“That’s her,” said Fuldner. “Evita. The president’s wife.”
“Somehow I didn’t think she was the cleaning lady. Not with all the mints she’s wearing.”
We walked up the stairway into a richly furnished hall where several women were milling about. Despite the fact Peron’s was a military dictatorship, nobody up here was wearing a uniform. When I remarked on this, Fuldner told me that Peron didn’t care for uniforms, preferring a degree of informality that people sometimes found surprising. I might also have remarked that the women in the hall were very beautiful and that perhaps he preferred them to uglier ones, in which case he was a dictator after my own heart. The kind of dictator I would have been myself if a highly developed sense of social justice and democracy had not hindered my own will to power and autocracy.
Contrary to what Fuldner had told me, it seemed that the president had not yet arrived at his desk. And while we awaited his much anticipated arrival, one of the secretaries fetched us coffee on a little silver tray. Then we smoked. The secretaries smoked, too. Everyone in Buenos Aires smoked. For all I knew, even the cats and dogs had a twenty-a-day habit. Then, outside the high windows, I heard a noise like a lawn mower. I put down my coffee cup and went to take a look. I was just in time to see a tall man climbing off a motor scooter. It was the president, although I would hardly have known that from his modest means of transport or his casual appearance. I kept comparing Peron with Hitler and trying to imagine the Fuhrer dressed for golf and riding a lime-green scooter down the Wilhelmstrasse.