Evita

Argentina's Heart

domenico vecchioni, Ellen Bain Prior

• Publisher: Babelcube Inc.
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781071546567
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Historische Biographien

Life, love, politicalengagementon behalf of her descamisados, the struggle forwomen's emancipation, death, second life andthe enduring myth of Eva Peron, one of the most remarkable women of the 20th century and one who is still held dear in the memoriesand hearts of Argentinians.

EVITA

Argentina’s Heart

1. EARLY YEARS

––––––––

Eva had a sad childhood, devoid of a father figure, living in poverty and outcast by the local community, nourishing a growing yearning for revenge against society, and this marked her indelibly for life. Some of her character traits, her recurring contradictory behaviour and some significant choices she made when at the peak of her political power, can be better understood in the light of the humiliation, injustice and harassment she suffered in Los Toldos and Junin as an adolescent.

Eva was born a "bastard", the illegitimate daughter of a humble, working class woman of Basque origin, Juana Ibarguren, and a landowner from Chivilcoy (a town some 170 kilometres west of Buenos Aires), Juan Duarte, who already had a wife and three daughters.

At a very young age, Eva's mother was recruited as an assistant cook at a property which Duarte acquired in Los Toldos, an isolated village deep in the Pampas, not very far from Chivilcoy. What followed was a very common story. When not taken up with his business affairs, Juan would drown out his boredom with alcohol and look for "fun" to counter the solitude of life on the Argentine plains. Juana, for her part, pleasant, fresh and lively, was willing to do anything she could to escape the humiliating misery of her lot in life. What prospects did she have, a girl with no dowry, no education and living in absolute poverty in the land of the gauchos at the beginning of last century? A decent job? Unlikely. A respectable marriage? No chance. At most, she could aspire to become the mistress of some person of local importance who could provide her with protection and assistance.

Juana was well aware of all this. In fact, she was a product of what was probably the humblest social class in Argentina. Her mother, Petronia Nuñez, had been a "puestera" or "adelita", that is to say one of those uneducated and illiterate women who had arrived in the desert as camp-followers in the wake of General Julio Roca's troops, when they came to wipe out the last Indian settlements. Thus, Juana’s only option was to cling desperately to the lifeline offered by Juan, an insurance policy for survival which also offered a very slight chance of future respectability in the eyes of society. We all need a dream to cling to! But Juan Duarte was in no hurry. Their union was to last eighteen years and produced five children. Maria Eva was the last of these, after Elisa, Bianca, Juan Ramón and Erminda.

The future Mrs. Perón came into the world at an unpropitious moment, on 7 May 1919, in a farmhouse on the "La Union" farm, just at a point when Juan appeared bent on putting an end to his adulterous relationship. The house was a primitive building with mud walls and a corrugated iron roof, provided by Duarte for his illegitimate family in Los Toldos, the setting for his extra-conjugal adventure. A handful of houses in the middle of nowhere, where endless, monotonous plains stretched to the horizon and endless dust blew in the “pampero”, the pampas winds that found their way into homes, into every nook and cranny, into people's lungs, into their very hearts; where melancholy was the only defence against solitude; where all hopes of liberty were crushed below the weight of the dust covering everything.

Even as the father of five illegitimate children, Juan Duarte's position was not considered by provincial society to be particularly shameful. Regrettable, certainly, but by no means scandalous. By the customs and morals prevailing in Argentina at that time, it was quite acceptable for a man, a real man, a macho, to openly have a mistress, and even numerous illegitimate children; these constituted irrefutable proof of his virility. So, the legitimate wife, Doña Estela Grisolia, basically just ignored the affaire, closing her eyes to the increasingly frequent evenings spent by her husband in the nearby village.

But whilst Juan could openly admit locally to having two families, Juana and her children paid a heavy price for the situation, forced to live in a ghetto with invisible walls, the targets of poisonous comments, victims of senseless mockery, ignored and rejected by society. The children of the local bourgeoisie were strictly forbidden even to play with the "Basque bastards", the children of sin and misery. The "goose" clearly did not enjoy the same prerogatives as the "gander": a woman’s social respectability could be ensured only by her legitimate status as a submissive wife and caring mother. Juana therefore had to make do with such crumbs as came her way from the table of the "paterfamilias". But she never complained. And when Juan's support dwindled, under pressure from his legitimate wife, and he ended up abandoning his second family, she still did not give up. She immediately set to work to provide for her five children. She would spend all day working away, pedalling without a break, until the veins in her calves were fit to burst, on an old Singer sewing machine which she had been lucky enough to procure. An image that would be forever engraved in Eva's memory. Later, as Evita, she came up with the idea of providing all the poor and needy mothers in Argentina with an effective work tool: a new Singer!

The feeling of social exclusion, combined with economic difficulties and domestic sacrifices, had the effect of cementing family ties and forging the children's character, constantly urged as they were by their mother to stand up in the face of adversity. Eva, from a very young age, was particularly receptive to her mother's teachings. When she was just 6 years old, a pot of hot oil splashed her face, causing second-degree burns. She barely cried, showing courage and dignity in the face of pain, a harbinger of the personality she would develop as an adult. To heal the burns, on the advice of an Indian healer, an ointment made from wild herbs was applied to her face daily. The treatment helped, but it also made her naturally pale skin even lighter in colour, almost marble-like; an unusual shade that would later often be remarked on by people meeting Senorita Duarte for the first time.

At seven years of age, little Eva suffered the greatest humiliation of her life so far when, her father having died suddenly in a car accident, the legitimate family decided not to allow the adulterous one to join the wake for the corpse or to participate in the funeral procession. Only after the intervention of the late Duarte's brother-in-law, Juan Grisolia, was the "second family" (only the children, however, not the guilty mother) permitted to walk behind the coffin, in single file, in amongst the servants, far away from the official relatives.

Eva would never forget the shame she felt on that day, the shame of giving a last farewell to her father whilst semi-concealed, under the inquiring, gossiping and reproachful gaze of the crowd. Guilty of a sin she had not committed. Punished for the inappropriate behaviour of a "macho". Her tendency towards diffidence, her deeply ingrained sense of resentment, rejection, perhaps even physical repulsion towards "Lotharios", seducers and, indeed, men in general, almost certainly had its roots in this episode. As an adult, she would be inflexible in her desire to "normalize" irregular situations and would do everything in her power to ensure material assistance and social dignity for poor and illegitimate children.

All that Eva inherited from her father was his name, a late acknowledgment made at the point of death in the hope of acquiring credits for heavenly forgiveness, that of society being taken for granted. A poor legacy indeed.

Eva would not keep, nor even wish to keep, any fond memories of her father, a man she barely knew and who had been the cause of so much pain and frustration. She didn’t even mention him in her autobiographical book, La Razón de Mi Vida, which she wrote with the help of a journalist of Spanish origin, Penella de Silva, a few months before her death, a true spiritual testament of self-glorification and justification for Peronism.

After the death of Juan who, albeit in an unsatisfactory manner, had been their main support for years, the “spare” Duarte family went through a period of poverty and want. Their mother's sewing machine could not provide enough to feed five teenagers. In order to survive, the four girls were obliged to resort to hanging around on nearby estancias, where Eva gained her first glimpse into the world of the wealthy. Until then, she had lived in straitened circumstances in a difficult and hostile environment, where a few people might, at best, enjoy slightly easier circumstances but where no-one enjoyed a starkly different standard of living to the rest. On these large, landed estates, however, Eva discovered for the first time a world of opulence, butlers, English housekeepers, of elegant clothes, parties and fiestas and suddenly, poverty - or rather wealth - became unbearable to her. Properties extending over as much as twelve thousand hectares, endless estancias, often with their own churches, schools and hospitals, immense fortunes which, however, brought no benefit to the hordes of underprivileged people employed there. She would eventually write, in Razón de mi Vida,

"The wealth of our land is only a long-standing lie for our people. For over a century, the seeds of misery and poverty have been sown in Argentina's towns and countryside. Argentinian wheat has served only to satisfy the greed of the privileged few . ... But the peons [peasants]who sowed and harvested this grain had no bread to feed their children. The same was true also for Argentina's other main products: meat, fruit, milk."

After years of poverty, marked by hard work, sacrifice and just scraping by, Juana, still attractive at forty years old, met with a suitable replacement for Juan Duarte in a local exponent of the radical party, who fell for her charms and set her up as his mistress (again!), in the nearby town of Junin, a city of thirty thousand inhabitants. With its with shops, asphalted streets, cinemas, restaurants, this must have seemed like a big city, similar to the capital, Buenos Aires, in the eyes of the hungry and scrawny family from dusty Los Toldos.

Juana, lively and intelligent, soon adapted to this new environment and, after initially giving all her attention to her new "benefactor", she decided to open a family-run boarding house. With a welcoming hostess, her friendly and attractive daughters and excellent table fare, the house soon proved very popular with young bachelors, officials and officers serving in Junin. This provided an excellent hunting ground for Juana's older daughters, now of marriageable age.

Much has been written about the true nature of the guesthouse at 90, Calle Winter, by people of widely opposing opinions in Argentina. Contrasting views that often recur in the interpretation of the darker episodes of Eve's life. Whilst her adversaries attempted to project an extremely negative image of Señorita Duarte by attacking her indirectly, including through her mother (the daughter of a brothel-keeper, who became a prostitute at an early age, an unscrupulous adventurer, uneducated...), with a view to scoring political points, her supporters explained away any details that might stain Mrs Perón's public and political facade (modest but honest roots, familiar with the aspirations of ordinary people because she was once one of them herself, retained her honesty whilst successfully broaching the challenges of an artistic career, etc.), retrospectively putting together a credible history of her progression from "humble origins" to "supreme power".

Thus, for her opponents, it was a house of ill-fame, whose attractions included not only the still-desirable Juana, but also her young and alluring daughters ... More serious biographers, however, suggest that Juana's aim in opening the boarding house was merely to improve her daughters' chances of contracting a respectable marriage, given that this was the only way they could improve their social status and obtain that acceptance by society which had always been denied to their mother. Moreover - as recognized by these biographers - the straitened circumstances of the family prior to Eva's sudden rise to fame in 1945, their lack of any savings, the daughters’ respectable marriages, are surely in themselves convincing evidence that Juana's activities during that period were entirely legitimate. Bianca became the wife of Justo Alvarez Rodriguez, a lawyer and teacher at Junin high school, Elisa married an officer, Herminio Arrieta, head of military district no. 7 and Erminda wed Alvaro Bertolini, an official at the local town hall. They could hardly have aspired to such alliances had they really been the daughters of a provincial madam.

Eva, in contrast, a slight, thin, solitary teenager who was always scowling, put up determined resistance to her mother's matrimonial plans for her. She had a lively and penetrating gaze and her dark eyes contrasted starkly with her extremely light skin. Eva made no attempt to attract the attention of the pot-bellied local notables, she was neither docile nor very polite, nor was she curvaceous like her sisters. She was never submissive, but always ready to defend her corner. The young Ms.Duarte already unconsciously nurtured a strong desire to avenge herself on society, an irrepressible urge to defy the conventions and restrictions prevailing at that time, and an unquenchable desire for freedom. So, she retreated to a world of her own, where she could give free rein to her wild imagination, to her taste for masks, disguises, new identities, dramatic speeches, in short, theatre. In 1933, at the age of fourteen, she discovered her vocation. Having acted for the first time in public, in a school show entitled Arriba los Estudiantes, she decided that no other career would suit her than that of an actress on the stage. This profession alone could satisfy her need for limelight in a traditionalist and extremely male-dominated world which offered few opportunities for women to achieve fame and social emancipation. Eva was naturally rebellious, detesting the idea of being subordinate and unable to tolerate the prospect of marrying and adopting the name of some local man, thereby losing her own identity. She saw theatre, comedy, and acting as her only escape route from a life that, whilst it might be materially secure, offered no prospects for spiritual or intellectual development.

In Junin, however, there were no theatres or concert halls: the only option, therefore, was to move away, to study drama in Buenos Aires and then look for acting work amongst the bright lights of the iconic Via Corrientes. In short, from that time on, Eva's one ambition was to escape the boredom and squalor of daily life in Junin.

The walls of her bedroom, which she shared with her brother Juan, were plastered with photos of the film stars of the day; she particularly admired Jean Harlow, one of Hollywood's platinum blondes, and she devoured the pages of Sintonia magazine, which published photos of Argentinian idols. One day - she felt certain - she, too, would become famous.

Eva was simply waiting for her time to come. And she was determined not to miss her opportunity when it arrived. And come it did, in late 1934 or early 1935, under the guise of a singer of Italian origin, Agustìn Magaldi, a performer undertaking a provincial tour, endowed with a fairly good singing voice, rather in the style of the great tango performer, Franco-Argentinian tenor, Carlos Gardel.

Details of what actually happened between the two, what they said to each other, what their relationship was, have never been established with any degree of certainty. There are at least four versions of their move to the city, a fundamental step in Eva's life, the long-awaited "big day". According to the most accepted version, after the last performance, at the first light of dawn, Agustin and Eva left secretly by car, heading towards the capital, that magical Buenos Aires where all the dreams of the restless teenager and assiduous reader of film magazines, would come true. Other accounts tell of Eva setting off by train, going so far as to say her mother went with her, determined to assist her youngest daughter in her chosen career. So, was it a romantic elopement or a straightforward move to the big city? We'll never know for sure.

Whatever the truth of it, Eva Duarte followed her dream, regardless of the risks and dangers involved. It was the start of a marvellous adventure for a small-town girl, a journey that would take her to undreamt-of heights, transforming her from a provincial “nobody” into the "spiritual leader" of her nation, from an illegitimate daughter in a macho world, to the de facto President of a people who totally venerated her; the long-awaited national heroine, finally in the limelight, a product of the Argentinian Pampas.

Eva was about to become Evita, the faithful were preparing to venerate Saint Evita, she would be the beating heart of Argentina. The stage was set.

2.YOUTH

––––––––

From about the turn of the century, Argentina had become indisputably the most important country on the American sub-continent. In 1934, Buenos Aires had two million inhabitants, half of whom were of foreign origin, mostly European: Italians (by far the most numerous), Spanish, French, English, German, Slavs and others. It was a real melting pot of races and nationalities, even if immigrants did generally tend to remain defined by their countries of origin long after their arrival. Whilst almost all large landowners were of Spanish or English descent, the middle classes generally had German roots; whilst jewellers an...