Santa Evita, Liquid Sun

"Evita was a liquid sun, the arrested flame of a volcano."

Purgation. Catharsis. Martyrdom. Primordial mythology. Celestial motherhood. Drained. Emptied. Bled dry. Burned out. And yet liquified and relit. Tomás Eloy Martínez's Santa Evita is a genre-bender of hagiographic proportions that details the afterlife of Eva Perón in the embodiment of her embalmed corpse and its disappearance, duplications, and disrupted (re)burials. Martínez writes,

"The embalmer's account was glowing. He maintained that after the injections and the fixatives, Evita's skin had turned taut and young... Through her arteries there flowed a current of formaldehyde, paraffin, and zinc chloride. The whole body gave off a delicate aroma of almonds and lavender. The Colonel could not keep his eyes off the photographs that showed an ethereal, ivory-colored creature, possessed of a beauty that made a person forget all the other felicities of the universe... The transparencies of the body gave off a liquid light, immune to changes of humidity, storms, and the devastations of ice and heat."

In her inorganic liquified state, Evita becomes emblazoned with the hopes of the descamisados who project their dreams, their poverty, their hardships, and their futures onto her larger-than-life lifeless body, and in so doing, Eva Perón manifests that which Teresa of Avila spoke of the transcendence and dignity of personhood and that which Martínez quotes in his novel/(auto)biography/historical account/political expose: "Person is light that no one can reach. The less I understand, the more I believe." Throughout the text, Martínez likens Evita to primordial light forces: "Evita was a liquid sun, the arrested flame of a volcano"; "Touching Evita was touching the stars"; and "In Argentina she is still the Cinderalla of television serials, the nostalgia for having been what we never were, the woman with the whip, the celestial mother." It is through this celestial language that the notion of primordial femininity; the fluidity of memory; and the mythology of the self, nationhood, and saintliness intersect. 

The reliquary objectification of her body (the embalmed canary that Evita gifts Dr. Campora...the lipstick mark that she leaves on a champagne glass an an evening gala...the 1936 bottle of Gomenol that Evita used to clear her nasal passages...the locks of Evita's cut hair...her incorruptible corpse) makes her destroyed and yet paradoxically replicated, unearthed, relocated, and reburied, lost and discovered, hidden and forgotten, proclaimed and denied, touched, fetishized, and projected. Martínez writes beautifully and hauntingly, and it is one novel to which I often return for poetry, imagery, and contemporary mythology as it blurs the lines between fact and fiction, history and legend, mythology and prophecy. Thank you Dr. Carrasco for recommending this gorgeous book!