Free Che Guevara by Jon Lee Anderson

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-mockingguise. 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