In her brief 33 years, Eva Perón traveled fast and far. The illegitimate daughter of a dirt farmer and a woman who ran a rooming house, she became the second wife of Argentine Dictator Juan Perón. With her expansive charity giveaways, Evita, as she was known to Argentina's adoring masses, became a cult figure—the "Queen of the Descamisados" (the shirtless ones).
Dignity. But Evita's travels in life were nothing compared to her travels in death. On the night of Dec. 22, 1955, her body vanished from Buenos Aires' central labor headquarters; it had been placed there after she died of cancer in 1952 while a glass-enclosed mausoleum was being made ready. Rumors had her body thrown into the River Plate by the regime that ousted Perón. There was one report that 25 leading citizens were each given a sealed coffin, sworn to secrecy and asked to bury it. Each of the 25 believed that he alone had been entrusted with Evita's body.
The most persistent rumor was that Evita's body had been shipped to Rome disguised as that of a nun and buried in a cemetery there. As it turned out, that story came closest to the truth. The Argentine ambassador to Spain announced two weeks ago that Eva Perón's body had been transferred from Italy and returned, as an act of "Christian dignity," to Juan Perón, now 75 and living in exile in Spain with his third wife. The transfer was reportedly part of a political accommodation between the Peronistas, who are still the most vociferous political force in Argentina, and the military regime of General Alejandro Lanusse.
The story was pieced together from various sources last week. It appears that Evita's body arrived in Milan on May 17, 1957, accompanied by Giuseppina Airoldi, a lay sister of the Company of St. Paul. Signora Airoldi believed the body to be that of an Italian woman who had died in Argentina—Maria Maggi, widow of Luigi De Magistris. The body was buried in Lot 86, Garden 41, in Milan's Musocco Cemetery.
The next chapter in Evita's posthumous peregrinations began 14 years later. Last month a man calling himself Carlos Maggi, "brother" of the fictitious Maria, received permission for the exhumation and transport of Maria Maggi's remains to Madrid. The coffin's wooden casing was found to be rotting, but the coffin itself, reportedly of silver with a glass window showing the woman's face, was in excellent condition. So was the corpse. After Evita's death, Perón paid the famed Spanish pathologist Pedro Ara $100,000 to embalm her body the way the Russians had embalmed the remains of Lenin and Stalin. According to one witness, "the body was so natural that it looked like Evita was only asleep."
Return. After paying a Milan funeral firm $1,280 in cash to transport the body to Spain, "Carlos Maggi" took his seat beside the funeral-van driver for the trip to Perón's closely guarded house in a swank section on the outskirts of Madrid.