Carlos Gamerro - The Adventure of the Busts of Eva Perón

‘Haven’t you heard? There’s a military coup on the way, Señora,’ he said, as quick to the draw as a sheriff in a spaghetti western. ‘And Ciudad Evita’s top of their list. If they catch us with this lot, there’ll be nothing left of this building but rubble.’

But he realised he’d laid it on too thick when the petrified woman wanted to wake up the whole building to lend him a hand. He stopped her by arguing that the old pick-up was full and told her he’d take up her offer when he got back. He’d decided to load up more than the ninety-two in case any got broken on the journey, but, drained of every last drop of strength, had stopped somewhere around the hundred mark. It was starting to get light, and the building would soon be a hive of busy Peronists, all wide awake.

The clapped-out old pick-up responded to the ignition with a series of intermittent, hoarse coughs; only at the fifth try, after Marroné had prayed as never before to God and all the saints he could remember, did it judder into life with a series of grudging jolts. Making a beeline for the base of the bun, he came out at the Ricchieri Freeway, which flung him like a stone from a slingshot out and away from Ciudad Evita. He hadn’t slept properly for days, he was dehydrated and exhausted to a degree he’d never imagined possible, but he had the busts, he thought, as he aimed the clunking red pick-up like a ballistic missile straight at the doors of 300 Paseo Colón. No Soviet tank in World War II, nor even Castro in the Cuban Revolution, had advanced on Berlin or Havana with such devastating momentum as did Ernesto Marroné on the city of Buenos Aires.

He drove like the wind, his fingers locked on the wheel like the teeth of a dog on a bone, shielding it with his body, glancing with lightning speed through windscreen and mirrors, and windows left and right; had it been possible he would have looked upwards through the roof at the sky, whence calamity might also rain in the form of fire and brimstone. On the plus side, the traffic was unusually light even for this early hour, something which had at first filled him with grim forebodings, as if the deserted streets were a stage for the evil enchanters to burst upon, leading the armies of the Apocalypse; but as the minutes passed and all remained quiet, the tense rictus of his sphincter against the wood-bead massage cover slowly eased and, keeping a judicious distance from the traffic around him, he drove towards a green spot slowly growing in the blue-black east. When he swung onto the General Paz Freeway and saw the first row of houses in the capital filing silently past on the right, his eyes welled with tears. You’re home and dry, he told himself, sobbing and hiccuping with gratitude; nothing bad can happen to you now.

A first pothole on the Alberdi approach road, and the real or imagined sound of dozens of unpacked busts crashing into each other and shattering, reminded him that he’d better slow down, and he kept tight to the kerb for those first blocks, like a nervous swimmer who stays close to shore. Before his bleary eyes the city slowly stretched, yawned and shook itself awake: the odd bus starting out on its route, the bakery opening, the concierge sluicing down the pavement, the newspaper seller at the lights offering him a paper he refused so as to focus on the task in hand. On his right, a merry band of revellers in evening dress were leaving a reception room and hanging around on the pavement; after staring at them for several seconds he came up with the solution to the conundrum: a wedding. When, after broadening invitingly, the avenue wickedly reversed direction without warning, he had to take a diversion to the right and endure a few blocks of anxiety before coming out onto Avenida Directorio, whose one-way lanes downtown and slight (possibly imaginary) slope would now lead him straight as an arrow to his target, signposted by a brace of pink clouds floating in the distant azure like two flocks of flamingos in flight. He nodded off once or twice at the wheel, but it was ok: his little pick-up was like a faithful horse that knew which way to go, eating up the green lights as it went. Avenida Directorio, which at one point became Avenida San Juan, billowed up and down like a magic-carpet ride at the fair; the city, Marroné realised, was in fact not as flat as a billiard table, as was always claimed, but gently undulating. Unless it had changed in his absence.

He was no longer dazzled by the streetlights and traffic lights, or the headlights in the mirrors: daylight had spread to all corners of the sky. The piece of sky that loomed ahead of him now burnt an angry orange against bright blue: he was driving straight into the rising sun.

The last set of green lights beckoned to him welcomingly as he swung onto Paseo Colón in a broad curve; he drove past the Doric columns of the Engineering Faculty, smiling to himself, and hung a right onto Avenida Belgrano to take Moreno and park, at last, half a block from 300 Paseo Colón, right outside the entrance to the company’s building. He switched off the ignition and said a short prayer of thanks. He’d done it. Mission accomplished.

It was almost seven-thirty in the morning by his watch, but the city centre was inexplicably deserted. A bus went by, then a taxi, then nothing; even the kiosk on the corner where he used to buy the paper was all locked up and bolted. The door to the garage should have been open since seven, as it wasn’t unusual for executives to make an early start in order to get on top of their workload, but even when he knocked several times on the heavy brass ring, and then rang the janitor’s bell on the entryphone, he got no answer. Something strange was going on, not just at Tamerlán & Sons, but right across the city. Where had everyone gone? Was there something going on that everyone but him was in on? He crossed the four lanes of the avenue to the square opposite to scan the windows of the building for a revealing light. Nothing. The first rays of the sun had just clawed their way above the two battlements of the Customs House, catching the domes of the neighbouring office buildings like a flame lighting a row of candles. The bells of a nearby church — probably San Roque — struck the half-hour; he couldn’t remember ever having heard them before. He was thirsty and hungry and found a kiosk open on the other side of Belgrano, where he bought himself a packet of crackers and a bottle of chocolate milk with a straw in it, and dragged from the still-sleepy kiosk owner the answer to the riddle:

‘It’s Sunday, chief.’

‘Just my fucking luck,’ muttered Marroné and, adding two tokens to his order, asked for the nearest phone.

It was on the corner of Venezuela and, loath as he was to let the old pick-up out of his sight, there was nothing else for it. He dialled the number of Govianus’s house — the only one he knew by heart.

‘Ah, Marroné,’ a thick voice at the other end eventually answered. ‘It’s you. We’d given you up for dead. So you got the news that… What was that?’

‘The busts, Sr Govianus,’ he interrupted him eagerly. ‘I have the busts. I’m standing by the truck outside the door of the company right now. But I can’t find anyone to open up for me.’

‘Well… difficult, you know? On a Sunday at…’ he paused to pretend he was looking at the time on his alarm clock, just to make Marroné feel bad, ‘twenty to eight in the morning. Lucky for you I was in, wasn’t it? Waiting by the phone.’

Marroné started to get irritated: after all he’d been through, he’d hoped for a warmer reception, and he was also worried about the pick-up and its contents. What if they’d followed him and were taking advantage of his absence to make off with the lot?