Carlos Gamerro - The Adventure of the Busts of Eva Perón

His thoughts grew less sombre as the Peugeot surged up the exit ramp and emerged from the fluorescent light into the radiance of the summer afternoon, to join the double column of cars that crawled with rush-hour sluggishness along the side-lanes. This was the most vulnerable part of his journey and, in spite of the suffocating heat, he kept the windows firmly closed: while one eye checked the rear-view mirrors to make sure he wasn’t being followed by ‘rovers’ from the guerrilla, the other was intent on the pedestrians, who, with Argentinian contempt for white lines and red lights, kept materialising between the trunks of the tipa trees and recklessly darting between the moving cars. ‘If some person srows zemselves in front of ze car,’ he heard the idiosyncratic Spanish of Colonel Bigeard, ‘do not stop. Run zem over and let ze Legal Department take care of it. Iz easier to escape a trial zan a kidnap.’ After an accidental detour via Balcarce, he managed to get into the safer central lanes and exceed walking pace, until, on reaching Alem, the traffic opened up like spray squirting from the nozzle of a hosepipe, and Marroné could wind down the window and let the wind dry his sweat-drenched face. Seven thirty-five. If everything went well, he’d be home by eight, he told himself, relaxing and automatically turning the stereo on to listen to the B-side of The Socratic Pitch : ‘Once the dialectic moment of your presentation is over, and your formerly sceptical listener has become an ardent “yes-man” for your proposals, it is time for the midwife to step in. The Socratic Pitch will teach you the art of…’ As the tape reeled out its litany, which he knew almost by heart, having listened to it twice a day for almost thirty days (side A on the outward leg, side B on the return as recommended by the enclosed booklet), he amused himself with the familiar beauty spots along the way that glowed with the almost spiritual raking light of the golden hour: the majestic tree-covered slope of the Plaza San Martín; the stately Kavanagh Building and the brand-new Sheraton Hotel, symbols the one of past splendour, the other of future prosperity; the French grace of the Palais de Glace and the virile archaism of Antoine Bourdelle’s Monument to Alvear, flanked by the four allegorical figures of Victory, Strength, Eloquence and Liberty; the imposing Graeco-Roman façade of the Law Faculty; the Asiatic splendour of the Assyrian column and its towering bulls; and the galactic curves of the Municipal Planetarium… Paseo Colón and Avenida Libertador, he was fond of saying, were the spinal column of a better Buenos Aires, one that no Porteño need be ashamed of: a city every bit the equal of the great capitals of Europe and America, the axis of a better, more desirable country; and whenever he had to play chaperone to foreign visitors, it was with delight that he faced the challenge of plotting routes that joined up all the beauty spots without passing any of the eyesores (in daylight at least, which was when they might create a worse impression), and he found nothing more rewarding of his efforts than the spontaneous exclamation of an important foreign executive or businessman: ‘This doesn’t look like South America at all!’ Ah well, he said to himself, pressing the stop button and interrupting Socrates in full swing — just for today he could take a break and indulge in his own thoughts. For it had not escaped Marroné’s notice that he was facing a decisive turning point, one that — with hindsight — would divide not only his career but his life into a before and an after. Until today, he ventured to himself as he savoured the idea, he had merely been living; today perhaps he was beginning to write his autobiography.

‘How did Marroné become Marroné? That’s a good question. There are moments in the career of every top executive… They’re things you sometimes can’t put on your CV, but they’re precisely the kind of things that make everyone want to read your CV. This is one of the golden rules of what I earlier called “the marketing of the self”. Let me give you an example: when, thanks to my forceful yet sensitive handling of negotiations, I managed to rescue Fausto Tamerlán from the clutches of Marxist terrorism, I was no more than a “junior executive” fresh from the United States. True, I had brought back with me an MBA in Marketing from Stanford and a battery of innovative ideas, but I was no more than a cog — necessary perhaps, but replaceable — in a complex commercial machine. My coolness, calmness and collectedness, and above all my leadership abilities, proven in those dark hours when the whole future of the company hung in the balance, were the making of me. From that moment on, I became in all but name the CEO of Tamerlán & Sons, as it was called in those days. Sr Tamerlán’s prolonged captivity, coupled with the tortures inflicted on him — which included mutilation — had left physical and mental scars that kept him from anything more than nominal leadership, and that vacuum had to be filled by a providential man full of new ideas and the will to implement them. The now world-famous Marroné & Tamerlán Ltd had until those days been no more than a family enterprise, in the most limited sense of the word, and one that had never known bracing exposure to the elements of healthy competition, having grown up in the shadow of a nanny state, which, by the way, it will soon be time to wean ourselves off permanently.’ Marroné raced ahead with his autobiography, sticking close in language and style to the ones he so loved to read — those of Henry Ford, Alfred P Sloan, Thomas Watson Jr and Lester Luchessi — and dictating it to an imaginary listener who sat there, cassette recorder in hand, in the empty passenger seat. He liked to imagine himself dictating it because, as he now set about explaining to his attentive scribe (a ghost writer who had at first accepted the assignment just for the cash, but who, all agog, was now receiving a veritable masterclass in leadership and — why not? — in life too), the only executives who can afford the time to write their biography themselves have either retired or failed. Marroné now drove under the General Paz flyover and entered the suburbs, the docility of his Peugeot 504 and the wind, which barely ruffled his gel-slicked hair, intoxicating him as if he were breathing the air of high mountain tops, and spurring him on with his autobiography, which he had tentatively titled Marroné by Marroné : ‘My family spared no expense when it came to securing a first-class education for me, which I received at the exclusive and expensive St Andrew’s College in Buenos Aires, from where I graduated in 1964 with the honour of having obtained the coveted turquoise- and brown-striped prefects’ tie and the captain’s badge of the Dodds House rugby team. My time at St Andrew’s bequeathed me many gifts, such as my sound command of the English language, which has led to many a foreign businessman expressing disbelief when I confess to being Argentinian; a solid humanist background in the best British tradition; and the essential school spirit, which in the world of business translates into donning the company jersey…’ (‘Underpants,’ whispered the sly side of his mind once again, and he mentally swatted away the intrusive word) ‘… but I learnt two essential things that marked my subsequent career: I learnt to command and I learnt to obey.

‘I learnt to obey, to let myself be guided,’ he explained now to an audience not of one but of hundreds, the cassette recorder turned microphone, and the inside of his Peugeot grown to the proportions of the immense St Andrew’s assembly hall, decked out in homage to its favourite son, Ernesto Marroné, who had acquiesced to afford them a few hours of his precious time to deliver a lecture on leadership that would later be published in full in the school magazine, The Thistle . ‘To let myself be guided by my teachers and coaches,’ he continued, smiling encouragingly at the front rows, where the serried ranks of his old teachers sat — a few still active, others now retired but expressly invited for the occasion — and following the recommendations of How to Develop Self-Confidence and Influence People by Public Speaking , by — who else? — Dale Carnegie, his eyes rested for a second on each of them in turn: Mr Adams; Mrs Halley; Mrs McCarthy; Mrs Oxford, who used to force him, retching, to finish his milk in the dining hall; Sra Polino; Sra Regamor; Mr Guinness; Wójcik the Pole; the PE teachers Mr Trollope, Osvaldo Lamas and Willy Speakeasy; Uve; Sapa; El Pollo; Mr Peters; the fearsome Sr Macera, who had humiliated him before the whole class and then flunked him in Anatomy… ‘And by learning to obey, I learnt to command, to be a leader. What is a leader?’ asked Marroné in the theatre of his mind while his body handled the wheel and pedals of his Peugeot, respected traffic signals and dodged neighbouring cars. ‘The wise leader does not push to make things happen, but allows the process to unfold on its own. The leader teaches by example rather than by lecturing others on how they ought to be. Bosses are appointed; leaders are chosen by their peers,’ he thought, stringing together a series of phrases from The Tao of Leadership , now casting his eyes over the faces of some of his former schoolmates: ‘Slim’ Sörensen; Ramiro Agüero, who used to call him ‘sissy’ at break-time in primary school; Alberto Regamor, the brainiac who had won the Dux Medal and whose features Marroné’s memory insisted on confusing with those of the hated Cáceres Grey; and many others; but his satisfaction was complete when he spotted the unmistakeable, neatly trimmed ginger hair of Paddy Donovan, his high-school hero, who, on meeting his gaze, smiled back, his teeth whiter-than-white, and raised both thumbs approvingly. And beyond the guests and familiar faces, their heads bobbing expectantly on a sea of dark-blue blazers with their thistle-flanked badges bearing the motto ‘ Sic itur ad astra ’, stood the future leaders of Argentina, and there in their midst, bursting with pride, was little Tommy…