The Adventure of the Busts of Eva Perón

by Carlos Gamerro

  ‘You, and you, Trejo,’ he said, ‘have no business here. I’ll report you to the union.’

  ‘We’re not in the union any more, Sr Sansimón. We were disaffiliated when you fired us,’ retorted Trejo, adjusting his white helmet.

  ‘For once we understand each other. To go on strike here, you have to work here. But as you don’t work here any more, you can’t go on strike.’

  ‘The first of our demands is the reinstatement of our dismissed comrades,’ croaked a fat man with a green helmet and several days’ stubble, and with one eye veiled by a milky film.

  ‘And what else do you want, eh? Executive salaries? A holiday camp with a golf course? Chauffeur-driven limousines to ferry you to work and back? Jacuzzis in the toilets?’ Sansimón gulped in air with each item instead of releasing it; at this rate he was going to burst like a toad.

  ‘The only thing we want for now, Sr Sansimón, is for you to come with us,’ Trejo said to him.

  Whether it was the man’s intimidating laconic tone or because the invitation was accompanied by emphatic waving of the confiscated gun, Sansimón deflated like a fallen soufflé and, with the last wisp of air, his tiny voice wheezed, ‘What… are you going to do to me?’

  His fear was understandable. Workers might not have been in the habit of executing their bosses during occupations, but the way the reciprocal violence had been escalating it was only a matter of time before they started. Especially now there seemed to be more subversives infiltrating the factories than actual workers.

  ‘Take it easy, boss. We’re peace-lovers, we are. If we’ve come to this, it’s only ’cause you gave us no choice. We’re taking you with the others,’ Trejo reassured him.

  Meek as a lamb, Sansimón allowed himself to be led outside. He didn’t even look at Marroné as he left. Nor did the strikers pay him any attention. Somewhat offended at everybody’s indifference, Marroné decided to speak up.

  ‘Errm, excuse me,’ he ventured.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘What about me?’

  The strikers consulted each other with a rapid exchange of glances, and most of them shrugged.

  ‘You can leave when you like, chief. Only company managers to remain here as hostages,’ the ringleader replied.

  ‘Yes, but there’s a slight problem,’ said Marroné, smiling, searching for the words with utmost delicacy and tact, as if testing fruit in a supermarket. He remembered an anecdote from How to Win Friends and Influence People about Nelson Rockefeller emerging victorious from a tussle with strikers, but couldn’t recall what tactic he had used or even which of the book’s general principles the anecdote was supposed to illustrate. He’d have given a month’s salary to have it handy. ‘Look, mister striker, I can quite understand the justness of your claims, and I believe we should all fight for our rights, providing, of course, we don’t violate the rights of others…’

  ‘Get to the point, chief. We’ve an occupation on our hands in case you hadn’t noticed.’

  ‘That’s exactly my point, because you see I’ve just closed a major deal with the company, I’ve even paid an advance, and if you’re going to halt production, I think it’s only fair that you respect any orders placed before the strike was called, such as mine, for the ninety-two busts of…’

  ‘Oh, so you’re the one who ordered the busts? You’re the one who demanded our comrades in the workshop do piecework and forced us to bring the occupation forward!’ the ringleader broke in, then immediately issued an order to his lieutenants, ‘This one stays as well.’

  Marroné flailed like a drowning man. ‘Listen, co… comrades, these aren’t just any busts. They’re busts of Eva Perón no less: Evita, the Standard-Bearer of the Poor, the Lady of Hope, the Spiritual Leader of the Nation! Will you strike against Eva? What kind of Peronists are you?’

  It was useless, they weren’t listening. Tamely he let himself be led away by the heavy-jawed worker to a sector of the outer gallery where some office workers had gathered, several of whom were leaning on the banister watching the scenes playing out on the shop floor. Most of the foremen were still hanging in their chair-lifts like canaries on swings, some still hurling hoarse threats through their megaphones, others by now resigned to waiting for the strikers to get them down, using a system that had seemingly been adopted less out of efficiency than revenge: below one of the nearest chair-lifts several workers were holding a tarpaulin, stretched as tight as a drum-skin, and were urging the foreman to jump.

  ‘Come on, mate, we ain’t got all day, eh.’

  ‘Jump, mate, jump! We’ll be here for you.’

  The foreman was doing his best to get to his feet, but his knocking knees wouldn’t let him and he slumped back into his seat; he eventually made it up and, clinging on to one of the vertical bars with rigid, corpse-like hands, he gingerly put one leg, then the other, over the horizontal bar and, wobbling on legs that had started doing the Charleston of their own accord, readied himself for the big jump.

  ‘Don’t run off on me, lads, you could do me a serious injury,’ he implored from his perch. ‘Remember I always treated you decently.’

  Marroné had never heard anyone beg through a megaphone before: it created a rather odd effect. Out of the corner of his eye he noticed the office workers beside him had started laying bets: ‘A hundred says he jumps! Two hundred says he doesn’t! Three hundred says he hits the deck!’

  ‘Get a move on, will you! We got all the plaster in Paris if you break a leg.’ The foreman leant forwards and they all ran off with the tarpaulin, shouting ‘Olé!’ The poor sod above clung to his vertical bar like a stripper and then, whiter than any of the surrounding plaster, he wailed, ‘Oy! Stop playing silly buggers will you, don’t be so bloody daft!’

  He was practically in tears and the workers were beneath him again, but the canvas rose and fell with their laughter like a cellophane sea, offering little in the way of safety.

  At last the poor devil crossed himself swiftly, closed his eyes and leapt into the void. He landed bang in the middle of the tarpaulin, which gave almost all the way to the floor and then, answering the unanimous call of the six pairs of strong arms, bulged up and out, and launched him high into the air again. Then the blanketing began. During his first few pirouettes the foreman was still up to cursing the strikers and threatening them with reprisals, but as his somersaults got further and further from the ground, and his arms and legs flailed in the air more and more desperately, he went back to begging and pleading, and in the end just clenched his jaw and held on tight to his helmet in case it came off and he lost his teeth on it in one of the falls. Less out of mercy than weariness the workers finally deposited him on the ground and set off with their tarpaulin in search of another victim to rescue.

  Later in the day one of the commissars came by and issued a directive to separate the management from the office staff; Marroné was herded with the execs into Sansimón’s office, where, having recovered from the shock, the man himself ushered them in with a cheery ‘Ah, Macramé, still here?’ and introduced him to the members of his crisis cabinet: Aníbal Viale, the chief financial officer; Arsenio Espínola, the marketing manager; Garaguso, the personnel manager; and Cerbero, head of security, whose names Marroné jotted down in his notebook as soon as he had the chance. He asked for permission to use the phone and it was magnanimously granted by Sansimón, but no sooner did he reach for the receiver than an ‘Oy, you! What you doing?’ from one of the two commissars guarding them made him leap backwards as if the telephone had snarled at him. ‘All communication with outside suspended till further notice,’ the commissar told him, revelling in his bureaucratic tone, and Marroné was just able to make out the mocking grins exchanged by Sansimón and his men.

  ‘Welcome to Socialist Argentina, Macramé,’ Sansimón said to him tongue-in-cheek before returning to the dialogue of signs and whispers he and his management had been conducting.

  Around midday two new workers came to relieve the guards and the personnel
manager hailed them with a ‘Baigorria, Saturnino, great to have you back with us, you don’t know how much we missed you!’ With the changing of the guard came some rolls and two litre-bottles of Fanta, which Sansimón and his management team shared out with an egalitarian disdain that duly included him. They had a radio on to catch the news, but there was no mention whatsoever of their plight, understandably so, since for some time now more factories, companies and government buildings were occupied than still in the hands of their rightful owners. What worried Marroné most was that the company might not have heard what had happened and attribute his inexplicable absence to negligence or – worse still – bad faith, and what annoyed him most was that he hadn’t brought with him any of the management books he so enjoyed and which would have at least allowed him to extract some benefit from the bleak hours of waiting, which his comrades in captivity spent playing cards, sleeping in shifts on the white leather sofa or practising their putting with Sansimón’s putter and a plastic cup. At one point he tried to interest Garaguso in the advantages of applying the techniques of How to Win Friends and Influence People to the settlement of union disputes. ‘Yeah, yeah, I did that course too,’ Garaguso interrupted him soon after he’d started, ‘but I’d like to see Dale Carnegie take on these babes in arms with his sincere praises and friendly smiles. There are two and only two ways to influence a certain class of people: gold or lead. And as head of procurement you surely realise that lead’s a lot cheaper than gold.’ At about seven o’clock two workers in black helmets brought in the sales manager, who was sweating, dishevelled and sprinkled with white dust; he explained that, tipped off by a loyal worker about the start of the occupation, he’d hidden among the towering sacks of plaster and stayed put until he’d been captured making a break for the outside to bring back reinforcements. ‘They’re highly organised and synchronised,’ he remarked in a whisper to cap his account. ‘This isn’t just the workers – they’re getting outside help.’ ‘You don’t say!’ sneered Sansimón, belittling his revelation; then, turning to Garaguso, he said, ‘Remind me of your infallible infiltrator-detection system again, will you? I didn’t quite get it first time round.’ Garaguso shrugged off the jibe and immediately raised his eyebrows inquisitively in the direction of the two commissars, who, in their boredom, were leafing through some magazines, and Sansimón closed and opened his eyes with all the deliberation of a prearranged signal. Garaguso eyed the two of them the way a lion studies a herd of zebra to pick out the weakest and, when his prey looked up from the magazine and they made eye contact, he got up from his seat and nonchalantly started closing in. From where he was, Marroné caught the gist of their conversation.

  ‘Listen, Baigorria. Us bosses wanted to organise one or two things here – of a private nature, you understand, keep it in the family, you know the sort of thing: nothing too flashy, a box of whisky perhaps, some nibbles, quiet hand of cards, couple of scags… Just to kill the time, right? Now that we’re here… And we got to thinking, you know, it’s true what you say about us having to learn to share and that… Socialising, as you call it…’

  Baigorria’s mouth began to water in spite of himself.

  ‘I mean, as we’re all in this together, we should at least have as good a time as possible, are you with me?’ Baigorria nodded eagerly and Garaguso, knowing it was in the bag, pointed almost tactfully to one of the disconnected telephones.

  ‘So… you don’t mind if I make a couple of quick phone calls?’

  Saturnino came over to see what was going on, and Baigorria whispered the glad tidings in his ear. Standing beside Marroné, Sansimón explained the meaning of the ruse.

  ‘At least now we know they’re real workers.’

  ‘How do we know?’ asked Marroné.

  ‘If they were undercover subversives, they’d never have gone for it. Revolutionary morality,’ he elucidated.

  Marroné seized the chance to raise his most pressing concern.

  ‘So tell me… The little matter of the busts… What shall we do about them?’

  Sansimón immediately went on the defensive.

  ‘As you can see, I have no say in the matter any more. You’ll have to discuss it with the boys,’ he said, indicating the two guards with his chin.

  ‘But in that case, the cheque I gave you…’

  ‘Ah, no, that’s another matter. They’ll be delivered, you can be certain of that. Now, if there’s a delay owing to circumstances beyond our control…’

  ‘But you know we need the busts to expedite Sr Tamerlán’s release. If you don’t deliver them soon, they’ll be no use to us at all.’

  ‘Listen… Who are the ones holding him? If I’m not mistaken, it’s the Montoneros, isn’t it?’

  Marroné nodded. Sansimón was leading him somewhere but he couldn’t work out where. There was nothing for it but to go with the flow.

  ‘And who do you think’s behind all that’s going on here?’

  ‘The Montoneros?’

  ‘Correct.’

  ‘Not the union?’

  ‘I’ve got the union in my pocket, sonny. The occupation’s worse for them than it is for us. No, it’s the Montos. So, if the ones asking you to have a bath take the sponge and the soap, it isn’t my problem, or yours – it’s theirs. Am I right or am I right?’

  Marroné did his best to conceal his annoyance.

  ‘The problem…’

  ‘The problem,’ Sansimón interrupted him gruffly, ‘is that this occupation started because I had the bad idea – the very bad idea – of making the workforce do piecework just to save your boss’s arse. Because I trust you’ve learnt something from your tour and don’t expect some crummy little busts to make any difference to the yearly balance. But instead of apologies and gratitude you come to me with demands – worse still, with sly accusations. Next time someone goes down on bended knee asking me for a favour over a matter of life or death, I’ll think with my head, not my heart.’

  Marroné recalled one of the golden rules from How to Win Friends and Influence People: ‘The only way to get the best of an argument is to avoid it’ and he thought it inadvisable to contest such insidious reasoning. The occupation might be over in a matter of hours, as so often happened, and in that case it wasn’t in his interests to get on the wrong side of Sansimón, who had clearly taken offence and treated him with manifest coldness thereafter; an attitude immediately picked up on and aped by his obsequious executives.

  Lunch arrived an hour later. It consisted of a box of real Scotch whisky, another of local champagne, and cold cuts of sliced York ham and pineapple, turkey and glacé cherries, and king prawns and palm-hearts with thousand island dressing. The girls arrived half an hour later: one short and fleshy, the other tall and gangling with a husky voice, and the party got into full swing. Sansimón opened up his radiogram and put on some dance hits and then, while Cerbero and Garaguso strutted their stuff with the girls, began pouring the whisky into cardboard cups. Marroné approached the table, which the caterers had laid with a white tablecloth, and picked up a slice of turkey upon which a phosphorescent cherry sat impaled. Following his example, Baigorria and Saturnino sidled shyly over and stretched out their hands, Baigorria for a palm-heart, whose heart popped out under his rough grip, Saturnino for a king prawn, which he devoured shell and all with an audible crunching and pained expression; but by their third whisky they were wolfing down slices of turkey and ham as if to the manner born, and even allowing Garaguso to put his arms round their shoulders and press home his advantage. When he thought they were ready, he decided it was time to play his trump card and, beckoning them with his finger to watch, he began to pull down the taller prostitute’s panties until, to the fanfare of her shrill, artificial laughter, out popped a limp member, as wrinkled as a prune.