The Adventure of the Busts of Eva Perón

by Carlos Gamerro

  Coughing up his lungs and groping blind and swollen-eyed, Marroné made his way back to the now empty workshop. If he was quick, he kept repeating, there was still time to save a few; he could charge back and forth from workshop to car with an Eva under each arm, through the crossfire and explosions, until he’d saved the last remaining bust, but no sooner had the thought taken shape in his brain than a tank came crashing through the brick wall, knocking all the Evas off their shelves, its caterpillars proceeding to grind the few unbroken by the fall to dust.

  ‘Back to the factory! Back to the factory!’ shouted a distant voice in the fog, and Marroné, whose brain was too battered to think for itself, followed the order, dragging himself out of the workshop on all fours.

  On his way to the factory he came across the young rebel office worker, Ramírez, running along the outer wall of the transept clutching a machine gun. They took cover at what had been the inner corner of the left transept of the building and crouched down together for a moment.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ Marroné asked him in amazement.

  ‘To Die in Madrid!’ came back the cryptic reply and, planting one knee squarely on the ground, he started firing on the tank, which was pivoting in search of a target. Two bottles came from nowhere and smashed over its skin of iron, bathing it in fuel but failing to burst into flame. ‘What are they trying to do? Clean it? The bloody incompetents spout World Revolution and don’t even know how to mix a bloody Molotov,’ spat his mind in contempt. To avoid being blown to pieces together with Ramírez, Marroné staggered off, his arms wheeling like a drunk. What was all this? What was Ramírez, the paper-pusher who’d been wearing a pink shirt and green tartan tie when they’d met, doing firing on an armoured car with a machine gun? Who was in charge of the casting in this ridiculous film?

  No sooner had he emerged from the smoke and the entrance was in sight than a giant’s hand slammed into his chest, sending him flying backwards, skidding wildly on his backside. As he flailed to free himself from its grip, he realised he was soaking wet.

  ‘Whoa, hey! It’s Ernesto!’

  His own men had hit him with the fire-hose. ‘At least we didn’t plug you one,’ said the arms that picked him up off the floor and dragged him inside by the armpits. Before he could even attempt to regain his senses, he was surrounded by half a dozen workers asking for all sorts of instructions and, as he peered over the ring of heads, he caught sight of the face of María Eva, her FAL slung over her shoulder; she saluted gravely when their eyes met. She had tied her hair back for combat, making her look even more like the Eva in the photonovel.

  ‘Comrade María Eva is in charge of defence operations,’ he said off the top of his head to wriggle out of it. ‘I want you to obey her every command as if it were my own,’ he said, with more composure, and headed into the factory to find a safe place to hide until all this madness had blown over.

  Grenades came through the skylights and windows with monotonous regularity and, if you looked up or weren’t wearing your helmet, the vicious rain of glass could leave you badly cut, or worse still, quite blind. But no sooner had they landed than they were picked up and launched back by the ever-vigilant workers, usually with unerring aim, and controlled fires were dotted about, their smoke neutralising the gas and making the air still just about breathable.

  His first idea had been to take refuge under a desk or sofa bed in one of the offices, but then he called to mind the fuel barrels and garlands of grenades, as well as Miguel’s promise to blow the factory sky high if it was attacked, and it no longer seemed like such a good idea. He was in the grip of these deliberations, crossing the central nave in the direction of the apse, when a hand deposited a jar of marbles and ball bearings in his, and a voice yelled in his ear:

  ‘It’s the Cossacks! The Cossacks are coming!’

  His sense of reality was so badly shaken by now that he wouldn’t have been at all surprised when he turned round to find himself face to face with a host of fierce, bearded faces wielding sabres and wearing fur caps; but as usual the reality was even worse: in through the entrance to the atrium, whose barricades of furniture and beams had been swept aside by the personnel carrier, charged a troop of mounted police on monstrous brown steeds, galloping at full tilt and wielding what might have been truncheons or whips. Again the sense of unreality trumped common sense, and Marroné just stood there in the middle of the nave, as if, by staring hard at them, these figments of the enchanters who were pursuing him would pop and vanish like bubbles into the air. What was wrong with all these people? How on earth could a fucking cavalry charge be bearing down on him, a St Andrew’s graduate and head of procurement at Tamerlán & Sons, as if they were back in the Middle Ages? Luckily for him, someone else, of a more practical, less metaphysical turn of mind, hurled a paper grenade at the wall of jostling steeds, whereupon it promptly burst, sending clouds of pepper into the air and making the horses rear and prance, forcing their riders to halt the charge to bring them under control.

  He was running for the apse when the voice of command reached his ears once again.

  ‘The marbles! Throw the marbles!’

  Blindly, he obeyed. Maybe too blindly, for instead of throwing the jar backwards between himself and the horses, Marroné flung it forwards, and when the jar shattered on the floor and the coloured marbles scattered in all directions, it was Marroné that went skating uncontrollably and fell flat on his face. The pain as he hit the floor was unspeakable and for a moment he thought he’d swallowed some of the marbles, which now floated in his mouth in some kind of thick soup, and it was only after taking cover behind one of the brown machines and spitting a spurt of blood into his palms that he understood he’d split his lip, bitten his tongue and broken God knows how many teeth. ‘With everything I’ve got on, and I have to make a dental appointment!’ grumbled the old part of his mind indignantly, still obstinately running about bumping into the walls of his skull like a headless chicken.

  Still, there must have been enough marbles rolling about to have come between him and the horses, for they had gone into a stiff-legged Holiday on Ice routine, bumping into and falling over each other with great thuds, squashing at least two riders against the cement floor or the machines.

  ‘Nice one! Way to go, Ernesto!’ he heard someone shout. He poked his head out of his hiding place; an iron hand closed over his arm like a mantrap and hauled him to his feet.

  ‘Don’t hurt me! I’m a hostage!’ he was about to scream, but he recognised Saturnino’s features just in time and saved the disclaimer for the right occasion.

  ‘Ernesto! You been hit?’ he asked him in concern, and then, in reply to the burbling sounds coming from Marroné, who discovered he could barely talk for the blood pouring from his mouth, he shouted, ‘Come on! We’re falling back!’

  Saturnino led Marroné towards the barricade, which followed the line of blue machines. They crouched low as they ran, because shots could now be heard inside the factory too. Manning the barricade were a couple of workers with small-arms, and a guerrilla with a light machine gun, while most of the others had only catapults and bolts; three men lay on the ground, their white overalls stained with blood. Two weren’t moving: one, unrecognisable for the burns to his face, giving off the pestilential stench of charred flesh; another, fists clenched, as if someone had been trying to prise something away out of them, and teeth bared, as if they too had been summoned in defence of it. It took Marroné a couple of seconds to realise that what he was looking at was a corpse; and another to notice that this was – or had been – the young worker called Zenón. The third, eyes half-closed, was fat and very tall, and was frothing at the mouth, his forearms flapping back and forth, like one of those wind-up bath toys; him too Marroné recognised, for he had got to know all of them by now: he was a River Plate supporter like himself, and they’d spent a morning chatting about the championship they might win after eighteen years without a trophy. ‘We won’t let it slip away this time,’ the youn
g, fair-haired giant had assured him with a slap on the back that almost broke his spine. Kneeling beside them, Edmundo Rivero hid his heavy face in his great hands and wept.

  ‘Let’s go, comrade. We don’t cry over dead combatants, we step in for them!’ the guerrilla shouted to him, and Marroné was tempted to pull rank and tell him to shut his mouth. Something had quickened inside him when he saw those bodies lying there. He’d also noticed the looks his men had been casting in his direction as much as to say ‘Do something!’ Absurdly, and quite inappropriately, the indifferent features of Tamerlán as he donned the finger-stall appeared before his eyes. All this was for that sonofabitch? No sooner had the thought crossed his mind than the jumble of emotions distilled to a clear, burning rush that rose through his chest and throat, and flooded into his tingling arms. Marroné was suddenly very angry.

  ‘Gimme a fucking gun!’ he shouted.

  He’d barely got the words out before he had one in his outstretched palm. He recognised it immediately: a Browning 9mm. Once he reached puberty, his father would regularly take him to the Federal Firing Range, so he knew how to handle a gun and didn’t think twice as, quick as a lizard, he took a peep over the barricade, pinpointed the advancing forces taking cover behind the machines and emptied the remaining contents of the clip at them. Back on the floor, while – his hands barely trembling – he banged in a fresh clip a guerrilla had tossed to him, he realised what had happened: ‘I can do it too. I am brave after all!’ He’d tell Paddy the moment he saw him.

  But for now he had other fish to fry. The man at his side gave a cry and rolled away, tiny objects were bouncing all around him as if being hurled with great force from above.

  ‘Snipers! Up in the roof! Let’s get out of here!’

  Marroné looked up and saw what was going on. The aggressors had set the yellow chair-lifts going again and were zooming about, gunning them down like fish in a barrel. Only the enveloping smoke, especially thick up in the roof, prevented them from being picked off one by one, like olives stabbed with toothpicks. He fired a few shots upwards, but no joy as far as he could see, then dragged himself under a heavy machine to shield himself from the death raining down from the sky.

  From his hiding place he watched a patrol led – or at least headed, because the real leader, a fifty-something with a face as red and meaty as raw steak and hair as white as fat, had him firmly by the arm – by a terrified Baigorria and made up of heavies carrying clubs or chains, as well as several revolvers and at least one sawn-off shotgun. ‘That one,’ Baigorria pointed suddenly with a trembling arm, and the men behind him leapt on a wounded striker dragging himself across the floor and, when they hauled him up by his hair, Marroné recognised Trejo, who was no longer wearing his white helmet, perhaps to escape detection; a ruse that, thanks to Baigorria’s untimely intervention, hadn’t worked.

  ‘Where’s El Colorado, the sonofabitch? Where’s El Colorado!’ they screamed at him in unison, and his reply – if he gave one – apparently didn’t satisfy them, because without asking twice they’d let go of his hair and, before he even hit the ground, they’d laid into him with sticks, chains, lengths of lead-filled hose, and knuckle-dusters, which glinted with every raised fist. One even wielded a spade.

  ‘This is for Babirusa, you lefty cunt!’ said the man with the white hair when they were done, and Marroné shut his eyes and covered his ears to drown out the shotgun’s thunder that finished the sentence off.

  When they were at a safe distance, Marroné felt a wetness between his legs and wondered if he’d been hit. He touched it, looked at it, smelt it. It wasn’t blood; it was urine. Feeling not so much shame as detached surprise, as if it had happened to someone else, he began to drag himself towards the exit that led to the service lifts, which would allow him to get up to the offices and hide until the worst was over; he now regretted binning his James Smart suit and Italian shoes, for even in that state they would have served to identify him as one of the hostages (wasn’t he, after all?) and minimise the risk of being gunned down before getting a word in edgeways, should he have to give himself up.

  But the assailants seemed to have chosen this as their meeting point, and the apse was swarming with riot police looking like armoured beetles, union thugs and security personnel. Like a praetorian guard, they rallied round the recently freed Sansimón, who, dishevelled and bald (he must have been wearing a toupee), with blackened face, torn shirt and sporting only one shoe, was screaming wildly at the top of his voice:

  ‘Get me Macramé! I want him dead! No! I want him alive. I want to torture him!’

  There was only one thing for it. In his flight from the workshop he’d caught a glimpse of one of the huge vats brimful of fresh plaster, ready for use in the first batch of products from the newly liberated plasterworks. A team of fire-fighters was patrolling the corridors, dousing the fires with their extinguishers, and under cover of their white clouds he managed to dodge from one machine to the next and finally reached the edge of the vast pool of white. A thin crust had formed, like a crème brûlée, which Marroné broke with his boot and the thick watery paste folded itself coolly around him as he slid silently into it. He had picked up a piece of half-inch tubing on the way and, gripping it firmly in his teeth like a snorkel, he sank back in the thin gruel until he was lying flat. His plan was to stay submerged in this white mire until night fell, though exactly how he would check the light with his eyes closed under all this plaster was a riddle he hadn’t yet solved. Maybe if he counted the seconds, he could get an approximate idea of the passing of time. But he soon lost count, as keeping track of the seconds on the one hand and the minutes on the other sent his brain into a tailspin, and it was getting harder and harder to breathe too, either because the density of the liquid, far greater than water, was compressing his lungs, or because… the plaster was setting! Panic welled within him at the thought. What if, by the time he decided to get out, it was too late, and he wound up buried prematurely in a sarcophagus of calcium sulphate? The claustrophobia flooded through him in wave after wave of sheer, breathless panic, and, by raising his knees and levering himself up onto his elbows, he pressed with his forehead until he felt the fresh crust give, and, with the gingerliness of an old man extricating himself from a slippery bathtub, he lowered himself down from the vat and took two faltering steps, dripping like a pat of butter in the summer sun. Before he could take a third, he heard voices approaching. He couldn’t run in this state: he was a target with arrows pointing at him and a big sign saying ‘PLEASE SHOOT ME’. Utterly at the end of his wits he froze where he stood. He gazed blankly around the jungle of corbels, amphorae and columns, looking for anywhere to hide – and then inspiration struck. He puffed out his chest, put his hand to it, clenched the other into a fist, and raised his forehead proud and high to the future. Then he shut his eyes: if he could resist the urge to open them, there was an outside chance they would take him for a model of the Monument to the Descamisado and walk straight past.

  It worked like a dream: the patrol or whoever it was he’d heard approaching walked straight past without noticing him, one of them panting the mantra ‘Motherfuckincunt! Motherfuckincunt!’, which gave Marroné no clue as to whatever or whoever it was they were looking for. He opened his eyes a crack: the coast was clear. The plaster must have set on contact with the air, which no doubt improved his camouflage; all he had to do was remain perfectly still, like one of those living statues you see in squares or in the street. Luckily, the blood had stopped dripping from his lips.

  That was when he saw them coming back, led by the white-haired man whose face looked like an Arcimboldo of raw steaks, and Marroné shut his eyes tight so they wouldn’t see him as they passed. They didn’t, but stopped right in front of him, puffing and panting and all talking at once, muttering, ‘Take that, you sonofabitch, motherfuckincunt, fucking lefty scumbag, Happy Christmas,’ and with every phrase came a whish of air – dull and muffled from the clubs, dizzying and sibilant from the chains �
�� invariably climaxing in a thud and a moan, a cry, sometimes a crunch. ‘Come on, come on, finish him off!’ urged a hoarse voice full of hatred or maybe just weariness, and then came another: ‘Whoa, don’t be in such a hurry, I want to enjoy this.’

  Unable to stop himself, Marroné began first to loosen his eyelids without actually unsticking them, then separated them very slightly until a filigree of pale light filtered through the crack, the way you loosen a closed shutter in the morning with the first tug. He kept his breathing shallow – very shallow and very slow; inside he shook with every blow, but outside – he hoped, he prayed – there was nothing to see. By the light now coming in through his eyelids he could distinguish shapes and colours through a faint mist. To see more clearly he had to open his eyes still further, but he remembered having heard or read that the eye of a predator is hard-wired for movement; but no predator – not even these – would spot the stop-motion of his eyelids. He could now make out the thugs’ faces: they were red and sweaty, and they huffed and wheezed from the effort; they spat as they swore but, lucky for Marroné, they were intent on their victim, who he couldn’t make out, because his forehead was still tilted upwards. Stage by stage, his eyes abandoned faces for shoulders, shoulders for chests, chests for bellies and bellies for knees, until his gaze reached their feet and the thing that lay between them.

  It was face down, and the blood made the white overalls looked like a slaughterman’s; he wouldn’t have recognised him if it hadn’t been for the unmistakeable copper tone of his hair. The instant he did, his legs nearly gave way. He heard a gasp of horror escape his lips, but the thugs mustn’t have heard it above their hoarse wheezing. Or had he only gasped to himself? Paddy was still moving, his arms and legs bending and stretching as if trying to carry him away from the pain, but his body wouldn’t budge. His friend was being murdered before his eyes and he was powerless to do anything.