Jose Paz Tomb
She had her moments…she had some style, the best show in town was the crowd outside the Casa Rosada crying ‘Eva Peron’…but that’s all gone now.
But who is this Santa Evita, why all this howling hysterical sorrow?
When I learned we were coming to Buenos Aires, I knew there was one place I had to go, one set of footsteps I had to walk in, at least some of the way.
I can’t vouch a fascination or obsession with Evita, but I’ve always found her a curious figure. I’m one of those people who does a lot of research on the background of the shows I play in, even when they’re am-dram productions. Years ago, longer ago than I care to think about now, I was in an AmDram production of Evita. One of the last shows I did in my hometown, and, in fact, one of the last shows I was in at all before I went ship-side. In a lot of ways that production changed large portions of my life – but that’s another story. The point is, the research I had to do with it, also sparked a vague interest in the woman who inspired it.
Eva beware your ambitions
They told her.
Risen to passionate heady heights by her mid-twenties, dead by the age of 33. Evita is a legend, she always will be. Despite many things.
When you stand in front of the Casa Rosada and stare at the balconies, you can almost here the cheers of the people who once stood in front of them. The past echoing back over the hustle and bustle and traffic of the present.
The Perons were not good people. At least, Juan Peron was not, he was a dictator, quite likely of the worst kind. Evita, with her love for the poor and her schooling projects (no one ever questions where the funding may have come from), and her ‘rainbow energy’ cushioned and countered that.
Which is why when you walk the streets of Recoletta cemetery today, and eventually make your way to the Duarte family tomb – as nearly everyone who walks those cracked pavements does – you still find flowers woven into the gate. Evita is long dead, but she lives still…an odd irony. A mystery wrapped in an enigma that is so intertwined with popular culture and mythology that the truth of the woman behind the myth may never come to light, or if it does, it may not be believed.
None the less, I made the treck. And it was not Evita’s tomb that stayed with me as I did 
so. The Duarte family monument is actually very simple in comparison to the others, flush to the rest of the edifices that sit alongside it, it is simple black marble, with a series of plaques that denote the presence of its most famous resident. Evita herself, or what’s left of her mortal shell, is interred in a coffin well below the surface. One of the cemetary’s only underground internments…
Recolleta is unlike anything I have ever experienced. Canada does not usually lean towards above ground burials. While we have a few mausoleums in our older cemetery, for the most part, our dead are interred beneath the earth. Recolleta however, is a city of the dead, streets of mausoleums looking over blocks of cracked pavement. Some perfectly maintained and some worn to the point where it seems that ivy would take over them in a moment if given the chance. Huge angels flank black marble, their massive wings seeming about to lift off to heaven. A stone mother holds two children to her breast, her eyes weeping tears that have been worn onto the stone by age.
You walk down those streets as you would those of any neighborhood; only no one living is behind the doors in this city. It speaks in its very silence. You step through the gates, and despite the fact that you can see the tops of the buildings of the rest of the city, once you are inside this city of the dead; the outside world simply ceases to exist. You feel as if the silent white streets could go on forever and you may never find your way back to the world you know.
You find yourself wondering if you want to return to that world, what you might learn if you chose not to.
The cemetery does have living residents of a sort. Cats. Dozens of them, lazing on the warm tiles of the streets, curled up in the shade provided by the perfectly carved monuments. One was even asleep at the feet of a long dead general. They’re well cared for, apparently there is a group of women who come to feed them and look after them. They seem quite happy there, representatives of the world of the living in the world of the dead.
I could have spent hours there. It’s odd really, the last time I spent time in a graveyard I looked much more like I fit in there…but that’s neither here nor there, and is a story for another time and another place.