Undoubtedly the noisiest place in the world on August 23,1947, was the port of Buenos Aires. Evita was coming home. A chill breeze off the Rio de la Plata whipped the muddy water-front as her ship slipped past the old yacht club of the oligarchs and pulled into harbour. Sirens howled. Tugs boomed their welcome. On the dockside, 250,000 Argentines roared a greeting: ‘Uno, dos, tres, Evita otra vez!’ (One, two, three, Evita once again!). Thousands of them had poured into the capital by train and bus the previous day, sleeping out in the city parks, wrapped in their ponchos to protect them from the cold winter night air. Their dark skins, Indian-mestizo features, and ragged clothes — the badge of the descamisados, Evita’s Shirtless Ones — were their passport to the dockside festivities.
Amid the din, the ship inched up against the quay. Evita was on the bridge, waving and wiping the tears from her eyes. Her husband-president was crying, too. For in Latin America, a man is allowed to show his emotion. He is not considered any less of a man for that. As his wife stepped ashore, dressed in a kohinoor mink coat with luxurious balloon sleeves, he crushed her in an emotional embrace in front of the crowd. Then, with a flourish, Juan Domingo Perón wiped the tears from her eyes and led her to a specially-built platform draped with wine-coloured velvet.
Obviously, it was a happy and exciting moment for both of them. While the Grand Tour had had its ups and downs — diamonds in Madrid, boos in Milan — Eva Perón had become a world-famous figure. The Presidents of Spain and France had kissed her hand. She had met the Pope. She had stolen the limelight from US Secretary of State George Marshall. For two months her name had been in the headlines every day throughout Western Europe as newsmen scrambled over each other to cover every word and move of the illegitimate farm girl from the pampas. Every newspaper told and retold the astonishing rags to riches success story of the beautiful enchantress from Argentina.
It would not have been surprising if the Peróns had used those moments in front of the microphones for a little reflective glory and mutual back-slapping. Perhaps it says a lot about their characters, their single-minded devotion to power, that they used their few minutes with their descamisados and their captive nation-wide audience to attack their enemies. For even after nearly two years of close to dictatorial Perónista power, there were still opposition newspapers that refused to be silenced and political opponents who refused to be cowed. The President warned them on that August afternoon that his patience was exhausted and that if they did not accept his bid for tranquillity, it would be forced upon them.
‘We have been tolerating the intolerable for the past year and a half,’ he thundered. ‘We are still asking that they do not use infamy as a battle nor calumny as a weapon. It is to their advantage that they listen to us: we want peace, we want tranquillity, because if some day they convince us that in order to obtain that tranquillity it is necessary to fight, we will fight! If tomorrow the moment should come to impose that peace by force I am decided to do so and on their shoulders will rest the responsibility.’
The crowds loved it. That was the kind of oligarch-bashing they had come to hear. They cheered even louder when their beloved Evita stepped forward to the microphones. First, she said softly, ‘It is with profound emotion that I return to this my country where I left my three great loves, my homeland, my descamisados, and my beloved General Perón.’ Then she, too, turned on her enemies. She had heard disturbing rumours in Europe and Rio, she cried, ‘But whatever the future promises, if I fall, I will fall with my beloved descamisados, and at the side of General Perón.’
And yet whatever it was she had heard, this hardly seemed the right moment for such sabre-rattling. For barring a few boos in middle-class suburban cinemas when pictures of her return were shown on the newsreel programmes that precede every film in Argentina, she had received the most tumultuous welcome ever staged for any woman in the Americas. While church bells rang out throughout the nation, a thanksgiving mass was held in the main cathedral in Buenos Aires. Airplanes dropped olive twigs, tied with the ribbons of flags of all nations, over the city. Coloured pigeons — dyed pink and blue (a task that occupied the attention of lowly Perónista functionaries for days) — fluttered across the central plazas of the capital. It was an outpouring of love, genuine as well as organised, on a scale that even that admittedly emotional nation had never known before. A writer for the New Yorker magazine caught the mood of the moment with an article called ‘Love, Love, Love’. The classic pulp romance of our time,’ wrote Philip Hamburger, may well turn out to be ‘The fabulous Adventures of Juan and Eva Perón, or Love Conquers All.’
Hamburger wrote that on his first day in Buenos Aires, he was lunching in a restaurant on one of the main downtown streets, sampling a practically raw sirloin the size of a telephone directory, when he heard a shrill honking of horns. He looked out of the window and saw a long parade of trucks that had halted, snarling traffic. The drivers were just sitting in their cabs, grinning and blowing their horns. On the side of each truck were crude posters bearing pictures of red hearts pierced by arrows, and mingled with the hearts, inscriptions reading: ‘Eva, We Love You,’ ‘Eva and Juan, a Blessed Couple,’ ‘You Will Go to Heaven, Eva and Juan,’ and so on.’ Thinking that it was a satiric attack on the administration and perhaps the beginning of a revolution, he paid his bill and went out into the street to get a closer look.
‘Hundreds of people, mostly pale, thin little men with tiny black moustaches, were glancing at the posters as they rushed past, presumably on their way to a steak lunch. Hundreds of other people were peering from the windows of the tall, modern buildings along the street. The unceasing sound of the horns, the truck drivers’ foolish grins, and the mocking, insolent signs shimmering in the bright sunlight gave the scene a momentous and historic air.’
‘This is it,’ he thought. The Perón police will come. They will destroy these seditious posters. Heads will roll.’ He stood there for quite a while. The police did not come. The only policeman he saw was standing on a white wooden platform in the middle of the cross-roads, and he was simply shrieking at the driver of a huge bus, who, delayed by the cavalcade of trucks, had begun to honk his horn.
Finally, he caught sight of a North American friend of his, a long-time resident in Argentina, in the crowd. He grasped his arm. ‘Revolution?’ he asked, pointing at one of the signs. ‘Revolution, hell,’ his friend said. ‘Just a demonstration of affection. The trucking union is about to strike. They want to make certain in advance that Juan and Eva are on their side.’ The friend looked again at the signs. ‘Very good,’ he said. ‘Properly affectionate. They’ll probably win the strike.’
In Argentina, Hamburger wrote, ‘love makes the Peróns go round. Their whole act is based on it. They are constantly, madly, passionately, nationally in love. They conduct their affair with the people quite openly. They are the perfect lovers — generous, kind, and forever thoughtful, in matters both large and small. Their love is all-encompassing, ever present. It settles like a soft blanket over the loved ones, providing warmth and protection and the opportunity for a good, long sleep.’
But there were still plenty of Argentines who did not love the Peróns. Not that there was anything they could do about it except exchange gossip and rumours — there were plenty of these, told at fashionable cocktail parties and dinners. At one dinner party a guest had learned that the Señor and Señora were splitting up. Just that morning, he had heard from a man who knew a man who had a friend who worked in the President’s office, in the Casa Rosada, that the Señora often screamed at the President and that her voice could be heard down the corridor outside his chambers. This split, the guest continued, was quite in line with the rumour that the Señora coveted the Presidency herself and had secretly ordered the printing of hundreds of thousands of posters bearing her picture and the words ‘The First Woman President’. When the time comes,’ the guest said, ‘she will poison him.’ Another guest was also flushed with rumour. The President, he said, was fascinated by the Señora. In her presence, he acted like a lovesick adolescent. At official dinner parties, she would endlessly relate details of her famous trip abroad, and the President would clap his hands at each tiresome incident and cry, ‘Wonderful, wonderful!’ But the party’s hostess said she had been told that the President was tired of the Señora and was considering forcing her into exile. When she insisted on boring dinner guests with reminiscences about her trip, he would ostentatiously drop his chin onto his chest and make rude snoring sounds.
Certain stories were staples. When the Señora autographed pictures, she always misspelled most of the words of her inscription; the Señora had left huge unpaid bills behind her in Rome; every evening after work she repaired to the Central Bank, where she drank ‘real French champagne’ with the directors and plotted the undermining of the nation’s financial structure; she carried about with her several million pesos in cash, in a little black bag; she had recently bought a £550,000 diamond from Cartier’s in Paris; at dinner parties she admired the jewellery of other female guests with such feline emphasis that she was invariably presented with it before the end of the evening.
However, the telling and retelling of such gossip did little to lift the heavy air of depression and dejection that pervaded the city. The country’s intellectuals — students, writers, artists — were depressed by a sense of inevitability, frustration, and gathering darkness. A middle-aged lawyer recalled his student days in the 1940s. ‘On this continent,’ he said, ‘we were accustomed to the dictator type of rulers — ruthless, arrogant strongmen. It is a woeful tradition. But this man Perón, he was a dictator of another type. He was subtle, devious, charming. He did not come out in the open and crack skulls. He did his work silently and cynically. You see, there was so little we could put our hands on — everything he did was in the name of democracy and social betterment — and yet we sensed the smell of evil in the air, and the thin ledge on which we walked.’