The Adventure of the Busts of Eva Perón

by Carlos Gamerro

  Marroné nodded, avidly gulping in the refrigerated air: twenty-eight degrees in the shade at eight o’clock in the morning, the radio presenter had announced, not without a hint of malice, as Marroné drove down the freeway to the Sansimón Plasterworks, whose owner now took the cheque from his hands and, snapping it in the air a couple of times to test its elasticity, insisted on treating him yet again to the celebrated aerial tour of his impressive plasterworks, a proposal that Marroné, ever mindful of the demands of public relations, seconded with an enthusiasm as convincing as it was fake.

  His guide had given his factory’s shop floor the layout and even the dimensions of a cathedral (‘190 metres long, three more than St Peter’s,’ he immodestly specified). It was organised over two levels: the Terrestrial, where the machines and their operators were located, and the Celestial, suspended in its entirety above the Terrestrial and comprising two large office wings situated over the arms (‘Transepts,’ specified Sansimón), the management’s offices over the apse, and the overhead rails along which the foremen travelled the length and breadth of the central nave in their yellow chair-lifts.

  He’d picked them up at junk prices in the tourist end of the Córdoba sierra, where the Sansimóns owned numerous quarries, and then had them dismantled, transported, reassembled and hung from the crossbeams and struts of the vaulted roof. They were boarded on the Celestial level, and each could comfortably accommodate two people, though the ones Marroné could see in motion were each occupied by just one black-helmeted foreman, whose job it was to keep an eye on the workers from on high and bark detailed instructions at them through a megaphone.

  Sansimón led him to the first chair-lift in the line. After taking their seats, donning their executives’ white helmets and lowering the safety bar, they set out on their trapeze artist’s tour through the heights of the factory. Each chair was equipped with a personal console that let you move horizontally in all four directions and even descend to the shop floor via a simple pulley system, an option many of the foremen made use of to scrutinise the workers’ labours at closer quarters. Combining the roles of driver and guide, Sansimón manipulated the controls at the same time as he gave a running commentary itemising the innovations and improvements introduced since his return from the United States.

  ‘We brought in colour coding, as you might have noticed. Here in the Yellow Sector,’ he said, pointing to the chrome yellow of the machines and the lemon of the workers’ helmets, each with its black ID number clearly legible on the crown, ‘we manufacture ceiling roses, mouldings, cornices, rosettes, friezes, balusters, corbels, columns and amphorae; in the Brown Sector stucco, gesso, plaster casts, floor treatments and insulation – oh, and chalk of all colours too, essential for educational purposes,’ he rounded off, and Marroné thought he could see a delicate rainbow of fine dust at the heart of the uniform white cloud rising from all the general toiling beneath. ‘In the Green Sector we make stuff for the medical industry: orthopaedic plaster, plaster bandages, plaster for death masks when all else fails,’ he said, allowing himself the same joke he had cracked on all the other tours, and which Marroné laughed at with the same laugh. ‘And now…’ he made a pause that had something majestic about it, as the chair switched rails and set off on its procession down the imposing central nave, ‘for the Blue Sector, where we make partition walls, panels and plasterboards; maybe not the flashiest side of our extensive product range, but most definitely the backbone. But all this is just the beginning. Over there,’ he said, pointing in the direction of the atrium, ‘there’s a revolution afoot in the construction industry, so watch this space: you can wave goodbye to bricks, forget concrete. The future is plaster! Just one hour after setting, Sansimón Super X is as hard and durable as Portland cement. You can combine it with fibreglass for high impact, with polystyrene for flexibility and – with sand and fuller’s earth – it’s both fire-proof and sound-proof. Gypsum is the prima materia the Ancients were searching for, the protean matter par excellence.’ Sansimón waxed lyrical as he worked the chair’s controls with one hand and Marroné’s arm with the other, directing his attention here and there to the points he considered of most interest. And he had good reason to feel proud. The clouds of chalk dust rising like incense smoke, pierced by the shafts of light that streamed in through the high windows; the slow, elegant coordination of man and machine, moving in time through the stages of the liturgy; the exalted music composed by countless organs of steel, with their poundings and hummings, squelchings and whirrings, imparted its fullest meaning to what had seemed at first a mere architectural whim: the Sansimón Plasterworks was a true cathedral to human labour. Taken to these extremes, the efficiency of productive labour took on an aesthetic and – why not? – a spiritual dimension, and Marroné felt a tingling of pride well up through his core to his crimsoned cheeks: he too was part of all this, he was doing his bit, he was one of the numberless yet indispensable pillars of the faith. He was nothing less than an executive-errant.

  A conspiratorial nudge from Sansimón drew his attention to a scene playing out a few metres behind them. From up above, in his slowly swinging chair, a foreman was lambasting a blue-helmeted operator through a megaphone.

  ‘Blue Twenty-Seven, that plaque’s cracked coz you was careless. Docked from your wages!’ Blue Twenty-Seven looked up and said something that was drowned out by the altitude and noise from the machines. The foreman cupped his hand to his ear like a deaf old man and roared back through the megaphone.

  ‘Can’t hear you, Blue Twenty-Seven. You’ll have to speak up,’ he boomed, and winked at his boss, who shook his head as if to say, ‘They’re something else these boys of mine…’

  Once the tour was over, Sansimón pulled the lever on the console and the chair began to descend vertically until it stopped half a metre from the shop floor. Taking his first steps on terra firma with legs of jelly – he wasn’t what you’d call cut out for heights – Marroné followed the sprightly figure of Sansimón towards the workshop, plainly a far older structure housed in the armpit of the left transept. Within, a few sculptors and craftsmen in red helmets were working on long wooden tables, sculpting busts and figures that demanded a more craftsmanly approach: lovingly fashioning the latex and clay of the moulds, stirring the thin white paste in wide, shallow pans, applying the fresh plaster to make copies that, once cast, they smoothed and polished by hand. On either side, on old wooden shelves reaching up to the roof, were accumulated the spectral testimonies to five millennia of civilisation, perpetuated in this infinitely protean white stuff. As he walked, Marroné saw Chinese mandarins with conical hats, broad sleeves and long Fu Manchu whiskers; Buddhas in all postures and sizes, the smiles of the smallest – more cunning than enlightened – echoed by the broader-than-their-faces smiles of a choir of Carlos Gardels and those of a congregation of gluttonous friars rubbing their pot bellies; he took in the masks of tragedy and comedy, phalanxes of Michelangelo Davids flanked by Oscar statuettes, sphinxes, Tutankhamuns and Nefertitis, Egyptian cats, tablets and sarcophagi covered with hieroglyphs; shepherds and shepherdesses with crooks, panpipes and little lambs; he gazed upon repeated Nativity scenes (Herod’s nightmare multiplied), a whole camp of nudes (kissing couples, sorceresses, girls with pitchers), Saint Georges and the Dragons, Aztec calendars, Myron Discoboli and lucky elephants; he came across a host of Venuses de Milo by a flock of Victories of Samothrace (the Venuses huddled together like skittles in a bowling alley, the Victories like doves taking wing); he spotted a whole row of Laurel and Hardy medallions jumbled between a pair of Einstein bookends; a Canova Pauline Bonaparte surrounded by coiled sausage-dog ashtrays; Don Quixotes and Sancho Panzas in a variety of poses: standing, on horse- and donkey-back, and even sitting on thrones; bas-reliefs of the Last Supper and an infinity of medals of Martín Fierro, with Sergeant Cruz, guitar, maté and horse; he saw Rodin Thinkers and Michelangelo Pietàs, wagonloads of Statues of Liberty, citadels of Eiffel Towers, tunnels of Arcs de Triomphes and bristling
forests of Big Bens and Obelisks; massed ranks of Michelangelo Moseses directing their severe gazes at a chorus line of Marilyns with uplifted skirts; he spotted busts of Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms and, with growing jubilation, those of the great figures of universal history: Socrates, Pericles, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Napoleon, Lincoln, Lenin, Churchill, Franco, Hitler and Mussolini (‘We sell those three under the counter, but they go like hot cakes,’ Sansimón clarified)… Until he reached the pantheon of national heroes: enormous busts, life-size or larger, of San Martín the Liberator (young and sideburned, old and moustachioed), Belgrano, Sarmiento, Irigoyen and Perón (in two models: the general with furrowed brow, and in shirtsleeves wearing an avuncular smile), and finally – and at that moment Marroné really did feel like a knight-errant standing before the Holy Grail – four busts with the virile, classical, Spartan lines of the serene and peerless Eva Perón.

  A voice stopped him before he could lay a finger on them. ‘They’re already spoken for, those are. We’ve been fair swamped with orders for her these last three years.’

  It belonged to an old man in glasses, with a bushy, white moustache, wearing a cream-coloured cap rather than the regulation red helmet, whom Sansimón introduced as ‘My old man, the founder of the company’.

  ‘This young man is Tamerlán’s head of procurement, Dad. He needs… how many was it? Ninety-two?’

  Marroné nodded.

  ‘Ninety-two busts of Eva, Dad.’

  Sansimón Senior gave a low whistle.

  ‘Sounds like you mean business. When do you need them by?’ he asked Marroné.

  ‘Today, Dad,’ Sansimón answered. ‘Matter of life or death.’

  ‘Today? Are you serious? Tell me, do you see any automated machines here? Assembly lines? Mass-produced goods devoid of soul or beauty? Do you see men working like robots? No. And you know why? Because that’s your way of doing things, out there in your big factory. In here men still work with their hands and take legitimate pride in the fruit of their labour.’

  ‘Don’t give me that old socialist crap again, Dad. I’m not a baby any more. Put them on sixteen-hour shifts with eight-hour breaks right away. Nobody’s leaving till all ninety-four Evas are cast, dried and packed to go.’

  ‘Ninety-two,’ Marroné corrected him politely.

  ‘What?’ snapped Sansimón, who seemed to have forgotten all about him in the heat of the father–son tiff.

  ‘It’s ninety-two in total,’ he reminded him. He was very pleased with the way things were going. Sansimón certainly knew how to inspire customer loyalty.

  ‘Yeah, right. Whatever.’ Then to his father, ‘Are we agreed?’

  ‘What? Overtime?’

  ‘Half time and they can lump it. They still owe me from the last strike.’

  ‘Perhaps you might consider,’ ventured Sansimón Senior, appealing with exquisite delicacy to Marroné’s understanding, ‘taking a batch of busts of the General instead? This one, for example,’ he said, pointing at the eternal smile of the tieless Perón, ‘we have a considerable surplus of. We had a few returns because the clients said he’d come out looking like Vandor. You know Vandor,’ he added, noticing Marroné’s blank expression, ‘the union leader who reckoned he could replace Perón in the workers’ hearts.’

  ‘Dad,’ Sansimón tapped his foot impatiently.

  ‘Yes, yes, I’m just a talkative old man with old-fashioned ideas. Well, in any case, you can see for yourself, he doesn’t look a bit like him.’

  Marroné pursed his lips in a non-committal smile.

  ‘My… clients asked for Evas, specifically Evas. And your son isn’t exaggerating when he says it’s a matter of life or death.’

  Sansimón Senior stood and stared at him for a few seconds, then, without another word, turned away to correct the work of a young sculptor, whose delicate hands and studiously hesitant speech gave him away as an artist or Fine Arts student. The son took the opportunity to bring the tour to an end.

  ‘Come on, let’s go to the office and shake on it,’ he said, leading him away by the arm.

  * * *

  ‘I leave the little workshop to my old man, for sentimental reasons, you know,’ Sansimón explained once they were back in his office. ‘To be perfectly frank with you, it makes a loss, but what can you do? We’re all ruled by our hearts, and it keeps him busy and leaves me to run the rest of the show. Sure you don’t want them gilded? A few pesos extra and I can have her looking like royalty.’

  ‘Look,’ said Marroné, opening his palms on the table as if showing his hand, ‘the minute it’s all over, we’ll be chucking the lot out of the eighth-floor window, I can assure you. They mean nothing to us, you understand. Peronist Party novelties. So if I have them gilded, the boss might not look too kindly on it. When they let him go, I mean.’

  ‘I don’t mean to put a jinx on him or anything, but that “when” of yours is a big “if”. Look what they did to his partner.’

  ‘We’re making huge sacrifices to get the ransom money together. A cent saved is a cent nearer our target,’ Marroné repeated a phrase from one of Govianus the accountant’s listless harangues. ‘All of us, from the managers to the lowliest operator, have been donating 15 per cent of our salaries to the ransom fund for the last six months.’

  ‘Lucky bastard, that Tamerlán. If I was in his shoes, this lot of bloody leeches would as soon have me cut into little pieces as part with one red cent. Back again last week, they were. More demands. About falling wages this time. Tell me something I don’t know. Here we are up to our necks in it like half the country, but instead of downsizing so the boat won’t sink, their lordships punch more holes in it. Good job we got shot of the ringleaders before things spiralled out of control, otherwise… I’ve got a personnel manager worth his weight in gold, a godsend he is.’

  ‘So they won’t make a stink over the busts?’

  ‘Who?’ Sansimón had understood perfectly, but he was feeling cocky now and wanted to talk himself up.

  ‘You know. The union.’

  ‘Who with? Me? The boss? We play golf every weekend, me and the general secretary. Still holds his club like a mop, but what can you do? Pulled himself up by his bootstraps he did. They had a ballot recently and if the union wasn’t nicked from him by them – what do you call ’em now, oh yeah – hardliners, it was with a little help from his friends – this friend. Had to sack qualified staff I did, ’cause the stupid bastards had joined the opposition. But you know how it is: you want to fuck in the grass, you have to fumigate for red ants. Commie infiltrators, that’s the problem these days. Which is why…’ Sansimón broke off mid-sentence to flash the butt of a gun that could have been a Colt or a Smith & Wesson, Marroné couldn’t tell, ‘… I never leave the house without it. By the way, there was something I meant to ask you, just between you and me.’ Sansimón leant forwards in treacherous confidence. ‘Is it true they snatched Tamerlán in a poofters’ sauna? That some Monto had to put his arse on the line for the Revolution?’

  Marroné didn’t really know what to say: not only did he have proof that the rumour was true, he even knew that the Montonero who’d acted as bait had received special training from a Chinese pederast to clamp his buttocks shut doggy-style and keep Sr Tamerlán there until his accomplices could take him away. The bodyguards had already been taken out by two sexy young guerrillas dressed as whores, who lured them into adjacent rooms where their comrades were waiting. Marroné tried to look suitably sorrowful, but in his heart of hearts he couldn’t deny that his compunction coexisted with a certain gleeful vengefulness, a feeling shared by many in the company, though they would never admit it. Things had backfired on Tamerlán for once. Outwardly at least there was tacit agreement not to reveal more than strictly necessary, and indeed the official media reports were of the usual kidnapping in a car and bodyguards killed in the line of duty… Just then, Marroné found an opportunity to change the subject.

  ‘The chair-lifts… They’ve stopp
ed,’ he said to Sansimón.

  Sansimón turned to the inside window and saw that the chair-lifts had indeed stopped moving, save for a gentle swaying, and that the occupants, seated or standing, were yelling through their megaphones instructions that couldn’t be made out through the thick glass panes.

  ‘What the…’ Sansimón began to say, rising from his chair, when the door of his office imploded and six or seven workers in different-coloured helmets, wearing leather jackets over their work clothes, barged in en masse.

  ‘This factory has been occupied by its workers, Sr Sansimón. From this moment on all the management shall remain on the premises as hostages,’ reeled off a slim fifty-year-old wearing a white helmet. The white helmet on the head of a worker spoke for itself: power had quite obviously changed hands. Marroné had a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach: a mute disappointment, tinged less with surprise than the confirmation of a basic unhinging between himself and the world. Things had been going too well.

  Sansimón hit the red button on the intercom.

  ‘Security!’

  ‘Here they are.’

  The wall of workers parted just enough to reveal the three security guards, from whose belts, relieved of their heavy burden of truncheons and guns, empty clips hung inert.

  ‘They was too quick for us, boss,’ said the oldest guard, a fat, moustachioed man who had every appearance of a retired policeman. ‘There was nothing we could do.’

  In a gesture more desperate than prudent, Sansimón’s right hand scuttled crab-like towards his left armpit, and Marroné spun round in his chair to see all seven strikers, with almost tactful synchronisation, open their jackets to display an array of automatics and revolvers, some of which had no doubt been seized from the guards. In an instant – the one when it dawned on him he was sitting right in the line of fire – Marroné saw his whole life flash, film-like, before his eyes. He saw himself standing at the centre of a shameful pool of pee in the house of the little girl next door (his earliest memory?); he saw himself fleeing down dark corridors from the Paraguayan maid who was lashing him with a wet floor cloth; he saw the exasperated face of his kindergarten teacher telling him his mother would never come to pick him up if he didn’t stop crying; he could feel the goosebumps on his shorts-clad legs during winter break-times at St Andrew’s and in his chest the anguish of only winning the bronze medal for reciting a poem that opened Up into the cherry tree, Who should climb but little me?; he relived the humiliation of drowning in the school swimming pool and being saved by Mr Trollope, who had to dive in fully clothed; his father’s exasperated reproach when his gun went off accidentally at the Federal Shooting Range ricocheted again around his empty skull (‘You’re no use even at this’); again he felt his soul empty from his body with his first premature ejaculation, again he saw the whore’s look of sadistic scorn as she made him wipe up the juvenile dribble that would soon be a river of humiliation, swollen by all the subsequent premature discharges until dammed up by a ministering angel, who immediately reappeared in a bridal dress, standing beside a wedding-cake figurine that bore his face; again he whirled through the vortex of blood and other substances he never imagined could issue from a wife, only to wake up on a stretcher, to the news that his son had been born with the correct number of fingers and chromosomes; he saw himself back in his apartment on the Stanford campus, trying to concentrate on Blake & Mouton, while through the wall came the exasperated cries of his child and through the window the moans of teenagers who appeared to attend college for the sole purpose of humping in the grounds night and day; he saw himself back in San Francisco for a brief visit that culminated in a panic-stricken stroll through the gayhippiepsychedelia terrors of Haight-Ashbury; and then straight down the rabbit hole, all the way to that first meeting with Tamerlán in Valhalla, a scene he knew – had always known – would be the last one his eyes would see before they sank into final darkness. All in all it was, he had to admit – and it made him rather sad to bid the world farewell on such a melancholy note – a rather dull movie. Then, just as his mind had begun to articulate the desire for a second chance, to try to live a better, fuller life, his wish was granted: realising the game was up before it began, Sansimón raised his hands and allowed a striker with a blue helmet and acromegalic chin to remove the Smith & Wesson from its holster and hand it to the man in the white helmet. No sooner was Sansimón allowed to put his hands on his desk than he was on the offensive again.