Carlos Gamerro - The Adventure of the Busts of Eva Perón

‘I’ve already had the medical,’ stammered the terrified Marroné.

‘Don’t be stupid, Marroné, or I’ll regret hiring you before I do. It isn’t your prostate I’m worried about, let alone your haemorrhoids; in fact, all my most efficient executives have them: makes them edgier, more aggressive. Like ulcers. No, Marroné, it’s a different part of you I want to reach. Move forward a few steps, please. That’s it. Now rest both hands on the desk. Put those down there. Have no fear, we’ll give them back to you on your way out.’

Marroné deposited pants and underpants on the glassy wooden surface. The warmth of the golden light caressed his face and the back of his hands, and its brightness made him half-shut his eyes. Through the cracks he managed to see what Sr Tamerlán had been flicking through. It wasn’t a bid for tender as he had first supposed but a magazine called Queen Studs . A naked, hairless hunk stared out from the cover with come-hither eyes, one slack hand draped casually over his crotch. As if both ends of his body were connected by a single taut thread, Marroné’s pupils dilated as fast as his sphincter contracted to a full stop.

‘As you must surely know, Marroné, physicians and philosophers have for centuries been searching for the physical seat of the soul. Pythagoras, for example, contended that the soul is air or, put another way, breath — which led him to locate it in the lungs; Democritus would complete the idea with an intricate atomistic lucubration to explain why the soul doesn’t come out of our mouths every time we exhale. The Stoics fluctuated between placing it in the heart or the head, but they agreed that it then extended through the body in seven polyp-like tentacles that informed our five senses, our speech and our organs of generation; from there it was but a short step, taken by Sir Thomas Browne amongst others, to the notion that the soul is handed down to the child in the father’s seed, and thence to its relocation in the balls. The mystical, theosophical or spiritualist traditions, on the other hand, usually favour the cardiac zone; The Upanishads situate it beautifully in a small chamber in the shape of a lotus-flower at the very centre of the heart. The Assyrians, however, located it in the liver. Stupid race. They deserved to die out for that if for nothing else. Then there were those who spoke of several souls, such as the Egyptians, who counted seven, distributed around the body; whilst Plato, always thrifty where material reality was concerned, cut them down to three: the rational, located in the head; the thumetic or spirited, in the chest; and the appetitive, between the diaphragm and the navel. Now, with that last one he really hit the post. Descartes, on the other hand, went completely the other way: he claimed the soul was housed in the pineal gland, this being the only single rather than dual structure of the brain and sense organs; which is why some have tried to link it with the third eye of the Buddhists — the eye of the soul.

‘This last notion, though essentially wrong, would eventually help me to see the truth. As you can see, many of the scholars, poets and thinkers in the history of East and West have devoted their days and nights to pondering or even scientifically investigating this tricky point. What a bunch of incompetent cocksuckers! Five thousand years of culture and I always end up having to do it myself! Still. All that effort may not have been in vain; the truth is sometimes nothing more than the qualitative leap forward that springs from an accumulation of blunders. Yes, Marroné. The third eye — the eye of the soul — does exist, hidden within us, waiting to be awakened; just not in the middle of your forehead. So where is it? With due modesty I think I can safely say that I have solved the riddle. Legs a little wider, please.’

Marroné felt the first, tentative contact between his buttocks, then an increase in pressure as the rubber surface began to work its way inside. All the words hoarded over the last week completely evaporated from his mind. At that moment, had someone asked him his name, he couldn’t have answered with any certainty.

‘It was pretty obvious, though the answer lay not in anatomy, but in language. Why do you think they always talk about the “seat” of the soul? Why do you think the phrases “save your soul” and “save your arse” are so closely alloyed? Why do you think we say “I can’t be arsed” to express flat refusal? Didn’t it ever strike you as odd that we locate the seat of integrity not in the head or the heart, but a fair bit lower down? And what, Marroné, is the organ of our integrity but the soul? That’s why when your soul won’t bend, your arse won’t budge. As long as you own your arse, you own your self. That’s why if you’re going to work for me, there’s one thing you need to be very clear about. In this company we applaud freethinking, creativity and imagination; you’re free to have your own ideas and feelings, but your arse is ours. We aren’t asking much. We can’t get into your head, true, but we can get into your arse. And once we’re in, we give you the freedom to think whatever you like. That orifice is our most sensitive organ for perceiving errors, and there’s no better antidote for idiotic leanings towards independence or rebellion than a nicely puckered arse. From now on, Marroné, when you’re in any doubt, consult your arse and it’ll tell you what to do. Remember: your arse is your best friend.’

While he spoke, Sr Tamerlán kept his finger still but rigid. Once his monologue was over, he began to withdraw it, and that was perhaps the most humiliating moment for Ernesto Marroné, when by reflex his sphincter contracted on Sr Tamerlán’s finger as if he were trying to keep it there just a little bit longer. It was the final proof, if any were needed, that Sr Tamerlán was right: Marroné could no longer call his arse his own. But the stupefied blank that the removal of Sr Tamerlán’s finger had left in his mind was not to be filled by such elaborate sentiments as offence or humiliation, not even when, terminating the interview, Sr Tamerlán tossed the used finger-stall into the waste-paper basket like a spent condom.

‘I expect great things of you, Marroné. Be here for work first thing on Monday.’

As he left, he thought he caught ill-concealed smiles in every glance, stifled laughter behind his back, and, that night, when his wife, eczematous with impatience, asked him the moment he walked in through the door, ‘And? How did it go? Did you meet him? Did you meet Sr Tamerlán?’, Marroné opened his mouth to speak and stood there staring until he found the words to deny all personal contact with the great company man. ‘I got the job,’ was all he managed to say.

‘So? Think you can do it?’ The weary voice of Govianus the accountant, who had finished his telephone conversation, brought him back with a thud from dome to basement, from glaring past to murky present. He cast around as if the eye of his mind had also to grow accustomed to the change of light. If the top-floor office and its vicinity to the heavens, its blinding light and bracing wind blowing in from the river, had always conjured for Marroné a majestic galleon in full sail, this office, with the unflagging ultramarine and emerald green of its windowless walls, the fish-tank lighting of its fluorescent tubes, the armoured metal furnishings and the refrigerated air descending motionlessly from the vents in the ceiling, resembled nothing so much as a submerged submarine in wartime. And wartime it undoubtedly was when proud men like Sr Tamerlán, accustomed to leading the nation’s economic destiny from the prow, were forced to dig lairs and hide underground like hunted animals. Construction work on the bunker had been completed shortly after Marroné joined the firm, and the engineer and labourers Sr Tamerlán had imported had been flown back to the USSR: only the big man himself would be privy to the secrets of its construction. But the office they now found themselves in was just the tip of the iceberg, the semi-public space of a much vaster subterranean complex: some hidden point of the mute surfaces surrounding Marroné concealed the entrance to the secret chambers that only a handful of the elect had seen, though rumours circulated in the company about the treasure accumulated in the vault, enough to buy wills (‘arses,’ his mind corrected) and to finance acts of sabotage; about the communication equipment powerful enough to jam all the radio and television sets in the country and commandeer the airwaves; about the power plant with supplies for several months, the weapons and explosives depot, the larders and freezers overflowing with the choicest produce of five continents; and especially about the executive bedrooms, entirely covered with mirrors, and complete with rotating waterbeds, jacuzzis and fat catalogues of products from the ports of Northern Europe and the Far East. The bunker could accommodate the company’s top executives, and their sexual partners of choice, male or female (wives and children were strictly banned as counter-effective to the ruthless exercise of power). If a communist revolution was ever victorious in Argentina, capitalism could hole up here and hold out for months. Months! Ha! Sr Tamerlán had been kidnapped in broad daylight by the guerrillas before he was able to see his super-sophisticated lair completed, and maybe now, locked away in dungeons more primitive, dug by his captors, he would be reflecting on the vanity of the insatiable human longing for security.