An honourable story: a little over 60 years ago on 26th July the incorruptible body of Eva Peron breathed its last.
Her body was embalmed, and it is said that over two million mourners filed past her open coffin in the Hall of Memory Hall of the city of Buenos Aires during the following weeks to pay their last respects to the wife of the Popular Front president Juan Peron. It was not so much a lying in state, as a rite of passage or elevation to a zone of "contagious fiction and contested fact". *
For instance, it is known that her body was then placed in one of the city cemeteries in a specially constructed mausoleum intended for her final resting place and place of popular remembrance. However, three years later a popular rising lead by church and army forced Juan Peron out of office. He had recently legalised both divorce and prostitution in Argentina, and for many this was a disgrace too far. During the coup d’etat Evita’s tomb was broken into and her body disappeared. Not the end of the story, but a new beginning, instead of efficiently disposing of her body in the Rio Plata, the security men who had taken her had strict orders from their superiors to guard her carefully and see that she came to no harm. This required them taking her from secret location to secret location; sometimes the body was left in its coffin in a van at an anonymous street corner; sometimes she lodged in the offices of a senior member of the security forces; sometimes she lay in a damp cellar. The fact was that wherever she went word seemed travel with her, and soon after flowers and lighted candles would mysteriously appear on the nearby pavements, and so she had to move on.
Eventually, with the approval of the Vatican, she was secretly flown to Italy and buried in Milan under the name "Maria Maggi". A government decree under president Aramburu, an ex-general who had helped lead the 1955 coup, also prohibited all mention of either Juan Peron or Evita. But word continued to be carried on people’s lips, and so it was in the 1960’s that Evita was claimed the protectress of the revolutionary leftist Montoneros movement, who in 1970 succeeding in kidnapping president Aramburu himself. He was killed shortly thereafter, but his body was hidden as a provocation and act of revenge for the disappearance of Evita.
The Argentina military finally admitted their shameful deception concerning Evita’s body in 1971 enabling the later release of the body of Aramburu. Honour satisfied, she was exhumed and flown to Madrid where Juan Peron was living in exile. There Isobel, Peron’s third wife, agreed with her husband that Evita should be kept in their apartment dining room next to their dining room table. Peron himself returned to Argentina as president in 1973 but died two years later and was succeeded by Isobel. It was she who arranged the burial of Evita with her husband, but not before the Montoneros had also re-enacted their kidnapping of Aramburu by again stealing his body from his grave in 1974.
Honour again satisfied with the supporters and family of Aramburu, Evita now lies in a new tomb in Buenos Aires with her husband. Such is the massive underground concrete construction and the two sets of reinforced doors that it is said it would outlast a nuclear bomb drop on the city. It is from the room below ground that, when honour requires it, she awaits her next resurrection.
*"Contagious fiction and contested fact"
The phrase comes from the recent LRB review of A Book of A Journey to a Room by Geoff Dyer.