The Adventure of the Busts of Eva Perón

by Carlos Gamerro

  ‘What?’

  ‘Let him have them. They’ll at least be used to save a life that way.’

  ‘Yes, the life of one of the sonsofbitches that sent in the planes, and the gangs to hunt us down one by one.’

  ‘Ernesto says not, and I for one believe him. Besides, who are we to decide who lives and dies?’

  ‘They decide.’

  ‘Yes. But we want to be better than them, don’t we? Listen to me. Everything we lost… Everything you lost… you won’t bring it back by clinging onto idols. They’re just figurines of wood and stone. They aren’t Perón and Eva. Let him have them.’

  ‘What do you know about loss?’ Rodolfo retorted, resentfully. ‘Rolling in children and grandchildren the way you are?’

  ‘Everything that’s mine is yours. The doors of my house are open to you day and night.’

  ‘I don’t want your family’s charity,’ he blurted out, regretting it immediately. ‘Forgive me. I didn’t mean that.’ And then, obliquely, to Marroné, as if he’d offended him too: ‘I apologise. I’ll have to think about it.’

  ‘Go ahead and think about it, take your time,’ thought Marroné to himself, refilling Rodolfo’s wine glass.

  By the second bottle they were getting all nostalgic about the days of the Resistance.

  ‘Remember that time we graffitied the glassworks and were nabbed by that sergeant… ? What was his name?’

  ‘Merlo?’

  ‘That’s him! Comes at us blowing his whistle he does, and this lunatic,’ said Don Rogelio, slapping Rodolfo on the shoulder, ‘only goes and throws the bucket of paint over him.’

  ‘I can just see him standing there with his little whistle, blowing bubbles,’ Rodolfo added as soon as the guffaws allowed him to breathe. ‘Ffff! Ffff!’

  ‘Took them two or three days to catch up with us,’ Don Rogelio rounded off the story. ‘What a going-over we got! Submarines: dry, wet, semi-liquid.’

  ‘In shit,’ Rodolfo elucidated. ‘How many months was it that time?’

  ‘Dunno. Must have been about five.’

  Marroné listened with a painted smile, hands clasped beneath the table, slowly windmilling his thumbs. When they’d finished up the wine, he offered to go out and get some more from the general stores in the tower block.

  ‘Blimey, Ernesto!’ they exclaimed when they saw him come in with two bottles of Château Vieux. ‘You didn’t half push the boat out! What do you take us for? A couple of gorilla toffs?’

  He’d actually bought the most expensive label the meagre store had to offer in an attempt to placate – or rather suborn – the evil enchanters pursuing him with all the savagery of bull-dogs in a dog-fight, but he concealed the fact with a magnanimous gesture of ‘It’s the least I can do for my new friends’ and filled their glasses as fast as they could down them – except his own, of course, from which, after each toast, he would wet his lips without drinking.

  ‘… coal, potassium and sulphuric acid. And it doesn’t let out a wisp of smoke and then before we can leg it… Phut!’

  ‘Were there many casualties?’ asked Marroné thoughtfully.

  ‘What! It was the work of this loon. Everywhere filled with black smoke, you could see it twenty blocks away. That was how we got caught again. And back to the clink we went.’

  ‘And what about Teresa? Did you tell him about Teresa?’

  ‘Teresa! What’s she up to now I wonder.’

  ‘Dead probably. There aren’t many of us left any more.’

  ‘Once at the Party offices we were arguing about Manger, see…’

  ‘Tell him about Manger, he doesn’t know who he was.’

  ‘Oh, you’re right. What an idiot. It’s just that I think of old Ernesto here as one of us,’ Rodolfo said to him, with a grin of drunken camaraderie which Marroné returned, with compound interest. ‘He was a foreman at the textile factory, always trying it on with the girls he was, made the women delegates’ lives not worth living. So we’ve been discussing what to do about him for two hours and this, that and the other, and then Teresa, fed up to the back teeth, whistles to us and when we all turn and look at her, she lifts up her skirt – she was famous for wearing no knickers – and goes, “This is for whoever beats the crap out of that fucker.”’

  ‘So we all piled round to his place to give him a good seeing-to. The lads were lining up to hit him. Took Teresa a whole month to pay us back.’

  ‘Woman of her word that Teresa.’

  ‘And tough as nails to boot. A true comrade.’

  They sailed on into the past down a river of wine.

  ‘And who was going to take us on after that? Workshops, a bit of manual work, odd jobs…’

  ‘We stuck a gas cylinder in there… Boom! Sarmiento got to the moon before the Yanks did.’

  ‘Eight months!’

  ‘“There’s a man at the door,” my youngest shouts when I show up on the doorstep.’

  ‘After eight months’ porridge beggars can’t be choosers.’

  ‘You must mean… The old pork sausage!’

  ‘Yes, but good old Peronist pork!’

  ‘And watching it burn away, I thought to myself… if only the General could see me now!’

  Marroné proceeded with premeditated stealth as soon as the two men’s snores fired the starting gun. Cautiously, he unhooked a bunch of keys from Rodolfo’s belt and grabbed those to the pick-up off the kitchen worktop; then, before opening the gate, he oiled the hinges with olive oil from the glass cruet. As the driveway sloped slightly, all he had to do was take the pick-up out of gear and release the brake, and the old banger slid back towards the road, where he got out and pushed for about fifty metres, busting several guts and sweating buckets all the way to the tower-block entrance. When he saw that the third lift – the one they’d taken that afternoon – was out of order and locked, he almost gave in to the urge to sit down on the kerb and weep, but he pulled himself together and set off on the five-floor ascent with fierce determination, muttering over and over again, ‘Fucking darkie Peronists, they don’t deserve what they’ve got. Give them a model city and all they do is wreck it.’

  On his first trip he grabbed two of the largest busts, one under each arm; he had to stop three times on his way down to catch his breath and, by the time he’d finished securing them at the back of the pick-up, he was out of breath and his knees were wobbling; a speedy bit of mental arithmetic told him that at this rate it would take him another forty-six trips; he had neither the strength nor the time before sunrise, so on his next trip he chose only the smallest busts and filled one of the wooden crates, but he barely got as far as the landing before collapsing from exhaustion. Emptying out half the pieces, he could just about manage it, and, now that he’d established the limits of his endurance, he adjusted the number with each round trip; he was also in two minds whether to carry less and make more trips, which would sap the energy from his legs, or to make fewer trips laden like a mule; in the end he put aside all calculations and abandoned himself to a mindless doggedness that bordered on insanity. At one point he tripped on his way down, and the busts rolled downstairs in fragments that got smaller and smaller as he watched; at another, an early bird – the kind of old biddie there’s never a shortage of when you least need one – opened the door as he was making his way down with a granite Inca Eva and a Quebracho Toba Eva (all the smaller or lighter pieces were already in the box of the pick-up) and demanded to know what he was up to.

  ‘Haven’t you heard? There’s a military coup on the way, Señora,’ he said, as quick to the draw as a sheriff in a spaghetti western. ‘And Ciudad Evita’s top of their list. If they catch us with this lot, there’ll be nothing left of this building but rubble.’

  But he realised he’d laid it on too thick when the petrified woman wanted to wake up the whole building to lend him a hand. He stopped her by arguing that the old pick-up was full and told her he’d take up her offer when he got back. He’d decided to load up more than the ninety-tw
o in case any got broken on the journey, but, drained of every last drop of strength, had stopped somewhere around the hundred mark. It was starting to get light, and the building would soon be a hive of busy Peronists, all wide awake.

  The clapped-out old pick-up responded to the ignition with a series of intermittent, hoarse coughs; only at the fifth try, after Marroné had prayed as never before to God and all the saints he could remember, did it judder into life with a series of grudging jolts. Making a beeline for the base of the bun, he came out at the Ricchieri Freeway, which flung him like a stone from a slingshot out and away from Ciudad Evita. He hadn’t slept properly for days, he was dehydrated and exhausted to a degree he’d never imagined possible, but he had the busts, he thought, as he aimed the clunking red pick-up like a ballistic missile straight at the doors of 300 Paseo Colón. No Soviet tank in World War II, nor even Castro in the Cuban Revolution, had advanced on Berlin or Havana with such devastating momentum as did Ernesto Marroné on the city of Buenos Aires.

  ‌10

  ‌The Other Nine Fingers

  He drove like the wind, his fingers locked on the wheel like the teeth of a dog on a bone, shielding it with his body, glancing with lightning speed through windscreen and mirrors, and windows left and right; had it been possible he would have looked upwards through the roof at the sky, whence calamity might also rain in the form of fire and brimstone. On the plus side, the traffic was unusually light even for this early hour, something which had at first filled him with grim forebodings, as if the deserted streets were a stage for the evil enchanters to burst upon, leading the armies of the Apocalypse; but as the minutes passed and all remained quiet, the tense rictus of his sphincter against the wood-bead massage cover slowly eased and, keeping a judicious distance from the traffic around him, he drove towards a green spot slowly growing in the blue-black east. When he swung onto the General Paz Freeway and saw the first row of houses in the capital filing silently past on the right, his eyes welled with tears. You’re home and dry, he told himself, sobbing and hiccuping with gratitude; nothing bad can happen to you now.

  A first pothole on the Alberdi approach road, and the real or imagined sound of dozens of unpacked busts crashing into each other and shattering, reminded him that he’d better slow down, and he kept tight to the kerb for those first blocks, like a nervous swimmer who stays close to shore. Before his bleary eyes the city slowly stretched, yawned and shook itself awake: the odd bus starting out on its route, the bakery opening, the concierge sluicing down the pavement, the newspaper seller at the lights offering him a paper he refused so as to focus on the task in hand. On his right, a merry band of revellers in evening dress were leaving a reception room and hanging around on the pavement; after staring at them for several seconds he came up with the solution to the conundrum: a wedding. When, after broadening invitingly, the avenue wickedly reversed direction without warning, he had to take a diversion to the right and endure a few blocks of anxiety before coming out onto Avenida Directorio, whose one-way lanes downtown and slight (possibly imaginary) slope would now lead him straight as an arrow to his target, signposted by a brace of pink clouds floating in the distant azure like two flocks of flamingos in flight. He nodded off once or twice at the wheel, but it was ok: his little pick-up was like a faithful horse that knew which way to go, eating up the green lights as it went. Avenida Directorio, which at one point became Avenida San Juan, billowed up and down like a magic-carpet ride at the fair; the city, Marroné realised, was in fact not as flat as a billiard table, as was always claimed, but gently undulating. Unless it had changed in his absence.

  He was no longer dazzled by the streetlights and traffic lights, or the headlights in the mirrors: daylight had spread to all corners of the sky. The piece of sky that loomed ahead of him now burnt an angry orange against bright blue: he was driving straight into the rising sun.

  The last set of green lights beckoned to him welcomingly as he swung onto Paseo Colón in a broad curve; he drove past the Doric columns of the Engineering Faculty, smiling to himself, and hung a right onto Avenida Belgrano to take Moreno and park, at last, half a block from 300 Paseo Colón, right outside the entrance to the company’s building. He switched off the ignition and said a short prayer of thanks. He’d done it. Mission accomplished.

  It was almost seven-thirty in the morning by his watch, but the city centre was inexplicably deserted. A bus went by, then a taxi, then nothing; even the kiosk on the corner where he used to buy the paper was all locked up and bolted. The door to the garage should have been open since seven, as it wasn’t unusual for executives to make an early start in order to get on top of their workload, but even when he knocked several times on the heavy brass ring, and then rang the janitor’s bell on the entryphone, he got no answer. Something strange was going on, not just at Tamerlán & Sons, but right across the city. Where had everyone gone? Was there something going on that everyone but him was in on? He crossed the four lanes of the avenue to the square opposite to scan the windows of the building for a revealing light. Nothing. The first rays of the sun had just clawed their way above the two battlements of the Customs House, catching the domes of the neighbouring office buildings like a flame lighting a row of candles. The bells of a nearby church – probably San Roque – struck the half-hour; he couldn’t remember ever having heard them before. He was thirsty and hungry and found a kiosk open on the other side of Belgrano, where he bought himself a packet of crackers and a bottle of chocolate milk with a straw in it, and dragged from the still-sleepy kiosk owner the answer to the riddle:

  ‘It’s Sunday, chief.’

  ‘Just my fucking luck,’ muttered Marroné and, adding two tokens to his order, asked for the nearest phone.

  It was on the corner of Venezuela and, loath as he was to let the old pick-up out of his sight, there was nothing else for it. He dialled the number of Govianus’s house – the only one he knew by heart.

  ‘Ah, Marroné,’ a thick voice at the other end eventually answered. ‘It’s you. We’d given you up for dead. So you got the news that… What was that?’

  ‘The busts, Sr Govianus,’ he interrupted him eagerly. ‘I have the busts. I’m standing by the truck outside the door of the company right now. But I can’t find anyone to open up for me.’

  ‘Well… difficult, you know? On a Sunday at…’ he paused to pretend he was looking at the time on his alarm clock, just to make Marroné feel bad, ‘twenty to eight in the morning. Lucky for you I was in, wasn’t it? Waiting by the phone.’

  Marroné started to get irritated: after all he’d been through, he’d hoped for a warmer reception, and he was also worried about the pick-up and its contents. What if they’d followed him and were taking advantage of his absence to make off with the lot?

  ‘Sr Govianus, I don’t think you heard me. I have the ninety-two busts of Eva Perón, the ones we need to free Sr Tamerlán. I got them, I finally got them. But I can’t leave them in the street for long. Can you hear me, Sr Govianus?’

  ‘Yes, Marroné, perfectly,’ the accountant answered, in the same insipid tone. Perhaps what had happened was so huge, so unexpected, after all hope of good news had been lost, that he couldn’t take in the news. Marroné heard a prolonged sigh at the other end of the line. ‘All right, Marroné. Stay put while I get dressed and drive over.’

  The accountant lived in Caballito: if he got his skates on, the light traffic would mean he’d be there soon, so Marroné decided to hunker down in the car and have breakfast, and not budge an inch until Govianus arrived; but a brand-new surprise awaited him back at the kerbside, which was empty of all other vehicles save the patrol car now parked behind his pick-up. Inside the car sat an overheated policeman, while the other sniffed around the pick-up, tugging at the ropes that fastened the tarpaulin to the box, trying to peek inside. Striding over to him, Marroné tried to contain the washing machine now churning in his empty stomach: they were under an administration that was Peronist in name at least, and there was nothing
wrong, in principle, with transporting a cargo of busts of Eva Perón; but he had an educated accent and was dressed as a worker, which, until proven otherwise, made him a potential guerrilla. There was also the possibility that he was on the wanted list, his photo or identikit plastered all over the streets, and in newspapers, and on television; and as if that weren’t enough, he’d just parked a clapped-out pick-up truck with dodgy contents in a sensitive area of town containing, in a two-block radius, the Ministry of the Interior and the Central Police Headquarters, the Ministry of the Economy, the Libertador Building, which housed the Ministry of Defence and the General Staff, and last but not least, the Pink House.

  ‘Morning,’ said the policeman at large, with that curt urbanity they often affect once they’ve zeroed in on their prey.

  ‘Morning, Constable… er… Officer… Any problem?’ Marroné answered with an ingratiating, brown-nose grin.

  ‘This yours?’ he replied, pointing to the truck with pursed lips.

  ‘Errrr… yes. But I was just on my way, eh. I had to make a quick phone call,’ he said, with gestures that invoked a vaguely telephonic distance.

  ‘Hands on the bonnet if you don’t mind.’

  He frisked him quickly, not forgetting armpits and crotch, then said:

  ‘Papers.’

  Braced for the worst, he fished the white clam out of his pocket, extracted his identity card and handed it to the policeman, who gave it a couple of perfunctory flips, then froze at the photo of an immaculate Marroné in jacket, tie and slicked-back hair. Working hard to square it with the black-nailed, tangle-haired, stubbly creature that stood before him in flip-flops, he said flatly:

  ‘Car papers…’

  It was just as he feared. He had forgotten, or rather been too preoccupied to dig out the papers for the pick-up. His only hope was that Don Rogelio was in the habit of leaving them in the glove compartment.

  ‘Excuse me.’

  The policeman stayed the hand that Marroné had slipped into his pocket, felt it and helped him remove it, daintily, with a bunch of keys between thumb and forefinger. Marroné gave the officer in the patrol car a sidelong look. He was wearing mirrored shades, smoking a cigarette and swatting a fly that was trying to sip the sweat from his forehead. In the angle of his arm, resting on the open window, lolled the barrel of a shotgun. After rummaging in the glove compartment to make sure there were no lethal weapons or pamphlets for guerrilla organisations, his partner emerged with a cracked leather wallet that turned out to contain – blessed be the Mercy of the Lord – the papers for the pick-up. The policeman held it open in Marroné’s face, confronting him with the photo of a Don Rogelio a good ten years younger. Marroné knew the time had come to talk up a storm.