Authors: Jon Lee Anderson
Despite some retrospective attempts to see an early hint of socialist ideals in the teenage Ernesto Guevara, virtually all his Córdoba schoolmates recalled him as politically uninterested. To his friend José María Roque, Ernesto didn’t have “a defined political ideal” at the time. “We all loved to argue politics, but I never saw Guevara get involved in any sense.” Nor did Ernesto let his antifascism get in the way of friendship. One of his classmates was Domingo Rigatusso, a poor Italian immigrant’s son who worked after school selling sweets to the patrons of the local cinemas. Rigatusso steadfastly supported Mussolini in the war, as did his father, and Ernesto referred to him affectionately as a
tano fascio
, a slang term meaning “Italian Fascist.”
Raúl Melivosky, the son of a Jewish university professor, recalled briefly belonging to a “cell” of the Federación Estudiantil Socialista (FES) with Ernesto in 1943, at a time when the militant youth wing of the pro-Nazi Alianza Libertadora Nacionalista was intimidating students sympathetic to the Allies. Melivosky, who was a year younger than Ernesto and in his first year at the school, had heard about him before they were introduced. Ernesto was pointed out as the only student in school who had stood up in class to a notoriously pro-Nazi history professor over a factual inaccuracy.
When the FES decided to form three-man units as a defensive measure against the students of the Alianza Libertadora Nacionalista, Ernesto was assigned to be the leader of a group that included Melivosky and another first-year student. “We were cells in name only,” Melikovsky recalled. “We didn’t meet, and practically the only thing we did was to call ourselves cells.” But, one afternoon, when he and some other students were blocked from leaving the school grounds by some Alianza bullies who were brandishing penknives embossed with their group’s condor insignia, Ernesto hurled himself at the throng, whirling his school satchel around his head. To the grateful Melivosky, Ernesto seemed “more than brave. He was absolutely fearless.”
The only other time their “cell” was activated was the day when, making use of his authority as leader, Ernesto ordered Melivosky and the other boy under his tutelage to skip school the following day. It was an exploit that could get them expelled, and Melivosky knew it. “He didn’t order us only to skip school, but to go to a movie that was prohibited to minors. We were thirteen and fourteen, and you had to be eighteen, so we weren’t going to be able to fool anybody. None of us was very tall or robust. But he ordered us to each come wearing a hat, with a cigarette, and with the money we needed for the tickets.”
Such were Ernesto’s earliest incursions into “politics.” Twenty years later, in a letter to a sycophantic editor who intended to publish a hagiography about him, he wrote, bluntly: “I had no social preoccupations
in my adolescence and had no participation in the political or student struggles in Argentina.”
Ernesto was now a full-fledged teenager, and along with his voracity for books he had developed a strong curiosity about the opposite sex. He managed to satisfy both interests when he discovered and read the unabridged and highly erotic original edition of
A Thousand and One Nights
at a friend’s home.
In the provincial Argentina of the mid-1940s, prevailing values concerning sex and marriage were still very much those of a traditional Catholic society. Women didn’t have the right to divorce, and “good” girls were expected to retain their virginity until marriage. “We were little angels,” recalled Tatiana Quiroga, who went out with Ernesto and other friends on double dates. “We went to dance, to converse, to drink a coffee, and at twelve-thirty you had to be back, or they would kill you. That was the period when you could barely go out. How could we little girls go to some boy’s house, all alone? Never! The most we ever did was to escape the parties and go drink some
mate
.”
For sex, boys of Ernesto’s social milieu either visited brothels or looked for conquests among girls of a lower class, where their social and economic differences gave them advantages. Their first sexual experience was often with the family
mucama
, the servant girl, usually an Indian or poor mestiza from one of Argentina’s northern provinces. Ernesto was introduced to sex when he was fourteen or fifteen. Rodolfo Ruarte and several other youths spied on him during a liaison with “La Negra” Cabrera, the servant girl in the house of Calico Ferrer. The boys watched through the keyhole of the bedroom door. They observed that, while Ernesto conducted himself admirably on top of the pliant maid, he periodically interrupted his lovemaking to suck on his asthma inhaler. The spectacle had them in stitches and remained a source of amusement for years afterward. But Ernesto was un-perturbed, and his sessions with La Negra continued as a regular pastime.
Along with his discovery of sex, Ernesto nurtured a love of poetry, and he enjoyed reciting passages he had memorized. With the aid of the seventeenth-century Spanish poet Francisco de Quevedo’s
Picaresque Sonnets and Romances
, he began displaying a sense of the ribald. One day, he employed it to effect on a blushing Dolores Moyano. He had overheard her pedantically discussing the poetry of the Spanish-Arab mystics, and when he challenged her knowledge of the topic, she found herself gullibly explaining: “The lover and the mystic in St. John’s poetry have this double vision.
The inner eye and the outward eye, the lover-mystic sees both ways. ...” At that point, she recalled, Ernesto interrupted her, and affecting an exaggerated Cordoban accent, he recited a profane couplet about a one-eyed nun and a cross-eyed saint.
The incident highlights the schism that existed between male and female adolescents of Guevara’s social class and generation. The girls, virginal and innocent, steeped themselves in romantic poetry, saving themselves for true love and marriage, while boys like Ernesto, bursting with hormones, sought out the real world of sex as best they could in bawdy poems and brothels, or by bedding the family
mucamas
.
During the summer holidays of 1945 and 1946, Ernesto’s pretty cousin Carmen Córdova Iturburu de la Serna reappeared. She was three years younger than Ernesto, on whom she developed a crush. Carmen’s father, the poet Cayetano Córdova Iturburu, always brought a trunkful of newly published books from Buenos Aires with him, and she would rummage through it for books of poetry. It was her passion, one that she found she shared with Ernesto, and he recited to her from Pablo Neruda’s
Twenty Poems of Love and a Desperate Song
, which he had recently discovered. “In the full bloom of adolescence, Ernestito and I were a little more than friends,” she recalled years later. “One day we were playing on a terrace of my house and Ernesto asked me if I was now a woman. ...” A lover’s tryst ensued, and later on, when the Guevaras moved to Buenos Aires, Ernesto and Carmen continued to see each other. She often stayed in the Guevaras’ home, where she recalled romantic interludes with Ernesto in the stairwell, talking “of literature ... and of love because, as often happens between cousins, we too had our idyll. Ernesto was so handsome!”
And he was. By the age of seventeen, Ernesto had developed into an extremely attractive young man: slim and wide-shouldered, with dark brown hair, intense brown eyes, clear white skin, and a self-contained, easy confidence that made him alluring to girls. “The truth is, we were all a little in love with Ernesto,” confessed Miriam Urrutia, another wellborn Córdoba girl.
At an age when boys tend to try hard to impress girls, Ernesto’s insouciance regarding appearances was especially compelling. One evening, he showed up with an elegantly attired society girl at the Cine Opera, where his
fascio
friend Rigatusso worked. Ernesto had come dressed, as usual, in an old, oversize trench coat, its pockets stuffed with food and a thermos of
mate
. When he spotted Rigatusso, he pointedly left his date standing on her own while he chatted to his “socially inferior” friend.
Ernesto’s devil-may-care attitude, contempt for formality, and combative intellect were all now visible traits of his personality. Even his sense of humor was confrontational, although it was often expressed in a self-mocking
guise. His friend Alberto Granado became very familiar with Ernesto’s penchant for shocking people. “He had several nicknames,” Granado recalled. “They called him El Loco Guevara. He liked to be a little bit of a terrible lad. ... He boasted about how seldom he bathed, for example. They also called him Chancho [The Pig]. He used to say, ‘It’s been twenty-five weeks since I washed this rugby shirt.’” One day Ernesto stopped wearing short pants to school and arrived dressed in trousers. No doubt to forestall the ribbing he was bound to receive from the older boys about suddenly growing up, he announced that the reason he wore trousers was that his shorts were so dirty he’d had to throw them away.
Throughout his five years at the Colegio Nacional Dean Funes, Ernesto cultivated the image of an irrepressible rascal. He would wordlessly light up his pungent antiasthma cigarettes in the middle of class and debate openly with his mathematics and literature teachers about inaccuracies he’d caught them in. He organized weekend outings to the outlying mountains or back to Alta Gracia, where he engaged in the same kinds of daredevil stunts that had so horrified his parents when he was a child: balancing on pipelines over steep chasms, leaping from high rocks into rivers, bicycling along train tracks.
Ernesto’s behavior was duly noted by the school authorities. On the first of June 1945, his fourth year at Dean Funes, he received “ten admonishments [twenty-five meant expulsion] by rectoral order, for acts of indiscipline and for having entered and left the establishment outside of hours, without the corresponding permission.”
His grades, on the whole, were good. They continued to reflect his interest in subjects such as mathematics, natural history, geography, and history, although with each year he showed a gradual improvement in French, Spanish, writing, and music. His extracurricular reading was unabated. His friend Pepe Aguilar noticed, as had Alberto Granado, that Ernesto’s tastes were eclectic and often advanced for his years. “He read voraciously, devouring the library of his parents,” Aguilar recalled. “From Freud to Jack London, mixed with Neruda, Horacio Quiroga, and Anatole France, even an abbreviated edition of
Das Kapital
in which he made observations in tiny letters.” Ernesto found the dense Marxist tome incomprehensible, however. Years later, he confessed to his wife in Cuba that he “hadn’t understood a thing” in his early readings of Marx and Engels.
In the 1945 school year, a more serious side of Ernesto began to emerge. He took a course in philosophy. It engaged his interest, as his “very good” and
“outstanding” grades reveal. He also began writing his own “philosophical dictionary.” The first handwritten notebook, 165 pages in length, was ordered alphabetically, and carefully indexed by page number, topic, and author. Consisting of pocket biographies of noted thinkers and a wide range of quoted definitions, its entries include such concepts as love, immortality, hysteria, sexual morality, faith, justice, death, God, the devil, fantasy, reason, neurosis, narcissism, and morality. The quotations on Marxism were culled from
Mein Kampf
and featured passages revealing Hitler’s obsession with a Jewish-Marxist conspiracy. For his sketches of Buddha and Aristotle, he used H. G. Wells’s
Short History of the World
. Bertrand Russell’s
Old and New Sexual Morality
was the source on love, patriotism, and sexual morality. But Sigmund Freud’s theories also obviously fascinated him, and Ernesto quoted Freud’s
General Theory of Memory
on everything from dreams and libido to narcissism and the Oedipus complex. Jack London provided the gloss on society and Nietzsche on death. For revisionism and reformism, Ernesto drew definitions from a book written by his uncle Cayetano Córdova Iturburu.
This notebook was the first in a series of seven that he continued to work on over the next ten years. He would add new entries and replace older ones as his studies deepened and his interests became more focused. Future notebooks reflected his reading of Jawaharlal Nehru and also his intensified reading on Marxism, quoting not Hitler but Marx, Engels, and Lenin.
Ernesto’s choice of fiction began to shift to books with more social content. Indeed, in the opinion of his friend Osvaldo Bidinost Payer, “everything began with literature” for him. Around this time, Osvaldo and Ernesto were reading Faulkner, Kafka, Camus, and Sartre. In poetry, Ernesto was reading the Spanish Republican poets García Lorca, Machado, and Alberti, and the Spanish translations of Walt Whitman and Robert Frost. But his overall favorite remained Pablo Neruda. Among Latin American writers, he had also delved into Ciro Alegría, Jorge Icaza, Rubén Darío, and Miguel Ángel Asturias. Their novels and poetry often dealt with Latin American themes—including the unequal lives of marginalized Indians and mestizos— ignored in fashionable literature and virtually unknown to Ernesto’s social group. Bidinost believed that such literature gave Ernesto an inkling of the society he inhabited but did not know firsthand. “It was a kind of advance glimpse of what he wanted to experience, and what was around him was objectively Latin America and
not
Europe or Wyoming.”
As Ernesto’s friends in Alta Gracia had been, Bidinost was bewitched by the Guevara household’s informality and by the influence of Ernesto’s
mother. The home seemed to shelter a cult of creativity, and of what he called “the discovery of the world through the service entrance.” Celia collected all kinds of colorful people, irrespective of their social status. One met itinerant painters who worked as bootblacks, wandering Ecuadorean poets, and university professors, who sometimes stayed a week or a month, depending on their level of hunger. “It was a fascinating human zoo,” Bidinost recalled.
While Celia presided over her all-hours salon, Ernesto’s father came and went on an old motorbike he had named La Pedorra (The Farter), for the sputtering noise it issued from its exhaust. He and Celia slept in the same house but were estranged, and they lived increasingly separate lives.