The Adventure of the Busts of Eva Perón

by Carlos Gamerro

  Another source of unease stemmed from the realisation of how little he missed home and work. True, he could use the phone as often as he liked, which he did at least once a day, to say hello to his little boy and his wife (who only through Govianus’s timely intervention had finally renounced the belief that it was all a story Marroné had concocted to cheat on her), and to ring Govianus every morning to keep abreast of the latest developments. He could have climbed into his car and driven home or to work any time he liked: he was free to come and go as he pleased. Yet, as he had told the journalist who’d interviewed him for the television, the plasterworkers’ strike was going strong across the country, and all attempts by the company to procure the busts of Eva through other channels had failed miserably. At least they had a man on the inside at Sansimón’s: he was their only hope. Whenever he could – in conversation, at daily assembly – he would bring up the possibility of breaking the basic rule of every strike and producing at least just a few ‘trial’ busts, or would try to initiate the less headstrong in the virtues of the ‘Japanese strike’, where in true samurai fashion the workforce would work twice as hard to produce an unsellable surplus. And though the motion was never passed, he found out from subsequent conversations his ideas were not falling on stony ground. But these purely practical justifications weren’t enough to hide Marroné’s undeniable reluctance to return to the routine of his work and home life. Perhaps, he told himself to appease the misgivings of his bourgeois conscience, it all boiled down to a feeling that he was on holiday, without the usual timetables and chores: the occupied plasterworks had become a proletarian version of an all-inclusive holiday camp, complete with recreation activities and games. Only the several days without a bowel movement weighed a little heavy on him – that and almost as many without sex. There were times he regretted not having taken up Dorita’s generous offer: her very lack of sex appeal could have worked – as it did with his wife – as an antidote for the malfunction in which his sexual timidity was rooted. By what sinister joke of nature, he sometimes asked himself, had his connections been switched? If his overeagerness were to move from his testicles to his intestines and their stubbornness make the reverse journey, all in his life would be well, he felt.

  Meanwhile, there were crucial hours ahead, hours that could bring about that ‘17th October’ he had read about in the photonovel. Though enthusiastically supported by the workers, their families and even the local residents, the occupation had begun to go flat, leaking air through a thousand little holes. The sheer number and variety of the tasks was overwhelming, and many were already beginning to mutter that when they worked for the management they at least had a timetable and a wage. The assemblies were held daily, sometimes at the rate of two or three a day, and were packed mainly by militants from leftist groups, who spent the time discussing the Chinese or Cuban Revolutions and calling for a minute’s silence for Che Guevara or today’s daily update of murdered militants. Most of the genuine workers had families to support and many of them missed sleeping in their beds, kissing their children in the mornings and banging the missus whenever they felt like it; also, Sansimón had gradually caved in to their demands, giving them pay rises, better working conditions, full payment of overtime, and the heads of Garaguso and Cerbero; but he had baulked at their demand to reinstate all those dismissed for union or political reasons since ’55, and his outburst at their insistence (‘Fine! And would you like me to suck their dicks one by one as well?’) had rather dampened the negotiating climate.

  Rumour had it that these concessions were no more than ruses – that Sansimón was only waiting for them to release him and vacate the factory before filing for bankruptcy and turfing them all out on the street – and many of them, their faith daily sapped by the sermons of Baigorria and his henchmen, had begun to believe it. Faced with this eventuality, the collaborationists were calling for the strike to be lifted before things got out of hand, the negotiators for consensus over a timetable of reinstatements, the moderates to pursue the strike but call off the occupation (which would allow them to stay at home all day watching TV, otherwise what in God’s name were they striking for?), while the hardliners – now in a distinct minority – upped the ante: if Sansimón refused to play ball, they’d get to keep the factory and he could go cry into his soup. Everything seemed to be pointing to one big assembly that would decide once and for all whether to end the occupation or continue it.

  It was held one cloudy morning, which again threatened stormy weather, inside the big empty factory, which, in the sepulchral silence where footsteps sounded like pounding hammers and cowed people to a whisper, looked now even more like a vast, abandoned cathedral. Its floor, machines, bags of plaster and the pieces that the announcement of the strike had left unfinished were all coated in a fine layer of dust. The air was strained and still, like an animal about to pounce, and, filtering in through clouds and skylights, the dead light made it hard to believe that just a week ago the whole factory had been clean and sparkling, and running like clockwork. He felt a little guilty for having caved in to the irresponsible delights of strike action: this was the result of the selfish satisfaction of his own desires; this was what happened when each part of the body worked for its own ends, with utter disregard for the health of the whole. What was happening at the Sansimón Plasterworks might well be a warning of what could happen across the whole country unless something were done to reverse the downward spiral into permanent chaos and conflict. Ah well, perhaps it wasn’t too late to put things right. Because this time Marroné was determined to have his say. This time it was all or nothing. If he couldn’t make his voice heard and make progress over the issue of the busts, he would take his mission at the Sansimón Plasterworks to be over and continue the search elsewhere. He still had no clearly defined plan of action: first he’d observe, see how things were shaping up, then seize the slightest chance to bring up his proposal.

  At the vague line dividing the blue zone of the nave from the brown zone of the apse, more or less where the altar would be in a real cathedral, they had erected a makeshift platform out of a truncated pyramid (more Aztec-like than Egyptian) of stacked wooden pallets, which had the additional advantage of providing natural ladders for the speakers to climb up and down. Virtually the whole workforce was there, including those officially on leave; they’d even invited the Sansimóns, Senior and Junior, as onlookers. The list of speakers was carried by Trejo, one of Paddy’s lieutenants; Paddy himself – the whiteness of his hard-hat vying with the permanent smile that rose out of several days’ growth of copper beard – was running the show.

  The start was as predictable as it was disappointing, with the usual declarations of support from delegates of neighbouring factories, class-struggle unions, opportunistic politicians, student organisations, political youth movements and guerrilla organisations, regurgitating the obligatory quotes by Marx and Lenin, Ho Chi Minh and Mao, Brecht, El Che, Fidel and, of course, Eva Perón… By this stage several of the workers from the factory had started coughing, yawning and gathering in groups with their backs to the podium to talk amongst themselves. It was understandable, their lives and jobs were on the line, and they had to stand there listening to some shrill little pedant giving them the low-down on some worker’s strike in Saint Petersburg. Marroné looked on with rising impatience at the received gestures and hackneyed phrases of the orators, who acted as if they hadn’t even heard of Dale Carnegie, not to mention Demosthenes or Cicero. Not one of the speakers made any effort to put themselves in the other’s place; they only listened to themselves: the art of persuasion had given way to loud-mouthed sloganeering. If only he could find the room to do some creativity exercise with them… But which one? He could forget brainstorming or brain-sailing: the dynamics of the assembly were already too turbulent, and the chances of entropic disorder grew exponentially with the number of people. A mind-mapping exercise would be ideal, but he lacked the basic materials: an overhead projector to write on, a blackboard…
There was some coloured chalk, and the office easel was there to hand, but the felt-tips were dry, and anyway… No, it had to be something more dramatic that forced the participants to step outside their rigid, inflexible positions and put themselves in the other’s place. In other words it had to be a role-play exercise. With the speed of a pocket calculator his mind reviewed all the known options, whether honed at meetings and workshops or studied in books on the subject. None of what he had done or learnt seemed to be any use to him, and there, he realised suddenly, lay the answer: creativity begins at home. The onus was on him to be creative; he would have to invent something new, something no one had ever done before. But what? What? He racked his brains, running his eyes over the motley crowd. How to captivate them? How to get through to them, these rookies? That was when his eyes fixed on the coloured helmets.

  At that precise moment Ernesto Marroné had an inkling of what Moses might have felt on seeing the burning bush, or Archimedes on leaping naked from his bath, or Newton when the apple landed on his head. Rapt by the revelation taking shape effortlessly within him, it was with some effort that he managed to nudge Trejo on his right:

  ‘Put my name down.’

  His move didn’t escape Paddy’s notice.

  ‘What are you up to?’ he asked in surprise.

  Without looking at him and with such assurance that his voice sounded as if it belonged to someone else, to the man he had become since feeling the magic wand, he replied:

  ‘You leave it to me, I’ll have this assembly on the right track for you in no time.’

  He had to wait a while for those ahead of him on the list to speak and, although an impatience bordering on frenzy ate into his body with a furious tingling, he knew it was for the best, because it gave him time to work out the finer details of his original brilliant intuition and draw up a plan of action worthy of it. As at other key moments of his life his brain burnt white-hot, like a tungsten filament, and his whole environment was transfigured before his feverish eyes, as if what had changed were not just his gaze, but the very light itself. When it came to his turn, he mounted the steps of the platform with a steady purpose, and the tremulous note in his opening words was more an ‘Oxford stammer’ calculated to create sympathy in his audience than genuine nervousness.

  ‘Comrades…’ He paused to make sure he had everyone’s attention, then went on, ‘I have been here for a while listening to one comrade after another telling us we have to pull together and that the workers have the final say and the workers wear the trousers. And in the end all they do is talk and talk, and tell the workers what they have to do’ (murmurs of approval). ‘Is it because they’re afraid that, if they really and truly give the workers the final say, you’ll say something they don’t want to hear?’ (More murmurs, sporadic applause, someone shouts ‘Nice one!’) ‘Comrades… We all know each other here, and we all know that at the end of the day it’s always the same at these assemblies. Always the same ones who talk and talk and talk till people get tired and leave, and only then do they vote, and decide behind the workers’ backs’ (more sustained applause, shouts of ‘It’s true!’ and ‘You tell ’em, comrade!’).

  Paddy watched him with a worried frown, and Marroné winked at him to reassure him.

  ‘All right, all right, at the end of the day I’m yacking on too much too’ (laughter and applause). He had everyone’s absolute attention: the time had come.

  ‘So let’s get down to brass tacks – I mean the real facts. At Tamerlán Construction, where I’m from, we’ve invented a miles more efficient and entertaining way of doing assemblies. We use coloured hats; yes, just like the ones you’re wearing,’ he said, when several of his listeners instinctively raised their hands to their heads. ‘Seven comrades, seven volunteers: come up here onto the platform, each wearing a different-coloured hat. Well? What are you waiting for?’

  The workers looked at each other doubtfully, but their eyes sparkled and half-smiles crept over the corners of their mouths; their hesitation wasn’t a sign of rejection or distrust, but the initial reticence of children before the party entertainer summoning them to a game: a mixture of desire, a little embarrassment and bags I go first.

  A worker in a green helmet – the one with a jutting acromegalic chin like tango singer Edmundo Rivero’s, and one of the party that had burst into Sansimón’s office that far-off morning when all this began – raised a large, heavy hand, like an asbestos glove filled with steel. Marroné invited him up onto the platform. He was followed by: the black-helmeted Saturnino, Baigorria’s grim companion the night of the bosses’ Bacchanal; Baigorria himself, wearing a yellow hat; a young Indian-looking man called Zenón wearing a red helmet, who had helped Marroné replace his ruined suit; and the fat man in the brown helmet and milky-white eye that everyone called El Tuerto. Marroné was wearing the blue hat of the propagandists, having spent the day before phoning in to various radio programmes to outline the rationale and progress of the occupation. All they needed now was a white helmet, and the group would be complete. But the last one up there – Pampurro by name – wore green.

  ‘Ok, we have a problem. We’ve got two green hats up here, but we’re still missing a white hat. Looks like our good leaders have had a fit of embarrassment (laughter). Well, Pa… Colorado? Can you lend us yours? Come on, don’t be shy. Lend us it a bit, will you? We’ll give it back afterwards. Promise.’

  With a fixed smile, Paddy swapped helmets with Pampurro and donned the green one, and Marroné smiled: a sudden picture from their schooldays – Paddy’s red hair and the green Monteith shirt – flashed before his eyes.

  ‘Right, now comes the interesting bit. Pay attention. When the factory belonged to Sr Sansimón here (general laughter, jeers, face like thunder of said Sansimón, who had been scrutinising him for some time as if trying to work out where they’d met. Marroné thanked his stubble which, though sparse, had altered his appearance considerably), each colour stood for a section: white for the bosses, red for the workshop, black for maintenance… With the occupation we’ve turned things around: now it’s the leaders who wear the white hats (only one person laughed – the young sculptor from the workshop – the irony being lost on the rest), the blue hats who do the propaganda and the yellow hats who do the cleaning; except that the hats are rotated periodically and therefo… and that’s why the tasks are, too. What I’m proposing to you is closer to the second way than the first. In this debate each colour has a task: white is neutral, and the one wearing it has to present the facts as they stand, the way things are, not the way we want them to be, as objectively as they can. Red is the colour of passion, of high temperatures, so the one wearing the red hat has to speak from his feelings – anger, exasperation, fear – whatever they may be…’ He was improvising, thinking on his feet, but each idea immediately found its proper place and expression, the words following one another effortlessly. His brow seemed to have been touched by some divine inspiration – just like Eva Perón whenever she spoke to the people. ‘Yellow is the colour of the sun, comrades, and the one wearing it…’ he touched Baigorria’s head for a second, ‘… has to give a positive, optimistic appraisal of the situation. The one wearing the black hat, however…’ he looked at Saturnino, who, with his permanently gloomy expression, was tailor-made for the part, ‘… always has to imagine the worst, warn us of the possible consequences – the most serious he can imagine – of our actions and decisions. Green is the colour…’

  ‘… of hope!’ shouted an enthusiastic voice in the crowd. They were behind him now, no doubt about it.