by Barnes, John
Two policemen guard the entrance to the Ministry, which the Señora has in effect taken over from the Minister himself. Colour posters of both Peróns deck the crowded lobby. Evita has two offices which adjoin but do not connect. Into one, poor mothers and children are screened on the basis of slips of paper fixing their audience for 4 pm. Into the other filter better dressed callers invited for special audiences at 5 pm. The Presidenta’s car rolls up a little after 5.30 and Evita slips into the latter room via a side door.
The office is scarcely less crowded than the hallway. Yet many of those waiting are important people: the Governor of Buenos Aires Province, the wife of the Minister of Education, a distinguished Italian actor. Evita’s technique is like that of a chess master, playing twenty-five simultaneous games at high speed. She walks from one to another, listening briefly, though with apparent intentness, speaking rapidly with quick gestures and frequent smiles which flash her teeth.
‘Her voice rises as she rebuts a complaint about a benefit concert. (“In this matter, Gigli is an authority. He knows what he’s doing.”) She tells a banker that whoever gets a certain job must be very suave, very patient. She calls peremptorily for the head of the General Labour Confederation (Jose Espejo). She sends a publicist away glowing with the idea he’d make a fine counsellor of the embassy in Washington. And she pats the Governor of Buenos Aires and guides him back to an impatient circle by the window, where small talk is running thin.
‘She parries a question about her personal reaction to her work.
‘“All these people, you see?” she says. “I am nothing — my work is everything.”
‘She is off on another swing. When she returns, there is a little more fencing and she extends a soft, warm, hand, smiling superbly.
“Time is my greatest enemy,” she says.
‘Meanwhile the other room overflows with children. They squirm and giggle, scramble on the floor and wail. At about 6.15, a premature murmur goes around. “Ya viene!” (“Here she comes!”) Presently the Señora steps in briskly. She sits beneath a huge oil of “Amalia”, a melancholy lady in black mantilla, by Juan Carlos Alonso. Other pictures in the red-damasked room are of the Peróns or of Christ.
‘Four secretaries surround the table. The synchronisation is like that of an operating room. One shoves a pencil into her hand, another readies a pad of clothing tickets, a third holds up a ‘phone.
‘Señora Perón speaks animatedly. “Yes, yes. We are very grateful to you. If there is anything else you need, let us know. Hasta luego.” Most of the people in the room listen dumbly. A stringy-haired mother rocks her child.
The first supplicant is a shapeless woman with a toil-worn face. The First Lady turns her brown eyes; clusters of black crystals tinkle at the brim of her open-crown straw.
‘“I live in one room,” the woman says. “I want a house to live in . . .”
“How many children do you have?”
‘“Eight.”
‘The Presidenta murmurs to one of her secretaries.
‘“We can provide a wooden house,” she begins. The woman asks questions. Evita is dictating. “Clothing for nine … a large bed, complete . . .” She turns for a brief aside to a visiting Ambassador. Then she takes the slip from the secretary’s pad and signs “E.P.” The woman shuffles out with the slip.
‘Señora Perón distributes clothing, bedding, furniture, drugs and fifty-peso notes (about ten dollars). The drug is usually streptomycin. There is no indication as to why the patient actually needs it. But Evita says “four grams,” and the public health secretary writes it out. The fifty peso notes come from a seemingly endless supply under the blotter. All are new and folded in half. Evita doles them out one or two at a time. No account is kept and Evita told me in a written answer, “None will be.” The foundation is not a “business proposition.”
‘Gradually the clutter of children thins. A priest from a distant province speaks urgently. “An audience for the padre at the residence on Monday at 8,” says Evita, rising as the audience ticket is written.
‘She poses with the visiting Ambassador, who contributes 100,000 pesos (£2,500). As she leaves for an acto or public ceremony, a young man looks on disappointedly. “Monday,” she tells him, sweetly rueful.
‘She sweeps across the amphitheatre. A thousand-odd graphic arts workers cheer. The stirring words of the national anthem move lightly over her lips. Another acto follows. When Evita leaves after four hours, everyone else is exhausted. On Wednesdays the scene shifts to the Casa Rosada, where she and her Juancito put on the act together.’
In the evening, she was usually out again, for another acto. Fleur Cowles accompanied her one night to the Opera House in Buenos Aires. The audience literally hung from the rafters; so many streamers and flags curled from each hand that the great tiered circle looked like a splashed gilt crazyquilt. Women and their children, ignoring the hour, were packed inside each box, crowding the edges. Everyone was yelling, throwing flowers and waving a little blue-and-white flag with Evita emblazoned on it.
‘As Evita’s car entered the Opera square, the calm of the night turned to pandemonium. The darkened streets through which we had been driven in Evita’s bullet-proof car had been quiet and deserted, until we turned a corner into dense crowds. Police strained to form an opening wedge for her car. All that this pressing mass of humanity really wanted was to surge towards Evita. Those nearest Evita, at the entrance, did break police lines to plunge at her, to touch her skirt, to see, at close hand, the Cinderella dressed by Dior, with her three-quarters of a million dollars in jewels. It was an orgy of curiosity and admiration.
‘The occasion was the handing out of pensions to workers over seventy . . . On the big empty stage was a handful of gnarled, quivering old men summoned to receive her bounty. They sat in a Breughel-like, half-lit semi-circle against the back wall, silent and frightened. Thousands and thousands had come to see Evita distribute largesse and to hear her speak. They came to admire Evita, and, if luck would have it, to cash in on an extraordinary lottery.
‘The game is childlike: everyone throws a little folded sheet of paper with his name and address written on it towards Evita whenever she makes a public appearance. Thousands of tiny folded papers fluttered through the Opera House during the proceedings that night.
‘Whenever Evita stoops to pick up such a paper, that gesture means the winning of the “sweepstakes” for the lucky person whose name is on the crumpled missile. An audience with Evita in her Social Aid Foundation automatically follows.’
But to Evita, it was no sweepstakes or charity, as others called it. There was a difference, she always insisted, between the charity of the wealthy dowagers and the social assistance of her foundation. ‘Charity humiliates and social aid dignifies and stimulates,’ she said. ‘Charity is given discreetly; social aid rationally. Charity prolongs the situation; social aid solves it . . . Charity is the generosity of the fortunate; social aid remedies social inequalities. Charity separates the wealthy from the poor; social aid raises the needy to the level of the well-to-do.’ Her foundation, she always claimed, had emerged to cope with the conditions in which millions of Argentines lived ‘with starvation wages, without security of employment, without rights to self-improvement, without a single guarantee for themselves, their families, and their future.’ So while her enemies regarded her as beneath contempt, a charlatan, thief, demagogue, those other Argentines really did believe that was the Dama de la Esperanza, the Lady of Hope.
10
TEETHING TROUBLES
In June of 1950, on one of those grey Argentine winter days when the wind whips off the River Plate and blows with a bitter fierceness through the streets of Buenos Aires, a new batch of posters plastered the downtown walls of the city with an unseasonal splash of colour and a message: ‘Eva Perón, standard bearer of the meek, should be elected in 1952.’ Elected for what? The posters did not elaborate, although it was already being taken for granted by most people in Argentina tha
t Evita would choose to run as the Vice-Presidential candidate on her husband’s ticket for another six years in office. Had she now decided to aim even higher? In wealthy porteño circles, where even the mere mention of that woman’s name was considered a social faux pas, the possibility was too intriguing to be ignored. She had the power. Did she now want the office, too?
It was the kind of speculation that fed the rumour mills of the Buenos Aires cocktail circuit with tales of matrimonial troubles in the Casa Rosada. But they were usually embroidered versions of old stories that had done the rounds before. There was certainly no evidence to indicate there was truth in any of them. On the contrary, the Peróns seemed very happy. In many ways theirs was an ideal marriage. They had clawed their way to the top together. They ran the country together. They complemented each other; his sophistication and avuncular charm blunting the raw cutting edge of her political passion; she driving him on to defend commitments he might not have made without her backbone and strength to support him. Like the Emperor Justinian and Theodora, also an actress and the most beautiful woman in Byzantium, whom Justinian married and enthroned as co-ruler, the Peróns never wavered in their love for each other as they rode the roller-coaster of political power.
It often showed in public. On one occasion, when Perón was inaugurating Evita’s children’s village, he praised her so highly that tears welled in her eyes. With a grin, he stopped talking and turned and kissed her. ‘These two tears,’ he said, ‘point to the great merit in this work, namely human emotion.’ He was so obviously proud of her that he never missed an opportunity of letting everybody know it. ‘You see her extraordinary influence — why is it? Is it because she dresses well and is pretty? No. She is loved and respected and honoured by all the humble because she cannot eat or sleep or live for doing good.’ Whenever she left him on one of her frequent trips out: into the provinces, he would bid her farewell with old-fashioned courtesy, bowing ceremoniously, then kissing her on the forehead. There was a charm and warmth about him, which she lacked. Her hero-worshipping praise of him in public was so extravagant it often verged on the ridiculous. But there is also no doubting the look of devotion shining from her eyes in 30-year-old photographs of the two of them together. And there was a day a year before she died when in a moment of crisis the brittle smile collapsed and she burst into tears, her shoulders heaving as she buried herself in his bear-like hug of protection.
They led a quiet life together. As they were always up so early in the morning, they rarely went out in the evening, except to official functions. Occasionally they had friends in for dinner and Perón would bound down the steps himself to open their guests’ car door. Perhaps because they were both country-bred (or maybe because they had no children), they loved to have animals around them. Evita had two or three poodles, and the household also included two deer, two gazelles, and an amiable blackbird which perched on the General’s shoulder. There were even more animals out at their 45-acre country home in San Vicente, a distant suburb of Buenos Aires. Perón’s brother Mario was director of the city’s zoological gardens. So naturally they had their pick of animals — fifteen ostriches, eight storks, two flamingos, five llamas, and eleven chajas, a native bird.
Evita loved her weekend home (called a quinta in Argentina because it is never more than 50 kilometres from town). She wore slacks there, which provoked much tut-tutting and ‘I-told-you-so’s’ among fashion-conscious Argentine ladies, while Perón became a weekend gaucho in baggy pants. Whenever they had guests, he appointed himself the asador, the barbecue chef, while she baked empanadas (meat pies) in her own criollo native oven. She put on a little weight in those early days. There were signs of a double chin, indications that the Ibarguren family plumpness was waiting to burst out of that trim figure. But it never happened. Strict adherence to diet and the frantic pace of her life kept her slim from then on.
Evita had changed a great deal over the years. A curly-haired brunette wearing frilly blouses and too much lipstick in her early days in Buenos Aires, she had become a reddish-blonde by the time she moved into the Presidential Residence in 1946. She wore clothes that showed off her fine figure, luxurious gowns cut low. At that time they were a little too loud and elaborate, and she wore too much jewellery. But the trip to Europe transformed her. She started spending over £10,000 a year on exquisite Paris clothes designed by Dior, Fath and Balmain. Then, as she became the most dominating personality in the land, so her appearance changed again. She was now the brisk, efficient career woman, wearing simple conservative suits, her blonde hair tied back in an old-fashioned bun.
Fleur Cowles was surprised at her appearance when she met her for the first time in July 1950. ‘She was not at all the flashy companion old news accounts prepared you for … a trim, obviously busy woman, with an air that was efficient, aware, composed. Except for her jewels, at first glance she even looked modest. She was elegantly dressed in a navy-blue suit by Jacques Fath; she had an expensive navy-blue velvet beret on her blonde hair. There were sables on her arm; she wore them as if she had always carried them. She was dressed as millions of women would like to be dressed. The only give-away was the orchid in her lapel. No real flower, that, but one of diamonds, larger even than an orchid, about 5 inches across by 7 inches high — a brooch of big, pure white diamonds that must have been worth $250,000. Barrel earclips of diamond baguettes and her ball-like diamond ring were minor accessories by contrast.’
‘She stared back at me at first with a cold, unpleasant look.’ But ‘after she’d taken in every part of me (including the black pearl and diamond pin I wore),’ Evita asked Fleur to stay a while. ‘She displayed a willingness (later, eagerness) to talk “girl talk” about clothes, jewelry, coiffure. . . She kept eyeing the jewel I wore. Perón winked at me and said in his halting English: “That’s one she can’t have.” ‘When Fleur remarked that Evita’s hair was ‘very becoming worn straight and simply, she asked if I would look at pictures of her in the many ways she had worn it during the years, then tell her if she was doing it the best way. Someone was sent off to bring her a range of her best photographs; they were laid out on the floor on the Napoleonic room. Full-length paintings of Evita and Perón stared at us from the walls, one with Evita’s hair dressed in the bad sausage pompadour she originally wore as First Lady. I agreed heartily she looked her best in the newer, neater way she wore her hair that evening. I’m not sure Perón agreed, although that constant smile of his was ready.’
The cost of Evita’s jewels, which she bought from Van Cleef and Arpels in Paris, hardly came out of her husband’s pocket. His presidential salary was only £40 a week. Even the profits from the three newspapers she owned could not have supported her collection which had become so vast that she could match all her costumes with sets of diamonds, emeralds, and sapphires. She delighted in wearing them in the most poverty-stricken of city slums, knowing full well that part of her appeal to her followers was her Cinderella rags-to-riches success story. ‘I am taking the jewels from the oligarchs for you.’ she told them. ‘One day you’ll inherit the whole collection.’
On that basis, she no doubt rationalised that she could finance her Paris purchases through her foundation, as she never tired of pointing out that it was the duty of social aid to ‘raise the needy to the level of the well-to-do.’ How she did it certainly never seemed to bother her husband. One day, while showing a visitor over the Residence, he opened closet after closet of Evita’s clothes. ‘Not exactly a descamisada, eh?’ he grinned. No one in the Party apparently minded (if they did, they had the sense to keep quiet about it) and as for political enemies, they did not count. It was simply accepted that like the blonde in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Evita believed that ‘kissing your hand may make you feel very very good but a diamond and sapphire bracelet last forever.’ Accordingly, the taxi drivers’ union gave her a diamond watch one year for her birthday. The Perónista newspaper editors weighed in with diamond earrings, and the Cabinet split the cost among Ministers for a
pearl and diamond necklace.
One opposition deputy, Colonel Atilio Cattaneo, did have the temerity to grumble about the thief who entered office poor but who would leave it rich and the Señora’s relatives ‘who were so poor in 1943 and now are multi-millionaires’. Perón was furious. Summoning fifty local and foreign reporters and the entire Cabinet to the Casa Rosada at 8.30 for his first press conference in almost four years, he announced that he felt obliged to ‘set an example’ to the rest of the country on what to do when falsely accused. ‘A man holding office must look to his reputation,’ he said. ‘Now that I have been accused of robbing the public purse, I intend to show by documents that these charges are false. And since Prensa and Nacion have echoed these uncalled for calumnies, I now intend to see that these accusers are brought to justice.’
At this point, Perón who had entered the room wearing his usual broad smile had tears streaming down his cheeks. On the table lay a big white envelope. The envelope, said Perón, contained a statement listing his assets before he took office; it had been sealed for three years. He persuaded two American newsmen, Milton Bracker of the New York Times and William Horsey of the United Press news agency to open it. Then he called Prensa and Nacion reporters forward to sign statements attesting to the contents. The statement, dated July 6, 1946 (a month after Perón took office), said simply that his assets then consisted of the San Vicente quinta, a Packard and a share in his father’s modest estate.
Of course, all this did not prove anything. What people wanted to know was not what Perón had in the way of assets when he took office but what he had acquired since then. No one dared ask that question, except Colonel Cattaneo. The Peronistas in Congress lifted his parliamentary immunity and a warrant was issued for his arrest on a charge of ‘desacato’ or disrespect to the President, a new law which had just come into effect. Police raided eighteen houses in Buenos Aires searching for him. But by then the Colonel had crossed the river to Uruguay.