To Wander to Wonder

Ten of us sat around the table. Night lay heavy outside the adobe walls, the courtyard dark save for the flickering of lanterns. The old telegram office had been without electricity for years.

Lack of power, however, did not entail lack of talk. Over warm stew and bread, bottles gurgling as passed around by candlelight, we shared our food and our thoughts. Decades earlier, out in the scrubby foothills, the revolutionaries did so before us.

My journey began that same morning. Five hours to the north-east lay a town named Samaipata, where four of us had piled into a ripe red Toyota. Javier, our guide, wound and wove through the Bolivian landscape, the mellow warmth of cloudforest giving way to clattering markets, wisps of tobacco smoke and the din of barter spilling over into the cab. Lowlands followed, browned from lack of rain, the fields dry and dusty and home to mighty cacti flowering in muted pinks.

As dusk fell, we came to a halt atop the ridge above La Higuera. A clear evening, the hills were illuminated in the soft hues of sunset. Shrubs rustled in the breeze, whispering away as we gazed out at the valleys before us. Javier pointed to a wooded basin over to the east, the brush lacking in height but thick in coverage.

‘There,’ he said in Spanish, ‘that is where they were captured.’

He motioned towards the sky, and then to the jeep.

‘We will go tomorrow.’

The following morning, we went. Soon after dawn, the ten of us trekked up into the bush, dirt tracks tapering off into sunken footpaths, the gnarled trees forming a dense canopy despite their lack of foliage. Only when we reached the ravine was there a greenness to the thicket, the burble of water a clue to its source.

‘Did any of them die here?’ asked someone.

‘Yes,’ replied Javier, ‘but not him. They took him down to the village.’

In the semblance of tranquillity that now existed in the clearing, one could begin to forget the violence that occurred there all those years ago. It was the end to their fight; the end of the road.

Back in La Higuera, we were directed towards the former schoolhouse. A spartan, low-roofed structure, it now lay empty but for a few remaining fragments of the events that unfolded there in the autumn of ’67 - an old door, a wooden bench, a chair. Javier gestured to the latter. He spoke deferentially, his neutral tone giving little away.

‘Here,’ he said. ‘This is where Ché was killed.’

There was no more to see.