No sooner did the first gloom of dawn creep through his sleep-encrusted eyelids than the man woke up and wondered who he was. The two words that came into his mind – ‘Ernesto Marroné’ – though not quite enough, did at least allow him to move on to the next question: where exactly, and in what, was he? He was sitting, his knees forced into his chest by the cramped circular walls; these were rough and fluted and, when he rapped on them with his knuckles, they gave a metallic boom. In the roof, which was flat, there was a round hole about the diameter of a teacup, through which dribbled the meagre light and air; stretching up his arm, he could just about manage to poke his fingers through, which, from the outside, he imagined – in a spasm of spliced consciousness – must have looked like worms wriggling their way out of a tin can. The bottom, on the other hand, was little more than a soggy mass of flakes that crumbled in his fingers like wet choux pastry, leaving his feet resting on the spongy surface of the ground, which, when trodden underfoot, exhaled a nauseating stench that made the air quite unbreathable. He couldn’t lift it, whatever it was he was in, but, by pushing the walls with his hands, he discovered it was possible to move it from side to side and, by rocking in ever-widening arcs, he eventually managed to tip it over, and he backed out to find himself on another planet. Neither the lunar landscape, riddled with potholes and craters full of iridescent water that reflected nothing but itself, nor the mountains that fumed relentlessly despite the swirling drizzle, seemed to belong to any natural geography. They did to human geography, though: the vast marches of polythene bags, grizzly newspaper, plastic containers and broken bottles, the snowdrifts of flaking polystyrene, helped him grasp the fact that he must be in a garbage tip. He cast about him in all directions: as far as the misty drizzle revealed any shapes, there wasn’t a single house, not a single tree – nothing but the sheer spurs of the tip, made ever hazier by the distance and the rain. He made for a steep bank along which muddy waterfalls cascaded softly over inflated cliffs of polythene. His whole body ached, as if he had been in a rugby game after which the other team, not content with whipping them on the field, had barged into the changing rooms and beaten them with sticks; and incapable of remembering what had happened, he tried to imagine how he might, in one of the possible worlds his mind was capable of grasping, have come to such a sorry pass. He didn’t even recognise as his own the clothes he stood up in: the buttonless, double-breasted serge jacket, which he could barely fasten over the bleached-out t-shirt; the elasticated tracksuit bottoms with foot straps, so short they left his ankles exposed; the fraying espadrilles, whose rope soles softened by the water had begun to unravel and dragged behind him like dead snakes. Didn’t he use to wear suits of the finest cashmere, ties of silk and Italian shoes? No, that had been in another life. White overalls, boots, hard hat? Not any more, it seemed. The images dissolved in the pools of his memory as soon as he tried to grasp them, and in like manner his feet, as he attempted to scale the bank, churned the crumbling rubbish without going anywhere. It was as if, in the relentlessly repeated act of climbing, his muscles were in pursuit of a memory rather than a physical spot, and they found it when he reached the top: he had already been here, not long ago; but it had been darkest night and he hadn’t been able to see, as he could now, the winding palisade of dilapidated shacks, huddled together like cattle in a flooded field, between the grey drizzle and the vast mirror of water; and it was only now, when his crusted eyes met the crusted landscape, that it all came flooding back to him.
Paddy was dead, the busts were gone and his own life had been saved by a miracle. Dragging him by the hand like a rag doll – the battered knight-errant assisted by his faithful squire – El Tuerto had led him down the indistinguishable alleyways of the rickety maze: dogs barked as they passed, children scattered before them, chamamé and cumbia duelled on rival radio sets. ‘This way, Ernesto… mind yer head… Geroudofit, yer mutt!’ El Tuerto shredded his sentences between gasps. On yet another anonymous corner he gave Marroné a shove without warning and they crashed as one through a swing door on tyre hinges.
The house was part airbrick, part corrugated iron, part wood. Lit by a couple of candles, the front room contained: a chest of drawers upon which stood a black-and-white TV set, whose light, he would later discover, came from a kerosene lamp set in its hollow innards; a half-open Siam fridge; a Gilera motorbike, whose back wheel and various parts were dotted about the floor (El Tuerto was a mechanic at the factory); a stout woman in a mousey, floral-print dressing gown that enveloped her like a badly wrapped parcel; and two girls of six and ten, playing with dead babies on the dirt floor (upon closer inspection they turned out to be bald dolls with missing arms or legs). The woman was in the process of making milanesas in a frying pan that wobbled precariously atop a Primus stove on the floor and barely turned round when the two quivering lumps burst in.
‘Oh. So you’re back, are you? Well? How did you get on with the strike?’ she asked, her feigned innocence dripping with malice as she slapped a raw cutlet in egg and breadcrumbs. ‘Over is it? Get everything you bargained for, did you?’
‘Shut your face, Pipota, and stick your ’ead out to see if we’ve been followed,’ barked El Tuerto at her, unbuttoning his overalls; it was an order she chose blithely to ignore, returning instead to the hypnotic sputterings of her milanesa. ‘Oy! Ernesto! What you waiting for?’ yelled El Tuerto, making Marroné leap into the air with alarm.
El Tuerto was already down to his underpants, which peeked out red from beneath the thick fold of hairy belly, and was trying to extricate his boots from his overalls spread on the floor.
‘Get out of those things, will you. If the pigs show up, or the union goons, you’re dead meat.’
Marroné hastily complied, but when he reached the fourth button (he was having difficulty undoing them, as they were now welded with hard plaster to their buttonholes), he realised there was a problem. He called El Tuerto to one side and whispered in his ear:
‘Errb. I dot dothig odd udderdeath,’ he said, gesturing at the three ladies present.
‘Eh?’ answered El Tuerto. ‘I didn’t get a bloody word of that.’
‘I dot wedding eddy udderdads,’ he rephrased, pointing insistently at his crotch. His thick tongue and tumid lips could barely form words.
El Tuerto was now jumping about the room as if in a sack race, pulling on skin-tight jeans below his Huracán shirt.
‘Naaaah. Don’t worry about those two, won’t be the first cock they’ve seen. Just as long as it stays visible… And the other one must have lost count by now. Right, Pipota?’ he chuckled as he rummaged in the chest of drawers and tossed Marroné some light-blue Lycra underpants and the drainpipe tracksuit bottoms, a buttonless double-breasted jacket, and a bleached-out t-shirt in quick succession. ‘Try these on. I got better threads than these, but you can’t be going around the place all got up like a dog’s dinner, now, can you? You’ll stick out like a sore thumb. Alright, Ernesto, go on; you can use the bedroom if you’re that fussed about it.’
The room he had entered lay on the other side of a cotton counterpane, attached to the door frame with drawing pins, and every square inch was taken up by a double bed covered with a brand-new Afghan blanket, a three-piece wardrobe whose veneer was chipped at the corners of the doors, a night table, a lighted candle in a candlestick and, asleep on a camp bed, a tiny little old man who looked so still and worn by life that he might actually have been dead. Through the curtain, as he undressed – no mean feat, for the fabric of his overalls was by then as hard and unyielding as plasterboard and, rather than a man disrobing, he felt like a chick hatching from an egg – Marroné had eavesdropped on the conversation.
‘So you’re out of a job again, are you?’
‘But I wasn’t fired this time, Pipota. I was on strike.’
‘How long d’you last this time? Twenty days? What did I tell you? Bet you don’t see the end of the month out.’
‘Listen ’ere, old girl… we was fucked. Several of the comrades pegged out. I got out of there by a sheer fluke.’
‘All right, keep your shirt on. We’ll get by on the milanesa butties. I’ll make another batch straight off, now you’re back to lug the basket around. What about me laddo in there, who’s he? Got to put grub on his plate, too, have I?’
At this point El Tuerto’s voice had fallen to a whisper, and his wife must have been suitably impressed because she had answered in the same hushed tones. Marroné also remembered feeling a rather mean-minded relief at overhearing his hosts’ conversation. All the women he had met during the strike were self-sacrificing proletarians who put their shoulders to the wheel, took whatever came their way and supported, not to say encouraged, their husbands’ bravery – and all without a word of complaint. Of course, he’d only met the ones who had visited the factory. There were also, he now realised, women who stayed at home, cursing and muttering as they fried their poisoned milanesas.
Moving delicately and feeling as fragile as a limb just out of a cast, he’d sat down to get changed on the bed, which was so high (each leg stood on three bricks) that his feet didn’t reach the floor; the next thing he remembered was a hand slapping him gently to bring him round from his comatose slumber.
‘Ernesto… Ernesto… There’s some people ’ere as wants to see you,’ El Tuerto told him.
There were three of them. The first, between forty and forty-five, was tall, dark-skinned, mono-browed, sunken-eyed; he wore bell-bottoms – from under which peeped the toes of moccasins – and a short-sleeved safari shirt, and smoked super-king-size, which he pulled out of one or other countless pockets weighed down with buckles; he was backed up by a hulk with long hair and a moustache, wearing a tight-fitting, flesh-coloured polo neck and towelling wrist- and head-bands, as if he’d just dropped in after a game of tennis; and a lad who couldn’t have been more than twenty, in a shimmering brown velvet jacket, the crease in his immaculate white trousers ironed sharp as a knife, and whose unruly quiff had been slicked back into a roof of corrugated iron. They shook hands very formally: Sr Gareca, Malito and El Bebe. El Tuerto had brought them all chairs, but had parked himself on an upended orange crate; he poured them a glass of unchilled white wine from a bottle without a label and sent the girls into the other room; La Pipota, meanwhile, went on with her milanesas, filling the scant breathing space with a choking fog of burnt oil and kerosene.
Sr Gareca had opened by acknowledging their achievements in the shanties and had thanked them for their contributions of cider and panettone on Christmas Eve, then gone on to explain how they’d do their best to pay them back (‘You scratch our backs…’), even if they did lack the wherewithal. But then, the mutual return of favours aside, one thing was clear: they all had the same interests at heart, like dragging the poor out of their poverty (here La Pipota, who, with snorts of disbelief and exaggerated gesticulations, provided a running commentary on all she heard, had said – as if to herself, but out loud for all to hear – ‘Yeah, right, just as long as them’s the poor,’ and her husband flashed her a withering glare with his white eye, which, like one of those purple rings you buy at the seaside, seemed to change colour with his mood). They shared the same enemy, Sr Gareca had continued, not letting on he’d heard a thing, and then, after all, they were all Peronists, weren’t they. At this point Malito had whispered something in his ear, and Sr Gareca had muttered back through clenched teeth, ‘Not now, wait a bit.’ Up till now, Sr Gareca resumed his introduction, they’d been getting along famously, ‘All for one and one for all’ as they say; whenever the need had arisen, they’d helped each other out, and if there had ever been any friction, or the odd misunderstanding, they had worked things out with goodwill ‘and above all respect’. He spoke carefully, choosing his words and using them painstakingly to construct his sentences, which he invariably ended with an ‘Am I making sense?’, to which Marroné would invariably reply with bouts of vehement nodding, though he understood less and less of what was said. Satisfied, Sr Gareca had paused, lit up another super-king-size, let out the smoke and set off again with a ‘The fact is…’ that had sounded promising but he soon lapsed back into his circuitous progress through the chaff without ever reaching the wheat: things, it seemed, had changed; now they could no longer each tend to their own little patch; the time had come to join forces and think big. ‘He wants to do business with the company,’ Marroné had told himself, beginning to join the dots: since Sr Tamerlán’s kidnapping they’d been dishing out food in the shanties like there was no tomorrow; in fact, he himself as head of procurement had been responsible for finding the cheapest fare, and it made perfect sense for the panettone and cider he’d ordered to end up here in this shanty town; what made no sense at all was that the very same shanty housed a company that wanted to do business with Tamerlán & Sons, and that someone like Sr Gareca was its owner or CEO. Unless, of course, it was all about sanitary landfill, which made quite a lot of sense, especially if it involved buying the land for a song and bulldozing the shanties to push its value up; Sr Tamerlán had made many such an investment. ‘The fact is we’ve got the people, we’ve got the territory and we’ve got the experience; I won’t bore you with all the details, but right here in the area we’ve done two factories, a hospital and a lumberyard…’ Oh, so this was another construction company then, and what Sr Gareca was proposing was a merger. So the rumours going round were true: far from being kennels for slumdogs, dark shores where the jetsam from the city’s churning wake washed up, the shanties were miniature republics, underdeveloped versions of those European principalities that flourish away from the asphyxiating regulations that hold back the economies of the big republics. As rumour had it, the shanties were a vast black market, an archipelago of miniature duty-free zones, like the tax havens of the Caribbean, amidst an ocean of asphalt and cement. They had everything; everything was bought and everything was sold: what you couldn’t find elsewhere you could buy here, and Marroné made a mental note to ask about those disposable nappies. These true clandestine industrial parks were home to textile firms, furniture factories, bottling plants that filled brand-name bottles with foul substances, slaughterhouses for contaminated animals and travel agents that organised package holidays back home for illegal immigrants. He’d heard all this before but had dismissed it more often than not as fantasy and exaggeration. And now he had the tangible proof before his very eyes: one of these entrepreneurs, who had, by dodging the taxman, entered the fray with the lowest prices and made an astronomical killing, was daring to speak with one of the giants of the field as an equal.
‘Don’t forget the pharmacy,’ the young man in the velvet jacket had chipped in at one point, and Sr Gareca included it forthwith in his oral curriculum. The ever-obliging El Tuerto went around attentively refilling their glasses, while his wife went on frying her milanesas, and every one she tossed on the growing stack was accompanied by a barbed sideswipe: ‘Oh. Right. The lefties gang up with the pimps and we’re saved!’
‘In drincidle id sounds like an inderesdig drodosal,’ said Marroné at one point, and he felt the tension in the atmosphere ease immediately, while the three visitors exchanged half-smiles and satisfied glances, and El Tuerto blurted out an exultant ‘I told you? Didn’t I tell you?’ Sr Gareca lit the first cigarette of a new pack (he seemed to have one in every pocket – even his sleeves had pockets) and, exhaling, he got right down to brass tacks. ‘Here in the shanties we’re in a position to offer you free transit and lodging, and outside, contacts in the other settlements. Men: no less than fifty. We can count on you, can’t we Tuerto?’ El Tuerto nodded, and Pipota muttered, ‘Yeah, right. When they scarper at the first shot, he’ll be the one leading the pack.’ The three men no longer looked at the wife but at the husband, as if urging him to take matters in hand, and El Tuerto, realising he’d have to deal with a sharper weapon than his wife’s tongue if he didn’t oblige, covered the two metres between them in two strides and stood beside her, this time without a word.
‘Something the matter? What are you stood there looking at me for?’ brazened Pipota, in the same flat tone as before. Without answering the question her husband grabbed her right hand, which was running with egg, and thrust it, palm down, into the breadcrumbs. But only when he twisted her wrist to coat the back of her hand with breadcrumbs did the penny drop, too late to prevent the mechanic’s sinewy mitt from plunging her breaded right hand into the boiling oil. It can’t have been more than a second, and it was by no means burnt to a crisp – just a light goldening; more the egg and breadcrumbs than the underlying flesh – but it was still pretty shocking: Pipota emitted a string of fearsome shrieks and, when her husband let go of her, she fled the house, knocking over oil and Primus as she went. Sr Gareca and his men exchanged approving glances, Malito even going so far as to give El Tuerto, who was tidying up the mess, a pat on the back. Picking up where he left off, Sr Gareca went on with his business proposal. ‘We ’ave the will, we ’ave the grit, we ’ave the people. What we ’aven’t got is the infrastructure, see. The kit.’
He handed Marroné a folded piece of graph paper torn from a spiral-bound exercise book, on which there was a typewritten list:
GEAR REQUIRED
While Marroné’s widening eyes read through the list, Sr Gareca felt the need to go on with his explanation. ‘We reckon that under the current circumstances we are ready to take the leap from isolated, individual actions to a full-scale, coordinated attack on simultaneous fronts. We’re getting nowhere offing the odd pig in the street: we have to take the police station, seize the arsenal and blow the place sky high. We’re not hurting them by holding up grocers or kiosk-owners, who at the end of the day are all our brothers. We have to hit them where it really hurts: supermarkets, banks, multinationals… Because that way it ain’t stealing any more; it’s taking back what they took from us, just the way you lot taught us. I mean, what’s the robbing of a bank compared to the founding of a bank…’ he went on. ‘That’s why we’ve decided to join the armed struggle. What we will need is a couple of trained instructors too, coz it’s not like we’re about to stick heavy artillery into the hands of any silly prat.’ Malito whispered in his ear a couple more times until, in exasperation, Sr Gareca finally caved in: ‘Comrade Malito here wants to know if the campaign of police executions is still ongoing, coz he wants to join it, and can you notch two up for him: one from the hospital and another from the raid on the armoured truck last September?’ Marroné looked up from the piece of quivering paper in his hands into the eyes of a Malito beaming at him with a broad, friendly grin. He went back to the list after croaking out a ‘No droblem’.
‘Whaddaya wad de dazooka and de bines for?’ asked Marroné out of professional reflex. He was after all head of procurement and accustomed to considering any order exorbitant on principle.
Sr Gareca, Malito and El Bebe looked at each other rather taken aback, as if their confidence in him was suddenly wavering. ‘To defend the settlement, in case they send in the tanks. The idea – I mean, if you agree, of course – is to declare this a liberated zone. Us and the other neighbourhoods can form a cordon street by street and cut off the capital.’
‘And the andi-airdraft?’ Marroné insisted. ‘Don’t you dink id’s a bid ober de dop?’
Once again the triple exchange of looks, only this time there was a faint note of reproach in Sr Gareca’s tone:
‘Every time you lot pull a big one, comrade, they let the local neighbourhoods have it. It ain’t just the pigs we’re up against now, it’s the bleeding army. Only two days ago – two days – they razed the Iapi and the 25 de Mayo settlements to the ground with fighters and helicopter gunships. That’s the whole point, comrade. You do what you have to, but then don’t go and leave us up the creek.’
After that the discussion relaxed and took a more predictable turn: Marroné, nodding and numb with tiredness, ticking off the items on the shopping list, asking for unnecessary details and coming out with the occasional reservation for the sake of verisimilitude; at one point Pipota returned, her hand wrapped in a rag, and disappeared into the bedroom, where the two girls were asleep on the bed; at another point an insistent drumming began overhead, and, looking up at the corrugated-iron roof, Sr Gareca remarked that it was good news, because the rain and its consequences – the poor visibility, the mires, the floods – meant that the police were less likely to move into the neighbourhood. He had barely finished the sentence when the barking of dogs, the shouts, the gunfire and the raking white-hot beams of spotlights that tigered their shapes through the walls announced the start of the raid.
Guns drawn, the three men bundled Marroné over the bed and over Pipota and her two daughters, who lay huddled and bawling beside her, then kicked down one of the bedroom’s plywood walls and burst into the alley winding off through the shacks. Drenched in seconds and half-blind from the water pouring from the corrugated-iron roofs, he let himself be dragged along identical, criss-crossing alleys, switching course abruptly and forced to dive whenever they ran into the spotlights and gunshots (Malito threw himself on top of him every time, using his body to shield him from the bullets). Down dizzying tunnels of blackness that seemed to swing up and down as they went, one moment up slippery slopes, the next down liquid slides that plunged into deep vertical wells, Sr Gareca guiding the way, El Bebe firing to cover them as they retreated and Malito flying Marroné behind him like a kite, they finally came out into the open at the edge of a bank, whereupon Sr Gareca grabbed him by the arm and shouted in his ear over the din of the rain, the barking and the shots, ‘Now hide, we’ll throw them off the scent,’ then gave him a shove that sent him rolling downhill. Bouncing like a ball, sometimes on inflated bags that cushioned his fall, at others on jagged edges and sharp corners, he eventually reached the foot of the mountain, whereupon the kindly flash from a bolt of lightning silhouetted the squat outline of a bottomless barrel, where he curled up inside, trembling with cold and fright; but then, realising the meanest searchlight would still pick him out like a rabbit on the road, he tilted and tipped it till it stood upright, the narrow orifice in the top doubling as breathing- and spy-hole. Through it, if the rain that found its way inside didn’t sting his eyes, he would have been able to spend the entire night gazing at a small disc of blood-red sky. Abandoning the upright, he hugged his knees and slid down, like melting ice cream into its cone, awakening several hours later, in the same position, to the small, white circle of dawn overhead.
He had been wandering about among the hunched and shapeless shacks for some time now, up to his knees in mud and water, shivering in his soaking clothes, without spotting a single other human form. He plucked up the courage outside one brick house to clap hands and shout ‘Ave María Purísima!’, the way they do in the countryside. But no one answered his call, not even when he banged on the metal door with his open palm and shouted ‘Please, open up!’ Then, from a neighbouring shack, someone did appear: a boy in shorts of a nondescript shade, a t-shirt so short it left his distended belly exposed like some uninhibited pregnant woman’s, and blondish hair blanched more by malnutrition than by race, his legs sticking out of wellington boots so large the edges dug into his groin, but even then barely rose above the water.
‘Sweedie… is bubby in?’ Marroné asked him, and his own voice frightened him: it sounded like a toad venturing out to croak in the rain.
The boy shook his head. He was staring oddly at Marroné.
Swatting away a couple of flies that insisted on clambering over his eyelashes and lips, he tried again:
‘Aren’d dere eddy growd-ups wid you?’
As if summoned by some magic spell and preceded by the swell displaced by her body, a toothless Indian crone in a Pepsi t-shirt and men’s jeans several sizes too large appeared in the cave-mouth. She sized up Marroné with a single glance.
‘Out of here, you bum! Go and do your begging somewhere else!’ she yelled at him, before grabbing the child by the hand and disappearing into her riverside grotto.
A little further on, however, from a coloured barge beached in the mud for the rest of time, someone did answer his call.
‘Psst! Young ’un!’
A Bolivian woman in bowler hat and plaits peeked out of a porthole, shooing him away.
‘Hide yourself, young ’un,’ whished the chola. ‘They’re still snooping around.’
‘Excuse me,’ he said, without understanding properly. ‘I’m looking for El Duerdo’s house. Do you dnow hib?’
The chola shook her head, so hard her plaits cracked like whips.
‘Bibota?’
Nope.
‘Señó Gadeca? Malito? El Bebe?’
This time she switched to an emphatic nodding that left her hat tilted to one side, and a smile that revealed a gold-sheathed incisor, which for one sorry second Marroné envied, lit up her face.
‘Where cad I find deb?’
The chola’s finger pointed upwards, and Marroné’s gaze followed it, as if he hoped to see the three of them winging their way across the overcast sky. When the penny dropped, his stomach turned and he struggled to get out the question:
‘Wad happened?’
The chola made a gun of her hand and her finger pulled the trigger.
‘All thdee of dem?’
‘Señó Gareca were still a-moving. Like dis,’ she said, imitating a mermaid dancing in the waves. ‘El Bebe were me hubbie’s nephew, dead as a doorknob he was, his body tossed at de wayside. Dey was defending some big gun commandant from de guerrilla. Dey done took dem all away.’
Marroné thanked her, as a calf might thank the slaughterman that has just dealt it the hammer-blow, and staggered off through the current as best he could, past floating bits of wood, drowned rats, islands of excrement and even, face down, the corpse of a man. He had to get out of this water maze as fast as he could, away from this mock Venice of cardboard and tin. ‘I’m not from this place, this isn’t my country, there’s been a terrible mistake, help me get home,’ his head implored powerful imaginary intercessors. As in fairy tales, the babe had been stolen from his cradle and whisked through the air to a faraway land of monsters, a world that was the precisely detailed denial of all he knew and loved; he had to escape by his own native wit or he would drown and his corpse float off face down after the other one to join the rest of the trash at the foot of the steep embankment. It wasn’t so much the dying that bothered him as dying here, in this place, amidst the rubbish and the mud. He yearned to return to the golden rugby fields of his youth, feel the sun on his face, the scent of trampled clover in his lungs; if his blood had to be spilt, would that it were in a brand-new Dodds shirt, flowing red on yellow like a blazing sunset, rather than sucked from him by these sticky rags or mingling with the eddies of sewage that hemmed him in on all sides. If he could just sit down and rest for a minute, get out of the rain and his feet out of the water, regain a shred of human form, just maybe he’d be able to come up with something.
A rusty Fanta sign nailed to a wall of planks; a sheet of blue polythene propped up by two sticks that, buckling under the weight of the accumulated rainwater, formed an elegant baldachin; and a wooden bench moored with a piece of rope to prevent the current carrying it off, which came into view on peeking round the corner of one of the main channels, told him that, for once, his prayers had been answered. Relieved, he straightened the floating bench and sat down on it, his rear sinking below the waterline, and no sooner had he negotiated some kind of balance than he noticed the slant-eyed face of a man watching him from behind the bars of the window.
‘I wad somedig to drink. Somedig strog,’ ordered Marroné, stifling the urge to kiss his hands.
The man vanished into the gloom and came back with a glass of colourless liquid, but when Marroné reached out, he withdrew it into the depths. Marroné rummaged in his pocket and pulled out a huge, white, roughly square-shaped piece of limestone. Bashing it several times on one of the bars, he eventually managed to crack it and prise it open like an oyster: inside was his money, which the plaster had preserved from the ravages of the water. He daintily extracted a wad of whitish notes, still damp and stuck together, peeled one off and handed it to the man, who in return handed him the glass, the contents of which Marroné downed in one. It was cheap gut-rot, which might have been nothing more than rubbing alcohol diluted in water but, together with the tears in his eyes and the burning in his throat, he felt the warmth return to his frozen limbs, the blood to his heart and his soul to his body. He chased it down with another, which he paid for with a few coppers from the change, then, at fainting pitch, ordered a meat pasty, which promptly popped out through the bars. It was as cold and wet as a frog’s belly, but he wolfed it down without noticing. No doubt thanks to the alcohol that had burnt out his taste buds, it didn’t taste as bad as it looked, and he ordered two more, paying up front as before. He felt better with some food inside him – more upbeat, less defeated. He’d wait until nightfall and get out of there; it would be easier under cover of darkness to elude his pursuers. He told the wordless man he needed somewhere to rest for a few hours. A gesture was all it took to tell Marroné he had to enter by the back door; a few more pesos to buy him the privilege of a high bed that looked as if it was floating like a boat on the water (now he understood why they put bricks under the legs); and two minutes to undress and fall asleep under the dry blanket. He dreamt that his team had just won the rugby championship final: the captain of the rival team came up to congratulate him with a smile, his hair flaming like a beacon in the afternoon sunshine, and Marroné awoke, his eyes bathed in tears, to the sound of weeping.
The tears were his, but the weeping was coming from the next room, or maybe the next house (like dogs’ territory, boundaries here were invisible to the naked eye). He put on his barely dry clothes and, noticing with relief that the flood had retreated and left behind a memento of sedimental slime, like a lake bed, he squelched through it in his espadrilles – first inside then outside the house – in search of the source of the weeping, which seemed to coincide with a faint flickering light in a nearby window. A cool breeze was blowing and, high above, amidst the blue-grey clouds, twinkled a paltry scattering of urban stars. He pushed open a wooden door a good deal smaller than its frame, and made for a cradle improvised from a cardboard box, with tea towels for sheets, dimly lit by a lone candle set beside a picture of Eva Perón, before which stood a bunch of fresh flowers: humble daisies and honeysuckles. So their paths had crossed again; here he was, still fluttering round her flame and, for all he tried to get away, he always ended up coming back. ‘What is it now?’ he ventured to ask her. ‘What do you want from me? Why have you brought me here?’ He picked up the paint-pot-lid candlestick and brought the flame close to the face of the child within: a boy, just a few days old, a couple of weeks at most, his little almond eyes almost closed, his mouth and cheeks sticky with grime, and atop his head a crest of spiky, jet-black hair. What was such a tiny infant doing alone? What kind of people were these, how far had ignorance and poverty dehumanised them, that they could abandon such a small babe in arms? Another possibility occurred to him, and he clapped his hand to his mouth in horror. Perhaps the parents had been gunned down too. He felt, if not guilty, at least implicated, and recalled the late Sr Gareca’s lucid words, about taking responsibility for his actions, and decided to honour his last wish: he picked up the baby, cradling it to stop it crying, the way he used to with little Cynthia (only, she slept in a white wicker cradle with frills and flounces, holland sheets and satin bedspread), feeling its soft warmth against his chest. Marroné’s eyes filled with tears a second before his mind understood: the child was him; he was gazing at himself in a mirror of the past. This was how he had come into the world, this was how his life had started out: the same life in store for this child would have been his, had fate or chance not snatched him from the shack and carried him off to the palace. Not the same, he corrected himself; this child’s would be far worse, for the life of Ernesto Marroné (though, obviously, he wouldn’t have been called by that name) would have played itself out under the protection of a real-life Eva, not a mere icon like this. A series of imaginary flashbacks screened an alternative past – what his Peronist childhood would have been like under the constant care of Eva: a safe, hygienic birth in one of the brand-new hospitals that bore her name, his early years spent with his mother (his father was for now a hazy figure in this retrospective fantasy) in the spacious halls of the Maid’s Home, sleeping under satin quilts, playing with other children like himself – a Peronist child was never lonely – and drinking his milk on Louis XIV chairs upholstered in light brocade beneath chandeliers with crystal teardrops, until that ‘marvellous day’ in his mother’s life. ‘We’re going to see her, Ernestito!’ she said to him, picking him up and dancing with him (had his foster parents adopted him with that name or had they given it to him?). When the day finally came, his mother dressed him in a short-sleeved shirt, tie, short trousers and lace-up shoes, giving his slicked-down black hair a neat parting and wavy quiff; they took the tram on Avenida de Mayo and got off at Paseo Colón and Independencia, outside the imposing columns of the Foundation. Ernestito would be four or five years old. No, he couldn’t be, he realised, doing the sums; Eva would already have been dead by then. Three then, the age at which bourgeois or proletarian consciousness is born: the visit to Eva would be his earliest memory and brand his class consciousness for the rest of his days. Smiling, helpful uniformed men and women – her secretaries and assistants – would give them directions. ‘You have an audience with the Señora? This way please.’ They would walk past a long line of men in uniforms, cassocks and suits, and elegant, bejewelled women, and his mother would murmur, ‘I think these ladies and gentlemen were here first.’ ‘Them?’ Eva’s private secretary would say with a disparaging wave. ‘They are nothing but ambassadors, generals, businessmen, high-society ladies and church dignitaries. For decades they’ve gone first while the people waited. Now it’s their turn to wait. With Eva the last shall be first, and the first last,’ she concluded, pushing open the swing doors to Eva’s office.
She was seated behind her desk, legs crossed, dressed in an impeccably tailored suit with velvet lapels, hair gathered in a tight bun, and she was radiant: light poured from her eyes, her brow, her mouth and her ears, encircling her like a halo. His mother made to kneel and kiss her hands, telling Ernestito with a tug to do the same, but Eva stopped her with a gesture, and it was she who stood up, walked around her desk and came over to kiss her. ‘Your name’s Eulalia, isn’t it?’ said Eva, without checking her notes (Eulalia? Where on earth had he got that name from?). ‘I’ve seen you at the Maid’s Home on several occasions. So you’re looking for a house. What is it? Don’t you like it where you are? Do they treat you badly? Are you short of anything?’ Stammering, his mother would explain her reasons: the boy’s father worked in the sugar-cane plantations in Tucumán and had nowhere to stay when he came to visit; if she had somewhere of her own, maybe… Eva Perón listened and nodded and smiled; then, half-turning, all briskness and efficiency, to her court of ministers and trade unionists that, only now they were needed, Marroné’s fantasy had summoned: ‘House, furniture, kitchen equipment and refrigerator, and a job in Buenos Aires for her husband. Are you married?’ she asked as an afterthought, and Marroné’s mother shook her bowed head in shame. ‘Make that a bridal gown too.’ And by the following day they were installed in Ciudad Evita, in a smart little Californian bungalow with a front garden, two fully furnished rooms and a refrigerator in the living room; not one of those modern ones with angular, aggressive edges, but a Siam with rounded feminine forms, overflowing with food like a maternal breast, and atop it a little shrine with the portraits of Perón and Eva. His parents’ wedding – she all in white, he uncomfortable but happy in his first dark suit, smoothing his pencil moustache, the pair of them hand in hand in a long line of couples, all dressed the same, like a line of toppers on a wedding cake, a mass proletarian wedding officiated by Eva in the flesh, acting as everyone’s godmother; then the carefree childhood in a modest, but clean and comfortable, home, the games with other children of his kind in the community park (never lonely, with no one for company but the television or the maid in the gloomy Belgrano flat, never the endless Sundays, never children at St Andrew’s, whiter than him, shouting ‘Marron Crappé’). There was more: school, where the teachers read them The Reason for My Life without a twitch of sarcasm; the visits to the Children’s Republic, with its little scale houses, shops, churches and swimming pools; the Children’s Football Championships, where Eva always kicked off and handed out the medals afterwards, and Ernestito, who had scored the winning goal for his team – for in this other life he was a star of the national sport of football, not foreignising rugby – would always cherish the gold medallion with her profile on it, received from her very own hands; the Peronist Christmases with toys from the Foundation at the foot of the tree, and the inevitable cider and panettone on the chequered tablecloth; the Children’s Tourism Plans, the journey on the train where first class was working class; the stay in Chapadmalal, at one of the eight hotel complexes perched atop the cliffs as if standing guard over the people’s happiness, together with other children like Marroné, who, thanks to Evita, were seeing the sea for the first time. Yes, yes, that childhood might have been his had he not been robbed of it by the oligarchy, had he not been torn from his mother’s arms by an elderly couple, incapable, out of selfishness or laziness, of having children of their own until it was too late, then deciding on a whim to get themselves one, like someone buying a puppy in a pet shop.
And at that point Marroné was at last granted the vision of the face of his true mother: not the face of that vaguely affectionate, always distant lady that popped up now and then to keep an eye on the maids and lecture them on how to bathe him, dress him and feed him, but the brave, obscure woman who had borne him in her belly for nine months, perhaps trekking long distances on her journey from the countryside to the city (he’d got it into his head they were from Tucumán and was surer of it with every passing minute), supporting him with one hand and stroking him with the other while she talked to him. But the dream was shattered no sooner had it begun: she hadn’t the wherewithal to keep him, she was alone in the monstrous, indifferent city. Why hadn’t she turned to Evita? Why hadn’t she taken her helping hand? There was no way of knowing. Yes, there was, he told himself, transforming his despondency into decisiveness. The time had come to ask the questions he never had: he would confront his parents, and if they didn’t talk, there would be birth certificates, adoption records… If she was still alive, he’d find her, go to see her and ask her. Because, while he was ignorant of the motives, there was no doubting the sentiment: he could see her clearly, torn apart by tears after signing, without having looked at the papers they handed to her (perhaps she couldn’t read), then regretting it, trying to go back for him and being held back, first by the strong arm of a head nurse, then ushered out into the street by another younger, pleasanter one, repeating to her ‘It’s better this way’. Marroné’s eyes filled with tears at the imaginary scene. Cradled in the warmth of his lap, the baby had fallen asleep and, all emotion, Marroné swore to him he’d never put him through his own terrible ordeal of orphancy: if Evita wasn’t there, he’d take charge and adopt him – if not as a son, at least as a godson. He’d look after him, watch over him, make sure he wanted for nothing. Because, for all he’d been brought up a bourgeois, his soul was anything but. He was, he realised at last, a Peronist born if not bred. The time had come for him to adopt his true identity. It suddenly became clear, crystal-clear, the reason for his presence in this incredible place, which had at first seemed to him the most foreign and alien of places, and now turned out to be the country of his lost childhood. If his steps had guided him to this shanty town and this house, it wasn’t because he was the victim of circumstances, but because he was following a path. All of this had happened – all of it: Sr Tamerlán’s severed finger, his captivity in the occupied factory, becoming a workers’ leader, the struggle against the forces of the anti-people, the death, or sacrifice as he could see it now, of Paddy, María Eva, El Bebe and so many others, his flight through the mud and water, the very existence of his genteel neighbourhood and this slum, of Montoneros and Sr Tamerlán – so that Marroné could find Marroné. Because he would only find out who he really was when he uncovered the obscure past that had been denied to him, the roots that reached deep into the garbage and the mire. He now also understood the deeper meaning of his mission (which might also be his life’s mission): it was nothing less than to carry the spirit of Eva, embodied in her busts, to the very heart of the corporation. For, being neither us nor them, he was the chosen one, predestined, belonging to both worlds. Like Eva, he was a bridge. Carrying Eva to the corporation, opening the corporation up to Eva: this way capital and labour would march hand in hand rather than be at loggerheads, and this senseless war that had claimed so many victims would come to an end. And, as if blessed by a vision underwriting the truth of his revelation, at that very moment he saw Eva Perón walk past the window of the shack.