In his astonishment Marroné checked the top of the page: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Bloom. Intrigued, he looked at the first page: 127. Then he clicked: what he was holding was a fragment of a larger work, torn from the original and stuck inside another book’s cover.
‘Please, don’t tell my superior,’ he heard María Eva’s voice say. ‘Last time he caught me reading Proust, he made me write a self-criticism. If he finds out I’ve lapsed again…’
‘So that’s why you hid it inside the Fanon, is it?’ he asked with a smile.
María Eva flashed him a smile, at once shy and impish. The first. She was definitely the Eva in the photonovel. But he decided to wait until they were on closer terms, before he asked her.
‘So, do you like him?’
‘Fanon? Well, sure, he’s right about everything he says, of course: the culture of the coloniser and the colonised, right? Of course, the situation in Africa’s a bit different from ours… I mean, when he wrote it, they really were colonies…’
‘No, Proust,’ he cut her short.
She spoke quickly, almost apologetically, as if ashamed of her own enthusiasm.
‘Aaaah. Sure! Well, I mean, he’s a real bourgeois; no, if only, not even a bourgeois; he’s an out-and-out oligarch: all those princesses and marquises, and their residences… They’re all such snobs… It’s almost embarrassing at times. You’d think there’d never been a revolution in France. And he’s sooo European… I know the comrades gave me funny looks when they found out, but I dunno, it’s kind of like a vice… And there are other things about him… his relationship with his mother – wanting her to tuck him in and all that, and Swann’s love for Odette, and the walks around Méséglise and Guermantes… You’re reading and suddenly you’re there, in the countryside… Oh, I’m sorry… I’m talking as if everyone had read him. That’s so rude of me, I’m always doing that. Comrade, have you ever… ?’
‘Please, call me Ernesto,’ he reassured her, desperately scrabbling in his memory for scraps of information about Proust: he’d written In Search of Lost Time; there were several volumes; and it had something to do with memories… But, as far as he knew, there wasn’t a single business title along the lines of In Search of Lost Profits or In the Shadow of Young Markets in Bloom.
‘No, I can never find the time for things like that,’ he quipped. ‘As you know, being an officer isn’t a part-time… er… But you have to take a break occasionally, don’t you. You can’t be reading Marx and Lenin and Mao all the time, now, can you. At the moment, for example, I’m reading…’ He took a breath before saying, ‘Don Quixote.’
This time he was rewarded with the full, radiant, eternal smile of the photo.
‘I don’t believe it. I finished it a couple of months ago. I can still remember the day. Oh, when he died all huddled up and shrivelled like that, it made me feel so sad… I wept like a little girl.’
Marroné looked at her sternly.
‘Now you’ve told me how it ends.’
María Eva clapped her hand over her mouth and opened her eyes wide in horror.
‘Only joking. I know how it ends,’ he lied to reassure her.
María Eva suddenly seemed to recall where she was and looked anxiously around her.
‘I should be getting back to my post, shouldn’t I? If Miguel were to see me…’
‘I’ll take the rap,’ said Marroné, squaring his shoulders and puffing out his chest to assert his rank.
‘Thanks.’ That smile again. ‘It’s just that… Miguel isn’t just my superior… he’s my partner, you see?’
Marroné did see, and intercepted the downward rictus of his mouth just in time.
‘Right,’ he said, trying not to let his disappointment show. ‘Maybe we’ll find more time to talk tomorrow. I just wanted to ask you one thing: are you the Eva in the photonovel?’
This time she reacted differently: she blushed in shame, like her biblical namesake, but covered her face rather than her sex.
‘Don’t tell me you’ve read it,’ she said through her fingers.
‘Yes. You’re the one who plays Eva, aren’t you?’
María Eva took her hand from her face and gave a tight-lipped nod.
‘Why are you embarrassed about it? You look great.’
María Eva stared at him for a second, as if trying to guess the reply expected of her.
‘Yes, I know. I really admire Eva, and I loved playing her; I took it really seriously. Course, I had to go on a diet for the part about her illness… The Reason for My Life can be a bit daft in places, like this little fairy tale, but then we all know it was ghosted for her when she was ill… We tried to bring out the real Eva. The original script was really good, I don’t know if you’ve read it… It was by a comrade, Marcos, you know. They rewrote bits of it later, to make it more militant, beef up the slogans.’ It suddenly seemed to dawn on her that, as a leader, Marroné may well have been the one who’d ordered the changes in the first place, because she abruptly interrupted herself. ‘It isn’t a criticism, eh. I know what we need isn’t armchair literature, but books for the trenches. Still, I dunno, I find the whole idea of these militant photonovels a bit hard to swallow. They’re bourgeois prejudices of mine, aren’t they. As a girl I was taught they were just pulp for the pig-ignorant, because they were read by proles. But why shouldn’t a well-made photonovel ultimately be as valuable as a film, or a comic? I’m not talking about El Tony or Intervalo; I’m talking Oesterheld, right?’
Marroné nodded, though he hadn’t the faintest idea what she was talking about. He was overwhelmed by the strangeness of it all: a beautiful young woman dressed in worker’s clothes, packing an FAL and discussing Proust was nothing his previous life had prepared him for.
‘So, you aren’t going to ask a worker to read this,’ she said, holding up the copy of Fanon, although she may also have been referring to the Proust within. ‘But there’s one thing I don’t get… I mean, I’m told not to read Proust because he’s bourgeois, because he’s European, because the people won’t understand him… Yet everyone in Cuba reads Lezama Lima, or Carpentier, and neither of them have a trace of the worker about them… And that’s ultimately why we’re leading the Revolution, isn’t it? The Russians didn’t burn the Hermitage. They opened it up to the people. I don’t know… I suppose you have to renounce Proust at this stage… and reclaim him after the Revolution, when we can read him properly – all of us, not just a select clique. I felt the same when I used to act.’
‘You’re an actress?’
‘Couldn’t you tell, from the photonovel?’ she said with a coy laugh.
‘Film or television?’
‘No, just the theatre.’
‘So what made you give it up?’
‘Well, you guys don’t leave us much spare time, actually. Don’t take it the wrong way, I’m only kidding. Let’s see… how can I put it? One day… I saw the face of the audience. I was playing Nora, and I slammed the door and rattled the wings night after night just so that all those good married ladies could go home happy. Antigone too: I buried my brother to keep the spectators from being alarmed by all those corpses they were reading about in the papers. Then I read Brecht and realised I was falling into the trap of cathartic theatre. I realised I was acting to soothe the guilty consciences of the bourgeoisie. I took my act to the shanties, but the feeling just wouldn’t go away… What I was doing wasn’t getting through because my acting was still bourgeois. That was when I realised that, much as I loved it, I had to give up the stage… But then, everything we renounce now the triumph of the Revolution will give us back a thousandfold, won’t it? So that’s how I went from acting to action. Just like Evita. Goodness! Now I really do have to get back to my post. I’ve really enjoyed talking to you… er…’
‘Ernesto,’ repeated Marroné, who, if truth be told, had barely said a word, this time not because he was applying the sixth rule of How to Win Friends and Influence People, but out of dumbstruck devotion.
He bade her goodbye with a vaguely military salute, but gave it a nonchalant air as if to say ‘We’re bigger than all this’, and began to climb the spiral staircase to avoid the service lift, which was too noisy. He spent a while leafing through the photonovel, looking for photos of María Eva, tenderly caressing the polka dots on her bathing costume and the breasts beneath her uniform, then switched off the light and lay there turning over their conversation in his mind; only when bars of dawn began to filter in through the shutters did he manage to catch a couple of hours’ sleep.
First thing in the morning he found himself in the canteen, sharing the breakfast of rolls and maté cocido with his comrades, when Zenón, his transistor radio glued to his ear, raised his voice over the general hubbub to announce:
‘Babirusa! They’ve taken him out!’
Instantly, like a goal celebration at the Sunday match, a deafening victory roar shook the canteen windows and helmets flew into the air, landing on heads and feet, smashing plates and cups. The workers hugged and kissed, or pinched each others’ cheeks, and some even climbed onto the benches, jumping up and down as if they were on the terraces, and singing:
‘Babirusa, you brass whore,
Say Hello to old Vandor!’
Zenón, who still had his ear glued like a plunger to the radio, interrupted the revelling to relay the devil in the detail.
‘Mown down outside his house. Got one of his bodyguards too. Hasn’t checked out yet, but they’re saying he won’t make it.’
But Zenón’s running commentary didn’t seem to make any difference to the mood of the diners, who gave another raucous cheer and carried on regardless with the old chants. At least, thought Marroné, the workers didn’t pull their punches when it came to expressing themselves. He thought it unlikely that, if anything similar happened to Sr Tamerlán, the office staff would dare to be so open about their feelings, even if many in private wished him the worst that fate could throw at him. How very petit bourgeois!
Amidst occasional laughter, jokes like ‘Heard the new song about Babirusa? Which song? The one that goes “And though the holes were rather small… ”’ and the odd little sing-song, the workers slowly dispersed to their respective posts. As soon as the Evas were finished, they’d be off to their homes to get ready for Christmas Eve; and after Christmas – a working-class Christmas at last – they’d be back to full production: no more exploitation, no more capital gain, no more alienated labour; the Eva Perón Plasterworks was liberated territory and in it the socialist utopia was very much a fait accompli, Marroné told the workers as he bid them goodbye with a pat on the back or – the more trusted ones – a slap on the buttocks. They were still leaving and he was about to join them, when he came face to face with a ghost. It was Paddy. All expression had drained from his face and his eyes were dead.
‘Pa… Colo! Come here, sit down. Have you had any breakfast? Fancy a bite to eat?’
‘Not hungry. Gimme something to drink.’
Marroné clicked his fingers for Pampurro, who was in charge of the kitchen today, to bring him a maté cocido. Paddy gulped it down thirstily, his throat bulging at every swig.
‘Everything all right?’
Paddy shook his head.
‘Want to talk about it?’
Paddy repeated the gesture.
Marroné sat beside him for a few minutes, watching him, keeping him company. It pained him to see his friend in this state, although, if he were being truly honest with himself, part of him envied him too. He’d been in a shoot-out; he’d fired at other people – maybe he’d even killed someone too. Would he have the guts if he found himself in Paddy’s shoes? He didn’t think so, but life sometimes had surprises up its sleeve. If someone had told him the morning he’d left his house, as he did every day, on his way to what was then the Sansimón Plasterworks, that in little over a week he would have become a strike leader and be taken for part of the top brass in a guerrilla army… what would he have replied? That they be locked up without delay, no doubt. It was one of the lessons he’d learnt from reading about the life of Eva Perón. Who are we really? Who really knows what they’re capable of under certain circumstances and what they aren’t? Perhaps his friend was asking himself the same questions right now. Or perhaps, he corrected himself, looking again at the expression on Paddy’s face, he’d found some answers. Which didn’t seem to be to his liking.
‘All right… I’m going to see how production’s going,’ he said eventually, slapping his knees.
Paddy barely looked at him as, in a broken voice, he said:
‘They saw me, Ernesto. Babirusa’s people are looking for me right now. Look at me.’ A flap of his hand took in the flaming beacon of his hair and beard. ‘You can spot me a mile off. I’ll have to go underground for a while.’
‘You’re safe here,’ Marroné reassured him in all confidence. ‘The comrades and I will look after you. Miguel’s brought in six specialists…’
‘Yeah, I know. But I never wanted to go underground. I’m a born front man, me. My thing is to be among the people. But if I stick around here I’m fucked.’
‘Now you’re being melodramatic,’ said Marroné jovially. ‘If you ask me, it sounds like they’re the ones whose days are numbered. Just like the whole capitalist system, right?’ he said, thumping him on the back.
When he stepped outside, he came across a bizarre sight, even by recent standards. A vast cloud of butterflies was crossing the factory gardens; it must have been some kind of migration, for they were all flying in the same direction, approximately due west: they were coming from behind the workers’ quarter, beyond the entrance gate, pouring through the gaps in the ever-tighter cordon of police cars and policemen, or flying straight over their heads and then crossing the wire fence, in which some got caught and fluttered for a few seconds. The ones that made it through crossed the entire premises of the factory and, after negotiating the wire on the other side, disappeared into the first outcrops of the shanty town beyond the black waters of the stream. As far as he could tell, they were all the same size and pattern, but wore a variety of colours: rust-tinted orange, lemon yellow, greeny yellow, immaculate white and sky blue, and when he managed to catch one in his fingers – it wasn’t hard, all he had to do was put his hand in the air and they would fly into it – he could see at closer quarters the hairy body, the iridescent eyes, the bright-green buttons of the antennae and the grey rim at the apex of the wings. He let it flutter off and gazed with curiosity at the coloured dust it left on his fingertips, and it was as if a distant memory were trying to come back to him. Rubbing his hands on his overalls, he set off back to the workshop. On his way, he ran into two workers swatting butterflies like houseflies as they walked, but a third – the man he had christened Edmundo Rivero – had stopped whatever it was he’d been doing and was gazing at them transfixed, his mouth half-open under the weight of his jaw, his great hands hanging motionless at his sides.
In the workshop everything was running like a dream. The workers greeted him without looking up from their tasks, which they tackled with renewed glee and determination now that everything was theirs; and Sansimón Senior, who was still directing operations, came over to welcome him in person and, taking him by the arm, steered him in the direction of the workbenches. The last of the Evas had just come out of the drier and was waiting alongside nineteen companions to be packed away in its nest of tow and wood, and loaded onto the van with the seventy-two others. He ran his fingertip over the delicate, slender neck and rounded chin, slowly traced the outline of the enigmatic smile, ascended the slight curvature of the nose, the open forehead, the hair pasted to the skull and the intricate, tightly tied bun that would reveal the fate of the country to the hero who could unravel it. They were his. He’d done it. In a couple of hours at most he’d be back at the office, Govianus would congratulate him, Sr Tamerlán would be released, Cáceres Grey would be sacked, and Marroné would be handed his job or any other he asked for.
It was all too good to last, he realised a second later when he heard the first dull bang and knew without needing to be told that things had returned to their usual state of catastrophe. The first shot set off a string of others, and several smoke grenades came crashing in through the windows in a hailstorm of broken glass, and ricocheted into two busts of Eva, splitting one of them open on the table and sending the other crashing to the floor. The men in the workshop ran back and forth willy-nilly, the way ants do when their nest has been kicked; some had tied handkerchiefs over their noses against the smoke, but most were just groping their way towards the exit, pushing and shoving and trampling everything in their way, including of course the odd bust that had fallen from the rocking shelves. Wearing the black hat of the defenders, El Tuerto climbed onto the table in a heroic attempt to stem the pandemonium, but managed only to play Godzilla to the few Evas still left intact on the table.
‘Remain calm, comrades! Fall back in orderly fashion! The factory is yours! Defend it!’ he shouted in between the coughing fits that tore through his throat. A single idea was hammering on the anvil of Marroné’s brain: the van. Save the van! Get in the driver’s seat, put your foot down, drive through the hail of bullets, hunched over the wheel, straight through the wire if necessary and don’t stop till you’ve reached 300 Paseo Colón and delivered the seventy-two busts, packed and parcelled, and later, in some other life, worry about the twenty that were missing. As soon as he put his head round the door, he knew that not even that grace would be his: hit by some projectile or set alight by the workers as a barricade, the van was now an orb of fire, its precious cargo aflame on its pyre of tow and wood. The heat forced Marroné to back away.
‘They’ve sent in the Air Force! We’re being bombed!’ a boy running past shouted to him, his eyes bulging with fright. But it wasn’t true; at least, when he looked up at the sky, Marroné could see no aircraft raking across it, hear no roar of jet engines; all he made out were a few lost butterflies, straggling and directionless, which, smothered by the fumes and smoke, fell to the ground as if gassed.
The Adventure of the Busts of Eva Perón Page 19