Carlos Gamerro - The Adventure of the Busts of Eva Perón

As he pulled down the garage door, Marroné remembered the disposable nappies his wife, beleaguered by the chronic shortage of supplies, had asked him to pick up at any price. He had promised to look for some near the office, but being by nature somewhat prone to distraction — ‘the Achilles heel of creative thinkers’, the specialist literature called it — and to losing himself in reveries, he had clean forgotten. As Mabel would never in a million years pass up the opportunity to make a scene if he dared to come home empty-handed, he pushed the creaking wooden door back up in order to go and raid the supermarket on Avenida Libertador, before he remembered that it was ‘Closed for Refurbishment’, the usual euphemism for ‘Blown Up by the Montoneros’ (or the ERP, who knows). He thought of trying the duty chemist’s, but he’d left his newspaper at the office and his mission to retrieve the one from indoors and get out again without being seen was aborted by little Tommy’s vigilance, who, alerted by the noise of the gate or perhaps the car, intercepted him on the ground-floor landing with his strident demand of ‘Tweeties! Tweeties!’ — which, of course, his father had forgotten to pick up, along with the nappies. To the abject confession of his empty hands little Tommy’s mouth responded with an O of incredulity that instantly narrowed to a ∞ of incessant wailing, which inevitably brought Mabel running. ‘I bet you’ve forgotten the nappies too,’ she spat at him in greeting, at which the ‘Hello darling’ that Marroné had at the ready barely managed to escape his throat, strangled and squeezed dry of any genuine emotion. ‘I was just going to check the paper for a chemist’s,’ he said, adopting a decisive tone, but Mabel was ready with her answer and fired at him: ‘Haven’t you heard there’s-a-shor-tage, Ernesto? The chemist’s haven’t even got aspirins in stock!’ ‘Of course I have. You seem to forget that I’m the head of procurement for one of the leading comp…’ he began in an offended tone, but realised too late that he’d put the ball just where she wanted him to (Mabel always beat him at tennis). ‘You might be head of procurement at the office, but at home you can’t even pick up a lousy chocolate bar,’ she snapped as little Tommy, seeing his position defended, redoubled his bawling, and Marroné felt the tension running up and down his body in thick, indignant waves of pure stress; with the stoic fatalism of the serial somatiser, he knew that that night he would suffer from heartburn and insomnia, and it was with a supreme effort of self-control that he stopped himself from screaming in his wife’s face: ‘The life of a very important man is in my hands and you’re banging on to me about candy bars!’ But he couldn’t do this without jeopardising the whole operation, and so he turned once again to the pages of How to Win Friends and Influence People , to be precise, to the chapter entitled ‘If You’re Wrong, Admit It’ from the section ‘How to Win People to Your Way of Thinking’, which advised: ‘Say about yourself all the derogatory things you know the other person is thinking or wants to say or intends to say — and say them before that person has a chance to say them.’

‘You’re right, my darling,’ said Marroné through jaws clenched as tight as a hydraulic press. ‘You deserve a better husband than me. All that effort you make morning, noon and night, running the house, and I can’t even remember one little errand you ask me to do…’ As his tongue waded laboriously through the viscous insincerity of his words, Mabel’s features gradually lost their tautness, as if each admission of guilt loosened one of the threads that tensed it, and very soon she was the one coming to his defence: ‘Well, Ernesto, I wouldn’t go that far, I mean we’ve got enough to last till the weekend’ (‘Then why did you kick up such a fuss about it, you bitch!’) ‘and you, Tommy, be quiet will you, your daddy’s had a long day at the office, come here, I’ve got some sweeties for you upstairs…’ and Marroné, now certain of victory, allowed himself to add a ginger ‘First thing tomorrow I’ll pop out to the supermarket in La Lucila’, only for Mabel to reply: ‘No, no, you’re always in a dreadful hurry when you leave, I don’t want you doing anything to add to your stress. I’ll have Doña Ema pick some up for me at the weekend, they have everything in the shanties you know, never go short of anything. We’ll soon be resorting to cloth nappies out here and they’re spoilt for choice — course they resell what the government gives them, so Doña Ema tells me. Cynthia’s just woken up, can you believe it? Like she knows you’re home. Want to go up and see her?’

At dinner, which consisted of a starter of boiled ham and Russian salad, a main course of milanesas and mash, and a dessert of crème caramel and dulce de leche , Mabel gave him the latest update on little Cynthia’s latest escapades, encouraged by her husband’s studied posture of the absorbed listener. Knowing how to listen, after all, was one of the secrets of success in business and private life, for Principle Six (‘How to Make People Like You Instantly’) reminds us that even if you happen to be President of the Republic, the person you are talking to is a hundred times more interested in themselves, in their petty needs and problems, than in you and your great ones. What everyone ultimately wants is to feel important, and listening with attention was an infallible way of satisfying that basic need, Marroné was repeating to himself, when Mabel suddenly blurted out:

‘Is anything wrong? You’ve hardly said a word since we started eating.’

‘I was listening carefully,’ he mumbled behind his tight-lipped smile.

‘You didn’t manage…?’

He was about to break the good news to her, when he thought better of it and shook his head contritely instead. Marroné had made of the prolonged barrenness of his belly an impregnable excuse to lock himself in the bathroom for extended periods of time whenever the manifold demands of married life or home became too much for him; especially since his study had been annexed as the little girl’s bedroom and there was no other room in the house he could call his own. The bathroom had become the only place where he could enjoy some degree of peace and quiet, and devote some time to himself. Confessing to Mabel the success that had crowned his afternoon’s efforts would be to deprive himself of that minimal but indispensable right to privacy.

Once the coffee cups had been cleared away, Doña Ema’s working day was over and it was Marroné’s turn to look after the children, while Mabel went upstairs to the bedroom to watch television for a bit. Much as he liked to picture himself as an exemplary father — the very phrase made him swell with pride — after a day of stress at the office the tasks it involved were capable of pushing him over the edge, for since the little girl’s arrival, the demands of his children seemed irrationally to have multiplied not by two, but by ten. He would make a superhuman effort to remind himself that every opportunity for recreation was essential in the life of the executive, enabling him to return to his tasks with renewed vigour, but after a few minutes of lending them his undivided attention, he would start thinking about all the work he could be catching up on, or the books he could be reading, and which he did sometimes try to read while looking after them, with the regrettable result of neither being able to concentrate on reading nor enjoy the children, which meant he would end up losing his patience and yelling at them. Today he didn’t last twenty minutes: while he was changing little Cynthia’s dirty nappy, little Tommy in a fit of jealousy shook the changing stand and knocked the bottle of baby oil on the floor, which Marroné, of course, hadn’t put the top back on; cursing, he leapt, cotton wool in hand, to wipe it up before it ruined the carpet and earned him another dressing-down from Mabel. His reprimand, not so much violent as tense with barely contained anger, set off little Tommy, who was a sensitive child at heart, and while tending to him, Marroné forgot about the girl, who, when he looked up, was teetering on the brink of the changing stand about to follow the bottle into the abyss. Once he had deposited her safely in the middle of her crib, he went back to consoling little Tommy and, by the time he noticed the fresh nappy, which should have been on little Cynthia, lying open and unused on the changing stand, her pee had drenched the sheets and soaked through to the mattress. ‘I’m not cut out for this, I’m not cut out for this,’ Marroné hiccuped, his throat closed by hysteria as he laid the little girl on the floor and stripped the sheets in order to pick up the mattress. He flirted for a moment with the temptation of sitting down on the floor next to her and starting to cry, but that would probably only trigger a sympathetic response in little Tommy, who, quieter now, had climbed up to the third shelf of the bookcase and was on the verge of falling backwards and breaking his neck on the edge of the crib. Having reached this point, he felt psychically and morally justified to go to his wife with the babe in his arms and the boy by the hand and guiltlessly say, ‘Can you take them for a while? I’m going to try…’