The Joys of Necrophilia
Argentina is probably the only country in the world with sufficient reserves of heroism, masochism, or foolishness to allow its citizens to go to the theater in the middle of the summer, with temperatures reaching Saharan heights, and broil themselves alive listening to lectures on liberalism. I know this because I was the madman giving the lectures, bathed in sweat and staving off tachycardia and dizzy spells in Rosario, Buenos Aires, Tucumán, and Mendoza over the course of this unreal past week as the newspapers announced record-breaking temperatures (113 degrees in the shade) with a baffling air of triumph.
I was accompanied by the tireless Gerardo Bongiovanni, an idealist from Rosario who was determined that no effort be spared in spreading the gospel of freedom, even if it required us to brave brazier, grill, and pyre, images insufficient to convey the blaze of that southern summer. Besides arranging conferences, roundtable discussions, seminars, and dialogues, he managed to organize lavish barbecues that would have horrified a vegetarian but that resuscitated me, an inveterate carnivore, and made up for the glare of the sun. One afternoon, as we were traveling down the broad Paraná River, he suggested that instead of repeating the line “take the bull by the horns” in my lectures, I should eliminate either the animal or the verb, since in Argentinean Spanish the allegory was technically absurd and grotesquely indecent (in Argentina, coger [to take] means to fornicate). My instinct tells me that Gerardo and his sense of humor had something to do with the gentlemen who, as we left those hot auditoriums, would ask in a seemingly guileless manner if I, too, believed, like Pedro Camacho in Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, “that Argentineans have an irrepressible proclivity for infanticide and cannibalism.”
But perhaps nothing contributed so much to the sensation of unreality that suffused those seven days as the novel I was reading along the way, snatching every spare minute as I traveled by car and plane, changed hotels and cities, and swung between bloating and dehydration: Santa Evita, by Tomás Eloy Martínez. I beseech readers to plunge into it without a moment’s delay and discover, as I did, the (literary) pleasures of necrophilia.
I met its author on my first trip to Buenos Aires, in the mid-sixties, when he was the star reporter of the weekly Primera Plana. He spoke with the pleasant lilt of Tucumán, drawling his r’s; he had kissed the hand of Joseph Jean Lanza del Vasto in public; and despite his youth, it was said that he was “married every so often,” as Neruda once put it, and always to incredibly beautiful models. Since then, I’ve run into him frequently—in Venezuela, where he lived in exile from Argentina’s military regime, in Paris during the unrest of 1968, in swinging London—and most recently in the ugliest city of the ugliest state of the United States—New Brunswick, New Jersey—where he was teaching at Rutgers University and editing, by fax from his house in a neighborhood of ultra-Orthodox Jews, the literary supplement of the Buenos Aires newspaper Clarín. With such credentials, it should come as no surprise that Tomás Eloy Martínez is capable of anything, including the feat of composing a masterpiece.
Since anything can be a novel, Santa Evita is one too, but it is also a biography, a sociopolitical mural, an inquiry, a historical document, a hysterical fantasy, a surrealist slapstick, and a tender and moving radio play. It has the deicidal ambition that drives great narrative projects, and in it resides, beneath the displays of imagination and flights of lyricism, a painstaking labor, an investigation carried out with sleuth-like tenacity and the consummate dexterity required to fit the author’s very rich material into a structure that milks the story for all it’s worth. As is the case with successful fictions, the book is not what it seems to be at first, and it is doubtless something other than its author intended.
What it seems to be is the story of the cadaver of Eva Perón, from the moment that Eva’s illustrious husband delivers her still-warm body into the hands of a Spanish embalmer—Dr. Ara—for her to be eternalized, until, after roaming two continents and several countries and playing the leading role in bizarre, meandering adventures (she is copied, worshipped, mutilated, deified, caressed, profaned, hidden in ambulances, cinemas, attics, military bunkers, the bilges of ships), she is finally buried more than two decades later, like a character out of García Márquez, in the Recoleta Cemetery of Buenos Aires, under more tons of steel and reinforced concrete than a bomb shelter.
Interwoven with this story is another, that of the live Evita, from her provincial and illegitimate birth in Junín to her political epiphany and glorious death thirty-three years later, with half Argentina at her feet, after a lurid and difficult life as a repertory actress in second-class radio shows and theaters, a creature of the night protected by wealthy impresarios. After she meets Perón, at a critical juncture in his political career, her life changes course, ballooning until it is a central element and symbol of the blessing or historical catastrophe (depending on one’s perspective) called Peronism, in which Argentina is still mired. That history has been chronicled many times, with admiration or disdain, by Evita’s political devotees and adversaries, but in the novel it seems different, fresh, because of the shadings and ambiguities lent it by the stories surrounding it.
Besides the ones I’ve mentioned—those dealing with live Eva Perón and dead Eva Perón—two more stories are told in this multifaceted book: the story of the handful of Army Intelligence Service officers charged by the military regime that overthrew Perón with keeping Evita’s embalmed cadaver safe from the Peronist masses who want to rescue it, and the story of the author himself (a character camouflaged under the apocryphal pseudonym Tomás Eloy Martínez) in the process of writing Santa Evita. To these two last stories the novel owes its most imaginative and unusual pages and its best character, a neurotic figure worthy of the anarchist stories of Joseph Conrad or the Catholic-political-spy-thriller novels of Graham Greene: Colonel Carlos Eugenio de Moori Koenig, security theorist and practitioner, gossip strategist and pillar of the state, and victim and executioner of Evita’s unburied body, which makes him an alcoholic, a sinister paranoiac, a fetishist, a necrophiliac lover, a bit of human filth, and a madman.
Not the least of Santa Evita’s wiles is its ability to make us believe that this character existed, or rather, that the de Moori Koenig who did exist was the way the novel paints him. This is as false, of course, as imagining that the flesh-and-blood Eva Perón, or the embalmed one, or the excessively excitable and extravagantly depressed writer called Tomás Eloy Martínez who insinuates himself into the story in order to show himself writing it, is a transcription, a reflection, a truth. No: each is a trick, a lie, a fiction. They all have been subtly stripped of their reality, manipulated with the same ghoulish dexterity with which Dr. Ara—another marvel of invention—plucks Evita’s body from the impure realm of corrosion and transfers it into the pure one of fantasy; they have been transformed into literary characters, that is to say, ghosts, myths, counterfeit figures, and conjured beings that transcend their real-life models and inhabit the independent universe of fiction, the opposite of History.
The power of persuasion of the kind of novel producing these sleights of hand resides in the practical details of its construction and the ability of its prose to cast a spell over the reader. The structure of Santa Evita is asymmetrical, labyrinthine, and extremely effective; its language—a domain in which the author has risked much and several times comes close to cracking his skull—is, too. The abyss he skirts in choosing the language of his story and giving it rhythm and harmony is the seductive and thoroughly treacherous one of preciousness. In the novel musicians don’t perform but “muddy” Vivaldi’s “Summer” and “murder” Schubert’s “Ave Maria” patients don’t undergo surgery but “face consecutive operations” and a scriptwriter describes the noise of a crowd with these rhetorical effusions: “The uncontrollable now spreads its wings of a bat, of a butterfly, of a forget-me-not. The nows of cattle and waving spears of grain buzz; nothing can put a stop to their frenzy, their lance thrust, their fiery echo.” And to describe a dark cold day, the narrator coins this bit of futurist madness: “The sheep of the mist stretched their legs in the deserted streets, and you could hear them bleating down inside your bones” (in a less pastoral allegory, D’Annunzio calls Marinetti “Idiot poet with flashes of imbecility”).
Though taken out of context these and similar sentences make the reader cringe, in context they are indispensable and work perfectly, as is the case with certain exceptionally precious bits of works by García Márquez or Manuel Puig. I have no doubt that if this grotesque and terrible story had been narrated in more sober, less pyrotechnic prose, without the mawkish excesses, the melodramatic affronts, the modernist metaphors, and the sentimental blackmailing of the reader, it would be impossible to believe, and page after page would be annihilated by the reader’s critical defenses. It is credible—moving and unsettling, in fact—by virtue of the defiant molding of form to content: the author has discovered the exact degree of verbal and aesthetic distortion required to relate a series of adventures that, although encompassing extremes of ridiculousness, absurdity, extravagance, and stupidity, exude a profound humanity.
The magic of a good novel deludes its readers, makes them swallow the wildest stories whole, and corrupts them at will. I confess that this one had its way with me, and in such matters I’m a seasoned expert, someone who doesn’t succumb easily to the tricks of fiction. Santa Evita conquered me: from the very first page, I believed, I was enthralled, I suffered, I enjoyed, and in the course of my reading I contracted hideous vices and betrayed the liberal principles I hold most dear, the same ones I was expounding all week, amid the fire and boiling lava of summer, to my friends in Rosario, Buenos Aires, Tucumán, and Mendoza. I, who hate tyrants and despots with all my soul and despise their followers and the sheep-like masses they mesmerize even more, suddenly found myself, on a sizzling morning in my room with its Doric columns—yes, Doric columns—at the Tucumán Grand Hotel, wanting Evita to come back to life and return to the Pink House to lead the Peronist revolution once again, giving away houses, wedding dresses, and false teeth. And in Mendoza, in the shadows of the Plaza Hotel with its facade like a Masonic temple, I found myself dreamily wondering—horror of horrors!—why an exquisite cadaver—after being eternally preserved, made beautiful, and purified by the arts of Dr. Ara, bridegroom of death—shouldn’t, indeed, be desirable. When a book is capable of inducing such excesses in a being of firm principles and frugal habits, the conclusion is inevitable: it must be prohibited (as all novels were during the Inquisition, since the genre was considered a public hazard) or read immediately.