Carlos Gamerro - The Adventure of the Busts of Eva Perón

‘In drincidle id sounds like an inderesdig drodosal,’ said Marroné at one point, and he felt the tension in the atmosphere ease immediately, while the three visitors exchanged half-smiles and satisfied glances, and El Tuerto blurted out an exultant ‘I told you? Didn’t I tell you?’ Sr Gareca lit the first cigarette of a new pack (he seemed to have one in every pocket — even his sleeves had pockets) and, exhaling, he got right down to brass tacks. ‘Here in the shanties we’re in a position to offer you free transit and lodging, and outside, contacts in the other settlements. Men: no less than fifty. We can count on you, can’t we Tuerto?’ El Tuerto nodded, and Pipota muttered, ‘Yeah, right. When they scarper at the first shot, he’ll be the one leading the pack.’ The three men no longer looked at the wife but at the husband, as if urging him to take matters in hand, and El Tuerto, realising he’d have to deal with a sharper weapon than his wife’s tongue if he didn’t oblige, covered the two metres between them in two strides and stood beside her, this time without a word.

‘Something the matter? What are you stood there looking at me for?’ brazened Pipota, in the same flat tone as before. Without answering the question her husband grabbed her right hand, which was running with egg, and thrust it, palm down, into the breadcrumbs. But only when he twisted her wrist to coat the back of her hand with breadcrumbs did the penny drop, too late to prevent the mechanic’s sinewy mitt from plunging her breaded right hand into the boiling oil. It can’t have been more than a second, and it was by no means burnt to a crisp — just a light goldening; more the egg and breadcrumbs than the underlying flesh — but it was still pretty shocking: Pipota emitted a string of fearsome shrieks and, when her husband let go of her, she fled the house, knocking over oil and Primus as she went. Sr Gareca and his men exchanged approving glances, Malito even going so far as to give El Tuerto, who was tidying up the mess, a pat on the back. Picking up where he left off, Sr Gareca went on with his business proposal. ‘We ’ave the will, we ’ave the grit, we ’ave the people. What we ’aven’t got is the infrastructure, see. The kit.’

He handed Marroné a folded piece of graph paper torn from a spiral-bound exercise book, on which there was a typewritten list:

GEAR REQUIRED

10 11.25mm Ballester-Molina automatics; 20 magazines each.

10 9mm Browning automatics; 20 magazines each.

10 Ithaca pump-action shotguns, plus cartridges.

5 Halcón machine guns; 10 magazines each.

5 PAM machine guns; 10 magazines each.

20 FAL rifles; 10 magazines each.

‘3 Uzi sub-machine guns; 1,000 rounds.

1 MAG general-purpose machine gun; 2,000 rounds.

500kg gelignite; 20 electric detonators.

50 grenades.

1 anti-aircraft battery (model to be decided).

20 anti-personnel mines.

10 anti-tank mines.

1 bazooka.

While Marroné’s widening eyes read through the list, Sr Gareca felt the need to go on with his explanation. ‘We reckon that under the current circumstances we are ready to take the leap from isolated, individual actions to a full-scale, coordinated attack on simultaneous fronts. We’re getting nowhere offing the odd pig in the street: we have to take the police station, seize the arsenal and blow the place sky high. We’re not hurting them by holding up grocers or kiosk-owners, who at the end of the day are all our brothers. We have to hit them where it really hurts: supermarkets, banks, multinationals… Because that way it ain’t stealing any more; it’s taking back what they took from us, just the way you lot taught us. I mean, what’s the robbing of a bank compared to the founding of a bank…’ he went on. ‘That’s why we’ve decided to join the armed struggle. What we will need is a couple of trained instructors too, coz it’s not like we’re about to stick heavy artillery into the hands of any silly prat.’ Malito whispered in his ear a couple more times until, in exasperation, Sr Gareca finally caved in: ‘Comrade Malito here wants to know if the campaign of police executions is still ongoing, coz he wants to join it, and can you notch two up for him: one from the hospital and another from the raid on the armoured truck last September?’ Marroné looked up from the piece of quivering paper in his hands into the eyes of a Malito beaming at him with a broad, friendly grin. He went back to the list after croaking out a ‘No droblem’.

‘Whaddaya wad de dazooka and de bines for?’ asked Marroné out of professional reflex. He was after all head of procurement and accustomed to considering any order exorbitant on principle.

Sr Gareca, Malito and El Bebe looked at each other rather taken aback, as if their confidence in him was suddenly wavering. ‘To defend the settlement, in case they send in the tanks. The idea — I mean, if you agree, of course — is to declare this a liberated zone. Us and the other neighbourhoods can form a cordon street by street and cut off the capital.’

‘And the andi-airdraft?’ Marroné insisted. ‘Don’t you dink id’s a bid ober de dop?’

Once again the triple exchange of looks, only this time there was a faint note of reproach in Sr Gareca’s tone:

‘Every time you lot pull a big one, comrade, they let the local neighbourhoods have it. It ain’t just the pigs we’re up against now, it’s the bleeding army. Only two days ago — two days — they razed the Iapi and the 25 de Mayo settlements to the ground with fighters and helicopter gunships. That’s the whole point, comrade. You do what you have to, but then don’t go and leave us up the creek.’

After that the discussion relaxed and took a more predictable turn: Marroné, nodding and numb with tiredness, ticking off the items on the shopping list, asking for unnecessary details and coming out with the occasional reservation for the sake of verisimilitude; at one point Pipota returned, her hand wrapped in a rag, and disappeared into the bedroom, where the two girls were asleep on the bed; at another point an insistent drumming began overhead, and, looking up at the corrugated-iron roof, Sr Gareca remarked that it was good news, because the rain and its consequences — the poor visibility, the mires, the floods — meant that the police were less likely to move into the neighbourhood. He had barely finished the sentence when the barking of dogs, the shouts, the gunfire and the raking white-hot beams of spotlights that tigered their shapes through the walls announced the start of the raid.

Guns drawn, the three men bundled Marroné over the bed and over Pipota and her two daughters, who lay huddled and bawling beside her, then kicked down one of the bedroom’s plywood walls and burst into the alley winding off through the shacks. Drenched in seconds and half-blind from the water pouring from the corrugated-iron roofs, he let himself be dragged along identical, criss-crossing alleys, switching course abruptly and forced to dive whenever they ran into the spotlights and gunshots (Malito threw himself on top of him every time, using his body to shield him from the bullets). Down dizzying tunnels of blackness that seemed to swing up and down as they went, one moment up slippery slopes, the next down liquid slides that plunged into deep vertical wells, Sr Gareca guiding the way, El Bebe firing to cover them as they retreated and Malito flying Marroné behind him like a kite, they finally came out into the open at the edge of a bank, whereupon Sr Gareca grabbed him by the arm and shouted in his ear over the din of the rain, the barking and the shots, ‘Now hide, we’ll throw them off the scent,’ then gave him a shove that sent him rolling downhill. Bouncing like a ball, sometimes on inflated bags that cushioned his fall, at others on jagged edges and sharp corners, he eventually reached the foot of the mountain, whereupon the kindly flash from a bolt of lightning silhouetted the squat outline of a bottomless barrel, where he curled up inside, trembling with cold and fright; but then, realising the meanest searchlight would still pick him out like a rabbit on the road, he tilted and tipped it till it stood upright, the narrow orifice in the top doubling as breathing- and spy-hole. Through it, if the rain that found its way inside didn’t sting his eyes, he would have been able to spend the entire night gazing at a small disc of blood-red sky. Abandoning the upright, he hugged his knees and slid down, like melting ice cream into its cone, awakening several hours later, in the same position, to the small, white circle of dawn overhead.