The Adventure of the Busts of Eva Perón

by Carlos Gamerro

  Before leaving, he waved to the car park attendant, whose name, in spite of his supposed adherence to Dale Carnegie’s Third Way to Make People Like You (‘Remember that a person’s name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language’), Marroné could never remember. Most of his colleagues not only didn’t make the effort, but would consider it demeaning to recall the name of such a lowly subordinate, but Marroné was mindful of the exemplary case of Andrew Carnegie, the author’s father, who was able to call all his workers by their Christian names, and in all his years in charge of the steelworks he wasn’t troubled by a single strike. It crossed his mind to ask the man his name and jot it down in the notebook he always carried with him for just that purpose, but that would be tantamount to admitting he’d forgotten it: he’d be offending rather than making himself liked, which only defeated his purpose. And then… what if he was a mole planted by the Montoneros and Marroné’s impertinent question only aroused his suspicion? It didn’t seem very likely: the man had been working at the company for years and was too dark for a guerrilla; but that was no guarantee either. In the inexorably spiralling violence even the poor had begun taking up arms against the rich, and the most unlikely of people, with unimpeachable service records, were daily being won over to the subversives’ side, becoming willing accomplices or merely useful idiots in their service. When simple persuasion failed, it was supplemented with death threats against their person or against their families, or the slow drip of ideological indoctrination, which by accumulation could culminate in a total brainwashing. Difficult times indeed.

  His thoughts grew less sombre as the Peugeot surged up the exit ramp and emerged from the fluorescent light into the radiance of the summer afternoon, to join the double column of cars that crawled with rush-hour sluggishness along the side-lanes. This was the most vulnerable part of his journey and, in spite of the suffocating heat, he kept the windows firmly closed: while one eye checked the rear-view mirrors to make sure he wasn’t being followed by ‘rovers’ from the guerrilla, the other was intent on the pedestrians, who, with Argentinian contempt for white lines and red lights, kept materialising between the trunks of the tipa trees and recklessly darting between the moving cars. ‘If some person srows zemselves in front of ze car,’ he heard the idiosyncratic Spanish of Colonel Bigeard, ‘do not stop. Run zem over and let ze Legal Department take care of it. Iz easier to escape a trial zan a kidnap.’ After an accidental detour via Balcarce, he managed to get into the safer central lanes and exceed walking pace, until, on reaching Alem, the traffic opened up like spray squirting from the nozzle of a hosepipe, and Marroné could wind down the window and let the wind dry his sweat-drenched face. Seven thirty-five. If everything went well, he’d be home by eight, he told himself, relaxing and automatically turning the stereo on to listen to the B-side of The Socratic Pitch: ‘Once the dialectic moment of your presentation is over, and your formerly sceptical listener has become an ardent “yes-man” for your proposals, it is time for the midwife to step in. The Socratic Pitch will teach you the art of…’ As the tape reeled out its litany, which he knew almost by heart, having listened to it twice a day for almost thirty days (side A on the outward leg, side B on the return as recommended by the enclosed booklet), he amused himself with the familiar beauty spots along the way that glowed with the almost spiritual raking light of the golden hour: the majestic tree-covered slope of the Plaza San Martín; the stately Kavanagh Building and the brand-new Sheraton Hotel, symbols the one of past splendour, the other of future prosperity; the French grace of the Palais de Glace and the virile archaism of Antoine Bourdelle’s Monument to Alvear, flanked by the four allegorical figures of Victory, Strength, Eloquence and Liberty; the imposing Graeco-Roman façade of the Law Faculty; the Asiatic splendour of the Assyrian column and its towering bulls; and the galactic curves of the Municipal Planetarium… Paseo Colón and Avenida Libertador, he was fond of saying, were the spinal column of a better Buenos Aires, one that no Porteño need be ashamed of: a city every bit the equal of the great capitals of Europe and America, the axis of a better, more desirable country; and whenever he had to play chaperone to foreign visitors, it was with delight that he faced the challenge of plotting routes that joined up all the beauty spots without passing any of the eyesores (in daylight at least, which was when they might create a worse impression), and he found nothing more rewarding of his efforts than the spontaneous exclamation of an important foreign executive or businessman: ‘This doesn’t look like South America at all!’ Ah well, he said to himself, pressing the stop button and interrupting Socrates in full swing – just for today he could take a break and indulge in his own thoughts. For it had not escaped Marroné’s notice that he was facing a decisive turning point, one that – with hindsight – would divide not only his career but his life into a before and an after. Until today, he ventured to himself as he savoured the idea, he had merely been living; today perhaps he was beginning to write his autobiography.

  ‘How did Marroné become Marroné? That’s a good question. There are moments in the career of every top executive… They’re things you sometimes can’t put on your CV, but they’re precisely the kind of things that make everyone want to read your CV. This is one of the golden rules of what I earlier called “the marketing of the self”. Let me give you an example: when, thanks to my forceful yet sensitive handling of negotiations, I managed to rescue Fausto Tamerlán from the clutches of Marxist terrorism, I was no more than a “junior executive” fresh from the United States. True, I had brought back with me an MBA in Marketing from Stanford and a battery of innovative ideas, but I was no more than a cog – necessary perhaps, but replaceable – in a complex commercial machine. My coolness, calmness and collectedness, and above all my leadership abilities, proven in those dark hours when the whole future of the company hung in the balance, were the making of me. From that moment on, I became in all but name the CEO of Tamerlán & Sons, as it was called in those days. Sr Tamerlán’s prolonged captivity, coupled with the tortures inflicted on him – which included mutilation – had left physical and mental scars that kept him from anything more than nominal leadership, and that vacuum had to be filled by a providential man full of new ideas and the will to implement them. The now world-famous Marroné & Tamerlán Ltd had until those days been no more than a family enterprise, in the most limited sense of the word, and one that had never known bracing exposure to the elements of healthy competition, having grown up in the shadow of a nanny state, which, by the way, it will soon be time to wean ourselves off permanently.’ Marroné raced ahead with his autobiography, sticking close in language and style to the ones he so loved to read – those of Henry Ford, Alfred P Sloan, Thomas Watson Jr and Lester Luchessi – and dictating it to an imaginary listener who sat there, cassette recorder in hand, in the empty passenger seat. He liked to imagine himself dictating it because, as he now set about explaining to his attentive scribe (a ghost writer who had at first accepted the assignment just for the cash, but who, all agog, was now receiving a veritable masterclass in leadership and – why not? – in life too), the only executives who can afford the time to write their biography themselves have either retired or failed. Marroné now drove under the General Paz flyover and entered the suburbs, the docility of his Peugeot 504 and the wind, which barely ruffled his gel-slicked hair, intoxicating him as if he were breathing the air of high mountain tops, and spurring him on with his autobiography, which he had tentatively titled Marroné by Marroné: ‘My family spared no expense when it came to securing a first-class education for me, which I received at the exclusive and expensive St Andrew’s College in Buenos Aires, from where I graduated in 1964 with the honour of having obtained the coveted turquoise- and brown-striped prefects’ tie and the captain’s badge of the Dodds House rugby team. My time at St Andrew’s bequeathed me many gifts, such as my sound command of the English language, which has led to many a foreign businessman expressing disbelief when I confess to being Argentinian; a
solid humanist background in the best British tradition; and the essential school spirit, which in the world of business translates into donning the company jersey…’ (‘Underpants,’ whispered the sly side of his mind once again, and he mentally swatted away the intrusive word) ‘… but I learnt two essential things that marked my subsequent career: I learnt to command and I learnt to obey.

  ‘I learnt to obey, to let myself be guided,’ he explained now to an audience not of one but of hundreds, the cassette recorder turned microphone, and the inside of his Peugeot grown to the proportions of the immense St Andrew’s assembly hall, decked out in homage to its favourite son, Ernesto Marroné, who had acquiesced to afford them a few hours of his precious time to deliver a lecture on leadership that would later be published in full in the school magazine, The Thistle. ‘To let myself be guided by my teachers and coaches,’ he continued, smiling encouragingly at the front rows, where the serried ranks of his old teachers sat – a few still active, others now retired but expressly invited for the occasion – and following the recommendations of How to Develop Self-Confidence and Influence People by Public Speaking, by – who else? – Dale Carnegie, his eyes rested for a second on each of them in turn: Mr Adams; Mrs Halley; Mrs McCarthy; Mrs Oxford, who used to force him, retching, to finish his milk in the dining hall; Sra Polino; Sra Regamor; Mr Guinness; Wójcik the Pole; the PE teachers Mr Trollope, Osvaldo Lamas and Willy Speakeasy; Uve; Sapa; El Pollo; Mr Peters; the fearsome Sr Macera, who had humiliated him before the whole class and then flunked him in Anatomy… ‘And by learning to obey, I learnt to command, to be a leader. What is a leader?’ asked Marroné in the theatre of his mind while his body handled the wheel and pedals of his Peugeot, respected traffic signals and dodged neighbouring cars. ‘The wise leader does not push to make things happen, but allows the process to unfold on its own. The leader teaches by example rather than by lecturing others on how they ought to be. Bosses are appointed; leaders are chosen by their peers,’ he thought, stringing together a series of phrases from The Tao of Leadership, now casting his eyes over the faces of some of his former schoolmates: ‘Slim’ Sörensen; Ramiro Agüero, who used to call him ‘sissy’ at break-time in primary school; Alberto Regamor, the brainiac who had won the Dux Medal and whose features Marroné’s memory insisted on confusing with those of the hated Cáceres Grey; and many others; but his satisfaction was complete when he spotted the unmistakeable, neatly trimmed ginger hair of Paddy Donovan, his high-school hero, who, on meeting his gaze, smiled back, his teeth whiter-than-white, and raised both thumbs approvingly. And beyond the guests and familiar faces, their heads bobbing expectantly on a sea of dark-blue blazers with their thistle-flanked badges bearing the motto ‘Sic itur ad astra’, stood the future leaders of Argentina, and there in their midst, bursting with pride, was little Tommy…

  As he pulled down the garage door, Marroné remembered the disposable nappies his wife, beleaguered by the chronic shortage of supplies, had asked him to pick up at any price. He had promised to look for some near the office, but being by nature somewhat prone to distraction – ‘the Achilles heel of creative thinkers’, the specialist literature called it – and to losing himself in reveries, he had clean forgotten. As Mabel would never in a million years pass up the opportunity to make a scene if he dared to come home empty-handed, he pushed the creaking wooden door back up in order to go and raid the supermarket on Avenida Libertador, before he remembered that it was ‘Closed for Refurbishment’, the usual euphemism for ‘Blown Up by the Montoneros’ (or the ERP, who knows). He thought of trying the duty chemist’s, but he’d left his newspaper at the office and his mission to retrieve the one from indoors and get out again without being seen was aborted by little Tommy’s vigilance, who, alerted by the noise of the gate or perhaps the car, intercepted him on the ground-floor landing with his strident demand of ‘Tweeties! Tweeties!’ – which, of course, his father had forgotten to pick up, along with the nappies. To the abject confession of his empty hands little Tommy’s mouth responded with an O of incredulity that instantly narrowed to a ∞ of incessant wailing, which inevitably brought Mabel running. ‘I bet you’ve forgotten the nappies too,’ she spat at him in greeting, at which the ‘Hello darling’ that Marroné had at the ready barely managed to escape his throat, strangled and squeezed dry of any genuine emotion. ‘I was just going to check the paper for a chemist’s,’ he said, adopting a decisive tone, but Mabel was ready with her answer and fired at him: ‘Haven’t you heard there’s-a-shor-tage, Ernesto? The chemist’s haven’t even got aspirins in stock!’ ‘Of course I have. You seem to forget that I’m the head of procurement for one of the leading comp…’ he began in an offended tone, but realised too late that he’d put the ball just where she wanted him to (Mabel always beat him at tennis). ‘You might be head of procurement at the office, but at home you can’t even pick up a lousy chocolate bar,’ she snapped as little Tommy, seeing his position defended, redoubled his bawling, and Marroné felt the tension running up and down his body in thick, indignant waves of pure stress; with the stoic fatalism of the serial somatiser, he knew that that night he would suffer from heartburn and insomnia, and it was with a supreme effort of self-control that he stopped himself from screaming in his wife’s face: ‘The life of a very important man is in my hands and you’re banging on to me about candy bars!’ But he couldn’t do this without jeopardising the whole operation, and so he turned once again to the pages of How to Win Friends and Influence People, to be precise, to the chapter entitled ‘If You’re Wrong, Admit It’ from the section ‘How to Win People to Your Way of Thinking’, which advised: ‘Say about yourself all the derogatory things you know the other person is thinking or wants to say or intends to say – and say them before that person has a chance to say them.’

  ‘You’re right, my darling,’ said Marroné through jaws clenched as tight as a hydraulic press. ‘You deserve a better husband than me. All that effort you make morning, noon and night, running the house, and I can’t even remember one little errand you ask me to do…’ As his tongue waded laboriously through the viscous insincerity of his words, Mabel’s features gradually lost their tautness, as if each admission of guilt loosened one of the threads that tensed it, and very soon she was the one coming to his defence: ‘Well, Ernesto, I wouldn’t go that far, I mean we’ve got enough to last till the weekend’ (‘Then why did you kick up such a fuss about it, you bitch!’) ‘and you, Tommy, be quiet will you, your daddy’s had a long day at the office, come here, I’ve got some sweeties for you upstairs…’ and Marroné, now certain of victory, allowed himself to add a ginger ‘First thing tomorrow I’ll pop out to the supermarket in La Lucila’, only for Mabel to reply: ‘No, no, you’re always in a dreadful hurry when you leave, I don’t want you doing anything to add to your stress. I’ll have Doña Ema pick some up for me at the weekend, they have everything in the shanties you know, never go short of anything. We’ll soon be resorting to cloth nappies out here and they’re spoilt for choice – course they resell what the government gives them, so Doña Ema tells me. Cynthia’s just woken up, can you believe it? Like she knows you’re home. Want to go up and see her?’

  At dinner, which consisted of a starter of boiled ham and Russian salad, a main course of milanesas and mash, and a dessert of crème caramel and dulce de leche, Mabel gave him the latest update on little Cynthia’s latest escapades, encouraged by her husband’s studied posture of the absorbed listener. Knowing how to listen, after all, was one of the secrets of success in business and private life, for Principle Six (‘How to Make People Like You Instantly’) reminds us that even if you happen to be President of the Republic, the person you are talking to is a hundred times more interested in themselves, in their petty needs and problems, than in you and your great ones. What everyone ultimately wants is to feel important, and listening with attention was an infallible way of satisfying that basic need, Marroné was repeating to himself, when Mabel suddenly blurted out:

  ‘Is anything w
rong? You’ve hardly said a word since we started eating.’

  ‘I was listening carefully,’ he mumbled behind his tight-lipped smile.

  ‘You didn’t manage… ?’

  He was about to break the good news to her, when he thought better of it and shook his head contritely instead. Marroné had made of the prolonged barrenness of his belly an impregnable excuse to lock himself in the bathroom for extended periods of time whenever the manifold demands of married life or home became too much for him; especially since his study had been annexed as the little girl’s bedroom and there was no other room in the house he could call his own. The bathroom had become the only place where he could enjoy some degree of peace and quiet, and devote some time to himself. Confessing to Mabel the success that had crowned his afternoon’s efforts would be to deprive himself of that minimal but indispensable right to privacy.

  Once the coffee cups had been cleared away, Doña Ema’s working day was over and it was Marroné’s turn to look after the children, while Mabel went upstairs to the bedroom to watch television for a bit. Much as he liked to picture himself as an exemplary father – the very phrase made him swell with pride – after a day of stress at the office the tasks it involved were capable of pushing him over the edge, for since the little girl’s arrival, the demands of his children seemed irrationally to have multiplied not by two, but by ten. He would make a superhuman effort to remind himself that every opportunity for recreation was essential in the life of the executive, enabling him to return to his tasks with renewed vigour, but after a few minutes of lending them his undivided attention, he would start thinking about all the work he could be catching up on, or the books he could be reading, and which he did sometimes try to read while looking after them, with the regrettable result of neither being able to concentrate on reading nor enjoy the children, which meant he would end up losing his patience and yelling at them. Today he didn’t last twenty minutes: while he was changing little Cynthia’s dirty nappy, little Tommy in a fit of jealousy shook the changing stand and knocked the bottle of baby oil on the floor, which Marroné, of course, hadn’t put the top back on; cursing, he leapt, cotton wool in hand, to wipe it up before it ruined the carpet and earned him another dressing-down from Mabel. His reprimand, not so much violent as tense with barely contained anger, set off little Tommy, who was a sensitive child at heart, and while tending to him, Marroné forgot about the girl, who, when he looked up, was teetering on the brink of the changing stand about to follow the bottle into the abyss. Once he had deposited her safely in the middle of her crib, he went back to consoling little Tommy and, by the time he noticed the fresh nappy, which should have been on little Cynthia, lying open and unused on the changing stand, her pee had drenched the sheets and soaked through to the mattress. ‘I’m not cut out for this, I’m not cut out for this,’ Marroné hiccuped, his throat closed by hysteria as he laid the little girl on the floor and stripped the sheets in order to pick up the mattress. He flirted for a moment with the temptation of sitting down on the floor next to her and starting to cry, but that would probably only trigger a sympathetic response in little Tommy, who, quieter now, had climbed up to the third shelf of the bookcase and was on the verge of falling backwards and breaking his neck on the edge of the crib. Having reached this point, he felt psychically and morally justified to go to his wife with the babe in his arms and the boy by the hand and guiltlessly say, ‘Can you take them for a while? I’m going to try…’