In the ghostly shade of a plaster-shrouded ombú his old acquaintance Baigorria addressed his comrades from a wooden crate. Not a white helmet in sight.
‘Comrades… We are living a historic moment here at the Sansimón Plasterworks… Our occupation has been a huge success… We’ve shown the bosses what we can do, and if we did it once we can do it again… But the fact is, comrades, if we keep this up we’re playing straight into the management’s hands. The storehouses are packed to the gunwales with goods going nowhere; you know that better than me. This strike’s a godsend to them: they can stop production and not pay us a cent. I want to believe – want to believe – that those insisting on continuing this occupation are acting in good faith, thinking they’re doing what’s best, but it wouldn’t be the first time they’ve pulled a fast one on us, comrades, that those who say they’re our friends turn out to be at best useful idiots and at worst management spies, not to mention our old friends the infiltrators, those wolves in workers’ clothing…’
Marroné was truly impressed. Garaguso the personnel manager wasn’t just quick, he was subtle – Machiavellian even. In a matter of hours he had not only won over one of the strikers to his cause, but had turned Baigorria into a skilful orator capable of ensnaring his listeners unawares. Marroné felt like going up to him and giving him a few tips on making the most of body posture, auditorium layout and, above all, lighting, but some of his listeners had started speaking their minds.
‘Shut it, scab! You blackleg bastard!’
‘How much is Garaguso paying you, you fucking sell-out?’
‘Go back to Babirusa, you turncoat!’
Imperturbable, Baigorria tried to go on with his speech.
‘Comrades, comrades! Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying the occupation was a mistake, I’m not saying we should back down. I’m saying enough’s enough, that we’ve got what we wanted. There’s a time to sow and a time to reap, and if we don’t gather it in time, what happens to the harvest, comrades? It rots! If we go on with this occupation, we’ll gain nothing else and might lose all we’ve gained so far. The only thing we’ll achieve is more wholesale firings and a small rise at most for those who stay on. So if you’re willing to pay that price, then go ahead! You, Pampurro… Will you enjoy your match tickets knowing they’ve taken food from the mouths of Alfieri’s hungry children? And you, Zenón, will you enjoy buying your wife that new dress knowing El Tuerto will be forced to work as a rag-and-bone man again?’
Out of reflex Marroné had already seized his notebook and quickly jotted down the names – ‘Pampurro… Alfieri… Zenón… El Tuerto’ – adding the essential aide-mémoires, and so bent on his task was he that he didn’t react when a voice at his back exclaimed:
‘Oy, you… What you writing?’
Before looking up, he instinctively tried to finish the sentence he was on, which turned into a black scrawl when a hand landed on his arm and gave it a violent tug.
‘Comrades! I got a pig here! A grass!’
Giving him no time to explain, half a dozen strapping proletarian hands had pinned down his arms and shoulders, and a dark-complexioned man in a blue helmet and thick, black-framed glasses was scanning his notes with a calloused finger, spelling out each word with his lips.
‘It’s all here, comrades. We’re all down here, one after another. Got ourselves an informer here we have, boys and girls.’ Then, bringing his face to within centimetres of Marroné’s, ‘Who sent you, Cerbero or the pigs?’
‘No, no,’ stammered Marroné, overcome at the absurdity of the mistake. ‘I read How to Win Friends and Influence People, I’m trying to please others…’
A hand closed over his face and he could no longer speak or see. It wasn’t so much fear he felt as befuddled outrage. Had he been spared death in the crossfire yesterday only to get lynched over a ridiculous blunder?
‘Now then, comrades, calm down, comrades…’
Marroné realised they had let go of him when his struggles met with no further resistance than gravel and air. He opened his eyes to see a worker in a white helmet – at last! – squatting studiously over him, his body blocking out the sunlight, his face encircled by a corona of flame-red locks. A second later Marroné’s eyes had adjusted and taken in his features too.
‘So, matey, what’s all this the comrades are saying about a notebook?’ the worker began, with quiet authority. If Marroné had had any doubts, the voice did away with them.
‘Paddy? Paddy Donovan?’
The panic shifted, lodging itself for an instant in the newcomer’s honey-coloured eyes as his milk-white skin reddened to rival his hair. He pulled himself together with a visible effort and gave him a jaunty smile, which he immediately bestowed on the rest of the audience.
‘Must be mistaken there, chief.’ Then, to the others, ‘Hey, if this one’s from the secret service, he should be sent back to spy school.’
Marroné had sat up and was mechanically dusting off the plaster that covered his jacket and trousers – and no doubt his face too – thinking it might be preventing Paddy from recognising him. All the anxiety of the situation had dissolved into stupefaction at such an improbable reunion.
‘No, no, I’m certain,’ he insisted with a smile. ‘It’s me, Ernesto, Ernesto Marroné, we were at St Andrew’s together, remember? I used to sit at the desk behind you. We used to play rugby together; you were in Monteith and I was in Dodds.’
For a second he toyed with the idea that Paddy had lost his memory in a car crash and, having been rescued by a working-class family, now took himself for one of them. Perhaps he needed more basic sensory stimuli.
‘Monteith, green shirts? Dodds, yellow shirts? The scrum? “Push, St Andrew’s, push!”’
Fists pumping the air, Marroné froze in mid-war cry. Struck dumb, Paddy’s eyes were on him, but the other workers, half-puzzled, half-wary, had fixed theirs on Paddy, who this time spoke with less conviction, almost tripping over his tongue.
‘I… I… dunno what you’re t… talking about, chief.’
Unable to tell if his friend’s eyes were shining with confusion or entreaty and making the most of the fact that his exhortations, if failing to restore Paddy’s memory, had at least led the others to suspect they were dealing with a harmless loon rather than a dangerous intelligence agent, he decided to beat a hasty retreat.
‘I’m sorry. My mistake.’
Smiling insistently he backed away until he reached the statue of Moses at the entrance gate and sat down in its shade to study the man he had taken for his old schoolmate. The two were as similar as the replica now looming over him was to the original…
If Marroné had one hero in his youth, it was Paddy Donovan, whom the eye of memory always haloed with light in a sunny postcard of the rugby pitch; it was as if fate itself had made him captain of the green house of Monteith just to set off the blaze of red upon his head, and the games against Monteith were the ones Marroné always found hardest to win, at least until fourth year, when Paddy Donovan, to the despair of directors and trainers, abandoned rugby for the more plebeian football team, a symbolic gesture he would complete in fifth year by handing back the brown and turquoise prefects’ tie in favour of the navy-blue and silver stripes of the regular school tie. Paddy, the first to smoke marijuana. Paddy, who wrote articles for the school magazine that the school authorities had invariably to censor. Paddy, who bedded the rector’s daughter, a petite, liberated English blonde everyone wanted but nobody dared. They hadn’t been friends, exactly, though less out of reticence on Paddy’s part than timidity on Marroné’s. The latter had never felt altogether worthy of such a friendship, a feeling that perhaps dated back to an episode in first grade, when, alone in the classroom, Marroné had amused himself by taking coloured chalk to the homework written on the blackboard – thinking it would please Miss – turning the drab white letters into pretty rainbows. But the scowling teacher demanded the culprit reveal his identity, and Marroné, paralysed and dumb on one of the desks at the back, found himself incapable of uttering the words of explanation. When she threatened to take away their trip to the cattle show at La Rural, Paddy Donovan, who had already cast two or three suspicious glances in his direction, raised his hand and confessed to the crime. The teacher thanked him for his honesty and gave him no other punishment than to clean the blackboard, which only further aggravated Marroné’s sense of guilt: he’d behaved like a coward and let someone else pay, and all for the sake of an insignificant risk. He never admitted the truth to Paddy, so he could never thank him for stepping into the breach, and the suspicion that he knew and, out of delicacy, hadn’t pressured him into speaking up, filled him with gratitude and bitterness in equal parts. On another occasion, when they were at seventh-grade summer camp, Marroné had been the victim of a case of quite gratuitous and unjustified bullying: he had accidentally set fire to a sixth-grader’s tea towel and, just to annoy him, all the younger boy’s companions, fired up by the impunity of the mob, had taken the side of the crybaby and set upon him – all except Paddy, who had sent them packing with a few choice words; and once again Marroné was unable to find the words to thank him. As soon as he had finished school, Paddy had gone away for a year to travel the world and Marroné had heard nothing more of him than the occasional rumour, which included all the forbidden words: hippies, drugs, communes and attempted suicide. They hadn’t seen each other again, as Paddy never attended the annual old boys’ dinners at the Claridge Hotel, but word reached them that on his return Paddy had settled down, studied law, carved out a career in his father’s business and married a model who was on TV… No, Marroné concluded, he was seeing things, hearing things: this couldn’t be his old classmate, not this red-headed proletarian striding towards him after sealing what looked like a challenge or a wager, exchanging a high-five with the blue-helmeted worker in glasses.
‘Look,’ Marroné began, ‘I swear I didn’t mean to…’
‘It’s me, you arsehole,’ muttered Paddy out of the corner of his mouth, with his back to the group so his face wouldn’t be visible. ‘What are you trying to do? Are you trying to ruin me? I’ve told them I’m playing along with you to find out who you are.’
‘But, Paddy, I swear I didn’t know a thing. What’s happened to you? You should have come to see me, there’s always something at the company…’
All five of Paddy’s fingers clamped shut on Marroné’s hand to stop him reaching for his wallet.
‘All I’m short of is them thinking you’re trying to bribe me.’
‘Forgive me, Paddy, but… Can you explain to me what you’re doing here?’
‘I’m prltrnsng myself,’ he said through clenched teeth.
‘What?’ shouted Marroné. ‘You’re problematising yourself?’
‘Proletarianising,’ Paddy spluttered in exasperation. ‘Making myself a proletarian.’
‘But why? Has your family fallen on hard times?’
‘No, no. We aren’t on speaking terms. It’s a personal decision, you understand, a renunciation. I’ve taken the vow of poverty.’
‘You’ve become a priest?’ Marroné asked with some relief. Paddy’s family had always been devout Catholics.
‘No. A Peronist.’
Paddy smiled. Now that the imminent danger of exposure had passed, he was beginning to sound like his old self again: warm, charismatic, the leader of the picket line, as once he was of the rugby team. He took Marroné by the arm.
‘Let’s walk.’
Skirting the car park, which rippled like jelly in the heat that radiated from the white gravel and the overheated bodywork of the cars, they reached the loading bay, where the drivers were relaxing over an asado, swigging wine from demijohns by their parked trucks. Gesturing to Marroné to follow him, Paddy went up to them and, after the usual round of friendly greetings, both men were offered a choripán and a glass of red.
‘Are you still in touch with anyone?’ asked Marroné, spraying crumbs, as they wandered off. ‘I ran into Robert Ermekian with his wife and kid the other day at a performance by The Suburban Players, and what do you know, he only asked if I’d heard from you…’
Paddy gave him an oddly compassionate smile.
‘What about you, Ernesto? Are you married? Have you got any children?’
‘Yes,’ he answered, beaming, ‘two. A boy of two and a half and baby girl of a few months.’
He pulled the relevant photos from his wallet. The one of Cynthia was just after she’d been born: with her deformed head and lobster-red complexion, she looked more like Sr Tamerlán than ever, but he always forgot to change it for a more recent one.
‘They look like you,’ said Paddy, without a trace of irony, handing them back to him.
‘What about you, Paddy?’
‘There is no more Paddy. He’s dead and gone. Call me Colorado, or Colo: everyone else does here. No, no I haven’t got children, yet. My partner and I have discussed the issue and we’ve decided to wait till after the Revolution. That way they’ll be raised differently.’
‘Course,’ nodded Marroné, who, beginning to get the picture, decided it was time to apply the rules of How to Win Friends and Influence People. ‘There’ll be plenty of day-care centres under socialism, won’t there. It’s a boon because it isn’t always easy to find a decent nanny or a baby-sitt…’
Paddy was scowling at him. No, that wasn’t it. He had nearly put his foot in it.
‘I don’t want them to be like us, Ernesto: raised to despise people with less money, less status or darker skin. Treating people like things and things like gods. Worshipping all things English and American, and despising all things Argentine and Latin American. “Command and obey”,’ he snorted in conclusion.
‘Well, we were educated to be leaders, weren’t we? And from what I can see they didn’t do such a bad job on you,’ added Marroné with a wink of complicity that ricocheted off Paddy’s frown.
‘No, Ernesto, that’s where you’re wrong. I’m respected here because I’m one of them. And learning to be one of them was the hardest thing I’ve done in my life.’
‘Well… I mean… Couldn’t you do more for them from a management post – or a political post? Even… I dunno, listen to me, even a union lawyer? You could be one, if you finish your training.’
‘You’re falling into the trap of bourgeois reformism,’ Paddy shot back at him. ‘Look, Ernesto, you may find it hard to believe, but the days of capitalism are numbered. There is no other future than the Revolution, and the Revolution can only be led by proletarians.’
‘This lot?’ asked Marroné incredulously, casting his eyes over the truck-drivers, who, having made short work of their first demijohn, had started cracking dirty jokes and were rolling about laughing. ‘Are you sure? Have you asked them?’
‘That’s because it hasn’t occurred to them yet. They want it but they don’t know they want it. It’s called alienation. Simple as that. Their class situation makes them proletarians who need to start the Revolution to end exploitation and thereby class society. Those are their objective conditions. But because of alienation their class consciousness is still bourgeois, so subjective conditions aren’t fulfilled: they don’t know they can and have to start the Revolution. This divorce between their objective and subjective conditions is what’s holding back the Revolution for the time being. It’s like saltpetre and sulphur: as long as they’re separate, nothing happens; put them together and you get gunpowder. The communist old guard thought the solution was to educate the proletariat so that they would develop a revolutionary consciousness. A huge effort with little to show for it. This solution is far simpler: Columbus’ egg; the Copernican Revolution of the Revolution. If the mountain won’t come to Muhammad, Muhammad must go to the mountain.’
‘Wasn’t it the other way round?’
‘No. We’re Muhammad. In them, the objective conditions have been met, but not the subjective ones; with us it’s the other way round. We do know it’s necessary to make the Revolution, but because we’re bourgeois, if we wage it on our own, it’ll be a bourgeois revolution, like the French Revolution.’
‘Of course. And they cut lots of heads off, didn’t they.’
‘The heads are immaterial, Ernesto. Listen to me. If we become proletarians, we’re mixing saltpetre and sulphur. We’ll be proletarians with a revolutionary consciousness, and when we’ve become true proletarians, the original proletarians – the masses – will follow us. Do you see how it works?’
Marroné nodded. Paddy had a talent for making himself understood. A shame he didn’t have the equipment to give an audiovisual presentation.
‘Ok… And does it work?’
‘What?’
‘This… proletarianisation thing.’
‘Well… to stop living like a bourgeois is easy enough. For better or worse we all did it as kids, right? When we got into the hippie thing or backpacking.’
Marroné gave a non-committal nod.
‘But we were just slumming it. The really difficult thing is to stop thinking or seeing or feeling like a bourgeois. Bourgeois consciousness is the most insidious thing going. It’s like an evil spirit that deceives you about everything, everything…’
Marroné was about to mention the wise enchanters in Don Quixote: The Executive-Errant, but Paddy was in full flow and he couldn’t get a word in edgeways.
‘Becoming one of the people is like an exorcism, like purging the evil spirit from your body. But even so… Take me: my life’s now impeccably proletarian… but at night I still have bourgeois dreams. Look, to give you an idea… the other day me and some comrades from the factory here went to the match, and afterwards to celebrate… you can guess where. Because I hesitated, I got the last girl in line, a young girl from the north who must have been under thirty but looked like she was going on fifty, with this double chin… Goitres are endemic in the Puna, you know. A drop of iodine in their diet and the problem’s solved, but they’re Collas of course, so who gives a damn about them… She was wearing this red PVC mini-skirt and laddered fish-net stockings and a blonde wig, and when she smiled at me the teeth that weren’t gold were black and rotten… And I forced myself to think of her people, who’ve suffered nearly five centuries of oppression, and of the subhuman conditions of hunger and poverty she must have grown up in, the feudal exploitation she must have suffered in her land and the sexual exploitation here in the capital… And I reminded myself that physical beauty is a bourgeois privilege proletarians can’t afford and that aesthetic norms are imposed on us by the First World and that a little chola, especially in traditional dress and not the synthetic garbage we sell them, can look prettier than a Swedish model… But I just couldn’t get it up, see, nothing doing, and in the end to stop her giving me away to my comrades I shut my eyes and thought of Monique. I thought of Monique the whole time to get through it.’ Paddy ended the story on a note of sadness, his eyes lost in the pale lunar lawn.
‘Are you and Monique still together?’
Paddy let out a loud, sarcastic snort.
‘Yeah, right! She works as a model by day and drops round my bedsit to rustle me up some spaghetti on the Primus at night. We separated the day I became an activist.’
‘Oh. Sorry to hear that.’
‘I’m not. Monique was a trap. You have to be awake, wide awake… So, tell me. What were you doing with the notebook when the comrades caught you?’
Marroné reeled off the spiel he had prepared.
‘I was just jotting down their names because I think of the strikers as individuals, not an anonymous mass. I came down to look for one of the ringleaders to organise a joint activity, a kind of workshop, for office staff and workers, so the two sectors could get to know each other better and maybe find out that their ideas, their problems, their interests aren’t that different after all… Actually, I’d thought they could spend an afternoon – today if you’re on-board – making a series of plaster figures…’ he took a deep breath before the plunge, ‘… of Eva Perón, as a token of fellow feeling between blue and white collar… But, as even the workers are “white” here, the first step’s already been taken,’ he concluded with affable acumen.
Paddy stared hard at him, without even blinking, then shook his head like a father about to reveal to his son the true identity of Father Christmas.
‘It won’t work, Ernesto. Like the typical petits bourgeois they are, office workers do their level best to live up to the bourgeoisie, which they aspire to, and to differentiate themselves from the proletariat, which they’re terrified of slipping into. They may occasionally form a tentative alliance with the proletariat if they think they have something to gain, but when it’s their arses on the line, you just watch how fast they throw in the towel. That’s why the only option, Ernesto, is to proletarianise yourself. If you like… I can give you a hand.’
‘Well… thanks…’ said Marroné, trying to buy some time, ‘I’d have to think about it.’
They’d reached the foot of the statues’ cemetery, a towering mountain of broken or faulty pieces shining in the sun like a snow-capped peak. Marroné scoured the rubble in the vain hope of discovering a forgotten trove of chipped but still usable busts of Eva, but the nearest thing he found was a torso of Marilyn trying to push down her skirt to hide the fact that her legs were missing. Paddy rolled a battered Corinthian column over to him and, sitting astride an Ionic one, invited him to do the same.
‘Look,’ said Paddy after a second’s pause, alluding to the mountain of smashed pieces with a wave of his hand. ‘What do you see?’
Marroné ran his eyes over the jumbled heap: cracked mouldings, split columns, shattered amphorae, a legless David, a Discobolus whirling his stump, the masks of comedy and tragedy with missing jaws so you couldn’t tell which was which, a ballerina tying the laces of a non-existent dance shoe, a Perón with a broken nose who resembled the Sphinx, an armless Botticelli Venus that looked like the Venus de Milo, a headless Venus de Milo that looked like a wingless Victory of Samothrace, the two halves of an Aztec calendar…
‘There’s a very high proportion of damaged pieces. The productivity index…’
‘There you go again. You see everything from a business viewpoint. You don’t think about the meaning of human labour. What does it mean to make these copies?’
‘Errrr…’ Knowing that, however hard he thought, the evil spirit of the bourgeoisie would put the wrong answer in his mouth, he chose to gain time with an innocuous vowel sound.
‘Exactly. Nothing. Ours is a culture of copies, imitations, replicas, and shoddy workmanship on top of that. Look at this,’ he said, picking up a Pietà in which, rather than swooning his last, Christ melted like mozzarella over his mother’s knees, who contemplated him more in disgust than in sorrow. ‘Who could confuse this miscarriage with Michelangelo’s original? We try to be like them and this is what we come up with,’ he said, tossing it back on the mound. ‘This mountain of ruins, of tack and broken replicas, is a monument to the borrowed culture we have tried to assemble out of our masters’ leftovers. We content ourselves with fragments, with copies of copies, and, by fixing our eyes on them, we blinker ourselves to our own reality.’
Paddy had a point. Staring so hard at the broken pieces had dazzled him, and several little piles spun in a kaleidoscope of black residual images on his retinas.
‘Europe’s finished, like Fanon says. We have to leave it behind. You’d better start getting used to the idea. We have to travel light on this trip. And the day we arrive, we’ll have to burn the boats.’
‘What do you mean?’
Paddy pulled the two halves of the Aztec calendar from the immense pile and put them together so the break was invisible.
‘When we’re like this,’ he said, holding together the solar disc, ‘we’ll have to forget all this.’ His bright eyes cast a doleful glance over five millennia of useless western culture gathered in a sad heap of broken images at their feet. ‘Paris. El Greco. Shakespeare,’ he mused, with anticipated nostalgia.
Marroné decided to add a healthy dash of dissent.
‘But you used to like Shakespeare.’
‘True. Remember when we read Julius Caesar?’
‘Yeees,’ he began hopefully, thinking he could steer the conversation towards Mark Antony’s speech, considered by both Dale Carnegie and R Theobald Johnson as the best Shakespeare had ever written.
‘A play where the revolutionaries who want to save the republic are depicted as villains, and the dictator and his henchmen as heroes. And the people? They’re either portrayed as idiots who let themselves be led by the nose or as a savage mob that goes around murdering people indiscriminately and torching everything in sight. If Shakespeare had been Argentinian, he’d have had Peronist mobs sticking their feet in the fountain and burning down the churches – the whole shooting match. I’m telling you, it couldn’t be more anti-Peronist if it had been written by Borges rather than Shakespeare.’
Marroné gulped twice before answering. He was having trouble applying the principles of Dale Carnegie to Paddy’s conversations. Very serious trouble.
‘But we have a lot to learn from reading his plays,’ implored Marroné. ‘From Hamlet, for example…’
‘Yeah, I’ll give you that. A critical reading of Hamlet could help you make the leap from intellectual doubt to revolutionary certainty. If Hamlet would just stop navel-gazing, he’d realise there’s a world outside the palace walls: beyond them the people of Denmark await him. If he’d taken the side of the people, all his doubts and hesitations would have evaporated as if by magic: he’d enter the winter palace with fire and sword, and wreak his revenge, because it would no longer be in the name of his father – who, let’s face it, was just another oligarch – but in the name of the oppressed Danish masses,’ he concluded. Then, after a barely perceptible pause: ‘Ernesto, I want to ask you something, and I want you to answer me as honestly as you can. What does Eva Perón mean to you?’
The question took him completely by surprise. In despair he reached for a rule from How to Win Friends and Influence People, but his mind had gone blank.
‘Errr… The Spiritual Mother of all Argentine Children… The Plenipotentiary Representative of the Workers… The First Argentinian Samaritan…’ He salvaged the phrases from his childhood memories, trying to wring from them the sarcastic tone his father used to give them as he spat them through clenched teeth. But he couldn’t quite manage it. ‘Perón’s wife. I don’t know. Nothing,’ he eventually admitted.
‘So,’ said Paddy as if he’d been given the answer he was expecting, ‘what do you want the busts for?’
‘It’s for an order,’ said Marroné, trying to contain his growing exasperation. ‘I’m head of procurement for a construction company, and they sent me to purchase them. My brief is to get quality, price and, above all in this case, fast delivery, which, incidentally, your blessed occupation is making rather difficult. I’m not after the Holy Grail, just a few mass-produced plaster busts. It isn’t much to ask. Couldn’t you just cut the crap and run them off for me, eh? Make my life a little easier? Some of us can’t afford to just drop everything and devote ourselves to changing the world. We have responsibilities, a job, a family to keep… I’m sorry,’ he said, wiping the sweat from his brow with the back of his hand. ‘I don’t know what came over me. Must be the heat.’
‘It’s all right, Ernesto, don’t worry. It’s a start.’
‘The start of what?’ Marroné asked with a trace of alarm.
‘Cuba wasn’t liberated in a day. I sent them packing the first time they came to talk to me too. But here I am,’ came Paddy’s oblique reply.
‘Who talked to you? What about?’
‘Look, I’ve got to go now. There are so many things we have to see to… It’s extremely important that the strike goes well because it’s a rehearsal for something bigger… If the workers see they can do this, they’ll want more… We can’t fail them.’
‘Who are you? What do you want?’
‘I’ll bring you some reading matter tonight. And tomorrow, if you still want to know who we are, we can talk some more. I’m not saying we don’t bite… The thing is who. Oh, and another thing,’ he added with a knowing wink before leaving, ‘I promise you that, if we start production again, I’ll do everything in my power to give priority to your ninety-two busts.’
* * *
He realised something was amiss when he entered the cathedral and saw the hail of forms, receipts, invoices, carbon-paper, memos, chequebooks, letters, envelopes, folders, box-files, typewriter ribbons and other office equipment fluttering like confetti, hanging from the banisters in streamers and garlands, carpeting the floor and the machines, and lending the factory the general appearance of city streets at the start of the office workers’ holidays. The area in front of the service lift was littered with aluminium food trays and disembowelled ham and cheese rolls, and when he looked up at the internal balcony, he caught sight of yet another tray, spinning as it fell, orbited by floating rolls, and had to leap aside to avoid it. As he climbed the spiral staircase, he could hear a confused buzz of hysterical shouting and laughter, and when he reached the platform, his suspicions were confirmed: the office workers had run riot, and were charging up and down the gangways and platforms with armloads of card-index boxes and box-files that they hurled over the banisters with whoops of jubilation. Led by Gómez and Ramírez, a picket line of administrative staff were attempting to storm the offices of the executives, who had set up barricades of filing cabinets and other office furniture, and were putting up resistance from within, the office workers shouting slogans like ‘Down with privilege!’, ‘We won’t eat rubbish!’, ‘Tarts for overtime!’ and, from those within, a mixture of threats and entreaties: ‘We can talk it over!’, ‘We’ll sack the lot of you!’, ‘Calm down and we’ll talk!’ The two commissars had lost control of the situation and, leaning over the banisters, were shouting to their comrades.
Ramírez embraced Marroné exultantly when he saw him.
‘You were right, Marroné! It was just a matter of daring! We can if we want to!’
Horrified, Marroné tried to explain to him that they hadn’t grasped the gist of his proposal, but Ramírez was already off somewhere else and didn’t hear him. Some of the men were lighting their ties as if they were the Stars and Stripes, while others had torn off their shirts and were jumping about in their vests, wheeling them over their heads and chorusing ‘He cheats, he farts, he takes it up the arse! Sansimón, Sansimón!’ and ‘Garaguso is a wanker and he shags for Sansimón!’; the women, with Nidia and Dorita at their head, were hammering their shoes on the floor to break off their high heels, and two maniacs (one of whom was none other than the irreproachable González) were lugging the big pot of hot coffee brought to them by the workers in order to tip it over the railings; but, stumbling headlong into a fallen typewriter, they tripped and spilt its entire contents over the terrified Marroné, who for the third time in two days thought his final hour had come, until he realised the coffee was lukewarm and had succeeded only in ruining his James Smart suit and Italian shoes.
‘What the hell do you think you’re playing at, you bloody fools!’ he blurted out.
González’s blue eyes opened wide in genuine concern.
‘Ernesto! My God! Are you all right? Let me help you!’ he stammered, stretching out an inept pair of hands towards the sodden suit.
‘Don’t touch me! Don’t touch me!’ shrilled Marroné, on the brink of hysteria, slapping the hands away. He regretted it immediately when he saw the hurt expression in the two blue puddles looking back at him.
‘It was an accident,’ murmured González, about to blub.
‘What’s happened?! Didn’t you carry on with the activity?’
‘We were working in groups like you told us,’ stuttered González, as if his boss had just shouted at him, ‘and we kept smelling those mouth-watering asados they’re making downstairs… We were sure this time it was for us too. As a token of us joining the struggle, see… But when we saw them coming in again with the same old rolls and burnt coffee… I dunno… we just lost it.’
Paddy was right, Marroné said to himself, grinding his teeth in an effort to restrain himself: it was impossible – im-poss-ib-le – to expect anything from people like this. You set up a visualisation for them and got them working in teams – one of the simplest, most elementary creativity exercises! – and they ended up behaving like schoolchildren on a graduation trip. He looked around in search of a culprit to vent his exasperation on. His eyes lit upon one of the commissars. Lugging the weight of his sodden clothes, coffee running in torrents between cloth and skin and overflowing out of his shoes, he plodded purposefully towards him.
‘You lot,’ he pointed at him with a stiff and trembling finger. ‘You lot are responsible for this. That was my best suit! Made to measure! Just look at it!’
The guard, a young worker of twenty-five with Indian features, looked him up and down before replying.
‘I’ve never had a suit to ruin.’
Marroné wasn’t going to let him get away with that. Not this time. Not in a million years.
‘Don’t give me that. No. Just because you lot have always got social injustice on your side you think you can get away with murder. No way. You want to occupy the factories? Be my guest. You want to take over the country? Go right ahead. But this suit here, you’ll have it cleaned or buy me a new one. We all have to take responsibility for our actions. I demand a solution.’
The worker shrugged.
‘You can drop round the storeroom if you like. They’re sure to have something to change into there.’
As the coffee cooled on Marroné’s body, so did his irritation. There wasn’t much else he could do under the circumstances.
‘Where?’ he asked with resignation.
‘Go down in the service lift and turn right…’
Dorita emerged from the offices and ran to him.
‘Sr Ernesto, are you all right? Did you scald yourself? Can I do anything to help?’
Though her presence right then was more a nuisance than anything, her concern helped to sweeten his mood. He’d been wrong to get annoyed. It wasn’t an intelligent emotion, and stupid emotions were a luxury a man in his situation could ill afford.
‘No, thank you, Dorita. This gentleman has just been kind enough to point me…’
The service lift guillotined Dorita into sections as it descended: first the head with its oddly bright eyes, which followed him down to the last moment, then the plucked-chicken neck, the flat chest, the boyish hips, the skinny thighs showing through the pencil skirt. Last came the bare feet, visible through the weft of her stockings, laddered in the riot. She didn’t have ugly ankles, thought Marroné. Could it be that she had taken a fancy to him?
The storeroom manager, an old worker with blue eyes and white hair, gave him the once-over and grabbed some folded white overalls his size and handed them to him over the counter. He asked him if he wanted socks and shoes too, and Marroné accepted because he disliked the sensation of walking on wet sponges and, if he wanted to save his shoes, the best thing would be not to wear them until he could get them seen to by a decent cobbler.
‘You can have a shower if you like; the changing room’s right next door,’ he said, handing him a towel.
The water was cold but Marroné didn’t care, nor did he care about how rough and cheap the soap was, and he rubbed it with gusto over his stubbly cheeks, his arms, his hairy chest, back, buttocks and genitals, which he covered with a startled shriek when he saw her standing in the doorway, clutching her handbag – draped with a crocheted cotton cardy – in both hands, and watching him with her mouth half-open, her eyes wide. Only when Marroné doubled over and covered himself like a statue bereft of its fig leaf did she back out, mumbling apologies and dropping bag and jacket, which she came back in to retrieve just as Marroné, in an absurd reflex of courtesy, bent to pick them up. He quickly straightened to cover himself and backed away with thighs clamped tight, leaving the items on the floor. Gathering them up, Dorita beat a hasty retreat, while Marroné cast desperately around him as he finished rinsing off the soap: to cap it all he’d left the towel in the changing room and had nothing to cover himself with but a flimsy gold crucifix.
‘Dorita?’ he asked.
‘Yes?’ came her voice from the changing room. She was still there. Damn it.
‘Could you… pass me the towel, please?’
‘Yes, yes. Right away.’
The towel appeared around the tiled corner, floating in the air like a little ghost and, calling to him, shook itself a couple of times. Stretching out an arm, he took it, briskly towelled himself down and tied it around his waist. Dorita was sitting on one of the wooden benches, waiting for him, cheeks flushed, eyes lowered.
‘I’m so sorry, Sr Marroné. I asked for you, and they told me I’d find you down here…’
‘It’s all right. Was there something you needed?’
‘Just to tell you… that what you did for us… I wanted to thank you, nobody’s ever made me feel… like I could contribute something of value… that I’m worth something, as much as the next woman… that I can be creative too, if I look inside myself…’
The towel on Marroné’s lap started to rise like a circus tent, every word of Dorita’s a tug from the dwarfs hoisting it skywards. He found nothing as stimulating as a dose of praise after a successful creativity exercise; there was no way to control it, and even if there had been, it was too late now: Dorita seemed incapable of taking her eyes off the hypnotic pulsing of the charmed cobra under the towel.
‘Would you… mind if I had a shower too? It’s so hot… You can stay, in case someone comes… I’m not embarrassed with you.’
Marroné could see it all before it happened: the scrawny, graceless body running with water under the shower; the fumbling foreplay; the dash to get in the tip if nothing else before his dignity drained away, along with his erection, in two or three brief spasms; and afterwards the concerned questions, the abject explanations, the sincere commiseration, so much more unbearable than outright derision. He took hold of the hand Dorita had tentatively raised to the top button of her blouse and, moving it as far away as possible from the throbbing centre of his being, he looked directly into her eyes and spoke to her.
‘Dorita… I feel grateful for your words and also for… this… But I’m a married man, you know. I love my wife, I have a son of two and a half, and yesterday my dong… my darling daughter was two months old’… ‘and you haven’t had a bowel movement since you got here,’ his meddling mind reminded him absurdly, as if that had anything to do with anything.
Dorita nodded contritely at every word he spoke, as if this was the story of her life. She fought back the tears.
‘Now… If you wouldn’t mind stepping outside for a minute… While I get dressed… Wait for me and we’ll go up together if you like.’
Dorita nodded, chewing her bottom lip, and went to wait for him outside. Since not even his underpants had been spared the deluge of coffee, Marroné pulled his white overalls on, straight over his naked body (he didn’t so much as put them on as climb into them, as if they were a diving suit or a spacesuit), and then the socks and heavy shoes. There was something exciting in his new outfit, especially in the way his still erect member brushed against the coarse cotton: he felt different, looser, bold… even… virile. Just then his eyes lit upon the bundle of sodden clothes and the shoes that, he now knew, would never be the same again, and he was seized by a sudden weariness. He pressed the shoes hard into the heap of clothes, wrapped them up in his suit trousers and tossed the bundle in the bin. ‘Burn your boats,’ he thought, and when he looked up he met in the mirror the reflection of a stubble-covered face topped with tousled hair and the rugged, set jaw of an explorer on the road to adventure. He undid the top two buttons on his overalls so that his pecs and the start of his clearly defined six-pack – which years of rugby had given him and two gym sessions a week had helped to preserve – were visible in the neckline. He frowned, raised one hand to his chest, clenched the other in a tight fist and smiled to himself: if they’re after a model for the Monument to the Descamisado, they need look no further.
When he went out, Dorita was nowhere to be seen. On his way back to the service lift he ran into a worker in a white helmet who looked upset and came over to talk to him.
‘Off upstairs, comrade?’
‘Yes,’ replied Marroné after a tiny, indiscernible pause.
‘Tell Zenón and Aníbal just to let them go, tell them Trejo said so if they ask.’
‘All of them?’
‘No, no. The bosses stay. Just the administrative staff. The dickheads want to join the strike, they’re cocking up all our organisation.’
When he got there, the office staff were still jumping up and down on the platform, hurling paper in the air and chorusing ‘Jump, jump, jump, Sansimón’s a chump!’ Standing on a chair, his pink shirt drenched with sweat, Ramírez was doing his best to harangue them in a hoarse voice, but the general rejoicing drowned out his proclamations.
‘Comrades. The time has come to shake off the labels of bootlickers, yes-men and wimps that we’re always branded with. History is being rewritten, here, today, at the Sansimón Plasterworks, and this time us office staff are going to stand by the shop-floor workers to the bitter end. If we stick together over this, nobody can stop us, comrades…’
Once he had passed on the news to the two worker guards, calling them by their first names, Zenón and Aníbal (he’d learnt his lesson and decided to shelve the notebook and activate his memory), Marroné saw no reason to delay the good news.
‘The order’s come through from below! You can leave whenever you like!’
A jug of iced water poured into a pan of boiling water could not have been quicker-acting. The pandemonium ceased instantly and initial bemusement crept over the faces of the office staff, to be followed in quick succession, as they looked at those of their neighbours, by guilty relief, shame, embarrassment and, finally, ill-concealed satisfaction. Without saying a word, first one (Suárez), then another (unknown) began to make their way to the office to collect their things and leave. Ramírez tried to stem the flow with some feeble words of persuasion.
‘Comrades… Where are you going? Are we going to miss the chance to show that they’re wrong in what they say: that when the chips are down, we throw in the towel? That we’re all talk? That we wouldn’t say boo to a goose? Don’t you want to stay, so that you can go back to your houses with your heads held high and say that we’ve earned some respect for once? If we leave, comrades… what will we come back to? The same old thing?’
Out of compassion Marroné went over to him.
‘It’s useless, pal. They aren’t listening.’
Ramírez looked at him with blank eyes that showed no sign of understanding or recognition, and then, leaning on Marroné’s shoulder, climbed down from the chair and headed for the office. His colleagues had started queuing up outside the service lift. In their midst, looking like butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth, was Sansimón’s sales manager, the one who had made a botched attempt to flee the day before.
‘Oy! You! Papillon! Trying to pull a fast one, are we? Get back in there with the others,’ Marroné said to him, tapping him twice on the shoulder.
The sales manager meekly obeyed without a word, merely casting a surprised look in Marroné’s direction, as if his face were familiar but he couldn’t say where from… Marroné rubbed his hands with pleasure. It was like a role play, and he was enjoying it enormously. It was a rule that always proved infallible: you never know your potential until you start exploring it. Just then the service lift arrived and Paddy, carrying a newspaper, stepped out, along with two others in black helmets. Paddy’s jaw dropped when he saw him.
‘Ernesto! What are you up to?’ he said to him.
Marroné replied with a shrug and an expression of defiance.
‘What? Are you the only one that can proletarianise yourself around here?’
The worker guards had started bringing the office workers down in two groups of ten. Dorita was in the second one, the service lift this time slicing her up the other way round, starting with her feet and finishing with her faintly moist eyes, which remained fixed on him until the last moment. Out of politeness he kept up his smile and raised hand until they vanished from sight, then turned to Paddy, who was still staring at him in astonishment.
‘Well… that’s the petit bourgeoisie off our backs. One less problem, right?’
‘And you, Ernesto? What are you going to do?’
There was something he needed to know before he took a decision.
‘What about the rest of the country? What’s happening with the other plasterworks?’
Paddy smiled.
‘All occupied. Nothing can stop us, Ernesto!’
‘I’m sticking around then,’ said Marroné without hesitation.
Paddy locked with him in fraternal embrace, and Marroné was awash with happiness. By what strange and crooked ways life made your wishes come true: Paddy and he were friends at last. As they parted, Paddy unfolded the magazine he’d been carrying and held it out to him.
‘Here.’
‘What is it?’ Marroné asked.
‘The reading matter I promised you. Give it a look and we’ll discuss it tomorrow.’
Marroné glanced at the title page. On the cover a woman as taut and vibrant as a tensed string was haranguing a dark expanse that presumably harboured a multitude within, and above her tight bun, in red graffiti letters, streamed the caption ‘EVITA MONTONERA’.
* * *
The cars pulled away one by one: Gómez’s Peugeot, with González in the passenger seat; an impeccably preserved Auto Union with Fernández at the wheel; a Fiat 600 with Suárez, Ramírez, Nidia and Dorita squeezed inside it; and a Fiat 1500, a Citroën 3CV and a Renault 4L with all the others. Through the high window overlooking the car park, Marroné watched them all as they clambered in, turned on their engines and headlights, and made for the entrance gate held open for them by the armed guards. It was getting dark but, far from letting up, the heat was mounting; heavy burgundy clouds, lit up by the recent passage of the sun, still burnt in the west, while others, the colour of lead and ash, gathered in the northern sky like an Indian raiding party.
What Marroné needed now was a quiet place to sit down and read the Eva Perón photonovel without interruption, so, after recovering his briefcase from the devastated main office, through which the rebellion had swept like a gale, one at a time he tried the doorknobs until he found one that turned, and crossed into a deserted office. After waiting for the few seconds the flickering fluorescent tube needed to provide a steady light, he made resolutely for the toilet, where he unbuckled his belt and sat down with the photonovel open on page one.
1919. Despite enjoying true democracy for the first time in its entire history, the country toiled under the double yoke of Saxon imperialism and the land-owning oligarchy, he read, reshuffling his buttocks on the toilet seat. A nation divided into a civilised, white, European metropolis and a barbarian, American, mestizo hinterland. A wealthy country, rich in paupers. A country where patriots pay and traitors prosper. One 7th May, in a small town in this country – a town like so many other Pampas towns, founded on lands snatched from our Indian brothers by the military – was born one of the greatest revolutionaries America has ever seen: Eva Perón, read the words above the photo, which showed an English-style train station, a cluster of silvery silos and the words ‘LOS TOLDOS’ in block letters on a shed wall. In the next photo was a woman in a little woollen jacket and headscarf, holding aloft a doll in the role of a newborn baby and exclaiming in an enthusiastic speech bubble: ‘Look at her, Juan! Isn’t she beautiful?’ The man these words full of hope were addressed to was older and smartly attired in a double-breasted pinstripe suit, with glossy hair and a finely pencilled moustache over his disdainful upper lip. His bubble was not one of dialogue, but of thought. It read: ‘This one makes five. Time to get savvy.’
True to his class values, Marroné went on reading, Eva’s father, Juan Duarte, left his wife (by devotion if not by law) and five children for his ‘legitimate’ family in Chivilcoy.
Having experienced social rejection at first hand, Eva knew from a very young age which side she stood on, read the caption to the next photo, which showed her as a little girl in plaits and polka dots, shielding a frightened beggar boy from three brilliantined brats in short trousers and lace-up shoes, with rocks in their hands; and Eva’s thought bubble bloomed with her first tentative childish judgement: ‘Even as a little girl, every injustice was like a splinter in my soul.’
On encountering this uncomfortable term, Marroné shuffled restlessly on his toilet seat as if fearing that some concealed peeping Tom could see not just his actions (he was in the bathroom after all) but the very contents of his mind, and that was, of course, absurd. He made the most of this pause to try a few strains, but to no avail. The next few boxes illustrated a string of soap-opera clichés: the selfless mother hunched over her Singer, pedalling into the small hours of the morning; the same mother in mourning, sheltering her five chicks under her wing like a black hen, and bowing before a lady in satin and mink who stood behind a closed wrought-iron gate, barking at her a bubble with the words ‘How dare you? Get those bastards out of my sight, you shameless hussy!’ while the caption below explained that Eva was just seven when Juan Duarte died in a car accident and she suffered the humiliation of not being able to attend her father’s funeral; then little Eva taking communion in a borrowed dress; Eva at school practising recitation and dreaming of being an actress; and the fifteen-year-old Eva evading the advances of a brilliantined beau who promised to take her to Buenos Aires and make her a star while his bubble revealed his wicked intentions, and hers, her precocious shrewdness: ‘If this city slicker thinks he’s going to pull a fast one on me, he’s got another thing coming.’
Marroné strained again, with no result save for the certainty of being far from his goal, then turned the page: the teenage Eva had now arrived in Buenos Aires with her suitcase full of hope, like so many thousands of men and women from the marginalised and impoverished hinterland who migrate to the big city in search of a better life, and embarked on her career as an actress and model. But when the last footlight had gone out, away from the illusory reality of the stage, Eva encountered the same exploitation and the same injustices in the world of the theatre as she had in the outside world. She could do little about it for the moment. Whenever she demanded improvements, whenever she made herself heard to her bosses, she was invariably fired, and the photo showed her with her back to the camera, sitting opposite a fat toad of an impresario puffing on an equally fat cigar as he tore a contract up in her face; another in a winter street, shivering in her threadbare summer coat, and, oblivious to her own distress, giving a coin to the same ragged urchin from Los Toldos (was Marroné supposed to believe the child had followed her all the way to Buenos Aires, or was this some kind of allegory?): ‘I wanted not to admit, not to look, not to see the misfortune, the hardship, the destitution around me, so I plunged single-mindedly into my strange artistic vocation. But the more I tried to lose myself in it, the more beleaguered I was by injustice.’ The businessmen, the bankers, the rich cannot hear the cry welling up from below, from the factories, from the shanties… Eva hears it and knows that she will one day speak for them. For she is no longer the same frightened little girl: Eva has changed.
The change had been made clear by the choice of a different actress to portray her as an adult: it was visible from the first still, which showed her in a polka-dot bathing costume, her long legs bare, her feet crossed, her loose chestnut hair tumbling over her shoulders, her hands clasped behind her head to display the carefully shaven armpits. Her posture might be unnatural, uncomfortable, extremely ‘camera-conscious’, but in her forced smile and her eyes, which childishly solicited the photographer’s approval, there was a genuine, uncontaminated joy.
Next came her radio days, where she seemed to be more at ease, for she wielded the fearsome corn-cob of a microphone like a gun, with all the decisiveness of the great women of history – Elizabeth I, Catherine the Great, Isadora Duncan, Madame Chiang Kai-shek – whose lives she plays, unaware that one day she will be the greatest of them all. This was followed by a still of Eva with her hair loose, staring directly into the camera and seeming to speak directly to him, to Marroné: ‘There comes a point in every life when we feel we have to do the same things, over and over, for the rest of our days, and that our paths are fixed for all time. But to all, or nearly all of us, there comes a day when everything changes, our “marvellous day”. For me…’
The page ended and Marroné, more intrigued than he would have liked to admit, turned it and went on reading: ‘For me it was the day my life came together with Perón’s. That meeting marks the start of my one true life.’ The caption beneath read: In January 1944 an earthquake destroys the city of San Juan, and Colonel Perón and Eva meet at a festival for the victims. One image showed Eva atop a pile of rubble that purported to be the destroyed city, hugging the by-now ubiquitous ragged urchin from Los Toldos; another image showed her touching the epaulette of the uniformed man seated in front of her. Yet it was neither the images nor their captions, but Evita’s words, that really made him stop and think. What, if he’d already had it (‘all, or nearly all of us,’ announced the bold print of Eva’s admonition, with harsh sincerity), had been Marroné’s ‘marvellous day’? ‘It could hardly have been the day his life had joined with his wife’s,’ one side of his mind whispered to him insidiously, while in a guilty reflex the other tried to conjure up images of domestic bliss: the house and garden in Olivos, the double bed, the two cots… Yet here he was in an occupied factory, disguised as a worker, reading a photonovel of the life of Eva Perón, and all of that seemed as far removed from the here and now as the abundant offspring of Gauguin and his stern Danish wife were from Tahiti. It was also possible that his ‘marvellous day’, he told himself with a shudder, had been the day of his interview with Sr Tamerlán. He found it painful to admit, but it was possible. Or perhaps it had been the day Govianus had set him his mission. It was hard to say for sure. Because the ‘marvellous day’ might already have happened, or might be happening now, this very instant (the bold type of the photonovel seemed to be shadowing his thoughts) and you might not realise until much later. Or the ‘marvellous day’ might arrive disguised as a catastrophe: the ‘one true life’ of Lester Luchessi, for example, had started the day he was unceremoniously fired from the Michigan Real Estate Co: without the goad of his outrage and panic he might never have become that providential man who saved the Great Lakes Building from rack and ruin, or the author of Autobiography of a Winner. So Marroné’s ‘marvellous day’ could well be today and this apparent dead end. The change in Luchessi’s life had come at fifty-something, the same age as Ray A Kroc or Alonso Quijano… or Juan Domingo Perón, he realised in amazement, swiftly flicking through the boxes introducing the newcomer to Eva’s life.
Who was this handsome but obscure colonel that had become a household name overnight? asked the text, and proceeded to answer its own question with scant biographical details and a tedious list of Perón’s achievements as head of the Secretariat of Labour, which Marroné skipped without compunction. He wasn’t interested in this smiling, made-up Lugosi; he thirsted only for Eva. By the time he ran into her again, she had become Perón’s mistress and was sitting at the far end of an unlikely but convivial café table, at which were gathered the motley adversaries of the now-famous couple: an indignant soldier in epaulettes wearing a cap with a visor and with a bubble saying ‘He has the cheek to take that slut on parade with him!’; a ranch-owner dressed like an English lord, who reminded him of his father (‘Before he filled their heads, labourers were meek and went about their work with a happy smile’); a bespectacled man who wore a goatee and a French beret, which presumably marked him out as an intellectual of the left (‘Perón is a Nazi Fascist, no doubt about it’); a snooty oligarch looking as if she could smell shit (‘You can’t make a silk purse…’); and a priest with an expression of infinite disapproval, who kept his counsel, having run out of space for a bubble. Beside them, shrugging off the inevitable criticism of the conservatives, there emerged from Eva’s mouth the barbed words: ‘Soon, along the wayside, our hypercritics began to shower us with threats and insults and slurs. “Ordinary men” are the eternal enemies of everything new, of every extraordinary idea and therefore of every revolution.’
It had been the same with him, thought Marroné, when he’d brought back all those innovative ideas from the United States: he too had been held up as a madman and dreamer by ‘ordinary men’ like Cáceres Grey, who viewed him ‘indulgently’, ‘pityingly’, with that air of superiority adopted by the mediocre when faced by true men of genius. Don Quixote had also been thought mad by the ‘mediocre men’ of his village, but it was his name that was written in stone, while the hand of time had erased the names of the sane and the sensible, dissolved for ever in the half-baked wash of their inane vacuousness. ‘I will not stop for barking dogs,’ added Evita proudly, in allusion to that famous saw from the Quixote, ‘You know you’re riding, Sancho, when you hear the dogs bark.’
But the dogs – the hypercritics – wouldn’t give in and reappeared again and again over the next few boxes, this time in the form of four young women decked out in furs, hats and jewellery, waving little French and English flags, while among them strutted a blonde-haired, pot-bellied, Stetsoned Texan with an American flag emblazoned on his dickey. The forces of the anti-people, from the oligarch traitors and the petit bourgeoisie to the socialist and communist intellectuals who had never seen a worker close up, led by the Yankee ambassador, Spruille Braden, call for Perón’s head and obtain his arrest, read the text, and over the next few boxes a dignified if somewhat browbeaten Perón was shown being dragged away by police from the arms of a tousled Eva wearing a simple flowery dress, at first tearful and distressed (‘I had never felt so small or helpless as I did in those days…’), then suddenly looking fiercely and resolutely into the camera (‘But then I took to the streets in search of friends who could still do something for him’), then talking to the military, priests and politicians with their stony faces (‘Up at the top I met only with cold, calculating, “sensible” hearts, the hearts of “ordinary men”, hearts at whose contact I felt sick, afraid and ashamed’); then with workers in helmets and berets under bubbles shouting ‘Viva Perón! Viva Eva!’, housewives dropping their shopping to follow her, passionate shanty-dwellers with clenched fists raised aloft (But as she descended from the neighbourhoods of the rich and proud to the poor and humble, people’s doors began to open wide). The sequence climaxed in an elongated box featuring an Evita who evoked Delacroix’s Liberty (though with no breast on display), brandishing an Argentine flag and leading the hopeful, swarthy crowd of workers, people, masses who first burst onto the Argentine political scene on that 17th October 1945 and made their voices heard, and below: ‘Ever since that day I have believed it cannot be hard to die for a cause you love.’
Overleaf Marroné came across a double-page spread showing the Peronist tide filling Plaza de Mayo and clamouring for Perón’s freedom in a variety of bubbles; a box with the cabecitas dangling their feet in the fountain (both apparently archive photos); and a roundel of the photonovel’s two leading lights: an exultant Perón, with one arm raised aloft and the other around Eva’s wasp-waist. Like Venus from the sea, read the pithily overinflated caption, Eva Perón is born of those million mouths demanding the freedom of one man.
So she too had known doubt and dejection, the dark night of the soul, thought Marroné, straining his abs again. Her acting career was over, fallen by the wayside along with the man who had raised her to the top; the enemy had won the day, all doors had closed, and she had even been beaten up in the street by a mob of extremists. Yet her spirit had won through, turning her darkest hour into victory. Bereft of everything, save her determination and courage, she had achieved it all: Perón’s freedom, her marriage to him, a presidential candidacy for her husband and, for her, the title of First Lady at the ripe old age of twenty-six. She had had a clear sense of her mission: to save Perón and set him free, and she had stopped at nothing to fulfil it. What a woman, thought Marroné. Whether you shared her political views or not, it would be mean-minded – the stuff of ‘ordinary men’ – not to acknowledge her leadership qualities.
That was it, felt Marroné, as he gingerly detached his buttocks from the edge of the plastic toilet seat and rearranged them. He could see it clearly now: Evita had followed the Way of the Warrior, she was a samurai woman, and her lord was, of course, Perón: ‘May it come as no surprise to those who seek my portrait in these pages but find Perón’s instead. I have ceased to exist in myself, and it is he who lives in my soul, master of all my words and feelings, the overlord of my heart and life.’ As Marroné read, a maxim from The Corporate Samurai came to his mind: ‘Your errors are yours; your successes, your lord’s.’ Or as Eva would have put it: ‘I was not, nor am I, anything but a sparrow in a vast flock of sparrows… But he was and is a giant condor flying high and sure amidst the mountain tops. Were it not for him, he who came down to me and taught me a different way to fly, I would never have known what a condor was…’
And himself? Marroné too had a clear sense of his mission: he had to save Sr Tamerlán at all costs. The message was clear: all of us have our 17th October in our lives, and his was knocking on the door. He would follow Eva’s example and save Sr Tamerlán, and, like that other 17th October, he would use the workers. He didn’t yet know how, but he’d think of something. He wasn’t the kind of man to stick to the beaten track or always drink from the same well. He would go on ploughing his own furrow while the hypercritics huffed and puffed, and the dogs barked till they were hoarse.
And there was another idea that had begun to nibble at the edges of his mind. If Eva Perón’s exemplary demeanour on 17th October could be his lodestar in the current situation, why not write a book that would take her whole life and career as an example to be emulated? Eva Perón in Enterprise Management, for example, or perhaps something more metaphorical and less pedestrian, like The Sparrow and the Condor. A biography that would keep inessential ideology separate from the core issues: the mettle, the spirit, the will to self-mastery, the capacity for leadership. Had there ever been a better example in history of someone who could overcome the most adverse circumstances, create an image and a name for themselves and, with blind faith, reach the top against all the odds? Eva Perón was a born winner, a self-made woman who had created a product – herself – that millions in Argentina and around the world had bought and consumed. There were – it had to be admitted – powerful reasons why her example had not yet been taken up in the business world: one, the circumstantial anti-capitalist rhetoric and class resentment, which the age and experience that were denied her would no doubt have helped to assuage; two (it was painful to admit, but being economical with the truth would be worse), her being a woman in a still eminently male business environment, where few women could carve out niches for themselves.
Next he flicked through the pages that recounted Evita’s initial faltering steps as First Lady, the gradual refinement of her tastes and the creation of a personal style, as reflected in her wardrobe and hairdos, culminating in her glittering journey to devastated post-war Europe, which, perhaps because of production limitations, the photonovel barely touched on, save to mention that on that tour Eva indulged in rubbing the imperialist countries’ noses in her regal show of wealth. It was a crying shame, because the ‘Rainbow Tour’, as it was known, had wrought a sea change – a genuine metamorphosis – in the young woman from Los Toldos. Before that, Marroné reflected, Eva Duarte, later Eva Perón, had played only pre-existing roles: the young provincial girl who dreams of stardom, the influential lover of a powerful man, even the First Lady… And she had succeeded by making use of the tools of her trade: dresses, hairdos, make-up, studied gestures… But on her trip to Europe she began to enter virgin territory. Eva became Evita, and Evita was no longer an interpretation, but an entirely new creation. And this singular trait of Evita’s manifested itself most fully in the Eva Perón Social Aid Foundation. One photo showed the Foundation’s neoclassical façade; another, the torrent of letters that poured in to her daily, written by mothers with ten or twelve children to look after, unemployed fathers, toothless old men, teenage prodigies with rag balls, the blind, the crippled, the syphilitic; letters from the men, women and children of our people who were no longer alone, who had someone to listen to them and sort out their problems, even asking her from home or the workplace for footballs, clothes, shoes, furniture, false teeth, crutches and wheelchairs, bicycles, sewing machines, toys, cider and panettone for Christmas, or a trousseau for a wedding. These requests were not answered by faceless officials; instead everyone was given a personal audience with Evita: and the photo showed her sitting at her desk, letter in hand, inviting incredulous descamisados to sit down, smiling as she listened to their dreams, their needs, sometimes their life stories; requests that were often nothing but pleas for attention, respect, someone to acknowledge their existence – in a word, love. Evita had set in motion one of the most innovative and truly revolutionary customer service departments in history: the Foundation was a well-oiled customer loyalty machine, once again testing the truth of the maxim learnt by Marroné on his marketing course: ‘A company always makes the same product: happy customers.’ And Evita knew how to promote consumption: rather than giving grudgingly to the people who turned to her, she would egg them on: ‘Ask for more! The best, the most luxurious, the most expensive! Don’t hold back! It’s all yours now! Feel free and help yourselves!’ If you asked for a set of bed linen, you went away with a mattress; if a mattress, you got a bed; if a bed, a house. It was impossible not to be touched by the images in the next few pictures: Evita welcoming long queues of ragged paupers, handing out money from her own pocket when the coffers ran out; Evita kissing a leper; Evita sharing her cape with a beggar; Evita giving away her jewellery… ‘For the love of my people I would sell everything I am and everything I own, and I think I would even lay down my life,’ she said, and Marroné felt a knot in his throat: because that life, fanned by the breath from millions of mouths, was in fact consuming itself in a furious blaze. The queenly finery had long since been swapped for the republican simplicity of the grey or black tailored suit, and the unruly whorls and waves for the stony coiffure that would soon be made marble: as if refined and purified in that flame burning her inside and out, Evita had been hardening, her dress cleaving to her flesh and her flesh to her bones; her body tensing like a bow and her face sharpening to an arrowhead; her ever more prominent teeth sinking into the air with growing hunger. Perón, on the other hand, was the very picture of health, like a vampire feeding on Evita’s energy, his piggy little eyes sinking like raisins into risen dough, the bloated tortoise face retracting deeper and deeper into the thick neck. And so the eternal couple – that work-team of the idealist and the realist (the very essence of Don Quixote and Sancho) – reached the day when, in front of more than a million faithful all screaming for her to accept, Evita was offered the candidacy for vice president. ‘The time you have waited for for so long has come, Chinita,’ a tender, smiling Perón was saying to her on the balcony. ‘Look, they’ve come from far and wide… Never before in the history of humankind has a woman been more loved by her people…’ And Eva, with pained countenance, ‘No, Juan, I can’t,’ prompting Perón’s astonished reply: ‘What do you mean you can’t? Who deserves this post more than you?’ And Evita: ‘I’m not cut out for posts and protocols… If I were in government, I’d no longer be of the people, I couldn’t be what I am or do what I do… I’ve always lived in freedom. I was born for the Revolution. Look at them. Do you see them? Do you hear them? There is no scene more beautiful, no music more wonderful. My place is among them… I am their bridge to you… I don’t wish to be anything else. Promise me that if one day I am not there for them… you will go on listening…’ And then, turning to the crowd who chorused her name: ‘I am worthy not for what I have done, I am worthy not for what I have given up, I am worthy not for what I am or what I have. I have only one thing that is worthy and I keep it in my heart; it aches in my soul, it aches in my flesh and burns in my nerves. It is my love for the people and for Perón. If the people were to ask me for my life, I would give it to them gladly, because the happiness of a single descamisado is worth more than all my life.’
What an orator, thought Marroné to himself, looking up for a minute at the closed cubicle door. It wasn’t your run-of-the-mill campaign speech, a mere rhetorical exercise; it was Public Speaking and Influencing Men in Business by Dale Carnegie incarnate. Cold intelligence could make many a specific objection to Evita’s words, but the heart was overpowered by them. That was the touchstone of a good speaker: when they managed to convey their passion even to those who didn’t agree with their ideas. ‘Touching people’s hearts,’ Marroné said to himself, ‘is not the same as shaping their minds, but it’s definitely a step in the right direction.’ The formula sounded so apt that he vowed to jot it down in quotation marks, with his name at the side in brackets, in his notebook of famous quotes and phrases.
Allies of imperialism, the military and the oligarch traitors interpreted Perón’s prudence and Evita’s self-denial as weakness and launched their first coup, thwarted by the swift mobilisation of the people, who once again poured into the square to defend their leader. But Evita had understood that the presence of the people on the streets wasn’t enough. She didn’t want her descamisados to go like lambs to the slaughter. As well as being mobilised, the people had to be armed. And there she was again, in work clothes, hair loose, like a young guerrilla, examining a 9mm pistol that she had picked up from a table covered in an impressive array of hardware, remarking, ‘With these in the hands of my descamisados, the oligarchs will shit their pants,’ while the box read: 5,000 automatic pistols and 1,500 machine guns bought with money from the Foundation, the first weapons of the Peronist People’s Army, to be delivered to the workers to defend Perón and his government. Had these weapons reached their destination, Argentina’s recent history would have been very different: Perón wouldn’t have been overthrown by the Liberating Revolution, no exile or firing squads, no torture or murder of popular militants and workers’ leaders… But, working tirelessly and frantically, sometimes sleeping no more than two or three hours a night, as if wanting in just a few short years to compensate the poor for more than a hundred of suffering, attending only to the needs of her descamisados, Evita has neglected her own, and the cancer prayed for by the oligarchy, and lamented so bitterly by her people, has now taken possession of her body… Evita was now in her sickbed, receiving a group of five children, including the urchin from Los Toldos, and as she spoke you could see they drank in her every word: ‘Just one thing I ask of you today, children: that you promise to defend Perón and fight for him to the death. When I am no longer here, you will have to take my place: you will be the bridge between Perón and the people, you will be the eternal watchmen of the Revolution, for you are my heirs, and in the next picture, the five children, now grown up and with rifles in their hands, never forgot Evita’s message; and today wherever there’s a child crying for food, wherever there’s a worker fighting against exploitation, wherever there are people fighting for their liberation, there will always be a Montonero.
Once Evita was dead, the text proceeded rather more demurely, she was handed over to the Spanish embalmer, Dr Pedro Ara, so that that she would live on in soul and body too; so that, like Joan of Arc, she would be there to guide us in the struggle against foreign domination. The photo showed Evita in silhouette, covered by a shroud, while a bald Dr Frankenstein in white coat and glasses contemplated the maiden from Los Toldos – his masterpiece. After the funeral, which lasted a fortnight, during which the sky came out in sympathy with the dispossessed, accompanying their outpourings of grief with persistent drizzle, the body was deposited in the General Confederation of Labour building, where it lay patiently awaiting the erection of the Monument to the Descamisado, which will be the tallest in the world at twice the height of the Statue of Liberty, and will contain a silver sarcophagus, the permanent resting place for her mortal remains.
He smiled when he came across his old friend, the Descamisado of the Monument. His and Evita’s paths crossed at every turn, in every box. The next few showed archive footage of the military’s bombardment of Plaza de Mayo, of the coup that ousted Perón and of the iconoclastic fury unleashed by the anti-Peronists on effigies of Perón and Evita, and here again Marroné’s and Evita’s paths crossed. For, having been born at the height of the Perón administration, he well remembered the pompier portraits of the President and First Lady in the school entrance hall, by the dark wood panelling that listed in gold lettering the ‘Dux Medallist Boys’; he effortlessly recalled the opening phrases of his first reading book (‘Eva… Evita… Evita looks at the little girl… the boy looks at Evita… Perón loves children’) and the bust of Evita that presided over the school’s playground – an Evita with a plaited bun, mounted on a polished black marble pedestal, which they used as a base for tag or hide-and-seek. But suddenly one day – he must have been in third or perhaps fourth grade – he saw the mistresses, masters, headmaster and directors all kissing and hugging, and where the portraits of Perón and Evita had been, there now hung a portrait of the Queen, and they had new reading books, and there was no sign of the bust of Evita, not even of its pedestal: it had been removed, and the hole hastily filled with new flagstones, as if to erase every trace of her existence. And so it had been in every school, in every public office, in every hospital, police station and town square. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of busts of Perón and Evita delivered up to the fury of sledgehammers, pickaxes and iron bars: ears gone, noses gone, cloven in two, heads rolling with all the zeal of the French Revolution.
Just then a dull murmur reached his ears, muffled and powerful as the roar of the stadium on matchday. For a moment he thought his imagination had conjured up the roar of the people wailing for Eva’s return, but after listening hard for a few seconds the sound had only increased, so, pulling up his overalls in resignation, he flushed the toilet and the water washed his weak pee away – the sole tangible result of all his straining – and poked his head out of the office’s inner window. The sound came from the factory: it was the corrugated iron roof clattering and rattling in the falling rain. At that moment a bolt of lightning lit up windows and skylights, and a second later the first clap of thunder shook the whole structure, which, like a huge metal drum, went on vibrating for some time. He went out into the main corridor and caught the first gust of fresh air full in the face as it came in through the open window; he thrust his hands and arms outside, and felt the icy water and the gentle pattering of a few small hailstones, which melted on his palms as he watched; then, lifting his hands to his face, he freshened his forehead, his neck, his ears, his tired eyes. The rain washed the snow-covered gardens, which appeared less white and more green by the lightning, their coat of plaster trickling away through the blades of grass, and flowing in milky streams down ditches and paths.
Watching the rain, Marroné lost himself the way others lose themselves in the immensity of the sea or the depths of a log-fire. Something had changed in him – something was still changing in him – after reading the photonovel of Evita’s life. ‘It’s just another order,’ he had snapped at Paddy, believing it to be true. ‘They mean nothing to me; they’re just mass-produced busts,’ he had added, cursing his bad luck. But what if it wasn’t just a question of luck, good or bad? What if there was a reason for him to get involved in the strike? At times his mind’s eye caught flashes of a secret design, but for the moment all he could make out were a few loose ends. Could that be what Paddy had been trying to get across? He, Marroné, had marched in and ordered the busts like someone buying a dozen pastries – and from an oligarch exploiter no less. No, the busts of Eva couldn’t come from the hands of dissatisfied, exploited workers: that was the lesson. They could only come from the hands of the satisfied, well-remunerated, well-treated working class… of happy descamisados. The busts of Eva couldn’t be bought; they had to be earned. They would be his when he had learnt to be worthy of them.
But how? Whatever the answer, he knew that for the moment he had to watch and wait and listen. It – the answer – would come, as it had on so many other occasions, apparently out of nowhere, but a nowhere fertilised and cultivated with days or weeks of apparently fruitless effort. The bust of Eva was an oracle, a talking head that would give all the right answers when asked the right questions. And all Marroné’s questions boiled down to one basic one: would he be a condor or a sparrow? A Don Quixote or a priest and barber? A ‘man of genius’ or an ‘ordinary man’? Tomorrow maybe, or in the days to come, he was sure to find out, but he could already feel the answer incubating in the depths of his soul.