The Adventure of the Busts of Eva Perón

by Carlos Gamerro

  Marroné strained again, with no result save for the certainty of being far from his goal, then turned the page: the teenage Eva had now arrived in Buenos Aires with her suitcase full of hope, like so many thousands of men and women from the marginalised and impoverished hinterland who migrate to the big city in search of a better life, and embarked on her career as an actress and model. But when the last footlight had gone out, away from the illusory reality of the stage, Eva encountered the same exploitation and the same injustices in the world of the theatre as she had in the outside world. She could do little about it for the moment. Whenever she demanded improvements, whenever she made herself heard to her bosses, she was invariably fired, and the photo showed her with her back to the camera, sitting opposite a fat toad of an impresario puffing on an equally fat cigar as he tore a contract up in her face; another in a winter street, shivering in her threadbare summer coat, and, oblivious to her own distress, giving a coin to the same ragged urchin from Los Toldos (was Marroné supposed to believe the child had followed her all the way to Buenos Aires, or was this some kind of allegory?): ‘I wanted not to admit, not to look, not to see the misfortune, the hardship, the destitution around me, so I plunged single-mindedly into my strange artistic vocation. But the more I tried to lose myself in it, the more beleaguered I was by injustice.’ The businessmen, the bankers, the rich cannot hear the cry welling up from below, from the factories, from the shanties… Eva hears it and knows that she will one day speak for them. For she is no longer the same frightened little girl: Eva has changed.

  The change had been made clear by the choice of a different actress to portray her as an adult: it was visible from the first still, which showed her in a polka-dot bathing costume, her long legs bare, her feet crossed, her loose chestnut hair tumbling over her shoulders, her hands clasped behind her head to display the carefully shaven armpits. Her posture might be unnatural, uncomfortable, extremely ‘camera-conscious’, but in her forced smile and her eyes, which childishly solicited the photographer’s approval, there was a genuine, uncontaminated joy.

  Next came her radio days, where she seemed to be more at ease, for she wielded the fearsome corn-cob of a microphone like a gun, with all the decisiveness of the great women of history – Elizabeth I, Catherine the Great, Isadora Duncan, Madame Chiang Kai-shek – whose lives she plays, unaware that one day she will be the greatest of them all. This was followed by a still of Eva with her hair loose, staring directly into the camera and seeming to speak directly to him, to Marroné: ‘There comes a point in every life when we feel we have to do the same things, over and over, for the rest of our days, and that our paths are fixed for all time. But to all, or nearly all of us, there comes a day when everything changes, our “marvellous day”. For me…’

  The page ended and Marroné, more intrigued than he would have liked to admit, turned it and went on reading: ‘For me it was the day my life came together with Perón’s. That meeting marks the start of my one true life.’ The caption beneath read: In January 1944 an earthquake destroys the city of San Juan, and Colonel Perón and Eva meet at a festival for the victims. One image showed Eva atop a pile of rubble that purported to be the destroyed city, hugging the by-now ubiquitous ragged urchin from Los Toldos; another image showed her touching the epaulette of the uniformed man seated in front of her. Yet it was neither the images nor their captions, but Evita’s words, that really made him stop and think. What, if he’d already had it (‘all, or nearly all of us,’ announced the bold print of Eva’s admonition, with harsh sincerity), had been Marroné’s ‘marvellous day’? ‘It could hardly have been the day his life had joined with his wife’s,’ one side of his mind whispered to him insidiously, while in a guilty reflex the other tried to conjure up images of domestic bliss: the house and garden in Olivos, the double bed, the two cots… Yet here he was in an occupied factory, disguised as a worker, reading a photonovel of the life of Eva Perón, and all of that seemed as far removed from the here and now as the abundant offspring of Gauguin and his stern Danish wife were from Tahiti. It was also possible that his ‘marvellous day’, he told himself with a shudder, had been the day of his interview with Sr Tamerlán. He found it painful to admit, but it was possible. Or perhaps it had been the day Govianus had set him his mission. It was hard to say for sure. Because the ‘marvellous day’ might already have happened, or might be happening now, this very instant (the bold type of the photonovel seemed to be shadowing his thoughts) and you might not realise until much later. Or the ‘marvellous day’ might arrive disguised as a catastrophe: the ‘one true life’ of Lester Luchessi, for example, had started the day he was unceremoniously fired from the Michigan Real Estate Co: without the goad of his outrage and panic he might never have become that providential man who saved the Great Lakes Building from rack and ruin, or the author of Autobiography of a Winner. So Marroné’s ‘marvellous day’ could well be today and this apparent dead end. The change in Luchessi’s life had come at fifty-something, the same age as Ray A Kroc or Alonso Quijano… or Juan Domingo Perón, he realised in amazement, swiftly flicking through the boxes introducing the newcomer to Eva’s life.

  Who was this handsome but obscure colonel that had become a household name overnight? asked the text, and proceeded to answer its own question with scant biographical details and a tedious list of Perón’s achievements as head of the Secretariat of Labour, which Marroné skipped without compunction. He wasn’t interested in this smiling, made-up Lugosi; he thirsted only for Eva. By the time he ran into her again, she had become Perón’s mistress and was sitting at the far end of an unlikely but convivial café table, at which were gathered the motley adversaries of the now-famous couple: an indignant soldier in epaulettes wearing a cap with a visor and with a bubble saying ‘He has the cheek to take that slut on parade with him!’; a ranch-owner dressed like an English lord, who reminded him of his father (‘Before he filled their heads, labourers were meek and went about their work with a happy smile’); a bespectacled man who wore a goatee and a French beret, which presumably marked him out as an intellectual of the left (‘Perón is a Nazi Fascist, no doubt about it’); a snooty oligarch looking as if she could smell shit (‘You can’t make a silk purse…’); and a priest with an expression of infinite disapproval, who kept his counsel, having run out of space for a bubble. Beside them, shrugging off the inevitable criticism of the conservatives, there emerged from Eva’s mouth the barbed words: ‘Soon, along the wayside, our hypercritics began to shower us with threats and insults and slurs. “Ordinary men” are the eternal enemies of everything new, of every extraordinary idea and therefore of every revolution.’

  It had been the same with him, thought Marroné, when he’d brought back all those innovative ideas from the United States: he too had been held up as a madman and dreamer by ‘ordinary men’ like Cáceres Grey, who viewed him ‘indulgently’, ‘pityingly’, with that air of superiority adopted by the mediocre when faced by true men of genius. Don Quixote had also been thought mad by the ‘mediocre men’ of his village, but it was his name that was written in stone, while the hand of time had erased the names of the sane and the sensible, dissolved for ever in the half-baked wash of their inane vacuousness. ‘I will not stop for barking dogs,’ added Evita proudly, in allusion to that famous saw from the Quixote, ‘You know you’re riding, Sancho, when you hear the dogs bark.’

  But the dogs – the hypercritics – wouldn’t give in and reappeared again and again over the next few boxes, this time in the form of four young women decked out in furs, hats and jewellery, waving little French and English flags, while among them strutted a blonde-haired, pot-bellied, Stetsoned Texan with an American flag emblazoned on his dickey. The forces of the anti-people, from the oligarch traitors and the petit bourgeoisie to the socialist and communist intellectuals who had never seen a worker close up, led by the Yankee ambassador, Spruille Braden, call for Perón’s head and obtain his arrest, read the text, and over the next few boxes a dignified if somewhat b
rowbeaten Perón was shown being dragged away by police from the arms of a tousled Eva wearing a simple flowery dress, at first tearful and distressed (‘I had never felt so small or helpless as I did in those days…’), then suddenly looking fiercely and resolutely into the camera (‘But then I took to the streets in search of friends who could still do something for him’), then talking to the military, priests and politicians with their stony faces (‘Up at the top I met only with cold, calculating, “sensible” hearts, the hearts of “ordinary men”, hearts at whose contact I felt sick, afraid and ashamed’); then with workers in helmets and berets under bubbles shouting ‘Viva Perón! Viva Eva!’, housewives dropping their shopping to follow her, passionate shanty-dwellers with clenched fists raised aloft (But as she descended from the neighbourhoods of the rich and proud to the poor and humble, people’s doors began to open wide). The sequence climaxed in an elongated box featuring an Evita who evoked Delacroix’s Liberty (though with no breast on display), brandishing an Argentine flag and leading the hopeful, swarthy crowd of workers, people, masses who first burst onto the Argentine political scene on that 17th October 1945 and made their voices heard, and below: ‘Ever since that day I have believed it cannot be hard to die for a cause you love.’

  Overleaf Marroné came across a double-page spread showing the Peronist tide filling Plaza de Mayo and clamouring for Perón’s freedom in a variety of bubbles; a box with the cabecitas dangling their feet in the fountain (both apparently archive photos); and a roundel of the photonovel’s two leading lights: an exultant Perón, with one arm raised aloft and the other around Eva’s wasp-waist. Like Venus from the sea, read the pithily overinflated caption, Eva Perón is born of those million mouths demanding the freedom of one man.

  So she too had known doubt and dejection, the dark night of the soul, thought Marroné, straining his abs again. Her acting career was over, fallen by the wayside along with the man who had raised her to the top; the enemy had won the day, all doors had closed, and she had even been beaten up in the street by a mob of extremists. Yet her spirit had won through, turning her darkest hour into victory. Bereft of everything, save her determination and courage, she had achieved it all: Perón’s freedom, her marriage to him, a presidential candidacy for her husband and, for her, the title of First Lady at the ripe old age of twenty-six. She had had a clear sense of her mission: to save Perón and set him free, and she had stopped at nothing to fulfil it. What a woman, thought Marroné. Whether you shared her political views or not, it would be mean-minded – the stuff of ‘ordinary men’ – not to acknowledge her leadership qualities.

  That was it, felt Marroné, as he gingerly detached his buttocks from the edge of the plastic toilet seat and rearranged them. He could see it clearly now: Evita had followed the Way of the Warrior, she was a samurai woman, and her lord was, of course, Perón: ‘May it come as no surprise to those who seek my portrait in these pages but find Perón’s instead. I have ceased to exist in myself, and it is he who lives in my soul, master of all my words and feelings, the overlord of my heart and life.’ As Marroné read, a maxim from The Corporate Samurai came to his mind: ‘Your errors are yours; your successes, your lord’s.’ Or as Eva would have put it: ‘I was not, nor am I, anything but a sparrow in a vast flock of sparrows… But he was and is a giant condor flying high and sure amidst the mountain tops. Were it not for him, he who came down to me and taught me a different way to fly, I would never have known what a condor was…’

  And himself? Marroné too had a clear sense of his mission: he had to save Sr Tamerlán at all costs. The message was clear: all of us have our 17th October in our lives, and his was knocking on the door. He would follow Eva’s example and save Sr Tamerlán, and, like that other 17th October, he would use the workers. He didn’t yet know how, but he’d think of something. He wasn’t the kind of man to stick to the beaten track or always drink from the same well. He would go on ploughing his own furrow while the hypercritics huffed and puffed, and the dogs barked till they were hoarse.

  And there was another idea that had begun to nibble at the edges of his mind. If Eva Perón’s exemplary demeanour on 17th October could be his lodestar in the current situation, why not write a book that would take her whole life and career as an example to be emulated? Eva Perón in Enterprise Management, for example, or perhaps something more metaphorical and less pedestrian, like The Sparrow and the Condor. A biography that would keep inessential ideology separate from the core issues: the mettle, the spirit, the will to self-mastery, the capacity for leadership. Had there ever been a better example in history of someone who could overcome the most adverse circumstances, create an image and a name for themselves and, with blind faith, reach the top against all the odds? Eva Perón was a born winner, a self-made woman who had created a product – herself – that millions in Argentina and around the world had bought and consumed. There were – it had to be admitted – powerful reasons why her example had not yet been taken up in the business world: one, the circumstantial anti-capitalist rhetoric and class resentment, which the age and experience that were denied her would no doubt have helped to assuage; two (it was painful to admit, but being economical with the truth would be worse), her being a woman in a still eminently male business environment, where few women could carve out niches for themselves.

  Next he flicked through the pages that recounted Evita’s initial faltering steps as First Lady, the gradual refinement of her tastes and the creation of a personal style, as reflected in her wardrobe and hairdos, culminating in her glittering journey to devastated post-war Europe, which, perhaps because of production limitations, the photonovel barely touched on, save to mention that on that tour Eva indulged in rubbing the imperialist countries’ noses in her regal show of wealth. It was a crying shame, because the ‘Rainbow Tour’, as it was known, had wrought a sea change – a genuine metamorphosis – in the young woman from Los Toldos. Before that, Marroné reflected, Eva Duarte, later Eva Perón, had played only pre-existing roles: the young provincial girl who dreams of stardom, the influential lover of a powerful man, even the First Lady… And she had succeeded by making use of the tools of her trade: dresses, hairdos, make-up, studied gestures… But on her trip to Europe she began to enter virgin territory. Eva became Evita, and Evita was no longer an interpretation, but an entirely new creation. And this singular trait of Evita’s manifested itself most fully in the Eva Perón Social Aid Foundation. One photo showed the Foundation’s neoclassical façade; another, the torrent of letters that poured in to her daily, written by mothers with ten or twelve children to look after, unemployed fathers, toothless old men, teenage prodigies with rag balls, the blind, the crippled, the syphilitic; letters from the men, women and children of our people who were no longer alone, who had someone to listen to them and sort out their problems, even asking her from home or the workplace for footballs, clothes, shoes, furniture, false teeth, crutches and wheelchairs, bicycles, sewing machines, toys, cider and panettone for Christmas, or a trousseau for a wedding. These requests were not answered by faceless officials; instead everyone was given a personal audience with Evita: and the photo showed her sitting at her desk, letter in hand, inviting incredulous descamisados to sit down, smiling as she listened to their dreams, their needs, sometimes their life stories; requests that were often nothing but pleas for attention, respect, someone to acknowledge their existence – in a word, love. Evita had set in motion one of the most innovative and truly revolutionary customer service departments in history: the Foundation was a well-oiled customer loyalty machine, once again testing the truth of the maxim learnt by Marroné on his marketing course: ‘A company always makes the same product: happy customers.’ And Evita knew how to promote consumption: rather than giving grudgingly to the people who turned to her, she would egg them on: ‘Ask for more! The best, the most luxurious, the most expensive! Don’t hold back! It’s all yours now! Feel free and help yourselves!’ If you asked for a set of bed linen, you went away with a mattress; if a mattres
s, you got a bed; if a bed, a house. It was impossible not to be touched by the images in the next few pictures: Evita welcoming long queues of ragged paupers, handing out money from her own pocket when the coffers ran out; Evita kissing a leper; Evita sharing her cape with a beggar; Evita giving away her jewellery… ‘For the love of my people I would sell everything I am and everything I own, and I think I would even lay down my life,’ she said, and Marroné felt a knot in his throat: because that life, fanned by the breath from millions of mouths, was in fact consuming itself in a furious blaze. The queenly finery had long since been swapped for the republican simplicity of the grey or black tailored suit, and the unruly whorls and waves for the stony coiffure that would soon be made marble: as if refined and purified in that flame burning her inside and out, Evita had been hardening, her dress cleaving to her flesh and her flesh to her bones; her body tensing like a bow and her face sharpening to an arrowhead; her ever more prominent teeth sinking into the air with growing hunger. Perón, on the other hand, was the very picture of health, like a vampire feeding on Evita’s energy, his piggy little eyes sinking like raisins into risen dough, the bloated tortoise face retracting deeper and deeper into the thick neck. And so the eternal couple – that work-team of the idealist and the realist (the very essence of Don Quixote and Sancho) – reached the day when, in front of more than a million faithful all screaming for her to accept, Evita was offered the candidacy for vice president. ‘The time you have waited for for so long has come, Chinita,’ a tender, smiling Perón was saying to her on the balcony. ‘Look, they’ve come from far and wide… Never before in the history of humankind has a woman been more loved by her people…’ And Eva, with pained countenance, ‘No, Juan, I can’t,’ prompting Perón’s astonished reply: ‘What do you mean you can’t? Who deserves this post more than you?’ And Evita: ‘I’m not cut out for posts and protocols… If I were in government, I’d no longer be of the people, I couldn’t be what I am or do what I do… I’ve always lived in freedom. I was born for the Revolution. Look at them. Do you see them? Do you hear them? There is no scene more beautiful, no music more wonderful. My place is among them… I am their bridge to you… I don’t wish to be anything else. Promise me that if one day I am not there for them… you will go on listening…’ And then, turning to the crowd who chorused her name: ‘I am worthy not for what I have done, I am worthy not for what I have given up, I am worthy not for what I am or what I have. I have only one thing that is worthy and I keep it in my heart; it aches in my soul, it aches in my flesh and burns in my nerves. It is my love for the people and for Perón. If the people were to ask me for my life, I would give it to them gladly, because the happiness of a single descamisado is worth more than all my life.’