Madonna Clothed in the Sun

“I hate you. I need you to know that I hate you.” She repeated, passing the brush through the hair of her rival. 

“I didn’t want you to come back. I kept telling him that there was no point looking for you, you know? I thought you were gone forever.” She’d been telling this exact story for four months now. 

Isabel didn’t know what she expected. Eva died in 1952. It was 1972 now, and 20 years living as a corpse has a tendency to limit one’s ability to respond to questioning, no matter how many demands you make. Eva just stood there, propped up in the living room, erected in her own space between the flowers and the lamp. Kissing her on the cheek, Isabel rose and examined her craftsmanship. Neither Isabel nor Eva had seen Argentina since 1955. Everyday Isabel would comb through what remained of the hair, ‘so it wouldn’t tangle’ as her husband would say. It would be more accurate to describe him as ‘their’ husband, she supposed. ‘So it won’t tangle.’ She heard the way he talked to Eva, the whispers at night when he thought she was asleep. She knew that when you married a widower you could never replace the dead wife and she accepted that this was part of the deal, what she did not expect, however, was that one of those dead wives would come back.

 

If any of her husband’s dead wives had to come back, she would have preferred Aurelia, she could compete with Aurelia. Aurelia was nice, Aurelia never had the tenacity that Eva did. She never had the doggedness to share the stage with anyone, let alone Juan. When Aurelia died, Juan cried, when Eva died, she became a saint. ‘Will someone brush my hair when I die?’ Isabel wondered, ‘the wife of a failed despot, living in exile, tasked with protecting his darling queen. I deserve better than to be remembered as the also-ran in this house.’ She bit through with the brush. The extra pressure against the knots in Eva’s hair and Isabel’s patience.

 Sometimes, when there was no one around, Isabel would respond to her own questions, mimicking Eva’s voice. It wasn’t an accurate impression; she couldn’t remember if she’d ever actually heard her speak. She was so much younger than Eva and Eva had died so long ago. She did this impression because she was certain her husband did too. Anyway, what would the harm be? She was the one who had to groom and dress her every day, she was the one expected to set a place for her at the dining table, she was Eva’s master and companion. She didn’t think of it as ventriloquism, that would be far too vulgar. She reasoned it was more like a game, something more akin to a child’s imaginary tea party than a mockery of the dead. Eva had been through enough. All of those months on public display before being buried, dug up, transported across continents, re-buried, re-exhumed, and transported yet again. It must have been exhausting. Here she was though, ensuring one last intercession on Earth. On whose behalf that intercession was for, Isabel was unsure.

“I don’t think you hate me Isabel. You always say it, but you never really mean it.” Whispered Eva.

“What was that?”

“You don’t hate me. I definitely don’t hate you. We can’t hate each other, we need each other.” She repeated from behind pursed lips. Isabel had wondered what the difference between speaking to Eva and speaking to a manikin. There was something about getting to talk to Eva Peron though. She was the great mother of a nation, she liberated a whole sex and a whole class, even as a love rival and an embalmed corpse, there was still a trembling Isabel felt every time she heard the name of the woman who stood before her so beautiful and so unkillable.

“What do you mean we need each other? We share a husband, but we don’t owe each other anything.”

“Don’t we?”

Isabel paused before exhaling. She wasn’t quite sure what Eva was implying. 

“First there was Aurelia, then there was me, and now there’s you. We’re all part of this thing. This political dynasty revolving around one man.”

“Well, I suppose that’s just how life is. He loved Aurelia but she died. He loved you and you died. And now he loves me.” She paused in the face of the uncertain end she’d produced for herself. “I don’t think any of us really have anything in common beyond that. I don’t think there’s anything strange about it, that’s the way life goes.” Isabel said, running her hands over Eva’s dress, hoping to smooth it out a little. “It’s the way men are, they recover. Especially men like Juan, great men.”

“He had me lobotomised.” Eva said, the dryness of this statement, the emotionless cadence of her speech rang percussive in Isabel’s mind. 

“That’s just a rumour.” Isabel responded; she knew it couldn’t have been true. She knew her husband and he wasn’t capable of doing such a thing.

“You know he could have though. Even if it was just a rumour, we both know he could if he wanted to.”

Eva was right, Isabel knew Eva was right. No amount of rearranging the flowers would cast away the mildew of doubt which had entered the room and now contaminated the area. Surely, he wouldn’t have been so brutish to someone he loved so dearly, one who had been so integral to his success. He loved Eva, that much she knew. You don’t give the unloved the funeral of the century, the unlovable don’t send a whole nation into collective mourning. You don’t spend fifteen years searching for the body of a woman you never loved. Is a lobotomy an act of love too? Isabel wondered if she would meet a similar fate. She had assumed he loved her too. They had gotten married. They had fled to Spain together. They had spent evenings discussing how they were going to make their triumphant return home together one day. How they were going to lead their homeland into a golden age together. The lobotomy was there though. Everyone knew the story. Eva’s public disappearance after she got sick and the desire to hide her illness from her. It was a new science and maybe it eased the pain. She couldn’t imagine a worse fate though; she’d heard stories about the poor creatures left behind after those kinds of surgeries. Women reduced to ghosts of themselves. Isabel wouldn’t let that happen. The knots twisting tighter. The hands ringing the brush, now white before the realisation and the release.

“You were never this morbid when you were alive.” Isabel remarked, rubbing the creams the mortician prescribed into Eva’s shoulders. “When you were alive you gave beautiful speeches. Now you’re in my living room and you’re trying to frighten me. Shouldn’t you be telling me how in this new world I could become President, or that my children can achieve anything through education?” 

“You can become President and your children can achieve anything through education!” 

“Thank you, my unborn children and I are grateful for your support.”

“I mean it.”

“You’re such a doll,”

“You’ve got to take what you want.”

“With you by my side Eva, I’ll be unstoppable.”

“The people are going to love you.”

“It’s you they love.”

“Give it time and you’ll see me drift away into memory while you find your face in the heavenly gaze of the masses.”

“Always the idealist Eva. I don’t want their heavenly gaze; I want their support and their trust.”

“Why not take it all?”

This was the Eva that Isabel liked, the one who flattered her, the one who played the game with her. She placed her hand on her cheek for a brief moment, it rested cold and waxy, feeling for the shadow memory of the life that once inhabited those cheeks. She wondered what Juan’s Eva was like. Was she as she was in life? Or had she been further transformed into a political plaything? Did she flatter him too? Isabel was past flattering him. She loved him and she thought that he had changed the world and that he would again, once they returned to Argentina of course (she envisioned Juan as a modern Caesar crossing the Rubicon. She supposed it was Juan she saw, although the image far too blurry and the form androgynous.) – which she knew they would, soon. She didn’t worship him though, at least not in the way that he wanted. Not in the way the way his supporters did. He wanted to be viewed in the same manner as Eva was. Isabel didn’t think, in his ideal world, that it was her that he wanted to be laid in state with when he eventually dies. Juan had built this image of himself and Eva as two individuals functioning as one political body. The perfect living statue to an ideal. A monument left to a nation shaped in their shared image and collective mythology. There was no room for Isabel in that. She would never admit it, but she knew it was true, just like she knew that the rumours of the lobotomy where true. She’d wondered, as the grotesque totem of Eva remained stood in their living room, just how she figured in Juan’s immortality. The turmoil of the third wife exacerbated by the return of his great love. Placing her hand under Eva’s chin she moved the head side to side, examining the profile. 

“Do you think we could get a three-piece monument” Isabel asked, getting up to place a record on the turntable (Sounds of Spain, irony is all exiles have).

“What do you mean?” 

“Well, when we return to Argentina, I imagine you’re going to be laid in state again. On display to entertain the love of the masses. When Juan dies, he’ll probably take his place next to you as the married couple who brought about a new golden dawn for our nation. What happens when I die? Do we make a three? I’m thirty-five years younger than Juan, I assume I’ll outlive him. Is it wrong to expect to get to cuddle up in the glass box with the two of you?”

“That doesn’t sound very comfortable,”

“No, it doesn’t.” Isabel pondered a moment, Miles Davis’s trumpet painting red and yellow landscapes for their discourse to inhabit.

“It’s not that great being laid in state. No peace in life, no peace in death. I just want to be left somewhere we’re I don’t have to be stared at anymore.”

“Hopefully it won’t be a Spanish living room.” Isabel could have sworn she saw Eva smirk out of the corner of her eye when she said it.

“If it is a Spanish living room, I hope we get a nicer carpet.” This brief moment of a shared laughter the women had was the closest they’d come to friendship over the last few months. Isabel was aware that her question wasn’t answered. While she knew she wasn’t really going to get answer, she still couldn’t help but feel left out in the cold. Every year that ticked by with Juan was another year towards finding out just where her place in his legacy lay. They always spoke as if their return from exile was inevitable. They knew that the plane would one day land and they would be welcomed with open arms and, with the love of the people, ascend to the mountain top of Argentinian society. Every moment they were separated from their native land however, seemed to Isabel to be another step away from that horizon line. If she trusted in the idea that Juan was a great man, then she must trust in his promises. There were rumblings of the Peronists being on the verge of reclaiming power and that hope was what allowed her to smile a little.

“Why is it you brush my hair after he leaves the house?” 

“I’m not sure what you mean? He asks me to do it. He expects me to do it. Do you not want to be pretty?” The knots on every sympathetic nerve and every inch of the spinal column writhed and syphoned these questions into being. The question stung. It stung with a sense of ingratitude. Eva was her burden, her duty, why would she question why she carried out the wishes of their husband? She took hold of a piece of hair that had fallen loose and hung-over Eva’s eye and with particular scorn pulled at it until it came loose. Gazing at the mortal piece of the immortal persona, Isabel was aware now, more than ever, of the power she held over the past. Eva wouldn’t flinch and she wouldn’t tell. She was as brittle and strained as this piece of hair now entwined in the fingers of the living, breathing, woman before. She had done it. She had violated the incorruptible and immaculate corpse. The guardian angel of a nation existed between her knuckles. And she wrapped that piece of hair around those fingers until knots formed and the circulation had ceased. “Why do you ask such silly questions Eva? Everything I do, I do for the two of you.”

 “I’m sure he wouldn’t notice. It’s only hair.”

“He will notice, I’ve heard the way he talks to you. I can only imagine the way he inspects you. The way he caresses every inch of your body, remembering the way must have been before all of the mad doctors and all of absent years.” With each pause in her speech Isabel ran her hand over Eva. Her cheek, her neck, her arm, retracing the paths her husband walks in his memories of conquests past.

Eva refrained from responding. She had spent the last sixteen years in absentia, buried in some oddly marked spot in a Milanese cemetery, out of sight and out of mind for most to the world. The Ark had been removed from the temple and lost to time. Only this time she had been recovered, brought back to life by the collective love of the ideology she helped to birth into the world. It made sense to her that Juan, her husband in life, would want to see her, would want to touch her. She was not a religious holy idol to him, she was not Evita, she was his Eva in flesh and body before him. Her beauty preserved by chemical means. Flesh to be loved in eternity. It was not Isabel’s place to judge the interactions of a husband and a wife. She was Juan’s wife now though. Death parted Juan and Eva and sent him into Isabel’s arms and she wasn’t prepared to allow for infidelity. This was why she really hated Eva. It wasn’t just something she said out of anger or frustration with her exiled status. She hated her the way the annexed nation hates its occupiers. Her marriage had been invaded by a foreign body and it was expected of her to accept this new truth and embrace it. Every Argentinian woman owed Eva a debt and Juan expected this to be repaid in Isabel’s quite acceptance of her place. While they may have laughed and joked and made frivolous chit chat throughout the day Isabel knew that once the night came, when Juan returned from his outings, his drinking, it wasn’t her that he was so happy to see when he came falling arse over head into the living room. 

The question on everyone’s mind was whether or not he fucked Eva.

Isabel thought so, she didn’t want to admit it, but she thought it. He must have, that’s why his demands were so thorough. She had to brush Eva’s hair ‘so it wouldn’t tangle.’ What else would that mean? Why would her hair tangle? All she does is stand all day, until dinner when she is moved to her seat at the table. In Isabel’s eyes he looked at Eva the way a lion looks at a wildebeest, he looked at Isabel the way a husband looks at a third wife. Saint Eva’s immaculate and incorruptible corpse becomes the temple of their husband’s desire and the young new wife is left wondering if he’ll return from his pilgrimage into the past. It’s not her eyes he’s going to catch over dinner tonight. It’s not going to be her arm he’s going to take when he’s overcome with memories of old glories. Eva was no longer incorruptible however; Isabel had the evidence of that in her hand. Juan’s power was linked to the power which Eva represented but now Eva was crumbling and would continue to crumble until there was nothing life of either figure. They’d both carried out acts of violence, acts of mutilation. Only Isabel wouldn’t be consumed by hers. The knots had formed the new political body of woman and with this body she would refuse the dead wife.

Her only hope was to take them both. She had to be ready to pounce, to bring Juan to heel and to keep the memory of their beloved Evita under the boot.

“He’s back,” Eva’s whisper coinciding with the creak of the gate outside. “Can we talk again tomorrow?”

“We talk every day, all we have now are these chats.” Isabel replied, mumbling as she lit her cigarette. Her smile hiding that sinister intent. 

“You don’t really hate me, do you?”

“How can anyone hate you?”

“You always tell me you hate me.”

“Think of me a moment. When we return to Argentina my darling, they will revere you like the returning Madonna. They won’t even know who I am.”

The slamming of the door coincided with a drunken chorus. The blue and silver slurred Spanish had overcome the room. The conversation had died, and Isabel retreated in order to take the record off the player. Juan slumped into his armchair across from Eva. 

“Did you two do much whilst I was away?” He shouted more so to the room than any individual in it. 

“No, no, nothing too exciting. I just gave Eva a tidy up and a once over with the brush.” Isabel responded, playing with the piece of Eva’s hair she had claimed. She twirled it around her finger and was overcome with a momentary glee of ecstasy. It was in that lock of hair that Isabel began to make manifest a promise to herself. Her husband was dead. He’d lost himself like a junkie to the needle of time and melancholia. She’d live though, she knew she had to live. Not as some perverse doll. Not as a totemic symbol for a totalitarian despot to stuff himself into. Evita may be the beloved of the people; Isabel was going to take their love as she had taken this lock of knotted hair between her fingers. Juan’s thirty-five years older. All Isabel has to do is get him back to Argentina and he’ll be happy fucking Eva in hell while she’s sipping the sweet fountain of earthly glory.

“Is that lipstick on Eva’s cheek?” Juan asked. He sank back into a deep drunken sleep. Isabel would check on him periodically and his weakness became increasingly more apparent to her as the evening wore on. Was this their Caesar? The one made weak by the promise of power some thirty years ago. The game was no longer between the Peronists and their enemies, it was between Isabel and everyone else. The pieces will fall, empires will be built, and the political wheel of immaculate corpses will turn again.

“I hate you Juan. One day you’ll realise that I hate you.” She whispered back towards the room, sipping her coffee as she climbed the stairs back towards her empty bed. 

 

 

William H. Bonney