The Legend of Evita as Latin Gothic SANTA EVITA The second thing that occurs to the reader of ''Santa Evita''
is that it's a pity the novel isn't better. Although Mr. Martinez's
narrative is enlivened by some magical and highly perverse set
pieces, though it possesses moments that genuinely illuminate
the bizarre intersection of history, gossip and legend, the novel
as a whole feels leaden and earthbound. In the end, it gives the
reader neither a visceral sense of Evita's life nor an understanding
of the powerful hold she has exerted on her country's imagination.
As he did in an earlier novel about Eva Peron's husband (''The
Peron Novel,'' 1988), Mr. Martinez -- an Argentine writer who
is currently director of the Latin American Program at Rutgers
University -- moves his narrative backward and forward in time,
allowing various witnesses to Evita's life to set forth their
version of her story. Some of those witnesses -- who include Evita's
hairdresser, her mother, various acquaintances and several military
intelligence officers -- are decidedly unreliable, their tales
filled with contradictions. Still, as Mr. Martinez asks, ''Why
does history have to be a story told by sensible people and not
the delirious raving of losers?'' ''If history -- as appears to be the case -- is just another literary
genre,'' he argues, ''why take away from it the imagination, the
foolishness, the indiscretion, the exaggeration and the defeat
that are the raw material without which literature is inconceivable?''
Again and again, we are given facts, rumors and speculation about
Evita's life. We are told about her impoverished childhood as
the illegitimate daughter of a petty politician and a servant
woman in a small farming village, and her move at the age of 15
to Buenos Aires, where she eked out a living as an actress. We
learn of her first meeting with Juan Peron, her celebrated reign
as the country's first lady, and her agonizing death at the age
of 33 from cancer. We are told that Evita was hailed as a saint and denounced as
a whore, that she was celebrated for her acts of generosity toward
the poor and accused of embezzling money from the nation. We are
told that thousands of young girls dyed their hair blond in imitation
of Evita, and that 40,000 letters were written to the Pope attesting
to the miracles she had worked. But while much of ''Santa Evita'' takes place in flashback, Mr.
Martinez is primarily concerned with Evita's mysterious afterlife
-- with the legends that came to adhere to her posthumously, and
more particularly with the fate of her body, which was embalmed
after her death. According to Mr. Martinez, who claims that his story is based
on actual interviews and years of research, the military leaders
who helped overthrow Juan Peron in 1955 confiscated Evita's corpse
because they feared that opposition leaders would use the body
to rally their supporters. What's at stake, says one character,
is ''not the corpse of that woman but the destiny of Argentina.''
As Mr. Martinez tells it, Evita's corpse (as well as several copies
made out of wax, vinyl and fiberglass) soon began a series of
peregrinations. The body was hidden in various Government buildings,
hidden in an ambulance, hidden in an attic and taken on a boat
to Europe. Each time, Evita's followers would track down the wandering
body and shower it with flowers. There were whispers that the
body had levied a Tutankhanum-like curse on those who disturbed
its rest, and rumors, too, that it had been destroyed: dumped
in the Atlantic, dissolved in acid or buried standing up in ''a
garden where it rains every other day.'' Some of these scenes have a potent surreal power: Evita's corpse,
laid out on a glass slab, suspended from a ceiling, like a levitating
wonder; Evita's corpse, hidden in a theater, behind a movie screen
that plays and replays the images she loved as a girl. Unfortunately,
the passages between such scenes are too discursive, too labored
to really sustain the reader's interest. In Helen Lane's awkward
translation, many of Mr. Martinez's efforts to create poetic images
(for instance, hordes of bees that haunt Buenos Aires in the wake
of Evita's death) feel clumsy and contrived, and his efforts to
evoke Evita's mythic power tend to devolve into vague abstractions.
He writes of Evita's ''will to power, blood, madness, despair''
and describes her as ''the woman with the whip, the celestial
mother.'' The word Evita, Mr. Martinez observes in another chapter, comes
from the verb ''To avoid. To evade. To elude.'' In the case of
this novel, Evita not only manages to elude the machinations of
the military officers who longed to dispose of her corpse, but
also eludes the imagination of Mr. Martinez. As for Evita's body, it eventually wound up in the custody of
her husband, who kept it in an open casket on his dining room
table.
NEW YORK TIMES sept. 20, 1996By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
By Tomas Eloy Martinez
Translated by Helen Lane. 371 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $23.
The first thing that occurs to the reader of Tomas Eloy Martinez's new novel, ''Santa Evita,'' is why did it take so long for
someone to write an ambitious postmodern novel about Eva Peron?
Though Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice staked a claim on the
wife of the Argentine strongman Juan Domingo Peron back in 1978
with their musical ''Evita,'' her story, reinvented so many times
by rumor and myth, more obviously lends itself to the hallucinatory
brand of fiction practiced by writers like Gabriel Garcia Marquez,
Mario Vargas Llosa and Augusto Roa Bastos.