Carlos Gamerro - The Adventure of the Busts of Eva Perón

Marroné flailed like a drowning man. ‘Listen, co… comrades, these aren’t just any busts. They’re busts of Eva Perón no less: Evita, the Standard-Bearer of the Poor, the Lady of Hope, the Spiritual Leader of the Nation! Will you strike against Eva? What kind of Peronists are you?’

It was useless, they weren’t listening. Tamely he let himself be led away by the heavy-jawed worker to a sector of the outer gallery where some office workers had gathered, several of whom were leaning on the banister watching the scenes playing out on the shop floor. Most of the foremen were still hanging in their chair-lifts like canaries on swings, some still hurling hoarse threats through their megaphones, others by now resigned to waiting for the strikers to get them down, using a system that had seemingly been adopted less out of efficiency than revenge: below one of the nearest chair-lifts several workers were holding a tarpaulin, stretched as tight as a drum-skin, and were urging the foreman to jump.

‘Come on, mate, we ain’t got all day, eh.’

‘Jump, mate, jump! We’ll be here for you.’

The foreman was doing his best to get to his feet, but his knocking knees wouldn’t let him and he slumped back into his seat; he eventually made it up and, clinging on to one of the vertical bars with rigid, corpse-like hands, he gingerly put one leg, then the other, over the horizontal bar and, wobbling on legs that had started doing the Charleston of their own accord, readied himself for the big jump.

‘Don’t run off on me, lads, you could do me a serious injury,’ he implored from his perch. ‘Remember I always treated you decently.’

Marroné had never heard anyone beg through a megaphone before: it created a rather odd effect. Out of the corner of his eye he noticed the office workers beside him had started laying bets: ‘A hundred says he jumps! Two hundred says he doesn’t! Three hundred says he hits the deck!’

‘Get a move on, will you! We got all the plaster in Paris if you break a leg.’ The foreman leant forwards and they all ran off with the tarpaulin, shouting ‘ Olé! ’ The poor sod above clung to his vertical bar like a stripper and then, whiter than any of the surrounding plaster, he wailed, ‘Oy! Stop playing silly buggers will you, don’t be so bloody daft!’

He was practically in tears and the workers were beneath him again, but the canvas rose and fell with their laughter like a cellophane sea, offering little in the way of safety.

At last the poor devil crossed himself swiftly, closed his eyes and leapt into the void. He landed bang in the middle of the tarpaulin, which gave almost all the way to the floor and then, answering the unanimous call of the six pairs of strong arms, bulged up and out, and launched him high into the air again. Then the blanketing began. During his first few pirouettes the foreman was still up to cursing the strikers and threatening them with reprisals, but as his somersaults got further and further from the ground, and his arms and legs flailed in the air more and more desperately, he went back to begging and pleading, and in the end just clenched his jaw and held on tight to his helmet in case it came off and he lost his teeth on it in one of the falls. Less out of mercy than weariness the workers finally deposited him on the ground and set off with their tarpaulin in search of another victim to rescue.

Later in the day one of the commissars came by and issued a directive to separate the management from the office staff; Marroné was herded with the execs into Sansimón’s office, where, having recovered from the shock, the man himself ushered them in with a cheery ‘Ah, Macramé, still here?’ and introduced him to the members of his crisis cabinet: Aníbal Viale, the chief financial officer; Arsenio Espínola, the marketing manager; Garaguso, the personnel manager; and Cerbero, head of security, whose names Marroné jotted down in his notebook as soon as he had the chance. He asked for permission to use the phone and it was magnanimously granted by Sansimón, but no sooner did he reach for the receiver than an ‘Oy, you! What you doing?’ from one of the two commissars guarding them made him leap backwards as if the telephone had snarled at him. ‘All communication with outside suspended till further notice,’ the commissar told him, revelling in his bureaucratic tone, and Marroné was just able to make out the mocking grins exchanged by Sansimón and his men.

‘Welcome to Socialist Argentina, Macramé,’ Sansimón said to him tongue-in-cheek before returning to the dialogue of signs and whispers he and his management had been conducting.

Around midday two new workers came to relieve the guards and the personnel manager hailed them with a ‘Baigorria, Saturnino, great to have you back with us, you don’t know how much we missed you!’ With the changing of the guard came some rolls and two litre-bottles of Fanta, which Sansimón and his management team shared out with an egalitarian disdain that duly included him. They had a radio on to catch the news, but there was no mention whatsoever of their plight, understandably so, since for some time now more factories, companies and government buildings were occupied than still in the hands of their rightful owners. What worried Marroné most was that the company might not have heard what had happened and attribute his inexplicable absence to negligence or — worse still — bad faith, and what annoyed him most was that he hadn’t brought with him any of the management books he so enjoyed and which would have at least allowed him to extract some benefit from the bleak hours of waiting, which his comrades in captivity spent playing cards, sleeping in shifts on the white leather sofa or practising their putting with Sansimón’s putter and a plastic cup. At one point he tried to interest Garaguso in the advantages of applying the techniques of How to Win Friends and Influence People to the settlement of union disputes. ‘Yeah, yeah, I did that course too,’ Garaguso interrupted him soon after he’d started, ‘but I’d like to see Dale Carnegie take on these babes in arms with his sincere praises and friendly smiles. There are two and only two ways to influence a certain class of people: gold or lead. And as head of procurement you surely realise that lead’s a lot cheaper than gold.’ At about seven o’clock two workers in black helmets brought in the sales manager, who was sweating, dishevelled and sprinkled with white dust; he explained that, tipped off by a loyal worker about the start of the occupation, he’d hidden among the towering sacks of plaster and stayed put until he’d been captured making a break for the outside to bring back reinforcements. ‘They’re highly organised and synchronised,’ he remarked in a whisper to cap his account. ‘This isn’t just the workers — they’re getting outside help.’ ‘You don’t say!’ sneered Sansimón, belittling his revelation; then, turning to Garaguso, he said, ‘Remind me of your infallible infiltrator-detection system again, will you? I didn’t quite get it first time round.’ Garaguso shrugged off the jibe and immediately raised his eyebrows inquisitively in the direction of the two commissars, who, in their boredom, were leafing through some magazines, and Sansimón closed and opened his eyes with all the deliberation of a prearranged signal. Garaguso eyed the two of them the way a lion studies a herd of zebra to pick out the weakest and, when his prey looked up from the magazine and they made eye contact, he got up from his seat and nonchalantly started closing in. From where he was, Marroné caught the gist of their conversation.

‘Listen, Baigorria. Us bosses wanted to organise one or two things here — of a private nature, you understand, keep it in the family, you know the sort of thing: nothing too flashy, a box of whisky perhaps, some nibbles, quiet hand of cards, couple of scags… Just to kill the time, right? Now that we’re here… And we got to thinking, you know, it’s true what you say about us having to learn to share and that… Socialising, as you call it…’