Carlos Gamerro - The Adventure of the Busts of Eva Perón

She entered without knocking. He’d barely noticed her in the lounge, and it was plain to see why: she was a tiny, transparent slip of a thing, slight and flat-chested, with legs like a lapwing’s; she was wearing a cheap, printed cotton dress, smoke-coloured stockings and Basque espadrilles laced up her calves. She can’t have been more than fourteen and, rather than bed her, Marroné felt like fixing her some cookies and milk.

‘Were you looking for me, sir?’

Marroné’s eyes welled with tears. What in God’s name was a child like this doing here? Perhaps, the thought suddenly occurred to him, this was why he was here today; perhaps his true mission was to save her and, by doing so, the busts would magically be his. He immediately decided he was raving again: he was willing to believe in anything if it looked like offering him a way out of this maze.

‘Come here, don’t be afraid, sit down here, beside me,’ he eventually managed to say. ‘What’s your name?’

‘Eva, sir.’

‘No, I’m asking you your real name.’

The girl looked at him for a moment with her dark, unfathomable eyes, then said:

‘Eva María.’

‘Where do you come from, Eva María?’ he said, following her drift.

‘Los Toldos, sir,’ she said, without hesitation; she’d learnt her lines well. ‘Shall I take my dress off?’

Before Marroné could do anything to stop her, she’d whipped it over her head and was standing naked, save for a pair of turquoise suspenders, which, together with her smoke-coloured stockings, suggested not so much bad taste but only poverty. The bastards think of everything, Marroné said to himself. Her breasts would have fitted snugly into English teacups, and her pubic hair was dark but sparse, leaving her narrow slit exposed when she stretched out on the bed: she looked as if malnourishment had stopped her from developing fully. It was the last snatch of social conscience his mind was capable of before his spring-loaded erection toppled what little of his moral scaffolding was left standing, and he decided he’d had enough: enough of trying to understand what was going on, enough of being nice to everyone, enough of doing the company’s bidding and Sr Tamerlán’s especially, enough of winning friends only for them to get killed in the blink of an eye, enough of the stinking clothes he was wearing… ‘I’m going to screw her, I’m going to screw her and you can all fuck off,’ he said to himself, slipping his t-shirt over his head and tugging his pants and underpants down so fast his member bounced up and down like a springboard. Gripping his glans in his palm, like someone stopping a shaken bottle of beer, and muttering through clenched teeth ‘you whore, you little whore, you black slum bitch’, he launched himself on top of her in an attempt to get a hole-in-one, but missed, and all his virility dribbled away through his fingers in two or three miserable spasms. Eva must have felt it, because she sat up with a start.

‘Sorry, sir!’ she exclaimed, as if it had been her fault. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll clean you up.’

She disappeared into the little bathroom, while Marroné sat on the bed, holding up his cupped palm to stop the dripping, and was soon back with a damp cloth.

‘No, no, don’t,’ mumbled Marroné, stricken with shame, but Eva wouldn’t have any of it.

‘Let’s see, hand first… This little piggy, then this one, till they’re nice and clean… Don’t worry about the bed, the maids’ll change it… Ooh, look, it got on me too, it’s all over my muffin.’

She looked a lot more comfortable in her new role, more self-assured: she had clearly been in domestic service. She reminded him of a maid his parents had had — somewhat older than Eva María it’s true, and darker-skinned and bustier — who’d turned him on as a teenager; he used to follow her around the house with his tongue hanging out and a couple of times tried to spy on her naked through the keyhole, but to no avail; he had hoped he would lose his virginity to her and told all his classmates he had, but in the end he had never actually dared, and his father had had to take him to a brothel. That was his first premature ejaculation, and the woman had made him wipe it up, standing over him making sarcastic remarks while he got down on his hands and knees: this early humiliation could well have been the stigma that turned into a trauma what would otherwise have been no more than a mishap. And perhaps now this sweet little girl had come to redeem the unnecessary cruelty of that callous whore, and somehow bring the cycle to a close; perhaps this was the dawn of a new era, though he didn’t actually care much because all he wanted to do was die on the spot and be done with it all.

Eva María had returned to the bathroom with her cloth, and Marroné heard the water running, then the squeak of the tap. This time she’d soaked it in warm water and put a little soap on too.

‘Lie back, please, sir,’ he heard her say.

Without opening his eyes he obeyed. She ran the cloth first over his forehead, ears, eyes and cheeks; when she got to his neck, she got up and rinsed it again. Wetting it whenever it cooled, she bathed his chest, arms, abdomen, thighs and shins; then she whispered in his ear for him to turn over and repeated the procedure on the other side. Marroné hadn’t bathed since his days in the factory, and Eva María washed him clean of all he had been through since: the crust of plaster, the urine, the blood, the oil-slick stream, his intimate contact with the garbage and mud of the shanties. She lingered long and tender over his feet, devoting a warm cloth to each, and she must have brought alcohol because he felt a sharp stinging at several points, from sores or cuts. When he turned over he saw her standing at the bedside, alcohol in one hand, cotton wool in the other. She was smiling shyly.

‘There’s still another half an hour to go. Would you like me to stay?’

She didn’t wait for Marroné’s nod. She lay down beside him, nestling into the hollow at his side, with her head on his shoulder and one leg wrapped over both of his. Marroné slid an arm under her neck to caress her hair and back, and, after two or three strokes, fell sound asleep.

She wasn’t there when he awoke with a start and a moan. Regaining his sense of the present, he put his shabby clothes back on and checked his wallet to see if she’d emptied it. He took out the four notes and slipped them into The Reason for My Life .

He stepped out into a corridor of identical symmetrical doors; he couldn’t remember coming this way on his way up, though he might have forgotten. The doors were so thin that he could hear everything going on behind them: the familiar moans, a recording of Eva’s hoarse voice tirelessly repeating ‘I offer you all my energies so that my body can be a bridge to the happiness of all. Walk over it…’ One stood ajar, and Marroné spied the lady with the whip riding a naked fat man dripping with gold and chains, and shouting, ‘What kind of an oligarch are you? You don’t even have the balls to exploit Bolivian workers!’ Then, spying Marroné, she cracked the whip on the wooden floor and beckoned to him to come in. ‘Look,’ she said to her steed, ‘here’s a slumdog come to stick his filthy cock in you. Now you’ll see what’s good for you.’

Reeling, Marroné backed away and stumbled down the stairs. In spite of the music still playing (wan tango Muzak), the artificial light and the welded-shut blinds, he felt, in his stinging eyes and jaded blood, the end of the party and the closeness of dawn. It was also being heralded by the dynamics of the sexual encounters, which had now spilled out from the reserve of the bedroom and across the half-deserted lounge. The governess was disciplining one of the trade unionists with her cane, forcing him to recite the Twenty Truths of the Peronist Creed and whacking him every time he got one wrong; The Prodigal Woman leapt from one side of the red brocade sofa to the other, hitching up her heavy velvet skirt to reveal an outsized, flesh-coloured strap-on dildo swinging from its harness, just out of reach of the costumed tramp drunkenly grabbing at it; and, last of all, the radiant Eva, whom Marroné had followed through the alleys of the shanties — his Divine Beatrice who had led him from the dark forest, his luminous Tinkerbell — was being served simultaneously by the colonel, the businessman and the rancher, striving to hump her back to what in their eyes she had never ceased to be: the whore of Babylon, a peroxide blonde harlot, a black slumdog. Her bun — which was mostly hairpiece — had come undone and was now being batted about on the floor by a tortoise-shell cat.