Eva Maria Duarte and the ghetto wound

by Marianna Benigno

"As the camera slowly moves upward and takes in the dense swell of the crowd, the fluttering of the flags, and the oases of a few bonfires, the general's voice gradually fades. Seen from above, the images dissolve to the same scene, at night now. The sweeps of a spotlight beam stir the foam of the million heads. Rivers of torches rise out of nowhere. Suddenly the screen goes black, total darkness. The warm lips of a microphone move toward the viewer. [Does the director remember the last image of The Magnificent Ambersons, that masterpiece of Orson Well's overshadowed by his Citizen Kane? Look for it, plagiarise it.] From this nothingness flows the voice that all are awaiting".

Santa Evita: Tomas Eloy Martinez

I see the flat confines of the Pampas renew themselves over and over…a pair of frayed espadrillas playing hop-scotch in the courtyard, among the hot austerity of three Argentine matrons knitting away at spotless collars and the echo of fire of the shouts of the gauchos…

Eva Maria Duarte, the first lady of Argentina between 1945 and 1952, the latter coinciding with the year of her death…the Eva of Peron, the Casa Rosada and the Fundacion…of the highly-taut chignon, of the Dior suits and of the descamisados…the only one, the most loved, the most hated, the goddess… the same Maria Eva Duarte that grew up in Los Toldos, a small village in the province of Buenos Aires. Like all Argentine villages, this one was also gathered round a church, a school, the town hall, a bank and the market.

She was the daughter of Dona Juana Ibarguren. Her father Juan Duarte abandoned her, Eva and the four other children: Blanca, Elisa, Juan and Erminda…Eva's family therefore was a tribe of females and she was torn between her solidarity to the clan and the shame of belonging to it. Her character was also divided, cheerful and whimsical at home, introverted outside; the feeling that bonded her to her mother represented this ambivalence; her mother represented everything Eva would run away from, but at the same time she was also her blood, her passion, the personification of anger and dream.

Once, for the coming epiphany Evita wanted a doll, but not any doll; she wanted a big one. Super Dona Juana the indestructible looked for one at the village market and finally found a large doll with a broken leg. She paid less for it because of the defect; when Eva found it the following day she was perplexed, remaining silent, so her mother told her how the poor doll had fallen off the camel of one of three wise men and because of this needed much more loving; Evita intensely loved that broken doll that was missing something, just like she was. Women of power have been, from time to time, called phallic by some psychologists, the same that would have called her lack, her something missing a penis. But I am interested in a different perspective… with such a gesture, what was Dona Juana passing on to her daughter? On a more intimate level, what was her present?…She could have bought a whole doll, just a little smaller…instead she gives Eva the realisation of her dream with an indelible sign; the women of the house weave a long dress for the poor big doll so as to hide the defect to the world and for the entire length of the dream.

The strength with which she wanted to redeem her lack, represented by her condition of illegitimate daughter in her small village, together with the physical and erotic need to continue to feel such a condition seethe in her blood, was equal to the intensity of the obsessive passion with which she was loved or hated by the people of all the Los Toldos and by all the eyes that looked at her from ghettos of misery, solitude and humiliation, if only for a moment.

Growing up with white telephone films and clippings of ultra-blonde Hollywood stars, she dreamt of acting… So at the age of fifteen she physically left Los Toldos for the hypnotic lights of Buenos Aires. A mediocre actress in her radio and film roles, she reached unbeatable heights with the glittering show of her life, playing the role of herself superbly.

As first lady of Argentina she started applying on herself the same impulse to perfect her character…dressing it, hair-styling it, feeling it on that new set that saw her queen. Eva had to shape the contours of the negrita she had always been to get ever closer to the "Evita of the people"… to the incarnation of the dream. She appeared blonde to the world for the first time on the cover of "Atena" magazine; gold transfiguring the image of a brunette with an opaque whiteness, giving her an unusual supernatural pallor…it was a theatrical gold aimed more as a aureole; being blonde in Argentina in the forties meant camouflaging the curse of the south, and Eva with that gesture cancelled from her image all the signs of Los Toldos, of a lame doll and of all the mortification, taking on that characteristic of being distinguished from above like the celestial images found in church frescoes. That same gold that would have sunk increasingly into her brain like an aura of sanctity…

From the end of 1947 onwards the chignon became her only hairstyle; same have seen the influence of Dior in this; her trusted hairdresser Pedro Alcazar swears he was the sole inventor, to aid Eva during her extenuating days at the Secreteria. Whichever way, her taut and plaited chignon went beyond fashion to become the symbol of the new Eva and of the new Peronista regime.

From this point onwards we can easily pinpoint a certain symmetry between the woman and the political system, until the former becomes the image of the latter. One thing is for certain, all the actions and works done by her for thirst of power crumbled into ashes…nothing remained…the same when she acted on love.

And yet there is a sign, an indelible mark traced through time as she embarked on her unstoppable and liberating climb towards the dream…what remains therefore is the fairytale mist of myths and a powerful energy attached to her memory and to the counter-image of her passionate chignon.

Books: Tomas Eloy Martinez -- Santa Evita - Alicia Dujovne Ortiz - EVITA un mito del nostro secolo John Barnes - Eva Peron Mary Main - Evita: the woman with the whip