‘Same as you, I suppose. First time?’
‘Errm… No, well, actually…’ he began, but at that moment, still seated in her armchair, his Eva caught the back of his neck between sole and heel and thrust his face to the floor.
‘I told you not to talk to strangers, slave!’
‘Ooow… Now just hold on a second. He’s a colleague from the company.’
‘All the better. He can have a good look at what I do to you and tell everyone about it at work tomorrow.’
‘Well, you look busy. See you around…’ said Marroné, turning to go.
Cáceres Grey attempted to extricate himself from under her sole and got a thwack across the buttocks from her riding crop.
‘Ooow! You filthy black slum bitch!’
‘Down, boy! And don’t speak unless you’re spoken to.’
Marroné rejoined his guide, more and more composed by the second now he’d begun to understand.
‘We’re all businessmen, here.’
‘No, not everyone. That one over there, the one dressed as a farmhand, he’s a rancher. The docker in the gym vest with a handkerchief round his neck owns several shipping companies and the conscript being drilled by Admiral Eva is a colonel in the artillery.’
‘All anti-Peronists. Gorillas,’ mused Marroné. ‘Now I get it. And that one?’ he said, pointing at a football hooligan with a curly mop and hairy white belly protruding from beneath his San Lorenzo shirt.
‘Him? No, he actually works here. We lay on the real thing for the punters who like being buggered in drag. There’s an entire wardrobe at your disposal if you’re that way inclined.’
Marroné declined the invitation with a flick of the wrist:
‘Thanks. And the ones that look like trade unionists?’
Two fat men – one olive-skinned with a centre parting, the other with slicked-back curls and several days’ stubble, neither older than forty – were receiving a football and a bicycle from the hands of the Good Fairy.
‘Trade unionists. They come here quite a lot, as you’ll see – nostalgic steelworkers mostly. Loaded with cash they are, but they still hanker after the golden years of their humble childhoods, when they used to get presents from Eva,’ he said, with a puff of scorn, which Marroné seconded to conceal any hint of embarrassment, the memory of his own shanty-town epiphany still fresh in his mind. ‘But they’re in the minority. The ones that truly love her – worship her, I mean. Two classes of people come here as a rule: those who come to humiliate her and those who come to be humiliated by her. Or, not to put too fine a point on it, to fuck or be fucked.’
‘Literally?’
‘Those ones over there. The three tall ones? The Three Graces we call them.’
The Three Graces consisted of the lady in gold lamé, the governess with the angular jaw and sharp nose, and one he hadn’t noticed before, wearing an ermine-trimmed silk suit as white as daylight and a diamond tiara. All three had large feet and prominent Adam’s apples.
‘As well as being distinguished, our clients can be very specific at times. “I want my Eva to come with a dick. And one that works.” So we ask them to go easy on the hormones.’
Marroné was genuinely impressed, not only by what was on view, but by the lesson in business lore: they had found a niche in the market and had made it flourish with an almost infinite product range that exhausted all possible combinations. No, not all, he suddenly realised:
‘What about… the Montonero Evita?’
His guide let out a shush and fanned the air with his fingers to tell him to keep his voice down.
‘Shhh. Don’t even mention her. What are you trying to do? Make them shit themselves? Some things just aren’t funny. So, are you ready for the pièce de résistance?’
They went up some stairs and through a door. By now, Marroné had the impression that the world held no more surprises for him. But he was wrong. They were in a quadrangular room upholstered entirely in black velvet: portraits of Perón and Eva covered one of the walls, and hundreds of coloured votive ribbons, most with gold lettering, were pinned to the upholstery: ‘YOU LIVE ON ETERNAL IN THE SOUL OF YOUR PEOPLE – TRAMWORKERS UNION – NATIONAL ATOMIC ENERGY COMMISSION.’ The centrepiece was a couch surrounded by fresh flowers and covered with a silk sheet. And there, on the sheet, lay Eva.
She looked like Sleeping Beauty, and her skin had the pallor of marble and the sheen of wax. A snippet of schoolboy Shakespeare flashed across his mind: ‘Nor scar that whiter skin of hers than snow / And smooth as monumental alabaster.’ Her hair was combed back towards the nape in two thick Greek braids, and an ivory coloured tunic covered the rest of her body, save her hands – which clasped a rosary over her belly – and her naked feet with their slender toes, which Marroné could barely prevent himself from kissing.
‘So? What do you say?’ The procurer’s voice rang stridently in his ears.
‘She’s… perfect,’ he said in a whisper, incapable of taking his eyes off her.
‘Thirty grand.’
‘She’s… the real one?’
‘Of course.’
‘I thought she’d been returned to Perón.’
‘Perón got screwed. He got one of the three original replicas. You know, modelled in wax directly from the body.’
‘And does anyone ask for her?’
‘She’s our top earner. The military really get off on her.’
Marroné contemplated her head and the line of her shoulders with keen professionalism. Give him a saw and he might just be able to separate them from the rest of her body; that would make one bust – ninety-one short – but it would be a start. He immediately decided he was losing his mind.
‘So… Which one’ll it be?’
Marroné’s brain groped for the contents of the calcareous bivalve that had once served him as a wallet. He couldn’t leave without consuming something, not after being treated to such a display.
‘Errr… How much did you say the country girl was?’
He recognised the look at once. It was the kind a Dior salesman would give a customer who, after being shown around the entire season’s collection, abjectly asks to be reminded of the price of the ankle socks.
‘This way.’
He had to shove the wooden door, which danced on its hinges. The room had peeling walls, a cheap print of the Virgin Mary, a sagging iron bed, a chair and a night table with a bedside lamp and red lampshade.
‘It’s an exact replica of the rooms in the brothel run by Eva’s mother, Doña Juana, in Junín. It was where Eva, aged twelve, auctioned off her virginity at a party for the local ranch-owners; not out of need, but out of a sheer taste for vice,’ he recited in the monotone of a tour guide reeling off the same old spiel day in, day out.
‘I thought that whole brothel thing was a load of bull.’
This time Aníbal’s expression was openly hostile.
‘What do you think this is?’ he said, embracing the surroundings with raised open arms. ‘The National History Museum? If so, it’s news to me. So. Do you want her or not? Alright. Wait here.’
‘Errrr…’ began Marroné.
‘You can have her for four. Enjoy.’
Marroné sat on the bed, which sagged even lower, the metal springs groaning as if injured. The room had no windows or openings of any kind, and smelt like a damp kennel. Beside the bedside lamp was an ashtray overflowing with cigarette butts; had he had a lighter, Marroné would gladly have lit one. He opened the drawer: no lighter, no matches; just a candle end and a copy of The Reason for My Life in the perennial Peuser edition he remembered from his schooldays.
She entered without knocking. He’d barely noticed her in the lounge, and it was plain to see why: she was a tiny, transparent slip of a thing, slight and flat-chested, with legs like a lapwing’s; she was wearing a cheap, printed cotton dress, smoke-coloured stockings and Basque espadrilles laced up her calves. She can’t have been more than fourteen and, rather than bed her, Marroné felt like fixing he
r some cookies and milk.
‘Were you looking for me, sir?’
Marroné’s eyes welled with tears. What in God’s name was a child like this doing here? Perhaps, the thought suddenly occurred to him, this was why he was here today; perhaps his true mission was to save her and, by doing so, the busts would magically be his. He immediately decided he was raving again: he was willing to believe in anything if it looked like offering him a way out of this maze.
‘Come here, don’t be afraid, sit down here, beside me,’ he eventually managed to say. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Eva, sir.’
‘No, I’m asking you your real name.’
The girl looked at him for a moment with her dark, unfathomable eyes, then said:
‘Eva María.’
‘Where do you come from, Eva María?’ he said, following her drift.
‘Los Toldos, sir,’ she said, without hesitation; she’d learnt her lines well. ‘Shall I take my dress off?’
Before Marroné could do anything to stop her, she’d whipped it over her head and was standing naked, save for a pair of turquoise suspenders, which, together with her smoke-coloured stockings, suggested not so much bad taste but only poverty. The bastards think of everything, Marroné said to himself. Her breasts would have fitted snugly into English teacups, and her pubic hair was dark but sparse, leaving her narrow slit exposed when she stretched out on the bed: she looked as if malnourishment had stopped her from developing fully. It was the last snatch of social conscience his mind was capable of before his spring-loaded erection toppled what little of his moral scaffolding was left standing, and he decided he’d had enough: enough of trying to understand what was going on, enough of being nice to everyone, enough of doing the company’s bidding and Sr Tamerlán’s especially, enough of winning friends only for them to get killed in the blink of an eye, enough of the stinking clothes he was wearing… ‘I’m going to screw her, I’m going to screw her and you can all fuck off,’ he said to himself, slipping his t-shirt over his head and tugging his pants and underpants down so fast his member bounced up and down like a springboard. Gripping his glans in his palm, like someone stopping a shaken bottle of beer, and muttering through clenched teeth ‘you whore, you little whore, you black slum bitch’, he launched himself on top of her in an attempt to get a hole-in-one, but missed, and all his virility dribbled away through his fingers in two or three miserable spasms. Eva must have felt it, because she sat up with a start.
‘Sorry, sir!’ she exclaimed, as if it had been her fault. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll clean you up.’
She disappeared into the little bathroom, while Marroné sat on the bed, holding up his cupped palm to stop the dripping, and was soon back with a damp cloth.
‘No, no, don’t,’ mumbled Marroné, stricken with shame, but Eva wouldn’t have any of it.
‘Let’s see, hand first… This little piggy, then this one, till they’re nice and clean… Don’t worry about the bed, the maids’ll change it… Ooh, look, it got on me too, it’s all over my muffin.’
She looked a lot more comfortable in her new role, more self-assured: she had clearly been in domestic service. She reminded him of a maid his parents had had – somewhat older than Eva María it’s true, and darker-skinned and bustier – who’d turned him on as a teenager; he used to follow her around the house with his tongue hanging out and a couple of times tried to spy on her naked through the keyhole, but to no avail; he had hoped he would lose his virginity to her and told all his classmates he had, but in the end he had never actually dared, and his father had had to take him to a brothel. That was his first premature ejaculation, and the woman had made him wipe it up, standing over him making sarcastic remarks while he got down on his hands and knees: this early humiliation could well have been the stigma that turned into a trauma what would otherwise have been no more than a mishap. And perhaps now this sweet little girl had come to redeem the unnecessary cruelty of that callous whore, and somehow bring the cycle to a close; perhaps this was the dawn of a new era, though he didn’t actually care much because all he wanted to do was die on the spot and be done with it all.
Eva María had returned to the bathroom with her cloth, and Marroné heard the water running, then the squeak of the tap. This time she’d soaked it in warm water and put a little soap on too.
‘Lie back, please, sir,’ he heard her say.
Without opening his eyes he obeyed. She ran the cloth first over his forehead, ears, eyes and cheeks; when she got to his neck, she got up and rinsed it again. Wetting it whenever it cooled, she bathed his chest, arms, abdomen, thighs and shins; then she whispered in his ear for him to turn over and repeated the procedure on the other side. Marroné hadn’t bathed since his days in the factory, and Eva María washed him clean of all he had been through since: the crust of plaster, the urine, the blood, the oil-slick stream, his intimate contact with the garbage and mud of the shanties. She lingered long and tender over his feet, devoting a warm cloth to each, and she must have brought alcohol because he felt a sharp stinging at several points, from sores or cuts. When he turned over he saw her standing at the bedside, alcohol in one hand, cotton wool in the other. She was smiling shyly.
‘There’s still another half an hour to go. Would you like me to stay?’
She didn’t wait for Marroné’s nod. She lay down beside him, nestling into the hollow at his side, with her head on his shoulder and one leg wrapped over both of his. Marroné slid an arm under her neck to caress her hair and back, and, after two or three strokes, fell sound asleep.
She wasn’t there when he awoke with a start and a moan. Regaining his sense of the present, he put his shabby clothes back on and checked his wallet to see if she’d emptied it. He took out the four notes and slipped them into The Reason for My Life.
He stepped out into a corridor of identical symmetrical doors; he couldn’t remember coming this way on his way up, though he might have forgotten. The doors were so thin that he could hear everything going on behind them: the familiar moans, a recording of Eva’s hoarse voice tirelessly repeating ‘I offer you all my energies so that my body can be a bridge to the happiness of all. Walk over it…’ One stood ajar, and Marroné spied the lady with the whip riding a naked fat man dripping with gold and chains, and shouting, ‘What kind of an oligarch are you? You don’t even have the balls to exploit Bolivian workers!’ Then, spying Marroné, she cracked the whip on the wooden floor and beckoned to him to come in. ‘Look,’ she said to her steed, ‘here’s a slumdog come to stick his filthy cock in you. Now you’ll see what’s good for you.’
Reeling, Marroné backed away and stumbled down the stairs. In spite of the music still playing (wan tango Muzak), the artificial light and the welded-shut blinds, he felt, in his stinging eyes and jaded blood, the end of the party and the closeness of dawn. It was also being heralded by the dynamics of the sexual encounters, which had now spilled out from the reserve of the bedroom and across the half-deserted lounge. The governess was disciplining one of the trade unionists with her cane, forcing him to recite the Twenty Truths of the Peronist Creed and whacking him every time he got one wrong; The Prodigal Woman leapt from one side of the red brocade sofa to the other, hitching up her heavy velvet skirt to reveal an outsized, flesh-coloured strap-on dildo swinging from its harness, just out of reach of the costumed tramp drunkenly grabbing at it; and, last of all, the radiant Eva, whom Marroné had followed through the alleys of the shanties – his Divine Beatrice who had led him from the dark forest, his luminous Tinkerbell – was being served simultaneously by the colonel, the businessman and the rancher, striving to hump her back to what in their eyes she had never ceased to be: the whore of Babylon, a peroxide blonde harlot, a black slumdog. Her bun – which was mostly hairpiece – had come undone and was now being batted about on the floor by a tortoise-shell cat.
Dragged down by his cider hangover – a first far worse than he had ever imagined – and racked by an exhaustion that had escalated from the
physical to the metaphysical, Marroné cast about in all directions to see if he could find something to cling on to in the midst of the wreck. Then he saw the statue of Eva, standing tall and proud and unscathed in the general corruption scattered at her feet, and she was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen. Rapt by her loveliness, he knelt down in the fountain and kissed her small, frozen feet, resting his cheek against her fine ankles, not knowing whether it was the water flowing from her hands or his own tears running down his cheeks. Prostrate before her, he confessed his boundless contrition and remorse.
‘Radiant Eva, immaculate Eva, Eva most beauteous, I beseech thee… I don’t love my wife, I can’t stand my children, I try to influence people, I left my best friend for dead, I’ve been… fingered… I don’t know what to do. I’m lost, I can’t go on, I can’t go back… If you know, my lady, I beg you, show me the way…’
And, when he raised his eyes to her face, Eva seemed to answer him. Not in words, but with an eternally even, eternally quiet smile – a smile of stone. The tilt of her neck and face, the half-open eyelids, the slight curve of her nose, all seemed to be pointing to one spot, which was hidden by Marroné’s hands and face. He drew them back hurriedly: on one side of the pedestal, carved in Roman characters, there was a name, which must have been the sculptor’s: Rogelio García.
Marroné clasped her cold and lovely body and, standing on tiptoe, stretched up to her lips to leave his offering of a kiss.
‘Thank you, Evita… Thank you…’
On his way out he ran into Aníbal, who, yawning profusely, was locking up.
‘Would you like them to bring your car?’
‘No, I’ll walk, thanks.’ Marroné groped for a plausible lie. ‘I came… by train.’
‘You amaze me. What a passion for the authentic.’
The Adventure of the Busts of Eva Perón Page 25