Juan Domingo Perón & Eva Duarte,  Numa Ayrinhac, 1948

                                                                           

In this three week trip to Buenos Aires from mid September to October I noticed a few parallels that until then had been unbeknownst to me. 

As a roundabout introduction to the above I must mention a phone call I had some months ago with my first cousin Willoughby Blew (cousin on my father’s side) who lives in Florida. I happened to mention President Kennedy and that led to a long stream of nasty comments on what a terrible president and horrible man Kennedy had been. Willoughby caught me completely off my guard and I was speechless.

No matter when you go to Buenos Aires, Porteños will always tell you that things have never been worse. This cannot quite be true as things were worse during the military dictatorship between 1976 and 1983. Thousands disappeared. Some of these were thrown out of airplanes or helicopters over the River Plate.

My native country is polarized between those who see and saw Juan Domingo Perón (October 8, 1895 – July 1, 1974) as a saviour or a villain. Those who consider him a villain tend to be part of the upper crust aristocracy and the very Roman Catholics.

Evita bust in Nora Patrich's garden

My stay in Buenos Aires see-sawed between the homes of those two camps. You can also say that what holds true about Perón does too on opinions on his second wife Eva Duarte de Perón (7 May 1919 – 26 July 1952).

My knowledge of Eva Perón (who lived with Perón between 1944, until she died in 1952, they were married in 1945) is from a young boy’s experience. I saw her once in person when our school bused us to a tree planting ceremony. In the early 50s we lived next to some Peronists who always turned on their home radio to full blast during the speeches that Perón and wife would give during national days like 25 de mayo and 9 de Julio. Her voice is embedded in my brain.

Another view on Evita is the fact that on January 6, the feast of the Three Wise Kings she distributed toys to children. These toys were wooden (very valuable now if you kept them). I hated them, preferring Meccanos and Erector sets.

When she died in July of 1952 the incredible outpouring of grief introduced me to the Beethoven and Chopin’s funeral music. The place where her body was placed in state was called with the dramatic name of capilla ardiente (flaming chapel). The long funeral cortege which I saw in the newsreels at the movies is still in my memory.

Of the woman I knew nothing except what my grandmother would tell me. She said that Evita was a nasty Robin Hood who stole from the rich aristocracy and gave this to the poor as being hers. After she died there were stories of people complaining at the butcher shop that there was not meat to buy. The stories continued with accounts that those who had complained were arrested or disappeared. 

San Martín, Rosas & Perón, Alfredo Bettanin (1972). Museo del Bicentenario

I have no way of ascertaining if those butcher shop stories were true. When I questioned my friend Nora Patrich and her husband Roberto Baschetti (a Peronist scholar at the National Library) the expression used was, “It’s a myth.” To the question if Juan Perón was a right-wing dictator who admired Mussolini, the answer again was, “It’s a myth.”

The Argentine reality in 2013 is that most politicians call themselves Peronists even if they are from all sorts of splinter groups. Those in power now call themselves Kirchneristas. The president, Cristina Kirchner inherited her husband’s, Nestor Kirchner, when he died. So you have left-wing and center and center right wing Peronists. They are all Peronists.

Evita's death mask at Museo Evita

Juan Domingo Perón was booted out by the armed forces September 1955. By then my family had moved to Mexico City. When I returned for my military service there was a freely elected president, Umberto Illía (October 12, 1963 – June 28, 1966). That June 28 I was present on the coup d'etat that took him down. Until I left in December, 1966 Argentina to return to my home in Mexico, we were subject to constant mobilization to our barracks because of the rumors that Perón was coming back from his exile in Spain.

With Jorge Wenceslao de Irureta Goyena at Museo Evita

I am now making up for lost time on information on what happened to my country when I finally left it for good that December 1966 by reading as many books as I can on the subject.

My Eva Perón lunch

Of late I finished a novel; by noted Argentine author Marcos Aguinis called La Furia de Evita. It is a beautifully written book in the first person that is similar to Jerome Charyn's The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson. When Charyn published the book last year he was criticized by many for taking the liberty of attempting to be a woman in the first person. His book was defended by no less an author and a woman, Joyce Carol Oates.

Of Aguinis’s book my friend Nora Patrich told me not to believe anything in the book (she has not read it) as it is a novel. I have read countless essays on how novels sometimes circumvent the subjective view of non-fiction writers to actually tell many truths.

I did not attempt to tell Patrich that Aguinis paints Evita in a very good light and makes her an intelligent person who had many talents including one of knowing what to say to people while standing behind a microphone. If anything Evita comes out as the more politically savvy, almost ruthless in comparison to her husband Perón.

But going back to my initial paragraph, Perón and Evita seem to me to be almost a Kennedy and Jackie kind of celebrity cult. They are seen as being part of rosier times even if the reality of those times does not quite jibe.

Nora Patrich is curating a show in 2014 in the Evita Museum. She is placing in the show some extensive work of her own. I have seen some of it at a very strange but interesting store called Los Octubres of which I will write a bit more below. Let’s first visit the museum.

I went to the museum and met for lunch with Nora Patrich, her partner Roberto Baschetti and my first cousin Jorge Wenceslao de Irureta Goyena. The Evita Museum has a fine dining restaurant.  Everybody was most happy with their food and the excellent Malbec that Baschetti ordered. I was intrigued by something called “The Eva Perón Lunch”. This was a breaded veal cutlet twisted to resemble a cow’s tongue. And the veal cutlet could have easily replaced one of the soles of my shoes! But the dessert a “flan completo” (a flan served with sweet whipping cream and dulce de leche on the side, was awesome.

Museo Evita - kitchen

The museum is nicely staffed and well-organized. The house is one that Eva Perón used to house young women who might have “gotten-into-trouble” Upon leaving I purchased an Eva Perón postcard with the idea of writing something in Spanish and sending it to my granddaughter Rebecca but unfortunately the wells stocked museum did not have postage stamps. The young man with the bad news looked like Colin Firth might have looked like when he was 19!

If the museum was done in absolute good taste in homage of a woman who is in the hearts of many Argentines a little store (on a second floor) in the still fashionable Palermo Viejo area of Buenos Aires was different altogether. They had everything you could possible want, not want or imagine related to Eva Perón and her husband but I did spot a few Che Guevara postcards. At this store, called Los Octubres (perhaps because in 1945, on October 17, Perón gave a most important speech that is now called El Día de La Lealtad) I found a beautiful silk scarf with Evita exactly as she now looks on some Argentine Peso bills which I bought for Rebecca. They also had some striking postcards that are reproductions of Nora Patrich’s paintings of Evita. But in one room I found some paintings that are of questionable bad taste that still made me smile.

Museo Evita

Another very nice museum, El Museo del Bicentenario is tucked to one side of the Casa Rosada, downtown by Plaza de Mayo. It was here that I found the romantic painting, seen in the beginning of this blog of  Juan Perón and Evita.  A second painting, one showing three important men (and many others) in Argentine history, the liberator General San Martín, the powerful 19th century dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas (a friend of Darwin) and Juan Domingo Perón led me to ask one of the very young guides why it was that Evita was not in the painting. With a big smile on his face he showed me that she indeed was there standing on the hand of the very naked and most suffering woman who represents Argentina!

It would seem that Juan Domingo Perón and his wife Evita are similar to the US’s President Jack Kennedy and his wife Jacqueline. Both couples are seen in a regal manner. The similarity ends because Perón did not die at the height of his popularity (Evita did).

When Perón eventually did return to Argentina in 1973 and there was a terrible massacre of his followers at Ezeiza airport, few now mention (even avowed Peronists) that he came with a third wife, Isabelita and that when Perón died in office she became Argentina’s first female president who was done in by a General Jorge Videla in 1976 and which ushered in the repressive military juntas that climaxed with President (General) Leopoldo Galtieri taking las Islas Malvinas (I will not write here their other name, after all I am still sort of an Argentine).

Museo Evita

One way or another Perón and wife will dominate Argentine politics, culture and literature for many years to come.

One writer who wrote a most strange and very short story called El Simulacro was Jorge Luís Borges. His story, one of my favourites reads Gothic. Here it is in English with an analysis below it by Margaret Schwartz. In case you don’t know, Borges never did see Perón or his wife in favourable light.

Borges’s “El simulacro”

Borges, Jorge Luís. Collected Fictions. Translated by Andrew Hurley. New York, New York: Penguin Putnam Inc., 1998. 301-302:

One day in July, 1952, the man dressed in mourning weeds appeared in that little village on the Chaco River. He was a tall, thin man with vaguely Indian features and the inexpressive face of a half-wit or a mask. The townsfolk treated him with some deference, not because of who he was but because of the personage he was portraying or had by now become. He chose a house near the river; with the help of some neighbor women he laid a board across two sawhorses, and on it he set a pasteboard coffin with a blond-haired mannequin inside. In addition, they lighted four candles in tall candleholders and put flowers all around. The townsfolk soon began to gather. Old ladies bereft of hope, dumbstruck wide-eyed boys, peons who respectfully took off their pith hats — they filed past the coffin and said: My condolences, General. The man in mourning sat sorrowfully at the head of the coffin, his hands crossed over his belly like a pregnant woman. He would extend his right hand to shake the hand extended to him and answer with courage and resignation: It was fate. Everything humanly possible was done. A tin collection box received the two-peso price of admission, and many could not content themselves with a single visit.

Roberto Baschetti & Nora Patrich

What kind of man, I ask myself, thought up and then acted out that funereal farce — a fanatic? a grief-stricken mourner? a madman? a cynical impostor? Did he, in acting out his mournful role as the macabre widower, believe himself to be Perón? It is an incredible story, but it actually happened — and perhaps not once but many times, with different actors and local variants. In it, one can see the perfect symbol of an unreal time, and it is like the reflection of a dream or like that play within a play in Hamlet. The man in mourning was not Perón and the blond-haired mannequin was not the woman Eva Duarte, but then Perón was not Perón, either, nor was Eva, Eva — they were unknown or anonymous persons (whose secret name and true face we shall never know) who acted out, for the credulous love of the working class, a crass and ignoble mythology.

At Los Octubres - Palermo Viejo

El Simulacro” describes a scene in the Chaco, in July, 1952, during the period of national mourning for the first Lady of Argentina, Eva Perón. A charlatan, a mountebank sets up an obviously fake casket, adorns it with flowers and candles, and charges credulous country folk to pay their respects to a blonde doll he

has used to represent the corpse. Yet the question of credulity Borges’s narrator is addressed to the charlatan, not to the crowds, although he notes that many paid more than once to pay their respects to the fake widower. No, Borges’s narrator wonders, did the charlatan believe himself to be the mourning widower

Perón? Was he purely cynical, heartlessly opportunistic? He does not answer this question except to simply assert that the story is not only true, but only a local variation of a story taking place all over Argentina, in the provinces, while the people in the capital

mourned. Here the essay turns to the models for this sham, Eva and Juan Perón, and muses that they themselves “were unknown or anonymous persons (whose secret name and true face we shall never know) who acted out, for the credulous love of the working

classes, a crass and ignoble mythology”

Margaret Schwartz

“Los temas contemporáneos son peligrosos”

Borges in Entredichos

Buenos Aires, August 1983

At Los Octubres

At Los Octubres

At Los Octubres

Berenice Blanco &  Gabriel Galimberti at Los Octubres