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Guevara Lynch was never able to discipline his eldest son, and Celia never tried. The result was that the boy became increasingly wild and disobedient. To escape punishment for a transgression, he would run off into the brushy countryside, returning only when his parents’ fears for his safety had long since overcome their anger. Carlos Figueroa, a friend whose family had a summer villa just down the street, claimed that Ernesto’s escapes to the bush were his way of fleeing his parents’ arguments, which Figueroa remembered as “terrible.”
    Whether the emotional upset caused by these arguments helped provoke young Ernesto’s asthma isn’t clear, but both family and friends agree that Celia and Ernesto Guevara Lynch began to have regular shouting matches in Alta Gracia. Each of them had an extremely hot temper, and the stories of their domestic disputes are legion. No doubt their perennial economic woes were partly to blame. In Ernesto senior’s mind, his inability to find work stemmed ultimately from Celia’s “imprudence” and the swimming incident at San Isidro, which led to his son’s asthma and the move to Alta Gracia. But the real source of the rift, according to Celia’s closest friends, was Ernesto Guevara Lynch’s affairs with other women—affairs that, in a small place such as Alta Gracia, must have been impossible to conceal. With divorce still not legal in Argentina, or perhaps for the children’s sake, the Guevaras stuck it out.

    Celia Guevara with her children in Alta Gracia, 1937. From left, her daughter Celia, Roberto, Ernesto, and Ana María.

    Ernesto and his childhood gang in Alta Gracia in 1939 or 1940. Ernesto is second from the right, in the vest. His younger brother Roberto is at the far right and his sister Ana María is at the far left.

    Ernestito’s days of running free were finally curbed when Alta Gracia’s education authorities visited his parents and ordered them to send him to school. He was now nearly nine years old, and Celia had little choice but to relinquish him. Thanks to her tutoring, he already knew how to read and write, so he was able to skip the first and “upper first” grades of Argentina’s primary school system. In March 1937, he entered the second-grade class at the Escuela San Martín. He was nearly a year older than most of his classmates.
    Ernesto’s grades for the 1938 school year are summed up as “satisfactory” in his report card. He received high marks in history and was said to show “steady improvement” in natural sciences, reading, writing, geography, geometry, morals, and civics, but demonstrated little interest in drawing, organized athletics, music, or dance. His conduct was termed “good” throughout the year, although it was “deficient” in the third semester. This change in behavior coincides with an abrupt change in his attendance. After missing only about four days in the first two semesters, he was out of school for twenty-one days during the third, a lapse probably caused by a prolonged attack of asthma.
    Elba Rossi de Oviedo Zelaya, who was the school’s headmistress and his third-grade teacher, remembered him as a “mischievous, bright boy, undistinguished in class, but one who exhibited leadership qualities on the playground.” Years later, Che told his second wife, Aleida, that Elba Rossi had been a strict disciplinarian and was forever spanking him. One day, facing his customary punishment, he had gotten even with her by placing a brick in his shorts. When she hit him, she hurt her hand instead.
    Ernesto was an incorrigible exhibitionist during his primary school years. Whether by inclination or to compensate for his ill health, he developed a fiercely competitive personality, engaging in attention-getting high jinks that confounded adults and awed his peers. His former classmates recalled that he drank ink out of a bottle, ate chalk during class, and climbed the trees in the schoolyard; hung by his hands from a