The Nomadic Alternative – Page 40

to his parents in Argentina, "I feel Rocinante's ribs beneath my heels. I am back on the road with my shield on my arm..." But the Bolivian military monster traps him. Deserted by all but a few of his companions, he dies a cool hero's death. And his soul does receive its reward - instant recognition by the young of the whole world.

Why? Marxist apologists praise his selfless dedication to the cause of the just. His ideological opponents, however, say he was a spoiled mother's boy with problems of sexual identity, ruthless, egotistic and destructively cruel, mesmerised when young by the mystique of gaucho novels, and who, if an Argentine millionaire had not turned him down as a suitor for his daughter on account of his general scruffiness, might survive today as the hard-drinking member of a Buenos Aires club.

Both miss the point. "Che lives" for other reasons. He was a product of the age to the extent that the age needed a new hero, but he was a hero regardless of the age or his politics. Had his reputation not spread beyond the circuit of a few hundred people, he would still have been a hero. Consciously and unconsciously he never put a foot wrong. From the moment he defected from the Argentine establishment to the impact of the executioner's bullet, he lived out the wandering hero myth, and his character, regardless of his defects, which by all accounts were considerable, has been doctored to fit the hero mould. His life became a mythical model for others ritually to follow, until such time as another hero treads the archetypal Road of Trials and the process begins again.

The harsh journey to fight the Beast belongs to that class of initiatory scenarios the anthropologist Van Gennep called "rites of passage" in which the initiate snatches at his manhood in the teeth of exile and suffering. No hero makes his mark without his "years in the wilderness", for on his journey to the pit of chaos and despair he masters his fear of death and failure. The sturm und drang phase passes; new vigour revives him, and he returns to the society of men renewed and able to face the barriers of age with equanimity.