‘What about seniority?’ asked Fernández in concern.
‘With all due respect, Fernández, they’ll tell you to stick it up your jumper. Everyone’s equal, so tough shit. And another thing that’s out: pensions. From now on you work till you drop down dead like they do in Russia.’
Open-mouthed, the old man was shaking like a leaf.
‘Don’t listen to him, Fernández. He’s just messing with you,’ Nidia reassured him.
‘What I reckon is that we should join the strike in support of our comrades in the Terrestrial Sector, who are sticking their necks out for us. Why do we always keep our mouths shut? Let’s make our voices heard too. Or have we got nothing to say?’ said Ramírez, working himself into a lather while unsticking the sweaty pink shirt from his torso.
‘That Christmas box they owe us, for example,’ chimed in a blue-eyed forty-something in a brown suit, who answered to the name of González.
‘And the holidays,’ added a bald man called Suárez, who, in spite of the heat that marbled his forehead with sweat, was still wearing his jacket and tie.
‘And while we’re at it,’ the man in brown upped the ante, ‘the coat-stand issue… Look at the state of my jacket… I still have two instalments to pay on it and it’s already out of shape.’
Marroné stopped listening and devoted himself to studying these men and women whose company he had kept for barely an hour and whose souls held no further secrets for him: people with no horizons who had never taken a creativity course in their lives or ever heard of Dale Carnegie, R Theobald Johnson or Edward de Bono. His eyes alighted upon an easel on which sat a large pad of paper, of the type commonly used in business presentations. In that dust-covered lectern on which the inert pages had yellowed without ever bearing the fruit of gung-ho sloganeering, in the dry marker pens that would barely leave a mark, Marroné saw a symbol of all that wasted potential. Plenty of colour in the machines, plenty of chair-lifts, but the reality of the office was still the same uniform grey, a cesspool of routine, of disenchantment, resentment and envy, from which an office worker was released only in retirement or death. It was so easy to blame the system, the company, the bosses. But what attitude did those very office workers adopt when offered the opportunity to change? Marroné had experienced first-hand how difficult it was to ‘motivate the troops’ in that kind of environment. Bent on putting into practice in his own procurement department what he had learnt in a work environment workshop he’d attended in the United States, called ‘The Kindergarten Office’, he had met with – instead of acceptance and enthusiasm – reactions that ranged from indifference to open or concealed boycott. His proposal that everyone undergo a few days’ training (which he himself would coordinate for free) was greeted by his employees with a petition to the union, and he only managed to defuse the mood and persuade them to take part when he offered to hold it during working hours. He had even less luck with the workshop ‘Buy While You Play’, which would have consisted of a Sunday outing to the Tigre Fruit Market and a subsequent feedback session, but the mere idea of devoting part of their sacrosanct Sunday to work-related tasks unleashed an outright mutiny that included the sending of a delegation to Govianus the accountant and a week-long go-slow; not to mention Govianus’s answer when Marroné asked him for permission to hold it on a weekday: ‘A minibus, Marroné? To go to Tigre? To buy fruit? On a Monday?’ (‘Breaking Mondays’ was another of the innovative ideas he’d disembarked with.) ‘What a super idea! But tell me… will a minibus be big enough? Why don’t we lay on a school bus instead, to make the journey more comfortable? Because I imagine you won’t think of leaving the rest of us behind… And where shall we go on Tuesday? How about the zoo?’ But Marroné wasn’t disheartened by these remarks: abandoned by his superiors and distrusted by his subordinates, he was more determined than ever to forge ahead. First he tried to seduce them: he bought them all plants, but they were dead from lack of water before the month was out (save one plucky Pothos, which, after turning yellow and losing nearly all its leaves, stubbornly survived so as to remind him day after day of the futility of his efforts); he stayed behind after hours one Friday night to surprise them first thing Monday morning with a poster titled ‘Choose Your Attitude For The Day’, below which ‘Option 1’ depicted a face with knitted brow and ‘Option 2’ a smiley face, but not a week had gone by before someone had drawn an erect prick in the smiley’s mouth and glasses on the frowning face with an arrow saying ‘Govianus’, and he’d had to take it down; his employees, of course, accused the other departments, though Marroné’s own suspicions ran higher still, and he spent all that week studying the features of Cáceres Grey with ill-concealed suspicion. The brief maxims he wrote on different-coloured notelets posted around the office ‘at random’ were systematically sabotaged: if he wrote ‘You can’t always get what you want but you can want what you get’, someone would add in pencil ‘I got cancer’; and to his ‘In spite of everything, the sun shines’, some joker (probably the same) had added ‘I got skin cancer’. When he instituted his policy of ‘Catch your employee doing something right’ and spent a week pouncing on them and shouting ‘Aha! Gotcha! You’re doing a good job!’, the longest-serving member of the department, Ochoa, came on the others’ behalf to ask him to desist from a practice that had them with their hearts in their mouths every hour of the working day (‘We understand you’re doing it with the best of intentions, Sr Marroné…’). In the end he’d just given up: the coloured balloons that, in one desperate, last-ditch attempt, he’d bought in a novelty shop, and blown and hung up with Mariana’s help (that day he made the heart-stopping discovery that she didn’t wear tights but stockings and suspenders) gradually deflated over the next few weeks until, depressed at the sight of them hanging shrivelled and dusty, looking for all the world like used condoms, he stayed behind one evening after hours to take them down so no one would see. The only tangible result of all his efforts had been to make himself the laughing stock of the other executives, who made him the butt of their jibes in their lunch breaks in the canteen: they would, for example, ask him with a sorry look for advice on how to motivate an unwilling member of staff and then, when Marroné had enthusiastically embarked on his spiel, sneeze and emerge from their handkerchief wearing a red nose and saying ‘Will this do the trick?’, which would then set the others off, and the procurement department came to be known as ‘Circus Marroné’ in allusion to a hideous TV clown whose surname, Marrone, was but an unaccented version of his own.
At that moment Marroné ‘caught himself’ succumbing to the toxic energy of discouragement and frustration, to the impotence of ‘it’s impossible to change a thing in this country with people like this’. ‘No!’ he told himself forcefully. ‘No!’ The risk of doing nothing is always greater than that of taking action: you don’t lose faith in yourself when you fail, only when you stop trying. He looked around through different eyes, watchful and vibrant, and full of decision.
The mood was hotting up. The young, idealistic, pink-shirted Ramírez had apparently gone on haranguing them, and Gómez had finally had enough.
‘Oh, so you don’t understand us. Is that it? No, of course you don’t. It must be hard for someone like you. Because you’re different, aren’t you, you can spot it a mile off… You used to be a student, didn’t you? What of?’
‘History…’ Ramírez replied, fighting off with a defiant gesture the slight stammer Gómez’s sibylline haughtiness had started to cause him.
‘History…’ Gómez said, repeating each syllable carefully as if savouring a fine wine. ‘Yes, of course. That explains it. It must give you a different way of looking at things, a different… what do you lot call it?… perspective. Because all this is just temporary for you, isn’t it. Whereas we’re buried alive here… You probably pity us, don’t you?’
‘Leave him alone, Gómez, don’t be cruel,’ intervened Nidia maternally. But Gómez had tasted blood and liked it.
‘Know how many of your sor
t I’ve seen since I’ve been in here? Want to know what comes next? For the next five years you’ll keep telling yourself it’s just till you get your degree; in ten, that you’re going to pack it in and finish university, but all the while you’ll feel it’d be a shame to give up the benefit of seniority; in twenty you’ll start fantasising about getting yourself fired and setting up a newsagent’s with the indemnity money; and so on, just ticking over till you’ve been here for thirty years and start crossing off how many to go before you retire. No one here gets out alive, sonny. If you had what it takes, you’d never have come here in the first place.’
‘Don’t worry about me,’ said Ramírez defiantly when Gómez had finished. ‘I’ll shoot myself before I end up like you.’ At that moment a young woman with ashen hair and a timid chin, who hadn’t opened her mouth till then, began sobbing softly, and when Nidia gently asked her ‘What’s the matter, Dorita?’, Marroné jotted down the missing name.
‘I hate it when you fight,’ she said, through her tears and sniffles. ‘I find all that violence really upsetting.’
‘Don’t listen to them, silly. You know what men are like. If it isn’t politics, it’s football. They’ll have made up by tomorrow, you’ll see, as if nothing had happened,’ Nidia consoled her. And then to Gómez and Ramírez, ‘You’re a right pair, you two are.’
‘I want to go home,’ Dorita insisted, laying it on thick.
Marroné decided the time had come to intervene. It was now or never.
‘Have any of you ever done any visualisation?’
The seven pairs of eyes fixed on him. He had their attention now. Stage one was complete.
‘Ernesto Marroné, Procurement, Tamerlán & Sons,’ he introduced himself, shaking hands with each in turn and looking them in the eye with a smile to establish a more personal link through direct physical contact. ‘Do you mind if I interrupt for a minute? Because we’re ultimately all in the same boat and, if we all pull in the same direction, we may all go home safe and early. I’ve been following your conversation carefully and the words that kept coming to mind were frustration… discouragement… helplessness… anger. There’s nothing worse than feeling trapped in an unpleasant situation and thinking we can do nothing about it, true? There are times when life feels like a life sentence, and our home or our office the prison we serve it in. Yes it’s true this may not be the best job in the world: it’s routine and boring, and the pay’s never enough. And how do we react to all that? We grumble, we protest, we ask them to give us a raise, to change our job description, to change our boss. And when they don’t, we feel helpless and frustrated. And now I ask you… What have you done to change things? Because if you can’t change your job, you can change the attitude you bring to work. And if you can’t change your boss, you can try and get the boss you’ve been landed with to change. You aren’t happy with your boss… And what makes you think your boss is happy with you? Happy to see faces that reflect nothing day in day out but depression and discontent?’
He paused to gauge his audience’s reaction. Apart from the predictable expression on Gómez’s face, who was smoking a cigarette as much as to say ‘I’ve heard this one before’, he had the undivided attention of the rest of the group, whose ranks had swelled with the arrival of four more office workers – three men and a woman – who had homed in on the change of energy. Marroné was pleased. He had more than half the hostages on his side.
‘Personally I tend to be an optimist. Some,’ he cast a sidelong glance at Gómez, who smiled back politely, ‘would say that being an “optimist” is synonymous with being a dreamer or naive. But “optimist” is derived from “optimise”, which means securing the best conditions even under the most adverse of circumstances. We were talking about prisons just now. I hope that, after all that’s been said, you’ll agree with me that the real prisons are inside us: in our heads, our hearts, our souls… And to escape from them we’ve all been supplied at birth with a file, a hairpin, a skeleton key: creativity. It’s commonly thought that some people are “born” creative,’ Marroné’s fingers notched the air with inverted commas, ‘like inventors, artists, thinkers – and that others aren’t. It’s like saying people are born athletic, or muscular. Creativity is a universal potential, and as such it can be trained with specific exercises designed to trigger “boinks!” in the right side of our brains – the creative side. One of these exercises I was telling you about is visualisation. So… shall we give it a go?’
‘I’ll pass if you don’t mind,’ said Gómez, yawning conspicuously and getting up from his seat. ‘Someone over there looks like they’ve found a newspaper. I’ll see if I can borrow the classifieds. You can tell me about it later.’ He waved goodbye to his colleagues, who, now that the source of toxic energy was at arm’s length, looked more receptive and relaxed.
‘All right then. Please make sure you’re sitting comfortably. If any of your clothing feels too tight, please loosen it: ties, gentlemen; heels, ladies; belts if you’re wearing one. Great. Now, close your eyes and try to relax. Breathe deeply, become aware of every breath you take. Veeery good. Breeeathe. Iiiin. Oooout. You can see blue skies. In the sky there are clouds. Each of the clouds is a negative thought, a source of anxiety. There are days when they all come together and overwhelm you, covering the sky till you can’t see a single crack of blue. But not today. Today each one is a fluffy little white cloud, and you’re just watching them float by overhead. And you feel mooore at ease and mooore relaxed. And every passing cloud is smaller than the one before. Until there are no more clouds at all and your eyes are lost in the immensity of the blue sky. No more anxiety. You’re at peace. It’s time to begin.’
He paused to gauge the participants’ general state of mind and was pleased with what he saw.
‘Darkness,’ he said suddenly, and watched as a rictus of apprehension spread across their relaxed features. ‘You’re in a dark place, so dark you can’t see your hands. You touch the walls: they’re smooth and cold, and as you walk around them you can find no opening. You feel trapped. You want to get out. You can’t breathe.’ Suárez’s forehead was once again marbled with sweat, and he was tugging at his shirt collar as if it were choking him. Time to ease up. ‘Suddenly you see a crack of light at floor level. It’s a door. You open it,’ he said, and saw everyone untense their eyes and breathe with relief. ‘There is some light, and it allows you to see a spiral staircase going down and down, round and round. I’m going to count as you descend. Ten, nine… you’re going down… eight, seven… deeper… six, five, four… deeper and deeper… three… two… one. You’re in a vast building that has the appearance of a cathedral. The light’s pouring in through tall, stained-glass windows. You stroll around among different-coloured machines. You’d like to find out what they do and how they work. All in good time. Now, you come to a metal door. You open it. On the other side there’s a large room with long wooden tables and shelves all the way up to the ceiling. They’re packed with plaster figures. You look at them. You can touch them if you want to. Have you seen how smooth they are? Ever wondered how they’re made? Want to find out? There’s someone standing beside you now. Don’t be alarmed,’ he said, noticing several people start. ‘He’s a friend. He’s wearing a white coat and a red helmet, and he wants you to take his hand. You take it. You let him lead you. In front of you there’s a shallow pan full to the brim with liquid plaster. You sink your hands into it. Feel how cool it is? You stir it round and round, you feel like a child again.’ They were becoming more and more involved in this exercise of the imagination and, in some cases, totally immersed in it: Dorita, for example, was kneading her skirt with clenched hands and rubbing together her thighs and knees while emitting little panting noises. ‘Your friendly worker now leads you over to a series of casts. They all look the same on the outside: you can’t guess what figures lie within. Want to find out? Pour some liquid plaster into the first one. Careful now! Don’t spill any!’ he said with mock severity, and several of them a
ctually jumped, then relaxed again and smiled. ‘One by one, you fill them all. By the time you’ve finished the last, the first one has set. Your friendly worker helps you open it: slowly now, carefully, you don’t want it to break. And as you open it, little by little, you can see a nose, lips, eyes… Who could it be? The suspense! Now you’ve removed the cast and there she is for all the world to see. It’s Eva Perón. Have you made just one bust of Eva? No, lots! For, when you open the next cast, there’s another, and another, and another… All fresh and immaculate. Look at them… Aren’t they beautiful? And you made them! Don’t you feel proud? Now, you leave them to dry. You say goodbye. Goodbye to your friend too. You retrace your steps… no need to rush… you cross the cathedral, you reach the staircase. You start climbing. One… no need to hurry… two, three, four… you keep on climbing… five, six, seven… you’re almost there… eight, nine and… ten. You open your eyes. You’re awake. You’re back in the room, but you’re not the same as before… am I right?’
One by one the participants opened their eyes, rubbed them as if they’d just woken up, and looked about, puzzled, self-conscious, as if returning from a long journey. What exactly was it they’d just experienced? All of them except little old Fernández, that is, who’d fallen asleep during the exercise and was gently snoring, his head lolling over the back of the chair. A couple of shakes and he was awake.
‘Well? How do you feel?’ Marroné asked cheerily.
‘Good, good,’ some answered, while others nodded their approval.
The Adventure of the Busts of Eva Perón Page 9