The New York Review Abroad

by Robert B. Silvers

  For intellectuals and artists as well, the better ones, who are not afraid of the outside world, there is this great anxiety of being imprisoned in Argentina and not being able to get out, of having one’s creative years wasted by a revolution in which one can have no stake, or by a bloody-minded dictatorship, or just by chaos. Inflation and the crash of the peso have already trapped many. Menchi Sábat, the country’s most brilliant cartoonist, says, “It is easier for us to be on the moon by TV. But we don’t know Bolivia or Chile or even Uruguay. The reason? Money. What we are seeing now is a kind of collective frenzy. Because before it was always easy here to get money. Now we are isolated. It isn’t easy for people outside to understand what this means.”

  The winter season still begins in May with the opera at the Colón Theater; and orchestra seats at $21 are quickly sold out. But the land has been despoiled of its most precious myth, the myth of wealth, wealth once so great, Argentines tell you, that you killed a cow and ate only the tongue, and the traveler on the pampa was free to kill and eat any cow, providing only that he left the skin for the landowner. Is it eight feet of topsoil that the humid pampa has? Or it it twelve? So rich, Argentina; such luck, with the land.

  In 1850 there were fewer than a million Argentines; and Indian territory began 100 miles west and south of Buenos Aires. Then, less than a hundred years ago, in a six-year carnage, the Indians were sought out and destroyed; and the pampa began to yield its treasure. Vast estancias on the stolen, bloody land: a sudden and jealous colonial aristocracy. Add immigrants, a labor force: in 1914 there were eight million Argentines. The immigrants, mainly from Northern Spain and Southern Italy, came not to be smallholders or pioneers but to service the estancias and the port, Buenos Aires, that served the estancias. A vast and flourishing colonial economy, based on cattle and wheat, and attached to the British Empire; an urban proletariat as sudden as the estancia aristocracy; a whole and sudden artificial society imposed on the flat, desolate land.

  Borges, in his 1929 poem, “The Mythical Founding of Buenos Aires,” remembers the proletarian spread of the city:

  Una cigarrería sahumó como una rosa el desierto. La tarde se había ahondado en ayeres, los hombres compartieron un pasado ilusorio. Sólo faltó una cosa: la vereda de enfrente.

  Which in Alastair Reid’s translation becomes:

  A cigar store perfumed the desert like a rose. The afternoon had established its yesterdays, And men took on together an illusory past. Only one thing was missing—the street had no other side. A mí se me hace cuento que empezó Buenos Aires: La juzgo tan eterna como el agua y el aire. Hard to believe Buenos Aires had any beginning. I feel it to be as eternal as air and water.

  The half-made city is within Borges’s memory. Now, already, there is decay. The British Empire has withdrawn ordenadamente, in good order; and the colonial agricultural economy, attempting haphazardly to industrialize, to become balanced and autonomous, is in ruins. The artificiality of the society shows: that absence of links between men and men, between immigrant and immigrant, aristocrat and artisan, city dweller and cabecita negra, the “blackhead,” the man from the interior; that absence of a link between men and the meaningless flat land. And the poor, who are Argentines, the sons and grandsons of those recent immigrants, will now have to stay.

  They have always had their curanderos and brujas, thaumaturges and witches; they know how to protect themselves against the ghosts and poltergeists with which they have peopled the alien land. But now a larger faith is needed, some knowledge of a sheltering divinity. Without faith these abandoned Spaniards and Italians will go mad.

  At the end of May a Buenos Aires church advertised a special mass against the evil eye, el mal de ojo. “If you’ve been damaged, or if you think you are being damaged, don’t fail to come.” Five thousand city people turned up, many in motorcars. There were half a dozen stalls selling holy or beneficent objects; there were cubicles for religious-medical consultations, from thirty cents to a dollar a time. It was a little like a Saturday morning market. The officiating priest said, “Every individual is an individual source of power and is subject to imperceptible mental waves which can bring about ill-health or distress. This is the visible sign of the evil spirit.”

  “I can never believe we are in 1972,” the publisher-bookseller says. “It seems to me we are still in the year zero.” He isn’t complaining; he himself trades in the occult and mystical, and his business is booming. Argentine middle-class mimicry of Europe and the United States, perhaps. But at a lower level the country is being swept by the new enthusiastic cult of espiritismo, a purely native affair of mediums and mass trances and miraculous cures, which claims the patronage of Jesus Christ and Mahatma Gandhi. The espiritistas don’t talk of mental waves; their mediums heal by passing on intangible beneficent “fluids.” The espiritistas say they have given up politics; and they revere Gandhi for his nonviolence. They believe in reincarnation and the perfectibility of the spirit. They say that purgatory and hell exist now, on earth, and that man’s only hope is to be born on a more evolved planet. Their goal is that life, in a “definitive” disembodied world, where only superior spirits congregate.

  Despair: a rejection of the land, a dream of nullity. But someone holds out hope; someone seeks to resanctify the land. With Perón at the Iron Gate is José López Rega, who has been his companion and private secretary for the last thirty years. Rega is known to have mystical leanings and to be interested in astrology and espiritismo; and he is said to be a man of great power now. An interview with him fills ten pages of a recent issue of Las Bases, the new Peronist fortnightly. Argentines are of many races, Rega says; but they all have native ancestors. The Argentine racial mixture has been “enriched by Indian blood” and “Mother Earth has purified it all.… I fight for liberty,” Rega goes on, “because that’s how I am made and because I feel stirring within me the blood of the Indian, whose land this is.” Now, for all its vagueness and unconscious irony, this is an astonishing statement, because, until this crisis, it was the Argentine’s pride that his country was not “niggered-up” like Brazil or mestizo like Bolivia, but European; and it was his special anxiety that outsiders might think of Argentines as Indians. Now the Indian ghost is invoked, and a mystical, purifying claim is made on the blighted land.

  Other people offer, as they have always offered, political and economic programs. Perón and Peronism offer faith.

  And they have a saint: Eva Perón. “I remember I was very sad for many days,” she wrote in 1952 in La Razón de mi Vida (“My Life’s Cause”), “when I discovered that in the world there were poor people and rich people; and the strange thing is that the existence of the poor didn’t cause me as much pain as the knowledge that at the same time there were people who were rich.” It was the basis of her political action. She preached a simple hate and a simple love. Hate for the rich: “Shall we burn down the Barrio Norte?” she would say to the crowds. “Shall I give you fire?” And love for “the common people,” el pueblo: she used that word again and again and made it part of the Peronist vocabulary. She levied tribute from everyone for her Eva Perón Foundation; and she sat until three or four or five in the morning in the Ministry of Labor, giving away Foundation money to suppliants, dispensing a personal justice. This was her “work”: a child’s vision of power, justice, and revenge.

  She died in 1952, when she was thirty-three. And now in Argentina, after the proscribed years, the attempt to extirpate her name, she is a presence again. Her pictures are everywhere, touched up, seldom sharp, and often they seem deliberately garish, like religious pictures meant for the poor: a young woman of great beauty, with blonde hair, a very white skin, and the very red lips of the 1940s.

  She was of the people and of the land. She was born in 1919 in Los Toldos, the dreariest of pampa small towns, built on the site of an Indian encampment, 150 flat miles west of Buenos Aires. The town gives an impression of flatness, of total exposure below the high sky. The dusty brick houses, red or whi
te, are low, flat-fronted, and flat-roofed, with an occasional balustrade; the paraíso trees have whitewashed trunks and are severely pollarded; the wide streets, away from the center, are still of dirt.

  She was illegitimate; she was poor; and she lived for the first ten years of her life in a one-room house, which still stands. When she was fifteen she went to Buenos Aires to become an actress. Her speech was bad; she had a country girl’s taste in clothes; her breasts were very small, her calves were heavy, and her ankles thickish. But within three months she had got her first job. And thereafter she charmed her way up. When she was twenty-five she met Perón; the following year they married.

  Her commonness, her beauty, her success: they contribute to her sainthood. And her sexiness. “Todos me acosan sexualmente,” she once said with irritation, in her actress days. “Everybody makes a pass at me.” She was the macho’s ideal victim-woman—don’t those red lips still speak to the Argentine macho of her reputed skill in fellatio? But very soon she was beyond sex, and pure again. At twenty-nine she was dying from cancer of the uterus, and hemorrhaging through the vagina; and her plumpish body began to waste away. Toward the end she weighed 80 pounds. One day she looked at some old official photographs of herself and began to cry. Another day she saw herself in a long mirror and said, “When I think of the trouble I went to to keep my legs slim! Ahora que me veo estas piernitas me asusto. Now it frightens me to look at these matchsticks.”

  But politically she never weakened. The Peronist revolution was going bad. Argentina’s accumulated wartime wealth was running low; the colonial economy, unregenerated, plundered, mismanaged, was beginning to founder; the peso was falling; the workers, to whom so much had been given, were not always loyal. But she still cherished her especial pain that “there were people who were rich.” Close to death, she told a gathering of provincial governors, “We mustn’t pay too much attention to people who talk to us of prudence. We must be fanatical.” The army was growing restive. She was willing to take them on. She wanted to arm the trade unions; and she did buy, through Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, 5,000 automatic pistols and 1,500 machine-guns, which, when they arrived, Perón, more prudent, gave to the police.

  And all the time her private tragedy was being turned into the public passion play of the dictatorship. For her, who had turned Peronism into a religion, sainthood had long been decreed; and there is a story that for fifteen days before her death the man who was to embalm her was with her, to ensure that nothing was done that might damage the body. As soon as she died the embalming contract was signed. Was it for $100,000 or $300,000? The reports are confused. Dr. Ara, the Spanish embalmer—“a master,” Perón called him—had first to make the body ready for a fifteen-day lying-in-state. The actual embalming took six months. The process remains secret. Dr. Ara, according to a Buenos Aires newspaper, has devoted two chapters of his memoirs (which are to be published only after his death) to the embalming of Eva Perón; color pictures of the corpse are also promised. Reports suggest that the blood was first replaced by alcohol, and then by heated glycerine (Perón himself says “paraffin and other special matter”), which was pumped in through the heel and an ear.

  “I went three times to look at Evita,” Perón wrote in 1956, after his overthrow, and when the embalmed body had disappeared. “The doors … were like the gates of eternity.” He had the impression that she was only sleeping. The first time he went he wanted to touch her, but he feared that at the touch of his warm hand the body would turn to dust. Ara said, “Don’t worry. She’s as whole (intacta) now as when she was alive.”

  And now, twenty years later, her embalmed wasted body, once lost, now found, and no bigger, they say, than that of a twelve-year-old girl, only the blonde hair as rich as in the time of health, waits with Perón at the Iron Gate.

  It came as a surprise, this villa miseria or shantytown just beside the brown river in the Palermo district, not far from the great park, Buenos Aires’s equivalent of the Bois de Boulogne, where people go riding. A shantytown, with unpaved streets and black runnels of filth, but the buildings were of brick, with sometimes an upper story: a settled place, more than fifteen years old, with shops and signs. Seventy thousand people lived there, nearly all Indians, blank and slightly imbecilic in appearance, from the north and from Bolivia and Paraguay; so that suddenly you were reminded that you were not in Paris or Europe but South America. The priest in charge was one of the “Priests for the Third World.” He wore a black leather jacket and his little concrete shed of a church, oversimple, rocked with some amplified Argentine song. It had been whispered to me that the priest came of a very good family; and perhaps the change of company had made him vain. He was of course a Peronist, and he said that all his Indians were Peronist. “Only an Argentine can understand Peronism. I can talk to you for five years about Peronism, but you will never understand.”

  But couldn’t we try? He said Peronism wasn’t concerned with economic growth; they rejected the consumer society. But hadn’t he just been complaining about the unemployment in the interior, the result of government folly, that was sending two Indians into his shantytown for every one that left? He said he wasn’t going to waste his time talking to a norteamericano; some people were concerned only with GNP. And, leaving us, he bore down, all smiles, on some approaching Indians. The river wind was damp, the concrete shed unheated, and I wanted to leave. But the man with me was uneasy. He said we should at least wait and tell the father I wasn’t an American. We did so. And the father, abashed, explained that Peronism was really concerned with the development of the human spirit. Such a development had taken place in Cuba and China; in those countries they had turned their backs on the industrial society.

  These lawyers had been represented to me as a group working for “civil rights.” They were young, stylishly dressed, and they were meeting that morning to draft a petition against torture. The top-floor flat was scruffy and bare; visitors were scrutinized through the peep-hole; everybody whispered; and there was a lot of cigarette smoke. Intrigue, danger. But one of the lawyers was diverted by my invitation to lunch, and at lunch—he was a hearty and expensive eater—he made it clear that the torture they were protesting against wasn’t to be confused with the torture in Perón’s time.

  He said: “When justice is the justice of the people men sometimes commit excesses. But in the final analysis the important thing is that justice should be done in the name of the people.” Who were the enemies of the people? His response was tabulated and swift. “American imperialism. And its native allies. The oligarchy, the dependent bourgeoisie, Zionism, and the ‘sepoy’ left. By sepoys we mean the Communist Party and socialism in general.” It seemed a comprehensive list. Who were the Peronists? “Peronism is a revolutionary national movement. There is a great difference between a movement and a party. We are not Stalinists, and a Peronist is anyone who calls himself a Peronist and acts like a Peronist.”

  The lawyer, for all his anti-Jewish feeling, was a Jew; and he came of an anti-Peronist middle-class family. In 1970 he had met Perón in Madrid, and he had been dazzled; his voice shook when he quoted Perón’s words. He had said to Perón, “General, why don’t you declare war on the regime and then put yourself at the head of all the true Peronists?” Perón replied: “I am the conductor of a national movement. I have to conduct the whole movement, in its totality.”

  “There are no internal enemies,” the trade union leader said, with a smile. But at the same time he thought that torture would continue in Argentina. “A world without torture is an ideal world.” And there was torture and torture. “Depende de quién sea torturado. It depends on who is tortured. An evildoer, that’s all right. But a man who’s trying to save the country—that’s something else. Torture isn’t only the electric prod, you know. Poverty is torture, frustration is torture.” He was urbane; I had been told he was the most intellectual of the Peronist trade union leaders. He had been punctual; his office was uncluttered and neat; on his desk, below glass,
there was a large photograph of the young Perón.

  The first Peronist revolution was based on the myth of wealth, of a land waiting to be plundered. Now the wealth has gone. And Peronism is like part of the poverty. It is protest, despair, faith, machismo, magic, espiritismo, revenge. It is everything and nothing. Remove Perón, and hysteria will be uncontrollable. Remove the armed forces, sterile guardians of law and order, and Peronism, triumphant, will disintegrate into a hundred scattered fights, every man identifying his own enemy.

  “Violence, in the hands of the people, isn’t violence: it is justice.” This statement of Perón’s was printed on the front page of a recent issue of Fe, a Peronist paper. So, in sinister mimicry, the south twists the revolutionary jargon of the north. Where jargon turns living issues into abstractions (“Torture will disappear in Argentina,” the Trotskyite said, “only with a workers’ government and the downfall of the bourgeoisie”), and where jargon ends by competing with jargon, people don’t have causes. They only have enemies; only the enemies are real. It has been the South American nightmare since the break-up of the Spanish Empire.

  Was Eva Perón blonde or brunette? Was she born in 1919 or 1922? Was she born in the little town of Los Toldos, or in Junín, 40 kilometers away? Well, she was a brunette who dyed her hair blonde; she was born in 1919 but said 1922 (and had her birth record destroyed in 1945); she spent the first ten years of her life in Los Toldos but ever afterward disclaimed the town. No one will know why. Don’t go to her autobiography, La Razón de mi Vida, which used to be prescribed reading in Argentine schools. That doesn’t contain a fact or a date; and it was written by a Spaniard, who later complained that the book he wrote had been much altered by the Peronist authorities.