Book Review : Magic and the Absurdities of History

The Peron Novel by Tomas Eloy Martinez; translated by Asa Zatz (Pantheon: $18.95; 335 pages)

“But that’s absurd!” in a more assured time, meant that a thing was not so and therefore of no consequence. Nowadays, absurd is what must be taken account of; in the affairs of state and the individual and, of course, in the arts. “Credo quia absurdum” is no longer a stretch but an easy reach.

Magic Realism, that fruitful Latin American innovation, is in a sense a new variation upon a literary absurdism that has been with us for most of this century. Because things are not what they seem, but faster, slower, sicker or wilder, an excursion into the phantasmagoric can convey more reality than a traditional description or dramatization.

Call a spade a spade and you ignore its subatomic constitution, the economic displacements caused by the fact that it is cheaper to import it from Korea, the threat that its owner, in despair over the possibility of nuclear annihilation or his children’s nebulous wanderings may use it to bash you over the head. Better call it, say, a moonlight petro-flyer.

Harder to Dig With

That, of course, can make it harder to dig with. Magic Realism, like other absurdist variants, elucidates our sense of disorientation, thus fulfilling the traditional literary role of giving us a name for our predicaments. It does not do much for the other traditional role of strengthening our legs to walk on. It will probably give way to other styles.

Meanwhile, it can tell us quite a lot. It certainly does in Tomas Eloy Martinez’s evocation of the bloody, disorienting and mysterious convulsion that began in Argentina when Juan Domingo Peron organized a military coup in 1943; that continued in his presence, his absence and after his death a dozen years ago; and that still may not be over.

By its title, “The Peron Novel” indicates the author’s approach. A biography is simply the surface of a deeper fiction. Martinez uses prodigious factual detail about Peron’s life and political career, and he employs real names and real characters. But he wires the spaces between the facts and in the no-man’s-land where warring political versions of the facts collide, with a fictional charge that transforms them.

Specific Historical Focus

Like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Martinez was originally a journalist. As a journalist, he interviewed Peron a number of times; and he even makes a small appearance in his own novel. Despite his use of facts, though, he has unquestionably turned from journalist into literary artist. The artistry is perhaps not on the level of Garcia Marquez’s, but in its more specific historical focus, it accomplishes some extraordinary and startling things.

The most striking of these is the setting from which he tells his story. In a sense, the setting is the story. After more than 15 years of exile in Madrid, Peron is preparing to return to Argentina where his protege, Hector Campora, has been permitted to fight and win an election by the armed forces, enfeebled and divided by a long spell of military rule and internal quarreling.

Campora is simply a Peronist pol. The real power lies with Peron. Or rather, because he is in his 70s, in poor health and with a wandering mind, it oscillates between him and his Madrid entourage, specifically, his manipulative witch doctor of a private secretary, Lopez Rega, and Peron’s second wife, Isabel, who is under Rega’s influence.

It is a web, but the web is more complex than that. Peronism in Argentina is split between right and left, and although Peron’s Madrid household is on the right, the old leader wavers. His return is expected to be a battle to see which side can claim him.

And finally, there are the generals who have temporarily suspended their war with the Peronists but keep a close eye on them. In a shadowy way, they are allied with the Rega faction but in a few years--Peron having died and Isabel Peron having become president--they will take power once more.

The book’s ostensible action covers only a few days. There are the last-minute travel preparations of the Peron household, visits from ambitious Argentine politicians, the presence of Campora who will escort the man who remains his boss even though he is president.

Reception and Clash

There are the preparations in Buenos Aires for a massive reception, with the leftist faction planning to hijack the ceremonies and the army and Rega agents preparing to massacre them. There is a bloody clash, Peron’s airplane is diverted to a second airport, the dispirited masses troop home, and the aged leader is reduced to making a fumbling address over television.

In a way, all this is background. The heart of the book consists of the efforts of Peron and Rega to finish their work on an autobiography. Rega has done the research and prepared a draft; it is for Peron to make corrections, add his personal touch or, as he puts it, “to insert myself.”

But they are at cross purposes. Rega wants a kind of whitewash gospel that he and Isabel can use to rule the Peronists once they are back in Argentina. Peron, rambling, contradicting himself, arguing, is trying to resist literary embalming. He objects to becoming a premature monument; he is, in fact, struggling to find out who he really was.

At one point, he objects to some detail, saying that his memory is failing and he is not certain. “It is not a matter of lapses of memory,” Rega retorts stiffly, “but of the inaccuracies of reality.” Reality must be shaped to suit the ambitions of this Jeeves-turned-megalomaniac.

Martinez’s portrait of Peron’s menage is the best thing in the book--it provides the mad energy that holds together the long retrospective history argued out between Rega’s draft and Peron’s musings.

The Madrid house is part gangster hangout, part witches coven. Rega is everywhere, advising Isabel on her last-minute shopping, swamped in telexes from his political agents in Argentina, plotting deaths and kidnapings. He browbeats Peron by quoting Paracelsus and performs a voodoo ceremony in the attic--where Eva Peron’s body lies embalmed--to transfer Eva’s fighting spirit to the prosaic Isabel.

All kinds of schemers and favor-seekers crowd in, meals are continually being served, messages arrive from Generalissimo Franco about a farewell ceremony. Campora, earnest, loyal and distrusted--Rega suspects him of being in the hands of the leftists--hangs around, alternately summoned and snubbed.

A Dying Man’s Memories

And there is Peron, speaking what in effect are a dying man’s memories; asserting himself and slipping away, blurring and coming back into focus. And struggling with alternative versions of his rise to power from a hard childhood in the cold southern plateaus through the brutal indoctrination of military school, the schemings of his years as a staff colonel and military theorist, the coup that put his group into power and his discovery of Evita and his own power to arouse the masses.

He is slipping away, into the hands of Rega and the others who want his legend more than they want the man. There is a splendid absurdist reversal near the end. He calls in Campora and issues a set of startling commands. Argentina, he says, is a country in love with death. So Campora must name future Argentine cities after military defeats. And he must put up a statue to Gen. Lonardi, leader of the 1955 coup that ousted Peron.

Martinez is stunningly successful in setting this dissolving man against the power that has now turned into a dream, and against the terrible, bloody schemes of those for whom power is still life and not a dream yet.

The household comes brilliantly into its demented focus. As for the history, much of it is fascinating. The weakest parts of the book are the scenes in Buenos Aires. The conspiracies, riots and activities of the death squads are told in a hasty and jumbled fashion, and the characters are caricatures.

Some of the detail protrudes inertly from its fictional wrappings and seems excessive. Martinez the journalist has not been entirely absorbed, here and there, by Martinez the artist.

The English version is marred by a translation that is accurate but graceless. The effort to capture the oddly intimate tone of Argentine Spanish produces some non-idiomatic peculiarities. When Peron changes horses, we get, “Juan passed to the mare.” On a hot day, “The sun had uncorked 122 degrees.” And when Campora is to be shown a number of prized Peron mementos, it is in order to “open the pores of his noodle.”