‘Eighty-nine busts of Eva Perón, standard model, plain plaster of Paris, at 2,000 pesos a unit, that’s a subtotal of 178,000 pesos, plus three in white cement for outdoors, at 2,500 pesos a unit, that’s a subtotal of 7,500 pesos, that makes 185,000 in total, a 10 per cent discount for… payment upfront, is it?’
Marroné nodded, avidly gulping in the refrigerated air: twenty-eight degrees in the shade at eight o’clock in the morning, the radio presenter had announced, not without a hint of malice, as Marroné drove down the freeway to the Sansimón Plasterworks, whose owner now took the cheque from his hands and, snapping it in the air a couple of times to test its elasticity, insisted on treating him yet again to the celebrated aerial tour of his impressive plasterworks, a proposal that Marroné, ever mindful of the demands of public relations, seconded with an enthusiasm as convincing as it was fake.
His guide had given his factory’s shop floor the layout and even the dimensions of a cathedral (‘190 metres long, three more than St Peter’s,’ he immodestly specified). It was organised over two levels: the Terrestrial, where the machines and their operators were located, and the Celestial, suspended in its entirety above the Terrestrial and comprising two large office wings situated over the arms (‘Transepts,’ specified Sansimón), the management’s offices over the apse, and the overhead rails along which the foremen travelled the length and breadth of the central nave in their yellow chair-lifts.
He’d picked them up at junk prices in the tourist end of the Córdoba sierra, where the Sansimóns owned numerous quarries, and then had them dismantled, transported, reassembled and hung from the crossbeams and struts of the vaulted roof. They were boarded on the Celestial level, and each could comfortably accommodate two people, though the ones Marroné could see in motion were each occupied by just one black-helmeted foreman, whose job it was to keep an eye on the workers from on high and bark detailed instructions at them through a megaphone.
Sansimón led him to the first chair-lift in the line. After taking their seats, donning their executives’ white helmets and lowering the safety bar, they set out on their trapeze artist’s tour through the heights of the factory. Each chair was equipped with a personal console that let you move horizontally in all four directions and even descend to the shop floor via a simple pulley system, an option many of the foremen made use of to scrutinise the workers’ labours at closer quarters. Combining the roles of driver and guide, Sansimón manipulated the controls at the same time as he gave a running commentary itemising the innovations and improvements introduced since his return from the United States.
‘We brought in colour coding, as you might have noticed. Here in the Yellow Sector,’ he said, pointing to the chrome yellow of the machines and the lemon of the workers’ helmets, each with its black ID number clearly legible on the crown, ‘we manufacture ceiling roses, mouldings, cornices, rosettes, friezes, balusters, corbels, columns and amphorae; in the Brown Sector stucco, gesso, plaster casts, floor treatments and insulation – oh, and chalk of all colours too, essential for educational purposes,’ he rounded off, and Marroné thought he could see a delicate rainbow of fine dust at the heart of the uniform white cloud rising from all the general toiling beneath. ‘In the Green Sector we make stuff for the medical industry: orthopaedic plaster, plaster bandages, plaster for death masks when all else fails,’ he said, allowing himself the same joke he had cracked on all the other tours, and which Marroné laughed at with the same laugh. ‘And now…’ he made a pause that had something majestic about it, as the chair switched rails and set off on its procession down the imposing central nave, ‘for the Blue Sector, where we make partition walls, panels and plasterboards; maybe not the flashiest side of our extensive product range, but most definitely the backbone. But all this is just the beginning. Over there,’ he said, pointing in the direction of the atrium, ‘there’s a revolution afoot in the construction industry, so watch this space: you can wave goodbye to bricks, forget concrete. The future is plaster! Just one hour after setting, Sansimón Super X is as hard and durable as Portland cement. You can combine it with fibreglass for high impact, with polystyrene for flexibility and – with sand and fuller’s earth – it’s both fire-proof and sound-proof. Gypsum is the prima materia the Ancients were searching for, the protean matter par excellence.’ Sansimón waxed lyrical as he worked the chair’s controls with one hand and Marroné’s arm with the other, directing his attention here and there to the points he considered of most interest. And he had good reason to feel proud. The clouds of chalk dust rising like incense smoke, pierced by the shafts of light that streamed in through the high windows; the slow, elegant coordination of man and machine, moving in time through the stages of the liturgy; the exalted music composed by countless organs of steel, with their poundings and hummings, squelchings and whirrings, imparted its fullest meaning to what had seemed at first a mere architectural whim: the Sansimón Plasterworks was a true cathedral to human labour. Taken to these extremes, the efficiency of productive labour took on an aesthetic and – why not? – a spiritual dimension, and Marroné felt a tingling of pride well up through his core to his crimsoned cheeks: he too was part of all this, he was doing his bit, he was one of the numberless yet indispensable pillars of the faith. He was nothing less than an executive-errant.
A conspiratorial nudge from Sansimón drew his attention to a scene playing out a few metres behind them. From up above, in his slowly swinging chair, a foreman was lambasting a blue-helmeted operator through a megaphone.
‘Blue Twenty-Seven, that plaque’s cracked coz you was careless. Docked from your wages!’ Blue Twenty-Seven looked up and said something that was drowned out by the altitude and noise from the machines. The foreman cupped his hand to his ear like a deaf old man and roared back through the megaphone.
‘Can’t hear you, Blue Twenty-Seven. You’ll have to speak up,’ he boomed, and winked at his boss, who shook his head as if to say, ‘They’re something else these boys of mine…’
Once the tour was over, Sansimón pulled the lever on the console and the chair began to descend vertically until it stopped half a metre from the shop floor. Taking his first steps on terra firma with legs of jelly – he wasn’t what you’d call cut out for heights – Marroné followed the sprightly figure of Sansimón towards the workshop, plainly a far older structure housed in the armpit of the left transept. Within, a few sculptors and craftsmen in red helmets were working on long wooden tables, sculpting busts and figures that demanded a more craftsmanly approach: lovingly fashioning the latex and clay of the moulds, stirring the thin white paste in wide, shallow pans, applying the fresh plaster to make copies that, once cast, they smoothed and polished by hand. On either side, on old wooden shelves reaching up to the roof, were accumulated the spectral testimonies to five millennia of civilisation, perpetuated in this infinitely protean white stuff. As he walked, Marroné saw Chinese mandarins with conical hats, broad sleeves and long Fu Manchu whiskers; Buddhas in all postures and sizes, the smiles of the smallest – more cunning than enlightened – echoed by the broader-than-their-faces smiles of a choir of Carlos Gardels and those of a congregation of gluttonous friars rubbing their pot bellies; he took in the masks of tragedy and comedy, phalanxes of Michelangelo Davids flanked by Oscar statuettes, sphinxes, Tutankhamuns and Nefertitis, Egyptian cats, tablets and sarcophagi covered with hieroglyphs; shepherds and shepherdesses with crooks, panpipes and little lambs; he gazed upon repeated Nativity scenes (Herod’s nightmare multiplied), a whole camp of nudes (kissing couples, sorceresses, girls with pitchers), Saint Georges and the Dragons, Aztec calendars, Myron Discoboli and lucky elephants; he came across a host of Venuses de Milo by a flock of Victories of Samothrace (the Venuses huddled together like skittles in a bowling alley, the Victories like doves taking wing); he spotted a whole row of Laurel and Hardy medallions jumbled between a pair of Einstein bookends; a Canova Pauline Bonaparte surrounded by coiled sausage-dog ashtrays; Don Quixotes and Sancho Panzas in a variety of poses: standing, on horse- and donkey-back, and even sitting on thrones; bas-reliefs of the Last Supper and an infinity of medals of Martín Fierro, with Sergeant Cruz, guitar, maté and horse; he saw Rodin Thinkers and Michelangelo Pietàs, wagonloads of Statues of Liberty, citadels of Eiffel Towers, tunnels of Arcs de Triomphes and bristling forests of Big Bens and Obelisks; massed ranks of Michelangelo Moseses directing their severe gazes at a chorus line of Marilyns with uplifted skirts; he spotted busts of Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms and, with growing jubilation, those of the great figures of universal history: Socrates, Pericles, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Napoleon, Lincoln, Lenin, Churchill, Franco, Hitler and Mussolini (‘We sell those three under the counter, but they go like hot cakes,’ Sansimón clarified)… Until he reached the pantheon of national heroes: enormous busts, life-size or larger, of San Martín the Liberator (young and sideburned, old and moustachioed), Belgrano, Sarmiento, Irigoyen and Perón (in two models: the general with furrowed brow, and in shirtsleeves wearing an avuncular smile), and finally – and at that moment Marroné really did feel like a knight-errant standing before the Holy Grail – four busts with the virile, classical, Spartan lines of the serene and peerless Eva Perón.
A voice stopped him before he could lay a finger on them. ‘They’re already spoken for, those are. We’ve been fair swamped with orders for her these last three years.’
It belonged to an old man in glasses, with a bushy, white moustache, wearing a cream-coloured cap rather than the regulation red helmet, whom Sansimón introduced as ‘My old man, the founder of the company’.
‘This young man is Tamerlán’s head of procurement, Dad. He needs… how many was it? Ninety-two?’
Marroné nodded.
‘Ninety-two busts of Eva, Dad.’
Sansimón Senior gave a low whistle.
‘Sounds like you mean business. When do you need them by?’ he asked Marroné.
‘Today, Dad,’ Sansimón answered. ‘Matter of life or death.’
‘Today? Are you serious? Tell me, do you see any automated machines here? Assembly lines? Mass-produced goods devoid of soul or beauty? Do you see men working like robots? No. And you know why? Because that’s your way of doing things, out there in your big factory. In here men still work with their hands and take legitimate pride in the fruit of their labour.’
‘Don’t give me that old socialist crap again, Dad. I’m not a baby any more. Put them on sixteen-hour shifts with eight-hour breaks right away. Nobody’s leaving till all ninety-four Evas are cast, dried and packed to go.’
‘Ninety-two,’ Marroné corrected him politely.
‘What?’ snapped Sansimón, who seemed to have forgotten all about him in the heat of the father–son tiff.
‘It’s ninety-two in total,’ he reminded him. He was very pleased with the way things were going. Sansimón certainly knew how to inspire customer loyalty.
‘Yeah, right. Whatever.’ Then to his father, ‘Are we agreed?’
‘What? Overtime?’
‘Half time and they can lump it. They still owe me from the last strike.’
‘Perhaps you might consider,’ ventured Sansimón Senior, appealing with exquisite delicacy to Marroné’s understanding, ‘taking a batch of busts of the General instead? This one, for example,’ he said, pointing at the eternal smile of the tieless Perón, ‘we have a considerable surplus of. We had a few returns because the clients said he’d come out looking like Vandor. You know Vandor,’ he added, noticing Marroné’s blank expression, ‘the union leader who reckoned he could replace Perón in the workers’ hearts.’
‘Dad,’ Sansimón tapped his foot impatiently.
‘Yes, yes, I’m just a talkative old man with old-fashioned ideas. Well, in any case, you can see for yourself, he doesn’t look a bit like him.’
Marroné pursed his lips in a non-committal smile.
‘My… clients asked for Evas, specifically Evas. And your son isn’t exaggerating when he says it’s a matter of life or death.’
Sansimón Senior stood and stared at him for a few seconds, then, without another word, turned away to correct the work of a young sculptor, whose delicate hands and studiously hesitant speech gave him away as an artist or Fine Arts student. The son took the opportunity to bring the tour to an end.
‘Come on, let’s go to the office and shake on it,’ he said, leading him away by the arm.
* * *
‘I leave the little workshop to my old man, for sentimental reasons, you know,’ Sansimón explained once they were back in his office. ‘To be perfectly frank with you, it makes a loss, but what can you do? We’re all ruled by our hearts, and it keeps him busy and leaves me to run the rest of the show. Sure you don’t want them gilded? A few pesos extra and I can have her looking like royalty.’
‘Look,’ said Marroné, opening his palms on the table as if showing his hand, ‘the minute it’s all over, we’ll be chucking the lot out of the eighth-floor window, I can assure you. They mean nothing to us, you understand. Peronist Party novelties. So if I have them gilded, the boss might not look too kindly on it. When they let him go, I mean.’
‘I don’t mean to put a jinx on him or anything, but that “when” of yours is a big “if”. Look what they did to his partner.’
‘We’re making huge sacrifices to get the ransom money together. A cent saved is a cent nearer our target,’ Marroné repeated a phrase from one of Govianus the accountant’s listless harangues. ‘All of us, from the managers to the lowliest operator, have been donating 15 per cent of our salaries to the ransom fund for the last six months.’
‘Lucky bastard, that Tamerlán. If I was in his shoes, this lot of bloody leeches would as soon have me cut into little pieces as part with one red cent. Back again last week, they were. More demands. About falling wages this time. Tell me something I don’t know. Here we are up to our necks in it like half the country, but instead of downsizing so the boat won’t sink, their lordships punch more holes in it. Good job we got shot of the ringleaders before things spiralled out of control, otherwise… I’ve got a personnel manager worth his weight in gold, a godsend he is.’
‘So they won’t make a stink over the busts?’
‘Who?’ Sansimón had understood perfectly, but he was feeling cocky now and wanted to talk himself up.
‘You know. The union.’
‘Who with? Me? The boss? We play golf every weekend, me and the general secretary. Still holds his club like a mop, but what can you do? Pulled himself up by his bootstraps he did. They had a ballot recently and if the union wasn’t nicked from him by them – what do you call ’em now, oh yeah – hardliners, it was with a little help from his friends – this friend. Had to sack qualified staff I did, ’cause the stupid bastards had joined the opposition. But you know how it is: you want to fuck in the grass, you have to fumigate for red ants. Commie infiltrators, that’s the problem these days. Which is why…’ Sansimón broke off mid-sentence to flash the butt of a gun that could have been a Colt or a Smith & Wesson, Marroné couldn’t tell, ‘… I never leave the house without it. By the way, there was something I meant to ask you, just between you and me.’ Sansimón leant forwards in treacherous confidence. ‘Is it true they snatched Tamerlán in a poofters’ sauna? That some Monto had to put his arse on the line for the Revolution?’
Marroné didn’t really know what to say: not only did he have proof that the rumour was true, he even knew that the Montonero who’d acted as bait had received special training from a Chinese pederast to clamp his buttocks shut doggy-style and keep Sr Tamerlán there until his accomplices could take him away. The bodyguards had already been taken out by two sexy young guerrillas dressed as whores, who lured them into adjacent rooms where their comrades were waiting. Marroné tried to look suitably sorrowful, but in his heart of hearts he couldn’t deny that his compunction coexisted with a certain gleeful vengefulness, a feeling shared by many in the company, though they would never admit it. Things had backfired on Tamerlán for once. Outwardly at least there was tacit agreement not to reveal more than strictly necessary, and indeed the official media reports were of the usual kidnapping in a car and bodyguards killed in the line of duty… Just then, Marroné found an opportunity to change the subject.
‘The chair-lifts… They’ve stopped,’ he said to Sansimón.
Sansimón turned to the inside window and saw that the chair-lifts had indeed stopped moving, save for a gentle swaying, and that the occupants, seated or standing, were yelling through their megaphones instructions that couldn’t be made out through the thick glass panes.
‘What the…’ Sansimón began to say, rising from his chair, when the door of his office imploded and six or seven workers in different-coloured helmets, wearing leather jackets over their work clothes, barged in en masse.
‘This factory has been occupied by its workers, Sr Sansimón. From this moment on all the management shall remain on the premises as hostages,’ reeled off a slim fifty-year-old wearing a white helmet. The white helmet on the head of a worker spoke for itself: power had quite obviously changed hands. Marroné had a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach: a mute disappointment, tinged less with surprise than the confirmation of a basic unhinging between himself and the world. Things had been going too well.
Sansimón hit the red button on the intercom.
‘Security!’
‘Here they are.’
The wall of workers parted just enough to reveal the three security guards, from whose belts, relieved of their heavy burden of truncheons and guns, empty clips hung inert.
‘They was too quick for us, boss,’ said the oldest guard, a fat, moustachioed man who had every appearance of a retired policeman. ‘There was nothing we could do.’
In a gesture more desperate than prudent, Sansimón’s right hand scuttled crab-like towards his left armpit, and Marroné spun round in his chair to see all seven strikers, with almost tactful synchronisation, open their jackets to display an array of automatics and revolvers, some of which had no doubt been seized from the guards. In an instant – the one when it dawned on him he was sitting right in the line of fire – Marroné saw his whole life flash, film-like, before his eyes. He saw himself standing at the centre of a shameful pool of pee in the house of the little girl next door (his earliest memory?); he saw himself fleeing down dark corridors from the Paraguayan maid who was lashing him with a wet floor cloth; he saw the exasperated face of his kindergarten teacher telling him his mother would never come to pick him up if he didn’t stop crying; he could feel the goosebumps on his shorts-clad legs during winter break-times at St Andrew’s and in his chest the anguish of only winning the bronze medal for reciting a poem that opened Up into the cherry tree, Who should climb but little me?; he relived the humiliation of drowning in the school swimming pool and being saved by Mr Trollope, who had to dive in fully clothed; his father’s exasperated reproach when his gun went off accidentally at the Federal Shooting Range ricocheted again around his empty skull (‘You’re no use even at this’); again he felt his soul empty from his body with his first premature ejaculation, again he saw the whore’s look of sadistic scorn as she made him wipe up the juvenile dribble that would soon be a river of humiliation, swollen by all the subsequent premature discharges until dammed up by a ministering angel, who immediately reappeared in a bridal dress, standing beside a wedding-cake figurine that bore his face; again he whirled through the vortex of blood and other substances he never imagined could issue from a wife, only to wake up on a stretcher, to the news that his son had been born with the correct number of fingers and chromosomes; he saw himself back in his apartment on the Stanford campus, trying to concentrate on Blake & Mouton, while through the wall came the exasperated cries of his child and through the window the moans of teenagers who appeared to attend college for the sole purpose of humping in the grounds night and day; he saw himself back in San Francisco for a brief visit that culminated in a panic-stricken stroll through the gayhippiepsychedelia terrors of Haight-Ashbury; and then straight down the rabbit hole, all the way to that first meeting with Tamerlán in Valhalla, a scene he knew – had always known – would be the last one his eyes would see before they sank into final darkness. All in all it was, he had to admit – and it made him rather sad to bid the world farewell on such a melancholy note – a rather dull movie. Then, just as his mind had begun to articulate the desire for a second chance, to try to live a better, fuller life, his wish was granted: realising the game was up before it began, Sansimón raised his hands and allowed a striker with a blue helmet and acromegalic chin to remove the Smith & Wesson from its holster and hand it to the man in the white helmet. No sooner was Sansimón allowed to put his hands on his desk than he was on the offensive again.
‘You, and you, Trejo,’ he said, ‘have no business here. I’ll report you to the union.’
‘We’re not in the union any more, Sr Sansimón. We were disaffiliated when you fired us,’ retorted Trejo, adjusting his white helmet.
‘For once we understand each other. To go on strike here, you have to work here. But as you don’t work here any more, you can’t go on strike.’
‘The first of our demands is the reinstatement of our dismissed comrades,’ croaked a fat man with a green helmet and several days’ stubble, and with one eye veiled by a milky film.
‘And what else do you want, eh? Executive salaries? A holiday camp with a golf course? Chauffeur-driven limousines to ferry you to work and back? Jacuzzis in the toilets?’ Sansimón gulped in air with each item instead of releasing it; at this rate he was going to burst like a toad.
‘The only thing we want for now, Sr Sansimón, is for you to come with us,’ Trejo said to him.
Whether it was the man’s intimidating laconic tone or because the invitation was accompanied by emphatic waving of the confiscated gun, Sansimón deflated like a fallen soufflé and, with the last wisp of air, his tiny voice wheezed, ‘What… are you going to do to me?’
His fear was understandable. Workers might not have been in the habit of executing their bosses during occupations, but the way the reciprocal violence had been escalating it was only a matter of time before they started. Especially now there seemed to be more subversives infiltrating the factories than actual workers.
‘Take it easy, boss. We’re peace-lovers, we are. If we’ve come to this, it’s only ’cause you gave us no choice. We’re taking you with the others,’ Trejo reassured him.
Meek as a lamb, Sansimón allowed himself to be led outside. He didn’t even look at Marroné as he left. Nor did the strikers pay him any attention. Somewhat offended at everybody’s indifference, Marroné decided to speak up.
‘Errm, excuse me,’ he ventured.
‘Yeah?’
‘What about me?’
The strikers consulted each other with a rapid exchange of glances, and most of them shrugged.
‘You can leave when you like, chief. Only company managers to remain here as hostages,’ the ringleader replied.
‘Yes, but there’s a slight problem,’ said Marroné, smiling, searching for the words with utmost delicacy and tact, as if testing fruit in a supermarket. He remembered an anecdote from How to Win Friends and Influence People about Nelson Rockefeller emerging victorious from a tussle with strikers, but couldn’t recall what tactic he had used or even which of the book’s general principles the anecdote was supposed to illustrate. He’d have given a month’s salary to have it handy. ‘Look, mister striker, I can quite understand the justness of your claims, and I believe we should all fight for our rights, providing, of course, we don’t violate the rights of others…’
‘Get to the point, chief. We’ve an occupation on our hands in case you hadn’t noticed.’
‘That’s exactly my point, because you see I’ve just closed a major deal with the company, I’ve even paid an advance, and if you’re going to halt production, I think it’s only fair that you respect any orders placed before the strike was called, such as mine, for the ninety-two busts of…’
‘Oh, so you’re the one who ordered the busts? You’re the one who demanded our comrades in the workshop do piecework and forced us to bring the occupation forward!’ the ringleader broke in, then immediately issued an order to his lieutenants, ‘This one stays as well.’
Marroné flailed like a drowning man. ‘Listen, co… comrades, these aren’t just any busts. They’re busts of Eva Perón no less: Evita, the Standard-Bearer of the Poor, the Lady of Hope, the Spiritual Leader of the Nation! Will you strike against Eva? What kind of Peronists are you?’
It was useless, they weren’t listening. Tamely he let himself be led away by the heavy-jawed worker to a sector of the outer gallery where some office workers had gathered, several of whom were leaning on the banister watching the scenes playing out on the shop floor. Most of the foremen were still hanging in their chair-lifts like canaries on swings, some still hurling hoarse threats through their megaphones, others by now resigned to waiting for the strikers to get them down, using a system that had seemingly been adopted less out of efficiency than revenge: below one of the nearest chair-lifts several workers were holding a tarpaulin, stretched as tight as a drum-skin, and were urging the foreman to jump.
‘Come on, mate, we ain’t got all day, eh.’
‘Jump, mate, jump! We’ll be here for you.’
The foreman was doing his best to get to his feet, but his knocking knees wouldn’t let him and he slumped back into his seat; he eventually made it up and, clinging on to one of the vertical bars with rigid, corpse-like hands, he gingerly put one leg, then the other, over the horizontal bar and, wobbling on legs that had started doing the Charleston of their own accord, readied himself for the big jump.
‘Don’t run off on me, lads, you could do me a serious injury,’ he implored from his perch. ‘Remember I always treated you decently.’
Marroné had never heard anyone beg through a megaphone before: it created a rather odd effect. Out of the corner of his eye he noticed the office workers beside him had started laying bets: ‘A hundred says he jumps! Two hundred says he doesn’t! Three hundred says he hits the deck!’
‘Get a move on, will you! We got all the plaster in Paris if you break a leg.’ The foreman leant forwards and they all ran off with the tarpaulin, shouting ‘Olé!’ The poor sod above clung to his vertical bar like a stripper and then, whiter than any of the surrounding plaster, he wailed, ‘Oy! Stop playing silly buggers will you, don’t be so bloody daft!’
He was practically in tears and the workers were beneath him again, but the canvas rose and fell with their laughter like a cellophane sea, offering little in the way of safety.
At last the poor devil crossed himself swiftly, closed his eyes and leapt into the void. He landed bang in the middle of the tarpaulin, which gave almost all the way to the floor and then, answering the unanimous call of the six pairs of strong arms, bulged up and out, and launched him high into the air again. Then the blanketing began. During his first few pirouettes the foreman was still up to cursing the strikers and threatening them with reprisals, but as his somersaults got further and further from the ground, and his arms and legs flailed in the air more and more desperately, he went back to begging and pleading, and in the end just clenched his jaw and held on tight to his helmet in case it came off and he lost his teeth on it in one of the falls. Less out of mercy than weariness the workers finally deposited him on the ground and set off with their tarpaulin in search of another victim to rescue.
Later in the day one of the commissars came by and issued a directive to separate the management from the office staff; Marroné was herded with the execs into Sansimón’s office, where, having recovered from the shock, the man himself ushered them in with a cheery ‘Ah, Macramé, still here?’ and introduced him to the members of his crisis cabinet: Aníbal Viale, the chief financial officer; Arsenio Espínola, the marketing manager; Garaguso, the personnel manager; and Cerbero, head of security, whose names Marroné jotted down in his notebook as soon as he had the chance. He asked for permission to use the phone and it was magnanimously granted by Sansimón, but no sooner did he reach for the receiver than an ‘Oy, you! What you doing?’ from one of the two commissars guarding them made him leap backwards as if the telephone had snarled at him. ‘All communication with outside suspended till further notice,’ the commissar told him, revelling in his bureaucratic tone, and Marroné was just able to make out the mocking grins exchanged by Sansimón and his men.
‘Welcome to Socialist Argentina, Macramé,’ Sansimón said to him tongue-in-cheek before returning to the dialogue of signs and whispers he and his management had been conducting.
Around midday two new workers came to relieve the guards and the personnel manager hailed them with a ‘Baigorria, Saturnino, great to have you back with us, you don’t know how much we missed you!’ With the changing of the guard came some rolls and two litre-bottles of Fanta, which Sansimón and his management team shared out with an egalitarian disdain that duly included him. They had a radio on to catch the news, but there was no mention whatsoever of their plight, understandably so, since for some time now more factories, companies and government buildings were occupied than still in the hands of their rightful owners. What worried Marroné most was that the company might not have heard what had happened and attribute his inexplicable absence to negligence or – worse still – bad faith, and what annoyed him most was that he hadn’t brought with him any of the management books he so enjoyed and which would have at least allowed him to extract some benefit from the bleak hours of waiting, which his comrades in captivity spent playing cards, sleeping in shifts on the white leather sofa or practising their putting with Sansimón’s putter and a plastic cup. At one point he tried to interest Garaguso in the advantages of applying the techniques of How to Win Friends and Influence People to the settlement of union disputes. ‘Yeah, yeah, I did that course too,’ Garaguso interrupted him soon after he’d started, ‘but I’d like to see Dale Carnegie take on these babes in arms with his sincere praises and friendly smiles. There are two and only two ways to influence a certain class of people: gold or lead. And as head of procurement you surely realise that lead’s a lot cheaper than gold.’ At about seven o’clock two workers in black helmets brought in the sales manager, who was sweating, dishevelled and sprinkled with white dust; he explained that, tipped off by a loyal worker about the start of the occupation, he’d hidden among the towering sacks of plaster and stayed put until he’d been captured making a break for the outside to bring back reinforcements. ‘They’re highly organised and synchronised,’ he remarked in a whisper to cap his account. ‘This isn’t just the workers – they’re getting outside help.’ ‘You don’t say!’ sneered Sansimón, belittling his revelation; then, turning to Garaguso, he said, ‘Remind me of your infallible infiltrator-detection system again, will you? I didn’t quite get it first time round.’ Garaguso shrugged off the jibe and immediately raised his eyebrows inquisitively in the direction of the two commissars, who, in their boredom, were leafing through some magazines, and Sansimón closed and opened his eyes with all the deliberation of a prearranged signal. Garaguso eyed the two of them the way a lion studies a herd of zebra to pick out the weakest and, when his prey looked up from the magazine and they made eye contact, he got up from his seat and nonchalantly started closing in. From where he was, Marroné caught the gist of their conversation.
‘Listen, Baigorria. Us bosses wanted to organise one or two things here – of a private nature, you understand, keep it in the family, you know the sort of thing: nothing too flashy, a box of whisky perhaps, some nibbles, quiet hand of cards, couple of scags… Just to kill the time, right? Now that we’re here… And we got to thinking, you know, it’s true what you say about us having to learn to share and that… Socialising, as you call it…’
Baigorria’s mouth began to water in spite of himself.
‘I mean, as we’re all in this together, we should at least have as good a time as possible, are you with me?’ Baigorria nodded eagerly and Garaguso, knowing it was in the bag, pointed almost tactfully to one of the disconnected telephones.
‘So… you don’t mind if I make a couple of quick phone calls?’
Saturnino came over to see what was going on, and Baigorria whispered the glad tidings in his ear. Standing beside Marroné, Sansimón explained the meaning of the ruse.
‘At least now we know they’re real workers.’
‘How do we know?’ asked Marroné.
‘If they were undercover subversives, they’d never have gone for it. Revolutionary morality,’ he elucidated.
Marroné seized the chance to raise his most pressing concern.
‘So tell me… The little matter of the busts… What shall we do about them?’
Sansimón immediately went on the defensive.
‘As you can see, I have no say in the matter any more. You’ll have to discuss it with the boys,’ he said, indicating the two guards with his chin.
‘But in that case, the cheque I gave you…’
‘Ah, no, that’s another matter. They’ll be delivered, you can be certain of that. Now, if there’s a delay owing to circumstances beyond our control…’
‘But you know we need the busts to expedite Sr Tamerlán’s release. If you don’t deliver them soon, they’ll be no use to us at all.’
‘Listen… Who are the ones holding him? If I’m not mistaken, it’s the Montoneros, isn’t it?’
Marroné nodded. Sansimón was leading him somewhere but he couldn’t work out where. There was nothing for it but to go with the flow.
‘And who do you think’s behind all that’s going on here?’
‘The Montoneros?’
‘Correct.’
‘Not the union?’
‘I’ve got the union in my pocket, sonny. The occupation’s worse for them than it is for us. No, it’s the Montos. So, if the ones asking you to have a bath take the sponge and the soap, it isn’t my problem, or yours – it’s theirs. Am I right or am I right?’
Marroné did his best to conceal his annoyance.
‘The problem…’
‘The problem,’ Sansimón interrupted him gruffly, ‘is that this occupation started because I had the bad idea – the very bad idea – of making the workforce do piecework just to save your boss’s arse. Because I trust you’ve learnt something from your tour and don’t expect some crummy little busts to make any difference to the yearly balance. But instead of apologies and gratitude you come to me with demands – worse still, with sly accusations. Next time someone goes down on bended knee asking me for a favour over a matter of life or death, I’ll think with my head, not my heart.’
Marroné recalled one of the golden rules from How to Win Friends and Influence People: ‘The only way to get the best of an argument is to avoid it’ and he thought it inadvisable to contest such insidious reasoning. The occupation might be over in a matter of hours, as so often happened, and in that case it wasn’t in his interests to get on the wrong side of Sansimón, who had clearly taken offence and treated him with manifest coldness thereafter; an attitude immediately picked up on and aped by his obsequious executives.
Lunch arrived an hour later. It consisted of a box of real Scotch whisky, another of local champagne, and cold cuts of sliced York ham and pineapple, turkey and glacé cherries, and king prawns and palm-hearts with thousand island dressing. The girls arrived half an hour later: one short and fleshy, the other tall and gangling with a husky voice, and the party got into full swing. Sansimón opened up his radiogram and put on some dance hits and then, while Cerbero and Garaguso strutted their stuff with the girls, began pouring the whisky into cardboard cups. Marroné approached the table, which the caterers had laid with a white tablecloth, and picked up a slice of turkey upon which a phosphorescent cherry sat impaled. Following his example, Baigorria and Saturnino sidled shyly over and stretched out their hands, Baigorria for a palm-heart, whose heart popped out under his rough grip, Saturnino for a king prawn, which he devoured shell and all with an audible crunching and pained expression; but by their third whisky they were wolfing down slices of turkey and ham as if to the manner born, and even allowing Garaguso to put his arms round their shoulders and press home his advantage. When he thought they were ready, he decided it was time to play his trump card and, beckoning them with his finger to watch, he began to pull down the taller prostitute’s panties until, to the fanfare of her shrill, artificial laughter, out popped a limp member, as wrinkled as a prune.
She was a man! At first Marroné was as taken aback as the two commissars, but unlike him they soon recovered from the initial shock and, egged on by the drink, began to vie acrimoniously for the transvestite’s company, while the woman, altogether forgotten, smoked a cigarette and watched the events play out with a seen-it-all-before expression. To stop her feeling left out Sansimón took her by the hips and manoeuvred her naked titties onto the glass top of his desk, pulled down her panties with a tug and entered her, while Espínola, pretending to hide underneath, licked her nipples through the glass and Viale diligently crammed rolls of ham into her mouth, which she could only chew and swallow; meanwhile, Garaguso and Cerbero had commandeered the tranny and, as the former inserted a prodigious erection into her mouth, the other, with a good deal of snorting, took her from behind. Yet there was something contrived and – why not? – even theatrical about the whole scene; something that suggested a live number performed by the company’s executives for the benefit of their underlings, like in those progressive schools where the teachers dress up as children for the annual graduation party and play-act at behaving badly. Marroné had been to many a business convention and private party at which alcohol, sex workers and even drugs were freely available, but in this instance it was obvious that such histrionics were put on for the exclusive benefit of the two plebs, who were clearly having the worst time of it: the confirmation that all their fantasies about the dissipated and licentious lives led by their bosses at their expense were actually pretty accurate seemed to have robbed them of their capacity for reaction, or even righteous indignation, leaving instead two mere husks trembling with mute, affronted desire; so by the time the whore and the transvestite had gone from executive prick to executive prick and it was their turn, all that was left standing of their moral scaffolding was the requisite proletarian modesty to ask, after much tentative throat-clearing and shuffling of soles, if they could have their slice of the pie somewhere a bit more private, a mercy most graciously granted them by the conclave of executives.
No sooner had the two of them retired to Garaguso’s office with their sexual partners (their objection apparently only went as far as doing it in the presence of their bosses, not in front of each other) than Sansimón pounced on one of the phones on his desk and Cerbero on the other one, any trace of befuddlement or intoxication evaporated as if by magic, and while the big boss phoned the general secretary of the union, the other got on to a trusted police chief of his acquaintance:
‘Just a second, Babirusa, what do I stick in the envelope for you every month? Sugar-coated peanuts is it? Your people… a den of subversives, Turco, this strike thing’s a smokescr… You’ve disaffiliated them? Ah, well, that makes me feel a lot better. Made them go without pudding too, did you?… The delegates are all from the Montoneros and the ERP, and the shop stewards are armed to the teeth… do I know who they are? Wasn’t it you who said we’d sacked them all? Besides, the trouble started in the old workshop, Christ knows what those sonsofbitches have done with my poor old… I don’t think the police will be enough, what we could do with here…’
Garaguso had been acting as look-out while they were on the phone and, when the hand that was tracing windmills in the air became a pair of urgently slicing scissors, they hung up in perfect unison and settled back into the pretence with their whisky glasses. Whether it was their uncontrollable excitement or because the conditioning of assembly-line production had affected their sexual behaviour too, the workers were done quicker than it would have taken Marroné, leaving their bosses little more than the absolute minimum to organise the factory’s recovery with their allies on the outside. The problem now was that post-orgasmic relaxation, coupled with a misplaced egalitarian feeling induced in all likelihood by the promiscuous cohabitation of bourgeois and plebeian spermatozoa in the democratic innards of the transvestite and the whore, had stirred a geniality and over-familiarity in the two strikers, which their bosses, now that the objective of making contact with the outside world and setting the wheels of the rescue operation in motion had been achieved, treated with indifference and at times even disdain. Baigorria in particular, who had accompanied the whisky with an inadvisable mix of champagne, was going around hugging everyone, a situation exploited by the ever-alert Garaguso, who stuck to him like glue and continued his efforts at seduction: ‘The rate you’re going, Baigorria, your blessed revolution’s going to take how long… ten, twenty years? And who’ll pay your bills in the meantime? Fidel Castro? Who’ll buy your medicine when the kids are ill? Che Guevara? Who’ll pay for the iron your missus saw in that ad on the TV, or the dress your neighbour’s daughter wears the day you finally get round to banging her? Chairman Mao? They bang on to you about our children this, our children that, future generations the other… Life’s for living now, Baigorrita. Think about it, we’re all after the same thing: a decent life. And what do you need for a decent life? Money, Baigorrita, nothing but money. The rest is fairy tales. Now, if it’s money you need…’ The party was by now approaching the moment of maximum entropy: so drunk they could barely hold the putter between them, Viale and Espínola giggled oafishly as they tried to get a hole-in-one in the prostitute’s vagina, who, sitting on the floor with her legs spread, looked a lot like one of those weird contraptions you find at crazy-golf courses; meanwhile the sales manager, whose name Marroné hadn’t managed to jot down in his notebook, clocking the gawping mugs of Baigorria and Saturnino, shouted at them every thirty seconds ‘You two can use her to practise your pool on when we’re done!’; and the transvestite, who had swapped clothes with Sansimón and now looked like a lesbian from the 1920s, owned in a quite unprovoked fit of sincerity to being called Hugo and to doing all this to support his sick son, news that was received by all present – excepting Marroné and Saturnino – with gales of laughter, which, after a few seconds of puzzlement, Hugo himself joined in on, laughing most shrilly of all. Faring worst on the slippery slope was Sansimón himself: the combination of post-coital gloom, hangover and humiliating captivity at the hands of his own employees had wreaked havoc with his moral framework. Still got up in corset, stockings and suspenders, he fell prey to a bout of the drunken mopes and began to brood on his discontent:
‘Everything, everything… Nothing’s enough for them. They always want more. They start with the soap in the toilets and, when you agree, they want you to bend over and pick it up as well. You hold out your hand and they take your arm. Arm my foot! Shoulder. Neck. Head. And then they want more. More and more. So here you are. Yours for the taking. Eh? What are you waiting for?’
Finally cottoning on, Baigorria and Saturnino slowly turned their heads – Saturnino from gazing on his invisible member lost in the cavernous depths of the hooker’s throat, Baigorria from the insidious drip of Garaguso’s words in his ear.
Legs akimbo, grazing the carpet with the crown of his head, Sansimón pulled apart his hairy buttocks, separated by the narrow strip of panty fabric. In his inverted face his mouth opened and closed like the giant eye of a Cyclops:
‘You want my arse? Here it is! Roll up! Roll up! First the union delegates, then the shop stewards, then health and safety, then hygiene! Then the union lawyer! And all the members! And while we’re at it, everyone that’s been fired for labour or political reasons since ’55! Will you be happy then? Will you let me do my job in peace?’
He had dropped to his knees, head between his elbows, keeping his arse up high. To spare himself the rest of this sorry spectacle, Marroné grabbed his folded jacket and briefcase, and left the office without so much as a goodbye to those who wouldn’t notice his absence anyway.
As he stepped into the corridor, he was enfolded by the hot, slightly gelatinous summer-night air and, in a matter of seconds, his face was moist with sweat. The windows were all open to let in the breeze (the air-conditioning had doubtless been turned off by the strikers on an egalitarian whim that for some reason excluded the management) and, rolling up his sleeves and undoing a couple of buttons on his shirt, Marroné went over to a window that overlooked the garden and the street beyond.
The front garden was coated in the plaster dust produced by the factory’s round-the-clock schedule, and in the moonlight the talcum-powder paths, silver trees, wax flowers and flour-dusted lawn conjured what the landscape would look like if there were life on the Moon. Here and there, their light made all the brighter by the surrounding pallor, burnt the bonfires of the worker guards, and, as if riding the soft breeze, now and then there came the sound of voices, the occasional burst of laughter, the ham-fisted but resolute picking of a guitar against the rich chorus of frogs and crickets, which had surely turned albino to survive in this white-hued world. All of a sudden the pastoral calm was shattered by the sound of sirens, and the faint whiteness beyond the main gate was filled with a blinding blue haze. Half a dozen patrol cars, their headlights blazing, had pulled up en masse and, before taking up position, six or seven uniformed officers and another two or three in plain clothes had leapt out. For a second Marroné thought they would attack straightaway, but his hope soon died. Perfectly synchronised, black-helmeted strikers came running from all directions, the moonlight glinting on the metal of their drawn guns. Police and strikers spread out, facing each other in a precarious stand-off, with nothing between them but the flimsy wire fence – the police, for the time being, going through the motions with no other purpose than to show their faces and intimidate; the workers letting them know the factory wouldn’t be retaken without a fight.
Marroné looked at his watch: it was quarter past four in the morning, and it occurred to him he might be able to find a phone and call his wife to reassure her and ask her to let the company know his whereabouts; but, anticipating just such an eventuality, as they had everything else, the strikers had locked all the offices except the main one, where the office workers captured at the start of the occupation were sleeping, guarded by two other commissars. After asking him where he’d come from and accepting his hushed explanation, one of the guards told him to find somewhere to lie down.
There were twenty odd people in the room and, despite the ample space available to them, they lay huddled on the carpet, the men in one group, the women in another, like sea lions on a beach, their heads resting on rolled-up jackets, imitation-leather cushions or even stacks of files. On several desks were scattered the leftovers of a frugal dinner: the ubiquitous ham and cheese rolls, many of them half-eaten, empty pop bottles, cellophane wrappers and bits of foil from biscuits and sweets, little plastic cups half-full of coffee and sodden dog-ends. The air-conditioning was off here as well, and as the windows looked inwards to the shop floor, the night breeze was even feebler than in the corridor, and the faces he could make out were sweating in their sleep. The more daring of the menfolk were sleeping in their vests, someone was snoring, a portable radio crackled into a slumbering ear and there was an acrid smell of cigarettes, sweat and sit-in.
Besides worrying about not telling the company his whereabouts, the mild displeasure caused by his colleagues’ rebuff and the nuisance of not being able to brush his teeth, the situation wasn’t as grave as it had first appeared. They’d probably let them all go tomorrow, except perhaps the senior management; and if they didn’t, they’d at least let them make a phone call. Such events had become commonplace in recent years, and Tamerlán & Sons had had to deal with occupied construction sites on several occasions – and not just the sites of mere apartment blocks either, but mega-ventures like dams, freeways and airports. What worried him most was the possibility that the delay would put Sr Tamerlán in danger. What if the deadline expired while Marroné was locked away in here? If his boss died, he’d get the blame. Marroné’s heart skipped a beat as it dawned on him that Sr Tamerlán’s imprisonment was infinitely harsher than his own, and had lasted not just twenty-four hours, but more than six months. Only now that he was experiencing something similar first-hand did he feel close, not so much to this abstract person, the company’s CEO, but to the fragile, frightened man nestling within, and he swore to himself that he would remain at his post for as long as necessary if it helped shorten such an inhuman captivity.
* * *
It was nine in the morning but the heat made it feel like noon, and Marroné lay sprawled in a chair surrounded by dejected office workers, waiting for the breakfast they’d been promised by the worker guard. He’d been awake for about an hour and, after a cursory glance at his fellow captives, had begun to toy with the idea of returning to his executive peers, to enjoy the air-conditioning and other creature comforts. But they wouldn’t be released until it was all over, not to mention the possibility of all hell breaking loose and the worker commandos taking it into their heads to shoot the management: in that event the fact that he was from another company might be thought a subtlety worthy of little consideration. This lot, on the other hand, would be offloaded any time now and, concealed in their midst, he might be able to make his escape.
Breakfast arrived, borne by two workers in red helmets. It consisted of some stale bread rolls from the day before and a pan of weak, boiled coffee that every office worker worth his or her salt took as a slap in the face.
‘This tar’s a bit weak, lads and lasses.’
‘Was it just the one bat they got to piss in the pot?’
‘Hey, what have they been boiling? Shoes?’
‘No, one of their own!’
Soon, after taking an incoming call, one of the commissars made an announcement that helped calm the general mood a little:
‘You can use the phones!’
They had a minute each, but there was no need for the commissars to keep an eye on them: as soon as the second-hand had gone round once, the next in the queue would start chanting ‘Time’s up! Time’s up!’ and the receiver would change hands. So, despite being at the very back of the queue (a second’s distraction and they’d beaten him to it), it took Marroné just fifteen minutes to reach the receiver and dial the number of the red telephone.
Govianus picked up at the fourth try.
‘Marroné! Where the bloody hell are you? We thought you’d been kidnapped too! Have you got the busts?’
He gave Govianus a brief update.
‘You’ll have to look elsewhere,’ he concluded. ‘Ochoa has a list of suppliers…’
‘What suppliers, Marroné? All the plasterworks in the country have come out in solidarity. I’d place the order abroad if I could, but imagine what they might send us. An Eva with Doris Day’s face, or Faye Dunaway’s,’ said Govianus glumly.
‘Production’s at a standstill here. But I’ll try and persuade them to make an exception for Evita,’ he ventured without much conviction.
‘Try, Marroné, try. It’s our only hope.’
Marroné assured him he would do everything in his power and, before hanging up, asked Govianus to please ring his wife. The morning promised to be a tedious one, so he thought he’d make the most of it and have a quiet sit on the toilet, but when the cleaning staff had joined the strike, matters of hygiene had been left to individual users, who, unwilling to lower themselves to such a lowly task, had opted to let nature take its course. To make matters worse, Marroné had no reading matter with him, so to pass the time there was little else for it but to sit up in his chair and, notebook in hand, lend an ear to the chatterings of the office workers, who, with the artfulness of prestidigitators, had set about organising an alternative breakfast, whisking out of their drawers heaters, kettles, Thermos flasks, coffee pots, sugar bowls, mugs and spoons.
‘Want me to whip yours?’
‘Oh, go on then, I’ve got a bad wrist.’
‘They aren’t half dragging it out. Why won’t they just let us go?’
‘God, it ain’t half funky in here!’
‘If they don’t put the air-conditioning on again for us, there’ll be a right to-do here, matey.’
‘Come on, Fernández, don’t hog the biscuits. Food’s for sharing, as the comrades downstairs say.’
Marroné jotted down his first name, ‘Fernández’, adding beside it the aide-mémoire, ‘little old man, 70, 1950s fine-check suit, hogs biscuits’.
‘Tsk, too much water. Pass the sugar, will you, Nidia.’
‘Go easy on it boys and girls, we’re running a bit short.’
Nidia was a secretary with lipstick stains on her teeth and one of those seen-it-all-before expressions only earned after thirty years working for the same company – observations that Marroné conscientiously jotted down beside her name in his notebook.
‘Waiters in white gloves, caviar, lobster, champagne, god knows what else – the works. And here are we with pop, and ham and cheese rolls! And for dessert? Whores, five of ’em! Hostages? What hostages? They’ve got them up there living the life of Riley. And then they bang on to us about equality!’
‘You’re just miffed ’cause you weren’t invited, Gómez.’
Marroné hastily wrote down the name of the man with long sideburns in the wash-and-wear shirt, grey and burgundy paisley tie, and blue bell-bottoms, who carried on railing at the joint iniquity of management and workers.
‘And the lads got a slice of the pie too, don’t you know? Get my drift, Ramírez?’ he said to a young man, who went straight into Marroné’s notebook, along with his moustache and long mane of hair, pink shirt and green-check tie. ‘It’s always the same old story in this country. It’s either the sharks or the darkies that get the goodies, and we always end up looking on. We’re piggy in the middle, the stick in the mud, take it from me,’ clamoured Gómez. ‘Now it’s the lads are calling the shots. Have you heard what they’re saying? They’re going to turn the factory into a cooperative and bring in a standard wage. Managers to operators, everyone earns the same. Anyone doesn’t like it… out on their ear.’
‘What about seniority?’ asked Fernández in concern.
‘With all due respect, Fernández, they’ll tell you to stick it up your jumper. Everyone’s equal, so tough shit. And another thing that’s out: pensions. From now on you work till you drop down dead like they do in Russia.’
Open-mouthed, the old man was shaking like a leaf.
‘Don’t listen to him, Fernández. He’s just messing with you,’ Nidia reassured him.
‘What I reckon is that we should join the strike in support of our comrades in the Terrestrial Sector, who are sticking their necks out for us. Why do we always keep our mouths shut? Let’s make our voices heard too. Or have we got nothing to say?’ said Ramírez, working himself into a lather while unsticking the sweaty pink shirt from his torso.
‘That Christmas box they owe us, for example,’ chimed in a blue-eyed forty-something in a brown suit, who answered to the name of González.
‘And the holidays,’ added a bald man called Suárez, who, in spite of the heat that marbled his forehead with sweat, was still wearing his jacket and tie.
‘And while we’re at it,’ the man in brown upped the ante, ‘the coat-stand issue… Look at the state of my jacket… I still have two instalments to pay on it and it’s already out of shape.’
Marroné stopped listening and devoted himself to studying these men and women whose company he had kept for barely an hour and whose souls held no further secrets for him: people with no horizons who had never taken a creativity course in their lives or ever heard of Dale Carnegie, R Theobald Johnson or Edward de Bono. His eyes alighted upon an easel on which sat a large pad of paper, of the type commonly used in business presentations. In that dust-covered lectern on which the inert pages had yellowed without ever bearing the fruit of gung-ho sloganeering, in the dry marker pens that would barely leave a mark, Marroné saw a symbol of all that wasted potential. Plenty of colour in the machines, plenty of chair-lifts, but the reality of the office was still the same uniform grey, a cesspool of routine, of disenchantment, resentment and envy, from which an office worker was released only in retirement or death. It was so easy to blame the system, the company, the bosses. But what attitude did those very office workers adopt when offered the opportunity to change? Marroné had experienced first-hand how difficult it was to ‘motivate the troops’ in that kind of environment. Bent on putting into practice in his own procurement department what he had learnt in a work environment workshop he’d attended in the United States, called ‘The Kindergarten Office’, he had met with – instead of acceptance and enthusiasm – reactions that ranged from indifference to open or concealed boycott. His proposal that everyone undergo a few days’ training (which he himself would coordinate for free) was greeted by his employees with a petition to the union, and he only managed to defuse the mood and persuade them to take part when he offered to hold it during working hours. He had even less luck with the workshop ‘Buy While You Play’, which would have consisted of a Sunday outing to the Tigre Fruit Market and a subsequent feedback session, but the mere idea of devoting part of their sacrosanct Sunday to work-related tasks unleashed an outright mutiny that included the sending of a delegation to Govianus the accountant and a week-long go-slow; not to mention Govianus’s answer when Marroné asked him for permission to hold it on a weekday: ‘A minibus, Marroné? To go to Tigre? To buy fruit? On a Monday?’ (‘Breaking Mondays’ was another of the innovative ideas he’d disembarked with.) ‘What a super idea! But tell me… will a minibus be big enough? Why don’t we lay on a school bus instead, to make the journey more comfortable? Because I imagine you won’t think of leaving the rest of us behind… And where shall we go on Tuesday? How about the zoo?’ But Marroné wasn’t disheartened by these remarks: abandoned by his superiors and distrusted by his subordinates, he was more determined than ever to forge ahead. First he tried to seduce them: he bought them all plants, but they were dead from lack of water before the month was out (save one plucky Pothos, which, after turning yellow and losing nearly all its leaves, stubbornly survived so as to remind him day after day of the futility of his efforts); he stayed behind after hours one Friday night to surprise them first thing Monday morning with a poster titled ‘Choose Your Attitude For The Day’, below which ‘Option 1’ depicted a face with knitted brow and ‘Option 2’ a smiley face, but not a week had gone by before someone had drawn an erect prick in the smiley’s mouth and glasses on the frowning face with an arrow saying ‘Govianus’, and he’d had to take it down; his employees, of course, accused the other departments, though Marroné’s own suspicions ran higher still, and he spent all that week studying the features of Cáceres Grey with ill-concealed suspicion. The brief maxims he wrote on different-coloured notelets posted around the office ‘at random’ were systematically sabotaged: if he wrote ‘You can’t always get what you want but you can want what you get’, someone would add in pencil ‘I got cancer’; and to his ‘In spite of everything, the sun shines’, some joker (probably the same) had added ‘I got skin cancer’. When he instituted his policy of ‘Catch your employee doing something right’ and spent a week pouncing on them and shouting ‘Aha! Gotcha! You’re doing a good job!’, the longest-serving member of the department, Ochoa, came on the others’ behalf to ask him to desist from a practice that had them with their hearts in their mouths every hour of the working day (‘We understand you’re doing it with the best of intentions, Sr Marroné…’). In the end he’d just given up: the coloured balloons that, in one desperate, last-ditch attempt, he’d bought in a novelty shop, and blown and hung up with Mariana’s help (that day he made the heart-stopping discovery that she didn’t wear tights but stockings and suspenders) gradually deflated over the next few weeks until, depressed at the sight of them hanging shrivelled and dusty, looking for all the world like used condoms, he stayed behind one evening after hours to take them down so no one would see. The only tangible result of all his efforts had been to make himself the laughing stock of the other executives, who made him the butt of their jibes in their lunch breaks in the canteen: they would, for example, ask him with a sorry look for advice on how to motivate an unwilling member of staff and then, when Marroné had enthusiastically embarked on his spiel, sneeze and emerge from their handkerchief wearing a red nose and saying ‘Will this do the trick?’, which would then set the others off, and the procurement department came to be known as ‘Circus Marroné’ in allusion to a hideous TV clown whose surname, Marrone, was but an unaccented version of his own.
At that moment Marroné ‘caught himself’ succumbing to the toxic energy of discouragement and frustration, to the impotence of ‘it’s impossible to change a thing in this country with people like this’. ‘No!’ he told himself forcefully. ‘No!’ The risk of doing nothing is always greater than that of taking action: you don’t lose faith in yourself when you fail, only when you stop trying. He looked around through different eyes, watchful and vibrant, and full of decision.
The mood was hotting up. The young, idealistic, pink-shirted Ramírez had apparently gone on haranguing them, and Gómez had finally had enough.
‘Oh, so you don’t understand us. Is that it? No, of course you don’t. It must be hard for someone like you. Because you’re different, aren’t you, you can spot it a mile off… You used to be a student, didn’t you? What of?’
‘History…’ Ramírez replied, fighting off with a defiant gesture the slight stammer Gómez’s sibylline haughtiness had started to cause him.
‘History…’ Gómez said, repeating each syllable carefully as if savouring a fine wine. ‘Yes, of course. That explains it. It must give you a different way of looking at things, a different… what do you lot call it?… perspective. Because all this is just temporary for you, isn’t it. Whereas we’re buried alive here… You probably pity us, don’t you?’
‘Leave him alone, Gómez, don’t be cruel,’ intervened Nidia maternally. But Gómez had tasted blood and liked it.
‘Know how many of your sort I’ve seen since I’ve been in here? Want to know what comes next? For the next five years you’ll keep telling yourself it’s just till you get your degree; in ten, that you’re going to pack it in and finish university, but all the while you’ll feel it’d be a shame to give up the benefit of seniority; in twenty you’ll start fantasising about getting yourself fired and setting up a newsagent’s with the indemnity money; and so on, just ticking over till you’ve been here for thirty years and start crossing off how many to go before you retire. No one here gets out alive, sonny. If you had what it takes, you’d never have come here in the first place.’
‘Don’t worry about me,’ said Ramírez defiantly when Gómez had finished. ‘I’ll shoot myself before I end up like you.’ At that moment a young woman with ashen hair and a timid chin, who hadn’t opened her mouth till then, began sobbing softly, and when Nidia gently asked her ‘What’s the matter, Dorita?’, Marroné jotted down the missing name.
‘I hate it when you fight,’ she said, through her tears and sniffles. ‘I find all that violence really upsetting.’
‘Don’t listen to them, silly. You know what men are like. If it isn’t politics, it’s football. They’ll have made up by tomorrow, you’ll see, as if nothing had happened,’ Nidia consoled her. And then to Gómez and Ramírez, ‘You’re a right pair, you two are.’
‘I want to go home,’ Dorita insisted, laying it on thick.
Marroné decided the time had come to intervene. It was now or never.
‘Have any of you ever done any visualisation?’
The seven pairs of eyes fixed on him. He had their attention now. Stage one was complete.
‘Ernesto Marroné, Procurement, Tamerlán & Sons,’ he introduced himself, shaking hands with each in turn and looking them in the eye with a smile to establish a more personal link through direct physical contact. ‘Do you mind if I interrupt for a minute? Because we’re ultimately all in the same boat and, if we all pull in the same direction, we may all go home safe and early. I’ve been following your conversation carefully and the words that kept coming to mind were frustration… discouragement… helplessness… anger. There’s nothing worse than feeling trapped in an unpleasant situation and thinking we can do nothing about it, true? There are times when life feels like a life sentence, and our home or our office the prison we serve it in. Yes it’s true this may not be the best job in the world: it’s routine and boring, and the pay’s never enough. And how do we react to all that? We grumble, we protest, we ask them to give us a raise, to change our job description, to change our boss. And when they don’t, we feel helpless and frustrated. And now I ask you… What have you done to change things? Because if you can’t change your job, you can change the attitude you bring to work. And if you can’t change your boss, you can try and get the boss you’ve been landed with to change. You aren’t happy with your boss… And what makes you think your boss is happy with you? Happy to see faces that reflect nothing day in day out but depression and discontent?’
He paused to gauge his audience’s reaction. Apart from the predictable expression on Gómez’s face, who was smoking a cigarette as much as to say ‘I’ve heard this one before’, he had the undivided attention of the rest of the group, whose ranks had swelled with the arrival of four more office workers – three men and a woman – who had homed in on the change of energy. Marroné was pleased. He had more than half the hostages on his side.
‘Personally I tend to be an optimist. Some,’ he cast a sidelong glance at Gómez, who smiled back politely, ‘would say that being an “optimist” is synonymous with being a dreamer or naive. But “optimist” is derived from “optimise”, which means securing the best conditions even under the most adverse of circumstances. We were talking about prisons just now. I hope that, after all that’s been said, you’ll agree with me that the real prisons are inside us: in our heads, our hearts, our souls… And to escape from them we’ve all been supplied at birth with a file, a hairpin, a skeleton key: creativity. It’s commonly thought that some people are “born” creative,’ Marroné’s fingers notched the air with inverted commas, ‘like inventors, artists, thinkers – and that others aren’t. It’s like saying people are born athletic, or muscular. Creativity is a universal potential, and as such it can be trained with specific exercises designed to trigger “boinks!” in the right side of our brains – the creative side. One of these exercises I was telling you about is visualisation. So… shall we give it a go?’
‘I’ll pass if you don’t mind,’ said Gómez, yawning conspicuously and getting up from his seat. ‘Someone over there looks like they’ve found a newspaper. I’ll see if I can borrow the classifieds. You can tell me about it later.’ He waved goodbye to his colleagues, who, now that the source of toxic energy was at arm’s length, looked more receptive and relaxed.
‘All right then. Please make sure you’re sitting comfortably. If any of your clothing feels too tight, please loosen it: ties, gentlemen; heels, ladies; belts if you’re wearing one. Great. Now, close your eyes and try to relax. Breathe deeply, become aware of every breath you take. Veeery good. Breeeathe. Iiiin. Oooout. You can see blue skies. In the sky there are clouds. Each of the clouds is a negative thought, a source of anxiety. There are days when they all come together and overwhelm you, covering the sky till you can’t see a single crack of blue. But not today. Today each one is a fluffy little white cloud, and you’re just watching them float by overhead. And you feel mooore at ease and mooore relaxed. And every passing cloud is smaller than the one before. Until there are no more clouds at all and your eyes are lost in the immensity of the blue sky. No more anxiety. You’re at peace. It’s time to begin.’
He paused to gauge the participants’ general state of mind and was pleased with what he saw.
‘Darkness,’ he said suddenly, and watched as a rictus of apprehension spread across their relaxed features. ‘You’re in a dark place, so dark you can’t see your hands. You touch the walls: they’re smooth and cold, and as you walk around them you can find no opening. You feel trapped. You want to get out. You can’t breathe.’ Suárez’s forehead was once again marbled with sweat, and he was tugging at his shirt collar as if it were choking him. Time to ease up. ‘Suddenly you see a crack of light at floor level. It’s a door. You open it,’ he said, and saw everyone untense their eyes and breathe with relief. ‘There is some light, and it allows you to see a spiral staircase going down and down, round and round. I’m going to count as you descend. Ten, nine… you’re going down… eight, seven… deeper… six, five, four… deeper and deeper… three… two… one. You’re in a vast building that has the appearance of a cathedral. The light’s pouring in through tall, stained-glass windows. You stroll around among different-coloured machines. You’d like to find out what they do and how they work. All in good time. Now, you come to a metal door. You open it. On the other side there’s a large room with long wooden tables and shelves all the way up to the ceiling. They’re packed with plaster figures. You look at them. You can touch them if you want to. Have you seen how smooth they are? Ever wondered how they’re made? Want to find out? There’s someone standing beside you now. Don’t be alarmed,’ he said, noticing several people start. ‘He’s a friend. He’s wearing a white coat and a red helmet, and he wants you to take his hand. You take it. You let him lead you. In front of you there’s a shallow pan full to the brim with liquid plaster. You sink your hands into it. Feel how cool it is? You stir it round and round, you feel like a child again.’ They were becoming more and more involved in this exercise of the imagination and, in some cases, totally immersed in it: Dorita, for example, was kneading her skirt with clenched hands and rubbing together her thighs and knees while emitting little panting noises. ‘Your friendly worker now leads you over to a series of casts. They all look the same on the outside: you can’t guess what figures lie within. Want to find out? Pour some liquid plaster into the first one. Careful now! Don’t spill any!’ he said with mock severity, and several of them actually jumped, then relaxed again and smiled. ‘One by one, you fill them all. By the time you’ve finished the last, the first one has set. Your friendly worker helps you open it: slowly now, carefully, you don’t want it to break. And as you open it, little by little, you can see a nose, lips, eyes… Who could it be? The suspense! Now you’ve removed the cast and there she is for all the world to see. It’s Eva Perón. Have you made just one bust of Eva? No, lots! For, when you open the next cast, there’s another, and another, and another… All fresh and immaculate. Look at them… Aren’t they beautiful? And you made them! Don’t you feel proud? Now, you leave them to dry. You say goodbye. Goodbye to your friend too. You retrace your steps… no need to rush… you cross the cathedral, you reach the staircase. You start climbing. One… no need to hurry… two, three, four… you keep on climbing… five, six, seven… you’re almost there… eight, nine and… ten. You open your eyes. You’re awake. You’re back in the room, but you’re not the same as before… am I right?’
One by one the participants opened their eyes, rubbed them as if they’d just woken up, and looked about, puzzled, self-conscious, as if returning from a long journey. What exactly was it they’d just experienced? All of them except little old Fernández, that is, who’d fallen asleep during the exercise and was gently snoring, his head lolling over the back of the chair. A couple of shakes and he was awake.
‘Well? How do you feel?’ Marroné asked cheerily.
‘Good, good,’ some answered, while others nodded their approval.
‘Did anyone see or feel anything they’d like to share with the rest of us?’
They exchanged the usual ‘who’s going first?’ glances.
‘Well, I…’ began the woman who had joined the group just before the exercise, a tanned thirty-something in a tailored blue suit and peach blouse. ‘When I opened the cast, there was like this light coming out of Eva’s eyes. And out of her mouth, and her ears as well. There was like this light streaming out of her. What does it mean?’
‘Hold that image for now. It’s important. We’ll come back to it later,’ he said, nimbly sidestepping the claptrap. ‘Anyone else?’
‘The worker had my father’s face,’ piped up González, his voice about to crack. ‘He died two years ago,’ he explained. Ramírez gave his shoulder a firm squeeze and González pressed his lips together and nodded several times in thanks.
‘It was beautiful,’ ventured Dorita, gazing at him with wide eyes, in which welled two deeply emotional tears, like spilt water reaching the table’s edge. ‘It had never occurred to me to actually go to the workshop and see what we make in this factory.’
‘That’s it!’ Ramírez the rebel addressed his comrades, now highly motivated after the exercise. ‘Let’s go there right now! Let’s join our brother workers!’
‘How about this?’ Marroné joined in, mentally rubbing his hands. ‘What if I go down there now and have a word with them? If they agree to lift the restrictions on production in the interests of shop floor–office unity and to make an exception for Comrade Eva, we can get to work after lunch. Meanwhile, you can divide yourselves into two groups and suggest new ways to creatively and – why not? – entertainingly tackle the predicament we find ourselves in.’
‘Like falling off a log,’ Marroné thought to himself on his way down in the service lift, accompanied by one of the black-helmeted commissars, who gestured vaguely towards the gate and answered his question about who the leaders were with an ‘Anyone in a white helmet’. On the way he came across three green-helmeted workers heading for the canteen and shouldering half a side of beef, a bulky sack of bread rolls and a crate of oranges; one worker in a red helmet and kitchen apron; and two in yellow helmets, twirling brushes and mops; the guards, he noticed, all wore black helmets. The strikers were clever: instead of doing away with the colour coding and letting everyone merge into chaotic egalitarianism, they had kept the coloured helmets but changed their meanings. A prime example of the efficient reallocation of existing resources.
Above the replicas of Michelangelo’s Moses and David that guarded the entrance they had hung a white sheet with an inscription painted in broad red brushstrokes: ‘Factory Occupation – Day 2’. The front gate and adjacent areas were a hub of feverish activity: the patrol cars of the night before had been joined by two assault vans and even a water cannon, and the uniformed police by another twenty-odd men, sporting the helmets and batons of riot police. A crowd milled about in the free space, brightening the work-day monochrome with holiday colours: the lorries and vans of the suppliers bringing in victuals for strikers and hostages were joined by paper-boys touting their newspapers at the tops of their voices; the strikers’ wives and girlfriends had come, children in hand, with clean clothes and packed lunches, and exhorted their husbands not to give up the fight; street-hawkers wandered through the crowd peddling cigarettes, lighters, razors and razor blades, batteries, packs of cards and other trinkets; at one end of this seething human mass a choripán stall had begun to smoke and sizzle; a popcorn seller and an ice-cream seller were stationed at the other, and two Bolivian cholas had parked their stately anatomies on either side of the gate – one selling fruit and veg, the other ladies’ underwear. There were also two press units – one from Canal 13, another from Radio Mitre – as well as a swarm of journalists, who tried to force their way inside every time one of the gates opened. After studying this colourful animated tapestry for a while, Marroné found what he was looking for: at the north corner of the factory a throng was gathering, in which the brightly coloured helmets stood out against the shade of the trees like Smarties on the icing of a cake. Marroné took a deep breath and set off to join it.