“Subdued,” Mazza said. “But he is well. We think we can make a case to bring him back to Buenos Aires. He will still be in custody, but at least we can get him off that dreadful island.”
She moved next to him on the love seat. Perón’s letter had lifted her heart but roiled her mind. “Is there anything I can do to help?” She told him about her visit to Bramuglia and his refusal even to try to get the writ of habeas corpus.
“I have heard about that,” Mazza said. “You are assuming Perón really wants to leave the country and retire from politics.”
“It says that in this letter you just brought to me.” She tapped her nails on the paper in her lap.
“I do not know what he said to you, señora. But I don’t think he has made a final decision about what he will do. You know he always plays his cards close to his vest. I think he wants to keep all paths open.”
She did know how secretive he could be. He had said it himself once when speaking of his underlings in the government. “Often,” he had told her, “it is best for the person in charge to watch how a situation plays out and to step in at the last moment to embrace victory or disclaim defeat.” She had thought Perón so wise when he said that. But she feared she was now on the receiving end of that same strategy. Clinging to Perón was where her future lay. Without him, where would she go? When they took him away, he had said he wanted her to stand by him, but how could she, if she didn’t know where he stood?
As if to prove her point, Mazza opened the dark leather case in which he had carried Perón’s letter to her—the first love letter she had ever had from anyone. Mazza took out another envelope, identical to the one she had received. “When I leave you, I am going to deliver this to the editor of La Prensa.”
Evita took it. It was unsealed. She removed a second letter written on paper like that of Perón’s letter to her and also in his own hand. “Open letter to President Edelmiro Fárrell,” it said at the top. Evita scanned it quickly. Perón was publicly demanding to be put on trial or to be returned to his previous status. These demands belied the soul he bared in what he had written to her.
Which were his real sentiments? He had told her he was finished with political life. This public statement said he expected to be given his freedom to participate in governing Argentina. She did not know where her mind should go.
She chewed on her index finger. Her heart was split in two. A little voice in a dark corner of her mind warned her that she should distrust Perón for not telling her the truth of his feelings. It said he did not trust her, that he did not think her strong enough or brave enough to do anything useful. Otherwise, he would have been calling on her to fight for him. She wanted him to be again the powerful man he was when they met. It seemed impossible that Perón could fade from the halls of government in a few days and leave nothing behind, less than the wake of that small boat that had brought her back to Buenos Aires from Tres Bocas.
His letter to her offered a peaceful life away from all the political uproar. The idea was seductive. She was tired. She had been anemic for so long. It made her listless, made her long for a life of leisure. But under that fatigue she felt a reservoir of boiling anger that fed her determination and made her want to defeat those who would put Perón down, who would rob him of his rightful place, and rob her of the chance to become the woman she was destined to be.
“What do you think will happen next?” she asked Mazza.
He gazed at her with kind eyes and took her hand. His was warm and soft, the hand of a doctor, not a soldier. “Some small pro-Perón rallies have started up here and there,” he said, “but so far they don’t carry enough weight. Fárrell is keeping Perón’s whereabouts a secret. As long as the workers don’t know where he is, they may think he just went away.”
Evita longed again for the sound booth. She had spent the last two years talking into Radio Belgrano’s shiny round microphones, pretending to be the most important women of history: Catherine the Great of Russia, Elizabeth of England, and Eliza Lynch of Paraguay, who like Evita was not married to her man but helped to make him great. If only she could broadcast the news the laborers needed to hear, she could make them see the role they must now play. She had to find a way to show Perón she could be brave and strong and useful.
“I think Bramuglia is right,” she said at last. “We have to stay and fight. Perón cannot abandon everything he has worked for all these years. Did you know that I met him when he was raising funds for the poor victims of the earthquake in San Juan? Our first experience together was in an effort to help the unfortunate. Perón must be restored to his rightful place.” By the time she finished speaking, she was up and pacing Pierina’s blue-and-white Chinese carpet.
Webber came back and put a tray of coffees on the low table in front of the love seat.
Mazza smiled approvingly at her as she drank her espresso. He stood and kissed her cheek. “I must go now and deliver Perón’s letter to La Prensa.”
After he had gone, she sat and read again the most beautiful phrases from Perón’s letter to her. “My adored treasure … Now I know how much I love you … as soon as I get out, we’ll get married and go somewhere and live peacefully … love me very much because I need your love more than ever … Many, many kisses to my dearest chinita. Perón.”
She kissed his signature. These were words of commitment to her. But in many ways, they were the sentiments of a man defeated. A man who wanted to escape from everything with the woman he adored. Twice on this page he had mentioned retirement. The exact opposite of the public letter Mazza was on his way to deliver.
She nibbled on a pastry and wondered why going away with Perón and living a small, pleasant life was not enough for her, a girl who had risen from poverty, who had pushed herself to where she was with only the strength in this small body. But her very bone marrow refused to settle for what her mother had wanted for her and what her sisters wanted for themselves. To be a conventional wife was all they had ever longed for: the small satisfactions of normal domesticity. Evita could not help it. They were not enough for her. They never would be.
Perón’s letter also spoke of the anger in his heart: “What do you think of Fárrell and Avalos? A couple of bastards doing that to their friend … Be very calm. Mazza will tell you how everything stands … The evil of this time and especially of this country is the existence of all these idiots, and you know that an idiot is worse than a villain…”
She wanted to slap the faces of those idiots who were, to her, both stupid and villainous.
Even in this love letter, Perón spoke of the wrongs that had been done to him, as if he were calling on her love to redress them. She kissed his signature again and put the letter in her purse.
Jorge Webber came back into the salon and made a show of clearing away the tray.
“Turn on the radio, please, Jorge,” she said. “Let’s see if there is any news.”
He twisted the dial of the tall radio that stood in the corner but found only a Mass from the cathedral, some operatic arias, and a sports announcer talking about soccer.
“Switch it off,” she said. Her resolve rose and faded by turns.
As if he read her thoughts, the chauffeur spoke. “It has to be you, señora, who makes the appeal to the workers. You are the only one who can save him now.”
Evita opened her mouth to put him in his place, but at that moment Pierina Dealessi returned from church. “Save who from what?” she asked Evita. She took off her hat and replaced her hat pin in the crown. She pulled off her mink stole, made from whole-animal pelts including the heads with little beady eyes, and handed it to Jorge, along with the hat and her long black gloves, as if he were her personal valet.
“Save Perón from that awful jail,” Evita said. “People think I can do something to change matters. I keep telling them I can’t. I am not even his wife. And he can never marry a nobody like me.”
Pierina laughed. “He will marry you. I swear he will,” she said. With a flick of h
er slender fingers, she shooed Webber away.
Biting back resentment, he took her things out but quickly returned. With Mercante in jail, he was the one who was supposed to take care of Evita. When he reentered the room, the Dealessi woman was already sitting on the love seat with Evita, their heads together.
“… The circumstances of my birth—” Evita was saying. “Those tepid army officers don’t understand love. They would never accept such a marriage. They call me the colonel’s folly.”
“Nevertheless, he will do it.” Dealessi picked up a pastry from the dish before her, took one bite, and threw the rest back on the tray.
“Why do you think so?” Evita’s tone seemed to beg for reassurance.
Pierina laughed. “Because, although you don’t make much of an impression on the stage, darling, every day you portray to the world an image of Eva Duarte that you have written for yourself—you have stopped being that desperate little girl I first met, starving and doing anything to get even the smallest part. Now you sit with powerful men and act as if you have a right to give them your opinions. In real life, your performance is absolutely compelling.”
Evita looked at her friend in wonder, as if she had revealed some biblical truth. Neither of them spoke for a moment. A decision blurted out of Evita’s mouth before she was sure she had made it: “I have to help restore him to power. If I go to the barrios and talk to the descamisados, the poor workers will see they must stand up for the only person in power who ever gave them a single thought. All they need is someone to tell them what to do.” She was positive in her heart that she, more than anyone else, could make it work.
“They will believe you because at heart you are one of them,” Pierina said.
A fear Pierina did not understand flickered in Evita’s eyes. “What gives you pause, Eva?”
Evita shook her head. “Yesterday, the lawyer Bramuglia said I can whisper and be heard, and Colonel Miguel Angel Mazza encouraged me right here less than half an hour ago. But Perón…” She hesitated. She wanted to confess that she was not sure Perón trusted her to do the right thing. But she shrank from saying it aloud and making it true. “Isn’t it interesting that Mazza’s name is Angel?” she said instead. She looked at Dealessi expectantly, as if she wanted her friend to believe that Mazza was a messenger from heaven—like the angel Gabriel at the Annunciation.
“Well, if you ask me,” Pierina said, “some leadership is required. Low-level people always need someone to tell them what to do.”
Evita’s dark eyes shone. “That’s what people always think about the poor.” She turned to Webber, who was standing at attention in the corner, like some medieval page. “Do you have Mercante’s car nearby?” she asked him.
“Yes, I can have it out front in a few minutes,” he said.
“Bring it around, please. As long as the workers are with us, we will be unstoppable. I cannot organize them, but I can find out what they are thinking. That information may be useful to the colonel’s supporters. It’s time to take a ride through the barrios.”
“Be careful,” Dealessi said. “The situation out there is a tinderbox.”
Evita thought of the death of that poor girl Luz. Mercante said the police thought she had been killed because she was mistaken for Evita. But she refused to believe it. Except for her body, the girl did not resemble her at all. Pierina did not know anything about that murder, and it was best she didn’t. She would be overprotective. Evita saw no reason to fear the descamisados. If someone wanted to kill her for supporting Perón, he would be found in the Barrio Norte, where the oligarchy lived in their huge villas, not in the hovels that lined the streets of the working-class villages.
She put on her black straw hat, took her purse with Perón’s letter in it, and went out to meet Jorge at the front door of the building.
As the chauffeur drove Mercante’s gray Chevrolet sedan south toward La Boca, he warned Evita that the places where the workers lived would not be beautiful and leafy enclaves like the one she was used to. She smiled to herself. He thought she did not know how the poor lived, she who had practically starved to death while looking for work in the theater when she was just sixteen. In those days, a cup of coffee with condensed milk was like a three-course meal to her.
She took out Perón’s letter and ran her fingertips over the words only when we are separated from those we love can we know how much we love them. She wanted him. How was she supposed to know if she was doing the right thing if she could not see it in his eyes?
As they left the narrow streets of San Telmo and entered La Boca, they passed a gasworks with huge cylindrical containers, their domed roofs at different heights, the girders above them silhouetted against the cloudy sky.
Jorge turned into a long, straight street lined with boardinghouses of the type Evita knew well. “Stop up there,” she called to Jorge in the front seat. “Where those people are gathered in front of that corner store.”
Seeing his chauffeur’s cap in the rearview mirror warned her. “Take off your hat and don’t get out of the car. Your uniform is out of place here. It will make them suspicious.”
When he pulled up to the curb, Evita got out of the backseat and approached a knot of about eight people, all but one men. Two little boys were shooting marbles in a patch of dirt between the street and cracked sidewalk.
“The store is closed, señora,” a young man not much taller than Evita said apologetically. “Sunday,” he said, by way of explanation.
She had not thought about what she would say to them. “Yes, of course,” fell from her lips. She was used to having scripts to read when she played the heroine.
They looked through the windshield at Jorge behind the wheel. No doubt, even without his cap, his chauffeur’s jacket with its epaulets gave him away.
“Thank you,” Evita said and retreated toward the car. Jorge started it up.
A stocky man with a soccer ball under his arm pointed at Webber. “What do these people want here?” he demanded. The others clustered around him.
Evita got in the front seat. “Drive on, Jorge,” she said.
He put the car in gear and nearly hit the advancing soccer player as he pulled away. “You see,” Webber said. “These are rough places.”
“Perhaps I should go back to Pierina’s,” she said. Then she immediately rescinded. “Let’s try one more.”
He continued south, past the warehouses toward Avellaneda.
“We have to approach this differently,” she said. “You have to take off that jacket and tie. “She took off her rings and her necklace and dropped them into her purse as she spoke. She removed her hat and tossed it into the back. She was happy in these circumstances not to have the Packard.
Jorge pulled over on a deserted stretch along the Riachuelo, the river that separated Buenos Aires from the meatpacking suburb. He got out of the car, took off his jacket and tie, and placed them, carefully folded, on the backseat. If he left the car, his jodhpurs and tall boots would give them away, but when he got back into the car, sitting down, he looked like an ordinary man through the windows.
“Drive on,” she told him. She took out her letter again and reread Perón’s plea for her safety. “You should keep calm and take care of your health…” it said. “I would be more calm if I knew you were not in danger and that you were well.” What would he think if he knew where she was? she wondered. But how could he be angry with her? After more than a year and a half together, he must realize she would not remain passive. She was incapable of doing nothing.
They rode through a shantytown and entered a street lined by one-story dreary houses, the gutters filled with trash. A dirty, skinny, ill-clad child pushed the remains of a broom back and forth in a deep puddle of black water. Evita could not tell if it was a boy or a girl. This squalid place was more awful than the worst hovel where she had lived as a child. Here she would find the people who had no one but Perón. Without him, that child with the broom would never have a life any better than thi
s.
“Stop there.” She pointed across the street to an old woman sitting on a chair beside an open door. The tiny house was painted a streaky, venomous shade of green. The grandmother cradled a baby on her lap while she crocheted lace. Three young men on the sidewalk were building something unidentifiable with scraps of wood. They all looked askance at the car.
Evita got out and approached, holding out her hand to the woman. “My name is Eva,” she said. “Eva Duarte.”
The men stopped hammering. One who had been kneeling stood up. The old woman smiled. One of her front teeth was chipped and crooked. “I listened to you on the radio. Jabón Radical.” She named the brand of soap that had been Evita’s sponsor.
“Yes,” Evita said and returned the woman’s grin. The three men came nearer. “I just wanted people to know that Colonel Perón has been arrested. He is in jail.”
“Por Dios!” one of the men exclaimed. He slapped the saw he held with the flat of his other hand. The ringing sound it made startled the baby.
The woman dropped her handiwork and stood up, moving the wailing infant to her shoulder. She patted it on the back. “It is just what I told you, Adelio.” She gestured toward a man who taken nails from between his lips and now threw them and his hammer onto the cement sidewalk. “Bastards.”
Evita nodded vigorously. “The president is saying it is not true. That Perón is not in jail. But I swear he is.” She held up her hand as if she were speaking in court. “I know it.”
“What can we do?” asked the man with the saw. It was not clear if his question was for the old woman, for Evita, or for his comrades.
“The men at the plant need to know the truth,” the one called Adelio said. “As soon as our shift starts at midnight.”
“Yes, pass the word,” Evita said. “Pass the word.” She shook hands with them, kissed the now quiet baby on the back of its head. “Your grandchild is beautiful,” she said.
“He is my son,” the woman said.
Evita bowed her head in embarrassment and returned to the car.
Blood Tango Page 11
