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 man’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, seeing 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.
‘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.
‘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-two 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.