The Adventure of the Busts of Eva Perón Read online

  Which did not take place in the as yet non-existent bunker – in those days a mere archive and storage space in the basement – but at the antipole of the building, under the bulging dome of amber crystal that crowned the stately turn-of-the-century construction’s upper floor, baptised by Sr Tamerlán himself with the poetic name ‘Valhalla’.

  Sr Tamerlán’s desk, an imposing mahogany catafalque, was placed precisely beneath the crystal dome and, being a sunny day, Marroné was met on entering by the sight of his future employer submerged in a nimbus of golden light that isolated him from the surrounding atmosphere, as if he inhabited a reality of a different order and as if the desk, the objects strewn about it and the man himself sitting erect on his curved-armed throne were made of a more refined material, of gold and light.

  ‘That desk…’ Marroné began his well-rehearsed routine.

  ‘Drop the pants, please.’

  Sr Tamerlán had spoken without looking at him, without even looking up from the folder he had been leafing through – a bid for tender perhaps – and on hearing this unusual request, Marroné’s eyes scoured the enormous room in case the words had been intended for someone else and he was about to make a fool of himself. No, they were the only ones there. Marroné undid the buckle, loosened his belt, then the inside button of his James Smart trousers. As they were a wide fit he had no trouble pulling them over his shoes, except for the left heel, which got caught, forcing him to hop briefly on one leg. He folded them carefully, but having nowhere to put them, he hung them over his bent arm. His underpants, however, were worn and cheap-looking, and he was glad his shirt tails hid them from view.

  ‘Those too,’ said Sr Tamerlán without so much as a glance, as if taking it for granted that Marroné’s initial response would be dictated by modesty.

  Marroné obeyed, recalling at that instant an enigmatic phrase attributed to Sr Tamerlán by a reliable source: ‘Anyone who wants a career with us has to wear the company’s underpants.’ It was no doubt a reference to whatever it was that was about to happen. Sr Tamerlán closed the folder, rose from his chair, rounded the desk and walked towards him with his hands clasped behind his back, looking him up and down. For a moment Marroné feared Sr Tamerlán would open his mouth and examine his gums. Outside the enchanted circle of light Sr Tamerlán might pass for an ordinary human being, until he fixed his eyes on yours. Then, what the yellow light had softened leapt at you like a dog loosed from its muzzle: two eyes as blue as icebergs, and as hard. But it was only when Marroné looked down at his hands that sheer terror enabled him to wrest back the words that his surprise had taken from him: with his left hand Sr Tamerlán was pulling a proctologist’s rubber finger-stall over his right index finger.

  ‘I’ve already had the medical,’ stammered the terrified Marroné.

  ‘Don’t be stupid, Marroné, or I’ll regret hiring you before I do. It isn’t your prostate I’m worried about, let alone your haemorrhoids; in fact, all my most efficient executives have them: makes them edgier, more aggressive. Like ulcers. No, Marroné, it’s a different part of you I want to reach. Move forward a few steps, please. That’s it. Now rest both hands on the desk. Put those down there. Have no fear, we’ll give them back to you on your way out.’

  Marroné deposited pants and underpants on the glassy wooden surface. The warmth of the golden light caressed his face and the back of his hands, and its brightness made him half-shut his eyes. Through the cracks he managed to see what Sr Tamerlán had been flicking through. It wasn’t a bid for tender as he had first supposed but a magazine called Queen Studs. A naked, hairless hunk stared out from the cover with come-hither eyes, one slack hand draped casually over his crotch. As if both ends of his body were connected by a single taut thread, Marroné’s pupils dilated as fast as his sphincter contracted to a full stop.

  ‘As you must surely know, Marroné, physicians and philosophers have for centuries been searching for the physical seat of the soul. Pythagoras, for example, contended that the soul is air or, put another way, breath – which led him to locate it in the lungs; Democritus would complete the idea with an intricate atomistic lucubration to explain why the soul doesn’t come out of our mouths every time we exhale. The Stoics fluctuated between placing it in the heart or the head, but they agreed that it then extended through the body in seven polyp-like tentacles that informed our five senses, our speech and our organs of generation; from there it was but a short step, taken by Sir Thomas Browne amongst others, to the notion that the soul is handed down to the child in the father’s seed, and thence to its relocation in the balls. The mystical, theosophical or spiritualist traditions, on the other hand, usually favour the cardiac zone; The Upanishads situate it beautifully in a small chamber in the shape of a lotus-flower at the very centre of the heart. The Assyrians, however, located it in the liver. Stupid race. They deserved to die out for that if for nothing else. Then there were those who spoke of several souls, such as the Egyptians, who counted seven, distributed around the body; whilst Plato, always thrifty where material reality was concerned, cut them down to three: the rational, located in the head; the thumetic or spirited, in the chest; and the appetitive, between the diaphragm and the navel. Now, with that last one he really hit the post. Descartes, on the other hand, went completely the other way: he claimed the soul was housed in the pineal gland, this being the only single rather than dual structure of the brain and sense organs; which is why some have tried to link it with the third eye of the Buddhists – the eye of the soul.

  ‘This last notion, though essentially wrong, would eventually help me to see the truth. As you can see, many of the scholars, poets and thinkers in the history of East and West have devoted their days and nights to pondering or even scientifically investigating this tricky point. What a bunch of incompetent cocksuckers! Five thousand years of culture and I always end up having to do it myself! Still. All that effort may not have been in vain; the truth is sometimes nothing more than the qualitative leap forward that springs from an accumulation of blunders. Yes, Marroné. The third eye – the eye of the soul – does exist, hidden within us, waiting to be awakened; just not in the middle of your forehead. So where is it? With due modesty I think I can safely say that I have solved the riddle. Legs a little wider, please.’

  Marroné felt the first, tentative contact between his buttocks, then an increase in pressure as the rubber surface began to work its way inside. All the words hoarded over the last week completely evaporated from his mind. At that moment, had someone asked him his name, he couldn’t have answered with any certainty.

  ‘It was pretty obvious, though the answer lay not in anatomy, but in language. Why do you think they always talk about the “seat” of the soul? Why do you think the phrases “save your soul” and “save your arse” are so closely alloyed? Why do you think we say “I can’t be arsed” to express flat refusal? Didn’t it ever strike you as odd that we locate the seat of integrity not in the head or the heart, but a fair bit lower down? And what, Marroné, is the organ of our integrity but the soul? That’s why when your soul won’t bend, your arse won’t budge. As long as you own your arse, you own your self. That’s why if you’re going to work for me, there’s one thing you need to be very clear about. In this company we applaud freethinking, creativity and imagination; you’re free to have your own ideas and feelings, but your arse is ours. We aren’t asking much. We can’t get into your head, true, but we can get into your arse. And once we’re in, we give you the freedom to think whatever you like. That orifice is our most sensitive organ for perceiving errors, and there’s no better antidote for idiotic leanings towards independence or rebellion than a nicely puckered arse. From now on, Marroné, when you’re in any doubt, consult your arse and it’ll tell you what to do. Remember: your arse is your best friend.’

  While he spoke, Sr Tamerlán kept his finger still but rigid. Once his monologue was over, he began to withdraw it, and that was perhaps the most humiliating moment for Ernesto Marroné, when by
reflex his sphincter contracted on Sr Tamerlán’s finger as if he were trying to keep it there just a little bit longer. It was the final proof, if any were needed, that Sr Tamerlán was right: Marroné could no longer call his arse his own. But the stupefied blank that the removal of Sr Tamerlán’s finger had left in his mind was not to be filled by such elaborate sentiments as offence or humiliation, not even when, terminating the interview, Sr Tamerlán tossed the used finger-stall into the waste-paper basket like a spent condom.

  ‘I expect great things of you, Marroné. Be here for work first thing on Monday.’

  As he left, he thought he caught ill-concealed smiles in every glance, stifled laughter behind his back, and, that night, when his wife, eczematous with impatience, asked him the moment he walked in through the door, ‘And? How did it go? Did you meet him? Did you meet Sr Tamerlán?’, Marroné opened his mouth to speak and stood there staring until he found the words to deny all personal contact with the great company man. ‘I got the job,’ was all he managed to say.

  ‘So? Think you can do it?’ The weary voice of Govianus the accountant, who had finished his telephone conversation, brought him back with a thud from dome to basement, from glaring past to murky present. He cast around as if the eye of his mind had also to grow accustomed to the change of light. If the top-floor office and its vicinity to the heavens, its blinding light and bracing wind blowing in from the river, had always conjured for Marroné a majestic galleon in full sail, this office, with the unflagging ultramarine and emerald green of its windowless walls, the fish-tank lighting of its fluorescent tubes, the armoured metal furnishings and the refrigerated air descending motionlessly from the vents in the ceiling, resembled nothing so much as a submerged submarine in wartime. And wartime it undoubtedly was when proud men like Sr Tamerlán, accustomed to leading the nation’s economic destiny from the prow, were forced to dig lairs and hide underground like hunted animals. Construction work on the bunker had been completed shortly after Marroné joined the firm, and the engineer and labourers Sr Tamerlán had imported had been flown back to the USSR: only the big man himself would be privy to the secrets of its construction. But the office they now found themselves in was just the tip of the iceberg, the semi-public space of a much vaster subterranean complex: some hidden point of the mute surfaces surrounding Marroné concealed the entrance to the secret chambers that only a handful of the elect had seen, though rumours circulated in the company about the treasure accumulated in the vault, enough to buy wills (‘arses,’ his mind corrected) and to finance acts of sabotage; about the communication equipment powerful enough to jam all the radio and television sets in the country and commandeer the airwaves; about the power plant with supplies for several months, the weapons and explosives depot, the larders and freezers overflowing with the choicest produce of five continents; and especially about the executive bedrooms, entirely covered with mirrors, and complete with rotating waterbeds, jacuzzis and fat catalogues of products from the ports of Northern Europe and the Far East. The bunker could accommodate the company’s top executives, and their sexual partners of choice, male or female (wives and children were strictly banned as counter-effective to the ruthless exercise of power). If a communist revolution was ever victorious in Argentina, capitalism could hole up here and hold out for months. Months! Ha! Sr Tamerlán had been kidnapped in broad daylight by the guerrillas before he was able to see his super-sophisticated lair completed, and maybe now, locked away in dungeons more primitive, dug by his captors, he would be reflecting on the vanity of the insatiable human longing for security.

  ‘All we have to do is contact our usual supplier and place an urgent order,’ answered Marroné. ‘No big deal. That’s why I’m head of procurement, isn’t it? But as you know…’

  ‘Please, Marroné, not that again. You know all promotions are frozen until Sr Tamerlán gets back. Help me rescue our president and I promise you that, when all this is over, I will speak to him myself in person about your promotion to marketing and sales.’

  ‘When all this is over,’ Marroné mentally retorted to the unmannerly Govianus, who, without waiting for him to go out, had plunged his nose back into his paperwork, ‘I may not need a middleman to speak to Sr Tamerlán and ask him for what he’ll no longer be able to refuse.’ As he waited for the lift to take him back to his office on the sixth floor, he looked up at the model of the Monument to the Descamisado, which stood in the lobby: sheer forehead, shirt unbuttoned to the waist, right hand on chest, left clenched in a sinewy fist. The monument had been commissioned during the golden years of the first Peronist government and, at a purported 137 metres, was intended to be the tallest in the world. But by the time Perón fell from power in 1955 the building work hadn’t even started, and the model was shunted discreetly to the basement where it gathered dust until Perón’s return to power two years ago, when they had decided to move it into the lobby. Instinctively Marroné adopted his plebeian counterpart’s posture of Herculean determination, as befitting someone who has heard destiny knocking on his door. This, he said to himself, was the opportunity he had so longed for to prove to Sr Tamerlán his personal devotion, to show him he wasn’t just another employee (‘Just another arsehole,’ the devious side of his mind said in a whisper that the saner side dismissed with a mental grimace) and to join the inner circle of Tartars, as Sr Tamerlán had taken to calling his personal guard of samurai executives. ‘The arrival of those busts, Marroné,’ he would say when it was all over, the two of them lounging in the plush white armchairs of his living room (a living room he could relax in, thanks to Mabel’s collection of magazine cuttings, as comfortably as in his own), each warming a glass of cognac in their cupped hands, ‘was providential. They’d already pronounced my sentence, the murder weapon of the chosen one was already pointing at my temple – they draw lots, Marroné, such is their bloodlust that they will fight each other for the privilege. But tell me something… The idea of concealing a transmitter in the sample bust, was it really the police’s or… ? Of course. I knew it. What is a man like you doing vegetating in procurement? Marketing? Don’t be modest, man. Look, I need to recover, have some time to myself, travel the world in the company of my darling wife. And Govianus, we can agree, much as we acknowledge his efforts over these last few months, isn’t the man for the job… He lacks fibre, grit, drive… If it had been down to him, I wouldn’t have enough fingers left to warm this glass. Besides, Ernesto – mind if I call you Ernesto? – I needn’t tell you that the doors of this house are always open to you. So my daughter Clara won’t feel so alone while we’re away, will you, Clara, darling?’

  By the time the lift reached the sixth floor it was the day of his wedding to Clara Tamerlán and the bubble of his imagination burst with the rarefaction of the reality around it: Sr Tamerlán had no daughter, and Marroné was already married. But despite his right hemisphere’s natural tendency to such tangential flights of fancy, it didn’t escape the notice of his more sober left side that this wasn’t the time for dreaming but for living up to the name of executive and executing.

  ‘Busts? Of Evita? No, what problem could there be?’ the jolly voice of the owner of the Sansimón Plasterworks, the company’s main supplier, answered him good-naturedly. ‘A few years ago it would have been a different story, but these days… They’re going like hot cakes. How many did you say? No, not that many in stock, but I’ll have them run off for you before you can say “Evita Perón”. Why don’t you drop round first thing tomorrow and I’ll show you the different models. Will you be wanting some of the Governor too?’

  After hanging up, Marroné gazed out of the window of his deserted office at the crawling columns of vehicles as they drained from the city centre, and indulged in two more flights of fancy: the short version, in which he passed himself off as a member of the guerrilla to rescue Sr Tamerlán and fled with him through the slums at night, carrying him through a hail of zinging bullets; and the longer version, in which beneath Govianus’s unimpeachable mask
he discovered a guerrilla leader who had infiltrated the company years ago and bled it to swell the coffers of subversion. Knowing he had been exposed, Govianus holed up in the bunker and asked Marroné – named sole negotiator by mutual agreement of the parties – for a plane to take him and several political prisoners to Cuba in exchange for Sr Tamerlán’s release; in the end, realising the game was up, he bit the cyanide pill carried by every subversive and died in Marroné’s arms, but not before revealing Sr Tamerlán’s whereabouts and whispering his final message. ‘Been in their power for years. Wasn’t all my doing. Took me to the Soviet Union, had me brainwashed. In death I can be the man I used to be: Ulrico Govianus, accountant, loyal servant to the company and its president and director general. Sr Tamerlán’s finger it’s… in the freezer, in the bunker, third shelf down, under the beefburgers,’ Govianus would reveal before breathing his last, his penchant for the prosaic breaking the spell of Marroné’s second daydream. But it wasn’t just Govianus’s impertinent coda that brought him back to reality: a distant voice that seemed to reach him from his innermost being was calling to him, as if hesitating before the gates of his consciousness, and as it became more audible, the initial chill that had gripped his body on seeing the severed finger gradually thawed to a warm and pleasant inner glow. The sensation was unmistakeable, but so many months had passed since he had felt it with such intensity that it was like bumping into an old friend you never expected to see again. At once incredulous and grateful, with the hypnotic certainty of a dream, he pulled out a half-read copy of The Corporate Samurai and the key to the executive bathroom from the second drawer of his desk, and stepped out of his office and into the corridor.