My Conversations with Eva Péron

I laid the LP on the turntable and dropped the needle. The familiar scratch of the vinyl disc hit my ears before the mastery of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s first bars filled the air. The hairs on my arms stood on end as the death of María Eva Duarte de Perón was announced in a cinema in Buenos Aires. Operatic voices rang out with Requiem for Evita, their intensity rising as the seconds ticked by.

At sixteen, I was captivated. I dared move, my breathing shallow as I listened to the words Tim Rice so eloquently put to his collaborator's melodies.

I’m auditory. Sound speaks to me more than anything else. My love language is words of affirmation. So if you can whisper sweet nothings in my ear with passion, you have my attention. Tim and Andrew were whispering sweet somethings, transporting me to the streets of Buenos Aires as the character Ché lamented how his country has gone overboard mourning the loss of the icon.

Oh what a circus, oh what a show, Argentina has gone to town , over the death of an actress called Eva Perón.

We’ve all gone crazy . Mourning all day and mourning all night , falling over ourselves to get all of the misery right.

— Lyrics by Tim Rice

For one hundred and three minutes and five seconds, I was entranced, stopping only long enough to flip the album to the B-side and then laying the second on the turntable in the family room of my childhood home.

My eyes flew over the words in the libretto as I followed along with the story, listening intently to the life of the woman lovingly known as Evita by her fellow Argentinians.

There was something about this woman that made me feel a kinship. But why? Our lives couldn’t have been more different.

Evita spent her childhood in abject poverty in Junín in Buenos Aires province. Her father, a wealthy rancher with two families — not uncommon in rural Argentina at the time — deserted the family (his second) when Eva was just a year old.

They were stigmatized and isolated due to the abandonment and left to fend for themselves. When Eva was six, her father died, but due to their status as the forgotten ones, they were not permitted to attend the funeral, and the little girl was unable to say goodbye to the man she adored.

I, on the other hand, grew up in apartheid South Africa in an upper-middle-class family with all the privileges it afforded. My parents stayed married until my father died recently at the age of eighty-nine. I had fifty years with him and was right by his side to say goodbye.

Our family was respected and revered due to my father’s position in the community through his work and extensive volunteer commitments. I was given every opportunity to further myself.

The only thing Eva Perón and I had in common was that we were both born in the Southern Hemisphere to descendants of Western European immigrants and the black sheep of our respective families.

I still felt connected.

I listened to the 1976 recording again and again, falling more in love with the activist, philanthropist, and advocate for the working class with each drop of the needle.

I needed more. I needed to know more. I bought her biography, Eva Peron by Alicia Dujovne Ortiz, and consumed it. I wasn’t much of a reader in those days so that was significant.

The more I learned, the further away I spiralled from the character Ché’s point of view. There was no circus, no show. The mourning for the woman who meant everything to the downtrodden, the poverty-stricken, the forgotten people of post-war Argentina was real.

For over thirty years, I respected and admired the South American icon, not paying her much attention in my daily life but always knowing she was there within me.

The meeting

Thirty-four years after our first encounter, I finally got a chance to visit her as I made my way to Buenos Aires.

Exhausted from the epic twenty-four-hour bus trip that had carried me from Tôrres in South Brazil to Argentina’s capital, the first place I headed was Casa Rosada. The pink palatial mansion is located at the end of Avenida de Mayo, one of the city’s most famous streets, connecting the Congreso De La Nación Argentina, the office of the vice-president, to Casa Rosada, the office of the president.

As I’m not drawn to politics, this fact was of no interest to me. I desperately needed to see the balcony where my beloved Evita delivered her famous speech to the Descamisados on October 17, 1951, after her husband, Juan Perón, became president.

While the words penned by Tim Rice in the famous hit song, Don’t Cry For Me Argentina, do not remotely emulate Eva’s actual speech on that spring day, it was his words that echoed in my head as I basked in the energy of the columned terrace floating above me.

And as for fortune, and as for fame , I never invited them in , though it seemed to the world they were all I desired.

They are illusions, they’re not the solutions they promised to be, the answer was here all the time. I love you, and hope you love me.

Don’t cry for me, Argentina.

— Lyrics by Tim Rice

And so I looked up and thanked Eva Perón for all she had done, for the woman she had become, for the activist and advocate she was, and for the impact she had made on me.

Saying goodbye

A few weeks later, I made my way to Recoleta Cemetery to see Evita’s final resting place. After wandering down row after row of remarkable tombs and graves, many housing the remains of some of Argentina’s most notable people, I saved the best for last.

I’m not sure what I expected exactly, but it was definitely different from the black marble tomb I found as I snuck down the narrow aisle leading to the famous mausoleum.

I felt a sense of reverence as I approached. There were a few people crowded around honouring the remarkable benefactor. As I slowly took in the site, running my eyes over the myriad of plaques on either side of the iron door, a Korean woman asked me why this memorial was so important. I answered her questions, only too happy to do my part in raising awareness of Evita.

With red flowers lovingly laid at the gravesite, I spent a few silent moments paying respect to the woman I truly admire. I prayed for her soul and thanked her again for all she had done for her people and me.

As one plaque says, she is eternally in the heart, and another states, “Do not cry for me, lost or far away. I am an essential part of your existence.”

Two decades separated Eva’s death and my birth. There are over 5,000 miles between the place where she took her last breath and the hospital room where I took my first, but it all means nothing when you feel connected to another soul.

As a woman, an immigrant, an advocate, and a seeker, I honour the heroine I will never meet.

To convince oneself that one has the right to live decently takes time. — Evita.

Please feel free to buy me a coffee if you like what you read.