‘What’s happened?! Didn’t you carry on with the activity?’
‘We were working in groups like you told us,’ stuttered González, as if his boss had just shouted at him, ‘and we kept smelling those mouth-watering asados they’re making downstairs… We were sure this time it was for us too. As a token of us joining the struggle, see… But when we saw them coming in again with the same old rolls and burnt coffee… I dunno… we just lost it.’
Paddy was right, Marroné said to himself, grinding his teeth in an effort to restrain himself: it was impossible – im-poss-ib-le – to expect anything from people like this. You set up a visualisation for them and got them working in teams – one of the simplest, most elementary creativity exercises! – and they ended up behaving like schoolchildren on a graduation trip. He looked around in search of a culprit to vent his exasperation on. His eyes lit upon one of the commissars. Lugging the weight of his sodden clothes, coffee running in torrents between cloth and skin and overflowing out of his shoes, he plodded purposefully towards him.
‘You lot,’ he pointed at him with a stiff and trembling finger. ‘You lot are responsible for this. That was my best suit! Made to measure! Just look at it!’
The guard, a young worker of twenty-five with Indian features, looked him up and down before replying.
‘I’ve never had a suit to ruin.’
Marroné wasn’t going to let him get away with that. Not this time. Not in a million years.
‘Don’t give me that. No. Just because you lot have always got social injustice on your side you think you can get away with murder. No way. You want to occupy the factories? Be my guest. You want to take over the country? Go right ahead. But this suit here, you’ll have it cleaned or buy me a new one. We all have to take responsibility for our actions. I demand a solution.’
The worker shrugged.
‘You can drop round the storeroom if you like. They’re sure to have something to change into there.’
As the coffee cooled on Marroné’s body, so did his irritation. There wasn’t much else he could do under the circumstances.
‘Where?’ he asked with resignation.
‘Go down in the service lift and turn right…’
Dorita emerged from the offices and ran to him.
‘Sr Ernesto, are you all right? Did you scald yourself? Can I do anything to help?’
Though her presence right then was more a nuisance than anything, her concern helped to sweeten his mood. He’d been wrong to get annoyed. It wasn’t an intelligent emotion, and stupid emotions were a luxury a man in his situation could ill afford.
‘No, thank you, Dorita. This gentleman has just been kind enough to point me…’
The service lift guillotined Dorita into sections as it descended: first the head with its oddly bright eyes, which followed him down to the last moment, then the plucked-chicken neck, the flat chest, the boyish hips, the skinny thighs showing through the pencil skirt. Last came the bare feet, visible through the weft of her stockings, laddered in the riot. She didn’t have ugly ankles, thought Marroné. Could it be that she had taken a fancy to him?
The storeroom manager, an old worker with blue eyes and white hair, gave him the once-over and grabbed some folded white overalls his size and handed them to him over the counter. He asked him if he wanted socks and shoes too, and Marroné accepted because he disliked the sensation of walking on wet sponges and, if he wanted to save his shoes, the best thing would be not to wear them until he could get them seen to by a decent cobbler.
‘You can have a shower if you like; the changing room’s right next door,’ he said, handing him a towel.
The water was cold but Marroné didn’t care, nor did he care about how rough and cheap the soap was, and he rubbed it with gusto over his stubbly cheeks, his arms, his hairy chest, back, buttocks and genitals, which he covered with a startled shriek when he saw her standing in the doorway, clutching her handbag – draped with a crocheted cotton cardy – in both hands, and watching him with her mouth half-open, her eyes wide. Only when Marroné doubled over and covered himself like a statue bereft of its fig leaf did she back out, mumbling apologies and dropping bag and jacket, which she came back in to retrieve just as Marroné, in an absurd reflex of courtesy, bent to pick them up. He quickly straightened to cover himself and backed away with thighs clamped tight, leaving the items on the floor. Gathering them up, Dorita beat a hasty retreat, while Marroné cast desperately around him as he finished rinsing off the soap: to cap it all he’d left the towel in the changing room and had nothing to cover himself with but a flimsy gold crucifix.
‘Dorita?’ he asked.
‘Yes?’ came her voice from the changing room. She was still there. Damn it.
‘Could you… pass me the towel, please?’
‘Yes, yes. Right away.’
The towel appeared around the tiled corner, floating in the air like a little ghost and, calling to him, shook itself a couple of times. Stretching out an arm, he took it, briskly towelled himself down and tied it around his waist. Dorita was sitting on one of the wooden benches, waiting for him, cheeks flushed, eyes lowered.
‘I’m so sorry, Sr Marroné. I asked for you, and they told me I’d find you down here…’
‘It’s all right. Was there something you needed?’
‘Just to tell you… that what you did for us… I wanted to thank you, nobody’s ever made me feel… like I could contribute something of value… that I’m worth something, as much as the next woman… that I can be creative too, if I look inside myself…’
The towel on Marroné’s lap started to rise like a circus tent, every word of Dorita’s a tug from the dwarfs hoisting it skywards. He found nothing as stimulating as a dose of praise after a successful creativity exercise; there was no way to control it, and even if there had been, it was too late now: Dorita seemed incapable of taking her eyes off the hypnotic pulsing of the charmed cobra under the towel.
‘Would you… mind if I had a shower too? It’s so hot… You can stay, in case someone comes… I’m not embarrassed with you.’
Marroné could see it all before it happened: the scrawny, graceless body running with water under the shower; the fumbling foreplay; the dash to get in the tip if nothing else before his dignity drained away, along with his erection, in two or three brief spasms; and afterwards the concerned questions, the abject explanations, the sincere commiseration, so much more unbearable than outright derision. He took hold of the hand Dorita had tentatively raised to the top button of her blouse and, moving it as far away as possible from the throbbing centre of his being, he looked directly into her eyes and spoke to her.
‘Dorita… I feel grateful for your words and also for… this… But I’m a married man, you know. I love my wife, I have a son of two and a half, and yesterday my dong… my darling daughter was two months old’… ‘and you haven’t had a bowel movement since you got here,’ his meddling mind reminded him absurdly, as if that had anything to do with anything.
Dorita nodded contritely at every word he spoke, as if this was the story of her life. She fought back the tears.
‘Now… If you wouldn’t mind stepping outside for a minute… While I get dressed… Wait for me and we’ll go up together if you like.’
Dorita nodded, chewing her bottom lip, and went to wait for him outside. Since not even his underpants had been spared the deluge of coffee, Marroné pulled his white overalls on, straight over his naked body (he didn’t so much as put them on as climb into them, as if they were a diving suit or a spacesuit), and then the socks and heavy shoes. There was something exciting in his new outfit, especially in the way his still erect member brushed against the coarse cotton: he felt different, looser, bold… even… virile. Just then his eyes lit upon the bundle of sodden clothes and the shoes that, he now knew, would never be the same again, and he was seized by a sudden weariness. He pressed the shoes hard into the heap of clothes, wrapped them up in his suit trousers and tossed the bundle in the bin. ‘Burn
your boats,’ he thought, and when he looked up he met in the mirror the reflection of a stubble-covered face topped with tousled hair and the rugged, set jaw of an explorer on the road to adventure. He undid the top two buttons on his overalls so that his pecs and the start of his clearly defined six-pack – which years of rugby had given him and two gym sessions a week had helped to preserve – were visible in the neckline. He frowned, raised one hand to his chest, clenched the other in a tight fist and smiled to himself: if they’re after a model for the Monument to the Descamisado, they need look no further.
When he went out, Dorita was nowhere to be seen. On his way back to the service lift he ran into a worker in a white helmet who looked upset and came over to talk to him.
‘Off upstairs, comrade?’
‘Yes,’ replied Marroné after a tiny, indiscernible pause.
‘Tell Zenón and Aníbal just to let them go, tell them Trejo said so if they ask.’
‘All of them?’
‘No, no. The bosses stay. Just the administrative staff. The dickheads want to join the strike, they’re cocking up all our organisation.’
When he got there, the office staff were still jumping up and down on the platform, hurling paper in the air and chorusing ‘Jump, jump, jump, Sansimón’s a chump!’ Standing on a chair, his pink shirt drenched with sweat, Ramírez was doing his best to harangue them in a hoarse voice, but the general rejoicing drowned out his proclamations.
‘Comrades. The time has come to shake off the labels of bootlickers, yes-men and wimps that we’re always branded with. History is being rewritten, here, today, at the Sansimón Plasterworks, and this time us office staff are going to stand by the shop-floor workers to the bitter end. If we stick together over this, nobody can stop us, comrades…’
Once he had passed on the news to the two worker guards, calling them by their first names, Zenón and Aníbal (he’d learnt his lesson and decided to shelve the notebook and activate his memory), Marroné saw no reason to delay the good news.
‘The order’s come through from below! You can leave whenever you like!’
A jug of iced water poured into a pan of boiling water could not have been quicker-acting. The pandemonium ceased instantly and initial bemusement crept over the faces of the office staff, to be followed in quick succession, as they looked at those of their neighbours, by guilty relief, shame, embarrassment and, finally, ill-concealed satisfaction. Without saying a word, first one (Suárez), then another (unknown) began to make their way to the office to collect their things and leave. Ramírez tried to stem the flow with some feeble words of persuasion.
‘Comrades… Where are you going? Are we going to miss the chance to show that they’re wrong in what they say: that when the chips are down, we throw in the towel? That we’re all talk? That we wouldn’t say boo to a goose? Don’t you want to stay, so that you can go back to your houses with your heads held high and say that we’ve earned some respect for once? If we leave, comrades… what will we come back to? The same old thing?’
Out of compassion Marroné went over to him.
‘It’s useless, pal. They aren’t listening.’
Ramírez looked at him with blank eyes that showed no sign of understanding or recognition, and then, leaning on Marroné’s shoulder, climbed down from the chair and headed for the office. His colleagues had started queuing up outside the service lift. In their midst, looking like butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth, was Sansimón’s sales manager, the one who had made a botched attempt to flee the day before.
‘Oy! You! Papillon! Trying to pull a fast one, are we? Get back in there with the others,’ Marroné said to him, tapping him twice on the shoulder.
The sales manager meekly obeyed without a word, merely casting a surprised look in Marroné’s direction, as if his face were familiar but he couldn’t say where from… Marroné rubbed his hands with pleasure. It was like a role play, and he was enjoying it enormously. It was a rule that always proved infallible: you never know your potential until you start exploring it. Just then the service lift arrived and Paddy, carrying a newspaper, stepped out, along with two others in black helmets. Paddy’s jaw dropped when he saw him.
‘Ernesto! What are you up to?’ he said to him.
Marroné replied with a shrug and an expression of defiance.
‘What? Are you the only one that can proletarianise yourself around here?’
The worker guards had started bringing the office workers down in two groups of ten. Dorita was in the second one, the service lift this time slicing her up the other way round, starting with her feet and finishing with her faintly moist eyes, which remained fixed on him until the last moment. Out of politeness he kept up his smile and raised hand until they vanished from sight, then turned to Paddy, who was still staring at him in astonishment.
‘Well… that’s the petit bourgeoisie off our backs. One less problem, right?’
‘And you, Ernesto? What are you going to do?’
There was something he needed to know before he took a decision.
‘What about the rest of the country? What’s happening with the other plasterworks?’
Paddy smiled.
‘All occupied. Nothing can stop us, Ernesto!’
‘I’m sticking around then,’ said Marroné without hesitation.
Paddy locked with him in fraternal embrace, and Marroné was awash with happiness. By what strange and crooked ways life made your wishes come true: Paddy and he were friends at last. As they parted, Paddy unfolded the magazine he’d been carrying and held it out to him.
‘Here.’
‘What is it?’ Marroné asked.
‘The reading matter I promised you. Give it a look and we’ll discuss it tomorrow.’
Marroné glanced at the title page. On the cover a woman as taut and vibrant as a tensed string was haranguing a dark expanse that presumably harboured a multitude within, and above her tight bun, in red graffiti letters, streamed the caption ‘EVITA MONTONERA’.
* * *
The cars pulled away one by one: Gómez’s Peugeot, with González in the passenger seat; an impeccably preserved Auto Union with Fernández at the wheel; a Fiat 600 with Suárez, Ramírez, Nidia and Dorita squeezed inside it; and a Fiat 1500, a Citroën 3CV and a Renault 4L with all the others. Through the high window overlooking the car park, Marroné watched them all as they clambered in, turned on their engines and headlights, and made for the entrance gate held open for them by the armed guards. It was getting dark but, far from letting up, the heat was mounting; heavy burgundy clouds, lit up by the recent passage of the sun, still burnt in the west, while others, the colour of lead and ash, gathered in the northern sky like an Indian raiding party.
What Marroné needed now was a quiet place to sit down and read the Eva Perón photonovel without interruption, so, after recovering his briefcase from the devastated main office, through which the rebellion had swept like a gale, one at a time he tried the doorknobs until he found one that turned, and crossed into a deserted office. After waiting for the few seconds the flickering fluorescent tube needed to provide a steady light, he made resolutely for the toilet, where he unbuckled his belt and sat down with the photonovel open on page one.
1919. Despite enjoying true democracy for the first time in its entire history, the country toiled under the double yoke of Saxon imperialism and the land-owning oligarchy, he read, reshuffling his buttocks on the toilet seat. A nation divided into a civilised, white, European metropolis and a barbarian, American, mestizo hinterland. A wealthy country, rich in paupers. A country where patriots pay and traitors prosper. One 7th May, in a small town in this country – a town like so many other Pampas towns, founded on lands snatched from our Indian brothers by the military – was born one of the greatest revolutionaries America has ever seen: Eva Perón, read the words above the photo, which showed an English-style train station, a cluster of silvery silos and the words ‘LOS TOLDOS’ in block letters on a shed wall. In the next photo was a woman
in a little woollen jacket and headscarf, holding aloft a doll in the role of a newborn baby and exclaiming in an enthusiastic speech bubble: ‘Look at her, Juan! Isn’t she beautiful?’ The man these words full of hope were addressed to was older and smartly attired in a double-breasted pinstripe suit, with glossy hair and a finely pencilled moustache over his disdainful upper lip. His bubble was not one of dialogue, but of thought. It read: ‘This one makes five. Time to get savvy.’
True to his class values, Marroné went on reading, Eva’s father, Juan Duarte, left his wife (by devotion if not by law) and five children for his ‘legitimate’ family in Chivilcoy.
Having experienced social rejection at first hand, Eva knew from a very young age which side she stood on, read the caption to the next photo, which showed her as a little girl in plaits and polka dots, shielding a frightened beggar boy from three brilliantined brats in short trousers and lace-up shoes, with rocks in their hands; and Eva’s thought bubble bloomed with her first tentative childish judgement: ‘Even as a little girl, every injustice was like a splinter in my soul.’
On encountering this uncomfortable term, Marroné shuffled restlessly on his toilet seat as if fearing that some concealed peeping Tom could see not just his actions (he was in the bathroom after all) but the very contents of his mind, and that was, of course, absurd. He made the most of this pause to try a few strains, but to no avail. The next few boxes illustrated a string of soap-opera clichés: the selfless mother hunched over her Singer, pedalling into the small hours of the morning; the same mother in mourning, sheltering her five chicks under her wing like a black hen, and bowing before a lady in satin and mink who stood behind a closed wrought-iron gate, barking at her a bubble with the words ‘How dare you? Get those bastards out of my sight, you shameless hussy!’ while the caption below explained that Eva was just seven when Juan Duarte died in a car accident and she suffered the humiliation of not being able to attend her father’s funeral; then little Eva taking communion in a borrowed dress; Eva at school practising recitation and dreaming of being an actress; and the fifteen-year-old Eva evading the advances of a brilliantined beau who promised to take her to Buenos Aires and make her a star while his bubble revealed his wicked intentions, and hers, her precocious shrewdness: ‘If this city slicker thinks he’s going to pull a fast one on me, he’s got another thing coming.’
The Adventure of the Busts of Eva Perón Page 12