The Adventure of the Busts of Eva Perón

by Carlos Gamerro

  ‘I’m giving you the flip-flops because all of my shoes will be too big for you. Let’s see, what else…’ He reached up to the top shelf for a clean towel. ‘I think that’ll do for now,’ he said, laying it on the pile on the bed.

  Marroné looked on with the wariness of a little boy accustomed to each display of affection being the prelude to a slap; but after his shower with hot water and lots of soap, and the clean clothes, he felt his optimism and his faith in his fellow man rise in him again like the dawn of a new age. He felt even better when, after a deep, refreshing sleep, Don Rogelio’s two grandchildren burst into the room giggling and shook him awake without showing the slightest sign of fear.

  Saturday was family lunch day at Don Rogelio’s. He had so many children (nine, only counting the ones still living) that they came in two contingents: one on Saturday, another on Sunday, depending on work and commitments. The children’s mother had put a giant pan of water on to boil and was slicing tomatoes for the sauce; then one of her sisters arrived, with her numerous offspring in tow and a husband staggering under a tower of boxes of ravioli that reached his nose. Marroné was introduced to everyone as they arrived and helped set up, under the combined shade of the fig tree and the vine, the table of trestles and planks, which the women laid with vinyl tablecloths. Grim as the conversation was, ranging from the repression in the factories to the growing daily death toll or the recent botched coup attempt by the military, the atmosphere was generally festive and light-hearted: seated at the head of the table and flecked with dancing flashes of green and gold, Don Rogelio was a sun around which his children orbited like planets and his grandchildren like moons. For a moment the memory of the cheerless Sunday barbecues with his in-laws in the back garden of the house in Olivos came flooding back to Marroné, every one of them an instalment in the unpayable debt he’d incurred by accepting their contribution to the purchase of the house and swimming pool: the puckered face of his father-in-law every time he tried the meat his son-in-law had cooked, his wife and mother-in-law’s endless confabs, withdrawing as soon as they’d finished eating to discuss matters of child-rearing, and abandoning him to the interminable postprandial prattle of his gorilla father-in-law.

  At that moment Don Rogelio had clinked his glass with a coffee spoon to call for silence for the toast.

  ‘To all of this,’ said Don Rogelio, taking in the throng with an ecumenical gesture. ‘We don’t ask for much, do we? This will do. But we’ll not be content with less.’

  It was true, so true, thought Marroné, as if the words had been meant specially for him. Wasn’t this what life was all about? Was there anything else one could ask for? And at that moment, he had a vision of himself in thirty or forty years’ time, in another life: a Peronist patriarch in a house like this, surrounded by children and grandchildren, reaching a serene and ripe old age, eating the secure fruit of his harvest in peace beneath his vine. Could proletarianising be the way forward, after all? Had Paddy been right all along? Had this scene been conjured by his friend for his edification from beyond the grave? The cherished syllables came back to him: ‘If you like… I can give you a hand.’ But he’d taken no notice and slapped the hand away, he thought, flagellating himself to the verge of tears once again. He was becoming a crybaby. ‘And a proletarian crybaby at that!’ the sly side of his mind whispered in his ear. He mentally shooed it away with a ‘But it isn’t too late’. His friend wouldn’t have died in vain. Yes, that was exactly what he’d do: give up this senseless, monomaniacal search for the busts, abandon the rat race of the business world and leave everything behind. Everything: Sr Tamerlán, his wife, his in-laws, the house in Olivos. Then he’d sort out his bourgeois children’s visiting regime – because in his new life, naturally, he planned on having others – and come and live in Ciudad Evita. It couldn’t be as hard for him as it had for Paddy, after all. In the space of a few days he’d almost unwittingly made as much – or more – progress than his late friend had in months. ‘Or rather regress,’ his mind took to whispering again, for in his case it wasn’t so much a matter of taking the plunge into a new world as of rediscovering his roots; not of wrenching his fate out of joint, but of straightening out the kink others had inflicted on it… of going back to his origins, of listening to the call coursing through his veins…

  Don Rogelio had seated him on his right-hand side and, with a fresh cheroot fuming away in his hand, engaged him in conversation, which Marroné, revived by the ravioli and red wine, listened to with the utmost reverence, for he had decided this man would be his guide and role model in the new life he was about to embark on. Sitting on at the table after lunch, the bees buzzing about the green grapes that hung from the vine above, the newborn cicadas singing, and beetles with metallic-green wing cases and antennae with black pompoms drowning in the wine at the bottom of their glasses, Marroné felt he had found his way at last, especially when Don Rogelio leant over to him and, in the tone of a grandfather who has prepared his grandson a surprise, said into his ear:

  ‘I’d like to introduce you to a friend of mine.’

  They had only to cross the road, which shimmered like a piece of corrugated iron under the mid-afternoon sun, and walk through the pillars and the few cars parked in the shade of the tower block, to reach the entrance. They went up by the only lift in working order (the other two weren’t only not in working order, but their doors were welded shut); it was an open lift shaft and, as they ascended, Marroné was treated to a series of extended panoramic views of Ciudad Evita through the double-grille doors: a succession of red-tile roofs and bright-green treetops stretching out to the perimeter that etched her profile into the land. The building grew slummier the higher they got, and the small green-grey tiles grew thinner on the walls: where the flats of the ground floor had seemed fairly decent, the top floor was a succession of dilapidated lairs, and there was no further sign of any tiling. From the corridor on the right his nostrils were flooded by the combined aroma of grilled meat, woodsmoke and pitch – and a snippet of his father-in-law’s after-dinner wisdom came back to him, ‘These Peronists! They give the darkies proper apartments to live in and first thing you know they’ve gone and ripped up the floors for their asados!’ – and, still hungry despite all the ravioli, he was on the verge of grabbing Don Rogelio by the arm and suggesting they gatecrash the gathering; but the sculptor had already taken the left corridor, at the end of which was a glass-brick wall. In the blinding back-lighting his guide was reduced to a supernatural silhouette, and Marroné felt as if he were following him, not into one particular apartment or another, but into the light itself. They passed doors secured with padlocks, doors repaired with planks, doors sealed with barricade tape saying ‘POLICE LINE – DO NOT CROSS’, and knocked twice on the last one on the right.

  ‘Alright! Alright! Keep your shirt on!’ answered a gruff voice from inside, and soon enough they heard the drawing back of bolts, and the door opened as far as the chain would allow. ‘Oh, it’s you,’ said the voice, recognising Don Rogelio. ‘Why don’t you let me know beforehand?’ He closed the door and opened it again, this time wide.

  The shutters were down and the room was dingy; fortunately enough as it turned out, because seeing it in the clear light of day could have been a very depressing experience. General disorder vied with the dirt and the bizarre layout: a television on the bed, a bicycle serving as a clothes horse for underwear, a stiff and dusty suit on a coat-hanger hanging on a nail on the wall, like an installation in a gallery. It was the kind of habitat a single man can only achieve after long years of dreary celibacy. The man must have been Don Rogelio’s age, but the same years seemed to have passed over him not once but several times, like a car reversing over roadkill again and again to finish it off. He was taller than Don Rogelio but his hunched shoulders made him look more or less the same height, his skin was the colour of the ash overflowing from his ashtrays, and he coughed continuously. After introducing them and giving his friend a light-hearted ticking-off for
not accepting the services of a cleaning lady he’d recommended, and after Rodolfo – for that was the name of the owner of the apartment – retorted with a growl and a ‘She’s after something else that one is’, Don Rogelio came to the point, still all mystery.

  ‘The comrade here wants to see them.’

  To Rodolfo’s raised eyebrows Don Rogelio responded by taking hold of Marroné’s shoulder and resting his arm on it as if on a firm and reliable support.

  ‘It’s ok. He’s with me.’

  Rodolfo ushered them to another door in the same corridor, next to the lifts. After a brief tug of war Rodolfo managed to extract the padlock from the two rings it gripped and gave the door a shove. Marroné was expecting more or less the same kind of dingy hovel as the first, but was hit by a blinding light that poured in torrents through the wide windows of a vast room, which in some earlier day and age must have been a tea room with a panoramic view of Ciudad Evita. A second later his eyes managed to focus on its contents and he knew what Ali Baba must have felt when he stumbled upon the treasures of his cave. Overflowing from shelves, counters, niches, tables, packing cases and chairs, and spilling out over the floor, were more busts of Perón and Evita than he had ever seen or could even imagine. They came in all sizes and materials: white plaster or cement, painted gold, silver or black, cast in bronze, some gleaming, others weathered and green; carved in marble, granite, onyx or wood; modelled in clay or terracotta; some the size of a fist, others twice life-size; most with neoclassical, but some with romantic or even pre-Colombian features. Mass-produced pieces featured more abundantly, but there was no shortage of original works of artistic merit. But that was the least of it: the main thing was that there were enough Evas in this room to fill three office buildings like his, and as he gazed at them, Marroné felt his pupils narrow to two vertical slits; his tail, had he had one, would have rhythmically lashed his sides. Like the cat that won’t take its eyes off the canary but keeps purring to demur its intent, he asked in a voice that was barely more than a hiss:

  ‘Where did you get them?’

  ‘Soon as news got out that Perón had thrown in the towel, Rodolfo and I grabbed our old banger of a pick-up – the same one parked out there – and started doing the rounds. Because it wasn’t just the government; the civilian commandos didn’t hang around: wherever they saw a portrait, a statue or a bust that bore even the slightest resemblance to Eva or Perón, they’d hack it down, knock it over, send it rolling across the floor. That day, right here in Ciudad Evita, we saved every one we could: the one in the school, the one in the square, the one in the sports centre. Then we started getting tip-offs: the girls from a textile factory had been hiding one for months… another one at a cold-storage plant, a library, the baggage handlers at Ezeiza… Each and every one of these Evas and Juans you can see has a history; feats of heroism great and small were needed for them to get as far as this; as you well know, you could spend months in jail if you were caught – just for having a photo or a picture of them in your house.

  Marroné had started roaming around the improvised gallery: not even in the Louvre or the Uffizi had he felt anything remotely similar. The busts were all cleaned and shined and polished: clearly any devotion to cleanliness and order that Rodolfo might have had in him he lavished on his cherished collection, and had nothing left for his own life. He had them all facing the window so that they could entertain themselves day and night with contemplating the beauties of the Peronist citadel. And there they had been all along, waiting for him to collect the codes and solve the riddle. Where else could they have been? Here, right at the heart of the bun. He should have known. But of course, you can’t reach the heart of the maze without roaming its passageways first.

  ‘Nineteen years they’ve been waiting for the General to return. Almost all of them have their provenance noted down,’ said Rodolfo proudly.

  He turned over a small black Eva for Marroné to read the yellowing piece of paper stuck on the base: WOMEN’S PP BASIC UNIT – P PERÓN DISTRICT. Then – with both hands – a larger one, in cement: BERAZATEGUI WORKERS’ DISTRICT – SQUARE. And another, in bronze: GAS WORKERS’ UNION – BA PROVINCE. And another: AVELLANEDA HOSPITAL – ENTRANCE.

  ‘The idea was to put each one back in its original place,’ Don Rogelio explained.

  ‘Still is,’ declared Rodolfo categorically.

  ‘We can talk about that later,’ said Don Rogelio, with a wink at Marroné.

  But Rodolfo seemed determined to take a stand:

  ‘When he did eventually come back, I wrote him a letter. Then another, in case the first had got lost. Then another, and another. I gave up in the end.’

  ‘I told you, Rodolfo, the General never got them. All his correspondence was being screened.’

  Rodolfo stared at his friend through black orbs of bitterness.

  ‘He read them and used them to wipe his arse on is what I reckon. The Perón that came back wasn’t our Perón any more. They did something to him, López Rega and that whore of a wife of his. Anyway, makes no difference now. He’s dead and gone. Who are we going to give them to now? There’s nobody left as deserves them.’

  He finished speaking and gave Marroné a flinty glance – the first. It was but an instant, yet it spoke volumes. He had caught in Rodolfo’s eyes the fiery glint of fanaticism and the insane possessiveness of the collector; and if Rodolfo had seen something similar in his – if he had read how he felt, that is – they stood as much chance of coming to an agreement over Eva’s busts as Paris and Menelaus over Helen.

  They arranged a little asado for the same night, at Don Rogelio’s – just the three of them. In the violet twilight, with the first star hanging motionless in the sky and the first moth throwing itself headlong at the naked light bulb that hung over the grill, Don Rogelio told him his friend’s story while building the pyre of screwed-up newspaper, kindling and charcoal to start the fire. Marroné found it hard to follow, as he was busy making a mental inventory of the busts he’d seen, classifying them by colour, material, style and size – he had to choose them carefully: he didn’t want the office turning into a junk shop, after all – and only caught the odd word here and there.

  ‘Action in the square… the military… Perón… angry at the Church… to defend… several were armed…’

  ‘Huh? To defend the churches?’

  ‘It was us as torched the churches, Ernesto.’

  ‘Oh. Sorry.’

  ‘But that was later. I was telling you about the bombardment of Plaza de Mayo. Most went along like any other day… in ten years we’d gone soft and let our guards down. They sent the planes in early. Rodolfo had gone with his wife, and they spent the time walking round and round the city centre, which was chaos, not knowing what to do. By the afternoon, when the leaders of the uprising had surrendered, they approached the square, to see if they could do anything to help. They got there just as the last wave came in – the worst. Rodolfo had a bit of luck, good or bad depending on how you look at it: he was only wounded in the leg. But his wife… She was six months pregnant at the time. He was very bitter. Wouldn’t come to our house while my wife was alive. We used to meet up outside, in the houses we’d hole up in, or when we pulled off the occasional act of sabotage together…’

  Marroné was outwardly calm, making the appropriate signs of dismay or distress whenever the springs of the story seemed to require it; but inwardly he was a ferret, incapable of keeping still for a moment, sniffing about for the entrance to the rabbit warren. While providing him with some useful information on his rival and his potential weaknesses, Don Rogelio’s account only confirmed his initial fears about Rodolfo: the man was obsessed, a madman shackled to a trauma for life; it was going to be very tough, not to say downright impossible, to tear the Evas from his clutches. His evaluation was confirmed in the first phase of the asado, when, between mouthfuls of sausage and black pudding, Don Rogelio invited him to tell his friend the truth of the matter. Marroné gave his table companions
a watered-down version they could swallow, highlighting the involvement of ‘the company’ (he’d decided not to name it just in case) in the building of new schools, hospitals, union hotels, the Children’s Republic (a tactical strike) and the plans for the Monument to the Descamisado during the first Peronist government.

  ‘So your boss is a Peronist, is he?’ asked Rodolfo, still frowning suspiciously.

  ‘Of the first water,’ Marroné asserted categorically. ‘Believe it or not, he arrived in the country on 17th October 1945 and was the first to dip his feet in the fountain. His father was a frequent guest of Eva and the General’s, and he met them himself as a very young man at the Residence.’

  ‘So why’s he been kidnapped by the Montoneros?’

  ‘That one’s too easy,’ thought Marroné, ‘he’s handed it to me on a plate.’

  ‘Correct me if I’m wrong, but… I was under the impression that the hallmark of all true Peronists was the way they go around bumping each other off.’

  Rodolfo and Don Rogelio exchanged glances of truco partners facing the ace of swords.

  ‘What did you say his name was?’

  He hadn’t, of course, deliberately.

  ‘Fa… Fausto Tamerlán,’ he said, bracing himself for the shock wave.

  ‘Tamerlán? The one from the construction company?’ spluttered Rodolfo in outrage. ‘He’s a bigger gorilla than King Kong that one is. My nephew was a union delegate on a building site and the security guards beat the crap out of them.’

  ‘Er… No…’ He decided to try a weak line of defence. ‘That must have been his father… Or his partner… They’re both dead,’ he added with a winning grin.

  ‘Rodolfo…’ Don Rogelio intervened.