To offset the day’s highs with an unquestionable low he was forced to share the lift to the car park with Aldo Cáceres Grey, the executive usurping the chair that Marroné yearned with all his heart and soul to sit in: marketing and sales at Tamerlán & Sons. Cáceres Grey was a perfect specimen of an endangered species: the high-born executive who owes his post less to his curriculum vitae than to his pedigree, and more to his golfing handicap than to his academic scores. Sr Tamerlán wasn’t in the business of hiring fops on the strength of their double-barrelled surnames, but as one of the surnames also happened to be his wife’s, and as his little nephew was only a minor pain, and his assistant manager obsessively efficient but a social liability, the balance between the demands of business and those of high society might appear quite sensible. But for Marroné, whose head teemed with new ideas fresh from the US, Cáceres Grey was nothing but a bar to the company’s progress, an obstruction blocking the new thinking that was changing the face of business across the world. And to cap it all his rival had had the cheek to bang Mariana, the twenty-year-old secretary that Marroné, hobbled by scruple and guilt, had timidly, almost cryptically, been wooing all spring. Screwing your colleague’s secretary violated the executive’s tacit droit de seigneur over his subordinates and was nothing short of an act of war, a gauntlet thrown in his face. Marroné had taken it up, unbeknownst to Cáceres Grey, and had secretly been choosing his weapons ever since. Which didn’t stop him answering his rival’s condescending smile with a frank and open one, as recommended in How to Win Friends and Influence People.
‘Well? Are the tower blocks selling or aren’t they?’ he asked with a toothy grin.
‘There’s a sucker born every minute. Hey… What about Uncle? Any news?’
‘Who?’ asked Marroné, knowing perfectly well that Cáceres Grey was referring to Sr Tamerlán, but feigning ignorance to parry what he saw as an obscene exhibition of kinship.
‘Come on, don’t be silly. If you’ve been called to the bunker, it can’t have been to talk about the price of airbricks.’
‘Oh. You meant Sr Tamerlán’s kidnapping. No, we didn’t discuss the subject,’ he lied, with a thrill of private delight. So word had already got round of his descent into The Nibelheim. If this busybody only knew… he couldn’t even suspect the extent to which Marroné was not only in the know but in the core, the nerve centre… at the very helm.
‘Auntie is out of her mind; visiting her’s an ordeal. And my two little cousins aren’t far behind. We try to give them support, you know, over the phone; but there comes a point when you don’t know what to say. If you ask me, they’ve already offed him. They don’t usually keep them this long. Remember the head of Fiat?’
He gave Cáceres Grey a non-committal smile. Why bother telling him that he, Marroné, had irrefutable evidence to the contrary? Though, now that he came to think about it, the arrival of the finger didn’t prove Sr Tamerlán was still alive. The latest hard evidence – the customary photograph with that day’s newspaper – was over a month old, and while it wasn’t the standard pose (Sr Tamerlán had turned round at the last moment to show himself wiping his backside with it), the still visible headlines had left no room for doubt. But, on the other hand, he could easily have been executed since the photo was taken and kept in the freezer to be chopped up like a chicken and the chunks posted in instalments. No, they wouldn’t do that, he corrected himself; he’d be a lot harder to cut up frozen; they’d have chopped him up beforehand.
‘It must be hard for her…’ Marroné began.
‘That’s the least of our worries. The trouble is she’s out of control. Uncle used to keep her in check, you know, and now there’s no one to stop her. Only the other day she was being interviewed for Gente magazine, and she tried to mount the photographer. He asked her to lie on the conjugal bed, you know, to hit just the right tear-jerking note, and she says she got all misty-eyed and next thing she knew… I know six months is a long time, but what are staff for? You have to watch your step with journalists. They’ll publish anything.’
Marroné didn’t know what to say, and it galled him all the more. It was another of Cáceres Grey’s famous put-downs: from his position of privilege as a member of the Family he revelled in disclosing embarrassing private details and talking with over-familiarity about people his colleagues were obliged to refer to with the utmost ceremoniousness.
They got out of the lift at the car park and, after bidding each other farewell with formal courtesy – Marroné sincere and emphatic, extending his sinewy right hand in a virile American handshake; Cáceres Grey with Parisian nonchalance and a hint of irony, his slack hand floating palm down as if he were expecting a subject’s kiss – they each headed for their cars: Cáceres Grey to his orange ’68 Mustang Coupé; Marroné to his champagne-coloured Peugeot 504. Before he got in, Cáceres Grey shouted to Marroné over the roof of his car:
‘Be a good chap and remind Mariana to call me tomorrow!’
The phrase hadn’t finished ricocheting around the bare cement columns and walls before Cáceres Grey slammed the door and started his engine, and for a split second Marroné yearned with every fibre of his being for a gelignite blast to blow him out of existence for ever, before reminding himself that at that distance it would catch him too, and the last thing he wanted was to share another journey with his hated enemy, even if it was to the Hereafter. Marroné was more cautious: as he had been taught on the survival course (given by a retired French colonel and Algerian War veteran) he examined the locks to see if they showed signs of having been forced or displayed traces of plastic explosive, inside or out. Once – he still shuddered to remember – he had discovered the feared pink gunk inside the lock but, after the alarm and evacuation of the building, it had been identified by bomb-disposal experts as ‘masticated Bazooka bubble gum’, and for several weeks Marroné was the butt of his colleagues’ jokes: they would offer him chewing gum at all times of day, or blow bubbles and burst them in his presence – all except Cáceres Grey, who was unusually attentive and understanding with him, congratulating him on his sense of responsibility and so confirming Marroné’s suspicions about the authorship of this unforgivable prank. He then checked under the chassis, kneeling on his handkerchief to protect his trousers, and on getting up he said a quick Our Father and slid the key into the lock. Nothing. Once inside he examined the wiring and, opening the hood, got out again to check the engine: everything seemed to be where it should be. Even so, before starting the engine, he said two Our Fathers one after the other – first in English, then in Spanish – and gave a sigh of relief when the friendly purring of the Peugeot’s motor told him he had won another victory against death.
It was the same issue with this routine check as when he took his books to the toilet: he was embarrassed to be seen, particularly since, with the violence of the times, Tamerlán’s Tartars had apparently adopted a philosophy resembling the one expressed in The Corporate Samurai. Whenever two of them went down to the car park together, they would make a whole ceremony out of the simple act of leaving work in their cars, with remarks like ‘See you in the celestial spa’ or ‘Tamerlán or death’ and then counting ‘One, two, three!’ before whirling their keys like sabres and plunging them into the locks of their cars. After exaggerated laughter (and private sighs of relief) they repeated the burlesque ceremony by starting up their engines, and at no time – they would have seen it as an unpardonable breach of the warrior’s code – did they lower themselves to following the safety procedure, even though they knew that what was at stake wasn’t just their own physical integrity, but their colleagues’, and – if the bomb was big enough – the entire building’s. They’d even given the game a name: ‘Montonero Roulette’. Marroné knew that there was little or nothing of the bushido code and a good deal of the most vulgar and pedestrian Latin American machismo in all this horsing around but, incapable of withstanding peer pressure, in the presence of a colleague he would affect identical behaviour, so, if he had to go down to the car park with one of them, he would delay his departure with petty excuses – stopping the lift on the pretext of talking to someone, claiming to have forgotten important papers, or as a last resort the infallible ‘What a bloody fool, I’ve left my car keys upstairs’ so he could go through his procedure later, safe from sarcastic glances. As of today he would have to take more precautions than ever, for, as a key player in the negotiations, he was now a target for the assassins: his name might at that very instant be passing from mouth to mouth at a meeting of the Montoneros’ Central Committee: ‘Marroné? Marroné? What do we know about him? Bring me all you’ve got on Ernesto Marroné.’
Before leaving, he waved to the car park attendant, whose name, in spite of his supposed adherence to Dale Carnegie’s Third Way to Make People Like You (‘Remember that a person’s name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language’), Marroné could never remember. Most of his colleagues not only didn’t make the effort, but would consider it demeaning to recall the name of such a lowly subordinate, but Marroné was mindful of the exemplary case of Andrew Carnegie, the author’s father, who was able to call all his workers by their Christian names, and in all his years in charge of the steelworks he wasn’t troubled by a single strike. It crossed his mind to ask the man his name and jot it down in the notebook he always carried with him for just that purpose, but that would be tantamount to admitting he’d forgotten it: he’d be offending rather than making himself liked, which only defeated his purpose. And then… what if he was a mole planted by the Montoneros and Marroné’s impertinent question only aroused his suspicion? It didn’t seem very likely: the man had been working at the company for years and was too dark for a guerrilla; but that was no guarantee either. In the inexorably spiralling violence even the poor had begun taking up arms against the rich, and the most unlikely of people, with unimpeachable service records, were daily being won over to the subversives’ side, becoming willing accomplices or merely useful idiots in their service. When simple persuasion failed, it was supplemented with death threats against their person or against their families, or the slow drip of ideological indoctrination, which by accumulation could culminate in a total brainwashing. Difficult times indeed.
His thoughts grew less sombre as the Peugeot surged up the exit ramp and emerged from the fluorescent light into the radiance of the summer afternoon, to join the double column of cars that crawled with rush-hour sluggishness along the side-lanes. This was the most vulnerable part of his journey and, in spite of the suffocating heat, he kept the windows firmly closed: while one eye checked the rear-view mirrors to make sure he wasn’t being followed by ‘rovers’ from the guerrilla, the other was intent on the pedestrians, who, with Argentinian contempt for white lines and red lights, kept materialising between the trunks of the tipa trees and recklessly darting between the moving cars. ‘If some person srows zemselves in front of ze car,’ he heard the idiosyncratic Spanish of Colonel Bigeard, ‘do not stop. Run zem over and let ze Legal Department take care of it. Iz easier to escape a trial zan a kidnap.’ After an accidental detour via Balcarce, he managed to get into the safer central lanes and exceed walking pace, until, on reaching Alem, the traffic opened up like spray squirting from the nozzle of a hosepipe, and Marroné could wind down the window and let the wind dry his sweat-drenched face. Seven thirty-five. If everything went well, he’d be home by eight, he told himself, relaxing and automatically turning the stereo on to listen to the B-side of The Socratic Pitch: ‘Once the dialectic moment of your presentation is over, and your formerly sceptical listener has become an ardent “yes-man” for your proposals, it is time for the midwife to step in. The Socratic Pitch will teach you the art of…’ As the tape reeled out its litany, which he knew almost by heart, having listened to it twice a day for almost thirty days (side A on the outward leg, side B on the return as recommended by the enclosed booklet), he amused himself with the familiar beauty spots along the way that glowed with the almost spiritual raking light of the golden hour: the majestic tree-covered slope of the Plaza San Martín; the stately Kavanagh Building and the brand-new Sheraton Hotel, symbols the one of past splendour, the other of future prosperity; the French grace of the Palais de Glace and the virile archaism of Antoine Bourdelle’s Monument to Alvear, flanked by the four allegorical figures of Victory, Strength, Eloquence and Liberty; the imposing Graeco-Roman façade of the Law Faculty; the Asiatic splendour of the Assyrian column and its towering bulls; and the galactic curves of the Municipal Planetarium… Paseo Colón and Avenida Libertador, he was fond of saying, were the spinal column of a better Buenos Aires, one that no Porteño need be ashamed of: a city every bit the equal of the great capitals of Europe and America, the axis of a better, more desirable country; and whenever he had to play chaperone to foreign visitors, it was with delight that he faced the challenge of plotting routes that joined up all the beauty spots without passing any of the eyesores (in daylight at least, which was when they might create a worse impression), and he found nothing more rewarding of his efforts than the spontaneous exclamation of an important foreign executive or businessman: ‘This doesn’t look like South America at all!’ Ah well, he said to himself, pressing the stop button and interrupting Socrates in full swing – just for today he could take a break and indulge in his own thoughts. For it had not escaped Marroné’s notice that he was facing a decisive turning point, one that – with hindsight – would divide not only his career but his life into a before and an after. Until today, he ventured to himself as he savoured the idea, he had merely been living; today perhaps he was beginning to write his autobiography.
‘How did Marroné become Marroné? That’s a good question. There are moments in the career of every top executive… They’re things you sometimes can’t put on your CV, but they’re precisely the kind of things that make everyone want to read your CV. This is one of the golden rules of what I earlier called “the marketing of the self”. Let me give you an example: when, thanks to my forceful yet sensitive handling of negotiations, I managed to rescue Fausto Tamerlán from the clutches of Marxist terrorism, I was no more than a “junior executive” fresh from the United States. True, I had brought back with me an MBA in Marketing from Stanford and a battery of innovative ideas, but I was no more than a cog – necessary perhaps, but replaceable – in a complex commercial machine. My coolness, calmness and collectedness, and above all my leadership abilities, proven in those dark hours when the whole future of the company hung in the balance, were the making of me. From that moment on, I became in all but name the CEO of Tamerlán & Sons, as it was called in those days. Sr Tamerlán’s prolonged captivity, coupled with the tortures inflicted on him – which included mutilation – had left physical and mental scars that kept him from anything more than nominal leadership, and that vacuum had to be filled by a providential man full of new ideas and the will to implement them. The now world-famous Marroné & Tamerlán Ltd had until those days been no more than a family enterprise, in the most limited sense of the word, and one that had never known bracing exposure to the elements of healthy competition, having grown up in the shadow of a nanny state, which, by the way, it will soon be time to wean ourselves off permanently.’ Marroné raced ahead with his autobiography, sticking close in language and style to the ones he so loved to read – those of Henry Ford, Alfred P Sloan, Thomas Watson Jr and Lester Luchessi – and dictating it to an imaginary listener who sat there, cassette recorder in hand, in the empty passenger seat. He liked to imagine himself dictating it because, as he now set about explaining to his attentive scribe (a ghost writer who had at first accepted the assignment just for the cash, but who, all agog, was now receiving a veritable masterclass in leadership and – why not? – in life too), the only executives who can afford the time to write their biography themselves have either retired or failed. Marroné now drove under the General Paz flyover and entered the suburbs, the docility of his Peugeot 504 and the wind, which barely ruffled his gel-slicked hair, intoxicating him as if he were breathing the air of high mountain tops, and spurring him on with his autobiography, which he had tentatively titled Marroné by Marroné: ‘My family spared no expense when it came to securing a first-class education for me, which I received at the exclusive and expensive St Andrew’s College in Buenos Aires, from where I graduated in 1964 with the honour of having obtained the coveted turquoise- and brown-striped prefects’ tie and the captain’s badge of the Dodds House rugby team. My time at St Andrew’s bequeathed me many gifts, such as my sound command of the English language, which has led to many a foreign businessman expressing disbelief when I confess to being Argentinian; a solid humanist background in the best British tradition; and the essential school spirit, which in the world of business translates into donning the company jersey…’ (‘Underpants,’ whispered the sly side of his mind once again, and he mentally swatted away the intrusive word) ‘… but I learnt two essential things that marked my subsequent career: I learnt to command and I learnt to obey.
‘I learnt to obey, to let myself be guided,’ he explained now to an audience not of one but of hundreds, the cassette recorder turned microphone, and the inside of his Peugeot grown to the proportions of the immense St Andrew’s assembly hall, decked out in homage to its favourite son, Ernesto Marroné, who had acquiesced to afford them a few hours of his precious time to deliver a lecture on leadership that would later be published in full in the school magazine, The Thistle. ‘To let myself be guided by my teachers and coaches,’ he continued, smiling encouragingly at the front rows, where the serried ranks of his old teachers sat – a few still active, others now retired but expressly invited for the occasion – and following the recommendations of How to Develop Self-Confidence and Influence People by Public Speaking, by – who else? – Dale Carnegie, his eyes rested for a second on each of them in turn: Mr Adams; Mrs Halley; Mrs McCarthy; Mrs Oxford, who used to force him, retching, to finish his milk in the dining hall; Sra Polino; Sra Regamor; Mr Guinness; Wójcik the Pole; the PE teachers Mr Trollope, Osvaldo Lamas and Willy Speakeasy; Uve; Sapa; El Pollo; Mr Peters; the fearsome Sr Macera, who had humiliated him before the whole class and then flunked him in Anatomy… ‘And by learning to obey, I learnt to command, to be a leader. What is a leader?’ asked Marroné in the theatre of his mind while his body handled the wheel and pedals of his Peugeot, respected traffic signals and dodged neighbouring cars. ‘The wise leader does not push to make things happen, but allows the process to unfold on its own. The leader teaches by example rather than by lecturing others on how they ought to be. Bosses are appointed; leaders are chosen by their peers,’ he thought, stringing together a series of phrases from The Tao of Leadership, now casting his eyes over the faces of some of his former schoolmates: ‘Slim’ Sörensen; Ramiro Agüero, who used to call him ‘sissy’ at break-time in primary school; Alberto Regamor, the brainiac who had won the Dux Medal and whose features Marroné’s memory insisted on confusing with those of the hated Cáceres Grey; and many others; but his satisfaction was complete when he spotted the unmistakeable, neatly trimmed ginger hair of Paddy Donovan, his high-school hero, who, on meeting his gaze, smiled back, his teeth whiter-than-white, and raised both thumbs approvingly. And beyond the guests and familiar faces, their heads bobbing expectantly on a sea of dark-blue blazers with their thistle-flanked badges bearing the motto ‘Sic itur ad astra’, stood the future leaders of Argentina, and there in their midst, bursting with pride, was little Tommy…
As he pulled down the garage door, Marroné remembered the disposable nappies his wife, beleaguered by the chronic shortage of supplies, had asked him to pick up at any price. He had promised to look for some near the office, but being by nature somewhat prone to distraction – ‘the Achilles heel of creative thinkers’, the specialist literature called it – and to losing himself in reveries, he had clean forgotten. As Mabel would never in a million years pass up the opportunity to make a scene if he dared to come home empty-handed, he pushed the creaking wooden door back up in order to go and raid the supermarket on Avenida Libertador, before he remembered that it was ‘Closed for Refurbishment’, the usual euphemism for ‘Blown Up by the Montoneros’ (or the ERP, who knows). He thought of trying the duty chemist’s, but he’d left his newspaper at the office and his mission to retrieve the one from indoors and get out again without being seen was aborted by little Tommy’s vigilance, who, alerted by the noise of the gate or perhaps the car, intercepted him on the ground-floor landing with his strident demand of ‘Tweeties! Tweeties!’ – which, of course, his father had forgotten to pick up, along with the nappies. To the abject confession of his empty hands little Tommy’s mouth responded with an O of incredulity that instantly narrowed to a ∞ of incessant wailing, which inevitably brought Mabel running. ‘I bet you’ve forgotten the nappies too,’ she spat at him in greeting, at which the ‘Hello darling’ that Marroné had at the ready barely managed to escape his throat, strangled and squeezed dry of any genuine emotion. ‘I was just going to check the paper for a chemist’s,’ he said, adopting a decisive tone, but Mabel was ready with her answer and fired at him: ‘Haven’t you heard there’s-a-shor-tage, Ernesto? The chemist’s haven’t even got aspirins in stock!’ ‘Of course I have. You seem to forget that I’m the head of procurement for one of the leading comp…’ he began in an offended tone, but realised too late that he’d put the ball just where she wanted him to (Mabel always beat him at tennis). ‘You might be head of procurement at the office, but at home you can’t even pick up a lousy chocolate bar,’ she snapped as little Tommy, seeing his position defended, redoubled his bawling, and Marroné felt the tension running up and down his body in thick, indignant waves of pure stress; with the stoic fatalism of the serial somatiser, he knew that that night he would suffer from heartburn and insomnia, and it was with a supreme effort of self-control that he stopped himself from screaming in his wife’s face: ‘The life of a very important man is in my hands and you’re banging on to me about candy bars!’ But he couldn’t do this without jeopardising the whole operation, and so he turned once again to the pages of How to Win Friends and Influence People, to be precise, to the chapter entitled ‘If You’re Wrong, Admit It’ from the section ‘How to Win People to Your Way of Thinking’, which advised: ‘Say about yourself all the derogatory things you know the other person is thinking or wants to say or intends to say – and say them before that person has a chance to say them.’
‘You’re right, my darling,’ said Marroné through jaws clenched as tight as a hydraulic press. ‘You deserve a better husband than me. All that effort you make morning, noon and night, running the house, and I can’t even remember one little errand you ask me to do…’ As his tongue waded laboriously through the viscous insincerity of his words, Mabel’s features gradually lost their tautness, as if each admission of guilt loosened one of the threads that tensed it, and very soon she was the one coming to his defence: ‘Well, Ernesto, I wouldn’t go that far, I mean we’ve got enough to last till the weekend’ (‘Then why did you kick up such a fuss about it, you bitch!’) ‘and you, Tommy, be quiet will you, your daddy’s had a long day at the office, come here, I’ve got some sweeties for you upstairs…’ and Marroné, now certain of victory, allowed himself to add a ginger ‘First thing tomorrow I’ll pop out to the supermarket in La Lucila’, only for Mabel to reply: ‘No, no, you’re always in a dreadful hurry when you leave, I don’t want you doing anything to add to your stress. I’ll have Doña Ema pick some up for me at the weekend, they have everything in the shanties you know, never go short of anything. We’ll soon be resorting to cloth nappies out here and they’re spoilt for choice – course they resell what the government gives them, so Doña Ema tells me. Cynthia’s just woken up, can you believe it? Like she knows you’re home. Want to go up and see her?’
At dinner, which consisted of a starter of boiled ham and Russian salad, a main course of milanesas and mash, and a dessert of crème caramel and dulce de leche, Mabel gave him the latest update on little Cynthia’s latest escapades, encouraged by her husband’s studied posture of the absorbed listener. Knowing how to listen, after all, was one of the secrets of success in business and private life, for Principle Six (‘How to Make People Like You Instantly’) reminds us that even if you happen to be President of the Republic, the person you are talking to is a hundred times more interested in themselves, in their petty needs and problems, than in you and your great ones. What everyone ultimately wants is to feel important, and listening with attention was an infallible way of satisfying that basic need, Marroné was repeating to himself, when Mabel suddenly blurted out:
‘Is anything wrong? You’ve hardly said a word since we started eating.’
‘I was listening carefully,’ he mumbled behind his tight-lipped smile.
‘You didn’t manage… ?’
He was about to break the good news to her, when he thought better of it and shook his head contritely instead. Marroné had made of the prolonged barrenness of his belly an impregnable excuse to lock himself in the bathroom for extended periods of time whenever the manifold demands of married life or home became too much for him; especially since his study had been annexed as the little girl’s bedroom and there was no other room in the house he could call his own. The bathroom had become the only place where he could enjoy some degree of peace and quiet, and devote some time to himself. Confessing to Mabel the success that had crowned his afternoon’s efforts would be to deprive himself of that minimal but indispensable right to privacy.
Once the coffee cups had been cleared away, Doña Ema’s working day was over and it was Marroné’s turn to look after the children, while Mabel went upstairs to the bedroom to watch television for a bit. Much as he liked to picture himself as an exemplary father – the very phrase made him swell with pride – after a day of stress at the office the tasks it involved were capable of pushing him over the edge, for since the little girl’s arrival, the demands of his children seemed irrationally to have multiplied not by two, but by ten. He would make a superhuman effort to remind himself that every opportunity for recreation was essential in the life of the executive, enabling him to return to his tasks with renewed vigour, but after a few minutes of lending them his undivided attention, he would start thinking about all the work he could be catching up on, or the books he could be reading, and which he did sometimes try to read while looking after them, with the regrettable result of neither being able to concentrate on reading nor enjoy the children, which meant he would end up losing his patience and yelling at them. Today he didn’t last twenty minutes: while he was changing little Cynthia’s dirty nappy, little Tommy in a fit of jealousy shook the changing stand and knocked the bottle of baby oil on the floor, which Marroné, of course, hadn’t put the top back on; cursing, he leapt, cotton wool in hand, to wipe it up before it ruined the carpet and earned him another dressing-down from Mabel. His reprimand, not so much violent as tense with barely contained anger, set off little Tommy, who was a sensitive child at heart, and while tending to him, Marroné forgot about the girl, who, when he looked up, was teetering on the brink of the changing stand about to follow the bottle into the abyss. Once he had deposited her safely in the middle of her crib, he went back to consoling little Tommy and, by the time he noticed the fresh nappy, which should have been on little Cynthia, lying open and unused on the changing stand, her pee had drenched the sheets and soaked through to the mattress. ‘I’m not cut out for this, I’m not cut out for this,’ Marroné hiccuped, his throat closed by hysteria as he laid the little girl on the floor and stripped the sheets in order to pick up the mattress. He flirted for a moment with the temptation of sitting down on the floor next to her and starting to cry, but that would probably only trigger a sympathetic response in little Tommy, who, quieter now, had climbed up to the third shelf of the bookcase and was on the verge of falling backwards and breaking his neck on the edge of the crib. Having reached this point, he felt psychically and morally justified to go to his wife with the babe in his arms and the boy by the hand and guiltlessly say, ‘Can you take them for a while? I’m going to try…’
‘Are you going to be long?’ Mabel asked him, and Marroné was tempted to scream ‘Can’t you see that, if you hurry me, I’ll feel pressurised and end up taking twice as long?’ when he remembered that he’d already undergone his daily ordeal and was only looking for somewhere quiet to get some reading done.
‘I’ll be as quick as I can,’ he replied as usual and, before Mabel could answer back, he had left the room and was descending the stairs and heading for the bookcase, where he began running his index finger over the spines and titles in search of a book to keep him company. Drucker’s The Practice of Management? No, too constipated. Edward de Bono’s The Use of Lateral Thinking? Already knew it by heart. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful? It had been a gift from a hippie professor at Stanford and he hadn’t been able to get past the opening pages. He needed something more reader-friendly, something from his favourite genre for example, a book that could draw ideas and principles of business philosophy from the great works of universal culture. He owned several, some very good, others so-so: Jesus Means Business, for example, was nothing but a rehash of Og Mandino’s classic The Greatest Salesman in the World; but Konosuke Takamura’s Haikus for Managers was a real oyster bank from which he had extracted such pearls as:
A huge pyramid
An elephant can’t climb it
A tiny ant can
But his undisputed favourite was Shakespeare the Businessman by R Theobald Johnson. Thanks to this volume he had been able to maximise the benefits derived from reading the Swan of Avon in the classrooms of St Andrew’s, for Shakespeare the Businessman taught you to apply what you had learnt at school to the daily routine of the efficient executive, turning each play into a fountainhead of practical teachings: from Hamlet, for example, you could learn to avoid endless, fruitless procrastination in the decision-making process; from The Merchant of Venice, to pore over the small print of a contract, especially when dealing with venture capital; Henry V was a lesson in leadership, and Timon of Athens an appeal not to overspend on advertising and representation; King Lear alerted one to the dangers of dividing up a great family enterprise among the heirs, of rewarding the flatterer and punishing the critic and, above all, of putting off the appointment of a successor till the last moment and then naming them on a whim; Romeo and Juliet was about the sometimes tragic consequences of communication failures in companies, and Richard III about the destructive potential of the executive hell-bent on reaching the top by climbing a staircase of severed heads. Macbeth got it on the nose when it pointed to the wife who stays at home as the true power behind the unscrupulously ambitious husband, as did Antony and Cleopatra – but about the opposite risk: of losing in the voluptuous arms of a lover the Spartan virtues demanded by one’s profession. Othello offered the most penetrating analysis of in-house intrigues – that daily hell unleashed by jealousy, envy and rumour – and of the unimaginable destructive potential of a mid-ranking executive who feels he has been unfairly overlooked in his promotion. The Tempest, on the other hand, was an object lesson in how to regain control of a company with minimum damage to the organisation; and Mark Antony’s speech in Julius Caesar provided a master class in public speaking, combining the best classical oratory with the highly efficient use of the material props of a modern audiovisual presentation: the slashed cloak, the blood, the body of the assassinated leader. Bidding it farewell with a wistful caress of its well-worn spine, Marroné’s finger moved on until it ran into Michael Eggplant’s Don Quixote: The Executive-Errant, which his parents had recently brought him back from Spain. With a whoop of jubilation he grabbed it off the shelf and made straight for the bathroom, where, dropping his trousers out of mere habit, he sat down on the seat and began to read:
Hundreds of years ago western civilisation was about to perish under the onslaught of the armies of the night. There then emerged a special class of men, emissaries of light, pillars of society, defenders of justice and the true faith: the knights-errant. Thanks to them Christian Europe was able to defeat its enemies within and without, and prosper, sending out its light to all the peoples of the world. Today, as the darkness takes on new forms and once more lays siege to the citadel of civilisation, the future of the free world and the liberation of the iron-bound once again rests with a force of chosen men, the true heirs of the knights-errant of yore: the managerial classes – the executives-errant. Their castles are the dazzling crystal towers of corporations; instead of lances they bear fountain pens, and briefcases instead of shields; they travel not by horse but by plane, yet fundamentally nothing has changed. The emergence and development of the executive class is the crucial, defining event of our times, and one of the most significant in the history of mankind. More than presidents and statesmen, more than religious and military authorities, more indeed than the owners of businesses, it is executives who pave the way, who are in the front line on the battlefield as were the knights-errant of yore. Their appearance at the start of our century coincides with the most spectacular leap forward in the history of mankind: one that leads from a materialist civilisation, subject to the tyranny of existing resources, to an idealist one, in which the unlimited generation of resources ensures the true liberation of the human spirit. In this very spirit Cervantes’ celebrated hero, Don Quixote of La Mancha, decides one fine day to turn his back on the meagreness of his material life and the shallowness of the world around him – gutless mediocre folk devoted to traditional ways of doing things, for whom the word creativity is anathema – and strikes out on the highways in search of adventure. Don Quixote’s gesture encapsulates the adventurous spirit of today’s businessmen: conquering new markets, daring to vie with the corporate giants, earning themselves a name and an image, and devoting their lives to it. Until this moment – his fiftieth year – he has done nothing with his life: a village squire, a poor squire, so obscure and retiring that we cannot be certain of his real name: Quesada, Quijana, Quejana… Sr Quejana has not lived, but merely vegetated in the shadows of others’ adventures, like some small-time village tradesman who seeks consolation for the flatness of his life in the biographies of millionaires. Then, one fine day, he looks in the mirror and does not recognise himself. That dull, grey face, those lacklustre eyes, that look of defeat – the bitterest look of defeat, the look of someone who has never fought – cannot be his. Another expression is possible: that of his true self, that of his unexplored potential. And on that day he resolves to become Don Quixote of La Mancha.
Marroné closed the book for a moment. There’s no such thing as chance, he thought. This book had been sitting patiently on the shelves of his bookcase for the right moment to awaken. And that night, of all nights, on the eve of his new life – a life of adventure, a life in which his dreams would begin to come true – it had called out to him, to pass on its message of encouragement, and his hand had reached for it. This was what he had been waiting for, he saw it clearly now. Tomorrow, when dawn broke, Ernesto Marroné would go out into the world. Who knows who would come back?
Anxious and enthusiastic, he skipped the rest of the introduction and, opening the book at random, began to read a section entitled:
The Windmills
In this, perhaps the most famous of all his adventures, Don Quixote charges full tilt at some windmills he takes for fearsome giants, with predictable results: the great sails begin to turn in the wind snapping his lance into several pieces and bringing down horse and rider, who instead of recognising his error accuses some ‘evil enchanters’, who he claims are pursuing him, of having ‘transformed these giants into mills, to deprive me of the glory of the victory’. Although the proverbial phrase ‘tilting at windmills’ has come to be associated with an attitude of heroic or, more properly, ‘quixotic’ idealism, the executive-errant would do well to avoid imitating our knight to the letter. The giants of the market do not surrender at the first charge, their weapons are many and far-reaching, and a small or medium enterprise willing to give battle must tread carefully if it does not want to bite the dust and wind up bankrupt. Windmills perform a useful function, like any big company; seeing them as enemies to be destroyed is another example of the aforementioned quixotic lack of proportion. The executive-errant must rather design better, cheaper, more efficient windmills, and offer them on the market, and the giants will soon become obsolete and collapse under their own weight without anyone having to be ground down to defeat them.
The Helmet of Mambrino
A barber comes down the road, wearing his shiny golden barber’s bowl on his head to protect his hat from the rain. This bowl Don Quixote takes for the golden helmet of the legendary Moor, Mambrino, and after accosting him and tearing it away from him, he dons it himself, to ridiculous effect. The well-known saying ‘all that glisters is not gold’ would do very well to summarise the moral of this new adventure for the executive-errant: how many times on our journey does the oft-sought ‘golden opportunity’ seem to come our way, without us seeking it? That perfect deal whose brilliance blinds us at a distance, but once it is in our hands – and all our capital invested in it – turns out to be yellow brass that we have to ‘wear on our heads’ and we become the laughing stock of the business world.
The Freeing of the Galley Slaves
This episode is especially recommended for any general or personnel managers who might be tempted in these turbulent times to yield before the incessant demands of their employees. In this adventure our hero runs into a chain of galley slaves condemned by the king’s justice, whom without further ado he decides to free, and sets about their guards. And in token of their gratitude he is rewarded with a hail of stones that knocks him to the ground. In this adventure our gentle knight, in the name of an ideal of justice as abstract as it is dogmatic, interferes with, of all things, state justice, setting free a band of dangerous criminals, whose guilt they have confessed to him themselves, thus becoming the first – but probably not the last – victim of their criminal actions. This is precisely the way trade unions or other workers’ organisations proceed today: the workers, often ‘chained’ to them against their will, are led into action by resentful or opportunistic leaders, and shower us with stones where thanks are due. He who yields to the incessant and outrageous demands of strikers and expects those who benefit from his generosity to meet their obligations is not only guilty of quixotic naivety, but may have done his company serious, perhaps irreparable, harm.
An idyllic scene awaited him when he got back to his bedroom: his wife asleep with a child on either side; little Cynthia in the middle of the bed, her tiny, half-open mouth brushing the exposed nipple that peeped out from under the lip of Mabel’s unfastened bra; Tommy at the edge with his mother’s arm around him to stop him falling. Looking at them, he was overcome by a wave of tenderness that reached the depths of his being, where it stirred up a sediment of guilt that muddied the purity of his initial feeling. What kind of a man, he asked himself, extricating little Tommy from his mother’s embrace and carrying him to his room, was incapable of spending some time with his children like any normal father? What kind of a man needed to lock himself in the bathroom to hide from… what? From a two-and-a-half-year-old boy, from a barely two-month-old baby? Was he, at twenty-nine, becoming one of those workaholics he knew so well, incapable of thinking about anything other than their jobs, who before long end up sleeping with the secretary and filing for divorce? (‘In your case not even that,’ his sly right brain whispered to him, ‘she’s sleeping with Cáceres Grey.’) As of today he would do his best to be a better father, he promised himself as he carried the little girl to the bedroom that had until recently been his study, feeling her sweaty brow with the back of his hand to make sure she didn’t have a temperature (he’d call the doctor, he’d save his little girl; reduced to tears, Mabel would say to him, ‘If it hadn’t been for you, I don’t know what would have happened’), checking her nappy to see if it would last till morning – he could always change it, but with the shortage it was wiser to make it last as long as possible. Perhaps, he thought as he slid beneath the sheets and, trying not to make contact with his wife’s body, rigidly lined up his own with the edge of the bed, the problem was that he had got married and had children too young: at an age when others could devote themselves fully to their studies and careers, he had had to divide his energies between work and home. Not that he’d had any choice: he and Mabel had met in the classrooms of the Faculty of Economic Sciences, where he gave classes as an assistant and she was finishing her last subjects, albeit embattled by endless assemblies and occupations and revolutionary trials of lecturers and tributes to Eva Perón and Che Guevara. Fleeing from the upheaval, they had met in the ground-floor bar and shared a complicit cup of coffee. At first, he had thought she looked quite nice, almost pretty if she’d known what to do with make-up, and through the layers of winter clothes her body had looked warm and desirable; but when at the start of the summer he finally managed to divest it of its last wrappings, her naked skin felt unpleasant, like one of those woollen mattresses that are soft on the eye but lumpy to the touch. ‘She needs a good carding, not make-up,’ his mind whispered to him as he caressed her mechanically and, thinking thoughts such as these, for once he didn’t come too soon and, as he collapsed in tears into her arms, he must have made the easy mistake of taking relief for love. They went on seeing each other for two months, at the end of which Marroné was grateful for the respite provided by a trip Mabel and her parents made to Europe, which would give him a month to think about how best to end the relationship without causing her too much pain. But before the month was up, they were back and, by the time he’d recognised his future in-laws’ Mercedes-Benz outside the front door of his parents’ house, and the four progenitors had locked themselves in the living room for talks, and Mabel, her skin all red as if it had been pickled in brine, and wringing a little embroidered hanky between her bitten nails, had broken the joyous news to him, the future course of his life was all mapped out. The wedding took place two weeks later and they did without a honeymoon so that they could do up the house for the arrival of their firstborn, who stopped growing almost immediately and slipped away from them in a miscarriage, and had it not been for the need to put any small-mindedness aside and accompany Mabel through her subsequent depression, Marroné might have felt that to the indignities of blackmail had been added those of a confidence trick. Although over the years he had learnt to like her and appreciate her good qualities, there were times like this, while his sleepless eyes flicked across the shadows on the ceiling in time to the monotonous ticking of the clock, that he asked himself in bafflement if there wasn’t a certain irony to the fact that Mabel had been the only woman he’d been able to have satisfactory or at least full sexual relations with precisely because he didn’t find her attractive enough. Something similar, he told himself, often happened in the world of business: an efficient executive might chafe in the ignoble restraint of a job he considers below his abilities, but when he finally obtains the position he has longed for, next thing he knows his career, instead of being catapulted forwards, has ground to a standstill; he tried to shape this into a general rule that would in the fullness of time bear his name – ‘Marroné’s Law of Inverse Something or Other’ – but sleep was already closing his eyes, and besides, he couldn’t see himself using examples from his sex life in a business presentation…