Monday, July 31, 2017

the last book I ever read (My Fathers' Ghost is Climbing in the Rain: A Novel, excerpt twelve)

from My Fathers' Ghost is Climbing in the Rain: A Novel by Patricio Pron:

When I left the photographs on my father’s desk, I understood that his interest in what had happened to Alberto Burdisso was the result of his interest in what had happened to Alberto’s sister, Alicia, and that interest was in turn the product of a fact that perhaps my father couldn’t even explain to himself but, in trying to, he had gathered all those materials. This fact was, my father had gotten Alicia involved in politics without knowing that what he was doing would cost that young woman her life, would cost him decades of fear and regret and would have its effects on me, many years later. As I tried to shift my attention from the photographs I’d just seen, I understood for the first time that all the children of young Argentines in the 1970s were going to have to solve our parents’ pasts, like detectives, and what we would find out was going to seem like a mystery novel we wished we’d never bought. But I also realized that there was no way of telling my father’s story as a mystery or, more precisely, that telling it in such a way would betray his intentions and his struggles, since telling his story as a detective tale would merely confirm the existence of a genre, which is to say, a convention, and all of his efforts were meant to call into question those very social conventions and their pale reflection in literature.



Sunday, July 30, 2017

the last book I ever read (My Fathers' Ghost is Climbing in the Rain: A Novel, excerpt eleven)

from My Fathers' Ghost is Climbing in the Rain: A Novel by Patricio Pron:

In the room that held the exhibition on the daily press there was a television on a constant loop, and a chair. I sat in it trembling, listening to data and figures and watching the front pages of newspapers until my father appeared on the screen. He was as I remembered him in his last years. He had a long white beard, which he occasionally ran his fingers through with a flirtatious air, and he talked about newspapers where he’d worked, newspapers he’d seen go under and reappear with other names and other staffs in other places that, invariably, were finished off by the courts soon afterward, so the newspapers went under again and the cycle repeated itself from the beginning, if there ever was one; a whole series of pretty terrible cycles of exploitation and unemployment following one after another without leaving any room for a career or for hope. My father told his story, which was also the story of the press in this city where he’d decided to live, and I, watching him on the screen at that museum exhibition, felt both pride and very strong disappointment, the same disappointment I usually felt when I thought about everything my father had done and the impossibility of following in his footsteps or of offering him achievements that could match his own, which were many and were counted in newspaper pages, in journalists trained by him who in turn had trained me and in a political history that I had once known and then tried to almost completely forget.



Saturday, July 29, 2017

the last book I ever read (My Fathers' Ghost is Climbing in the Rain: A Novel, excerpt ten)

from My Fathers' Ghost is Climbing in the Rain: A Novel by Patricio Pron:

If one reads the articles carefully and ignores their typographical errors and erratic syntax, and if afterward one thinks about what they say and accepts that what they describe is what really must have happened, one can sum up the entire story in a more or less coherent narrative: A man was taken to an isolated place through some kind of deception and there he was ordered to sign over an unknown property, which he refused to do; his attackers threw him into a well and he died there. In its simplicity, in its almost brutal pettiness, the story could fit perfectly into one of those books of brutal pettiness, the story could fit perfectly into one of those books of the Old Testament in which the characters live and, above all, die beholden to simple passions, by the hand of an incomprehensible god who is nonetheless still worthy of praise and worship. However, since we can assume that this is not a biblical story and that the motivations of the characters are not subject to the whims of a capricious god, when reading all this, we must also ask ourselves what were the reasons behind these acts: Why was this crime committed? How is it possible that so many people are implicated in a murder that could have been carried out by one, two or, at the most, three people, all of whom could have fit in Burdisso’s little car? And what was he murdered? For his house, which the anonymous writer at El Trébol Digital presented in his or her articles as a place with no particularly special features? It certainly wasn’t some luxurious mansion that stood out in the puritanical, austere atmosphere of the town. For money? Where was this money going to come from, a sum large enough to outweigh the risk for his killers of winding up in prison for the rest of their lives? Where was a maintenance employee of an athletic club in a provincial town going to get all that money? How could Burdisso’s suffocation be explained if the well, as first reported, was dry? Why some sort of Faulknerian fool, poorer than a church mouse, in a town where his disappearance would be noticed immediately, a town where, moreover, many people would know who Burdisso was, what he had done and who was with him in his final hours?



Friday, July 28, 2017

the last book I ever read (My Fathers' Ghost is Climbing in the Rain: A Novel, excerpt nine)

from My Fathers' Ghost is Climbing in the Rain: A Novel by Patricio Pron:

Then there was one last photograph of the event, and when I saw it I was surprised and confused, as if I had just seen a dead an approaching along a path with the infernal red setting sun silhouetted behind his back. It was my father just as I would see him in the hospital, in his final years: bald with a white beard on his thin face, very similar to his own father as I remembered him, with large rimless glasses, the glasses of a policeman or a Mafioso, with his hands in the pockets of a white coat, talking, his throat wrapped with a plaid scarf that I thought I had given him at some point as a gift. Beside him were other men, who contemplated him with sad faces, as if they knew my father was talking about a dead man without knowing that he would soon be one of them, that he was going to enter a dark, bottomless well that everyone who dies falls into, but my father didn’t know it yet and they didn’t want to tell him. There were eleven men standing behind my father, as if my father were the sacked coach of a soccer team that had just lost the championship; one wore a jacket and tie, but the rest wore leather coats and one, a long scarf that seemed about to strangle him. Some of them looked at the ground. I looked at my father and couldn’t quite understand what he was doing there, talking in that cemetery on a cold afternoon, an afternoon in which the living and the dead should have taken refuge in the shelter of their homes or their tombs and in the resigned consolation of memory.



Thursday, July 27, 2017

the last book I ever read (My Fathers' Ghost is Climbing in the Rain: A Novel, excerpt eight)

from My Fathers' Ghost is Climbing in the Rain: A Novel by Patricio Pron:

In the lower corner of the article was a photograph. It showed a group of people—perhaps there really were a thousand, as the anonymous writer of the article claims, though it doesn’t look like it—listening to a bald speaker. In the background of the photograph was a church I recognized, with a disproportionately tall tower, which looked like a swan curled up on the shore, stretching out its neck in an attempt to find nourishment. Seeing it, I remembered my father once told me that my paternal great-grandfather had climbed up the old tower, which had been damaged in an earthquake or some other natural disaster, in order to clear out the rubble so it could be rebuilt, but because the tower’s wooden beams were rotted from exposure to the elements, my great-grandfather was risking his life, not to mention the inevitable thread of paternities that led to us; but in that moment I couldn’t remember if my father had told me the story or if it was made up, a flight of fancy based on the similarity between the thinness of the tower and that of my paternal grandfather as I remembered him, and still today I don’t know if it was my paternal great-grandfather or my maternal great-grandfather who climbed the tower, nor do I know if at any point the church tower suffered damage, since there aren’t many earthquakes or natural disasters in El Trébol.



Wednesday, July 26, 2017

the last book I ever read (My Fathers' Ghost is Climbing in the Rain: A Novel, excerpt seven)

from My Fathers' Ghost is Climbing in the Rain: A Novel by Patricio Pron:

A naïve reader might wonder why the regional press states that the police found signs of violence in the missing man’s home when the local press maintains that this wasn’t the case, that when his friends went looking for him they found the front door locked and the bicycle—not to mention the oh-so-literary detail of the “loyal dog” who followed his master “wherever he went”—in front of the house. The reader might wonder why the security camera at the cash machine wasn’t working at the moment the missing man’s debit card was used for the last time. Once again the naïve reader might wonder who the “loose living” people the article referred to were, but there, for someone who has lived in the city where the events took place, the answer is simple: a “loose living” person is in El Trébol, anyone who wasn’t born in the city. A foreigner. Even if this foreignness is based only on a couple of kilometers’ distance, or the supposed misfortune of having been born on the other side of a gully or beyond a copse of eucalyptus trees or on the other side of the train tracks, anywhere on the whole planet that extends past the city and that, for the inhabitants of El Trébol, is an inhospitable, hostile world where the cold cuts your flesh and the heat burns and there is not shade or shelter.



Tuesday, July 25, 2017

the last book I ever read (My Fathers' Ghost is Climbing in the Rain: A Novel, excerpt six)

from My Fathers' Ghost is Climbing in the Rain: A Novel by Patricio Pron:

That morning my sister told me she’d once found a sentence underlined in a book that my father had left at her house. My sister showed me the book. The sentence was: “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race: I have kept the faith.” It was verse seven of chapter four of Paul’s second letter to Timothy. Reading it, I thought that my father had underlined that sentence so it would inspire and console him, and perhaps also as an epitaph, and I thought that if I knew who I was, if the fog that was the pills dissipated for a moment so that I could know who I was, I would have wanted that epitaph for myself too, but then I thought that I hadn’t really fought, and that no one in my generation had fought; something or someone had already inflicted a defeat on us and we drank or took pills or wasted time in a thousand and one ways as a mode of hastening an end, possibly an undignified one but liberating nonetheless. Nobody had fought, we had all lost and barely anyone had stayed true to what they believed, whatever that was, I thought; my father’s generation had been different, but, once again, there was something in that difference that was also a meeting point, a thread that went through the years and brought us together in spite of everything and was horrifically Argentine: the feeling of parents and children being united in defeat.



Monday, July 24, 2017

the last book I ever read (My Fathers' Ghost is Climbing in the Rain: A Novel, excerpt five)

from My Fathers' Ghost is Climbing in the Rain: A Novel by Patricio Pron:

A doctor started to walk toward us from the opposite end of the hallway, and when we saw him we stood up without thinking. I’m going to examine him, he warned us, and then he went into my father’s room and he was there for a little while. We were waiting outside, not knowing what to say. My mother was looking out the large window behind us as a small tugboat dragged a much larger vessel upriver, toward the port. I held in my hands a magazine about cars, even though I don’t know how to drive; someone had left it on one of the seats and I merely let my eyes slide over its pages in an exercise as restful as contemplating a landscape, although in this case it was a landscape of incomprehensible technological innovations. The doctor finally came out and said that everything was the same, that there was no news at all. I thought out of us should ask him something so that the doctor would see we were really worried about my father’s situation, so I asked him how his temperature was. The doctor squinted for a second, and then he looked at me incredulously and stammered: His temperature is perfectly normal, there’s no problem with his temperature; and I thanked him and he nodded and started to head down the hallway.



Sunday, July 23, 2017

the last book I ever read (My Fathers' Ghost is Climbing in the Rain: A Novel, excerpt four)

from My Fathers' Ghost is Climbing in the Rain: A Novel by Patricio Pron:

Once again: my parents haven’t read Silvina Bullrich, Beatriz Guido, Ezequiel Martínez Estrada, Victoria Ocampo, or Ernesto Sábato. They’ve read Jorge Luis Borges, Rodolfo Walsh and Leopoldo Marechal but not Silvina Bullrich, Beatriz Guido, Ezequiel Martínez Estrada, Victoria Ocampo, or Ernesto Sábato. They’ve read Ernest Guevara, Eva and Juan Domingo Perón and Arturo Jauretche but not Silvina Bullrich, Beatriz Guido, Ezequiel Martínez Estrada, Victoria Ocampo, or Ernesto Sábato. What’s more: they’ve read Juan José Hernández Arregui, Jorge Abelardo Ramos and Enrique Pavón Pereya but not Silvina Bullrich, Beatriz Guido, Ezequiel Martínez Estrada, Victoria Ocampo, or Ernesto Sábato. One could spend hours thinking about this.



Saturday, July 22, 2017

the last book I ever read (My Fathers' Ghost is Climbing in the Rain: A Novel, excerpt three)

from My Fathers' Ghost is Climbing in the Rain: A Novel by Patricio Pron:

Something had happened to my parents and to me and to my siblings that prevented me from ever knowing what a home was or what a family was, though everything seemed to indicate I had both. Many times in the past I had tried to understand what that thing had been, but then and there, in Germany, I stopped trying, like someone who accepts the mutilations from a car accident he can’t remember. My parents and I had that accident: something crossed our path and our car spun around a few times and went off the highway, and we were now wandering through the fields, our minds blank, that shared experience the only thing uniting us. Behind us there was an overturned car in a ditch on the side of a country road, bloodstains on the seats and in the grass, but none of us wanted to turn around and look back.



Friday, July 21, 2017

the last book I ever read (My Fathers' Ghost is Climbing in the Rain: A Novel, excerpt two)

from My Fathers' Ghost is Climbing in the Rain: A Novel by Patricio Pron:

Sometimes I couldn’t sleep; when that happened, I’d get up off the sofa and walk toward my host’s bookshelves, always different but also always, without fail, located beside the sofa, as if reading were possible only in the perpetual discomfort of furniture in which one is neither properly seated nor completely stretched out. Then I would look at the books and think how I used to read them one right after the next but how at that point they left me completely cold. On those bookshelves there were almost never books by those dead writers I’d read when I was a poor teenager in a poor neighborhood of a poor city in a poor country, and I was stupidly insistent on becoming part of that imaginary republic to which they belonged, a republic with vague borders in which writers wrote in New York or in London, in Berlin or in Buenos Aires, and yet I wasn’t of that world. I had wanted to be like them, and the only proof that remained of that determination, and the resolve that came with it, was that trip to Germany, the country where the writers that most interested me had lived and had died and, above all, had written, and a fistful of books that already belonged to a literature I had tried and failed to escape; a literature like the nightmare of a dying writer, or, better yet, of a dying, talentless Argentine writer; of a writer, let’s say, who is not the author of The Aleph, around whom we all inevitably revolve, but rather the author of On Heroes and Tombs, someone who spent his whole life believing that he was talented and important and morally unquestionable and who at the very end discovers that he’s completely without talent and behaved ridiculously and brunched with dictators, and then he feels ashamed and wants his country’s literature to be at the level of his miserable body of work so that it wasn’t written in vain and might even have one or two followers. Well, I had been part of that literature, and every time I thought about it, it was as if in my head an old man was shouting Tornado! Tornado! announcing the end of days, as in a Mexican film I had once seen; except that the days had kept coming and I had been able to grab onto the trunks of those trees that remained standing in the tornado only by quitting writing, completely quitting writing and reading, and by seeing books for what they were, the only thing that I’d ever been able to call my home, but complete strangers in that time of pills and vivid dreams in which I no longer remembered nor wanted to remember what a damn home was.



Thursday, July 20, 2017

the last book I ever read (My Fathers' Ghost is Climbing in the Rain: A Novel, excerpt one)

from My Fathers' Ghost is Climbing in the Rain: A Novel by Patricio Pron:

My father got sick at the end of those years, in August 2008. One day, probably on her birthday, I called my paternal grandmother. She told me not to worry, that they’d taken my father to the hospital only for a routine checkup.I asked her what she was talking about. A routine checkup, nothing important, replied my grandmother; I don’t know why it’s taking so long, but it’s not important. I asked her how long my father had been in the hospital. Two days, three, she answered. When I hung up with her, I called my parents’ house. No one was there. Then I called my sister. A voice answered that seemed to come from the depths of time, the voice of everyone who has ever waited for news in a hospital hallway, a voice of tiredness and desperation. We didn’t want to worry you, my sister told me. What happened? I asked. Well, answered my sister, it’s too complicated to explain to you now. Can I talk to him? I asked. No, he can’t talk, she replied. I’m coming, I said, and I hung up.



Wednesday, July 19, 2017

the last book I ever read (The Tunnel by Ernesto Sábato, excerpt ten)

from The Tunnel by Ernesto Sábato:

‘There is nothing we can do. I cannot violate the regulation.’

‘A regulation, as I am sure you know, must be logical.’ I sputtered. On the woman’s cheek there was a mole punctuated with a few long hairs that was truly beginning to offend me.

‘And you know the regulation?’ she inquired scornfully.

‘It is not necessary to know the regulation, Señora,’ I replied icily, knowing that the word Señora would cut her to the quick.



Tuesday, July 18, 2017

the last book I ever read (The Tunnel by Ernesto Sábato, excerpt nine)

from The Tunnel by Ernesto Sábato:

I watched out the train window as the train sped toward Buenos Aires. We passed near a small homestead: a woman standing in the shade of a thatched roof looked up at the train. An opaque thought crossed my mind: ‘I am seeing that woman for the first and last time. I will never in my lifetime see her again.’ My thoughts floated aimlessly, like a cork down an uncharted river. For a moment they bobbed around the woman beneath the thatch. What did she matter to me? But I could not rid myself of the thought that, for an instant, she was a part of my life that would never be repeated; from my point of view it was as if she were already dead: a brief delay of the train, a call from inside the house, and that woman would never have existed in my life.



Monday, July 17, 2017

the last book I ever read (The Tunnel by Ernesto Sábato, excerpt eight)

from The Tunnel by Ernesto Sábato:

‘So, you’re a painter,” said the myopic woman, squinting at me through half-closed eyes, as if peering through a sandstorm. That grimace, obviously caused by trying to see without putting on her glasses (as if glasses could make her any uglier), merely intensified her insolent and hypocritical expression.

‘Yes, madam,’ I replied with rage. I was sure she was not married.



Sunday, July 16, 2017

the last book I ever read (The Tunnel by Ernesto Sábato, excerpt seven)

from The Tunnel by Ernesto Sábato:

That night, like many other nights, I was alone as a consequence of my own failings, my own depravity. At such times the world seems despicable, even though I know that I am necessarily a part of it. Then a frenzy to obliterate everything sweeps over me; I let myself be seduced by the temptation of suicide; I get drunk; I look for prostitutes. I receive a certain satisfaction from proving my own baseness, in confirming that I am no better than the lowest of the low around me.



Saturday, July 15, 2017

the last book I ever read (The Tunnel by Ernesto Sábato, excerpt six)

from The Tunnel by Ernesto Sábato:

My brain was in pandemonium: swarming ideas, emotions of love and loathing, questions, resentment, and memories all blended together or flashed by in rapid succession.

What, for example, could she have had in mind by having me come to her house to pick up a letter and then have her husband deliver it to me? And why hadn’t she warned me she was married? And what the hell was she doing at the estancia with that bastard Hunter? And why hadn’t she waited until I called? And that blind man, what kind of character was he? I have already said that I have a miserable opinion of human beings. Now I must confess that I do not like blind people at all, and in their presence I have the same feeling I get when I see certain cold, clammy, voiceless creatures like snakes. If you add to that the effect of reading in front of him a letter from his wife that said ‘I think of you, too,’ it will not be difficult to imagine the revulsion I felt at that moment.



Friday, July 14, 2017

the last book I ever read (The Tunnel by Ernesto Sábato, excerpt five)

from The Tunnel by Ernesto Sábato:

That night my scorn for humanity seemed nullified, or at least temporarily absent. I went to the café Marzotto. I suppose you know that people go there to listen to tangos, but to listen to them the way a true believer listens to Bach’s Saint Matthew Passion.



Thursday, July 13, 2017

the last book I ever read (The Tunnel by Ernesto Sábato, excerpt four)

from The Tunnel by Ernesto Sábato:

He sat down again at his desk, shuffled through some papers in a drawer, and finally handed me a letter written in English. I looked at it for the sake of courtesy.

‘I can’t read English,’ I explained

‘This is a letter from Chicago. It vouches for the fact that we are the only society of psychoanalysts in all Argentina.’

My face registered admiration and profound respect.



Wednesday, July 12, 2017

the last book I ever read (The Tunnel by Ernesto Sábato, excerpt three)

from The Tunnel by Ernesto Sábato:

The girl, I could assume, was in the habit of visiting art exhibits. If I saw her there, I could stop beside her and, without too much awkwardness, start a conversation about one of the paintings.

After examining this possibility in detail, I abandoned it. I never go to art exhibits. For a painter, this may seem a bizarre attitude, but there is a logical explanation, and I am sure that if I decide to give it, everyone will agree that I am right. Well, I may exaggerate when I say ‘everyone.’ No, I know I exaggerate. Experience has taught me that what seems clear and evident to me that what seems clear and evident to me is never so to my fellow human beings. I have been burned so many times that now before I justify or explain anything, I mull it over a very long time; almost inevitably, I end up withdrawing into myself and not opening my mouth at all. That is why until today I had not decided to tell the story of my crime. Even at this moment, I still do not know whether it is worth the effort to try to explain this quirk of mine about art exhibits; I am afraid, however, that if I do not explain you will think that it is some kind of phobia, when in fact I have a very sound reason for my reluctance.



Tuesday, July 11, 2017

the last book I ever read (The Tunnel by Ernesto Sábato, excerpt two)

from The Tunnel by Ernesto Sábato:

Everyone knows that I killed Mariá Iribane Hunter. But no one knows how I met her, exactly what our relationship was, or why I came to believe I had to killer her. I will try to recount all this objectively. I may have suffered great pain because of Mariá, but I am not stupid enough to claim that my behavior was exemplary.



Monday, July 10, 2017

the last book I ever read (The Tunnel by Ernesto Sábato, excerpt one)

from The Tunnel by Ernesto Sábato:

As I was saying, my name is Juan Pablo Castel. You may wonder what has motivated me to write this account of my crime (I may not have told you that I am going to relate all those details) and, especially, why I want to publish it. I know the human soul well enough to predict that some of you will believe it is from vanity. Think what you want, I don’t give a damn. It has been a long time since I cared a fig for men’s opinions or their justice. Go ahead, then, believe if you wish that I am publishing this story out of vanity. After all, I am made of flesh and blood and hair and fingernails like any other man, and I would consider it unrealistic for anyone to expect special qualities of me—particularly of me. There are times when a person feels he is a superman, until he realizes that he, too, is low, and vile, and treacherous. I do not need to comment on vanity. As far as I know, no human is devoid of this formidable motivation for Human Progress. People make me laugh when they talk about the modesty of an Einstein, or someone of his kind. My answer to them is that it is easy to be modest when you are famous. That is, appear to be modest. Even when you think a person hasn’t the slightest trace of vanity, suddenly you discover it in its most subtle form: the vanity of modesty. How often we see that kind of person. Even a man like Christ—whether real or symbolic—a being for whom I have always felt, indeed, still do, the deepest reverence, spoke words that were motivated by vanity—or at least by arrogance. And what can you say of a Leon Bloy, who defended himself against the accusation of arrogance by arguing he had spent a lifetime serving people who did not deserve to lick his boots. Vanity is found in the most unlikely place: in combination with kindness, and selflessness, and generosity. When I was a boy I used to despair at the idea that my mother would die one day (as you grow older you learn that death is not only bearable but even comforting). I could not imagine that she might have faults. Now that she is dead, I can say that she was as good as a human being can ever be. But I remember in her last years, when I was a grown man, how at first it pained me to discover a very subtle trace of vanity or pride underlying her kindness and generosity. Something much more illustrative happened to me personally when she had an operation for cancer. In order to arrive in time I had to travel two full days without sleeping. When I reached her bedside, a tender smile lighted her face as she murmured a few words of sympathy (imagine, she was sympathizing with my fatigue!). And in the obscure depths of my being I felt the stirring of vain pride for having come so promptly. I confess this secret so that you will see I am sincere when I say that I am no better than any other man.



Saturday, July 8, 2017

the last book I ever read (Evita, First Lady: A Biography of Eva Perón, excerpt twelve)

from Evita, First Lady: A Biography of Eva Perón by John Barnes:

Perónistas, aroused to fury by the disappearance of their saint, sent out their own agents on a clandestine hunt for the body. Fearful that the secret of his silent guest might leak out, the major took to sleeping with his service revolver under his pillow. One morning, before dawn, he was awakened by strange noises in the corridor outside his bredroom. He shot twice at a form that appeared in the doorway, killing his pregnant wife who had gone to the bathroom. After that, Evita’s body was moved to the fourth floor of military intelligence headquarters and dumped in a packing case labeled ‘radio sets.’

At that point, Colonel Hector Cabanillas, the head of the Casa Rosada secret service, took over responsibility for the body, the President having finally decided to send it abroad until passions in Argentina cooled. In Septembers of 1956, the body, still in its packing case marked ‘radio sets,’ was shipped to the Argentine Embassy in Bonn, where it was kept in the storeroom, unknow to the Ambassador. It was then put in a coffin and shipped to Rome, where it was met by a lay sister of the Society of St. Paul named Giuseppina Airoldi, who had been told that the body was that of an Italian widow who died in Argentina having left instructions for her burial in her hometown of Milan. There, under the name of Maggi, Evita was laid to rest.



Friday, July 7, 2017

the last book I ever read (Evita, First Lady: A Biography of Eva Perón, excerpt eleven)

from Evita, First Lady: A Biography of Eva Perón by John Barnes:

On August 1, 1952, the union of food workers cabled Pope Pius XII asking ‘in the name of 160,000 members that Your Holiness initiate the process of canonization of Eva Perón.’ To support this request, the union told of a little girl paying her last respects, who said: ‘Eva was a saint. I know because she cured my mother.’ It added: ‘Many sick are now well, many sorrowful are happy because of her.’ The Vatican response was quick, smooth, and predictable. ‘While in the case of Señora de Perón the civic virtues were practiced in an evident way,’ said a Vatican spokesman, choosing his words carefully, ‘nothing is known about her religious virtues, and, at first sight, there seems not to have been any of the heroism required by the church in such matters.’

The church, it appeared, did not seem to believe that a woman who had known as many lovers as Evita before marriage was quite suitable material for sainthood. But it did not really matter. She already was a saint to hundreds of thousands of elderly Argentine women around the country who had set up shrines to her in their homes. The government, too, was planning a shrine – the world’s biggest. Her embalmed remains were to be kept permanently on view in a crypt patterned after Napolean’s tomb which was to be topped by a 450-foot statue of a descamisado in Carrara marble. But while Italian sculptors chipped away on that four-year project, in Buenos Aires the Evita legend seemed to be quietly but rapidly receding into the mists of history. More than two months after her death, the Association of Friends of Eva Perón, founded in the first hour of grief by high-placed Perónistas, had yet to hold it first meeting. The film Evita Immortal, released shortly after her death, had been withdrawn from circulation after only a short run. Press and radio had drastically reduced the amount of time and space devoted to her. The President himself never mentioned her name in public speeches anymore. It looked as through the widower in the Casa Rosada was trying to exorcise the ghost around him.



Thursday, July 6, 2017

the last book I ever read (Evita, First Lady: A Biography of Eva Perón, excerpt ten)

from Evita, First Lady: A Biography of Eva Perón by John Barnes:

She was sinking fast. A second bulletin at 6.10 pm reported her condition as serious. At 7 o’clock it was announced that she had lapsed into unconsciousness fifteen minutes earlier. At 8.25, the crowds keeping a hushed but tearful vigil across the street from the residence saw a dim light snapped out in a second floor room. Inside the darkened chamber, President Perón walked away from the bedside of his wife. To waiting family and Cabinet Ministers he said, simply: ‘Evita is dead.’ At her death, the once beautiful woman weighed a gaunt 80 pounds. On that cold July night, for the second time in his life, Juan Perón was looking down at a wife dead of cancer.

All through the night Argentine radio stations interrupted their programmes of religious music with the news that ‘the Sub-Secretariat of Information fulfills the very sad duty of announcing that at 8.25 o’clock Señora Eva Perón, the spiritual leader of the nation, passed away.’ Churches throughout the country tolled a slow, mournful death-knell. The Cabinet met to declare all official activities suspended for two days, with 30 days of official mourning. Outside the Olivos residence, a man with a crepe-draped Argentine flag perched himself in the fork of a tree and announced dramatically that he would stay there for ever. (Rain soon forced him down.)



Wednesday, July 5, 2017

the last book I ever read (Evita, First Lady: A Biography of Eva Perón, excerpt nine)

from Evita, First Lady: A Biography of Eva Perón by John Barnes:

The crowd knew it. There were many men as well as women weeping openly in the plaza. One November 6, she was operated on for cancer of the uterus. Her newspaper, Democracia, said that before she went under the anaesthetic she cried, ‘Viva Perón!’ which must have shaken Dr. George T. Pack, the New York Memorial Hospital cancer specialist who performed the operation.



Monday, July 3, 2017

the last book I ever read (Evita, First Lady: A Biography of Eva Perón, excerpt eight)

from Evita, First Lady: A Biography of Eva Perón by John Barnes:

She appealed for a ‘patriotic’ boycott of the paper. Her Ministry of Information plastered the city with posters reading ‘La Prensa against the country’, and the State radio attacked it three times a day for 28 days. But to Evita’s dismay, she found out that as much as she attacked it so its circulation increased. She embarked on tougher measures. The paper was told that long lines of would-be advertisers blocked traffic. Two boilers in its rotogravure plant were condemned and the paper was forced to close down while they were replaced. A new customs duty, back-dated twelve years, was levied on its imported newsprint. Citing a national shortage, the government removed thousands of tons of newsprint already in the paper’s warehouse. For the same reason it ordered a cut in the number of pages each day, first to 16 pages, then to 12. Armed federal police raided the newspaper’s editorial offices after it published a story on the torture of political prisoners. Perón sued it for libel. Evita decreed restrictions on classified advertising, the paper’s lifeblood. Houses could only be advertised on certain days. On others, only job seekers could buy space. Government employment advertisements had to be run free. And to further intimidate La Prensa readers, people who wanted to place advertisements in the paper had to get government permission, which meant that their names would go down on police files as being anti-Perónista. But Gainza Paz still refused to stop his attacks on the government, and the paper’s circulation continued to soar from a pre-war 250,000 to over half a million. When Evita cut its newsprint supply yet again, porteños passed each day’s copy from hand to hand. In the end, thanks to Evita’s war on it, La Prensa, for all its faults, had become a symbol of embattled freedom, a rallying point for the government’s enemies. It had to die.



Sunday, July 2, 2017

the last book I ever read (Evita, First Lady: A Biography of Eva Perón, excerpt seven)

from Evita, First Lady: A Biography of Eva Perón by John Barnes:

American writer Bernard Collier once claimed that the most distinctive quality about Buenos Aires is that its olor porteño – the odour of fresh beef roasting.

‘An Argentine must have fresh beef,’ he wrote. ‘Without fresh beef he feels weak, angry, anxious and hungry, all the time without satisfaction. Give him lamb and he can’t stand the taste; chicken, fish and pork he rejects as baby food. You walk along a downtown street at 1 o’clock in the afternoon and watch the pipefitters, the cable splicers, the sewer workers, the diggers and the pavers pop out of holes in the street to check on the doneness of a 2-pound bife, which is sizzling over a wood or charcoal fire on a grill fashioned out of a tar bucket and iron reinforcing rods. By 2 o’clock on a hot summer afternoon there will be workmen in blue shirts and leather sandals lolling in the shade of buildings or construction fences all over town. In the winter they will be hunched over the little fires. They will be sleepy with their big steak and most of a bottle of good red wine and half a loaf of crusty Italian bread inside. At 3 o’clock they will return to their jobs refreshed and strong again. When they get home at night they want another steak for supper.’



Saturday, July 1, 2017

the last book I ever read (Evita, First Lady: A Biography of Eva Perón, excerpt six)

from Evita, First Lady: A Biography of Eva Perón by John Barnes:

With Perón’s old-fashioned charm, there’s little doubt that he would have echoed Farrell’s shocked grumble. But Evita apparently changed all that. When he became President, she saw to it that woman’s suffrage stood high on the list of the government’s legislative programme. But there were plenty of Argentines, Perónistas among them, who showed a marked lack of enthusiasm for the prospect of emancipated women turning their way of life upside-down. The suffrage bill somehow seemed to linger in Congressional committees while other bills speeded through. So, shortly after Evita returned from her European tour, she marched into Congress and told the deputies that she would not leave until the bill had passed. With the Chamber’s gallery packed with women and thousands more outside surrounding the building, the shaken legislators quickly did as they were told. Two days later, one hundred thousand Perónistas flocked into Plaza de Mayo to hear Perón promulgate the new law and to hear Evita assure the women, as well as the men, that a new era had dawned for Argentina.