Free The New York Review Abroad by Robert B. Silvers Page A

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 LosToldos, 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 white, 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