The Effigy

One day in July, 1952, a man dressed in mourning appeared in a small town in the Chaco. Tall and thin, he was of Indian blood and his face had the stolid look of a fool or a mask; the townspeople treated him with respect, not for himself but for what he represented or now was. He chose a hut by the river, and, with the help of a few neighbours, set up a trestle table and on it placed a cardboard box containing a blonde doll. He and his helpers also lit four candles in tall candlesticks and laid flowers around them. A crowd quickly gathered. Inconsolable old women, wide-eyed children, and farmhands, who reverently took off their cork sun-hats, filed past the box, each saying, 'My sincerest condolences, General.' In great sorrow, the man sat at the head of the table, his fingers interlaced over his belly like a pregnant woman. Reaching out to shake the hands offered to him, he replied with fortitude and resignation, 'It was fate. Everything humanly possible was done.' A money tin received the two-peso fee, and many people felt the need to come more than once.

What sort of man, I wonder, could have dreamed up and carried out this lugubrious farce? A fanatic, a sad wretch, someone deluded, or an imposter and a cynic? Did he believe he was Perón when he played out the macabre role of the grieving widower? The story is scarcely credible but it did take place and perhaps not once but many times over, with different actors and in different places. Perfectly epitomising an unreal period, the tale is like the mirror-image of a dream or the play within the play that appears in Hamlet. The man in mourning was not Perón, and the blonde doll was not his wife Eva Duarte, but neither was Perón Perón nor Eva Eva. Rather, they were two obscure, anonymous people (whose secret names and real faces we do not know) who, to gain the gullible love of the shanty-towns, fashioned a crass mythology.

[1957]