A Powerless Eva Peron

...A Powerless Eva Peron La Presidenta By Lois Gould Linden 349 pp $13 95 Reviewed by Elisabeth Jakab Senior editor, G P Putnam, editorial adviser, "Book Forum " With a hit Broadway musical, a television movie, a documentary film, several biographies, and now Lois Gould's novel to her credit, Eva Peron appears to be spawning a media industry similar to the one engendered by Adolf Hitler She has become the evil Cinderella of the 20th century No fairy godmother graced her with a glorious ball gown, though, nor did a handsome pnnce come searching for her, glass slipper in hand She had to do it all by herself Spurred on by a childhood of poverty and degradation, she slept her way, not to true love, but into power Lately power has become a legitimate word to link with women Indeed, a desire for the financial autonomy it represents, for eliminating dependence on the men in her life, may well be the dirty little secret motivating many a "modern" woman Whether this striving will eventually produce a change in the way the world is run remains to be seen What is evident is the proliferation of popular romantic novels sympathetically portraying females who make their own fortunes Such bestsellers as Elizabeth Hailey's A Woman of Independent Means and Barbara Taylor Bradford's A Woman of Substance carry a message in their very titles Robert Elegant's Dynasty has the immensely wealthy protagonist surviving both husband and lover, and, at the age of 80, indirectly effecting a rapprochement between China and the United States The next dainty step forward clearly should be into the public arena, and Lois Gould would seem ideal for accomplishing it Her previous novels have revolved around women struggling toward self-actuahzation In Such Good Friends a widow has the added burden of coping with the discovery of her late husband's affairs The two sisters in Necessary Objects, heirs to a huge fortune, are still exploited by the men m their lives A woman writer and her psychiatrist husband achieve a stand-off acceptable to each of them in Final A nalysis With/1 Sea-Change Gould shifted into a fantasy about a woman who becomes a "man " Power is the trail Gould has been following, and the progression to Eva Peron is a logical one The epigraph to La Presidenta, a long quotation from Jorge Luis Borges, serves notice that the novelist intends to bend the facts to her own purposes "The story is incredible, but it happened, and perhaps not once but manv times, with different actors in different locales Neither was Peron Peron, nor was Eva Eva They were, rather, unknown individuals who acted out, for the credulous love of the lower middle classes, a crass mythology" U n fortunately, however, Gould is more the handmaiden ot the tale than its perpetrator, the Perons' "crass mythology" proves to be beyond her powers of imaginative remterpretation Never does one forget that this is the Eva Peron figure, or Juan Peron, or Isabel, or the itinerant actor with whom Eva came to Buenos Aires, etc The few variations that are managed do not amount to much Gould strains for a grandness of tone without achieving it Thus the book begins "From this angle, with her foot resting lightly on the surface of the water, you might take her for some pale ornamental giant-killer, gracefully poised on the neck of her prey " The foot belongs to Maria Blanca (Isabel Peron) who is lounging by a pool Servants are being insolent to her in small ways she feels she cannot rationally complain about Thewaterinthepoohstoocold, the gardener is watering the wrong flowers, the bird of paradise is dying, and her breakfast is scorched The longed-for influence she thought she acquired with her marriage to General Montero (Juan Peron) four months earlier is evanescing Why this is happening just as she and Montero are preparing to return to Pradera (Argentina) and take over is not altogether clear Moreover, Blanca does not appear to have much stomach for power in the first place In any event, they are awaiting the arrival of the newly exhumed body of La Seflora (Maria Rosa Andu-jar—Eva Peron), dead these past 14 years As the history of Rosa Andujar unfolds, Maria Blanca's moments are interspersed irregularly as a mewling counterpoint Blanca frets about looking just right, and constantly feels sorry for herself because the General is less supportive than she would like Only near the end, in an account of her first meeting with Montero, is something of her charisma revealed "When she began to move, he felt a change in the air, as if a door had opened It was the girl who had wrought the change, she seemed to evolve as she moved, into a higher form of body, of being " But positioned very late, this insight carries little weight Rosa Andujar so dominates the book that Blanca and even the General are reduced to virtual supporting players, and the rest of the cast to supernumeraries in a steamy operetta Ultimately, La Presidenta is the story of a sexually abused child who spars relentlessly with her tormentors for their power without ever quite managing to grasp it The youngest of four illegitimate children, eight-year-old Rosa is raped by her natural father and then by a boarder in her mother's house The local priest gets her with child when she is 11 It is an ectopic pregnancy, she aborts and nearly dies Rosa not only becomes infertile, she never has her "courses,' as menstruation is quaintly labelled The consequent medical complications will conveniently contribute to her death Throughout her brief adulthood, she remains essentially "the mho perdido, the child who is lost " Her older sisters, rounder and riper, are approached by potential husbands Clever, skinny little Rosa arouses the passions of pedophiles This waifish quality and her manipulative gifts make her the perfect mate for the aspiring dictator Montero, who prefers oral sex with younger women, girls, or even boys Montero confides to Rosa on their first rendezvous that as a child he witnessed the power of the dead over the living at his two-year-old brother's funeral Propped up in a small chair in the local tavern, the corpse had such a popular wake that his mother rented out the body for the next three nights The general realized that it was not his dead brother who was to be envied, but rather the tavern owner, whose profits had been so handsomely increased Rosa shivers The general (then a colonel) fancies she reminds him of someone, but he cannot quite remember whom When Montero much later decides to have Rosa's imminent death hastened, he observes, "One may hold a dead bird to one's ear, and still hear its song The song of thepdjaro muerto—sin duda, it is the most beautiful " Betrayed by everyone around her, the dying Rosa is delivered into the hands of the doctor who will eventually perform miracles of embalming upon her As he ministers to her pain and takes his pleasure on her body, he thinks that "each of the fingers must be bound with a fine string, and the toes as well Otherwise the nails would part from the flesh in the black salt bath of 70 days " The doctor is the "last asesino, the last assassin," the last child molester Though Gould renders these incidents with a certain force, left in the lurch is any depiction of the nation's agony The intrigues among the generals, industrialists, labor leaders, and politicians function merely as an elaborately concocted background to the working out of Rosa's dismal sexual destiny Standard underdeveloped-country unrest is tidily trotted out "On the docks and in the factorias, men began to march, carrying signs of their anger, demanding more of pay and more of justice There would be no more es-clavos, no Pradereno slaves to be sold cheap to the foreign men of business " It's a little like peering behind the flats that are supposed to represent a real frontier town while a Western is being filmed Gould's diction does not help to repair this impression The book often reads as if it were an awkward translation from Spanish We are subjected to "the makers of trouble in the street," " nibbling an egg of the devil with a stuffing of el caviar,"'' ladies of the show business," "he was a financial partner of silence, asitissaid," "the figure of profit,' "the claim of insurance," "acertain private fund of trust " Then there are the society ladies on diets of el baby beef and ensaladas of exotic plants The liberal sprinkling of Spanish throughout, apparently intended to enhance the flavor of this linguistic stew, simply reinforces the suspicion that one is reading a poor imitation Perhaps the style was meant to capture something of the feeling and the sweep of such writers as Gabriel Gar-cia-Marquez or Borges It doesn't Instead, we experience the story through several layers of gauze Lois Gould is a writer of considerable gifts, but they are not successfully deployed in La Presidenta...