Authors: Jon Lee Anderson
Rescue came in the form of Alberto Granado, who had lately begun weaving grandiose plans to spend a year traveling the length of the South American continent. He had been talking about such a trip for years but had done nothing about it, and his family had long since written off “Alberto’s trip” as a harmless fantasy. He was nearly thirty years old, and he realized that if he didn’t take the trip now, he never would. He decided he needed a companion. Who else but Ernesto would throw everything up for a chance at an adventure like this? When Alberto asked him, Ernesto accepted on the spot.
During the October break from classes, Ernesto traveled to Córdoba to see Alberto. As he later lyrically evoked it, they sat under the grape arbor of Alberto’s house, drank sweet
mate
, and fantasized about where they would go. “Along the roads of daydreams we reached remote countries, navigated on tropical seas and visited all of Asia. And suddenly ... the question arose: And if we go to North America? To North America? How? With La Poderosa, man. And this was how the trip was decided, which forever after would be pursued along the same general lines it was planned: Improvisation.”
La Poderosa (The Powerful One) was the vintage 500-cc Norton motorcycle with which Alberto had unsuccessfully tried to pull Ernesto on his visit to San Francisco del Chañar. On January 4, 1952, they set out on it, heading for the beach resort of Miramar, where Chichina was on a holiday with an aunt and some friends. Ernesto wanted to say good-bye, and, as he rode on the back of the motorcycle, he carried a gift in his arms. It was a young, wriggly puppy he had given an English name: “Come-back.”
Miramar, where Chichina was staying, was the final hurdle between Ernesto and Alberto and the open road. Ernesto was still in love and nagged by doubts about leaving. Was he doing the right thing? Would she wait for him? He hoped to receive her assurances and had decided that if she accepted the puppy Come-back, it would be a sign that she wanted him to return.
Alberto worried that his friend would end their journey before it had even begun. Ernesto knew this. “Alberto saw the danger and imagined himself alone on the roads of America, but he didn’t raise his voice,” he wrote in his journal.
*
“The struggle was between she and I.” Their planned two-day stay “stretched like rubber into eight,” as Ernesto tried to extract Chichina’s promise to wait for him. Holding hands with her “in the enormous womb of a Buick,” he asked for the gold bracelet she wore, as a talisman and keepsake on his journey. She refused.
In the end, Ernesto decided to go. He had received neither the keep-sake nor Chichina’s benediction, but she had accepted Come-back, despite her girlfriends’ sneers that the dog was a mongrel rather than, as Ernesto claimed, a purebred German shepherd. And she gave him fifteen American dollars to buy her a scarf when he reached the United States. As a sign of undying affection and loyalty, it wasn’t much, and it must have been
with a sense of foreboding that Ernesto climbed back on La Poderosa on January 14.
The road was clear to begin their great trek, and the two gypsies sped off. It took them four more weeks, however, to leave Argentina. Before they were halfway across the settled pampa west of Bahía Blanca, Ernesto developed a fever and had to be hospitalized for several days. By the time they reached the picturesque Lake District on the eastern slopes of the Andean cordillera, bordering Chile, their meager revenues had dwindled and they had become expert freeloaders—
mangueros motorizados
, motorized scroungers, as Ernesto wryly put it—throwing themselves on the mercy of roadside families. They competed with each other in the art of grubbing for survival.
Sometimes they were forced to pitch their tent, but more often than not they found floor space in garages, kitchens, barns, and frequently police stations, where they shared cells and meals with an interesting variety of criminals. One night when they were staying in the barn of an Austrian family, Ernesto awoke at dawn to hear scratching and growling at the barn door and saw a pair of glowing eyes peering in. Having been warned about a fierce puma that was in the area, he aimed the Smith and Wesson that his father had given him and fired. But he didn’t bag a puma. It was their hosts’ beloved Alsatian dog, Bobby. Ernesto and Alberto made their escape, followed by wails and imprecations.
They hiked around lakes, climbed a peak—frightening themselves by nearly falling to their death—and used the revolver to poach a wild duck. At one particularly scenic lakeside spot they fantasized about returning together to set up a medical research center. In the jailhouse of the ski resort of Bariloche, Ernesto opened a letter from Chichina informing him that she had decided
not
to wait for him. A storm raged outside. “I read and reread the incredible letter. Just like that, all my dreams ... came crashing down. ... I began to feel afraid for myself and to write a weepy letter, but I couldn’t, it was useless to try.” The romance was over. Evidently she had begun seeing someone else.
Alberto always wondered if he bore some responsibility for the breakup. In full view of Chichina and her friends, he had taken one of the Ferreyras’
mucamas
—who was wearing a bathing suit that belonged to Chichina’s aunt—into his tent on the beach, thus defying the unanimously understood social convention prohibiting overt intimacy with the servant class. “Chichina didn’t like that very much,” Granado recalled. “And I think she resented me as the person who was taking Ernesto away from her.”
Outwardly reconciling himself to his loss, Ernesto was determined to enjoy the rest of the journey. Writing about their crossing of the Andes to Chile, he invoked the lines of a poem that began: “And now I feel my great root floating naked and free.”
Entering Chile, they obtained passage on a ferry across Lake Esmeralda by manning the bilge pumps of the leaky cargo barge it pulled in its wake. Some Chilean doctors were on board, and Ernesto and Alberto introduced themselves as “leprologists.” The gullible doctors told them about Chile’s only leper colony. It was on Easter Island, which was also, the Chilean doctors assured them, home to hordes of sensuous, pliant women. Ernesto and Alberto immediately resolved to add the leper colony to their ambitious itinerary, and they extracted a letter of recommendation to the Society of Friends of Easter Island in Valparaiso.
At the Pacific port of Valdivia, they paid a visit to the local newspaper, the
Correo de Valdivia
, and came away with a glowing profile of themselves, published under the headline “Two Dedicated Argentine Travelers on Motorcycle on Their Way through Valdivia.” They had solemnly reinvented themselves as “leprosy experts” with “previous research in neighboring countries.” They must have offered their opinions on a wide variety of topics, for the
Correo
went on to laud them for having, “during their very short stay in our country, penetrated its social, economic, and sanitary problems.”
They were interviewed again in Temuco. The headline of an article published in
El Austral de Temuco
on February 19, 1952, reads, “Two Argentine Experts in Leprology Travel South America on Motorcycle.” An accompanying photograph shows Ernesto and Alberto in heroic poses. Ernesto stares straight at the camera, with his thumbs locked casually in his belt. He looks dashing. Alberto leans toward him deferentially, wearing a rather impish expression. Ernesto referred to the clippings as “the condensation of our audacity.”
A day later, La Poderosa took a fall. The gearbox was smashed and the steering column snapped. Repairs were made in the whistle-stop of Lautaro, where Ernesto and Alberto became instant celebrities. They managed to scrounge a few free meals and were invited to drink wine with their new friends. Ernesto found the Chilean wine delicious, so much so that by the time he and Alberto arrived at a village dance, he felt “capable of great feats.” After having drunk even more, he invited a married woman to dance and began to lead her outside, even though her husband was watching them. She resisted, Ernesto kept insisting, and she fell to the floor. Both Ernesto and Alberto were chased from the hall. They left town, “fleeing a place that was no longer so hospitable to us,” but a few miles down the road the motorcycle’s rear brake failed on a corner, and then, as La Poderosa picked
up speed downhill, the hand brake failed as well. Ernesto swerved to avoid a herd of cows that suddenly loomed in front of him, and they crashed into the road bank. Miraculously, La Poderosa was undamaged, and, finding the rear brake mysteriously working once again, they continued their trek.
“Backed up as always by our ‘press’ letter of recommendation, we were put up by some Germans who treated us in a very cordial manner,” Ernesto wrote. “During the night I got a colic which I didn’t know how to stop; I was ashamed to leave a souvenir in the chamber pot, so I climbed onto the window, and gave up all of my pain to the night and the blackness. ... The next morning I looked out to see the effect and I saw that two meters below lay a great sheet of zinc where they were sun-drying their peaches: the added spectacle was impressive. We beat it from there.”
Leaving a lengthening trail of irate hosts behind them, the two young men continued their escape to the north, but their faithful steed began to fail them. Every time they reached a hill, La Poderosa balked. It finally gave out completely. A truck deposited them and the crippled motorcycle in the next town, Los Ángeles. They found lodging in the local firehouse after chatting with the three daughters of the fire chief. Later, Ernesto paid coy homage to the uninhibited girls as “exponents of the grace of the Chilean women who, whether pretty or ugly, have a certain something of spontaneity, of freshness, that captivates immediately.”
Alberto was more explicit. “After dinner we went out with the girls. Once again I noticed the different attitudes toward freedom between Chilean women and our own. ... We returned to the firehouse lax and silent, each one ruminating on his experience. ... Fuser made his bed, really agitated, I don’t know if from asthma or the girl.”
The next day they left on a truck headed for Santiago, lugging the carcass of La Poderosa with them like the body of a fallen comrade. The Chilean capital made little impression on them, and after finding a garage where they could leave the motorcycle, they were off again, on their own, still intent on reaching Easter Island.
In Valparaíso, they camped out at a bar, La Gioconda, where the generous owner fed and housed them free of charge. When they went down to the port, they were told that the next ship to Easter Island didn’t leave for six months, but they didn’t lose hope, for they had yet to call upon the Society of Friends of Easter Island. Meanwhile, their imaginations took flight. “Easter Island!” Ernesto wrote in his journal. “There, to have a white boyfriend is an honour for the female. ... There—what a wish—the women do all
the work. One eats, sleeps, and keeps them content.” It was a tantalizing vision. “What would it matter to stay a year there, who cares about work, studies, family, etc.”
After making abundant use of his alleged doctor’s “degree,” Ernesto was asked to look in on one of La Gioconda’s clients, who turned out to be an elderly servant woman, prostrate with chronic asthma and a failing heart. He found her room, where he breathed in an odor “of concentrated sweat and dirty feet.” She was surrounded by “the ill-concealed acrimony” of her family, who seemed to suffer her presence badly. She was dying, and there was little Ernesto could do for her. After giving her a prescription for her diet, what remained of his own supply of Dramamine tablets, and a few other medicines, he left, “followed by the praising words of the old lady and the indifferent stares of her relatives.”
The encounter affected him deeply and led him to think about the heartlessness of poverty. “There, in the final moments of people whose farthest horizon is always tomorrow, one sees the tragedy that enfolds the lives of the proletariat throughout the whole world; in those dying eyes there is a submissive apology and also, frequently, a desperate plea for consolation that is lost in the void, just as their body will soon be lost in the magnitude of misery surrounding us. How long this order of things based on an absurd sense of caste will continue is not within my means to answer, but it is time that those who govern dedicate less time to propagandizing the compassion of their regimes and more money, much more money, sponsoring works of social utility.”
A few days later, after the Society of Friends of Easter Island confirmed that no ships would be sailing there for many months, Ernesto and Alberto reluctantly resigned themselves to their original itinerary. After a fruitless round of the wharves asking for work on board ships, they stowed away on the
San Antonio
, a cargo ship headed to the port of Antofagasta in northern Chile. Slipping aboard at dawn with the collusion of a friendly sailor, they crept into a latrine, where they hid. Once the ship started moving, Alberto began vomiting. The stench in the latrine was terrible, but they remained where they were until they could bear it no longer. “At five in the afternoon, dead of hunger and with the coast no longer in sight, we presented ourselves to the captain.”
The captain turned out to be a good sport and, after giving them a thundering scolding in front of his junior officers, ordered them to be fed and given chores to help pay their way. “We devoured our rations contentedly,” Ernesto recalled. “But when I found out that I was in charge of cleaning the famous latrine, the food backed up in my throat, and when I went down protesting under my breath, followed by the joking stare of Alberto,
in charge of peeling the potatoes, I confess I felt tempted to forget everything written about the rules of comradeship and request a change of jobs. It’s just not fair! He adds his good portion to the shit that’s accumulated there and I have to clean it up!”
Once they had finished their chores, the captain treated them as honored guests, and the three of them played canasta and drank together long into the night. The next day, as the Chilean coastline slipped by, Alberto again did kitchen duty while Ernesto cleaned the decks with kerosene under the watchful eye of an irascible steward. That night, after another “tiring round of canasta,” the two friends stood together at the ship’s rail to look out at the sea and sky, with the lights of Antofagasta just beginning to appear in the distance.