Archive of Our Own

"Eva, you are dying."

Perhaps some part of her had always known that she would be devoured by her own treacherous body.  Back in her days of social climbing, she had chosen her targets cannily, but she had always known that one faulty rung was all it would take to end up throttled in the gutters come morning, just one more regrettable story of a backstreet girl gone wrong taking up an inch or two of column space on the back page of La Prensa.  Once Juan became President, the perils came from her unabashed love of luxury, the almost carnal delight she took in the physical pleasures of her new lifestyle.  She revelled in the cool softness of silk against her skin, in the tickle of furs against her neck, in how the cut of a diamond in her bracelet threw a scattering of refracted light like stars across her face.  Her tongue, long accustomed to the delicate sweetness of an alfajor and the sparkle of a Mendoza Cereza, acclimated itself to more decadent imports: bittersweet chocolates from Belgium, subtle Sauvignon Blancs from the Loire Valley.  She remembered the unsmiling soldiers who had arrested Juan, the cold glint of the guns in their arms; she had always known she was only one bad recession or public corruption scandal from staring down those steel muzzles.  And so she wrapped herself in her finery and greeted the crowds with the smile of a fairytale princess, dazzling from head to toe, keeping up appearances as the money rolled in and out.  If she must inevitably face the wolves, she would make sure they ate out of her hand until the moment they went for her throat, and she would take her pound of flesh from them in their turn first.

Somehow, though, she had never anticipated that her body would betray her in quite this way.  She had never been able to contemplate growing old, not when she was still so young and lunged at life at all times ready for the next fight.  But neither had she ever imagined dying from something as quotidian as illness.  Eva Duarte de Perón was meant to depart the earth in a blaze of glory, a comet streaking prophetically against the darkness from which she had emerged.  If she had slipped her hand into the public purse now and again for her own vanity, perhaps it was not only because she felt she had earned it, but also because she would rather provoke fate and face the consequences infamously, than do something so banal as fade quietly away into obscurity.  She had never relished the concept of aging, even as she felt her knees protest more and more as she climbed the staircases of the Quinta de Olivos, even as the first telltale gray hairs made their presence known at the roots of her blonde corona.  Now, she felt the pillows behind her head, solid and yet insubstantial, and she let her vision drift in and out of focus at the features of the hospital room around her: white walls with the paint flaking at the edge of the door frame, a window with a latch and panes wiped nearly clean that was framed by dense, no-nonsense curtains.  No amount of staring would allow her to see the masses spreading viciously throughout her body, without malice, without intent, without mercy.  Well, she always had grasped at life with a dangerous eagerness, destroyed and dominated where she was not readily accepted, tried to be everywhere at once and bigger than the one life she had been granted.  Perhaps she should not have been overly surprised that her own cells operated along the same principles.

"Eva?"

She would not let herself look at Juan, not now, not when she had failed him so utterly.  They both were keenly aware of how they propped each other up, delicately, precariously, like a pair of playing cards tented as sharply as the slopes of the Pyramid at the center of the Plaza de Mayo.  They were two edges of one sharp stab at destiny, his power and her popularity pressed into a force that would wedge itself forever into the dense pages of Argentine history.  When she felt his arms slip under her own on the ballroom floors, as structure, as support, she felt not just sinew and muscle overlaying bone, but the coolness of gun barrels and the round turrets of tanks, inarguable, unsentimental.  When he unzipped the backs of her dresses hours later on those evenings, she knew he saw not the smooth flesh of the actress adored by all, but the body politic of Argentina itself, the hopes and dreams and aspirations of millions bundled into the smiles and sighs that she fed her public on the screen and her lover in his bed.

It was not a romance in any sense that the poets would have understood.  The poets might have understood the thrill, the excitement, but they all imagined love as something irrational and sometimes foolishly selfless.  Love as something messy and indecipherable; love as something wild and divine; these were the ways in which the poets wrote of love in the whirlwind nights of Buenos Aires, when a delicious sort of despair quietly rippled beneath the reflection of the star-drenched heavens on the Río de la Plata, when the air throbbed achingly with the intercourse of accordion and piano and double bass.  (These were the ways in which the poets continued to write of love, longing for the familiar from the pained removal of exile.)  It was not romance by the poets' definition, but a canny transaction itself held a certain electrifying rush.  She had never been a convincing actress in any setting or genre, but with Juan she had never needed to act.  They, clear-sighted and calm, had had the measure of each other from the start, the fate of a people clasped in the press of one palm against another in the moments before the music began.

And now he sat here by her bedside, both of them knowing the dance was up.  He was wringing his hands as if torn between keeping them in his lap and reaching out to take one of her own, infinitely more hesitant than he had been the night they had met and she had first invited him to use her, with the tacit understanding that he would allow her to use him in return.  Now, with the thread of her own utility burnt nearly to its clip, the calculated certainties with which they had always approached each other, assessed each other, likewise had suddenly vanished into thin air.  She thought suddenly of his first wife, who also had been devoured alive by cancer when not much older than her successor.  Juan had survived that loss, and he would survive this one, as well.  The question then was where he would survive.  Would he wander the rooms of the Casa Rosada with his footsteps echoing in the silence against the marble chessboard beneath his feet, weary expression reflected in the glossy surfaces of conference tables, pressing on without her star quality shimmering across the gilded pilasters of the Salón Blanco, his feet marching diligently across the parquet and the expansive carpets like the soldier he had always been?  Or, without her adamancy anchoring him to Buenos Aires, would he flee across the border to Paraguay as he had threatened in those early days of October 1945, before his forced resignation and arrest, before the crowds that amassed on the Plaza de Mayo on Loyalty Day paved the way to his presidency?  The imperturbable rattle of a machine gun and a delirious flurry of loud applause held nearly the same rhythm, she knew; once the latter had been stripped away, the former would roar all the louder.  As they transferred her weak body into a car, weighted and hapless as luggage, she wondered vaguely what he would carry with him when the inevitable occurred.

The staircase of the Quinta de Olivos loomed before her, previously a nuisance, now unscalable.  She braced her hands against the arms of her wheelchair, ready to grit her teeth against the pain, to cling to the bannister as she pulled herself to her bedroom step by laborious step.  But to her surprise, Juan lifted her in his arms and began to carry her up the stairs, no doubt aided by how little of her was left to carry.  Their union had always been far too pragmatic to accommodate whimsy, and never once had either of them imagined he would carry her across any threshold like a bride.  But now she wrapped her arms limply around his neck and curled into his chest, less like a lover than like an exhausted child, suddenly regretting that she had ever locked her bedroom door against him for the petty thrill of proving she could.  At first she thought he was sweating from the mild exertion of carrying her, but after a moment, she realized that the dampness she felt when she pressed her forehead against his shoulder was because he was weeping, silently, so that no one but she would ever know.  He must love me, she thought, dazed, though she knew that his tears might just as well be for his own future.  Still, she tightened her embrace ever so slightly and closed her eyes and, for just this brief moment away from the scrutiny of the cameras and the cheers of the public, allowed herself to believe.