The Adventure of the Busts of Eva Perón

by Carlos Gamerro

Outside, a pale dawn had taken the heavens by storm. He didn’t need to ask for directions: he had only to join the blurred V of hazy figures converging on a single point with the defeated, trudging gait of those who rise in darkness every working day. Near the train station was a bar, whose tables and windows were thick with dust, turned to velvet by the early morning sun, and right next to the door, a public telephone, so orange it glowed. He ordered a milky coffee and croissants, and asked for the telephone directory; he found the man he was looking for with his third call.

  ‌9

  ‌Evita City

  A train so covered in graffiti that it looked like a mural on wheels pulled up in eerie silence at the deserted platform. Marroné curled up like a dog at the far end of the last carriage and noticed that, like himself, the inside was broken in a variety of ways: the green imitation leather of the seats was cracked or slashed; the rings of the handrails had been wrenched from their leather straps; the windows were jammed shut or had panes missing, and bore the scorch marks of flames that, after bursting them, had licked their innards. The train got under way with a series of choking rattles; it was like travelling in a snake with a broken spine. Two stations further on and his carriage had filled with early birds on their way to work, the odd old man, hawkers peddling their wares – and with a certain curiosity he noticed that no one had wanted to occupy the three free seats around him. He must have looked and smelt worse than he had supposed. But he didn’t feel like company anyway and, turning back to his jammed window, he devoted himself to contemplating the landscape through the dusty glass filigreed by old rain: unplastered, flat-roofed brick or cement houses, building sites suspended in eternal construction as if a magic spell had been cast over them, mechanics’ workshops overflowing with cars, front gardens, builders’ yards, sheds, fields, churches, shops, cars at level-crossings, main roads bristling with intrusive perpendicular billboards. The rhythmical impetus of the train drew a forgotten childhood prayer from his lips: ‘Good Fairy who laughs with the angels, I promise to be good as you wish, respecting the Lord, loving my country, loving General Perón, studying and being for everyone the child you dreamt: healthy, happy, polite and pure of heart.’ At the moments of greatest acceleration between stations, the contours and boundaries of the visible world began to merge and give: a cart morphed into a gate, a low wall into some waste ground, the sky blue of a house into the blue sky. When the train slowed down again, with a clatter like a captive Titan rattling his chains at regular intervals, things would return to their original, separate selves; but there came a point when the crazed engine driver just kept accelerating and they zoomed through first one station, then another, then another, each platform shorter than the last; the eye became incapable of taking in anything more than a single long broad brushstroke sweeping across trees, houses, gardens and signs, and soaking up their colours to paint a face so huge Marroné feared that, when complete, it would be too vast for his eyes to take in.

  He opened them to a disc of sky bordered with heads, and in its outline he could make out the profile of her face. Disappointed to find that what they’d taken for a fatality had been no more than a fainting fit, the ring of people around him immediately opened and the beloved features melted away like a cloud into the sky. But that instant had been enough to make Marroné smile in recognition: it was Eva, of course; she was still with him, she was everywhere, she would never abandon him. Before the crowd had dispersed, two men hauled him up by the armpits, supporting him until they were certain he wouldn’t fall again and break his neck on the platform, and sending him on his way with an ‘Alright, pal, get yourself back home now and sleep it off’, and other such trifles. After doing his incoherent drunk impression and muttering his unintelligible thanks with a faraway smile (he’d decided to role-play the character; if he had lost the ability to win friends and influence people – and everything suggested he had – he could still at least play along with them), he looked up at a sign to discover that by some miracle they’d got him off the train at the right station – the one the man had mentioned on the phone – and decided to take it as a good omen, being in great need of one: if the evil enchanters had not given up their pursuit, they may at least have taken the day off.

  The tracks in these parts ran along a deep, narrow gully, along which he could see no more than a patch of blue sky, the ubiquitous English station, another train whose great solar eye approached as silently as the one that had brought him, and the riotous summer foliage of the chinaberry trees, whose merciful shade shielded him from the unforgiving sun. With some difficulty he climbed the uneven steps of a cement staircase and, nearing the top, looked around him. Beyond the mandatory park of eucalyptuses that lined the tracks, stretched an ordered landscape of little bungalows shaped like pats of butter, with Spanish roofs, columns and wooden shutters with diamond fretwork, gardens with flower beds, the odd parked car and occasional garden gnome. He ventured along leafy streets that looked straight but curved imperceptibly as he walked, passing several children riding bikes in the middle of the road, an old woman wheeling a shopping bag and a soda-siphon delivery truck, before plucking up the courage to ask a passing resident out walking his dog.

  ‘Oh, yes. That’s in the First District, over towards the bun. Let’s see… Keep still, boy!’ he told the cocker tugging at its lead. ‘You go straight on…’

  ‘Along this one?’

  ‘No, you’re heading for the nose that way. No, if you want the bun, you go straight on down here, and then… You’ll see a big square, somewhere around the cheek… Turn left and keep going… There’s a big tall building right in the middle of the bun – a five-storey tower block. The house you’re looking for is right opposite. Can’t miss it.’

  And indeed he couldn’t, but it was more than ten blocks in the blazing sun and more than once he felt like throwing in the towel. He couldn’t have said what kept him going: it didn’t feel as though it was him but the houses that were moving, filing past him on either side like a procession, displaying all the personal touches that the inhabitants’ instinctive sense of difference had added to the basic Peronist bungalow: spear-headed railings, slate or wood cladding, porches, bay windows and quaint colonial streetlamps. The house he was looking for turned out to be on a corner, one with a rounded chamfer rather than the usual angled one, and a lawn that sloped to a low, trim privet fence, beyond which a rich array of statues and fountains was spread across the kempt front garden. This was the house. Outside the front gate, in the shade of an old red pick-up with a wooden box, a girl and a boy in swimming costumes were playing with watering cans, toy buckets and a hose-pipe.

  ‘Hello, lamb. I’m looking for Sr Rogelio,’ said Marroné, addressing the boy in as friendly a tone as he could, but when the girl started to wail and the boy to shout ‘Grandpa! Grandpa!’ with barely contained alarm, he decided he hadn’t hit the right note.

  The man didn’t emerge from the house but from an adjoining shed, evidently an extension of the original bungalow. He must have been somewhere between sixty and seventy, with white hair and dark skin, and his eyes were black and bright, like pebbles in a basket of wrinkles. He could, Marroné felt, have been his own grandfather – the original, not the fake. He was wearing a canvas apron over his loose-fitting clothes and clutched a hammer and chisel in his strong sculptor’s hands. His grandchildren had clung to his legs and peeked out from behind them.

  ‘Yes?’ he asked tentatively, putting away the chisel in an apron pocket but still gripping the hammer. ‘Are you looking for someone?’

  ‘We spoke on the telephone. It’s about the busts.’

  * * *

  He had leant on the gate to steady himself, and the grandfather had helped him to the kitchen, where he recovered sufficiently over biscuits and maté to explain what he’d come for.

  ‘My name’s Ernesto and I’m… well, you know, with the special forc… no, I mean the revolutionary… You must have come across our…’ he said hopefully, but seeing the m
an’s growing confusion, he was forced to be specific: ‘In the Montoneros. So, as part of the programme for deprived areas, we want every shanty town to have its very own bust of Eva…’

  Don Rogelio listened to him carefully, his calm, kind eyes fixed on him, and, feeling uncomfortable with the baldness of his flagrant lies, Marroné decided to season them with a pinch of truth.

  ‘I’m on the run, Don Rogelio. At this moment I’m being pursued by the union mob, the Triple A and the police. I look like this because I’ve been hiding away in a garbage tip. If they get their hands on me…’

  Rogelio put one of his hands on his, covering it completely.

  ‘Don’t you worry now, Ernesto. They can’t get to you here. You’re inside Eva now.’

  He pointed to a picture on the wall; it was just a page torn from a Filcar street guide, coloured in and covered with notes and numbers; a map whose blocks, squares, streets, train tracks and freeways formed, sharp and clear against the background of empty lots that encircled it, the unmistakeable outline of a bust of Eva. Marroné’s first reaction was to think he was hallucinating again, but as he began to find his way round the fantastic cartography, he remembered he was in Ciudad Evita, the model village whose outline had indelibly stamped the profile of Eva Perón on the surface of the pampas. Don Rogelio, meanwhile, had started to outline his theory about the inviolability of this Peronist Jerusalem.

  ‘Don’t forget that the figures of the General and Eva came in for some pretty brutal treatment after the coup against Perón – what they called “the Liberating Revolution”, but what we knew was our return to bondage. Rampant iconoclasm it was: pictures, posters, busts – no image was spared… Except this one, the biggest of all: maybe because it is so vast that, like the Nazca Lines in Peru, it can only be seen from the sky. Ironic, isn’t it? At one time there were rumours about them bringing in bulldozers and teams of conscripts, or radical and socialist volunteers, to alter the street plan and change her profile to Sarmiento’s or Yrigoyen’s; so we took turns on guard duty for several nights, all set to make a stand, even prepared to lay ourselves down in front of the machines as a last resort; but in the end they never came. One possibility that occurred to us later was that they could just as easily obliterate her features by building new neighbourhoods around them: but, besides being expensive, it wouldn’t have been any use, because Eva’s profile would still have been there, hidden yet visible at the same time, like those figures you sometimes discover hiding within a picture of another subject. So we eventually came up with the theory that Eva’s outline is like a magic circle, a stockade against the gorillas lying in wait in the jungle beyond. In here at least there’s still an island of the Argentina she dreamt up for us, the Argentina they stole from us after she died.’

  Don Rogelio’s serene, unhurried voice soothed him like a lullaby: Eva’s protecting you – You’re inside her – Eva’s Island – Eva loves you – Eva will look after you.

  He awoke with a start from his nodding, his head nearly on his knees.

  ‘So everything in our power we can do…’ Don Rogelio had carried on. ‘The doors of this house are never closed to a comrade on the run. Do you have any idea of the times I’ve had to hide? And been spared the nick by the help of a neighbour or a stranger? Actually, if you need houses, or families to hide your people in… I’m kind of in charge of neighbourhood business. We stick together in this place, Peronists through thick and thin; not the kind who go around shouting “Viva Perón” on 17th October and keep their mouths shut on 16th June. Alright, come on, I’ll show you the workshop before you drop off in that chair.’

  In his short walk through the garden he’d already had the opportunity to see that Don Rogelio’s work married a pure and delicate love of matter with a dubious taste for the plebeian. Proof of the former lay in his onyxes, marbles and granites, which seemed to be shaped more by the caresses of a loving hand than by the blows of a hammer, and in his polished woodcarvings, which seemed to have been moulded in some previous liquid state; proof of the latter, in the proliferation of shepherds, shepherdesses and naked nymphs, of gauchos with rugged, whittled features, and indomitable Indians with tensed throats and prominent teeth. Marroné, however, only took this in fleetingly and obliquely, for his eyes had locked like traps onto a shell-like forehead, a delicate swan neck and a cascade of loose hair pouring over translucent alabaster shoulders.

  ‘It’s her, isn’t it?’ he asked in hushed reverence.

  Don Rogelio nodded, silent and smiling. At that moment his two grandchildren came in – still regarding the shabby, bug-eyed Marroné with suspicion – and sat down, one on each of their grandfather’s knees. He waited until they’d made themselves comfortable before beginning his story.

  ‘I only saw her up close once. She came to visit us for the opening of the union building, and she dazzled us all, even the communists and socialists who’d sworn they weren’t going to greet her. She was wearing a wasp-waisted dress,’ he said, looking at the little girl, ‘in crimson brocade with gold thread and long sleeves, and a silk skirt embroidered with silver, and her hair was loose – just like spun gold it looked – all the way down to her waist.’

  ‘Was she like a princess, Granpa?’ she asked him.

  ‘Yes, but a princess of the people. Anyway, what stunned us most was her whiteness… I’ve heard her compared with magnolias and jasmines and snow, but she was different. White, translucent, yet with an inner fire. Like a flame burning in an alabaster lamp. Look, to give you some idea… When she arrived, we’d just finished lunch, so we offered her some red wine. She took the glass with a smile and drank it right down. You could see she had a thirst on her. And her whiteness was so pure we could all see the wine run down her throat, and we stood there and marvelled. Perón was opaque, always had been. The time I sculpted him, I did him in black granite. But Eva was so transparent… Through her skin… shone the people,’ he concluded, looking straight at Marroné with his kind, dark eyes. ‘I tried to put all that into this sculpture,’ he said, turning to the swan-necked Eva. ‘But it’s only a partial success.’

  ‘How much?’ asked Marroné, cutting him short lest the whole story be a ruse to bump up the price.

  ‘I wasn’t thinking of selling it, Ernesto. Not for now.’

  Marroné’s eyes were as hard and bright as the obsidian of an Aztec priest’s dagger. Tethered for days, the Tamerlán & Sons head of procurement roared inside him like a caged tiger with an empty stomach.

  ‘Just name your price. And for ninety-one others too,’ he said, sweating and trembling from head to toe as if he had the fever.

  Don Rogelio showed him a wicker chair, and Marroné sat down gratefully.

  ‘They’re very important to you, aren’t they?’

  Marroné nodded with imploring eyes, his Adam’s apple pumping like a piston with every gulp.

  ‘The poor children of the shanties…’ he began.

  ‘But I don’t see how I can help you. I’m a carver, I make one-offs, originals. What you need is someone who can mass-produce them.’

  He would have grabbed him by the lapels and shaken him if he’d had any.

  ‘I need those busts! I don’t care how! I don’t care if they’re made of papier mâché, tin foil or plasticine!’

  The two children had taken refuge behind their grandfather again. Marroné slumped back in his chair, his every limb trembling.

  ‘Forgive me.’

  Don Rogelio kept his benevolent eyes fixed on Marroné’s.

  ‘Right, children, off you go, I think I can hear your mummy.’ He sent his grandchildren away with a pat on each of their bottoms, then turned to Marroné. ‘Ernesto… you aren’t a Montonero, are you? You aren’t even a Peronist. Do you want to tell me about it?’

  Marroné fought an irresistible urge to fall to his knees and kiss his hands.

  ‘I’m a top executive with a leading construction company,’ he said, beginning his harrowed confession. ‘I realise that, seein
g me like this, you may find it hard to believe, but look,’ he fished the bivalve out of his pocket, rummaged in it and pulled out his driver’s licence, his medical insurance card, his San Isidro Athletics Club membership, and spread them out on the workbench to arouse, if not the credulity, then at least the compassion of the man in front of him, but Don Rogelio stopped him with an outstretched hand.

  ‘It’s alright, Ernesto. I have no reason to doubt your word. If you say so, I believe you.’

  Marroné felt his eyes flood with tears.

  ‘It’s just that I lied to you before.’

  ‘Well, I suppose you had your reasons.’

  He nodded dumbly, gulping back the snot.

  ‘The Montoneros have kidnapped the president of the company. He’s a good man, but he’s had some… er… bad press lately. One of the conditions for his release is that we put a bust of Eva in every office. That makes ninety-two busts in all. I’ve been hunting for them for weeks, but powerful forces have been moving against me,’ he babbled, because it was no longer the old Marroné talking, but the paranoid bag of shredded nerves the events of the last few days had turned him into. ‘Help me, please, Don Rogelio. I don’t know who else to turn to. Even if you just made me one or two little sample busts, it would buy us some time…’

  Don Rogelio had pulled a half-smoked cigar out of his shirt pocket and lit it with an old petrol lighter; it was a cheap, foul-smelling cheroot and he chewed on it with manifest delight.

  ‘Here’s what I suggest. You get yourself bathed, changed and have a lie-down for a while till lunchtime. And after something to eat, when you’ve got your strength back, we’ll carry on talking. What do you say?’

  Marroné nodded, still more disbelieving than frankly grateful, and followed Don Rogelio through the garden, the multicoloured strip curtain and the kitchen to the master bedroom, which contained a double bed, a wardrobe, a crucifix and olive branch, and a photo of Don Rogelio as a young man embracing a smiling, even younger woman in a floral dress. From the wardrobe his host produced a pair of trousers, clean and pressed, and a freshly ironed shirt, some thick cotton underpants and a pair of flip-flops.