What an orator, thought Marroné to himself, looking up for a minute at the closed cubicle door. It wasn’t your run-of-the-mill campaign speech, a mere rhetorical exercise; it was Public Speaking and Influencing Men in Business by Dale Carnegie incarnate. Cold intelligence could make many a specific objection to Evita’s words, but the heart was overpowered by them. That was the touchstone of a good speaker: when they managed to convey their passion even to those who didn’t agree with their ideas. ‘Touching people’s hearts,’ Marroné said to himself, ‘is not the same as shaping their minds, but it’s definitely a step in the right direction.’ The formula sounded so apt that he vowed to jot it down in quotation marks, with his name at the side in brackets, in his notebook of famous quotes and phrases.
Allies of imperialism, the military and the oligarch traitors interpreted Perón’s prudence and Evita’s self-denial as weakness and launched their first coup, thwarted by the swift mobilisation of the people, who once again poured into the square to defend their leader. But Evita had understood that the presence of the people on the streets wasn’t enough. She didn’t want her descamisados to go like lambs to the slaughter. As well as being mobilised, the people had to be armed. And there she was again, in work clothes, hair loose, like a young guerrilla, examining a 9mm pistol that she had picked up from a table covered in an impressive array of hardware, remarking, ‘With these in the hands of my descamisados, the oligarchs will shit their pants,’ while the box read: 5,000 automatic pistols and 1,500 machine guns bought with money from the Foundation, the first weapons of the Peronist People’s Army, to be delivered to the workers to defend Perón and his government. Had these weapons reached their destination, Argentina’s recent history would have been very different: Perón wouldn’t have been overthrown by the Liberating Revolution, no exile or firing squads, no torture or murder of popular militants and workers’ leaders… But, working tirelessly and frantically, sometimes sleeping no more than two or three hours a night, as if wanting in just a few short years to compensate the poor for more than a hundred of suffering, attending only to the needs of her descamisados, Evita has neglected her own, and the cancer prayed for by the oligarchy, and lamented so bitterly by her people, has now taken possession of her body… Evita was now in her sickbed, receiving a group of five children, including the urchin from Los Toldos, and as she spoke you could see they drank in her every word: ‘Just one thing I ask of you today, children: that you promise to defend Perón and fight for him to the death. When I am no longer here, you will have to take my place: you will be the bridge between Perón and the people, you will be the eternal watchmen of the Revolution, for you are my heirs, and in the next picture, the five children, now grown up and with rifles in their hands, never forgot Evita’s message; and today wherever there’s a child crying for food, wherever there’s a worker fighting against exploitation, wherever there are people fighting for their liberation, there will always be a Montonero.
Once Evita was dead, the text proceeded rather more demurely, she was handed over to the Spanish embalmer, Dr Pedro Ara, so that that she would live on in soul and body too; so that, like Joan of Arc, she would be there to guide us in the struggle against foreign domination. The photo showed Evita in silhouette, covered by a shroud, while a bald Dr Frankenstein in white coat and glasses contemplated the maiden from Los Toldos – his masterpiece. After the funeral, which lasted a fortnight, during which the sky came out in sympathy with the dispossessed, accompanying their outpourings of grief with persistent drizzle, the body was deposited in the General Confederation of Labour building, where it lay patiently awaiting the erection of the Monument to the Descamisado, which will be the tallest in the world at twice the height of the Statue of Liberty, and will contain a silver sarcophagus, the permanent resting place for her mortal remains.
He smiled when he came across his old friend, the Descamisado of the Monument. His and Evita’s paths crossed at every turn, in every box. The next few showed archive footage of the military’s bombardment of Plaza de Mayo, of the coup that ousted Perón and of the iconoclastic fury unleashed by the anti-Peronists on effigies of Perón and Evita, and here again Marroné’s and Evita’s paths crossed. For, having been born at the height of the Perón administration, he well remembered the pompier portraits of the President and First Lady in the school entrance hall, by the dark wood panelling that listed in gold lettering the ‘Dux Medallist Boys’; he effortlessly recalled the opening phrases of his first reading book (‘Eva… Evita… Evita looks at the little girl… the boy looks at Evita… Perón loves children’) and the bust of Evita that presided over the school’s playground – an Evita with a plaited bun, mounted on a polished black marble pedestal, which they used as a base for tag or hide-and-seek. But suddenly one day – he must have been in third or perhaps fourth grade – he saw the mistresses, masters, headmaster and directors all kissing and hugging, and where the portraits of Perón and Evita had been, there now hung a portrait of the Queen, and they had new reading books, and there was no sign of the bust of Evita, not even of its pedestal: it had been removed, and the hole hastily filled with new flagstones, as if to erase every trace of her existence. And so it had been in every school, in every public office, in every hospital, police station and town square. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of busts of Perón and Evita delivered up to the fury of sledgehammers, pickaxes and iron bars: ears gone, noses gone, cloven in two, heads rolling with all the zeal of the French Revolution.
Just then a dull murmur reached his ears, muffled and powerful as the roar of the stadium on matchday. For a moment he thought his imagination had conjured up the roar of the people wailing for Eva’s return, but after listening hard for a few seconds the sound had only increased, so, pulling up his overalls in resignation, he flushed the toilet and the water washed his weak pee away – the sole tangible result of all his straining – and poked his head out of the office’s inner window. The sound came from the factory: it was the corrugated iron roof clattering and rattling in the falling rain. At that moment a bolt of lightning lit up windows and skylights, and a second later the first clap of thunder shook the whole structure, which, like a huge metal drum, went on vibrating for some time. He went out into the main corridor and caught the first gust of fresh air full in the face as it came in through the open window; he thrust his hands and arms outside, and felt the icy water and the gentle pattering of a few small hailstones, which melted on his palms as he watched; then, lifting his hands to his face, he freshened his forehead, his neck, his ears, his tired eyes. The rain washed the snow-covered gardens, which appeared less white and more green by the lightning, their coat of plaster trickling away through the blades of grass, and flowing in milky streams down ditches and paths.
Watching the rain, Marroné lost himself the way others lose themselves in the immensity of the sea or the depths of a log-fire. Something had changed in him – something was still changing in him – after reading the photonovel of Evita’s life. ‘It’s just another order,’ he had snapped at Paddy, believing it to be true. ‘They mean nothing to me; they’re just mass-produced busts,’ he had added, cursing his bad luck. But what if it wasn’t just a question of luck, good or bad? What if there was a reason for him to get involved in the strike? At times his mind’s eye caught flashes of a secret design, but for the moment all he could make out were a few loose ends. Could that be what Paddy had been trying to get across? He, Marroné, had marched in and ordered the busts like someone buying a dozen pastries – and from an oligarch exploiter no less. No, the busts of Eva couldn’t come from the hands of dissatisfied, exploited workers: that was the lesson. They could only come from the hands of the satisfied, well-remunerated, well-treated working class… of happy descamisados. The busts of Eva couldn’t be bought; they had to be earned. They would be his when he had learnt to be worthy of them.
But how? Whatever the answer, he knew that for the moment he had to watch and wait and listen. It – the answer – would come, as it had o
n so many other occasions, apparently out of nowhere, but a nowhere fertilised and cultivated with days or weeks of apparently fruitless effort. The bust of Eva was an oracle, a talking head that would give all the right answers when asked the right questions. And all Marroné’s questions boiled down to one basic one: would he be a condor or a sparrow? A Don Quixote or a priest and barber? A ‘man of genius’ or an ‘ordinary man’? Tomorrow maybe, or in the days to come, he was sure to find out, but he could already feel the answer incubating in the depths of his soul.
5
Seven Debating Hats
The day after the storm dawned crisp and sunny, with a brisk southerly breeze that had blown all the clouds from the sky. Its coating of plaster now removed by the rain, the skin of the landscape had emerged tender and soft as a newborn babe’s, and the lawn, plants and trees gleamed with a green that hurt the eyes, as if every leaf and every bud were seeing the light for the very first time; the luxuriant ash trees cast green pools of shade for those in need of rest, the poplars flashed their silver coins and the plumes of pampas grass waved like sails straining for the open sea. The cloudless sky that sparkled radiant as sapphire, the clean air that filled his lungs, the singing of numerous birds whose whistling and trilling in the silence of the machines cheered the very air, and the happy faces of the workers diligently coming and going about their strikers’ duties made Marroné believe at times that a new world had been born; that day and the ones to come might have been counted among the happiest he had ever known.
The work duties were rotated so that no one would feel bored or hard done by, the simplest tasks alternating with the hardest; that way, Paddy explained to him, they could also try out the order of the future society, where, as Marx had predicted, every man could develop in the area best suited to him: he could hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, and hone his critical faculties after dinner. Gradually Marroné settled into his new life. He threw himself with enthusiasm into the varied tasks, which he sometimes chose himself and sometimes was assigned, and each of which was designated by a different-coloured hard-hat: in his green hat he unloaded supplies from the delivery trucks, a task to which his rugby-player’s physique was amply suited; in the red hat he introduced improvements in canteen management, varying the dishes on the menu and above all teaching the impromptu cooks the art of seasoning, about which they knew next to nothing; and, many a night he would don the black hat for guard duty, joining in with the songs around the bonfire, learning the words as he went, swapping dirty jokes and juicy anecdotes, which he often made up off the top of his head; he would talk football or politics, tweaking his language and views to his companions’ abilities, which often turned out to be more sophisticated than he’d thought; and sometimes, his gaze lost in the crackling flames of the bonfire as it slowly collapsed into a heap of embers, he would ruminate on the turn his life seemed to be taking. A couple of times he sallied forth, sporting the blue hat of the propagandists, to hand out leaflets in the neighbourhood, always in groups of three or more, and escorted by an armed guard of black helmets; rather than fear the police, who were content for now merely to strain at the leash, their concern was that they would cross swords with the union thugs or the parapolice squads, both of which in the last few weeks had kidnapped and murdered several worker delegates. But all the same the people came out to hug them and slap them on the back as they went by, shouting things like ‘Hang on in there, lads’ or ‘Don’t let up, comrades’; housewives came out on the pavement with glasses of pop or jugs of fresh lemonade, handed out fruit or alfajores and packets of milanesa sandwiches ‘For the lads on the inside’, and Marroné now began to understand – because sometimes to understand something it isn’t enough to read about it; you have to live and breathe it – what Eva must have felt daily in her office at the Foundation, constantly in the streets and roads of her country, and overwhelmingly from the balcony of the presidential palace: the soul of the people, the beat of its heart. It was a new reality, one that neither St Andrew’s nor Stanford had prepared him for. So it was with redoubled enthusiasm that Marroné donned the yellow hat for cleaning duties, which he performed if not with gusto, then conscientiously and with dedication, and it was with an identical attitude that, donning the brown hat of the supply brigades, he spent many an afternoon collecting nuts and bolts as ammunition for catapults, or bringing office furniture down in the service lift to build barricades in anticipation of the police attack, which might come any minute. Only the leaders’ white hats were off-limits to him for now: that office bore greater responsibility and was only renewed by assembly.
The permanent mood of cooperation, which turned every chore into a joy; the presence of Paddy Donovan, on the go around the clock, lending a hand in every activity (‘The leaders wear white hats because white is the sum of all the colours: the white hat is a badge not of privilege but of duty’); the predominance of manual over mental labour – labour which, frequently taking place in the open air, gave him the freedom to go bare-chested – all of this made Marroné feel he was reliving the halcyon days of the summer camp on Mascardi Lake, of which he had so many good memories. His enthusiasm, his frank and open disposition and the smile that always played over his lips quickly earned him the recognition and soon the esteem of his new comrades. He could no longer cross the grounds without them greeting him as he went past: those who knew his name – whose numbers rose daily – would shout out ‘Hey, Ernesto! Great stuff, Ernesto!’, and those who didn’t, ‘Don’t let up, comrade!’ or ‘Nice day, comrade!’, to which he invariably replied: ‘A Peronist day!’ And for the first time in his life Marroné was grateful for the olive tone of his skin, the plumpish lips, the spiky black hair, which, coupled with his new overalls, the five-day stubble and the studied carelessness of his appearance, made it easier to pass himself off as one of them. Dale Carnegie’s rules of conversation worked just as well in this world as the one they’d originally been written for, and for anything he couldn’t hide – the educated accent, a certain bourgeois set to his body – there was always an alibi in all those middle-class youngsters that had been sent to the factories to be proletarianised and join the rank and file of the working class. The first day he had had to do guard duty at the entrance was a case in point: the Canal 13 mobile unit had approached and asked him a few questions for the daily news.
‘Five days after the start of the occupation of the Sansimón Plasterworks, how do you view the situation?’
‘Well like, the occupation ’ere and ’cross the ’ole country’s still going strong, the lads ’ere are standing firm and morale’s good and we are determined to pursue our struggle whatever the cost,’ Marroné began, suddenly dropping all his aitches, and lowering the peak of his hard-hat so the camera wouldn’t give him away.
‘What news of the hostages? When do you intend to release them?’
‘Well er… we already released everyone… ’cept the management… They’s staying ’ere till they meets all our demands… Cleverer than a box of monkeys that lot are… Sr Sansimón wouldn’t listen to our demands… ignored us didn’t he… Laughed in our face he did… laughing on the other side of his now though inne eh?’
‘They say there are infiltrators in your midst… professional agitators, communists, with links to guerrilla organisations…’
Marroné took belligerent offence, slid his hand inside his overalls and pulled out the crucifix he wore round his neck.
‘You calling me a communist? What kind of communist wears a crucifix like this, pray tell? I’ll bet you and that lot that’s with you if you come in the factory and find a single brick that ain’t Peronist I’ll eat my hat.’
‘What if the management don’t give in? Are you going to stay here for ever?’
‘If they don’t back down that’s their bad luck. They’ll be left with nothing. We can run the factory on our own we can, if we puts our minds to it. We’ll show ’em they’s parasites living off the people and
we’ll all be a lot better off without ’em.’
‘And what if the police try to retake the factory by force?’
‘We’ll be ready for them is what’ll happen. Bring them on if they dare. They’ll be in for a big surprise.’
The journalists’ mistake was understandable in a way: their bourgeois consciousness made it hard for them to tell a false worker from a true one. But such an explanation didn’t hold for the lady who wobbled up to him on two legs like flowerpots and handed him a trayful of empanadas, beaming at him through her remaining half-dozen teeth, ‘For you and the lads, ’andsome. Don’t let up, pet, we’re all rooting for you ’ere we are. Keep going, got ’em by the balls you ’ave, don’t let ’em off the ’ook now, that lot are more slippery than the devil himself, they’ll stick the knife in when you ain’t looking, mark my words. You just watch your backs. And make sure you get some proper food in you and a good night’s sleep… Gotta stay fit and healthy, remember, case things get heavy like. Oooooh, I can tell you a thing or two about that. My late husband, God rest his soul, was just like you lot. Always giving them gorillas some, or anyone as ’ad a bad word to say about Perón.’ And, if he was being absolutely honest with himself, these practical achievements of his filled him with satisfaction, but also with a nagging sense of unease. Were Dale Carnegie’s tips, or Marroné’s proven ductility, or his recently discovered thespian abilities enough to explain just how easy, how untraumatic his introduction to the world of the working class had proven? Or was there something else? From what he had gathered, Paddy himself had found it something of an uphill struggle, whereas he, Marroné… Because when it came to the executives and the office staff, he’d put all his efforts into fitting in, applying the rules of How to Win Friends and Influence People with equal zest, and it hadn’t gone half as well as it had with this bunch. Perhaps the gene pool really was stronger than all else, and the fact of his adoption glared bright and clear through his upbringing in the bosom of a refined Anglo-Argentine family, his St Andrew’s and Stanford education, the trips to Europe and the United States, the summers in Punta del Este; as did his hair, which, just days after escaping the hairdresser’s practised hands, would already be verging on the mane-like, advertising his plebeian Indian blood for all to see. ‘You can certainly tell you’re the son of darkies!’ His father’s words, blurted out in a fit of exasperation, rang once again in his ears, as they did every time the subject came to mind. He had apologised immediately, but the ten- or eleven-year-old Ernestito had never forgotten or forgiven, sensing in those words a verdict that would brand him for ever. The stigma of his origins had dogged him with all the tenacity of a bloodhound at school too. Marooné! Maroon Monkey! Marron Crappé! were among his classmates’ favourite insults when they ganged up on him, and thus his mixed feelings every time the strikers or slum-dwellers took him for one of them.
The Adventure of the Busts of Eva Perón Page 14