The Return of Eva Perón, With the Killings in Trinidad

by V. S. Naipaul

  The military like clean walls; and the walls of Buenos Aires are now whitewashed and bare. But here and there the ghostly political graffiti of old times show through the whitewash: the “Evita Vive” (“Evita Lives”) of 1972; the emblems of the Peronist youth movement; the Peronist election slogan of 1973: “Cámpora a la Presidencia, Perón al Poder” (“Cámpora to the Presidency, the Power to Perón”); the later, the Peronistically inevitable, proclamation of “Cámpora traidor” (“Cámpora is a traitor”): friend mysteriously turned to enemy, now an unimportant part of dead Argentine history, the ghost of a ghost: all that dead history faint below the military whitewash. _

  Perón himself is not much talked about now. He is dead; he finally failed everybody; he and the years he wasted can be skipped. History in Argentina is less an attempt to record and understand than a habit of reordering inconvenient facts; it is a process of forgetting. And the middle-class politicians and intellectuals who campaigned for Perón’s return, the people who by their unlikely conversion to the Peronist cause made that cause so overwhelming in 1972 and 1973, now avoid the subject or do not come clean.

  They say they were hoping to change the movement from within; or they say, more fantastically, that what they really wanted was Peronism without Perón. But it was Perón they invited back from exile to rule over them; and they invited him back—even with his astrologer—because they wanted what he offered.

  In her ghosted autobiography, La Razón de Mi Vida, Eva Perón says she found out about poverty when she was eleven . . . “and the strange thing is that the existence of the poor did not cause me as much pain as the knowledge that at the same time there were people who were rich.” That pain about the rich—that pain about other people—remained the basis of the popular appeal of Peronism. That was the simple passion—rather than “nationalism” or Perón’s “third position”—that set Argentina alight.

  Eva Perón devoted her short political life to mocking the rich, the four hundred families who among them owned most of what was valuable in the million square miles of Argentina. She mocked and wounded them as they had wounded her; and her later unofficial sainthood gave a touch of religion to her destructive cause.

  Even when the money ran out, Peronism could offer hate as hope. And in the end that was why Argentina virtually united in calling Perón back, though the first period of his rule had ended in repression and disaster, and though he was very old and close to death. In his eighteen years of exile, while Argentina floundered from government to government, he had remained oddly consistent. He had become the quintessential Argentine: like Eva before him, like all Argentines, he was a victim, someone with enemies, someone with that pain about others. As the years passed, his enemies multiplied; his old words of Argentine complaint began to read like prophecies (“The Revolution is without a cause”; “The military rule but no one obeys”); until finally he appeared to have become the enemy of everybody’s enemy.

  Peronism was never a program. It was an insurrection. For more than thirty years Argentina has been in a state of insurrection. The parallel is not with any country in Europe, as Argentine writers sometimes say. The parallel is with Haiti, after the slave rebellion of Toussaint: a barbarous colonial society similarly made, similarly parasitic on a removed civilization, and incapable of regenerating itself because slavery provided the only pattern of human behavior, and to be a man meant only to be able to assuage that pain about the other, to be like the master.

  Eva Perón lit the fire. But the idea of reform was beyond her. She was too wounded, too uneducated; she was too much of her society; and always she was a woman among machos. Christophe, emperor of Haiti, built the Citadelle, at immense cost in life as well as money: the model was the British fortifications of Brimstone Hill in the small island of St. Kitts, where Christophe was born a slave and trained as a tailor. So Eva Perón in power, obliterating records of her early childhood, yet never going beyond the idea& of childhood, sought only to compete with the rich in their cruelty and wealth and style, their imported goods. It was herself and her triumph that she offered to the people, the pueblo in whose name she acted.

  Her enemies helped to sanctify her. After Perón’s overthrow in 1955 they put on a public display of her clothes, even her intimate garments. She had been dead three years; but that display (especially of the underclothes) was an Argentine, macho form of violation; and the people, el pueblo, were meant in addition to be shocked by the extravagance and commonness of their great lady. It was disingenuous: the violators themselves had no higher ideals, and the display of fairy-tale wealth—wealth beyond imagination coming to someone who was of the poor—added to the Evita legend.

  Twenty years after her death she found legitimacy. Her small embalmed body—she was five feet two, and at her death she was wasted—now rests in the Duarte family vault in the Recoleta Cemetery, the

  upper-class necropolis of Buenos Aires. The stone and marble avenues of the mimic town are full of the great names of Argentina, or names which, if the country had been better built, would have been great, but can be seen now only as part of a pretentious, failed past. This legitimacy, this dignity, was all that the girl from Los Toldos wanted; it has taken her an insurrection, an unraveling of the state, to achieve it.

  In the early Peronist days she was promoted as a saint, and she is now above Peronism and politics. She is her own cult; she offers protection to those who believe in her. Where there are no reliable institutions or codes or law, no secular assurances, people need faith and magic. And Nature in Argentina is overwhelming: meii can feel abandoned in that land of great mountains and big blank spaces. (What desert and scrub and mountains separate the northern province of La Rioja from the softer but still limitless land of the pampa: La Rioja, site of old, lost hope, the town founded in sub-Andean desolation late in the sixteenth century, after Mexico and Peru, as another of the Spanish bases for the search for El Dorado.) Desolation always seems close in the Argentine vast-ness: how did men come here, how have they endured?

  In that desolation cults grow, and they can have a feel of the ancient world. Like the cult of the woman know as La Difunta Correa, The Deceased Correa. At some undated time she was crossing the desert on foot. She was starving; there was no water in the desert; and she died. But her baby (or the baby she gave birth to before she died) was found alive, sucking at the breast of the dead woman. Now there are little roadside shrines to her memory, and in these shrines people leave bottles of water. The water evaporates: it has been drunk by the Difunta Correa. La Difunta Correa tomó el agua: the simple miracle is ceaselessly renewed.

  Eva Perón is that kind of figure now, without dates or politics. And offerings are made at the Duarte vault in the Recoleta. The sarcophagus cannot be seen, but it is known to be there. On the morning I went, white lilies were tied with a white scarf to the black rails, and there was a single faded red rose, unspeakably moving. On the ground, unprotected, was a white mantilla in a plastic wrapper. A woman came with a gift of flowers. She was a woman of the people, with the chunky body of someone whose diet was too starchy. She had come from far, from Mendoza, at the other end of the pampa.

  (Mendoza, the wine region at the foot of the Andes, where in the bright southern light and clear air the imported trees of Europe, the willow and the plane, grow gigantically; and the view on one side is always bounded by the gray-blue wall of the mountains. Not the true snow-capped Andes, though: these will appear one day, very far away, apparently unsupported, like a faint white overprinting in the middle sky, giving a new idea of size, awakening wonder not only at the sixteenth-century conquistadores who came this way, but also at the Incas, who, without the wheel, extended their rule so far south, and whose irrigation channels the cultivators of Mendoza still use.)

  The lady from Mendoza had a sick daughter—a spastic or a polio sufferer: it wasn’t clear. “Hace quince años hice la promesa. I made a vow fifteen years ago.” In 1962, that is, when Eva Perón had been dead for
ten years and Perón was still in exile, with no hope of return; when the embalmed body of Eva was presumed lost. Now the miracle had occurred. The body was there; the daughter was well enough again for the vow to be fulfilled.

  She placed the flowers on the ground; she went still for a little while, contemplating the rails and the blank vault; and then she became herself again, brisk and ready to go. She said, “Ya cumplí. There, I’ve done it.”

  A New King

  for the Congo:

  Mobutu and

  the Nihilism

  of Africa

  January—March 1975

  The Congo, which used to be a Belgian colony, is now an African kingdom and is called Zaire. It appears to be a nonsense name, a sixteenth-century Portuguese corruption, some Zairois will tell you, of a local word for “river.” So it is as if Taiwan, reasserting its Chinese identity, were again to give itself the Portuguese name Formosa. The Congo River is now called the Zaire, as is the local currency, which is almost worthless.

  The man who has made himself king of this land of the three Z’s—pays, fleuve, monnaie—used to be called Joseph Mobutu. His father was a cook. But Joseph Mobutu was educated; he was at some time, in the Belgian days, a journalist. In 1960, when the country became independent, Mobutu was thirty, a sergeant in the local Force Publique. The Force Publique became the Congolese National Army. Mobutu became the colonel and commander, and through the mutinies, rebellions and secessions of the years after independence he retained the loyalty of one paratroop brigade. In 1965, as General Mobutu, he seized power; and as he has imposed order on the army and the country so his style has changed, and become more African. He has abandoned the name of Joseph and is now known as Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga.

  As General Mobutu he used to be photographed in army uniform. Now, as Mobutu Sese Seko, he wears what he has made, by his example, the Zairois court costume. It is a stylish version of the standard two-piece suit. The jacket has high, wide lapels and is buttoned all the way down; the sleeves can be long or short. A boldly patterned cravat replaces the tie, which has more or less been outlawed; and a breast-pocket handkerchief matches the cravat. On less formal occasions—when he goes among the people—Mobutu wears flowered shirts. Always, in public, he wears a leopard-skin cap and carries an elaborately carved stick.

  These—the cap and the stick—are the emblems of his African chieftaincy. Only the chief can kill the leopard. The stick is carved with symbolic figures: two birds, what looks like a snake, a human figure with a distended belly. No Zairois I met could explain the symbolism. One teacher pretended not to know what was carved, and said, “We would all like to have sticks like that.” In some local carving, though, the belly of the human figure is distended because it contains the fetish. The stick is accepted by Zairois as the stick of the chief. While the chief holds the stick off the ground the people around him can speak; when the chief sets his stick on the ground the people fall silent and the chief gives his decision.

  Explaining the constitution and the president’s almost unlimited powers, Profils du Zaire, the new official handbook (of variable price: four zaires, eight dollars, the pavement seller’s “first” price, two zaires his “last” price), Profils du Zaire quotes Montesquieu on the functions of the state. Elima, the official daily, has another, African view of government. “In Zaire we have inherited from our ancestors a profound respect for the liberties of others. This is why our ancestors were so given to conciliation, people accustomed to the palaver [la palabre], accustomed, that is, to discussions that established each man in his rights.”

  So Montesquieu and the ancestors are made to meet. And ancestral ways turn out to be advanced. It is only matter of finding the right words. The palaver is, after all, a “dialogue”; chiefs rule is government by dialogue. But when the chief speaks, when the chief sets his carved stick on the ground, the modern dialogue stops; and Africa of the ancestors takes over. The chiefs words, as Elima (having it all ways) has sometimes to remind “anti-revolutionary” elements, cannot be questioned.

  It is said that the last five words of Mobutu’s African name are a reference to the sexual virility which the African chief must possess: he is the cock that leaves no hen alone. But the words may only be symbolic. Because, as chief, Mobutu is “married” to his people "The Marriage of Sese [Mobutu]” is a “revolutionary” song—and, as in the good old days of the ancestors, comme au bon vieux temps de nos ancêtres, the chief always holds fast to his people. This marriage of the chief can be explained in another, more legalistic way: the chief has a “contract” with his people. He fulfills his contract through the apparatus of a modern state, but the ministers and commissioners are only the chiefs “collaborators,” “the umbilical cord between the power and the people.”

  The chief, the lord wedded to his people, le pouvoir: the attributes begin to multiply. Mobutu is also the Guide of the Authentic Zairois Revolution, the Father of the Nation, the President-Founder of the Mouvement Populaire de la Révolution, the country’s only political party. So that, in nomenclature as in the stylish national dress he has devised, he combines old Africa with what is progressive and new. Just as a Guy Dormeuil suit (160 zaires in the Kinshasa shops, 320 dollars) can, with cravat and matching handkerchief, become an authentic Zairois national costume, so a number of imported glamorous ideas bolster Mobutu’s African chieftaincy.

  He is citizen, chief, king, revolutionary; he is an African freedom fighter; he is supported by the spirits of the ancestors; like Mao, he has published a book of thoughts (Mobutu’s book is green). He has occupied every ideological position and the basis of his kingship cannot be questioned. He rules; he is grand; and, like a medieval king, he is at once loved and feared. He controls the armed forces; they are his creation; in Kinshasa he still sleeps in an army camp. Like Leopold II of the Belgians, in the time of the Congo Free State—much of whose despotic legislation (ownership of the mines in 1888, ail vacant lands in 1890, the fruits of the earth in 1891) has passed down through the Belgian colonial administration to the present regime, and is now presented as a kind of ancestral African socialism—like Leopold II, Mobutu owns Zaire.

  Muhammad Ali fought George Forman in Kinshasa last November. Ali won; but the victor, in Zaire, was Mobutu. A big hoarding outside the stadium still says, in English below the French: “A fight between two Blacks [deux noirs], in a Black Nation [un pays de Negres] organized by blacks and seen by the whole [world] that is a victory of Mobutism.” And whatever pleasure people had taken in that event, and the publicity, had been dissipated by mid-January, when I arrived. I had chosen a bad time. Mobutu, chieflike, had sprung another of his surprises. A fortnight before, after a two-day palaver with his collaborators, Mobutu had decided on a “radicalization of the revolution.” And everybody was nervous.

  In November 1973 Mobutu had nationalized all businesses and plantations belonging to foreigners—mainly Greeks, Portuguese and Indians—and had given them to Zairois. Now, a year later, he had decided to take back these enterprises, many of them pillaged and bankrupt, and entrust them to the state. What, or who, was the state? No one quite knew. New people, more loyal people? Mobutu, speaking the pure language of revolution, seemed to threaten everybody. The three hundred Belgian families who had ruled the Congo, he said, had been replaced by three hundred Zairois families; the country had imported more Mercedes-Benz motorcars than tractors; one third of the country’s foreign earnings went to import food that could be produced at home.

  Against this new Zairois bourgeoisie—which he had himself created—the chief now declared war. “I offer them a clear choice: those among them who love the people should give everything to the state and follow me.” In his new mood the chief threatened other measures. He threatened to close down the cinemas and the night clubs; he threatened to ban drinking in the public places before six.

  Through the Belgian-designed cité indigène of Kinshasa, in the wide, unpaved streets, full of pits and
corrugations, between mounds of rubbish sometimes as high as the little houses in Mediterranean colors, in the green shade of flamboyant, mango and frangipani, schoolchildren marched in support of their chief. Every day Elima carried reports of marches de soutien in other places. And the alarm was great, among the foreigners who had been plundered of their business and had remained behind, hoping for some compensation or waiting for Canadian visas, and among the gold-decked Zairois in national costume. Stern men, these Zairois, nervous of the visitor, easily affronted, anxious only to make it known that they were loyal, and outdone by no one in their “authenticity,” their authentic Africanness.

  But it is in the nature of a powerful chief that he should be unpredictable. The chief threatens; the people are cowed; the chief relents; the people praise his magnanimity. The days passed; daytime and even morning drinking didn’t stop; many Africans continued to spend their days in that red-eyed vacancy that at first so mystifies the visitor. The nightclubs and cinemas didn’t close; the prostitutes continued to be busy around the Memling Hotel. So that it seemed that in this matter of public morals, at least, the chief had relented. The ordinary people had been spared.

  But the nervousness higher up was justified. Within days the ax fell on many of the chief’s “collaborators.” There was a shake-up; the circle of power around the chief was made smaller; and Zairois who had ruled in Kinshasa were abruptly dismissed, packed off to unfamiliar parts of the bush to spread the word of the revolution. Elima sped them on their way.

  The political commissioner will no longer be what he was before the system was modified. That is to say, a citizen floating above the day-to-day realities of the people, driving about the streets and avenue of Kinshasa in a Mercedes and knowing nothing of the life of the peasant of Dumi. The political commissioners will live with the people. They will be in the fields, not as masters but as peasants. They will work with the workers, they will share their joys and sorrows. They will in this way better understand the aspirations of the people and will truly become again children of the people.