Redeemers (38 page)

6

Eva Perón

THE MADONNA OF THE SHIRTLESS ONES

Thinkers and politicians through the ages have long been aware that politics is a kind of theater, but after the public opinion polls gave Ronald Reagan a victory in the televised presidential debates of 1980 against Jimmy Carter, the Cuban writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante was moved to consider the parallels between political power and the movies. Exiled from his own country by Fidel Castro, whom he considered a consummate actor, a maestro of monologue, Cabrera had personally suffered from the impact of a politician with the skills of an actor. Now the performance of Reagan, “that Errol Flynn of B movies,” convinced the Cuban writer that, while being an actor was not a sufficient qualification for becoming a politician, it surely did help a great deal. On that critical night for his campaign, Reagan spoke with ease, projecting calmness, security, even benevolence: the forthright American who within the
High Noon
of the Cold War would save what could be saved of the American century. “It was the best performance of his career,” wrote Cabrera Infante, “worth an Oscar, but they only gave him, as consolation prize, the presidency of the United States.”

Politicians with the skills of actors filed in a long stream across the stage of the twentieth century. Some of them were admirable, most of them contemptible. There were fewer actors turned politicians but they played equally imperious and disturbing roles in government. Jiang Qing, a minor and unsuccessful actress in low-budget films, made use of her acting gifts and experience to successfully represent a whole series of historic roles: fervent follower of the leader of Hunan, a protagonist of the Long March, and finally—a happy though not final ending—omnipotent wife of the omnipotent Mao Tse-tung. During the same period, at the other end of the world, another famous dictator, General Juan Domingo Perón, had once declared that “the Argentine who can perform on the speaker's platform the way Gardel does on the screen will hold Argentina in the palm of his hand.” Carlos Gardel, legendary actor and singer of tangos, had died in an airplane accident in 1935. And so the stage was empty and ready but it was not Perón who would take Argentina into the palm of his hand. It would be his consort: another minor actress and veteran of low-budget films, Eva Duarte.

 

IT ALL
really began with the impact of Hollywood on a young girl living in poverty in Junín, a small provincial city of Argentina. There she read the magazine
Sintonía
and clipped photographs of Norma Shearer. The girl had seen Shearer play the role of Marie Antoinette. She would dream of being the American film star, acting the same part and listening from her prison cell to the drumrolls at the guillotine. The girl had no resources, no education, not even any particular physical gifts other than a very smooth skin, translucent, like alabaster. Although she industriously practiced a kind of schoolgirl recitation of poetry, her pronunciation was painfully poor. But nothing would hold her back. She had decided that she would become an actress and that her hometown was far too small for her. On New Year's Day of 1935, when she was fifteen years old, she left Junín for Buenos Aires, the capital of the country.

For almost ten years she would work at her chosen vocation with very little luck: nonspeaking parts in plays, minor roles in movies, photographs for entertainment magazines or advertising posters. Every step was due to the patronage of one or another impresario who sometimes would favor and protect her, but more often merely exercise, at her expense, his droit de seigneur. A woman who worked with her during that period remembers:

 

Eva was a slight little thing, delicate, thin, with black hair and a long little face . . . She was so skinny that you couldn't tell if she was going or coming. Due to hunger and poverty and somewhat because of negligence, her hands were always wet and cold. And she was also cold in her acting work: a piece of ice. She was no girl to awaken passions. She was very submissive and very timid.

 

“I was bad at theater; in the movies I knew how to get by but if I was good at anything, it was radio,” she would confess years later. And to a degree she was right. The genre of radio plays stirred a sentimental fever of emotions throughout Latin America. Every evening, from Mexico to Patagonia, women of all social classes would pass their time listening to the umpteenth version of
Cinderella
. (The same is true now with telenovelas.) The fragile Eva began to be recognized as a heroine of these radio plays, where the only thing that counted was the melodramatic tone communicated by her voice: high-pitched, quivering, honest, suffering. Nevertheless, the first six months of 1943 were a nightmare for her: she was then an unemployed and faded Cinderella. Suddenly, the military coup of June 1943 (the first in Argentina since 1930, and the preamble to a long though varied military hegemony) rescued her from her despair. Through the patronage of a certain Colonel Aníbal Imbert, she signed a contract with Radio Belgrano to star in a series dedicated to eighteen celebrated women, all of whom were to be either artists, like Sarah Bernhardt and Isadora Duncan, or, preferably, empresses: Elizabeth of England, Eugenia de Montijo (the wife of Napoléon III), Carlota of Mexico, Anna of Austria, Catherine the Great of Russia. The weekly magazine
Antena
would now even describe her as “the famous actress Eva Duarte.”

Her meeting with her Prince Charming, Juan Domingo Perón, on January 22, 1944, instantly changed her own life and that of her country. “Thank you for existing,” she said to him. It was the conventional happy ending of a radio play become vivid reality. Once established as the lover of the powerful General Perón, who was then minister of labor, Eva continued to do radio programs and to climb the rungs of the movie business. Her last role on the big screen was as the star of the film
The Prodigal Woman
(
La pródiga
), a typical Spanish drama of religious conversion: a woman sinner atones for a licentious life through works of charity. The poor make her into a saint, calling her “the Señora,” “mother of the poor,” “sister to the afflicted.” Once she had risen to power, Eva would have all the copies of
La pródiga
destroyed, not really because of an impulse toward self-criticism but rather for a deeper and more revelatory reason—her radio embodiments of those actresses and empresses together with the story of
The Prodigal Woman
had provided her with the libretto for her future. It would be an occasion when a movie was not inspired by reality but exactly the reverse: a film would leap from the screen to seize power over the real.

With her role now clear to her, a physical transformation was needed. Years before, she had told her hairdresser, “Cut my hair, Julito, like Bette Davis.” Later he had begun to do her hair like Olivia de Havilland in
Gone with the Wind
but now her new part—not for a movie but within history—called for something more than just a change of style. It was then that she decided to abandon her past life as a
morocha
(the Argentine term for a dark-haired, lower-class woman) and dye her hair. She was reborn as a blond Madonna. “It was a theatrical and symbolic gold,” writes Alicia Dujovne Ortiz, author of the biography
Eva Perón
, “which served the same function as the halos and gilded backgrounds in the religious painting of the Middle Ages: to isolate sacred figures.”

Evita herself would say, “The poor like to see me lovely, they don't want to be championed by some lady who doesn't dress well. They dream of me and I cannot disappoint them.” And so that she would not disappoint them, she asked for advice on elegant clothes from women of high society, and in Europe bought Dior dresses and Rochas perfumes. Jewels drove her wild—or, more precisely, they nourished and calmed her—but she did not, in any way, disdain hard cash. When she died, she would own 1,200 gold and silver brooches, three ingots of platinum, 756 pieces of silver and gold work, 144 ivory brooches, a 48-karat emerald, 1,653 diamonds, 120 wristwatches, and a hundred clocks made of gold, as well as other unnumbered precious gems, necklaces, platinum brooches, and of course stocks and property, all of it worth tens of millions of dollars.

One could leaf through any copy of
People
or
Paris Match
or endless fan magazines without encountering an actual or cinematic fate that can be remotely compared to Eva Duarte's. Not only did she truly embody Cinderella but also the good and miraculous fairy godmother and the former sinner to whom Providence had done justice by filling her to overflowing with fame, power, and many millions. But she was not just any millionairess. She was a new “prodigal woman,” “the Lady of hope,” “the foremost Argentine samaritan.” It took only a few months for her to utterly fascinate her country, but she felt Argentina was too small for her. In 1947 she tried to add Europe to her conquests. The reporters christened her triumphal journey of that year “the Rainbow Tour” (
la travesía del Arco Iris
). Glittering at the head of her royal procession, she conquered Spain, had less success in Italy and some other countries, but in Paris, Cardinal Roncalli—the future John XXIII—would exclaim, when he saw her about to enter Notre Dame: “The Empress Eugenie has returned!” When she felt that she had won the heart of Europe, her ambition increased considerably: “What I want is to pass into History.” Her sudden illness would swell the limits of that dream into a wish for immortality. And to achieve it, she herself ordered (specifying every detail) that her body be embalmed. (A darker version of this decision claims that Perón himself decided on the embalming, and ordered that Evita begin to be injected months before her death with “chemical preparations” that would retard the visual deterioration of her body; he also, according to this story, forbade the use of painkillers, which could have interfered with the cosmetic chemicals.) She would die of cancer of the uterus, at the age of thirty-three. Half a million people attended the monumental funeral, showering her with. 1.5 million yellow roses, alhelís, and chrysanthemums. But afterward the body would find no rest. As if animated by a life of its own and casting a spell over anyone who took charge of it, the angelic object would endure an incredible nomadic journey of almost twenty years across Argentina and Europe. It was hidden, buried, and dug up various times; once it was mutilated and it wound up eventually accompanying Perón into exile. This necrophilic process of wandering is the central theme of the dark and fascinating novel
Santa Evita
, by Tomás Eloy Martínez. And in the end, after the no less incredible triumphal return of Perón to Argentina in 1973, pressure grew to repatriate Evita's remains. After the
caudillo
's death, his widow Isabelita—who, it is said, tried to absorb the soul of the dead Evita—brought the body to Argentina and gave it a Christian burial in the cemetery of La Recoleta, where Eva Perón now rests. But is she really at rest?

 

II

If the history of the embalmed body belongs more to the literature of the macabre (with overtones of Dracula himself), the ongoing obsession with remembering Evita has two sides to it: the religious and the mythological. Long before her death, Eva Perón had attracted a level of devotion in Argentina comparable to the adoration normally accorded to the various representations of the Virgin Mary. It was an idolatry that reached extremes of hysteria. People sent her letters so that they might “have a place in your thoughts.” “It is like being in the mind of God,” wrote a victim of polio. Many Argentines decided that the best way to demonstrate love for their saint was to establish new records: for unremitting work, for fasting, for dancing the tango, for linked sequences of shots on a pool table. Tomás Eloy Martínez offers a lively re-creation of scenes that surpass the
Guinness Book of World Records
. To ask God that He heal Evita's illness, a harness maker makes a thousand-kilometer pilgrimage on foot to a statue of Cristo Redentor in the Andes. He is accompanied by his wife and three children, one of them a babe in arms. Questioned about his intentions, he answers, “If Evita dies, thousands will be abandoned. You can find people like us anywhere, but there's only one saint like Evita.” For many months after her death, the radio stations of Argentina would interrupt their broadcasts at 8:25 every evening to inform their listeners that, exactly at that moment, “Eva had entered immortality.” The Vatican received forty thousand letters asking that she be canonized. (The Holy See refused to consider it.) The fetishism that accrued to her person and to objects that she had touched would reach the extreme of treating as “sacred” the banknotes she had lavishly distributed. It was a collective fervor not easy to explain. Jorge Luis Borges has observed that “no one is Catholic in Argentina but every one has to pretend to be . . . the Catechism has been replaced by Argentine history.” Perhaps Evita, for this very reason, would, for a while, come to fill the void of faith in Argentine piety.

The “religious” devotion to Evita—her life viewed as hagiography—would diminish with time but not the mythology that had collected around her. Endless articles, newspaper stories, factual revelations, and books would be written. Documentaries and fiction films would be produced. She would be both venerated and despised: the Great Saint, the Great Whore.

 

III

What were the wellsprings of her oceanic ambition? The first ingredient was certainly her position as not only an illegitimate child but (culturally even worse) the product of an adulterous relationship. Juan Duarte, Evita's father, was a man of the Argentine middle class, who administered haciendas. While Evita was growing up, her father was supporting his legitimate family in the town of Chivilcoy. Years before, he had abandoned Eva's mother, Juana Ibarguren, leaving her with five children: his son Juan and his four daughters. Doña Juana was an illegitimate child herself and in bringing up her offspring, she suffered real need. She lived with all her children in a single room of the inn that she managed and she had to take in other people's sewing, working in the same room on her Singer machine. The elusive Juan Duarte did not even attend the baptism of his youngest illegitimate daughter, Evita, “a daughter not of love but of habit,” in his own words to Juana as reported by Martínez. Juana remembered, “He saw Evita so rarely that if he had run across her in the middle of the fields, he would not have recognized her.” Eva came to know her father only in his coffin on the day of his burial, when his legitimate family brutally expelled Juana Ibarguren and her children from the graveside funeral.