the dog understood only when it was too late. My boot heel connected with her neck just as she let go, and with a long, aggrieved yelp the mother of puppies went flying tail over tooth into a thorn bush. We mustn’t be afraid of a little violence.
    Limping back to the bike, I assumed the worst, but when I yanked off the boot there was only a slight scrape that had not drawn blood. My brother had thrust the boots on me, just hours before my departure, to replace the sneakers I had foolishly planned to wear.
    My preparations for this trip had been shoddy by any standard. I’d spent only a few months conceiving a plan, and I didn’t have a Swiss Army knife, enough money, a motorcycle license or insurance, a repair manual, shirts with epaulets, a photojournalist vest with twenty-two pockets, any arranged interviews, a good map, a sleeping bag suitable for ascending Mount Everest, a stove that burned fourkinds of fuel, or, it would turn out months from now, a tire pump that actually worked. The things I did carry included a spare clutch cable and spark plugs, one inner tube (for some reason I thought only the rear tire would go flat), a six-year-old Macintosh PowerBook 100, a pair of $18 rain pants, a stove whose fuel cannot be purchased in South America, and a rotten Korean War surplus sleeping sack that dribbled feathers. My girlfriend had handed me a compass at the last minute. I was ill prepared and underfunded, but I had decided to go anyway.
    The last-minute boots were like a forecast of good weather. If people kept taking care of me, I would come through. I pulled the right boot on and looked around, and although there was still nothing to see out here, nothingness has inviting qualities. I’d been reading one of the first travelogs ever set in Argentina, an 1826 tract by an English captain of engineers known as Francis “Galloping”