Carlos Gamerro - The Adventure of the Busts of Eva Perón

‘Ah… Marroné…’ he stammered in embarrassment when he saw him loom over him. ‘What are you doing here?’

Cáceres Grey’s expression was that of a life member of the Jockey Club, in his favourite easy chair in the library, on seeing the butcher from the corner shop, who has just been admitted for a look round. Marroné knew that expression all too well; too often had he been on the receiving end of it at school, and a fierce smile of triumph spread inwardly across his lips.

‘Same as you, I suppose. First time?’

‘Errm… No, well, actually…’ he began, but at that moment, still seated in her armchair, his Eva caught the back of his neck between sole and heel and thrust his face to the floor.

‘I told you not to talk to strangers, slave!’

‘Ooow… Now just hold on a second. He’s a colleague from the company.’

‘All the better. He can have a good look at what I do to you and tell everyone about it at work tomorrow.’

‘Well, you look busy. See you around…’ said Marroné, turning to go.

Cáceres Grey attempted to extricate himself from under her sole and got a thwack across the buttocks from her riding crop.

‘Ooow! You filthy black slum bitch!’

‘Down, boy! And don’t speak unless you’re spoken to.’

Marroné rejoined his guide, more and more composed by the second now he’d begun to understand.

‘We’re all businessmen, here.’

‘No, not everyone. That one over there, the one dressed as a farmhand, he’s a rancher. The docker in the gym vest with a handkerchief round his neck owns several shipping companies and the conscript being drilled by Admiral Eva is a colonel in the artillery.’

‘All anti-Peronists. Gorillas,’ mused Marroné. ‘Now I get it. And that one?’ he said, pointing at a football hooligan with a curly mop and hairy white belly protruding from beneath his San Lorenzo shirt.

‘Him? No, he actually works here. We lay on the real thing for the punters who like being buggered in drag. There’s an entire wardrobe at your disposal if you’re that way inclined.’

Marroné declined the invitation with a flick of the wrist:

‘Thanks. And the ones that look like trade unionists?’

Two fat men — one olive-skinned with a centre parting, the other with slicked-back curls and several days’ stubble, neither older than forty — were receiving a football and a bicycle from the hands of the Good Fairy.

‘Trade unionists. They come here quite a lot, as you’ll see — nostalgic steelworkers mostly. Loaded with cash they are, but they still hanker after the golden years of their humble childhoods, when they used to get presents from Eva,’ he said, with a puff of scorn, which Marroné seconded to conceal any hint of embarrassment, the memory of his own shanty-town epiphany still fresh in his mind. ‘But they’re in the minority. The ones that truly love her — worship her, I mean. Two classes of people come here as a rule: those who come to humiliate her and those who come to be humiliated by her. Or, not to put too fine a point on it, to fuck or be fucked.’

‘Literally?’

‘Those ones over there. The three tall ones? The Three Graces we call them.’

The Three Graces consisted of the lady in gold lamé, the governess with the angular jaw and sharp nose, and one he hadn’t noticed before, wearing an ermine-trimmed silk suit as white as daylight and a diamond tiara. All three had large feet and prominent Adam’s apples.

‘As well as being distinguished, our clients can be very specific at times. “I want my Eva to come with a dick. And one that works.” So we ask them to go easy on the hormones.’

Marroné was genuinely impressed, not only by what was on view, but by the lesson in business lore: they had found a niche in the market and had made it flourish with an almost infinite product range that exhausted all possible combinations. No, not all, he suddenly realised:

‘What about… the Montonero Evita?’

His guide let out a shush and fanned the air with his fingers to tell him to keep his voice down.

‘Shhh. Don’t even mention her. What are you trying to do? Make them shit themselves? Some things just aren’t funny. So, are you ready for the pièce de résistance?’

They went up some stairs and through a door. By now, Marroné had the impression that the world held no more surprises for him. But he was wrong. They were in a quadrangular room upholstered entirely in black velvet: portraits of Perón and Eva covered one of the walls, and hundreds of coloured votive ribbons, most with gold lettering, were pinned to the upholstery: ‘YOU LIVE ON ETERNAL IN THE SOUL OF YOUR PEOPLE — TRAMWORKERS UNION — NATIONAL ATOMIC ENERGY COMMISSION.’ The centrepiece was a couch surrounded by fresh flowers and covered with a silk sheet. And there, on the sheet, lay Eva.

She looked like Sleeping Beauty, and her skin had the pallor of marble and the sheen of wax. A snippet of schoolboy Shakespeare flashed across his mind: ‘Nor scar that whiter skin of hers than snow / And smooth as monumental alabaster.’ Her hair was combed back towards the nape in two thick Greek braids, and an ivory coloured tunic covered the rest of her body, save her hands — which clasped a rosary over her belly — and her naked feet with their slender toes, which Marroné could barely prevent himself from kissing.

‘So? What do you say?’ The procurer’s voice rang stridently in his ears.

‘She’s… perfect,’ he said in a whisper, incapable of taking his eyes off her.

‘Thirty grand.’

‘She’s… the real one?’

‘Of course.’

‘I thought she’d been returned to Perón.’

‘Perón got screwed. He got one of the three original replicas. You know, modelled in wax directly from the body.’

‘And does anyone ask for her?’

‘She’s our top earner. The military really get off on her.’

Marroné contemplated her head and the line of her shoulders with keen professionalism. Give him a saw and he might just be able to separate them from the rest of her body; that would make one bust — ninety-one short — but it would be a start. He immediately decided he was losing his mind.

‘So… Which one’ll it be?’

Marroné’s brain groped for the contents of the calcareous bivalve that had once served him as a wallet. He couldn’t leave without consuming something, not after being treated to such a display.

‘Errr… How much did you say the country girl was?’

He recognised the look at once. It was the kind a Dior salesman would give a customer who, after being shown around the entire season’s collection, abjectly asks to be reminded of the price of the ankle socks.

‘This way.’

He had to shove the wooden door, which danced on its hinges. The room had peeling walls, a cheap print of the Virgin Mary, a sagging iron bed, a chair and a night table with a bedside lamp and red lampshade.

‘It’s an exact replica of the rooms in the brothel run by Eva’s mother, Doña Juana, in Junín. It was where Eva, aged twelve, auctioned off her virginity at a party for the local ranch-owners; not out of need, but out of a sheer taste for vice,’ he recited in the monotone of a tour guide reeling off the same old spiel day in, day out.

‘I thought that whole brothel thing was a load of bull.’

This time Aníbal’s expression was openly hostile.

‘What do you think this is?’ he said, embracing the surroundings with raised open arms. ‘The National History Museum? If so, it’s news to me. So. Do you want her or not? Alright. Wait here.’

‘Errrr…’ began Marroné.

‘You can have her for four. Enjoy.’

Marroné sat on the bed, which sagged even lower, the metal springs groaning as if injured. The room had no windows or openings of any kind, and smelt like a damp kennel. Beside the bedside lamp was an ashtray overflowing with cigarette butts; had he had a lighter, Marroné would gladly have lit one. He opened the drawer: no lighter, no matches; just a candle end and a copy of The Reason for My Life in the perennial Peuser edition he remembered from his schooldays.