Evita

EVITA

Ricardo Blaustein & Emmanuel Yevenes

Copyright 2013 Ricardo Blaustein & Emmanuel Yevenes

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.

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CONTENTS

Chapter One

PAMPAS AND THE CITY

Chapter Two

FATE

Chapter Three

DESCAMISADOS

Chapter Four

MARRIAGE

Chapter Five

TOTAL VICTORY

Chapter Six

FIRST LADY

Chapter Seven

EUROPE

Chapter Eight

LEADER

Chapter Nine

SURREAL

Chapter Ten

SAINT

Chapter Eleven

LIFE AFTER DEATH

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Chapter One

PAMPAS AND THE CITY

In a ramshackle village on the pampas, a land of gritty survivors, of thick skinned people without a past and perhaps without a future, on the afternoon of July 9th, 1919, one Juana Ibarguren gave birth to a daughter she named Maria Eva. Though this date was challenged later on, like many facts and events in her short and vertiginous life, it appears to have been Evita’s real birthdate.

Ibarguren was the last name inscribed on her birth certificate, telling society she had been born an illegitimate child, since it was her mother’s. Yet, Maria Eva Ibarguren was to become Eva Duarte, acquiring her father’s last name in her teens, and much later, she would be Maria Eva Duarte de Peron, or wife of Peron, the common usage for married women in Argentina, which added their husband names with a de.

Decades after her death in 1953, she’s known throughout the world as Evita Peron.

At the time, only the privileged in Buenos Aires, with their lips stiffened by entitlement and manners imported from London and Paris, could afford to contemplate a life of leisure. Like a polo game, for the top two percent, the days consisted of beautiful horses; and of gorgeous women in hats smoothing the grass fields while sipping champagne. It was one of the best countries in the Americas for the very few who had the money. All the others, in the Argentina of the 1920s and 1930s, knew they had to game the system, they had to look for a chance, or sweat it out in the dust bowls of the pampas, freeze in Patagonia, or brave the desert, or the mountains; for the dispossessed it was either take a chance or suffer.

Maria Eva learned this lesson, too.

She was always impetuous. Her impatience led her to crazy and quick solutions, her sister Erminda said.

Without fancy toys, Maria Eva grew up using her imagination to provide for her own entertainment. On one occasion, her mother bought Maria Eva a doll for her birthday. It was probably a thrift shop doll, one with a broken leg, her sister Erminda said. It gave Maria Eva endless hours of daydreaming. She spent most of her time playing alone.

How she liked to climb trees! I followed her. I saw her climb with swiftness; her body was flexible, dexterous, like that of a cat. Even when we were older, she had no fear of heights. She never had fear of anything, Erminda said.

These were years of little change. Ignorance was happiness. People rarely migrated. In a hundred years it had gone from a land of pioneers to a sclerotic country. Argentina was made of Spanish and Italian immigrants who by the 1940s stayed where they first landed or first settled. Half the population of seventeen million lived in Buenos Aires, which, considering the numbers and its cultural and easy transport connections to Europe, it had become the most important city in Latin America. Yet outside that metropolis loomed the specter of extreme poverty. There, in the pampas, daily existence revolved around the only activities that generated income: raising cattle and farming. Small villages and towns depended on them.

Argentina of the 1930s had a per capita income equal to that of France and greater than those of Italy and Spain.

Wealth, however, was badly distributed. Figures of the era show that more than seventy two percent of the national income accumulated in the hands of less than two percent of the population, the owners of the large cattle ranches, meat processing plants and export businesses. This group lived blind to the rest, looking up to London, emulating Paris, rather than watching those around them, those who like the Duartes eked a living any way they could, slaving it from sunrise to sunset for little or nothing.

Despite a world Depression the beautiful life went on. The richest of the rich in Argentina weathered catastrophe without worries. They hardly knew of business. Most of them were absentee owners of estancias. These were large tracks of land in the pampas or in Patagonia which they rented or handed to managers. Estancias in the 1930s usually were spreads of more than a hundred thousand acres.

While the Duartes sweated out their miserable existence, the absentee landowners and their families spent the Argentine winters in their favorite city, Paris, where being in the Northern hemisphere it was summer.

Once a year at harvest, the privileged went back to their spreads in the pampas of the South accompanied by the luxury to which they had grown accustomed. They left Buenos Aires in private trains or car and truck caravans, loaded with champagne boxes and Russian caviar and suits and dresses for every occasion. For a short while, they filled their country estates with butlers, cooks, waiters, maids, chauffeurs and nannies, who served them like the feudal lords they in many ways were.

Their power was nearly absolute. But their real pastime was government. Real money in Argentina did not run for office or showed themselves in public. They elected their candidates and when they could not do so, they appealed to the military. The latter did what was expected of them: nothing more than keep an eye on the farm. A few elected governments tried to improve the situation, but even their feeble attempts failed in light of the ubiquitous menace of a violent overthrow.

Even politics happened only in Buenos Aires.

Those who like the Duartes braved the pampas knew nothing of politics and politicians or how their lives and fate depended from idle men lunching at country clubs next to the river La Plata.

The year 1930 found Argentina governed by Hipolito Yrigoyen, a liberal and mild reformer from the largest political party, Union Civica Radical. It was his second term as president. A small urban middle class that wanted better wages had elected Yrigoyen. He tried to provide better salaries but his efforts ended in violence; impoverished workers expected much more than words and timid reforms. Strikes became their favorite weapon, generating a series of daily rallies in downtown Buenos Aires. After months of a struggle between Yrigoyen and the growing labor unions and their wage demands, the military overthrew him.

Little knew the Duartes that their family fate would be tied to the ebb and flow of Argentine politics.

The 1920s had seen the consolidation of a small, intellectual middle class. Living mostly in Buenos Aires, they were sons of immigrants striving for better futures by gaining specialized knowledge. Engineers, medical doctors, accountants and lawyers filled the professions and the bureaucracy. Yrigoyen and his party had been the tool of their interests. Formed in the 1890s, the Union Civica Radical fought for and won such entitlements as free university education and the separation of church and state. These results translated into a growing number of quality secular public schools, education having been up until then the domain of the Catholic Church and the Jesuits. It was the founding and consolidating of eight major universities that distinguished the first and second Yrigoyen administrations.

Argentina was becoming a country of culture and opportunities for a few more than the landowners, though only for men and not enough access for them either.

For women, the country offered no opportunities.

Despite the Depression, Buenos Aires theaters put on plays that packed people, restaurants served full tables, cafes crowded, cabarets operated night long and in Argentina grew the largest film industry in Latin America. More than 18 locally made silent films opened in Buenos Aires in 1930 alone. As in Hollywood, fame and fortune reached anyone who became a success on the big screen.

For the Duartes, this was an unknown world at the other end of a flat land, a mythological place literally far beyond the horizon. After consulting friends, Juana decided to move her family to a larger town, only sixty miles from Buenos Aires. Yet in the town of Junín which was where they moved to, as elsewhere in the pampas, a small-town mentality prevailed. Bourgeois aspirations of respectability grounded themselves in birth rights, last names, family connections and social exclusion. Perhaps the Duartes expected to escape the stigma of being an illegitimate family living in a small town, or perhaps their concerns were purely economic. Either way, Junín proved a disappointment. Soon everyone knew their story and children were forbidden to play with Maria Eva. The Duartes settled in the middle of the school year, in August of 1930.

Eva was a serious girl, but never withdrawn. On the contrary, she seemed pretty lively. Her mother was devoted to housework and they had a small number of boarders. Later, I thought Eva was pretty bright. She had in her that sixth sense that some people have, able to guess others' feelings, Julio Otero said. He was a neighbor of the Duartes.

Floating on the tide of history like families elsewhere, the end of the Depression brought relief to the Duartes.

Things brightened up.

They lived in a bigger home, her brother Juan got a steady job selling soap. Her older sister Blanca passed her teacher's qualifying examination. Time seemed to go by faster in this world recovering from the scars of economic catastrophe and so it seemed to this family who strived for a better life.

On October 20th, 1933, at age 13, Maria Eva got her first chance to experience something different. Students at the Teachers School staged a play called Rebel Students. Though she did not attend that school, the students offered Maria Eva a small part. Perhaps this was when Maria Eva got the idea of becoming an actress and to live the life of an artist. Vaudeville like the circus in past centuries offered unlimited opportunities to a girl like her with no father, stigmatized at birth by social custom, and who used to play alone with a broken-legged doll.

In this small universe, the past did not exist and family didn’t matter.

Theater and the media appeared to Maria Eva vastly different from established businesses, and far from the stodgy life of Argentines. It was a world liberated from the stiff social mores that regulated and limited lives.

Those thoughts probably did not yet occur to her but the few moments on stage gave her a taste of success, of the masses' applause, of being admired, of being the center of attention; they showed her the means of obliterating the still-haunting stigma of being the daughter of an adulterous affair. Many mothers had not allowed their children to forget that Maria Eva was the product of a socially unacceptable relationship.

At the time, it was unusual for a provincial girl to go out and conquer the big city. Nonetheless, I took Eva very seriously, thinking that she would do fine. My certainty came from her enthusiasm. Years later I came to understand that Evita's self-confidence was something natural. It came through in each of her actions, Palmira Repetti said. She had been Maria Eva’s school teacher.

If migrating to the big city was uncommon, doing so alone by a 14-year-old was inconceivable. Months of struggle followed between Maria Eva, the aspiring actress, and her mother, who was averse to the entire idea. Vaudeville in Buenos Aires like elsewhere had a reputation of being a loose world of fast women, and of happy men who had no intention of getting married.

Almost a year later, Maria Eva prevailed.

On January 3rd, 1935, at age 15, with a small cardboard suitcase in her hand, she took the train and three hours later got off, at the seedy, cavernous, and windy Retiro train station in Buenos Aires.

For Maria Eva, her trip was akin to having left home. She remembered the event differently. In her mind she had simply run away without her mother’s approval. She lived in a variety of places, each one cheaper and poorer than the one before. After an apartment on Sarmiento Street, the 15-year-old aspiring actress lived at a nearby boarding house.

She was a very nice, modest and poor girl. She went through periods of hunger but when she earned a peso, she spent it buying gifts for her friends. She was always in the company of her brother, Juan, who wore the uniform of an army private. I remember that the rooms at Sarmiento Street had very high ceilings and a round balcony, Eduardo Castillo said in an interview. He worked for Evita later on.

Regardless of the circumstances or what really happened, Maria Eva struggled like never before.

Upon arriving, I discovered that the city was not as I had imagined it. To begin with, I saw the shanty towns, the miserable dwellings on the outskirts. Watching those houses and streets, I realized that in the city, there were rich people and poor people. Such sudden awareness must have hurt me deeply because every time I return to the city after trips to the country, I remember my very first encounter with the city's vastness and its misery. And I experience once again the feelings of intimate sadness that I had back then, Maria Eva wrote.

The year 1935 went on to be one of slow economic growth and rampant unemployment since the Depression had finally affected the economy. Even the flourishing theater of the year before could not expect the success it had grown used to. Producers couldn’t raise funds. Less people could afford it. There were few new plays and too many unemployed actors. It was a bad time to begin an acting career.

Her brother Juan tried to convince Maria Eva to return to Junín and give Buenos Aires more time, until the Depression ends. Eva would not agree. She could not accept what she regarded as defeat, not under any circumstances, not without having tried her best. She preferred to endure hundreds of auditions, interviews, casting calls, to eke out a living with menial jobs. Months later her persistence paid off. She got her first role. It was one of those one-liners that every actor dreams of, the one that proves them there is hope. The play was called La Señora de Perez and ran at the Teatro Comedias, a medium-sized venue. The play opened on March 28th, 1935. Maria Eva played the role of a domestic servant and was happy simply to be an actress.

The pennies it paid also helped satiate the hunger that had become a steady companion.

It proved to be a difficult year.

The competition was brutal, the roles rare, the pay almost nonexistent. With each passing day, Maria Eva learned both the petty and significant humiliations that stamped the daily lives of the poor.

Eva Franco, part of the repertoire at the Teatro Comedias, the company that gave Maria Eva her first role, offered her subsequent roles. She earned her living at performing small roles, most of them one-liners, in Each House is a World, Madame Saint Gene and La Lady, the Gentleman and the Thief. The company paid an average of three pesos per night which was about 37 cents of a dollar, at the time.

Even those roles soon dried out.

Months passed before her next opportunity.

Her lack of training, her young age, rough accent and appearance, they militated against her success. Survival, food and lodging became struggles. Her life in those years centered around her moving from one boarding house to the next only to end up in flea-infested hotels with little money left for food.

I met Eva Duarte when she was 16-years-old. She was a pretty girl, of fine features. She wanted to be an artist. She stayed at a hotel on Callao Street between Sarmiento and Corrientes. The place was a really bad one for a girl of her ambitions, so she left after a while, Mauricio Rubinstein said. He had met her back then and remained friends.

Maria Eva continued to pursue that elusive first big role, that breakthrough role which every actor dreams with, the one she needed to establish herself professionally, and to earn a living from. While she waited and struggled, she became a ragged spectator of menacing, sad streets where others enjoyed themselves, ate, drank, and shopped.

She never starved because she always found people who helped her. I remember that on one occasion, Kartulovic and I suggested she get some plastic surgery because the bones on one of her cheeks were more prominent than on the other side. After we arranged for the surgery with doctors Gigante and Castellanos, who had a clinic on Sarmiento Street, she did not show up because she was scared. She also wasn't a healthy girl. She had anemia, Rubenstein said.

In May of 1936, Eva Duarte, Maria Eva's new stage name, again received a role from the company she had been associated with, the comedy troupe of Eva and Jose Franco, Eloy Alfaro and Pepita Munoz. This play meant more than a line; it meant her first cover picture in the Rosario newspaper La Capital. At the end of June, she got the most important role of her early career. Though a small role, Eva Duarte became a regular in the Prophylactic Society of Argentina's drama Deadly Kiss, a play about sex and VD. The play's purpose was disseminating sexual information, specifically promoting condom use. It had sexy lines and raunchy jokes and it was a hit with the student crowd. The play lasted for four months and provided a tour of the country including Mendoza, Rosario and Cordoba, cities that were hundreds of miles from Buenos Aires and its magnets of culture and wealth. Her performances reached an overall high of a hundred twenty.

In Buenos Aires, the year neared its end with a slight improvement in the general economic situation. The world, recovering from the Depression had money to buy beef again.

Cows mooed afraid.

The wheat harvest had been plentiful and Europeans wanted to acquire Argentine products. Close to forty five percent of the country's GNP depended on foreign trade. Any financial changes in the United States or Europe deeply impacted the lives of Argentines.

The world was back on its feet.