Carlos Gamerro - The Adventure of the Busts of Eva Perón

‘Er… No…’ He decided to try a weak line of defence. ‘That must have been his father… Or his partner… They’re both dead,’ he added with a winning grin.

‘Rodolfo…’ Don Rogelio intervened.

‘What?’

‘Let him have them. They’ll at least be used to save a life that way.’

‘Yes, the life of one of the sonsofbitches that sent in the planes, and the gangs to hunt us down one by one.’

‘Ernesto says not, and I for one believe him. Besides, who are we to decide who lives and dies?’

‘ They decide.’

‘Yes. But we want to be better than them, don’t we? Listen to me. Everything we lost… Everything you lost… you won’t bring it back by clinging onto idols. They’re just figurines of wood and stone. They aren’t Perón and Eva. Let him have them.’

‘What do you know about loss?’ Rodolfo retorted, resentfully. ‘Rolling in children and grandchildren the way you are?’

‘Everything that’s mine is yours. The doors of my house are open to you day and night.’

‘I don’t want your family’s charity,’ he blurted out, regretting it immediately. ‘Forgive me. I didn’t mean that.’ And then, obliquely, to Marroné, as if he’d offended him too: ‘I apologise. I’ll have to think about it.’

‘Go ahead and think about it, take your time,’ thought Marroné to himself, refilling Rodolfo’s wine glass.

By the second bottle they were getting all nostalgic about the days of the Resistance.

‘Remember that time we graffitied the glassworks and were nabbed by that sergeant…? What was his name?’

‘Merlo?’

‘That’s him! Comes at us blowing his whistle he does, and this lunatic,’ said Don Rogelio, slapping Rodolfo on the shoulder, ‘only goes and throws the bucket of paint over him.’

‘I can just see him standing there with his little whistle, blowing bubbles,’ Rodolfo added as soon as the guffaws allowed him to breathe. ‘Ffff! Ffff!’

‘Took them two or three days to catch up with us,’ Don Rogelio rounded off the story. ‘What a going-over we got! Submarines: dry, wet, semi-liquid.’

‘In shit,’ Rodolfo elucidated. ‘How many months was it that time?’

‘Dunno. Must have been about five.’

Marroné listened with a painted smile, hands clasped beneath the table, slowly windmilling his thumbs. When they’d finished up the wine, he offered to go out and get some more from the general stores in the tower block.

‘Blimey, Ernesto!’ they exclaimed when they saw him come in with two bottles of Château Vieux. ‘You didn’t half push the boat out! What do you take us for? A couple of gorilla toffs?’

He’d actually bought the most expensive label the meagre store had to offer in an attempt to placate — or rather suborn — the evil enchanters pursuing him with all the savagery of bull-dogs in a dog-fight, but he concealed the fact with a magnanimous gesture of ‘It’s the least I can do for my new friends’ and filled their glasses as fast as they could down them — except his own, of course, from which, after each toast, he would wet his lips without drinking.

‘… coal, potassium and sulphuric acid. And it doesn’t let out a wisp of smoke and then before we can leg it… Phut!’

‘Were there many casualties?’ asked Marroné thoughtfully.

‘What! It was the work of this loon. Everywhere filled with black smoke, you could see it twenty blocks away. That was how we got caught again. And back to the clink we went.’

‘And what about Teresa? Did you tell him about Teresa?’

‘Teresa! What’s she up to now I wonder.’

‘Dead probably. There aren’t many of us left any more.’

‘Once at the Party offices we were arguing about Manger, see…’

‘Tell him about Manger, he doesn’t know who he was.’

‘Oh, you’re right. What an idiot. It’s just that I think of old Ernesto here as one of us,’ Rodolfo said to him, with a grin of drunken camaraderie which Marroné returned, with compound interest. ‘He was a foreman at the textile factory, always trying it on with the girls he was, made the women delegates’ lives not worth living. So we’ve been discussing what to do about him for two hours and this, that and the other, and then Teresa, fed up to the back teeth, whistles to us and when we all turn and look at her, she lifts up her skirt — she was famous for wearing no knickers — and goes, “This is for whoever beats the crap out of that fucker.”’

‘So we all piled round to his place to give him a good seeing-to. The lads were lining up to hit him. Took Teresa a whole month to pay us back.’

‘Woman of her word that Teresa.’

‘And tough as nails to boot. A true comrade.’

They sailed on into the past down a river of wine.

‘And who was going to take us on after that? Workshops, a bit of manual work, odd jobs…’

‘We stuck a gas cylinder in there… Boom! Sarmiento got to the moon before the Yanks did.’

‘Eight months!’

‘“There’s a man at the door,” my youngest shouts when I show up on the doorstep.’

‘After eight months’ porridge beggars can’t be choosers.’

‘You must mean… The old pork sausage!’

‘Yes, but good old Peronist pork!’

‘And watching it burn away, I thought to myself… if only the General could see me now!’

Marroné proceeded with premeditated stealth as soon as the two men’s snores fired the starting gun. Cautiously, he unhooked a bunch of keys from Rodolfo’s belt and grabbed those to the pick-up off the kitchen worktop; then, before opening the gate, he oiled the hinges with olive oil from the glass cruet. As the driveway sloped slightly, all he had to do was take the pick-up out of gear and release the brake, and the old banger slid back towards the road, where he got out and pushed for about fifty metres, busting several guts and sweating buckets all the way to the tower-block entrance. When he saw that the third lift — the one they’d taken that afternoon — was out of order and locked, he almost gave in to the urge to sit down on the kerb and weep, but he pulled himself together and set off on the five-floor ascent with fierce determination, muttering over and over again, ‘Fucking darkie Peronists, they don’t deserve what they’ve got. Give them a model city and all they do is wreck it.’

On his first trip he grabbed two of the largest busts, one under each arm; he had to stop three times on his way down to catch his breath and, by the time he’d finished securing them at the back of the pick-up, he was out of breath and his knees were wobbling; a speedy bit of mental arithmetic told him that at this rate it would take him another forty-six trips; he had neither the strength nor the time before sunrise, so on his next trip he chose only the smallest busts and filled one of the wooden crates, but he barely got as far as the landing before collapsing from exhaustion. Emptying out half the pieces, he could just about manage it, and, now that he’d established the limits of his endurance, he adjusted the number with each round trip; he was also in two minds whether to carry less and make more trips, which would sap the energy from his legs, or to make fewer trips laden like a mule; in the end he put aside all calculations and abandoned himself to a mindless doggedness that bordered on insanity. At one point he tripped on his way down, and the busts rolled downstairs in fragments that got smaller and smaller as he watched; at another, an early bird — the kind of old biddie there’s never a shortage of when you least need one — opened the door as he was making his way down with a granite Inca Eva and a Quebracho Toba Eva (all the smaller or lighter pieces were already in the box of the pick-up) and demanded to know what he was up to.