Carlos Gamerro - The Adventure of the Busts of Eva Perón

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.