The Adventure of the Busts of Eva Perón

by Carlos Gamerro

  ‘Well, we were educated to be leaders, weren’t we? And from what I can see they didn’t do such a bad job on you,’ added Marroné with a wink of complicity that ricocheted off Paddy’s frown.

  ‘No, Ernesto, that’s where you’re wrong. I’m respected here because I’m one of them. And learning to be one of them was the hardest thing I’ve done in my life.’

  ‘Well… I mean… Couldn’t you do more for them from a management post – or a political post? Even… I dunno, listen to me, even a union lawyer? You could be one, if you finish your training.’

  ‘You’re falling into the trap of bourgeois reformism,’ Paddy shot back at him. ‘Look, Ernesto, you may find it hard to believe, but the days of capitalism are numbered. There is no other future than the Revolution, and the Revolution can only be led by proletarians.’

  ‘This lot?’ asked Marroné incredulously, casting his eyes over the truck-drivers, who, having made short work of their first demijohn, had started cracking dirty jokes and were rolling about laughing. ‘Are you sure? Have you asked them?’

  ‘That’s because it hasn’t occurred to them yet. They want it but they don’t know they want it. It’s called alienation. Simple as that. Their class situation makes them proletarians who need to start the Revolution to end exploitation and thereby class society. Those are their objective conditions. But because of alienation their class consciousness is still bourgeois, so subjective conditions aren’t fulfilled: they don’t know they can and have to start the Revolution. This divorce between their objective and subjective conditions is what’s holding back the Revolution for the time being. It’s like saltpetre and sulphur: as long as they’re separate, nothing happens; put them together and you get gunpowder. The communist old guard thought the solution was to educate the proletariat so that they would develop a revolutionary consciousness. A huge effort with little to show for it. This solution is far simpler: Columbus’ egg; the Copernican Revolution of the Revolution. If the mountain won’t come to Muhammad, Muhammad must go to the mountain.’

  ‘Wasn’t it the other way round?’

  ‘No. We’re Muhammad. In them, the objective conditions have been met, but not the subjective ones; with us it’s the other way round. We do know it’s necessary to make the Revolution, but because we’re bourgeois, if we wage it on our own, it’ll be a bourgeois revolution, like the French Revolution.’

  ‘Of course. And they cut lots of heads off, didn’t they.’

  ‘The heads are immaterial, Ernesto. Listen to me. If we become proletarians, we’re mixing saltpetre and sulphur. We’ll be proletarians with a revolutionary consciousness, and when we’ve become true proletarians, the original proletarians – the masses – will follow us. Do you see how it works?’

  Marroné nodded. Paddy had a talent for making himself understood. A shame he didn’t have the equipment to give an audiovisual presentation.

  ‘Ok… And does it work?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘This… proletarianisation thing.’

  ‘Well… to stop living like a bourgeois is easy enough. For better or worse we all did it as kids, right? When we got into the hippie thing or backpacking.’

  Marroné gave a non-committal nod.

  ‘But we were just slumming it. The really difficult thing is to stop thinking or seeing or feeling like a bourgeois. Bourgeois consciousness is the most insidious thing going. It’s like an evil spirit that deceives you about everything, everything…’

  Marroné was about to mention the wise enchanters in Don Quixote: The Executive-Errant, but Paddy was in full flow and he couldn’t get a word in edgeways.

  ‘Becoming one of the people is like an exorcism, like purging the evil spirit from your body. But even so… Take me: my life’s now impeccably proletarian… but at night I still have bourgeois dreams. Look, to give you an idea… the other day me and some comrades from the factory here went to the match, and afterwards to celebrate… you can guess where. Because I hesitated, I got the last girl in line, a young girl from the north who must have been under thirty but looked like she was going on fifty, with this double chin… Goitres are endemic in the Puna, you know. A drop of iodine in their diet and the problem’s solved, but they’re Collas of course, so who gives a damn about them… She was wearing this red PVC mini-skirt and laddered fish-net stockings and a blonde wig, and when she smiled at me the teeth that weren’t gold were black and rotten… And I forced myself to think of her people, who’ve suffered nearly five centuries of oppression, and of the subhuman conditions of hunger and poverty she must have grown up in, the feudal exploitation she must have suffered in her land and the sexual exploitation here in the capital… And I reminded myself that physical beauty is a bourgeois privilege proletarians can’t afford and that aesthetic norms are imposed on us by the First World and that a little chola, especially in traditional dress and not the synthetic garbage we sell them, can look prettier than a Swedish model… But I just couldn’t get it up, see, nothing doing, and in the end to stop her giving me away to my comrades I shut my eyes and thought of Monique. I thought of Monique the whole time to get through it.’ Paddy ended the story on a note of sadness, his eyes lost in the pale lunar lawn.

  ‘Are you and Monique still together?’

  Paddy let out a loud, sarcastic snort.

  ‘Yeah, right! She works as a model by day and drops round my bedsit to rustle me up some spaghetti on the Primus at night. We separated the day I became an activist.’

  ‘Oh. Sorry to hear that.’

  ‘I’m not. Monique was a trap. You have to be awake, wide awake… So, tell me. What were you doing with the notebook when the comrades caught you?’

  Marroné reeled off the spiel he had prepared.

  ‘I was just jotting down their names because I think of the strikers as individuals, not an anonymous mass. I came down to look for one of the ringleaders to organise a joint activity, a kind of workshop, for office staff and workers, so the two sectors could get to know each other better and maybe find out that their ideas, their problems, their interests aren’t that different after all… Actually, I’d thought they could spend an afternoon – today if you’re on-board – making a series of plaster figures…’ he took a deep breath before the plunge, ‘… of Eva Perón, as a token of fellow feeling between blue and white collar… But, as even the workers are “white” here, the first step’s already been taken,’ he concluded with affable acumen.

  Paddy stared hard at him, without even blinking, then shook his head like a father about to reveal to his son the true identity of Father Christmas.

  ‘It won’t work, Ernesto. Like the typical petits bourgeois they are, office workers do their level best to live up to the bourgeoisie, which they aspire to, and to differentiate themselves from the proletariat, which they’re terrified of slipping into. They may occasionally form a tentative alliance with the proletariat if they think they have something to gain, but when it’s their arses on the line, you just watch how fast they throw in the towel. That’s why the only option, Ernesto, is to proletarianise yourself. If you like… I can give you a hand.’

  ‘Well… thanks…’ said Marroné, trying to buy some time, ‘I’d have to think about it.’

  They’d reached the foot of the statues’ cemetery, a towering mountain of broken or faulty pieces shining in the sun like a snow-capped peak. Marroné scoured the rubble in the vain hope of discovering a forgotten trove of chipped but still usable busts of Eva, but the nearest thing he found was a torso of Marilyn trying to push down her skirt to hide the fact that her legs were missing. Paddy rolled a battered Corinthian column over to him and, sitting astride an Ionic one, invited him to do the same.

  ‘Look,’ said Paddy after a second’s pause, alluding to the mountain of smashed pieces with a wave of his hand. ‘What do you see?’

  Marroné ran his eyes over the jumbled heap: cracked mouldings, split columns, shattered amphorae, a legless David, a Discobolus whirling his stump, the mask
s of comedy and tragedy with missing jaws so you couldn’t tell which was which, a ballerina tying the laces of a non-existent dance shoe, a Perón with a broken nose who resembled the Sphinx, an armless Botticelli Venus that looked like the Venus de Milo, a headless Venus de Milo that looked like a wingless Victory of Samothrace, the two halves of an Aztec calendar…

  ‘There’s a very high proportion of damaged pieces. The productivity index…’

  ‘There you go again. You see everything from a business viewpoint. You don’t think about the meaning of human labour. What does it mean to make these copies?’

  ‘Errrr…’ Knowing that, however hard he thought, the evil spirit of the bourgeoisie would put the wrong answer in his mouth, he chose to gain time with an innocuous vowel sound.

  ‘Exactly. Nothing. Ours is a culture of copies, imitations, replicas, and shoddy workmanship on top of that. Look at this,’ he said, picking up a Pietà in which, rather than swooning his last, Christ melted like mozzarella over his mother’s knees, who contemplated him more in disgust than in sorrow. ‘Who could confuse this miscarriage with Michelangelo’s original? We try to be like them and this is what we come up with,’ he said, tossing it back on the mound. ‘This mountain of ruins, of tack and broken replicas, is a monument to the borrowed culture we have tried to assemble out of our masters’ leftovers. We content ourselves with fragments, with copies of copies, and, by fixing our eyes on them, we blinker ourselves to our own reality.’

  Paddy had a point. Staring so hard at the broken pieces had dazzled him, and several little piles spun in a kaleidoscope of black residual images on his retinas.

  ‘Europe’s finished, like Fanon says. We have to leave it behind. You’d better start getting used to the idea. We have to travel light on this trip. And the day we arrive, we’ll have to burn the boats.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Paddy pulled the two halves of the Aztec calendar from the immense pile and put them together so the break was invisible.

  ‘When we’re like this,’ he said, holding together the solar disc, ‘we’ll have to forget all this.’ His bright eyes cast a doleful glance over five millennia of useless western culture gathered in a sad heap of broken images at their feet. ‘Paris. El Greco. Shakespeare,’ he mused, with anticipated nostalgia.

  Marroné decided to add a healthy dash of dissent.

  ‘But you used to like Shakespeare.’

  ‘True. Remember when we read Julius Caesar?’

  ‘Yeees,’ he began hopefully, thinking he could steer the conversation towards Mark Antony’s speech, considered by both Dale Carnegie and R Theobald Johnson as the best Shakespeare had ever written.

  ‘A play where the revolutionaries who want to save the republic are depicted as villains, and the dictator and his henchmen as heroes. And the people? They’re either portrayed as idiots who let themselves be led by the nose or as a savage mob that goes around murdering people indiscriminately and torching everything in sight. If Shakespeare had been Argentinian, he’d have had Peronist mobs sticking their feet in the fountain and burning down the churches – the whole shooting match. I’m telling you, it couldn’t be more anti-Peronist if it had been written by Borges rather than Shakespeare.’

  Marroné gulped twice before answering. He was having trouble applying the principles of Dale Carnegie to Paddy’s conversations. Very serious trouble.

  ‘But we have a lot to learn from reading his plays,’ implored Marroné. ‘From Hamlet, for example…’

  ‘Yeah, I’ll give you that. A critical reading of Hamlet could help you make the leap from intellectual doubt to revolutionary certainty. If Hamlet would just stop navel-gazing, he’d realise there’s a world outside the palace walls: beyond them the people of Denmark await him. If he’d taken the side of the people, all his doubts and hesitations would have evaporated as if by magic: he’d enter the winter palace with fire and sword, and wreak his revenge, because it would no longer be in the name of his father – who, let’s face it, was just another oligarch – but in the name of the oppressed Danish masses,’ he concluded. Then, after a barely perceptible pause: ‘Ernesto, I want to ask you something, and I want you to answer me as honestly as you can. What does Eva Perón mean to you?’

  The question took him completely by surprise. In despair he reached for a rule from How to Win Friends and Influence People, but his mind had gone blank.

  ‘Errr… The Spiritual Mother of all Argentine Children… The Plenipotentiary Representative of the Workers… The First Argentinian Samaritan…’ He salvaged the phrases from his childhood memories, trying to wring from them the sarcastic tone his father used to give them as he spat them through clenched teeth. But he couldn’t quite manage it. ‘Perón’s wife. I don’t know. Nothing,’ he eventually admitted.

  ‘So,’ said Paddy as if he’d been given the answer he was expecting, ‘what do you want the busts for?’

  ‘It’s for an order,’ said Marroné, trying to contain his growing exasperation. ‘I’m head of procurement for a construction company, and they sent me to purchase them. My brief is to get quality, price and, above all in this case, fast delivery, which, incidentally, your blessed occupation is making rather difficult. I’m not after the Holy Grail, just a few mass-produced plaster busts. It isn’t much to ask. Couldn’t you just cut the crap and run them off for me, eh? Make my life a little easier? Some of us can’t afford to just drop everything and devote ourselves to changing the world. We have responsibilities, a job, a family to keep… I’m sorry,’ he said, wiping the sweat from his brow with the back of his hand. ‘I don’t know what came over me. Must be the heat.’

  ‘It’s all right, Ernesto, don’t worry. It’s a start.’

  ‘The start of what?’ Marroné asked with a trace of alarm.

  ‘Cuba wasn’t liberated in a day. I sent them packing the first time they came to talk to me too. But here I am,’ came Paddy’s oblique reply.

  ‘Who talked to you? What about?’

  ‘Look, I’ve got to go now. There are so many things we have to see to… It’s extremely important that the strike goes well because it’s a rehearsal for something bigger… If the workers see they can do this, they’ll want more… We can’t fail them.’

  ‘Who are you? What do you want?’

  ‘I’ll bring you some reading matter tonight. And tomorrow, if you still want to know who we are, we can talk some more. I’m not saying we don’t bite… The thing is who. Oh, and another thing,’ he added with a knowing wink before leaving, ‘I promise you that, if we start production again, I’ll do everything in my power to give priority to your ninety-two busts.’

  * * *

  He realised something was amiss when he entered the cathedral and saw the hail of forms, receipts, invoices, carbon-paper, memos, chequebooks, letters, envelopes, folders, box-files, typewriter ribbons and other office equipment fluttering like confetti, hanging from the banisters in streamers and garlands, carpeting the floor and the machines, and lending the factory the general appearance of city streets at the start of the office workers’ holidays. The area in front of the service lift was littered with aluminium food trays and disembowelled ham and cheese rolls, and when he looked up at the internal balcony, he caught sight of yet another tray, spinning as it fell, orbited by floating rolls, and had to leap aside to avoid it. As he climbed the spiral staircase, he could hear a confused buzz of hysterical shouting and laughter, and when he reached the platform, his suspicions were confirmed: the office workers had run riot, and were charging up and down the gangways and platforms with armloads of card-index boxes and box-files that they hurled over the banisters with whoops of jubilation. Led by Gómez and Ramírez, a picket line of administrative staff were attempting to storm the offices of the executives, who had set up barricades of filing cabinets and other office furniture, and were putting up resistance from within, the office workers shouting slogans like ‘Down with privilege!’, ‘We won’t eat rubbish!’, ‘Tarts for overtime!’ and
, from those within, a mixture of threats and entreaties: ‘We can talk it over!’, ‘We’ll sack the lot of you!’, ‘Calm down and we’ll talk!’ The two commissars had lost control of the situation and, leaning over the banisters, were shouting to their comrades.

  Ramírez embraced Marroné exultantly when he saw him.

  ‘You were right, Marroné! It was just a matter of daring! We can if we want to!’

  Horrified, Marroné tried to explain to him that they hadn’t grasped the gist of his proposal, but Ramírez was already off somewhere else and didn’t hear him. Some of the men were lighting their ties as if they were the Stars and Stripes, while others had torn off their shirts and were jumping about in their vests, wheeling them over their heads and chorusing ‘He cheats, he farts, he takes it up the arse! Sansimón, Sansimón!’ and ‘Garaguso is a wanker and he shags for Sansimón!’; the women, with Nidia and Dorita at their head, were hammering their shoes on the floor to break off their high heels, and two maniacs (one of whom was none other than the irreproachable González) were lugging the big pot of hot coffee brought to them by the workers in order to tip it over the railings; but, stumbling headlong into a fallen typewriter, they tripped and spilt its entire contents over the terrified Marroné, who for the third time in two days thought his final hour had come, until he realised the coffee was lukewarm and had succeeded only in ruining his James Smart suit and Italian shoes.

  ‘What the hell do you think you’re playing at, you bloody fools!’ he blurted out.

  González’s blue eyes opened wide in genuine concern.

  ‘Ernesto! My God! Are you all right? Let me help you!’ he stammered, stretching out an inept pair of hands towards the sodden suit.

  ‘Don’t touch me! Don’t touch me!’ shrilled Marroné, on the brink of hysteria, slapping the hands away. He regretted it immediately when he saw the hurt expression in the two blue puddles looking back at him.

  ‘It was an accident,’ murmured González, about to blub.