Blood Makes Noise - Truth In Fiction
Friday, December 06, 2013
Consider the following:
1. Dr. Pedro Ara was the man who embalmed María Eva Duarte de Perón after she died July 26,
1952. There were persistent rumours that Dr. Ara also made a precise replica of
Evita’s head in wax that was virtually indistinguishable from the real thing. Dr.
Ara was known to carry to parties hatboxes containing perfectly preserved heads
of not so notables. Dr. Ara advised the Russians on possible methods to
preserve Lenin’s cadaver. Dr. Ara wrote a book El Caso de Eva Perón in which he
reveals a few of his methods in 1974. The book is out of print but still
available.
2. When Evita’s body
was removed from its original holding space at the CGT (the very Peronist headquarters
of the Secretariat of Labour where Evita had held court as the spiritual head of the nation) in 1955, flowers would mysteriously appear outside
of whatever place her body was hidden by the military authorities who deposed
Juan Domingo Perón in that year. The authorities did not want Evita;s body to serve as a rally for opposing forces to the military government.
3. Evita’s body was abruptly
removed out of the CGT by Colonel Carlos Moori Koenig, Chief of Argentine
Military Security. She was, carried around to many locations including a flower shop
backroom. Moori was disobeying the order of his superior, the then president of
Argentina, General Pedro Aramburu,
by virtue of being the head of the military junta that had deposed Perón, to dig the body into a clandestine burial spot. Moori eventually
took Evita to the house of his second in command, Mayor Eduardo Arandía. Arandía
had a strange and overly protective relationship with the body of Evita which
he kept in his attic hidden by papers. Sometimes he would show her off to
dinner guests. One evening convinced that the Peronist resistance was outside
his door to retrieve the body he unaccountably shot his pregnant wife to death.
He eventually went mad.
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| Death mask at Museo Evita |
5. In 1970 Montonero guerrillas
kidnapped Aramburu and tortured him (until he died). If Aramburu knew where
Evita’s body was he never revealed it. At that time grafitti appeared on Buenos Aires wall demanding the whereabouts of her body.
6. In 1974, Aramburu's body was stolen by Montoneros.
The corpse was to be held until President Isabel Perón (Perón’s third wife)
brought back Evita Perón's body.
7. In 1987 unknown
persons broke into Juan Perón’s burial place and removed his hands with an
electric saw. The hands were never recovered.
8. When Evita’s body
was removed from Italy and
taken to Perón’s headquarters in exile in Madrid, his wife Isabelita would comb Evita’s
hair every day. Her body was put on a platform so that Perón’s dinner guests
could gaze on her.
Sims writes:
Explaining his reason for telling his story in a novel, which was published
this month and was at the top of the best seller’s list here, this week, Mr. Martínez
said what he learned about the fight for Eva Perón’s body from the informants
and from is own research was “so incredible, so unbelievable that it had to be
written in the novel style.”
“The novel is the most
effective way of telling the truth especially
about a person like Eva Perón, whose character has taken on mythical
qualities in Argentina,” said Mr. Martínez, who is one of Argentina’s most
prominent authors. While some names, places and events have been altered, the
novel is a reconstruction of the truth, he said.
A few weeks ago I
spotted Gregory Widen’s novel, Blood Makes Noise in the new novels section of
the Main Branch of the Vancouver Public Library.
The novel is by a man, a native from Laguna Beach, California
who is a former firefighter, NPR Station host, mountain rescue-team member and who
also wrote the script for the Sean Connery film Highlander. In comparison to a dead
general’s hand being cut off, it does not seem so strange that an American would write such a terrific novel about Evita. If anything I can
assert here that Eloy Martínez is right. From this Laguna Beach author I have learned many
things about my former country.
I often think of a little story told to me by my former spiritual mentor, Brother Edwin Reggio, C.S.C.. He said of a human swimmer encountering some intelligent fish. He tells the fish that they are surrounded by a colourless substance, that wets everything and that it is called water. The fish stare at our swimmer and say, “You are full of sh..”
I often think of a little story told to me by my former spiritual mentor, Brother Edwin Reggio, C.S.C.. He said of a human swimmer encountering some intelligent fish. He tells the fish that they are surrounded by a colourless substance, that wets everything and that it is called water. The fish stare at our swimmer and say, “You are full of sh..”
Likewise, my
politically polarized countrymen cannot see their reality because they are in
it.
One telling paragraph
that stopped me in my tracks:
“History is sometimes…difficult”
“Argentina loves
a corpse.”
This nation has an
unreal fixation with the remains of their famous. School children here were
taught to dutifully recite the last words of national heroes, like San Martín,
and celebrated not their birthdays but the day of their deaths. General Manuel
de Rosas, a nineteenth-century strongman who died in England,
had been buried for more than one hundred years, yet the government was today
using all its wheat power to blackmail a hungry Europe
into shipping his mouldy bones home. The dead have power everywhere, but
nowhere, it seemed, did their bodies themselves speak more forcefully than in Argentina.
And this one:
[Hector Cabanillas,
the Head of Argentine Military Security is one of the main protagonists in the
novel tells his friend and fellow spook, an American CIA officer]
Hector smiled, “You
think like an American, Michael. To Americans the power of myth rests in ideas
and people. Here the power of myth rests in objects. They need not actually
possess her body to stand before it and invoke her name as their name. It is
not her works that electrify the crowds but Her. Reveal where she lies with
such large-scale protection and there would be thousands of campesinos at the
gate in an hour, and our enemies would have succeeded in the same as if they
had run her up a flagpole. She would become their flag, something to rally
opposition around the way ideas never can in this nation.”
“Burn her, then. Dump
her in the river.”
“That’s an American
solution, Michael. You see history as linear. Cause and effect. The evolution
of events. But Argentina
is a land where nothing happens. History here is an endless cycle, and one day
the Señora will become the friend of the state, its flag. So we must keep her
safe, away from politics.”
“On deposit.”
“In Argentina
everyone is on deposit, Michael, Even the dead…”
Blood Makes Noise is a
novel that follows the events of what happens to Evita’s remains in 1952 until
she is brought back to Buenos Aires
by Isabelita (now the Argentine president as her husband Perón had died of a
heart attack). The novel further reveals the conflict between Hoover's FBI and the newish CIA for control of Latin America.
The accepted version
that Evita’s body now rests in the Recoleta
Cemetery, not far from
Aramburu, is a current one. Widen’s version may not be the accepted one but for
me it was the fitting end to a satisfying novel that no Argentine would ever
write. It is a pity that the chances are awfully slim that the novel would be translated into Spanish.
When I finished Blood Makes Noise, I re-read V.S. Naipaul’s The
Return of Eva Perón which is an account of several visits by Naipaul to Argentina
culminating with his last one in 1977. Naipaul’s description of Argentina in that year is not much different to
the Argentina
that I encountered this September and October. It is a sad fact that these Naipaul essays on Argentina have not been translated into Spanish.
Wherever I went I was
reminded of Evita. She was on peso bills, there is a Museo Evita and countless
books have been written (mostly non-fiction) of her period and her husband’s in
Argentina.
When I purchased and read the just out La Furia de Evita, a novel in first-person
autobiography form by distinguished wrier Marcos Aguinis, my one very Peronist
friend Nora Patrich told me that I could not believe anything I would read in
the novel, after all it was a novel. I kept quiet, feeling very much like that
swimmer talking to fish.
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| September 2013 |
