In every Peronist family a story is told: The grandfather hadn't seen the ocean, the grandmother didn't know what sheets or curtains were, the uncle needed a truck to deliver cases of soda, the cousin wanted an artificial leg, the mother didn't have the wherewithal to buy a bridal trousseau, the neighbor with tuberculosis couldn't afford a bed in a sanitarium in the Córodoba Mountains.
And one morning Evita appeared.
In the set design of the stories, everything happens one morning: a sunny one, in spring, not a cloud in the sky, the sound of violins. Evita arrives and with her great wings fills the space of desires, fulfills dreams. Evita is the emissary of happiness, the gateway of miracles. The grandfather sees the sea. She takes him by the hand, and both of them weep on sighting the ocean waves. That is how the story goes... When the time comes to vote, the grandchildren think of Evita. Although some people say that Perón's successors sacked Argentina and that Perón himself betrayed them before he died, they hand in their votes at the sacrificial altar. Because Grandfather asked me to before he died ... Full of hope, people seek the path their dreams promise to open before them.
Eva Perón, wife of Argentinian dictator Juan Perón, was one of the most charismatic political figures of this century. As she lay dying in the presidential palace in 1952, thousands of poor Argentinians flocked to the capital to pray for her. In a crafty political maneuver, her husband summoned Europe's best embalmer, and as soon as Evita's life had ended, the embalmer began preserving her body, working constantly to maintain it in pristine condition. Three years later, Perón was forced to run for his life and the new military rulers of Argentina soon realized that Evita's corpse was like a match that could light the fuse of mass revolution at any moment. Colonel Moori Koenig, a top-ranking intelligence officer, was assigned the task of disposing of the body. From there, things started to go a little crazy...
Tomás Eloy Martínez, an Argentinian native who was forced to flee the country in 1975 and currently heads the Latin American Program at Rutgers University, has taken the story of what happened to Evita's body after her death and used it as the basis for Santa Evita, a masterful non-fiction novel. With a particularly Latin American flavor, the historical record (which contains multiple fake corpses, accidental murders, a 'kidnapping', and the ghoulish freak accidental deaths of a string of soldiers assigned to transport her body) holds its own against any of the great magic realist novels, virtually defying genre categorization. Is it a biography? A macabre thriller? A dark comedy? Or does it represent a world that contains all of the above, and much more besides?
One of the keys to the novel's power is the shadowy presence of Martínez as the unnamed narrator. Unlike Truman Capote in In Cold Blood or Norman Mailer in The Executioner's Song, the author of Santa Evita constantly steps into the spotlight, abruptly shifting into different styles (the novelistic form is interrupted by transcribed interviews, newspaper clippings, even excerpts from an unshot film script), or ruminating on the agonizing difficulty of attempting to write about Evita, a task that has haunted him for decades:
"In a long, discarded version of this same novel I told the story of the men who had condemned Evita to endless wandering. I wrote several terrifying scenes, which I couldn't find my way out of... Certain sentences, on which I worked for weeks, evaporated beneath the sun of the first reading, ruthlessly cut out of a narrative that had no need of them."
"...All I needed to do was to go ahead. But when I tried to do so, my jumbles of voices and notes went nowhere, turning to dust in the yellowing files that I kept taking along with me from one exile to another."
The author compares Evita to the title character of the film Laura, but perhaps a more apt reference, and not at all an overreaching one, would be Beatrice in Dante's Divine Comedy. Like Beatrice, she is a figure of obsession for the narrator, one who constantly floats before him, leading him on a painful voyage of exile and self-discovery. She's the other, more obvious key to the novel, of course, but the true source of her power in Santa Evita doesn't lie in the plot machinations of a dead body that won't stay still. Beyond that lies the deeper story, a meditation on WHY Eva Perón's legend has persisted more than forty years after her death, why she has become the object of a national obsession bordering on religious fervor light years beyond America's fascination with the slain Kennedys.
In tracing her story in life and beyond death, Martínez also attempts to assemble fragments of her life into a coherent whole, even as he realizes that "the only thing that can be done with reality is to invent it again." His Evita isn't the 'real' Evita any more than an onscreen Madonna is, but that's the point. We can never truly know or understand the past, but can only struggle constantly in our efforts to make sense of it. If history consists of the stories that we tell ourselves, then as a captivating storyteller Martínez reveals himself in Santa Evita as a master historian.
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© Copyright 1997 Urban Desires
