Not Saluting, but Waving

Michael Wood

• Evita directed by Alan Parker
  
• The Making of ‘Evita’ by Alan Parker
  Boxtree, 127 pp, £12.99, December 1996, ISBN 0 7822 2284 6
• In My Own Words by Eva Perón, translated by Laura Dail
  New Press, 120 pp, $8.95, November 1996, ISBN 1 56584 353 3
• Santa Evita by Tomás Eloy Martínez, translated by Helen Lane
  Doubleday, 371 pp, £15.99, January 1997, ISBN 0 385 40875 7

Nothing became her life like the remaking of it, but there were so many remakes. The latest stars Madonna, but the earliest starred Eva María Duarte herself. Or was that María Eva Ibarguren? She was María Eva Duarte de Perón on her marriage certificate, but then she also took three years off her age on that occasion. Some of this is easily unravelled, and a number of the remakes are easy to name: country kid to city girl, dancer to actress, brunette to blonde, actress to politician, President’s wife to secular saint. But none of this is easy to explain, and all of it turns to myth at the slightest touch. Even her body had its long adventures: laboriously embalmed at her death in 1952, it began its mysterious travels when Perón fell in 1955, was dug up in Italy in 1971, although Perón didn’t take it back with him to Argentina when he was reinstalled in 1973. That act of piety was left to his widow, his second wife Isabel, who became President in 1974 and had Eva Perón’s corpse buried (at last) in a Buenos Aires cemetery.