The Return of Eva Perón, With the Killings in Trinidad

by V. S. Naipaul

The thing has been institutionalized; and the institution is served by a gigantic brothel industry. There are brothels everywhere, open night and day. Enormous new buildings, their function proclaimed by neon signs and a general garishness, are strung along the Pan American Highway. In the heart of the city, behind the Recoleta Cemetery, where the illustrious are buried, there is an avenue of tall brothels. The brothels charge by the hour. In the dim lobby of such a place a red spotlight might play on a crude bronze-colored woman’s bust: the bad art of Argentina. Every schoolgirl knows the brothels; from an early age she understands that she might have to go there one day to find love, among the colored lights and mirrors.

  The act of straight sex, easily bought, is Of no great moment to the macho. His conquest of a woman is complete only when he has buggered her. This is what the woman has it in her power to deny; this is what the brothel game is about, the passionless Latin adventure that begins with talk of amor. La tuve en el culo, I’ve had her in the arse: this is how the macho reports victory to his circle, or dismisses a desertion. Contemporary sexologists give a general dispensation to buggery. But the buggering of women is of special significance in Argentina and other Latin American countries. The Church considers it a heavy sin, and prostitutes hold it in horror. By imposing on her what prostitutes reject, and what he knows to be a kind of sexual black mass, the Argentine macho, in the main of Spanish or Italian peasant ancestry, consciously dishonors his victim. So diminished men, turning to machismo, diminish themselves further, replacing even sex by a parody.

  The cartoonist Sábat, in some of his Grosz-like drawings, has hinted at the diseased, half-castrated nature of machismo. In Buenos Aires the other day a new film opened and was a great success: Boquitas Pintadas—Little Painted Mouths—made by Argentina’s most famous director and based on a novel by an Argentine writer, Manuel Puig. The film—clumsy and overacted and without polish—is the story of the life and death of a tubercular small-town macho. An aimless film, it seemed, a real-life chronicle on which no pattern had been imposed. But the Argentine audience wept: for them the tragedy lay in the forsee-able death of the macho, the poor boy of humble family who made his conquests the hard way, by his beauty.

  To the outsider the tragedy lay elsewhere, in the apparent motivelessness of so much of the action. No relationship was hinted at, and no comment seemed to be offered by writer or director: it was as though, in the society of machismo, the very knowledge of the possibility of deeper relationships had been lost. After the macho’s death one of his women had a dream: in bleached color, and in very slow motion, the macho rose from his grave, in his pretty macho clothes, lifted her in his arms, flew with her through a bedroom window and placed her on a bed. On this necrophiliac fantasy the film ended. And the audience was in tears.

  To go outside after this, to walk past the long queue for the film, to see the lights of packed cafes and bars, the young people in flared jeans, was to have the sharpest sense of the mimicry and alienness of the great city. It was to have a sense of the incompleteness and degeneracy of these transplanted people who seemed so whole, to begin to understand and fear their violence, their peasant cruelty, their belief in magic, and their fascination with death, celebrated every day in the newspapers with pictures of murdered people, often guerrilla victims, lying in their coffins.

  After the genocide, a great part of our earth is being turned into a wasteland. The failure of Argentina, so rich, so underpopulated, twenty-three million people in a million square miles, is one of the mysteries of our time. Commentators like Mariano Grondona, unraveling chaos, tying themselves up in etapas, will try to make sense of irrational acts and inconsequential events by talking of Argentina’s French-style history. Others will offer political explanations and suggest political remedies. But politics have to do with the nature of human association, the contract of men with men. The politics of a country can only be an extension of its idea of human relationships.

  Perón, in himself, as folk leader, expressed many of his country’s weaknesses. And it is necessary to look where he, the greatest macho of them all (childless and reportedly impotent), pointed: to the center of Buenos Aires and to those tall brothels, obscenely shuttered, that stand, suitably, behind the graveyard.

  5 The Terror

  March 1977

  In Argentina the killer cars—the cars in which the official gunmen go about their business—are Ford Falcons. The Falcon, which is made in Argentina, is a sturdy small car of unremarkable appearance, and there are thousands on the roads. But the killer Falcons are easily recognizable. They have no number plates. The cars—and the plainclothesmen they carry—require to be noticed; and people can sometimes stand and watch.

  As they stood and watched some weeks ago, in the main square of the northern city of Tucumán: the Falcons parked in the semicircular drive of Government Headquarters, an ornate stone building like a nineteenth-century European country house, but with Indian soldiers with machine guns on the balcony and in the well-kept subtropical gardens: a glimpse, eventually, of uniforms, handshakes, salutes, until the men in plain clothes, like actors impersonating an aristocratic shooting party, but with machine guns under their Burberrys or imitation Burberrys, came down the wide steps, got into the small cars and drove off without speed or sirens.

  The authorities have grown to understand the dramatic effect of silence. It is part of the terror that is meant to be felt as terror.

  Style is important in Argentina; and in the long-running guerilla war—in spite of the real blood, real torture—there has always been an element of machismo and public theatre. In the old days policemen stood a little way from busy intersections with machine guns at the ready; at night the shopping streets of central Buenos Aires were patrolled by jack-booted and helmeted soldiers with Alsatian dogs; from time to time, as a dramatic extravaganza, there appeared the men of the anti-guerrilla motorcycle brigade. The war in those days was in the main a private war, between the guerrillas on one side and the army and police on the other. Now the war touches everybody; public theatre has turned to public terror.

  Style has been taken away from all but the men in the Falcons. The guerrillas still operate, but the newspapers are not allowed to print anything about them. They can print only the repetitive official communique, the body counts, and these usually appear as small items on the inside pages, seemingly unrelated to the rest of the news: in such a place, on such a date, in these circumstances, so many subversives or delincuentes were killed, so many men, so many women. The communiqués are thought to represent only a fraction of the truth: too many people are disappearing.

  In the beginning—after the chaos and near-anarchy of the Peronist restoration—the killings were thought to be good for the economy. War was war, it was said; the guerrillas—now like private armies, with no recognizable aims—had to be rooted out; the trade unions and their leaders had to be disciplined after the license and corruption of the Peronist years. (No more free trips to Europe on Aerolineas Argentinas for those union men, flashy provincial machos requiring attention from the crew, each man, after supper, settling down with his pile of comic books and photo-novels, light reading for the long night flight, the tips of ringed fingers wetted on the tongue before the pages were turned.) Another, more becoming, Argentina was to be created; the country (as though the country were an economic abstraction, something that could be separated from the bulk of the population) was to be got going again.

  And while wages were kept down like sin, the banker-saints of Argentina worked their own inflationary miracles. They offered 8 percent a month or 144 percent a year for the peso, and momentarily gave back faith to many good Argentines who had for years been praying only for the water of their pesos to be turned into the wine of dollars. During the early months of the terror the stock market boomed; fortunes were made out of nothing; Argentina seemed to be itself again. But now—even with that 144 percent—the terror is too close.

  No pattern can any longer be di
scerned in the terror. It isn’t only the guerrillas and the union men and the country’s few intellectuals who are threatened. Anyone can be picked up. Torture is routine. Even workmen unlucky enough to be in a flat at the time of a raid have been taken away, held for a few hours and tortured with everybody else, so automatic is the process: the tight blindfold, the eyes depressed in the sockets, the hooding, the beating, the electric shocks that leave burn marks for eighteen days, and then the mysterious journey in the boot of the Falcon and the sadism of release: “We are taking you to the cemetery. . . . Now, count a hundred before you take off your blindfold.”

  Almost everyone in Argentina now knows someone who has disappeared or been arrested or tortured. Even military men have, by the intervention of military friends, been called to receive the corpses of their children, corpses which might otherwise have been destroyed or thrown away, sometimes to roll ashore, mutilated and decomposing, at Montevideo, on the other side of the Río de la Plata. One woman was sent the hands of her daughter in a shoe box.

  There is still, for the distinguished or well known, legal arrest on specific charges. But below that there is no law. People are taken away and no one is responsible. The army refers inquirers to the police, and the police refer them back to the army. A special language has developed: an anxious father might be told that his son’s case is “closed.” No one really knows who does what or why; it is said that anyone can now be made to disappear, for a price.

  Buenos Aires is full of shocked and damaged people who can think now only of flight, who find it no longer possible to take sides, who can see no cause in Argentina and can acknowledge at last the barbarism by which they have for long been surrounded, the barbarism they had previously been content to balance against the knowledge of their own security and the old Argentine lure of the spacious rich land, easy money and abundant meat, the lure expressed in the words that so often in Argentina close a discussion: “Todovía aquí se vive mejor.” “Still, you live better here.”

  Barbarism, in a city which has thought of itself as European, in a land which, because of that city, has prided itself on its civilization. Barbarism because of that very idea: civilization felt as something far away, magically kept going by others: the civilization of Europe divorced from any idea of an intellectual life and equated with the goods and fashions of Europe: civilization felt as something purchasable, something always there, across the ocean, for the man or woman with enough money: an attitude not far removed from that of the politician of a new country who, while fouling his own nest, feathers another abroad, in a land of law.

  The official history of Argentina is a history of glory: of a war of independence, with heroes, of European expansion, wealth, civilization. This is the past of which Borges sometimes sings; but a recurring theme of his later stories is of cultural degeneracy.

  Torture is not new in Argentina. And though Argentines abroad, when they are campaigning against a particular regime, talk as if torture has just been started by that regime, in Argentina itself torture is spoken of—and accepted—by all groups as an Argentine institution.

  In 1972, at an elegant provincial hotel, an upper-class lady of Spanish descent (still obsessed with the purity of race, still fighting the old Spanish wars) told me that torture had started in Argentina in 1810, when the country became independent of Spain; and—middle-aged and delicate at the dinner table, drinking the yellow champagne of Argentina, and speaking English with the accent of the finishing school—she said that torture remained necessary because the penal code was so benign. “You have to kill a man in the most horrible way to go to jail here. ‘My client was excited,’ the lawyer says. ‘Oh?’ the judge says. ‘He was excited?’ And no jail.”

  A young Trotskyist lawyer didn’t see the law quite like that. He thought only that torture had been used by “most of the governments” and had become “a pretty important feature of Argentine life.” Its abolition seemed at first to form no part of his socialist program; but then, noticing my concern, he promised, speaking very quickly, as to a child to whom anything could be promised, that torture would disappear “with the downfall of the bourgeoisie.”

  However, the high Peronist trade union man I later went to see—this was in mid-1972, and the union man was close to power, waiting for Perón to come back—couldn’t promise anything. He said—and he might have been speaking of rain—that torture would always exist. It was this man, soft-voiced, reasonable, at that time still the representative of the oppressed, who told me—the map of the Paris metro and a photograph of the young Perón below glass on his desk—that there was good torture and bad torture. It was “all right” to torture an “evildoer”; it was another thing to torture “a man who’s trying to serve the country.”

  And that was the very point made four years later by Admiral Guzzetti, one of the leaders of the present regime, when, defending the terror, he spoke to the United Nations in August 1976. The Admiral (who has since been wounded in a guerrilla attack) said: “My idea of subversion is that of the left-wing terrorist organizations. Subversion or terrorism of the right is not the same thing. When the social body of the country has been contaminated by a disease that corrodes its entrails, it forms antibodies. These antibodies cannot be considered in the same way as the microbes.”

  Yesterday’s antibodies, today’s microbes; yesterday’s servants of the country, today’s evildoers; yesterday’s torturers, today’s tortured. Argentine ideologies, in spite of the labels of Right or Left that they give themselves, are really quite simple. What harms the other man is right; what harms me is wrong. Perón was never more Argentine—in his complaints and his moral outrage—than when, in 1956, the year after he had been overthrown by the military, he published his own lachrymose account of the affair. He called his book La Fuerza Es el Derecho de las Bestias. The words mean, literally, “Force is the right of animals,” and the title might be rendered in English as The Law of the Jungle.

  In that book Perón wrote: “The revolution is without a cause because it is only a reaction. It seeks only to undo what has been done, to extirpate Peronism, to take away from the workers the benefits they have won.” And Perón, if he were alive today, might use the same words about the present regime. So little has Argentina changed in the political seesawing of the last twenty years; so without point have been all the ma-neuverings and murders.

  The killer cars are not new. They began to operate in Perón’s time, when Perón turned against the guerrillas who had brought him back to power. And the cars became more murderous in the time of Isabel, Perón’s widow and successor, when the enemies became more personal, less politically definable. Then one day Isabel ceased to rule, and the Peronist cycle was over.

  It happened simply. Late one evening the military, who had held off for a long time, had the presidential helicopter hijacked; and Isabel—flying back in style from Government House in downtown Buenos Aires—was told that the presidential house in the suburb of Olivos, where she thought she was going, was no longer her home. In the official story, she burst into tears, the former cabaret girl who had become the first woman president of Argentina. She was taken first to a city airfield; later she was taken under guard to the presidential house to pack her clothes. There she tried to get the household staff on her side. She thought that they were hers, loyal to her. But they, used to Argentine presidents coming and suddenly going, simply helped her pack.

  That was how it ended for her, the poor girl born in the poor northern province of La Rioja. She was in a cabaret in far-off Panama when she met the exiled Perón in 1956, one year after his overthrow, four years after the death of Eva Perón. Isabel was never promoted as a replacement for Eva Perón; and Perón was never reproached by his followers for his association with her. To macho Argentina, infinitely comprehending of a man’s needs, Isabel was only the new woman at the leader’s side. And when she came back to Argentina with Perón in 1973, she came only as an “ambassador of peace,” the “verticalizer
,” the woman who was to bind Argentina with her love, while Perón handled the hate.

  “Perón conduce, Isabel verticaliza”: “Perón conducts, Isabel verticalizes.” The words are as difficult in Spanish as they are in English; but this was one of the slogans of the last days of Perón’s rule, in 1974, when Peronism had already shown itself to be nothing but words, and the rule of Perón and his court was like a continuation of the hysteria that had brought them back; when official printed posters supplemented aerosol graffiti, and the walls of Buenos Aires were like tattered billboards. So many posters, quickly outdated: always some new martyr to be mourned (and forgotten within a week: nothing as dead, in Peronist Argentina, as last week’s political poster), so many killings to be avenged: the leader seeking always to buoy himself up on a collective expression of anger, complaint and hate.

  Now there is silence. Isabel is still in detention somewhere in the south, the subject of fading gossip; a private snapshot, released by the authorities, shows that she grew fat during her time in office. Many of the people who ruled with her have scattered. The astrologer Lopez Rega—he was Isabel’s manager when she was a cabaret girl in Panama, and he later became Perón’s secretary—is out of the country; he has been accused by the present government of embezzling large sums during his time as welfare minister.

  The political scandals connected with Perón’s return to power, and the financial scandals of his rule and the rule of Isabel, continue. It was the guerrillas who made it possible for Perón to come back; they were the strong right arm of the Peronist movement in 1972 and 1973. But were they all guerrillas? The kidnappings and the bank raids—were they all for the cause? Or was some of the guerrillerismo mixed up with Argentine big business? Speculating this time not in land or the falling peso, but in idealism and passion, real blood and torture.