One evening in January of 1944, Perón was seated among the other military leaders in a Buenos Aires stadium, attending an artists’ festival. It was late and there were some empty seats around him; out of nowhere two beautiful young actresses asked his permission to sit down. Were they joking? He would be delighted. He recognized one of the actresses—it was Eva Duarte, a star of radio soap operas whose photograph was often on the covers of the tabloids. The other actress was younger and prettier, but Perón could not take his eyes off Eva, who was talking to another colonel. She was really not his type at all. She was twenty-four, far too old for his taste; she was dressed rather garishly; and there was something a little icy in her manner. But she looked at him occasionally, and her glance excited him. He looked away for a moment, and the next thing he knew she had changed seats and was sitting next to him. They started to talk. She hung on his every word. Yes, everything he said was precisely how she felt—the poor, the workers, they were the future of Argentina. She had known poverty herself. There were almost tears in her eyes when she said, at the end of the conversation, “Thank you for existing.”

In the next few days, Eva managed to get rid of Perón’s “daughter” and establish herself in his apartment. Everywhere he turned, there she was, fixing him meals, caring for him when he was ill, advising him on politics. Why did he let her stay? Usually he would have a fling with a superficial young girl, then get rid of her when she seemed to be sticking around too much. But there was nothing superficial about Eva. As time went by he found himself getting addicted to the feeling she gave him. She was intensely loyal, mirroring his every idea, puffing him up endlessly He felt more masculine in her presence, that was it, and more powerful—she believed he would make the country’s ideal leader, and her belief affected him. She was like the women in the tango ballads he loved so much—the suffering women of the streets who became saintly mother figures and looked after their men. Perón saw her every day, but he never felt he fully knew her; one day her comments were a little obscene, the next she was the perfect lady. He had one worry: she was angling to get married, and he could never marry her—she was an actress with a dubious past. The other colonels were already scandalized by his involvement with her. Nevertheless, the affair went on.

In 1945, Perón was dismissed from his post and jailed. The colonels feared his growing popularity and distrusted the power of his mistress, who seemed to have total influence over him. It was the first time in almost two years that he was truly alone, and truly separated from Eva. Suddenly he felt new emotions sweeping over him: he pinned her photographs all over the wall. Outside, massive strikes were being organized to protest his imprisonment, but all he could think about was Eva. She was a saint, a woman of destiny, a heroine. He wrote to her, “It is only being apart from loved ones that we can measure our affection. From the day I left you . . . I have not been able to calm my sad heart. . . . My immense solitude is full of your memory.” Now he promised to marry her.

The strikes grew in intensity. After eight days, Perón was released from prison; he promptly married Eva. A few months later he was elected president. As first lady, Eva attended state functions in her somewhat gaudy dresses and jewelry; she was seen as a former actress with a large wardrobe. Then, in 1947, she left for a tour of Europe, and Argentines followed her every move—the ecstatic crowds that greeted her in Spain, her audience with the pope—and in her absence their opinion of her changed. How well she represented the Argentine spirit, its noble simplicity, its flair for drama. When she returned a few weeks later, they overwhelmed her with attention.

Eva too had changed during her trip to Europe: now her dyed blond hair was pulled into a severe chignon, and she wore tailored suits. It was a serious look, befitting a woman who was to become the savior of the poor. Soon her image could be seen everywhere—her initials on the walls, the sheets, the towels of the hospitals for the poor; her profile on the jerseys of a soccer team from the poorest part of Argentina, whose club she sponsored; her giant smiling face covering the sides of buildings. Since finding out anything personal about her had become impossible, all kinds of elaborate fantasies began to spring up about her. And when cancer cut her life short, in 1952, at the age of thirty-three (the age of Christ when he died), the country went into mourning. Millions filed past her embalmed body. She was no longer a radio actress, a wife, a first lady, but Evita, a saint.

Familiarity destroys seduction. This rarely happens early on; there is so much to learn about a new person. But a midpoint may arrive when the target has begun to idealize and fantasize about you, only to discover that you are not what he or she thought. It is not a question of being seen too often, of being too available, as some imagine. In fact, if your targets see you too rarely, you give them nothing to feed on, and their attention may be caught by someone else; you have to occupy their mind. It is more a matter of being too consistent, too obvious, too human and real. Your targets cannot idealize you if they know too much about you, if they start to see you as all too human. Not only must you maintain a degree of distance, but there must be something fantastical and bewitching about you, sparking all kinds of delightful possibilities in their mind. The possibility Eva held out was the possibility that she was what in Argentine culture was considered the ideal woman—devoted, motherly, saintly—but there are any number of poetic ideals you can try to embody. Chivalry, adventure, romance, and so on, are just as potent, and if you have a whiff of them about you, you can breathe enough poetry into the air to fill people’s minds with fantasies and dreams. At all costs, you must embody something, even if it is roguery and evil. Anything to avoid the taint of familiarity and commonness.

This need to idealize extends to our romantic entanglements, because when we fall in love, or under the spell of another person, we see a reflection of ourselves. The choice we make in deciding to become involved with another person reveals something important and intimate about us: we resist seeing ourselves as having fallen for someone who is cheap or tacky or tasteless, because it reflects badly on who we are. Furthermore, we are often likely to fall for someone who resembles us in some way. Should that person be deficient, or worst of all ordinary, then there is something deficient and ordinary about us. No, at all costs the loved one must be overvalued and idealized, at least for the sake of our own self-esteem. Besides, in a world that is harsh and full of disappointment, it is a great pleasure to be able to fantasize about a person you are involved with.

This makes the seducer’s task easy: people are dying to be given the chance to fantasize about you. Do not spoil this golden opportunity by overexposing yourself, or becoming so familiar and banal that the target sees you exactly as you are. You do not have to be an angel, or a paragon of virtue—that would be quite boring. You can be dangerous, naughty, even somewhat vulgar, depending on the tastes of your victim. But never be ordinary or limited. In poetry (as opposed to reality), anything is possible.

Soon after we fall under a person’s spell, we form an image in our minds of who they are and what pleasures they might offer. Thinking of them when we are alone, we tend to make this image more and more idealized. The novelist Stendhal, in his book On Love, calls this phenomenon “crystallization,” telling the story of how, in Salzburg, Austria, they used to throw a leafless branch into the abandoned depths of a salt mine in the middle of winter. When the branch was pulled out months later, it would be covered with spectacular crystals. That is what happens to a loved one in our minds.

According to Stendhal, though, there are two crystallizations. The first happens when we first meet the person. The second and more important one happens later, when a bit of doubt creeps in—you desire the other person, but they elude you, you are not sure they are yours. This bit of doubt is critical—it makes your imagination work double, deepens the poeticizing process. In the seventeenth century, the great rake the Duc de Lauzun pulled off one of the most spectacular seductions in history—that of the Grande Mademoiselle, the cousin of King Louis XIV, and the wealthiest and most powerful woman in France. He tickled her imagination with a few brief encounters at the court, letting her catch glimpses of his wit, his audacity, his cool manner. She would begin to think of him when she was alone. Next she started to bump into him more often at court, and they would have little conversations or walks. When these meetings were over, she would be left with a doubt: is he or is he not interested in me? This made her want to see him more, in order to allay her doubts. She began to idealize him all out of proportion to the reality, for the duke was an incorrigible scoundrel.

Remember: if you are easily had, you cannot be worth that much. It is hard to wax poetic about a person who comes so cheaply. If, after the initial interest, you make it clear that you cannot be taken for granted, if you stir a bit of doubt, the target will imagine there is something special, lofty, and unattainable about you. Your image will crystallize in the other person’s mind.

Cleopatra knew that she was really no different from any other woman, and in fact her face was not particularly beautiful. But she knew that men have a tendency to overvalue a woman. All that is required is to hint that there is something different about you, to make them associate you with something grand or poetic. She made Caesar aware of her connection to the great kings and queens of Egypt’s past; with Antony, she created the fantasy that she was descended from Aphrodite herself. These men were cavorting not just with a strong-willed woman but a kind of goddess. Such associations might be difficult to pull off today, but people still get deep pleasure from associating others with some kind of childhood fantasy figure. John F. Kennedy presented himself as a figure of chivalry—noble, brave, charming. Pablo Picasso was not just a great painter with a thirst for young girls, he was the Minotaur of Greek legend, or the devilish trickster figure that is so seductive to women. These associations should not be made too early; they are only powerful once the target has begun to fall under your spell, and is vulnerable to suggestion. A man who had just met Cleopatra would have found the Aphrodite association ludicrous. But a person who is falling in love will believe almost anything. The trick is to associate your image with something mythic, through the clothes you wear, the things you say, the places you go.

In Marcel Proust’s novel Remembrance of Things Past, the character Swann finds himself gradually seduced by a woman who is not really his type. He is an aesthete, and loves the finer things in life. She is of a lower class, less refined, even a little tasteless. What poeticizes her in his mind is a series of exuberant moments they share together, moments that from then on he associates with her. One of these is a concert in a salon that they attend, in which he is intoxicated by a little melody in a sonata. Whenever he thinks of her, he remembers this little phrase. Little gifts she has given him, objects she has touched or handled, begin to assume a life of their own. Any kind of heightened experience, artistic or spiritual, lingers in the mind much longer than normal experience. You must find a way to share such moments with your targets—a concert, a play, a spiritual encounter, whatever it takes—so that they associate something elevated with you. Shared moments of exuberance have immense seductive pull. Also, any kind of object can be imbued with poetic resonance and sentimental associations, as discussed in the last chapter. The gifts you give and other objects can become imbued with your presence; if they are associated with pleasant memories, the sight of them keeps you in mind and accelerates the poeticization process.

Although it is said that absence makes the heart grow fonder, an absence too early will prove deadly to the crystallization process. Like Eva Perón, you must surround your targets with focused attention, so that in those critical moments when they are alone, their mind is spinning with a kind of afterglow. Do everything you can to keep the target thinking about you. Letters, mementos, gifts, unexpected meetings—all these give you an omnipresence. Everything must remind them of you.

Finally, if your targets should see you as elevated and poetic, there is much to be gained by making them feel elevated and poeticized in their turn. The French writer Chateaubriand would make a woman feel like a goddess, she had such a powerful effect on him. He would send her poems that she supposedly had inspired. To make Queen Victoria feel as if she were both a seductive woman and a great leader, Benjamin Disraeli would compare her to mythological figures and great predecessors, such as Queen Elizabeth I. By idealizing your targets this way, you will make them idealize you in return, since you must be equally great to be able to appreciate and see all of their fine qualities. They will also grow addicted to the elevated feeling you give them.