The Adventure of the Busts of Eva Perón

by Carlos Gamerro

  The tears were his, but the weeping was coming from the next room, or maybe the next house (like dogs’ territory, boundaries here were invisible to the naked eye). He put on his barely dry clothes and, noticing with relief that the flood had retreated and left behind a memento of sedimental slime, like a lake bed, he squelched through it in his espadrilles – first inside then outside the house – in search of the source of the weeping, which seemed to coincide with a faint flickering light in a nearby window. A cool breeze was blowing and, high above, amidst the blue-grey clouds, twinkled a paltry scattering of urban stars. He pushed open a wooden door a good deal smaller than its frame, and made for a cradle improvised from a cardboard box, with tea towels for sheets, dimly lit by a lone candle set beside a picture of Eva Perón, before which stood a bunch of fresh flowers: humble daisies and honeysuckles. So their paths had crossed again; here he was, still fluttering round her flame and, for all he tried to get away, he always ended up coming back. ‘What is it now?’ he ventured to ask her. ‘What do you want from me? Why have you brought me here?’ He picked up the paint-pot-lid candlestick and brought the flame close to the face of the child within: a boy, just a few days old, a couple of weeks at most, his little almond eyes almost closed, his mouth and cheeks sticky with grime, and atop his head a crest of spiky, jet-black hair. What was such a tiny infant doing alone? What kind of people were these, how far had ignorance and poverty dehumanised them, that they could abandon such a small babe in arms? Another possibility occurred to him, and he clapped his hand to his mouth in horror. Perhaps the parents had been gunned down too. He felt, if not guilty, at least implicated, and recalled the late Sr Gareca’s lucid words, about taking responsibility for his actions, and decided to honour his last wish: he picked up the baby, cradling it to stop it crying, the way he used to with little Cynthia (only, she slept in a white wicker cradle with frills and flounces, holland sheets and satin bedspread), feeling its soft warmth against his chest. Marroné’s eyes filled with tears a second before his mind understood: the child was him; he was gazing at himself in a mirror of the past. This was how he had come into the world, this was how his life had started out: the same life in store for this child would have been his, had fate or chance not snatched him from the shack and carried him off to the palace. Not the same, he corrected himself; this child’s would be far worse, for the life of Ernesto Marroné (though, obviously, he wouldn’t have been called by that name) would have played itself out under the protection of a real-life Eva, not a mere icon like this. A series of imaginary flashbacks screened an alternative past – what his Peronist childhood would have been like under the constant care of Eva: a safe, hygienic birth in one of the brand-new hospitals that bore her name, his early years spent with his mother (his father was for now a hazy figure in this retrospective fantasy) in the spacious halls of the Maid’s Home, sleeping under satin quilts, playing with other children like himself – a Peronist child was never lonely – and drinking his milk on Louis XIV chairs upholstered in light brocade beneath chandeliers with crystal teardrops, until that ‘marvellous day’ in his mother’s life. ‘We’re going to see her, Ernestito!’ she said to him, picking him up and dancing with him (had his foster parents adopted him with that name or had they given it to him?). When the day finally came, his mother dressed him in a short-sleeved shirt, tie, short trousers and lace-up shoes, giving his slicked-down black hair a neat parting and wavy quiff; they took the tram on Avenida de Mayo and got off at Paseo Colón and Independencia, outside the imposing columns of the Foundation. Ernestito would be four or five years old. No, he couldn’t be, he realised, doing the sums; Eva would already have been dead by then. Three then, the age at which bourgeois or proletarian consciousness is born: the visit to Eva would be his earliest memory and brand his class consciousness for the rest of his days. Smiling, helpful uniformed men and women – her secretaries and assistants – would give them directions. ‘You have an audience with the Señora? This way please.’ They would walk past a long line of men in uniforms, cassocks and suits, and elegant, bejewelled women, and his mother would murmur, ‘I think these ladies and gentlemen were here first.’ ‘Them?’ Eva’s private secretary would say with a disparaging wave. ‘They are nothing but ambassadors, generals, businessmen, high-society ladies and church dignitaries. For decades they’ve gone first while the people waited. Now it’s their turn to wait. With Eva the last shall be first, and the first last,’ she concluded, pushing open the swing doors to Eva’s office.

  She was seated behind her desk, legs crossed, dressed in an impeccably tailored suit with velvet lapels, hair gathered in a tight bun, and she was radiant: light poured from her eyes, her brow, her mouth and her ears, encircling her like a halo. His mother made to kneel and kiss her hands, telling Ernestito with a tug to do the same, but Eva stopped her with a gesture, and it was she who stood up, walked around her desk and came over to kiss her. ‘Your name’s Eulalia, isn’t it?’ said Eva, without checking her notes (Eulalia? Where on earth had he got that name from?). ‘I’ve seen you at the Maid’s Home on several occasions. So you’re looking for a house. What is it? Don’t you like it where you are? Do they treat you badly? Are you short of anything?’ Stammering, his mother would explain her reasons: the boy’s father worked in the sugar-cane plantations in Tucumán and had nowhere to stay when he came to visit; if she had somewhere of her own, maybe… Eva Perón listened and nodded and smiled; then, half-turning, all briskness and efficiency, to her court of ministers and trade unionists that, only now they were needed, Marroné’s fantasy had summoned: ‘House, furniture, kitchen equipment and refrigerator, and a job in Buenos Aires for her husband. Are you married?’ she asked as an afterthought, and Marroné’s mother shook her bowed head in shame. ‘Make that a bridal gown too.’ And by the following day they were installed in Ciudad Evita, in a smart little Californian bungalow with a front garden, two fully furnished rooms and a refrigerator in the living room; not one of those modern ones with angular, aggressive edges, but a Siam with rounded feminine forms, overflowing with food like a maternal breast, and atop it a little shrine with the portraits of Perón and Eva. His parents’ wedding – she all in white, he uncomfortable but happy in his first dark suit, smoothing his pencil moustache, the pair of them hand in hand in a long line of couples, all dressed the same, like a line of toppers on a wedding cake, a mass proletarian wedding officiated by Eva in the flesh, acting as everyone’s godmother; then the carefree childhood in a modest, but clean and comfortable, home, the games with other children of his kind in the community park (never lonely, with no one for company but the television or the maid in the gloomy Belgrano flat, never the endless Sundays, never children at St Andrew’s, whiter than him, shouting ‘Marron Crappé’). There was more: school, where the teachers read them The Reason for My Life without a twitch of sarcasm; the visits to the Children’s Republic, with its little scale houses, shops, churches and swimming pools; the Children’s Football Championships, where Eva always kicked off and handed out the medals afterwards, and Ernestito, who had scored the winning goal for his team – for in this other life he was a star of the national sport of football, not foreignising rugby – would always cherish the gold medallion with her profile on it, received from her very own hands; the Peronist Christmases with toys from the Foundation at the foot of the tree, and the inevitable cider and panettone on the chequered tablecloth; the Children’s Tourism Plans, the journey on the train where first class was working class; the stay in Chapadmalal, at one of the eight hotel complexes perched atop the cliffs as if standing guard over the people’s happiness, together with other children like Marroné, who, thanks to Evita, were seeing the sea for the first time. Yes, yes, that childhood might have been his had he not been robbed of it by the oligarchy, had he not been torn from his mother’s arms by an elderly couple, incapable, out of selfishness or laziness, of having children of their own until it was too late, then deciding on a whim to get themselves one, like someone buying a pupp
y in a pet shop.

  And at that point Marroné was at last granted the vision of the face of his true mother: not the face of that vaguely affectionate, always distant lady that popped up now and then to keep an eye on the maids and lecture them on how to bathe him, dress him and feed him, but the brave, obscure woman who had borne him in her belly for nine months, perhaps trekking long distances on her journey from the countryside to the city (he’d got it into his head they were from Tucumán and was surer of it with every passing minute), supporting him with one hand and stroking him with the other while she talked to him. But the dream was shattered no sooner had it begun: she hadn’t the wherewithal to keep him, she was alone in the monstrous, indifferent city. Why hadn’t she turned to Evita? Why hadn’t she taken her helping hand? There was no way of knowing. Yes, there was, he told himself, transforming his despondency into decisiveness. The time had come to ask the questions he never had: he would confront his parents, and if they didn’t talk, there would be birth certificates, adoption records… If she was still alive, he’d find her, go to see her and ask her. Because, while he was ignorant of the motives, there was no doubting the sentiment: he could see her clearly, torn apart by tears after signing, without having looked at the papers they handed to her (perhaps she couldn’t read), then regretting it, trying to go back for him and being held back, first by the strong arm of a head nurse, then ushered out into the street by another younger, pleasanter one, repeating to her ‘It’s better this way’. Marroné’s eyes filled with tears at the imaginary scene. Cradled in the warmth of his lap, the baby had fallen asleep and, all emotion, Marroné swore to him he’d never put him through his own terrible ordeal of orphancy: if Evita wasn’t there, he’d take charge and adopt him – if not as a son, at least as a godson. He’d look after him, watch over him, make sure he wanted for nothing. Because, for all he’d been brought up a bourgeois, his soul was anything but. He was, he realised at last, a Peronist born if not bred. The time had come for him to adopt his true identity. It suddenly became clear, crystal-clear, the reason for his presence in this incredible place, which had at first seemed to him the most foreign and alien of places, and now turned out to be the country of his lost childhood. If his steps had guided him to this shanty town and this house, it wasn’t because he was the victim of circumstances, but because he was following a path. All of this had happened – all of it: Sr Tamerlán’s severed finger, his captivity in the occupied factory, becoming a workers’ leader, the struggle against the forces of the anti-people, the death, or sacrifice as he could see it now, of Paddy, María Eva, El Bebe and so many others, his flight through the mud and water, the very existence of his genteel neighbourhood and this slum, of Montoneros and Sr Tamerlán – so that Marroné could find Marroné. Because he would only find out who he really was when he uncovered the obscure past that had been denied to him, the roots that reached deep into the garbage and the mire. He now also understood the deeper meaning of his mission (which might also be his life’s mission): it was nothing less than to carry the spirit of Eva, embodied in her busts, to the very heart of the corporation. For, being neither us nor them, he was the chosen one, predestined, belonging to both worlds. Like Eva, he was a bridge. Carrying Eva to the corporation, opening the corporation up to Eva: this way capital and labour would march hand in hand rather than be at loggerheads, and this senseless war that had claimed so many victims would come to an end. And, as if blessed by a vision underwriting the truth of his revelation, at that very moment he saw Eva Perón walk past the window of the shack.

  ‌8

  ‌The Foundation

  Marroné dropped the baby unceremoniously into its cardboard box and sped out of the shack, oblivious to its cries, to pursue her down the pitch-black streets. Her dress was embroidered with rhinestones and sequins, her wrists, neck and ears shone with blinding white stones, her platinum hair was tied back in a severe bun and her violet halo banished the impenetrable darkness as she went: it was impossible to lose sight of her. She crossed the mud – furrowed with tyre tracks and pitted with fetid puddles – without so much as staining her lace hem, her feet barely touching the ground. It was definitely her and, more out of an urge to share his astonishment than to corroborate the obvious, Marroné said to a boy of around twelve, the only mortal within earshot out there on the edge of the shanties:

  ‘It’s Eva!’

  ‘Course it is. Who do you expect?’ the boy answered phlegmatically.

  He thought at first it might be the ghost of his own María Eva, killed in combat and returning to earth in all her pomp and glory to lead the oppressed in the last battle against the forces of the anti-people; but when she looked about her at a particularly complex intersection of alleyways, and her glowing profile was silhouetted against the surrounding darkness, the difference in features became apparent; if this floating, glow-in-the-dark Eva wasn’t his very own, she could only be the real one. Dazzled, he followed her light like a moth, leaving behind the squalid shanties and crossing a dark wasteland, then climbing a long embankment – Eva with no apparent effort, Marroné slipping and sliding on the trails of muddy clay and the long water-combed grass. For a while now the chorus of frogs and crickets and the occasional barking of a dog had been joined by a continuous, monotonous hum, which he knew to be the high-speed contact of tyres on tarmac: he couldn’t be far from the freeway.

  He saw her silhouette crest the embankment and nimbly vault the guard rail, pausing for a moment at the hard shoulder as if, more than the risk itself, she feared the shock her spectral apparition might cause the unsuspecting motorists; then one of her diamond-dusted shoes stepped boldly out onto the asphalt, and she strode decisively across. Haloed in the strobes of frantically flashing headlights, she shone like a comet, and, as they swerved to avoid her and the lurid red eyes of their tail lights vanished into the vaporous fog, the echoes of their horns hung in the air like ships’ sirens over water. As he followed her, meticulously treading in her footprints, he could see himself – his consciousness split like two halves of an apple – behind the wheel of one of those cars, knuckles white, eyes bulging, heart thudding in his throat. What was that? Did you see it? Was it a woman or a ghost?

  Once he had negotiated the last guard rail, and before skittering down the slope of wet grass, Marroné saw where it was she was headed: about fifty metres away, brilliant white against an arc of dark cypresses that cupped them like a hand, gleamed the monumental forms of a neoclassical temple, complete with a ghostly array of statuary. Avoiding the freeway exit and the car entrance, Eva made resolutely for what turned out to be a door concealed in the privet fence surrounding the premises, and shut it behind her. Upon opening it, Marroné discovered that it led to a path laid with white gravel, which crunched softly beneath the soles of his espadrilles, and was lined with privets too tall to see over. The faint light from the waning moon gave the path a satiny sheen, and every dozen steps or so glaring Martian-green spotlights lit the bushes from below. Afraid he would lose first Eva and then himself amid this intricate maze, he quickened his pace; sometimes she would disappear for a few moments around a sharp corner or unexpected bend, but if he didn’t let her get too far ahead, her halo still shone above the privet to guide him on his way. But as luck would have it, just as he had felt confident enough to let her get a few steps ahead, a clump of grey clouds scudded across the sickle moon like a drawn curtain, and Eva’s faint phosphorescence was blown out like a candle flame. Marroné began running to catch up with her, taking the right-hand path at a fork and then, in the irrational certainty of having taken the wrong turning, retraced his steps and plunged headlong down the left-hand one, sprinting now and scratching his arms on the briars; he was still running when the maze came to an abrupt end, and he emerged onto an open lawn dotted with topiary, across which Eva glided, borne up on the dome of her skirt like a woman in a Monet painting, in the direction of the Greek temple, so close now that its imposing Doric columns seemed to lurch out at them. At this distan
ce the resemblance, which had been clear from afar, was all the more striking: the place they were making for was a simplified scale reproduction of the Foundation named after the woman whose ghost was now climbing the broad steps to a solid bronze door. Just as she reached it, the moon reappeared, allowing Marroné to take in the topiary of privet, elaborately pruned into motifs from Peronist iconography: medallion profiles of Perón and Eva, a Peronist Party badge, a pair of hands raised skywards as if waiting to embrace all visitors. He looked away only for a few seconds but, when he turned back, he could see no trace of Eva. She had vanished, along with her halo. Marroné’s steps rang hollow among the bare columns, which turned out to be not marble, but plaster; the whole façade – including, high above, a Venus de Milo with arms, a Botticelli Venus with clothes, a Victory of Samothrace with smiling head and a Virgin Mary – bore all the familiar hallmarks of the Sansimón Plasterworks. Descending a couple of steps to get a better view of their faces, he instantly recognised in each and every one the unmistakeable features of Eva Perón. This discovery fanned a hesitant, almost extinct flame of hope: if Eva had appeared to him just when he’d thought all was lost, it was to act as his guide. But why him? Had she, too, been fooled by his current proletarian looks? Or was it precisely the opposite: that being not of this world, she could see into his soul – the soul of the Peronist child he should have been?

  Fortified by these thoughts, he gave two or three firm knocks on the solid door, on which Perón’s head was sculpted in bas-relief. A peephole in the General’s face promptly opened, and when two suspicious, beady eyes peered out at him, he felt as if the General himself were inspecting him.