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Authors: Jon Lee Anderson
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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 preoccupationsin my adolescence and had no participation in the political or student struggles in Argentina.”
IV
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
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 preoccupationsin my adolescence and had no participation in the political or student struggles in Argentina.”
IV
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
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