Chasing Che by Patrick Symmes Read Free Book Online Page B

curled up at the pump like an old dog on his bed. I bought nineteen liters of gas and one of Quilmes beer. I rode all the way back and left the beer on the gaucho’s front step—because I had to, and because in the end the dog did let me go.

CHAPTER TWO

FELLOW TRAVELERS
    L ike Guevara, my first stop on an itinerary filled with larger things was a forgettable beach town called Villa Gesell, where I arrived with a sore ankle around three in the afternoon. The South Atlantic was an unappetizing brown here, discolored by the coast-hugging outflow of the great Río de la Plata estuary, which drains an enormous swath of the flatlands of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay. The streets of Villa Gesell were filled with sand, and I steered my way tentatively around the drifts and past the vacationing surfer boys from Buenos Aires dressed in the same NO FEAR T-shirts as their California cousins. I picked an empty restaurant for a late lunch and, wary of thieves, carried my saddlebags inside. I read while I ate.
    The day of departure arrived. A nervous emotion invaded all of us. Surrounded by a noisy multitude of little boys attracted by the spectacle of the motorbike and our unusual dress, the departure began
.
    That was a diary entry describing Guevara’s departure forty-four years before, but not the one written by Guevara himself. This was from the road diary of a man named Alberto Granado, the other half of that “us.” Guevara did not make his trip alone; his
Notas de Viaje
was filled with references to Granado, who had shared the motorcycle seat and all his adventures with him. But I had learnedonly a few months before that Granado too had kept a diary of the trip, describing the same events, the same places, and even the same conversations. Like Guevara’s diary, which had languished in obscurity with the Guevara family for decades, Granado’s diary had been forgotten for decades, and then finally published in Cuba in 1986, thirty-five years after their trip. I had a friend visiting Havana purchase a copy, which I now laid before me on the table beside my lunch. The edition was printed on flimsy paper with smudgy ink, under the grand title
Testimony: With El Che Across South America
. It had arrived just two days before my own departure, and this was literally the first chance I had had to crack the pages. This parallel account of the young Ernesto Guevara’s travel experiences would allow me to corroborate basic facts about the trip and flesh out the picture of how travel had changed Ernesto.
    Aside from a few qualities these two fellow-travelers shared—both men were from Córdoba and both were pursuing medicine—there was one overwhelming reason why Guevara wanted Alberto Granado along for the trip: Granado owned the motorcycle they were traveling on. The dilapidated 1939 Norton was mockingly named La Poderosa, or “the powerful one.” (Actually, the Norton was named La Poderosa II; the original La Poderosa had been Granado’s bicycle.)
    This fourteen-year-old English bike was to carry both men into what they understood would be the greatest undertaking of their young lives. The twenty-nine-year-old Granado’s friendship with the twenty-three-year-old Guevara was intense and would become the bookmark of the former’s life. Not only did Granado journey across South America with Guevara, but Granado was already in 1952 a devoted Marxist who would play a crucial role in crystallizing the revolutionary instinct of his younger companion. Years later, when Guevara was the famous Che and living in Havana, Granado would move there to be near his friend and lend his help in the building of socialism. Forged in the experience of travel, their friendship would endure until Guevara’s death in 1967.
    Granado’s account of the trip ran parallel to Guevara’s ownnotes, but I was only halfway through my
milanesa
sandwich and just one page into Granado’s account when I realized that the two volumes were different