Don't cry for her: Evita's story

PETER CALDER visits Buenos Aires, where Eva Peron - a daugher of the poor - stitched her legend iinto the national fabric.

If not for the single red rose I might have missed it altogether. The attendant was busying himself across the way with dustpan, broom and polishing cloth. In the long walk along the wide and well-swept paths I had seen no other curious visitor.

Compared to the surrounding tombs it was almost modest. In large letters it announced itself as the resting place of the Familia Duarte and I remembered that was her maiden name, the name of the man who had fathered her illegitimately in a dusty town on the edge of the pampas in the Argentine northwest.

When young Eva Duarte, a starstruck 15-year-old, arrived in Buenos Aires in 1933, she nursed dreams of fame as an actress. When she died, 20 years later, her performance, to an audience of millions, had seen her stitch her own legend into the national fabric. Her name was Eva Peron.

This was a woman who, though never elected to political office, was effectively the minister of health and labour in her husband's administration. He had been 48 and she 24 when she moved into his apartment and into the life of the nation. But she became the heart of that odd blend of democratic socialism and benevolent authoritarianism which came to bear the name of Peronism.

The post-war years were Argentina's heyday. Like New Zealand, it grew rich on the proceeds of an export tide, mostly of wool and meat, to a recovering Europe. In the 50 years since it has slumped from seventh to almost 70th on the world's rich list.

But there was money around when Eva Peron set up social welfare. A charitable foundation which bore her name was financed by a tax of a day's pay a year from every worker and "donations" solicited from businesses.

She worked tirelessly on behalf of the rural poor, one of whom she had once been. "Los descamisados," she called them, the shirtless ones - and they, very affectionately, called her Evita.

The rose was fresh, threaded through the bars of the mausoleum's gate and my eye was drawn to the polished plaque alongside. The words embossed in brass were hers and would once have had some resonance. But Broadway can make the most poetic seem banal.

"Don't cry for me," the self-penned epitaph began - the "Argentina" was absent but it was virtually impossible to resist inserting it unconsciously. "I am neither far away nor lost but an essential part of your existence. I foresaw all the love and the pain. I carried out a humble imitation of Christ. Let it be an example to those who follow me."

The American in the plaid shorts pressed his nose against the glass and peered into the gloom. "Is that it?" he asked no one in particular. It was less a question than a complaint. "Don't look like much of a coffin to me."

As he hefted the handicam to his eye I didn't have the heart to tell him it wasn't it. Somewhere in middle America they think they're looking at a picture of Evita's casket.

But it's a less famous relative. Evita lies 2m below ground, sealed in a leaden room, safe from plunder.

If we were to enter and exhume her remains, she would be easy to recognise. For in death Eva Peron makes a story almost as remarkable as she did in life.

When Eva Peron died of uterine cancer in 1952 (at 33, at the same age, as many have remarked, as Christ did) the widowed President Juan Peron resolved to ensure the immortality of her body as well as her memory. He engaged a Spanish pathologist to embalm her, as Lenin had been in Moscow and as Ho Chi Minh would be in Hanoi.

It was the work of two years and, as any South American dictator knows, two years is a long time in politics. Deposed by a military coup in 1956, Peron fled to Spain, leaving the body behind. The new regime, fearing that Evita's body would become the totem around which opposition might rally - and that her grave would become a shrine - spirited the corpse out of the country. For 14 years it lay - its whereabouts known only to a few - in an unmarked grave in Milan.

In 1971 the Government proposed its return to the exiled Peron, a gesture of reconciliation to the past. Eva Peron's body emerged from its coffin looking as fresh as the day she died.

Eva's memory was the focus of Juan Peron's political comeback when he returned in 1973 and won the presidency. But he died after less than a year in office and it was left to his third wife, Isabel, to ensure that Evita's body came back.

Now it lies in Buenos Aires' exclusive Recoleta Cemetery. Some find a rich irony in Evita's interment among the city's filthy rich. But she was, it must be said, one of history's great social climbers: there is substantial evidence, for example, that she planned, with her husband, the erection of a Statue-of-Liberty sized monument to herself - scarcely the act of one who "carried out a humble imitation of Christ."

The Casa Rosada, from whose balcony Evita delivered those stirring speeches to crowds of 200,000 in the Plaza De Mayo, is closed for renovation when I arrive, though jackbooted soldiers still march in the plaza, changing the guard in ceremonial slow motion each morning at 11.

But before workmen were set loose on restoring the old presidential palace, they recreated it, painted on scrim erected on a huge frame. It's an unconsiously ironic commentary on Argentine life, an irresistibly apt emblem of a city that will do anything to hide its flaws. Like Eva's corpse, like the Casa Rosada, the city is artificially preserved.

The average wage is $NZ1000 a month, social welfare is unknown, government employees can go several months without pay, and the cost of living is barely less than Paris or London. Yet Buenos Aires can still present a flawless face to the world.

On my last day in the city I wandered around the Cabildo, the 18th-century building in which the terms of Argentina's independence were hammered out by interested parties. Through the trees, across the plaza, I could see the Casa Rosada. If I squinted slightly, it almost looked real. I couldn't help wondering what Eva Peron would have thought of it all. Or whether she would even have cared.

* Peter Calder went looking for Eva Peron in Buenos Aires courtesy of Aerolineas Argentinas.