Carlos Gamerro - The Adventure of the Busts of Eva Perón

‘Pa… Colo! Come here, sit down. Have you had any breakfast? Fancy a bite to eat?’

‘Not hungry. Gimme something to drink.’

Marroné clicked his fingers for Pampurro, who was in charge of the kitchen today, to bring him a maté cocido . Paddy gulped it down thirstily, his throat bulging at every swig.

‘Everything all right?’

Paddy shook his head.

‘Want to talk about it?’

Paddy repeated the gesture.

Marroné sat beside him for a few minutes, watching him, keeping him company. It pained him to see his friend in this state, although, if he were being truly honest with himself, part of him envied him too. He’d been in a shoot-out; he’d fired at other people — maybe he’d even killed someone too. Would he have the guts if he found himself in Paddy’s shoes? He didn’t think so, but life sometimes had surprises up its sleeve. If someone had told him the morning he’d left his house, as he did every day, on his way to what was then the Sansimón Plasterworks, that in little over a week he would have become a strike leader and be taken for part of the top brass in a guerrilla army… what would he have replied? That they be locked up without delay, no doubt. It was one of the lessons he’d learnt from reading about the life of Eva Perón. Who are we really? Who really knows what they’re capable of under certain circumstances and what they aren’t? Perhaps his friend was asking himself the same questions right now. Or perhaps, he corrected himself, looking again at the expression on Paddy’s face, he’d found some answers. Which didn’t seem to be to his liking.

‘All right… I’m going to see how production’s going,’ he said eventually, slapping his knees.

Paddy barely looked at him as, in a broken voice, he said:

‘They saw me, Ernesto. Babirusa’s people are looking for me right now. Look at me.’ A flap of his hand took in the flaming beacon of his hair and beard. ‘You can spot me a mile off. I’ll have to go underground for a while.’

‘You’re safe here,’ Marroné reassured him in all confidence. ‘The comrades and I will look after you. Miguel’s brought in six specialists…’

‘Yeah, I know. But I never wanted to go underground. I’m a born front man, me. My thing is to be among the people. But if I stick around here I’m fucked.’

‘Now you’re being melodramatic,’ said Marroné jovially. ‘If you ask me, it sounds like they’re the ones whose days are numbered. Just like the whole capitalist system, right?’ he said, thumping him on the back.

When he stepped outside, he came across a bizarre sight, even by recent standards. A vast cloud of butterflies was crossing the factory gardens; it must have been some kind of migration, for they were all flying in the same direction, approximately due west: they were coming from behind the workers’ quarter, beyond the entrance gate, pouring through the gaps in the ever-tighter cordon of police cars and policemen, or flying straight over their heads and then crossing the wire fence, in which some got caught and fluttered for a few seconds. The ones that made it through crossed the entire premises of the factory and, after negotiating the wire on the other side, disappeared into the first outcrops of the shanty town beyond the black waters of the stream. As far as he could tell, they were all the same size and pattern, but wore a variety of colours: rust-tinted orange, lemon yellow, greeny yellow, immaculate white and sky blue, and when he managed to catch one in his fingers — it wasn’t hard, all he had to do was put his hand in the air and they would fly into it — he could see at closer quarters the hairy body, the iridescent eyes, the bright-green buttons of the antennae and the grey rim at the apex of the wings. He let it flutter off and gazed with curiosity at the coloured dust it left on his fingertips, and it was as if a distant memory were trying to come back to him. Rubbing his hands on his overalls, he set off back to the workshop. On his way, he ran into two workers swatting butterflies like houseflies as they walked, but a third — the man he had christened Edmundo Rivero — had stopped whatever it was he’d been doing and was gazing at them transfixed, his mouth half-open under the weight of his jaw, his great hands hanging motionless at his sides.

In the workshop everything was running like a dream. The workers greeted him without looking up from their tasks, which they tackled with renewed glee and determination now that everything was theirs; and Sansimón Senior, who was still directing operations, came over to welcome him in person and, taking him by the arm, steered him in the direction of the workbenches. The last of the Evas had just come out of the drier and was waiting alongside nineteen companions to be packed away in its nest of tow and wood, and loaded onto the van with the seventy-two others. He ran his fingertip over the delicate, slender neck and rounded chin, slowly traced the outline of the enigmatic smile, ascended the slight curvature of the nose, the open forehead, the hair pasted to the skull and the intricate, tightly tied bun that would reveal the fate of the country to the hero who could unravel it. They were his. He’d done it. In a couple of hours at most he’d be back at the office, Govianus would congratulate him, Sr Tamerlán would be released, Cáceres Grey would be sacked, and Marroné would be handed his job or any other he asked for.

It was all too good to last, he realised a second later when he heard the first dull bang and knew without needing to be told that things had returned to their usual state of catastrophe. The first shot set off a string of others, and several smoke grenades came crashing in through the windows in a hailstorm of broken glass, and ricocheted into two busts of Eva, splitting one of them open on the table and sending the other crashing to the floor. The men in the workshop ran back and forth willy-nilly, the way ants do when their nest has been kicked; some had tied handkerchiefs over their noses against the smoke, but most were just groping their way towards the exit, pushing and shoving and trampling everything in their way, including of course the odd bust that had fallen from the rocking shelves. Wearing the black hat of the defenders, El Tuerto climbed onto the table in a heroic attempt to stem the pandemonium, but managed only to play Godzilla to the few Evas still left intact on the table.

‘Remain calm, comrades! Fall back in orderly fashion! The factory is yours! Defend it!’ he shouted in between the coughing fits that tore through his throat. A single idea was hammering on the anvil of Marroné’s brain: the van. Save the van! Get in the driver’s seat, put your foot down, drive through the hail of bullets, hunched over the wheel, straight through the wire if necessary and don’t stop till you’ve reached 300 Paseo Colón and delivered the seventy-two busts, packed and parcelled, and later, in some other life, worry about the twenty that were missing. As soon as he put his head round the door, he knew that not even that grace would be his: hit by some projectile or set alight by the workers as a barricade, the van was now an orb of fire, its precious cargo aflame on its pyre of tow and wood. The heat forced Marroné to back away.

‘They’ve sent in the Air Force! We’re being bombed!’ a boy running past shouted to him, his eyes bulging with fright. But it wasn’t true; at least, when he looked up at the sky, Marroné could see no aircraft raking across it, hear no roar of jet engines; all he made out were a few lost butterflies, straggling and directionless, which, smothered by the fumes and smoke, fell to the ground as if gassed.

Coughing up his lungs and groping blind and swollen-eyed, Marroné made his way back to the now empty workshop. If he was quick, he kept repeating, there was still time to save a few; he could charge back and forth from workshop to car with an Eva under each arm, through the crossfire and explosions, until he’d saved the last remaining bust, but no sooner had the thought taken shape in his brain than a tank came crashing through the brick wall, knocking all the Evas off their shelves, its caterpillars proceeding to grind the few unbroken by the fall to dust.