Carlos Gamerro - The Adventure of the Busts of Eva Perón

‘That Christmas box they owe us, for example,’ chimed in a blue-eyed forty-something in a brown suit, who answered to the name of González.

‘And the holidays,’ added a bald man called Suárez, who, in spite of the heat that marbled his forehead with sweat, was still wearing his jacket and tie.

‘And while we’re at it,’ the man in brown upped the ante, ‘the coat-stand issue… Look at the state of my jacket… I still have two instalments to pay on it and it’s already out of shape.’

Marroné stopped listening and devoted himself to studying these men and women whose company he had kept for barely an hour and whose souls held no further secrets for him: people with no horizons who had never taken a creativity course in their lives or ever heard of Dale Carnegie, R Theobald Johnson or Edward de Bono. His eyes alighted upon an easel on which sat a large pad of paper, of the type commonly used in business presentations. In that dust-covered lectern on which the inert pages had yellowed without ever bearing the fruit of gung-ho sloganeering, in the dry marker pens that would barely leave a mark, Marroné saw a symbol of all that wasted potential. Plenty of colour in the machines, plenty of chair-lifts, but the reality of the office was still the same uniform grey, a cesspool of routine, of disenchantment, resentment and envy, from which an office worker was released only in retirement or death. It was so easy to blame the system, the company, the bosses. But what attitude did those very office workers adopt when offered the opportunity to change? Marroné had experienced first-hand how difficult it was to ‘motivate the troops’ in that kind of environment. Bent on putting into practice in his own procurement department what he had learnt in a work environment workshop he’d attended in the United States, called ‘The Kindergarten Office’, he had met with — instead of acceptance and enthusiasm — reactions that ranged from indifference to open or concealed boycott. His proposal that everyone undergo a few days’ training (which he himself would coordinate for free) was greeted by his employees with a petition to the union, and he only managed to defuse the mood and persuade them to take part when he offered to hold it during working hours. He had even less luck with the workshop ‘Buy While You Play’, which would have consisted of a Sunday outing to the Tigre Fruit Market and a subsequent feedback session, but the mere idea of devoting part of their sacrosanct Sunday to work-related tasks unleashed an outright mutiny that included the sending of a delegation to Govianus the accountant and a week-long go-slow; not to mention Govianus’s answer when Marroné asked him for permission to hold it on a weekday: ‘A minibus, Marroné? To go to Tigre? To buy fruit? On a Monday?’ (‘Breaking Mondays’ was another of the innovative ideas he’d disembarked with.) ‘What a super idea! But tell me… will a minibus be big enough? Why don’t we lay on a school bus instead, to make the journey more comfortable? Because I imagine you won’t think of leaving the rest of us behind… And where shall we go on Tuesday? How about the zoo?’ But Marroné wasn’t disheartened by these remarks: abandoned by his superiors and distrusted by his subordinates, he was more determined than ever to forge ahead. First he tried to seduce them: he bought them all plants, but they were dead from lack of water before the month was out (save one plucky Pothos, which, after turning yellow and losing nearly all its leaves, stubbornly survived so as to remind him day after day of the futility of his efforts); he stayed behind after hours one Friday night to surprise them first thing Monday morning with a poster titled ‘Choose Your Attitude For The Day’, below which ‘Option 1’ depicted a face with knitted brow and ‘Option 2’ a smiley face, but not a week had gone by before someone had drawn an erect prick in the smiley’s mouth and glasses on the frowning face with an arrow saying ‘Govianus’, and he’d had to take it down; his employees, of course, accused the other departments, though Marroné’s own suspicions ran higher still, and he spent all that week studying the features of Cáceres Grey with ill-concealed suspicion. The brief maxims he wrote on different-coloured notelets posted around the office ‘at random’ were systematically sabotaged: if he wrote ‘You can’t always get what you want but you can want what you get’, someone would add in pencil ‘I got cancer’; and to his ‘In spite of everything, the sun shines’, some joker (probably the same) had added ‘I got skin cancer’. When he instituted his policy of ‘Catch your employee doing something right’ and spent a week pouncing on them and shouting ‘Aha! Gotcha! You’re doing a good job!’, the longest-serving member of the department, Ochoa, came on the others’ behalf to ask him to desist from a practice that had them with their hearts in their mouths every hour of the working day (‘We understand you’re doing it with the best of intentions, Sr Marroné…’). In the end he’d just given up: the coloured balloons that, in one desperate, last-ditch attempt, he’d bought in a novelty shop, and blown and hung up with Mariana’s help (that day he made the heart-stopping discovery that she didn’t wear tights but stockings and suspenders) gradually deflated over the next few weeks until, depressed at the sight of them hanging shrivelled and dusty, looking for all the world like used condoms, he stayed behind one evening after hours to take them down so no one would see. The only tangible result of all his efforts had been to make himself the laughing stock of the other executives, who made him the butt of their jibes in their lunch breaks in the canteen: they would, for example, ask him with a sorry look for advice on how to motivate an unwilling member of staff and then, when Marroné had enthusiastically embarked on his spiel, sneeze and emerge from their handkerchief wearing a red nose and saying ‘Will this do the trick?’, which would then set the others off, and the procurement department came to be known as ‘Circus Marroné’ in allusion to a hideous TV clown whose surname, Marrone, was but an unaccented version of his own.

At that moment Marroné ‘caught himself’ succumbing to the toxic energy of discouragement and frustration, to the impotence of ‘it’s impossible to change a thing in this country with people like this’. ‘No!’ he told himself forcefully. ‘No!’ The risk of doing nothing is always greater than that of taking action: you don’t lose faith in yourself when you fail, only when you stop trying. He looked around through different eyes, watchful and vibrant, and full of decision.

The mood was hotting up. The young, idealistic, pink-shirted Ramírez had apparently gone on haranguing them, and Gómez had finally had enough.

‘Oh, so you don’t understand us. Is that it? No, of course you don’t. It must be hard for someone like you. Because you’re different, aren’t you, you can spot it a mile off… You used to be a student, didn’t you? What of?’

‘History…’ Ramírez replied, fighting off with a defiant gesture the slight stammer Gómez’s sibylline haughtiness had started to cause him.

‘History…’ Gómez said, repeating each syllable carefully as if savouring a fine wine. ‘Yes, of course. That explains it. It must give you a different way of looking at things, a different… what do you lot call it?… perspective. Because all this is just temporary for you, isn’t it. Whereas we’re buried alive here… You probably pity us, don’t you?’

‘Leave him alone, Gómez, don’t be cruel,’ intervened Nidia maternally. But Gómez had tasted blood and liked it.

‘Know how many of your sort I’ve seen since I’ve been in here? Want to know what comes next? For the next five years you’ll keep telling yourself it’s just till you get your degree; in ten, that you’re going to pack it in and finish university, but all the while you’ll feel it’d be a shame to give up the benefit of seniority; in twenty you’ll start fantasising about getting yourself fired and setting up a newsagent’s with the indemnity money; and so on, just ticking over till you’ve been here for thirty years and start crossing off how many to go before you retire. No one here gets out alive, sonny. If you had what it takes, you’d never have come here in the first place.’