Che Guevara (5 page)

The Guevara family in the Sierras Hotel swimming pool, Alta Gracia, 1936. From left, eight-year-old Ernesto; his father, holding his sister Celia; his mother with Ana María.

Ernesto’s asthma continued to be a source of anxiety. Desperate to isolate the causes of his ailment, his parents noted down his daily activities, documenting everything from the humidity and the type of clothing he wore to the foods he ate. In his father’s notebook for one of ten-year-old Ernesto’s “good days” in November 1938, the entry reads: “Wednesday 15: Semi-cloudy morning—dry atmosphere—he awoke very well. Slept with the window open. Doesn’t go to the swimming pool. Eats with a good appetite, the same as previous days. He is fine until five in the afternoon.” They changed his bedclothes, as well as the stuffing of his pillows and mattress,
removed carpets and curtains from his bedroom, dusted the walls, and banished pets from the house and garden.

In the end, the Guevaras realized that there was no pattern to Ernesto’s asthma. The most they could do was find ways to contain it. Having seen that the condition seemed to diminish after he swam, for instance, they joined the Sierras Hotel swimming pool club. Certain foods—such as fish—were permanently banned, and he was placed on strict diets during his attacks. He showed unusually strong self-discipline by adhering to these diets, but once his attacks had subsided, he gorged himself, and became known for his ability to consume huge quantities of food at a single sitting.

Often unable even to walk, and confined to bed for days at a time, Ernesto spent long solitary hours reading books or learning to play chess with his father. During his asthma-free spells, however, he was understandably impatient to test his physical boundaries. It was here, in the physical realm, that he first felt the need to compete. He threw himself into sports, playing soccer, table tennis, and golf. He learned to ride horseback, went shooting at the local target range, swam at the Sierras Hotel or in the dammed-up pools of local streams, hiked in the hills, and took part in organized rock fights between the warring
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.

Over her husband’s opposition, Celia encouraged these outdoor activities, insisting that their son be allowed to grow up as normally as possible. But the consequences were sometimes disastrous, with Ernesto being carried home prostrate and wheezing by his friends. Such episodes didn’t deter the boy from doing exactly the same thing again, however, and this too became a routine over which his father eventually lost all control.

Ernesto Guevara Lynch was never able to discipline his eldest son, and Celia never tried. The result was that the boy became increasingly wild and disobedient. To escape punishment for a transgression, he would run off into the brushy countryside, returning only when his parents’ fears for his safety had long since overcome their anger. Carlos Figueroa, a friend whose family had a summer villa just down the street, claimed that Ernesto’s escapes to the bush were his way of fleeing his parents’ arguments, which Figueroa remembered as “terrible.”

Whether the emotional upset caused by these arguments helped provoke young Ernesto’s asthma isn’t clear, but both family and friends agree that Celia and Ernesto Guevara Lynch began to have regular shouting matches in Alta Gracia. Each of them had an extremely hot temper, and the stories of their domestic disputes are legion. No doubt their perennial economic woes were partly to blame. In Ernesto senior’s mind, his inability to find work stemmed ultimately from Celia’s “imprudence” and the swimming incident at San Isidro, which led to his son’s asthma and the move to Alta Gracia. But the real source of the rift, according to Celia’s closest friends, was Ernesto Guevara Lynch’s affairs with other women—affairs that, in a small place such as Alta Gracia, must have been impossible to conceal. With divorce still not legal in Argentina, or perhaps for the children’s sake, the Guevaras stuck it out.

Celia Guevara with her children in Alta Gracia, 1937. From left, her daughter Celia, Roberto, Ernesto, and Ana María.

Ernesto and his childhood gang in Alta Gracia in 1939 or 1940. Ernesto is second from the right, in the vest. His younger brother Roberto is at the far right and his sister Ana María is at the far left.

Ernestito’s days of running free were finally curbed when Alta Gracia’s education authorities visited his parents and ordered them to send him to school. He was now nearly nine years old, and Celia had little choice but to relinquish him. Thanks to her tutoring, he already knew how to read and write, so he was able to skip the first and “upper first” grades of Argentina’s primary school system. In March 1937, he entered the second-grade class at the Escuela San Martín. He was nearly a year older than most of his classmates.

Ernesto’s grades for the 1938 school year are summed up as “satisfactory” in his report card. He received high marks in history and was said to show “steady improvement” in natural sciences, reading, writing, geography, geometry, morals, and civics, but demonstrated little interest in drawing, organized athletics, music, or dance. His conduct was termed “good” throughout the year, although it was “deficient” in the third semester. This change in behavior coincides with an abrupt change in his attendance. After missing only about four days in the first two semesters, he was out of school for twenty-one days during the third, a lapse probably caused by a prolonged attack of asthma.

Elba Rossi de Oviedo Zelaya, who was the school’s headmistress and his third-grade teacher, remembered him as a “mischievous, bright boy, undistinguished in class, but one who exhibited leadership qualities on the playground.” Years later, Che told his second wife, Aleida, that Elba Rossi had been a strict disciplinarian and was forever spanking him. One day, facing his customary punishment, he had gotten even with her by placing a brick in his shorts. When she hit him, she hurt her hand instead.

Ernesto was an incorrigible exhibitionist during his primary school years. Whether by inclination or to compensate for his ill health, he developed a fiercely competitive personality, engaging in attention-getting high jinks that confounded adults and awed his peers. His former classmates recalled that he drank ink out of a bottle, ate chalk during class, and climbed the trees in the schoolyard; hung by his hands from a railroad trestle spanning a chasm; explored a dangerous abandoned mine shaft; and played torero with an irascible ram. He and his
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companions once went around Alta Gracia shooting out the streetlights with their slingshots. Ernesto and a friend, Juan Míguez, settled a score with a member of a rival gang by defecating
onto the ivory keys of his parents’ grand piano. And then there was the glorious occasion when Ernesto shot burning firecrackers through an open window into a neighbor’s formal dinner party, scattering the guests.

Ernesto’s antics earned the Guevaras some local notoriety, but the family stood out in other ways. “Bohemian” is the term most often used to describe their buoyant, disorderly household. They observed few social conventions in their home. Neighborhood youngsters who arrived at tea-time or supper were invited to stay and eat, and there were always extra mouths to feed at the dinner table. The Guevara children made friends indiscriminately. They played with the sons of golf caddies and others whose homes were in “lower” Alta Gracia.

It was Celia
madre
, however, who made the greatest impression as a free-thinking individual. Elba Rossi, the headmistress, recalled that Celia set the record for many “firsts” for women in the socially stratified community. She drove a car and wore trousers, for instance. Others cited Celia’s smoking of cigarettes as a direct challenge to social norms of the day.

Celia got away with these radical-seeming gestures because of her social standing and her displays of generosity. She regularly drove her own children and their friends to and from school in the family car they had dubbed La Catramina (The Heap), a massive old 1925 Maxwell convertible with a jump seat in back. She inaugurated the practice of giving each child in school a cup of milk by paying for it herself, a custom later adopted by the local school board to ensure that poorer children had some nutrition during the school day.

Unlike most of their neighbors, the Guevaras espoused anticlerical views. Ernesto Guevara Lynch’s mother was an atheist, and he had had a secular upbringing. The religiously schooled Celia’s views were less certain, and throughout her life she retained a penchant for the spiritual. When they first arrived in Alta Gracia, Celia had attended Sunday Mass, taking the children with her, but according to her husband she did so for “the spectacle” more than out of any residual religious faith.

Yet, for all their libertarian views, the Guevaras shared with many other lapsed Catholics a contradiction between belief and practice, never entirely forsaking the traditional rituals that ensured social acceptance in their conservative society. Although they no longer attended church, the Guevaras had their children baptized as Catholics. Ernestito’s godfather was the wealthy Pedro León Echagüe, through whom Celia and Ernesto Guevara Lynch had met, and who had persuaded Ernesto to seek his fortune in Misiones.

By the time Ernesto junior entered school, however, Celia had stopped going to Mass, and the Guevaras asked for their children to be
excused from religion classes. Roberto remembered playing after-school soccer games formed by opposing teams of children: those who believed in God and those who didn’t. Those who didn’t invariably lost because they were so few in number.

Ernesto’s fellow students in Alta Gracia recalled, unanimously, his quickness in class, although he was rarely seen studying. He didn’t seem to have a competitive urge for grades, and his own were usually mediocre. It was a phenomenon that mystified his father. This theme was a constant refrain during Ernesto’s formative years. His father never seems to have understood what made his eldest son tick, just as he never completely understood his wife, Celia. To him, Celia was “imprudent from birth” and “attracted to danger,” and she was at fault for passing these traits on to their eldest son. Ernesto Guevara Lynch, meanwhile, who admitted to being “overly cautious,” was fretful, and forever worrying about the dangers and risks in life. In some ways, he was the more maternal of the two parents, while Celia was her son’s confidante and coconspirator.

Ernesto Guevara Lynch’s friends from Alta Gracia all had memories of his tantrums, especially when he perceived an affront to a member of his family. This was something he passed on to his eldest son. Ernestito became uncontrollable with rage if he felt he had been unjustly reprimanded or punished, his father wrote, and he got into frequent fistfights with his
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rivals. His temper never left him, but by the time he reached college he had learned to bring it under control, usually substituting a razor-sharp tongue for the threat of physical violence. Only on rare occasions did he strike out physically.

Ernesto senior was an intelligent man, but he looked across a perceptual divide at his wife and son, who were far more intellectually akin. Although he read books of adventure and history, and passed on his love for these works to Ernestito, he had little scholarly patience or discipline. Celia, on the other hand, was an avid reader of fiction, philosophy, and poetry, and it was she who opened their son’s mind to these interests.