Free Che Guevara by Jon Lee Anderson Page B

of Ernesto’smother. 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.
    Another Córdoba youth who found himself caught up in the Guevara magic was Roberto “Beto” Ahumada, a school friend of Ernesto’s brother Roberto. Ahumada recalled many occasions when the family members unblinkingly divided up their meal into smaller portions so that he could join them. “Nobody was worried about eating a little less because one of the kids had brought friends,” he said. “They brought who they wanted and nobody cared.” Not surprisingly, in this rollicking home replete with children, itinerant guests, and conversation, Ernesto found it difficult to read or study undisturbed, and he acquired the habit of reading for hours on end in the bathroom.
    One day, an old childhood
barra
mate named Enrique Martín bumped into Ernesto in Alta Gracia. Enrique was surprised to see him there: it was a weekday, and the school year was not over. Swearing Enrique to secrecy, Ernesto said he had rented a small back room in the Cecil Hotel, near the bus station, a place where nobody knew him. “I’m here to isolate myself from everybody,” he said. Exactly what Ernesto wanted isolation for, Enrique Martín didn’t ask, and he loyally guarded his friend’s secret for many years. Whether Ernesto wanted a place to think and study, or to rendezvous with one of Alta Gracia’s promiscuous
mucamas
, remains unknown. In any case, this was clearly not the extroverted madcap Loco, Chancho, or Pelao known to his friends in class and on the rugby pitch, but a distinctly private youth.
VI
    By the beginning of 1946, Juan Perón had survived a brief ouster from office by rival military officers and a brief exile on Martín García island in the Rio de La Plata estuary. Then, after a huge popular demonstration demanding his release, he made a triumphant comeback to win the presidency in the general elections.

    Perón was no longer on his own. Months earlier he had married his mistress, a young, blond radio actress named Eva Duarte.
    Nineteen-forty-six was Ernesto Guevara’s final year of high school. He celebrated his eighteenth birthday in June, just ten days after the Peróns assumed office. While continuing with his studies, he also had a paying job for the first time in his life, in the laboratory of Córdoba’s Dirección Provincial de Vialidad, a public works office that oversaw road construction in the province. His friend Tomás Granado was with him. The two youths, similarly adept in subjects such as math and science, were already discussing plans to study engineering at the university the following year. They had obtained their jobs, which offered useful practical experience for future engineers, after Ernesto’s father asked a friend to allow them into a special course given for field analysts at Vialidad. They successfully passed the course and now they were “soils specialists,” examining the quality of materials used by the private companies contracted to build roads. In the lab, where they worked part-time, Ernesto made everyone fruit shakes in the blender used for mixing soils.
    When they graduated from Dean Funes, Ernesto and Tomás began working full-time and were assigned to jobs in different parts of the province. Ernesto was sent to inspect