THE timing of the publication of this English translation of Santa Evita is just now most definitely opportune (opportunistic?). The Evita movie is doubtless generating an enormous amount of interest in Eva Peron, just as Neil Jordan's Michael Collins has already done for that film's eponymous hero. In the case of Santa-Evita, however, there is the danger that many people who have seen the movie will go out and buy Martinez's book in the expectation of discovering an exciting and romantic account (in the manner of popular fiction) of the Argentinian political superstar; such readers I think will be disappointed to find instead a complex, multi-layered narrative of the adventures and misadventures not of the charismatic and enigmatic Evita, but that of her corpse.
Santa Evita is an odd book. Flann O'Brien plotting without the humour? A grossly voluminous Borges? A journalistic Kafka? Capotean voyeurism? Orwellian dissection? Tortuous Conradian determination to discover what actually happened by presenting events through a multiple-narrative technique as a surrogate for the old-fashioned and impossible sub specie aeternitatis viewpoint? Technically, it is something of all of these.
Here is what happens. Tomas Eloy Martinez, in the persona of an obsessed investigative journalist, sets out to explain to himself (and to the reader) the amazing phenomenon of "Evita". The book opens with an account of the slow and painful death from cancer of Evita at the age of 33. Her husband has her body embalmed by Dr Pedro Ara, a leading Spanish anatomist. For years before her death and during her years as a corpse, Evita is kept under maniacally strict surveillance by Colonel Carlos Eugenio de Moori Koenig of the Argentine Military Intelligence. Moori Koenig is one of the book's principal narrators.
Other narrators, whose narratives are relayed in various ways by Martinez, are: Don Juana, Evita's mother; Julio Alcaraz, Evita's hairdresser; Atilio Renzi, her butler; Jose Nemesio Astorga (El Chino), a film projectionist; Also Cifuentes, Moori Koenig's confidant. This list is not exhaustive. Brief literary opinions are given from Borges, Cortazar, Rudolfo Walsh, Onetti and others. The book's two chief characters, apart from the embalmed corpse, are Martinez himself and Moori Koenig.
The book in fact is a kind of elaborate autopsy carried out not to discover what the deceased died of, but what she lived for. Her country? Her husband, the President? Wealth? Revenge on the bourgeoisie who had despised and humiliated her until she met Peron? The descamisados ("the shirtless", the wretched poor who were her massive popular support)?
Here is what Martinez himself says of what he was doing:
"Was Santa Evita going to be a novel? I didn't know and I didn't care. Story lines, fixed points of view, the laws of space and times, slipped through my fingers. The characters sometimes spoke in their own voices and sometimes in other people's, merely to explain to me that what is history is not always historical, that the truth is never what it appears to be."
In the end, Santa Evita is as much about the nature of illusion and reality, of fame and myth, of politics and power, as it is about Eva Duarte alias Evita. It is also a parable on the social condition of Argentina since the Twenties, though the country's political and social problems go back even further, to when a relatively small and highly privileged class ruled the pampas as feudal masters. But in the early decades of this century Argentina was swamped by huge waves of immigration (especially from Italy) and a large underclass came into existence. It was on the backs of this under-class that Peron and Evita rose to power. Once in power, Peron exploited Argentina's vast financial reserves to embark on a disastrous programme of industrialisation.
I don't think it too much of an exaggeration to say that since that momentous failure, Argentina has been more or less a police or military state. Evita's descamisados and the desaparecidos ("the disappeared") of more recent times are present or implied in Martinez's fascinating chronicle; and the corpse that dominates the novel is, I guess, as lovely and elusive as all our desirable ideals.
As translator, Helen Lane is as reliable as ever and avoids translatese. I sometimes wish, however, that her translations would not read, stylistically, as though written by the same person.