Carlos Gamerro - The Adventure of the Busts of Eva Perón

No sooner did the first gloom of dawn creep through his sleep-encrusted eyelids than the man woke up and wondered who he was. The two words that came into his mind — ‘Ernesto Marroné’ — though not quite enough, did at least allow him to move on to the next question: where exactly, and in what, was he? He was sitting, his knees forced into his chest by the cramped circular walls; these were rough and fluted and, when he rapped on them with his knuckles, they gave a metallic boom. In the roof, which was flat, there was a round hole about the diameter of a teacup, through which dribbled the meagre light and air; stretching up his arm, he could just about manage to poke his fingers through, which, from the outside, he imagined — in a spasm of spliced consciousness — must have looked like worms wriggling their way out of a tin can. The bottom, on the other hand, was little more than a soggy mass of flakes that crumbled in his fingers like wet choux pastry, leaving his feet resting on the spongy surface of the ground, which, when trodden underfoot, exhaled a nauseating stench that made the air quite unbreathable. He couldn’t lift it, whatever it was he was in, but, by pushing the walls with his hands, he discovered it was possible to move it from side to side and, by rocking in ever-widening arcs, he eventually managed to tip it over, and he backed out to find himself on another planet. Neither the lunar landscape, riddled with potholes and craters full of iridescent water that reflected nothing but itself, nor the mountains that fumed relentlessly despite the swirling drizzle, seemed to belong to any natural geography. They did to human geography, though: the vast marches of polythene bags, grizzly newspaper, plastic containers and broken bottles, the snowdrifts of flaking polystyrene, helped him grasp the fact that he must be in a garbage tip. He cast about him in all directions: as far as the misty drizzle revealed any shapes, there wasn’t a single house, not a single tree — nothing but the sheer spurs of the tip, made ever hazier by the distance and the rain. He made for a steep bank along which muddy waterfalls cascaded softly over inflated cliffs of polythene. His whole body ached, as if he had been in a rugby game after which the other team, not content with whipping them on the field, had barged into the changing rooms and beaten them with sticks; and incapable of remembering what had happened, he tried to imagine how he might, in one of the possible worlds his mind was capable of grasping, have come to such a sorry pass. He didn’t even recognise as his own the clothes he stood up in: the buttonless, double-breasted serge jacket, which he could barely fasten over the bleached-out t-shirt; the elasticated tracksuit bottoms with foot straps, so short they left his ankles exposed; the fraying espadrilles, whose rope soles softened by the water had begun to unravel and dragged behind him like dead snakes. Didn’t he use to wear suits of the finest cashmere, ties of silk and Italian shoes? No, that had been in another life. White overalls, boots, hard hat? Not any more, it seemed. The images dissolved in the pools of his memory as soon as he tried to grasp them, and in like manner his feet, as he attempted to scale the bank, churned the crumbling rubbish without going anywhere. It was as if, in the relentlessly repeated act of climbing, his muscles were in pursuit of a memory rather than a physical spot, and they found it when he reached the top: he had already been here, not long ago; but it had been darkest night and he hadn’t been able to see, as he could now, the winding palisade of dilapidated shacks, huddled together like cattle in a flooded field, between the grey drizzle and the vast mirror of water; and it was only now, when his crusted eyes met the crusted landscape, that it all came flooding back to him.

Paddy was dead, the busts were gone and his own life had been saved by a miracle. Dragging him by the hand like a rag doll — the battered knight-errant assisted by his faithful squire — El Tuerto had led him down the indistinguishable alleyways of the rickety maze: dogs barked as they passed, children scattered before them, chamamé and cumbia duelled on rival radio sets. ‘This way, Ernesto… mind yer head… Geroudofit, yer mutt!’ El Tuerto shredded his sentences between gasps. On yet another anonymous corner he gave Marroné a shove without warning and they crashed as one through a swing door on tyre hinges.

The house was part airbrick, part corrugated iron, part wood. Lit by a couple of candles, the front room contained: a chest of drawers upon which stood a black-and-white TV set, whose light, he would later discover, came from a kerosene lamp set in its hollow innards; a half-open Siam fridge; a Gilera motorbike, whose back wheel and various parts were dotted about the floor (El Tuerto was a mechanic at the factory); a stout woman in a mousey, floral-print dressing gown that enveloped her like a badly wrapped parcel; and two girls of six and ten, playing with dead babies on the dirt floor (upon closer inspection they turned out to be bald dolls with missing arms or legs). The woman was in the process of making milanesas in a frying pan that wobbled precariously atop a Primus stove on the floor and barely turned round when the two quivering lumps burst in.

‘Oh. So you’re back, are you? Well? How did you get on with the strike?’ she asked, her feigned innocence dripping with malice as she slapped a raw cutlet in egg and breadcrumbs. ‘Over is it? Get everything you bargained for, did you?’

‘Shut your face, Pipota, and stick your ’ead out to see if we’ve been followed,’ barked El Tuerto at her, unbuttoning his overalls; it was an order she chose blithely to ignore, returning instead to the hypnotic sputterings of her milanesa . ‘Oy! Ernesto! What you waiting for?’ yelled El Tuerto, making Marroné leap into the air with alarm.

El Tuerto was already down to his underpants, which peeked out red from beneath the thick fold of hairy belly, and was trying to extricate his boots from his overalls spread on the floor.

‘Get out of those things, will you. If the pigs show up, or the union goons, you’re dead meat.’

Marroné hastily complied, but when he reached the fourth button (he was having difficulty undoing them, as they were now welded with hard plaster to their buttonholes), he realised there was a problem. He called El Tuerto to one side and whispered in his ear:

‘Errb. I dot dothig odd udderdeath,’ he said, gesturing at the three ladies present.

‘Eh?’ answered El Tuerto. ‘I didn’t get a bloody word of that.’

‘I dot wedding eddy udderdads,’ he rephrased, pointing insistently at his crotch. His thick tongue and tumid lips could barely form words.

El Tuerto was now jumping about the room as if in a sack race, pulling on skin-tight jeans below his Huracán shirt.

‘Naaaah. Don’t worry about those two, won’t be the first cock they’ve seen. Just as long as it stays visible… And the other one must have lost count by now. Right, Pipota?’ he chuckled as he rummaged in the chest of drawers and tossed Marroné some light-blue Lycra underpants and the drainpipe tracksuit bottoms, a buttonless double-breasted jacket, and a bleached-out t-shirt in quick succession. ‘Try these on. I got better threads than these, but you can’t be going around the place all got up like a dog’s dinner, now, can you? You’ll stick out like a sore thumb. Alright, Ernesto, go on; you can use the bedroom if you’re that fussed about it.’

The room he had entered lay on the other side of a cotton counterpane, attached to the door frame with drawing pins, and every square inch was taken up by a double bed covered with a brand-new Afghan blanket, a three-piece wardrobe whose veneer was chipped at the corners of the doors, a night table, a lighted candle in a candlestick and, asleep on a camp bed, a tiny little old man who looked so still and worn by life that he might actually have been dead. Through the curtain, as he undressed — no mean feat, for the fabric of his overalls was by then as hard and unyielding as plasterboard and, rather than a man disrobing, he felt like a chick hatching from an egg — Marroné had eavesdropped on the conversation.