The Adventure of the Busts of Eva Perón

by Carlos Gamerro

  They went about it with a methodical slowness, like a long, physically demanding job for which you have to save your strength, and every so often one of them would stand up, arch his back with his hands on his kidneys and, after wiping his forehead with his forearm or a handkerchief, return to the task in hand. Arcimboldo didn’t take part, but merely supervised, hands on hips, and every now and then gave curt instructions or checked his heavy Rolex. A police officer came over to see how they were getting along.

  ‘Gonna be long?’

  ‘Nah. Five minutes tops.’

  It felt like five hundred years to Marroné. He had to keep his eyes half-open now, for if he closed them the tears would roll down his cheeks, carving broad, skin-coloured furrows through the white plaster, and his disguise would be blown. But if he kept his eyes like this and concentrated every ounce of his being on fighting back the tears, he could just about swallow them. His greatest fear was that he might start sweating from the heat and the effort of keeping still, and it occurred to his mind – not to him – that every minute Paddy took to die increased his chances of being caught.

  Arcimboldo checked his watch again and, true to his word, though the policeman had walked off by now, he called a stop to it and bent down to check Paddy, now face up from the kicking, for a pulse. Attempting to stand again, his downturned palms charlestoned in the air two or three times before he held them out to be pulled to his feet. They walked off in silence, pulling the knuckle-dusters off their swollen fingers, rubbing their red-raw knuckles and looking around for something to wipe them on.

  Cracking with every step and flaking like old plaster, Marroné began to move: he went over to his friend and touched his face with one outstretched finger. The one remaining eye suddenly popped open, and Marroné leapt backwards, barely able to contain his scream. The eye cast desperately about itself in all directions: there was no way to get him out of here or ask for help, and he was next on their list. But there was something he owed his friend, and it was now or never.

  ‘Paddy…’ He crouched down and whispered in his ear. ‘That time with the coloured chalk… remember? It was me. I did it.’

  Staring into his two, Paddy’s one good eye widened visibly, as if he were trying to absorb the enormity of what he’d just heard. Then it closed for ever.

  * * *

  Darting between the smoking ruins and freezing statue-like every now and then, Marroné made it to the right transept. The door was just a stone’s throw from the perimeter fence, which had been breached in places by the attackers. Moving cautiously through the scattered barricades, he ran into El Tuerto, who took one look at Marroné and crossed himself.

  ‘I’m still alive, you idiot,’ he whispered to him, when he understood.

  ‘Jesus Christ, Ernesto. I thought you was a ghost,’ said El Tuerto with one hand on his chest.

  ‘They’ve killed Paddy.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘El Colorado,’ he corrected himself.

  ‘Yeah, I know. And Trejo. And Zenón. And at least two others.’

  ‘Hey… What about the lads from the… Montos?’

  ‘Ah. Dead meat the lot of ’em.’

  Marroné’s heart skipped a beat.

  ‘The girls too?’

  ‘Them first.’

  ‘Both of them?’

  ‘I ’ope so, coz them as they take alive… You know. They took the lot of ’em. It’s just you and me left.’

  ‘Shouldn’t we turn ourselves in?’ asked Marroné.

  ‘Are you shitting me? They’ll fucking murder us. You first.’

  Marroné swallowed. It was exactly what he feared he’d hear.

  ‘So what do we do?’

  ‘It’ll be dark in a bit. My house is on the other side of the stream. If we make it across without ’em seeing us, we can hole down there for a bit.’

  By heaving the sacks around, they managed to make a tiny cubbyhole in the wall and, after dragging themselves inside, they blocked up the entrance with another sack and crouched there, not daring to say a word until the crack of light darkened from yellow to mauve to purple and black. Then they moved the sacks again and stuck out their snouts like a couple of armadillos in their burrow. A strong wind had picked up, whipping handfuls of plaster dust into the air, which blinded them and made them cough, but at the same time veiled their movements. The gardens had returned to the ghostly whiteness of the early days and, in the radiant light of the police spotlights, once again resembled a snow-covered landscape. Fortunately for Marroné and El Tuerto, the factory wall cast a long shadow that reached all the way to the wire fence and, groping their way along it for some distance, amidst the blinding dust clouds, they eventually came to a hole just large enough to crawl through. El Tuerto went first, getting stuck because of his girth, and Marroné had to find a firm foothold and push him through by the arse.

  They forded the stream – more of an industrial sewer flowing with oil – from whose swampy depths, with every squelch they took, came protracted gurgles of foul-smelling gas. With difficulty they made their way up the steep slope of the opposite bank, composed entirely, Marroné discovered, of layer upon layer of garbage, which crumbled under their feet as they climbed. A little further on they could make out twinkling lights from what appeared to be not electric bulbs, but flickering candles, and clutching El Tuerto’s hand so that he wouldn’t get lost, Marroné set off towards them.

  ‌7

  ‌A Peronist Childhood

  No sooner did the first gloom of dawn creep through his sleep-encrusted eyelids than the man woke up and wondered who he was. The two words that came into his mind – ‘Ernesto Marroné’ – though not quite enough, did at least allow him to move on to the next question: where exactly, and in what, was he? He was sitting, his knees forced into his chest by the cramped circular walls; these were rough and fluted and, when he rapped on them with his knuckles, they gave a metallic boom. In the roof, which was flat, there was a round hole about the diameter of a teacup, through which dribbled the meagre light and air; stretching up his arm, he could just about manage to poke his fingers through, which, from the outside, he imagined – in a spasm of spliced consciousness – must have looked like worms wriggling their way out of a tin can. The bottom, on the other hand, was little more than a soggy mass of flakes that crumbled in his fingers like wet choux pastry, leaving his feet resting on the spongy surface of the ground, which, when trodden underfoot, exhaled a nauseating stench that made the air quite unbreathable. He couldn’t lift it, whatever it was he was in, but, by pushing the walls with his hands, he discovered it was possible to move it from side to side and, by rocking in ever-widening arcs, he eventually managed to tip it over, and he backed out to find himself on another planet. Neither the lunar landscape, riddled with potholes and craters full of iridescent water that reflected nothing but itself, nor the mountains that fumed relentlessly despite the swirling drizzle, seemed to belong to any natural geography. They did to human geography, though: the vast marches of polythene bags, grizzly newspaper, plastic containers and broken bottles, the snowdrifts of flaking polystyrene, helped him grasp the fact that he must be in a garbage tip. He cast about him in all directions: as far as the misty drizzle revealed any shapes, there wasn’t a single house, not a single tree – nothing but the sheer spurs of the tip, made ever hazier by the distance and the rain. He made for a steep bank along which muddy waterfalls cascaded softly over inflated cliffs of polythene. His whole body ached, as if he had been in a rugby game after which the other team, not content with whipping them on the field, had barged into the changing rooms and beaten them with sticks; and incapable of remembering what had happened, he tried to imagine how he might, in one of the possible worlds his mind was capable of grasping, have come to such a sorry pass. He didn’t even recognise as his own the clothes he stood up in: the buttonless, double-breasted serge jacket, which he could barely fasten over the bleached-out t-shirt; the elasticated tracksuit bottoms with foot straps, so short
they left his ankles exposed; the fraying espadrilles, whose rope soles softened by the water had begun to unravel and dragged behind him like dead snakes. Didn’t he use to wear suits of the finest cashmere, ties of silk and Italian shoes? No, that had been in another life. White overalls, boots, hard hat? Not any more, it seemed. The images dissolved in the pools of his memory as soon as he tried to grasp them, and in like manner his feet, as he attempted to scale the bank, churned the crumbling rubbish without going anywhere. It was as if, in the relentlessly repeated act of climbing, his muscles were in pursuit of a memory rather than a physical spot, and they found it when he reached the top: he had already been here, not long ago; but it had been darkest night and he hadn’t been able to see, as he could now, the winding palisade of dilapidated shacks, huddled together like cattle in a flooded field, between the grey drizzle and the vast mirror of water; and it was only now, when his crusted eyes met the crusted landscape, that it all came flooding back to him.

  Paddy was dead, the busts were gone and his own life had been saved by a miracle. Dragging him by the hand like a rag doll – the battered knight-errant assisted by his faithful squire – El Tuerto had led him down the indistinguishable alleyways of the rickety maze: dogs barked as they passed, children scattered before them, chamamé and cumbia duelled on rival radio sets. ‘This way, Ernesto… mind yer head… Geroudofit, yer mutt!’ El Tuerto shredded his sentences between gasps. On yet another anonymous corner he gave Marroné a shove without warning and they crashed as one through a swing door on tyre hinges.

  The house was part airbrick, part corrugated iron, part wood. Lit by a couple of candles, the front room contained: a chest of drawers upon which stood a black-and-white TV set, whose light, he would later discover, came from a kerosene lamp set in its hollow innards; a half-open Siam fridge; a Gilera motorbike, whose back wheel and various parts were dotted about the floor (El Tuerto was a mechanic at the factory); a stout woman in a mousey, floral-print dressing gown that enveloped her like a badly wrapped parcel; and two girls of six and ten, playing with dead babies on the dirt floor (upon closer inspection they turned out to be bald dolls with missing arms or legs). The woman was in the process of making milanesas in a frying pan that wobbled precariously atop a Primus stove on the floor and barely turned round when the two quivering lumps burst in.

  ‘Oh. So you’re back, are you? Well? How did you get on with the strike?’ she asked, her feigned innocence dripping with malice as she slapped a raw cutlet in egg and breadcrumbs. ‘Over is it? Get everything you bargained for, did you?’

  ‘Shut your face, Pipota, and stick your ’ead out to see if we’ve been followed,’ barked El Tuerto at her, unbuttoning his overalls; it was an order she chose blithely to ignore, returning instead to the hypnotic sputterings of her milanesa. ‘Oy! Ernesto! What you waiting for?’ yelled El Tuerto, making Marroné leap into the air with alarm.

  El Tuerto was already down to his underpants, which peeked out red from beneath the thick fold of hairy belly, and was trying to extricate his boots from his overalls spread on the floor.

  ‘Get out of those things, will you. If the pigs show up, or the union goons, you’re dead meat.’

  Marroné hastily complied, but when he reached the fourth button (he was having difficulty undoing them, as they were now welded with hard plaster to their buttonholes), he realised there was a problem. He called El Tuerto to one side and whispered in his ear:

  ‘Errb. I dot dothig odd udderdeath,’ he said, gesturing at the three ladies present.

  ‘Eh?’ answered El Tuerto. ‘I didn’t get a bloody word of that.’

  ‘I dot wedding eddy udderdads,’ he rephrased, pointing insistently at his crotch. His thick tongue and tumid lips could barely form words.

  El Tuerto was now jumping about the room as if in a sack race, pulling on skin-tight jeans below his Huracán shirt.

  ‘Naaaah. Don’t worry about those two, won’t be the first cock they’ve seen. Just as long as it stays visible… And the other one must have lost count by now. Right, Pipota?’ he chuckled as he rummaged in the chest of drawers and tossed Marroné some light-blue Lycra underpants and the drainpipe tracksuit bottoms, a buttonless double-breasted jacket, and a bleached-out t-shirt in quick succession. ‘Try these on. I got better threads than these, but you can’t be going around the place all got up like a dog’s dinner, now, can you? You’ll stick out like a sore thumb. Alright, Ernesto, go on; you can use the bedroom if you’re that fussed about it.’

  The room he had entered lay on the other side of a cotton counterpane, attached to the door frame with drawing pins, and every square inch was taken up by a double bed covered with a brand-new Afghan blanket, a three-piece wardrobe whose veneer was chipped at the corners of the doors, a night table, a lighted candle in a candlestick and, asleep on a camp bed, a tiny little old man who looked so still and worn by life that he might actually have been dead. Through the curtain, as he undressed – no mean feat, for the fabric of his overalls was by then as hard and unyielding as plasterboard and, rather than a man disrobing, he felt like a chick hatching from an egg – Marroné had eavesdropped on the conversation.

  ‘So you’re out of a job again, are you?’

  ‘But I wasn’t fired this time, Pipota. I was on strike.’

  ‘How long d’you last this time? Twenty days? What did I tell you? Bet you don’t see the end of the month out.’

  ‘Listen ’ere, old girl… we was fucked. Several of the comrades pegged out. I got out of there by a sheer fluke.’

  ‘All right, keep your shirt on. We’ll get by on the milanesa butties. I’ll make another batch straight off, now you’re back to lug the basket around. What about me laddo in there, who’s he? Got to put grub on his plate, too, have I?’

  At this point El Tuerto’s voice had fallen to a whisper, and his wife must have been suitably impressed because she had answered in the same hushed tones. Marroné also remembered feeling a rather mean-minded relief at overhearing his hosts’ conversation. All the women he had met during the strike were self-sacrificing proletarians who put their shoulders to the wheel, took whatever came their way and supported, not to say encouraged, their husbands’ bravery – and all without a word of complaint. Of course, he’d only met the ones who had visited the factory. There were also, he now realised, women who stayed at home, cursing and muttering as they fried their poisoned milanesas.

  Moving delicately and feeling as fragile as a limb just out of a cast, he’d sat down to get changed on the bed, which was so high (each leg stood on three bricks) that his feet didn’t reach the floor; the next thing he remembered was a hand slapping him gently to bring him round from his comatose slumber.

  ‘Ernesto… Ernesto… There’s some people ’ere as wants to see you,’ El Tuerto told him.

  There were three of them. The first, between forty and forty-five, was tall, dark-skinned, mono-browed, sunken-eyed; he wore bell-bottoms – from under which peeped the toes of moccasins – and a short-sleeved safari shirt, and smoked super-king-size, which he pulled out of one or other countless pockets weighed down with buckles; he was backed up by a hulk with long hair and a moustache, wearing a tight-fitting, flesh-coloured polo neck and towelling wrist- and head-bands, as if he’d just dropped in after a game of tennis; and a lad who couldn’t have been more than twenty, in a shimmering brown velvet jacket, the crease in his immaculate white trousers ironed sharp as a knife, and whose unruly quiff had been slicked back into a roof of corrugated iron. They shook hands very formally: Sr Gareca, Malito and El Bebe. El Tuerto had brought them all chairs, but had parked himself on an upended orange crate; he poured them a glass of unchilled white wine from a bottle without a label and sent the girls into the other room; La Pipota, meanwhile, went on with her milanesas, filling the scant breathing space with a choking fog of burnt oil and kerosene.

  Sr Gareca had opened by acknowledging their achievements in the shanties and had thanked them for their contributions of cider and panett
one on Christmas Eve, then gone on to explain how they’d do their best to pay them back (‘You scratch our backs…’), even if they did lack the wherewithal. But then, the mutual return of favours aside, one thing was clear: they all had the same interests at heart, like dragging the poor out of their poverty (here La Pipota, who, with snorts of disbelief and exaggerated gesticulations, provided a running commentary on all she heard, had said – as if to herself, but out loud for all to hear – ‘Yeah, right, just as long as them’s the poor,’ and her husband flashed her a withering glare with his white eye, which, like one of those purple rings you buy at the seaside, seemed to change colour with his mood). They shared the same enemy, Sr Gareca had continued, not letting on he’d heard a thing, and then, after all, they were all Peronists, weren’t they. At this point Malito had whispered something in his ear, and Sr Gareca had muttered back through clenched teeth, ‘Not now, wait a bit.’ Up till now, Sr Gareca resumed his introduction, they’d been getting along famously, ‘All for one and one for all’ as they say; whenever the need had arisen, they’d helped each other out, and if there had ever been any friction, or the odd misunderstanding, they had worked things out with goodwill ‘and above all respect’. He spoke carefully, choosing his words and using them painstakingly to construct his sentences, which he invariably ended with an ‘Am I making sense?’, to which Marroné would invariably reply with bouts of vehement nodding, though he understood less and less of what was said. Satisfied, Sr Gareca had paused, lit up another super-king-size, let out the smoke and set off again with a ‘The fact is…’ that had sounded promising but he soon lapsed back into his circuitous progress through the chaff without ever reaching the wheat: things, it seemed, had changed; now they could no longer each tend to their own little patch; the time had come to join forces and think big. ‘He wants to do business with the company,’ Marroné had told himself, beginning to join the dots: since Sr Tamerlán’s kidnapping they’d been dishing out food in the shanties like there was no tomorrow; in fact, he himself as head of procurement had been responsible for finding the cheapest fare, and it made perfect sense for the panettone and cider he’d ordered to end up here in this shanty town; what made no sense at all was that the very same shanty housed a company that wanted to do business with Tamerlán & Sons, and that someone like Sr Gareca was its owner or CEO. Unless, of course, it was all about sanitary landfill, which made quite a lot of sense, especially if it involved buying the land for a song and bulldozing the shanties to push its value up; Sr Tamerlán had made many such an investment. ‘The fact is we’ve got the people, we’ve got the territory and we’ve got the experience; I won’t bore you with all the details, but right here in the area we’ve done two factories, a hospital and a lumberyard…’ Oh, so this was another construction company then, and what Sr Gareca was proposing was a merger. So the rumours going round were true: far from being kennels for slumdogs, dark shores where the jetsam from the city’s churning wake washed up, the shanties were miniature republics, underdeveloped versions of those European principalities that flourish away from the asphyxiating regulations that hold back the economies of the big republics. As rumour had it, the shanties were a vast black market, an archipelago of miniature duty-free zones, like the tax havens of the Caribbean, amidst an ocean of asphalt and cement. They had everything; everything was bought and everything was sold: what you couldn’t find elsewhere you could buy here, and Marroné made a mental note to ask about those disposable nappies. These true clandestine industrial parks were home to textile firms, furniture factories, bottling plants that filled brand-name bottles with foul substances, slaughterhouses for contaminated animals and travel agents that organised package holidays back home for illegal immigrants. He’d heard all this before but had dismissed it more often than not as fantasy and exaggeration. And now he had the tangible proof before his very eyes: one of these entrepreneurs, who had, by dodging the taxman, entered the fray with the lowest prices and made an astronomical killing, was daring to speak with one of the giants of the field as an equal.