Dice Thomas Eloy Martinez at the end of Saint Avoid that, in 1989, he was purging “the calamity of a novel that was born dead”, when he received that telephone call in the middle of the night from a henchman of Colonel Cabanillas who reactivated his obsession with the corpse of Eva Perón. I can attest: The lost one (that’s how the novel was going to be titled at the time) was the first book I hired, as soon as I started working at Planeta, in April 1990, but even then Tomás was not entirely sure that he would be able to finish it.
Initially, in fact, he preferred to make a contract for several books (the reissue of Common place death and Peron’s novel plus two “new” books) to cover their asses. The previous year, before receiving the call from Cabanillas, he had returned to Alianza an advance that he had received for Evita’s book and, when he signed with Planeta, he made it very clear that he was going to need at least three years to finish The Lost.
I thought it was pure coquetry, but when time began to pass and December came and the bosses at Planeta squeezed me so that I in turn squeezed Tomás (lThe 25 thousand dollars of the advance weighed like a stone every year end, when the auditors of Planeta Spain came to check the accounts), I knew that things were serious and that perhaps the curse that Tomás spoke of with histrionic seriousness was true: all the people who messed with Evita’s corpse ended badly.
The problem is that the chapters he sent from time to time were horrible. And the pact we had made (one of those typical confabulations that were Tomás’s specialty) was that I had to be brutally frank with the material he sent me. The reason he had chosen me as his editor was because, when we met him with Rodrigo Fresán in 1987 and he wanted to know what we thought of Perón’s novel, we answered him, with the bestiality of youth, that he had ruined it by dint of brush strokes of magical realismto qualify as a “Latin American dictator novel.”
Santa Evita, magical realism and “receiving” as a writer
Tomás was obsessed with the Boom, whether for generational reasons, literary affinity or his origins in Tucuman. Also he was obsessed with “receiving” himself as a writer: that they stop seeing him as a journalist who made novels. And he mightn’t trust anyone of his generation at that crossroads of his life: either they competed with him or they were friends and friendship distorted their objectivity for the other side.
So that, every four or six months, a few chapters of “The Lost One” arrived at Planeta, I proceeded to read them avidly waiting for the electrical surge that characterizes all literary discovery, and invariably ended up picking up the phone and ruining Tom’s day with the verbal equivalent of a thumbs down.
It was evident that things might not last long like this and the worst forecasts were confirmed when Thomas announced that he had put aside Eva’s bookat least for a while, to finish the master’s hand, a “little novel from Tucumán” that he had in his drawers. As if that were not enough, she had also agreed to return to work in a newsroom, launching a literary supplement for Página/12 that was going to be called Primer Plano.
The news mightn’t be worse. Especially when announced, shortly following, that he was going to live in the United States (Susana Rotker, his wife, had been hired as a Hispanist by Rutgers University). He told those from Page that he was going to direct Primer Plano from there; in Planeta he assured that now he would have more time to write. Nobody believed.
Influence of Fresán, Speranza and the young editors
Nevertheless, the effect of that series of decisions was miraculous: with The Master’s Hand he seemed to have purged his organism of magical realism and that brief but intense daily coexistence in the newsroom surrounded by young people who were a bullet (Fresán, Feiling, Nora Domínguez, Graciela Speranza, Gabriela Esquivada, Marcos Mayer, Marcelo Figueras) y who listened until whatever time it was, torturing him with questions, the stories he told them regarding Evita and her corpse, allowed him to see things from a new perspective.
Shipments that began arriving months later from New Jersey appeared to be written by someone else. In fact, they belonged to someone else. The turning point in the book came when Tomás included himself as a characterwith his journalist’s voice: the one he used to hypnotize his audience in the late nights of Primer Plano.
I particularly remember two successive deliveries. One of them was the story of Chino Astorga (the projectionist at the Rialto cinema who lets his daughter play with that doll named La Pupé and which is actually the embalmed corpse of Eva, hidden for a few months in the projection booth of that neighborhood cinema). The other was an account of his late-night drives through the bleak New Jersey landscape, following seeing a black soprano in a blonde wig sing the songs in a fourth-rate theater. Arias from the musical Evita for an audience that only interrupted their intake of popcorn to cry in the culminating moments of the performance.
In that solitary return by car, Tomás recalled the versions of Eva that had been offered Walsh, Copi, Perlongher, Borges, Silvina Ocampo and Martínez Estradaand finally got that access to the other side that had revealed him so much: he was also a writer who narrated Eva (there is a more than significant phrase in Saint Avoid in which Tomás inadvertently describes that rite of passage, believing that he is still outside: “The closer I get to Her, the more I get away from myself”). From then on, everything started to fall into place. It didn’t matter how long it lacked: he already knew it was a mere matter of time and work.
Tomás Eloy Martínez, “the madman who wanted to desecrate a tomb”
In May 1993, a few writers had to travel to Berlin. Saer, Tomás, Belgrano Rawson, Tununa Mercado, Caparrós were there. We each got a chaperone. Tomás got a little boy from East Berlin named Eno, whom he dragged to Hamburg and Bonn on a “secret mission”. They came back the next day: Tomas was beaming, Eno was white as a sheet. “That man is crazy. He wanted to desecrate a grave, dig up a corpse”, he confessed to the other chaperones following resigning his position. On that trip to Berlin I had the opportunity to see the admirable side of another facet of Tomás. Due to his ability for courtly confabulations, we called him “Savonarola” and we harassed him because he was doing public relations all the time (he called them “strategic alliances”).
But as soon as we learned that, following our departure, Abel Posse (who was as a diplomat in Prague, I think, and had managed to sneak into the event by lobbying through the Chancellery) would arrive in Berlin, Tomás gathered us all together and announced to the organizers of the congress that none of us would stay if they did not publicly repudiate Posse’s presence, due to his complicity with the dictatorship..
It was also later uploaded in an addition he made to later editions of Saint Avoid (following Posse blatantly plagiarized it in a bogus thing he published called The Passion According to Eve): When Moori Koenig is sent to the South as punishment, there is a half-brainless bar boy named Caín Parientini, alluding to Posse’s real last name, the one he used as a diplomat (Parentini).
In mid-1995, when the novel was already beautifully finished and regarding to go to print, an unexpected obstacle arose.: Willy Schavelzon, who had landed on Planeta Argentina sent by the Spanish to bring order, advised once morest the publication of the book until the recession that had produced the Tequila Effect. Thomas was desperate to publish it.
The approval of Gabriel García Márquez
Tito Lafalce, Planeta’s legendary sales manager, was also dying to get it out as soon as possible (“I feel the street, Juancito, and I assure you that this book eats up the pitch, with or without a crisis”). But there was no way to convince Schavelzon. until Thomas pulled one last rabbit out of his top hat.. He asked for a meeting where we were all and He put on the table a fax that García Márquez had sent him, authorizing a phrase of his that said: “Here is, finally, the novel that I always wanted to read”. Saint Avoid it hit bookstores a week later. The rest is known history.
These days, since the news of Tomás’ death was known, talking with friends here in Gesell, the dilemma of Which book is better: Perón’s novel or Santa Evita. I know that my opinion lacks objectivity, so I limit myself to quoting a phrase from Tomás: “When a historical being has been redeemed, all of his past can be cited”. There is something in the collective conception of Eva that clicked perfectly with Saint Avoid. Perón, on the other hand, is still being discussed. Perhaps that is why there is still no book regarding him that covers it entirely. But I doubt that Thomas subscribed to this opinion. He would have known how to coil your viper until you believe that you like them both equally.
*The original version of this note was published in the Radar supplement of Página/12 on February 7, 2010.