Maman was extremely well informed of everything in Buenos Aires. There was no news of any event , occurrence, rumor, demonstration, strike, coup, gas shortage, electricity outage, foul or fair-weather warning, cholera epidemic, potable water warning, thunderstorm, rainstorm, monsoon, locust invasion, malaria case, real estate transaction, school scandal, typhoid outbreak, kidnapping or attempted kidnapping, scandal in a prominent society couple, bribe of a well-known official, threat to a diplomat’s family, election pending, or plain gossip including from the Presidential residence, the Quinta Presidencial in Olivos and the Casa Rosada, news about the presidential family, the Perons, Juan Evita and Isabelita, that wouldn’t reach Maman’s ears. She knew about just about everything.
Though the former Argentine dictator Peron had been exiled to Spain decades before the current Argentine President Lanusse laid the way for his return to power in 1972. His third wife Isabelita Peron took the power when he died in 1974 and chaos ruled until she lost the reins to a military coup in 1976 when the military Junta established the government of the hour. There was violence and unrest, and many people died when Peron’s plane was supposed to land at Ezeiza and the left and the right started shooting at each other, while the plan had been for him to land at a military airport at Moron in the first place.
No one we knew wanted Peron back in power it seemed, and yet if you went into the kitchen on a night when they were washing up after a late dinner when all the plates had been cleared and the guests had their coffees candies and cigarettes in the great room, if you went to say goodnight to Mario and Adela and Raul who would be washing up to help Ada who had cooked the meal, you would hear Peron coming from the radio. He would be on one of his tears, though he was now leaning towards the right and aligning himself with the military as opposed to his past affiliations with the left and the labor unions before he had to leave the country.
Everyone but Ada and Mr. Lenci whose son had already gone missing well before the word disappeared came into use, would listen attentively, though neither Ada nor Oscar de Lenci said a word against Peron’s speech or the man at all, or his form of government. It was just written on their faces, the unspeakable horror of the Peronist regime. Maman said some of the Sanchez Elias and Zuberbuhlers along with other Argentine first family members had found themselves jailed for not supporting Peron, and Peron came along to take what you had built up for yourself in the city and in the country at your estancia or business.
The others in the kitchen including the Three Marias if they were still at the house on Juncal at night helping with the dinner parties, listened with a kind of breathless rapture to his bold phrases and bombastic statements that always held up the plight of the poor and the working classes as the message of hope. Peron seemed to think he was a fine fellow and yet although he had a popular base there was no real support from the left or the right the second time around.
Politics and the price of a kilo of bread let alone the galloping inflation were on people’s minds, and you will find that in Argentina we love to talk, and we could not get through the day without it. Conversation is in fact a national pastime.
~Como estan las cosas? was a favorite porteno phrase whenever you were out and about and going anywhere in town. If you had a thousand peso note for every time you heard it you’d be rich at the end of a day. Whenever you were talking to anyone you could get started with How are things? This would begin almost any conversation on a good start with complaints and commentary on the conditions of the country being endless, and about any and all the problems besetting the Republic of Argentina in the 1970s. Antique dealers and taxi drivers seemed to have the most accurate information and the most up to date.
Maman asked about and heard people talk about their lives and the history of the country which interested her no end, she heard the particulars of each family history and how and when they had made their way from rural provincias to the federal capital. and how these times had come about. She did not judge people with almost no time spent in school beyond the first grades who shared with her their sincere admiration for Juan and Eva Peron. She didn’t persuade them to try to think otherwise; she gave practical and emotional support, and she went to great lengths to help their families, in particular their children’s wellbeing and education. She was very adamant about helping with all her heart, and she made a difference wherever she could, and was loved well beyond the time she lived in Buenos Aires and Cordoba and she is still remembered by the people who loved her.
Maman was fascinated by the myth the rumors and stories about Evita as we all were. Peron’s first wife had come to Buenos Aires from the provinces and as an actress and radio star met and captivated Peron when he was just rising to power. Maman said that she had heard that Eva Duarte had worked for Aristotle Onassis who was the Greek shipping magnate who also ran all the night life in Buenos Aires, and owned every restaurant bar and club, but that was all that she had heard. She was not without admiration for Evita, maybe not her politics, but who she was as a woman and the bigger than life role she played in the world Maman did not scoff at.
Eva Duarte Peron
Our housekeeper Ada de Lenci’s husband Oscar left the house on Juncal every morning to go to his shoe atelier in another part of the city. The de Lencis had an apartment in Palermo Viejo they never went back to, and as it turns out the son they mentioned as if casually had been taken by the military because he was a union member, and had remained disappeared, and so they liked the security of living in the house with our family despite the drama. Their son had been taken and they had no news though they never spoke of it and Maman told me never to bring it up to them unless they did and to make no comment if they did.
Though Ada and Oscar de Lenci were exiles in their own city, hiding from the savage squads, it was to the other workers in the household who came from the Villas Miserias in and around the federal capital Buenos Aires that Maman turned her undivided attention, Though she took no part in organized charities as she had in New York City at The Junior League, The Lighthouse for the Blind, Kips Bay, Saint James Church, she now engaged on a daily basis with people she cared about and whose lives she wanted to leave better than she found them.
She was the matriarch of a family that in Buenos Aires included Raul the porter, Mario the butler, Adela the cook, Las Tres Marias, Nuno the chauffer, Manuel the fulltime guardaespalda or bodyguard, and a changing guard of off duty policemen. She learned of their situations and became aware of and acquainted with the daily details of their struggles, she learned in detail their family histories and the current situations. She immersed herself in their conversations when they talked about politics and what was happening in the country, about their hopes for themselves and their children and about the great country Argentina had been in the past, and how she was in the present, and how they wanted her to be in the future.
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If her passion betrayed her true heart Evita would have been a far stronger president than her husband as you can see from her words below in a speech she gave to the workers she called the descamisados, or people who’ve got no shirt on, and maybe like Langston Hughes calling the people of Haiti the shoeless ones. Evita as the people named her was loved and adored by millions which made her a threat to the status quo. After she died at the age of 33 of cancer her body disappeared for 17 years, and that is the closing line of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s smash Broadway hit Evita!
Juan Peron and Eva Duarte Peron ~Evita
My beloved descamisados: Today is a day of many emotions for me. With all my soul I wanted to be with you and Peron on this glorious day of the descamisados. I can’t ever miss this October 17 appointment with my people. I assure you that no one or nothing could ever prevent me from coming, because I have a sacred debt to Peron and all of you, to the workers, to the boys of the CGT, to the descamisados and the people. And it doesn’t matter to me if I have to leave shred of my life along the way in order to repay it…Remain faithful to Perón as you've been until today, because this means being loyal to the Fatherland and loyal to yourselves. And to all the descamisados of the interior, I hold them closely, so very closely to my heart, and want them to know how much I love them.
~From Eva Peron’s Speech To The Descamisados, Buenos Aires, 1951
How beautifully you capture the breathlessness of that time, the dread and disillusionment. Nicely done!