ARGENTINA: Cinderella from the Pampas

At 8:25 one night last week, tearful women keeping vigil outside the presidential residence in Buenos Aires saw what they were watching for: a dim light in a second-floor room snapped out. Inside the darkened chamber, President Juan Perón walked away from the bedside of his wife. To waiting cabinet ministers he said, heavily, “Evita is dead.”

Outside, a man with a crepe-draped Argentine flag perched himself in the fork of a tree and announced dramatically that he would stay there forever. (Rain soon forced him down.) Churches throughout Argentina tolled a slow, mournful death-knell. A month of crises in Eva Perón’s illness had put the nation on notice that she would die; by sunrise the citizens had draped buildings and lamp posts in black.

Next day, a black van brought Evita’s silver-trimmed cedar casket to the triangular Ministry of Labor building, where her body was laid in state in the gold-domed room she used as an office during her rise to power. While the casket was placed in a huge horseshoe of mauve and white orchids, Peronistas gathered outside until finally there were half a million of them; four were killed, 2,500 injured in the crush. At length the ministry’s doors were opened, and the grieving mob poured in to peer through the casket’s full-length glass top at the wasted body of the 20th century’s most powerful woman.

Lady of the Descamisados. Only nine years ago, Eva Duarte was just a beguiling girl from a modest home in the pampas, trying to make her way in movie bit parts and radio soap operas. Her assets —a trim, 5-ft.-5-in. figure, a coldly sexy manner and a shrewd if untutored brain —made her popular at parties. At one of them she met Colonel Juan Perón, then a comer in the Ministry of War. That very night they slipped off to a seaside resort; soon they were occupying next-door apartments.

Evita’s only toehold on philosophy was a bitter conviction that “there are rich and there are poor, and the odd thing is that the existence of the poor pains me less than the knowledge that at the same time others are rich.” This idea dovetailed with Perón’s own belief that an ambitious man could get to the top by becoming lider of Argentina’s millions of poor, politically neglected “shirtless ones.”* Eva Duarte quickly showed a sure, histrionic instinct for winning the descamisados over to Perón; when he was jailed by political enemies in 1945, she successfully urged 50,000 howling workers from the slaughterhouse district into the streets and got his freedom in eight days. Four days later, a secret civil marriage sealed their conjugal-political union. After Perón was elected President, Juan and Eva began their spectacular man & wife dictatorship.

Charity in a Paris Dress. Society was scandalized at the new First Lady of the Pink House. “I asked myself,” Eva wrote later, “why could I have been rejected by society? For my humble origin? My artistic activity?” Her answer to society was to acquire more gowns, furs and jewels than any other Argentine woman and to build the splashiest giveaway machine the world ever saw. Her Eva Perón Social Aid Foundation at once dwarfed the charities of the dowagers who scorned her, rallied mass political support, and made Eva rich. Labor, business and government had to kick in until funds totaling more than $100 million a year were channeled through Evita. She built a home for the aged staffed by butlers, a luxurious hotel for working girls, a fabulous children’s village complete even to a grim, moppet-size prison. In her businesslike afternoons with the descamisados, she gave away college educations, houses, medicine, fistfuls of 100-peso notes; she arranged for jobs and operations, provided homes for babies born out of wedlock, as she herself had been. Evita. shrewdly aware that the people wanted their Cinderella fittingly got up, met her public wearing Paris dresses which cost her $40,000 or more a year, and up to a quarter of a million dollars’ worth of jewels.

By August of last year Eva Peron was at the summit of her power, dominating more than 17 million Argentines through her control of women voters, the big trade unions and her sometimes indecisive husband. Ambitiously, she eyed the vice-presidency. Only the army, still one of Peron’s major props, could balk her. Top officers, bridling at the prospect of a woman commander if Perón should die, demanded than Juan Perón put his foot down. Evita laid aside her ambition, explaining with pretty prevarication that she had not yet reached the minimum legal age of 30. (She was 32. Her true birthday: May 7, 1919.) Within a month, she fell gravely ill. Argentines heard first that she had influenza, then anemia. Finally a New York cancer specialist flew to Buenos Aires, performed a hysterectomy. But Evita’s zeal grew as her health declined. “Peron is the air we breathe, Perón is our sun, Perón is our life,” she cried repeatedly. In a fervent autobiography, The Explanation of My Life, she compared Perón to Alexander, Napoleon and Christ.

Black Ties Forever. In the final month of Evita Perón’s life, which she spent in her sickroom, Argentina scrambled to pour new honors on her. While hearing 59 speeches of eulogy, Congress officially made her “Spiritual Chief of the State,” ordered construction of a huge monument in downtown Buenos Aires, conferred on her the 753-diamond Collar of the Order of the Liberator. Prayers for her recovery were said day & night. But a series of crises carried her lower & lower; at the last she weighed less than 80 Ibs. When larger & larger injections of morphine threatened to kill her, surgeons reportedly severed some brain nerves to reduce the pain. Meanwhile, Peronista fanaticism reached such a pitch that sobbing women crawled endlessly around the Presidential mansion on their knees.

Eva will not be given a permanent resting place until her monument is ready, two years from now. This week her body was to be taken in a vast funeral procession to Argentina’s central labor union headquarters near the Buenos Aires docks. The government, meanwhile, announced that July 26, the day Evita died, will be observed for the “rest of history” as a day of national mourning. And good Peronistas, the party ruled, will wear black ties at party meetings “forever.”

*An epithet plucked from a newspaper caption over a picture of ill-dressed demonstrators: “The shirtless ones who roam our streets.” The Peróns caught up the sneer as a weapon.