By KAITLIN QUISTGAARD
In the midst of this confusion, I discovered Evita. She, too, was double-sided, contradictory, an icon of illusion — and initially, I thought, unknowable. The posters of Eva María Duarte de Perón still rolled out by the Perónist Party were strangely bereft of slogans or political campaigning. They offered no clue as to who she was — and is — or what she stands for. Evita's admirers have traded memories for legend, and their melodramatic reminiscences about her "spiritual leadership" required a healthier dose of conviction than I could muster.
Nor did Evita's adversaries offer any help. They simply ignored her, in an attempt to excise her from the national memory. That was insufficient: Whatever the truth about this woman is or was, I knew she had to be found out. And in the shadow of her images, lining the streets of Buenos Aires like ghosts from a past that refuses to die, I began to understand her.
Obscene affluence, third world poverty and addictive charm that understanding came, in part, from shared experiences. Like Evita, I encountered during my four years in Argentina an adamantly insular society's disdain for outsiders and its obsession with appearances, with beauty and birthright. I wasn't barred entry into elite circles like the uneducated, working-class Evita, but even a blue-eyed American journalist who lost little ground to the gorgeous local girls could never be welcomed into the inner sanctum of Buenos Aires society. If America is predicated on independence and freedom, Argentina roots its existence in dependence and belonging. And I, like Evita, did not belong.
Also like Evita, I was angered by the callous elitism of Argentina which accepts obscene affluence alongside malnourished misery. As a reporter for the Buenos Aires Herald, I wrote a series of articles calling attention to the plight of 8,000 shantytown residents whose slum life, wedged in between the elegant city's marble palaces, dominates the view from many an opulent apartment and five-star hotel. But those stories are easily overlooked in a wannabe-European society still afraid to recognize its third world poverty and the existence of its dark-skinned mestizos.
This collective fantasy of being a European nation mistakenly trapped in Latin America (in 1993, President Carlos Menem proclaimed Argentina the "19th European nation," bemoaning its isolation in an apparently lesser continent) has undermined any sense of national identity. It is impossible for Argentina to be who she is — an addictively charming, intelligent and often warm-hearted country with a delectable Latin sensuality — while denying the very ground on which she stands. And her dreams of grandeur have become increasingly difficult to take seriously, as Argentina staggers beneath the highest unemployment in her history and huge foreign debt. Yet with breathtaking hypocrisy, Argentina pretended to be the equal of the U.S. during the 1994 invasion of Haiti, our only ally willing to spend its badly needed pesos on troops to join an unpopular military operation.
That was not the worst hypocrisy, however. President Menem ran on a Perónist ticket, only to promptly reverse all of the party's policies, privatizing the very industries Perón had once nationalized. Menem's only apology has been a weak argument that his policies are Perónist, because they are the ones Perón would institute if he were alive today — a rationale particularly apt in a country engaged in an endless game of make-believe.
As I became more fluent in the slippery realities of my adopted country, its contradictions and confusions, Evita loomed larger and larger. And when I finally found her, I also found Argentina — its rage, its idolatry, its self-mystification. Like Argentina, Evita dreamed of raising herself out of obscurity and into wealth and grandeur. Unlike Argentina, which arrogantly lords over its South American neighbors even while scrambling to pull itself into the first world, Evita succeeded — which is one reason why, almost half a century after her death, her pictures still decorate the streets.
For Americans, currently besieged by Evita cosmetics, Evita couture, a spate of new biographies, novels and memoirs and Madonna-movie hysteria, the enigmatic reality of this woman is about to vanish behind a gleaming Hollywood counterfeit. But though Madonna may share certain traits — self-creation, ambition — with the woman she fought ferociously to portray, the Material Girl is ultimately as thin a substitute for Evita as she is for that other unfathomable female icon, Marilyn Monroe. In the realm of myth, accept no substitutes.
As befits a myth, no one can seem to agree on much about Evita. A "pattern of uncertainty about Eva's life returns again and again," writes one of her biographers, Alicia Dujovne Ortiz. "The slightest detail always seems to be mirrored by its opposite or followed by many facts that are similar but not entirely the same, like a stone that shines under the water..." The salient facts of this elusive life are known, however. Born out of wedlock and into poverty in 1919, Evita escaped to the big city of Buenos Aires as a teenager, alone and with dreams of being a star. A scrawny brunette, she clawed her way into bit parts in radio and B movies — via the beds of industry impresarios, rumor has it. Then she caught her big fish — Colonel Juan Domingo Perón, a strongman in the army, himself born illegitimate and poor and now climbing from the bottomsucking depths of society. She became his live-in mistress, then his wife, campaigned for his presidency and, at 28, took on a role of political influence hitherto unimagined by a first lady.
Rallying the workers with their platform of social justice, Juan and Evita Perón quickly turned the tides on Argentina's long-standing tradition of feudalism, siphoning money from the wealthy and giving it, at least in part, to the poor. Now a blonde with bucks, newly learned table manners and a striking fashion sense, Evita flashed her diamonds and furs across Europe. As the official representative of her country, an unofficial union leader, and controller of a charitable "social assistance" foundation worth some $200 million, she became the most powerful woman Latin America had (and has) ever seen.
Like any good legend, she lived fast and died young — in 1952, at the for-our-sins age of 33, after an excruciating bout with uterine cancer. (When the disease was first diagnosed two years earlier, she refused an operation that could have saved her life, saying she didn't have time.) The popular plea for her to become vice-president was quickly converted, after her death, into a 40,000-letter-strong call for her canonization. Although the Pope declined to sanctify her, Santa Evita is worshipped to this day.
The transformation of this cinematic life into the very incarnation of Argentina — and then, inevitably, into an actual movie — has been assisted over the years by an endless stream of biographies. One of my favorites is Paul Montgomery's "Eva, Evita," the lurid cover of which shamelessly blares, "she tamed El Presidente with sexual skills learned on her knees in a hundred waterfront bars!" (In fact, Perón seems to have been a bit of a dead fish who probably did not need to be "tamed" in this unseemly fashion.) Even the august V.S. Naipaul, in "The Return of Eva Perón," drags her through the gutter as "the macho's ideal victim-woman ... don't those red lips speak to the Argentine macho of her reputed skill in fellatio?"
The most engrossing of the new crop of Evita books, and perhaps the most valuable, are not necessarily the most accurate. It may be that Argentina's duality, her seemingly nonsensical reality, is best captured by a deliberate deviation from the facts, a wild detour into the outlandish.
This is precisely the route taken by Tomás Eloy Martínez's audacious "Santa Evita" (Knopf). Evita's corpse is the central figure of this perverse tall tale, based tenuously on true stories. A sui generis work combining history, fiction, journalism and poetry — the luxuriant hybrid that defines Argentine literature — Eloy Martínez's extraordinary novel actually lives up that myth-soaked world he hails from. His fiction reveals the consummately strange truth that Evita was more powerful dead than alive — as the keepers of her corpse became the bearers of power.
The novel's plot will seem preposterous to those not familiar with this nation of necrophiliacs, machos and mystics. As an obsessed Spanish doctor battles to continue an embalming process that takes years, the deceased Evita is kidnapped by the military, hidden behind movie screens and in attics, then secreted away to Europe. Only in Argentina could the army quake in its boots, afraid its rule might explode if that flammable body appeared in enemy hands. And only in Argentina could the masses engage in the semi-religious worship of a dead first lady, while fragrant flowers and blinking votives miraculously appear and an increasingly paranoid colonel who guards her casket develops a perverse obsession with her corpse.
"Santa Evita" is based on extensive historical research, but it leaves the ground to take the reader on a fantastical voyage through clouds of lies, legends and occasional facts. Like Argentina, Eloy Martínez's Evita is Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty, a babe bursting with potential and awaiting that magical moment when she is brought into the world's view.
If "Santa Evita's" humor is bitter, the book also pays tribute "to what my country was and to what it wanted to but could not become." Eloy Martínez celebrates the insular mania of the pampas, the great grasslands populated by gauchos, tangueros and would-be europeos that gave birth to Evita. In the end, however, he sees Argentina as the embodiment of melancholy, a dreamy-eyed nation that could never do what Evita did and pull itself out of la nada to become what it is so clearly capable of.
Less successful, although brimming with splendid insights into the Argentine character and brilliant imaginings of Evita, is Alicia Dujovne Ortiz's "Eva Perón" (St. Martin's). Admitting that the apparent facts of Evita's life come in spades, with as many versions as memories consulted, Dujovne Ortiz lays them all before the reader. For example, she points out that biographers have given no less than four versions of a crucial event, Evita's move to Buenos Aires at 14. In two of them, she takes a respectably chaperoned train ride with her mother; in the third, she convinces a tango singer to take her; in the fourth, she makes a slut's progress, the ticket paid for with her fabled bedside talents. Dujovne Ortiz casts her vote for "the most convincing scenario" — number three. Such unmilled information begets a full-bodied Evita, the prismatic possibilities inextricably binding the woman and her myth into one.
The Eva of "Eva Perón" is a symbol not only of Argentina's dreams but of its womanhood. A role model for the thousands of bleached blondes who now parade down Calle Florida in the center of Buenos Aires, this Evita "invented it all — her life, her beauty, even her death." The text chronicles Argentina's first public makeover, as Evita transformed herself from an unschooled Raggedy Anne to the Dior diva. (In today's Argentina every woman with a dime has been remade, their bodies sculpted by surgeons and stylists, while celebrities exhibit tit jobs on talk shows.) Shifting the balance of power away from wives who accepted infidelity as non-threatening to their protected status, Evita's marriage to Perón in 1945 made legitimate the previously unthinkable leap from mistress to wife. While nothing like a feminist, Evita did get women the vote. And Dujovne Ortiz's Evita taught the chicas to use their power without threatening the macho status quo. Evita lets Perón "give wings to her feminine existence," but then takes flight solo, becoming even more powerful than he.
For all of its insights, however, "Eva Perón" doesn't quite reach the heights it strives for. Had Dujovne Ortiz been willing to gamble on a historical novel rather than a pseudo-biography, her book might have sprouted wings. As it is, it falls uncomfortably between two genres: as history it lacks rigor, as fiction it feels flatfooted — especially in its weak English translation. Dujovne Ortiz's "biography" is really a love story — about Evita's painful attachment to Perón as the daddy she never had and his power-obsessed pedophilia. It deserves to be rendered in a bonbon-popping festival of purple-hued prose, as it was written, first in French then Spanish, by an Argentine author living in Toulouse. But Shawn Fields' awkward translation is jarring and distracts from the fun inherent in a book that begs us to decide history for ourselves.
Evita as a symbol of Argentina is less visible in "In My Own Words: Evita" (The New Press), attributed to Evita and translated by Laura Dail. Touted as the "long-lost deathbed manuscript," the document recalls Evita's soulful union with the poor and her willingness to be Perón's shadow. It is rambling and poorly constructed — and therefore considered authentic. Even if the disputed manuscript wasn't written by Evita, "the text reflects much of the real Eva Perón," according to the introduction by Joseph Page, a Georgetown University Law Center professor and biographer of Perón. This crazy argument that the words are Eva's even if she didn't actually dictate them may not convince many scholars, but it strikes precisely the right, delirious note for its subject.
More a historian's resource than a reader's delight, the text's only value-added feature is the introductory mini-biography which argues that, contrary to the fevered assertions of many biographers, Evita's supposed bedroom prowess was not primarily responsible for her social ascent. Full of half-truths, the memoirs catalogue Evita's devotion to her husband and her impoverished "descamisados" (shirtless ones), but if this really is Evita's childish, nearly illiterate voice, she was hiding more than she revealed. "I would not let the soul I brought from the street be yanked away ... That is why I was never seduced by the grandeur of power..." This, like many "revelations" in the text, is laughable. Eva Perón never forgot her destitute roots and was sincerely devoted to the working class, but she also had a flagrant craving for dictatorial privileges and giant gems.
So what does this endlessly investigated life add up to? Evita embodies Argentina's most cherished myths: that she is a great nation on the brink of being discovered, that intellectually, artistically and demographically she belongs to Europe not Latin America, that her legendary dead have special powers, that the influence of her women comes not from their intelligence but their sexuality. Above all, her life resonates with the great ambiguity that still hangs over this nation of superb style and abundant resources whose last military government, only two decades ago, embarked on one of the most vicious killing sprees in contemporary history. Which is the "real" Argentina — the nation that could countenance the mass "disappearing" of innocents, or the urbane, cosmopolitan society? Which is the "real" Evita — the ambitious, greedy climber or the saintly champion of the poor? The two questions, inextricably related and engorged by legend, are not easily answered.
Today, Argentina needs Evita — at least the good Evita — more than ever. Her poor are as disenfranchised and voiceless today as they were when she was a young bastard girl ostracized in a two-bit town on the pampa. Many of her public works have fallen into disrepair. The minimum wage is stuck at $200 a month in an economy more expensive than the U.S., and the unions she fostered are being drained of their power. It is hardly surprising that in the barrios and shantytowns, even among a few members of the disillusioned middle class, the cult of Evita is stronger than ever.
Yet this worship may carry within it the seeds of that exhaustion, that defeatism, that nada decried by Eloy Martínez. Evita-olatry and the belief in saviours threaten to replace actual engagement with real issues. It is easier, after all, to fall into a grandiose swoon, dreaming vaguely of a glorious virgin-whore populist queen, than it is to sweep out a corrupt elite and empower the poor.
In the end, Evita may be only too powerful an embodiment of her nation's myths. The great irony is that in order to move forward, Argentina would have to bid farewell to its most representative figure. It desperately wants to be rescued from a heartless government and international anonymity, but such progress would mean a break with the made-up reality that now sustains it. To construct economic well-being and the social justice Evita fought for, Argentina would have to demolish its founding myths. And that may be too high a price for a country whose greatest gift is fantasy.
During her four years in Argentina, Kaitlin Quistgaard was a staff writer for the Buenos Aires Herald and the exclusive contributor from Argentina for Time magazine and the Miami Herald. Her work has also appeared in The Sunday Times of London, Sports Illustrated and the Chicago Tribune. She is a regular contributor to Salon.