Carlos Gamerro - The Adventure of the Busts of Eva Perón

‘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.