Little Eva Was she really beautiful? What did she look like? It is possible to stare for hours at the photographs--never enough of them--in the recent crop of Evita books and find no answers. Soon we will know that she looked exactly like Madonna, but for the moment it is possible to say only that once she had become Evita her image was that of a different order of being--of a Virgin, perhaps, or a saint. A flickering apparition with attributes rather than features: the radiant impact of the gold-colored hair, something haunted about the eyes, the lingering sad ecstasy of the smile. The posters, the photographs, the blurred documentary footage all confirm it: she was not a person but an embodied gesture. Not in the early photographs, though. Here she is, for example, in a picture reproduced in Eva Perón, a new biography by Alicia Dujovne Ortiz, [Published in English as Eva Perón: A Biography (New York: St. Martin''s, 1997).] which shows her in the days before her hairdresser discovered that history needed Evita to be a blonde.

It is mid-1944, and, thanks in large part to certain skillfully wielded influences, the provincial actress Eva Duarte, possessed of an unreconstructed working-class accent and an unfailingly gauche manner, has obtained her first feature role, in a movie called Circus Cavalcade. In the promo shot, brunet ringlets surround a pale, slightly thin-lipped face. The nose has a hint of the ski jump, but the eyes are large and their expression is pleasant. A big bow is strategically placed over what was a famously flat chest, but it does nothing to disguise her terrible posture. She projected no sexuality, and there is nothing in the photograph to indicate that Eva Duarte''s public personality might have been memorable either--an impression, or lack of one, confirmed by the kindest word that critics ever used to describe her acting: "discreet." There is nothing in the image, certainly, to suggest transcendence. And yet the sense we have of Eva Duarte''s destiny is so strong by now that it is almost impossible to believe that at the time the picture was taken she did not know, as we do, that this bland and to all appearances untalented girl, born illegitimate and on a ranch, was soon to become Evita. It would have been logical for anyone with more ordinary ambitions to think instead that 1944 was already the crowning year of her life: she had a movie role, a nice apartment filled with knickknacks, a modest degree of name recognition, and a new military lover--a very important one--with whom she was passionately, overwhelmingly involved.

Because the meeting between Eva Duarte, aspiring radionovela actress, and Juan Perón, putschist colonel, is the stuff of legend, it is impossible to be completely certain of anything about it, including the date and the circumstances of their first encounter. By most accounts, including Perón''s, it took place on January 22, 1944, and the occasion was a benefit for earthquake victims, sponsored by a group of army colonels who had overthrown the civilian government six months earlier. Eva Duarte, who had recently gone for months without acting in any of the radio soaps that were the mainstay of Argentine broadcasting, and who had in the past endured typically sordid casting-couch arrangements in order to get work, was working now, thanks to her new friend Lieutenant Colonel Aníbal Imbert, who was in charge of the post and telegraph offices (and communications in general) for the new regime. Imbert had got her the starring role in a new radio series, based on the lives of famous women in history--Isadora Duncan, Elizabeth I, Mme Chiang Kai-shek--but it was Eva alone who then, drawn to the populist rhetoric of the new regime and always looking for an opportunity to stand out, maneuvered herself into the position of spokeswoman for the Radio Association of Argentina, and into events like the earthquake benefit. In Eva Perón, Alicia Dujovne recounts the various versions of how that fateful evening Eva Duarte found herself being led to one of two empty seats on the platform, next to Imbert, who was waiting for his friend Juan Perón. (The most amusing story comes from the benefit''s emcee, Roberto Galán, who claims that Eva stood beneath the stage, tugged on his pants leg, and said, "Galancito, darling, introduce me. I want to recite a poetry.") Dujovne sensibly speculates that instead it may have been Imbert himself--by that time heartily sick of Eva''s anxious, clutching personality--who introduced her to Perón, at an earlier party.

But in the brilliant novel Santa Evita,[New York: Knopf, 1996.] Tomás Eloy Martínez recounts history as it should have been, and as it was told to him long ago in Madrid by an aging Juan Perón: Eva''s heart belonged to Perón even before they met. It had become clear that the colonel, who was in charge of labor relations, was emerging as the real authority in the new regime. He looked magnificent in uniform. His smile was benevolent and virile. His radio speeches had thrilled her. ("I am only a humble soldier who has been granted the honor of protecting the working masses of Argentina.") She was twenty-four, he forty-eight.

On the platform, sitting next to Imbert, she turned her great dark eyes on Perón as he walked to his seat. "Colonel." "What is it, my girl?" "Thank you for existing." She got his attention. Perón was ambitious but lazy, wily but aloof, and interested, as life would prove, in few things besides himself, politics in relation to himself, and his French poodles (and a fourteen-year-old mistress he took on after Eva''s death, to whom he wrote fond letters about the French poodles). But Eva could force herself into his hitherto sterile emotional life because from their first meeting she offered herself up to Perón as his worshiper, and from that moment virtually until the instant of her death, eight years later, she did nothing in public or in private that was not in some way an act of devotion to him, an oblation of frankincense and myrrh. "Mi vida por Perón!" she cried a thousand times before the roaring crowds, and then she died. There are parallels that could be drawn between her life and the lives of other obsessively ambitious women who have forced their way out of poverty and to fame through the skillful, untiring manipulation of their own images--Madonna, let us say--but instead popular memory finds parallels between Evita''s life and the lives of the saints, because she did it all for someone else.

In life, Evita was and wished to be only an instrument of Perón. (In death, she took on a life of her own, but we will come to that.) Toward the end, someone wrote an autobiography for her (she was barely literate), and it was called what she called Perón in all her speeches: My Reason for Living . [ La razón de mi vida (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Peuser, 1952).] If anything, she was even more effusive about her husband in private. Joseph Page, in his excellent introduction to the English-language edition of a second text ghostwritten for Evita, this one as she was dying, called In My Own Words ,[New York: New Press, 1996.] quotes a letter she wrote Perón: "Tonight I want to leave you this perfume above all else so that you will know I adore you and if it is possible today more than ever because when I was suffering I felt your affection and goodness so much that until the last moment of my life I will offer [misspelled] it to you body and soul, since you know I am hopelessly in love with my dear old man." By most accounts, Perón was sexually indifferent.

Dujovne assumes, without telling us why, that Eva Duarte was actually frigid. Yet there is no doubting the passionate and romantic nature of Eva''s commitment to her husband. By a lucky accident of history, her passion was fueled by precisely the same emotions that drove millions of Argentines to what Eva eventually baptized la fe peronista--the Peronist faith. The facts of Evita''s early life coincide nicely with those of the poor she came to represent: she was, like so many others, born of a destitute woman who found it expedient, and possibly gratifying, to take a wealthy and powerful lover. (Juan Duarte was a landowner and small-town caudillo, or political boss, in a rural area about ninety miles west of Buenos Aires, and he was properly married. Juana Ibarguren was a woman he spent many nights with and was the mother of five of Duarte''s children, of whom Eva María, born in 1919, was the youngest.) Like so many children born of these arrangements in a country where upper-class snobbery reaches extremes of refinement and viciousness, Eva was humiliated by her bastard status. (Juana Ibarguren and her children, who lived in a one-room house, were kept away from Juan Duarte''s elegant funeral, but were allowed to say a quick farewell to the corpse at the wake.

) Eva migrated on her own from the sticks to Buenos Aires at age fifteen, and, like so many of the expanding capital''s other new residents, she looked for opportunity and found it lacking. She shared with her class a gnawing, all-encompassing resentment that was the precise counterpart of the seething contempt the ruling class cultivated for the plebes. Most important, neither she nor her fellow poor were inclined to be fatalistic. The Argentina that Eva Duarte grew up in was a nation of recent immigrants--Italian anarchist farmers, Spanish socialist shopkeepers, conservative German merchants--who had brought their politics with them when they migrated, and who firmly believed that they deserved the better life they were willing to work so hard for. Perón--himself born out of wedlock, and pursuing upward mobility through an army career--was their catalyst. He was a cynical politician who systematically played off his followers against one anot.