WORKING NORTH
FROM PATAGONIA
[Illustration: Bush Negroes of Dutch Guiana]
WORKING NORTH FROM PATAGONIA
BEING THE NARRATIVE OF A JOURNEY, EARNED ON THE WAY, THROUGH SOUTHERN
AND EASTERN SOUTH AMERICA
BY
HARRY A. FRANCK
Author of “A Vagabond Journey Around
the World,” “Zone Policeman 88,”
“Roaming Through the West Indies,”
“Vagabonding Down the Andes,” etc.,
etc.
ILLUSTRATED WITH 176 UNUSUAL
PHOTOGRAPHS BY THE AUTHOR, WITH A
MAP SHOWING THE ROUTE
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
THE CENTURY CO.
1921
Copyright, 1921, by
THE CENTURY CO.
Printed in U. S. A.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
FOREWORD
Though it stands by itself as a single entity, the present volume is a
continuation and the conclusion of a four-year journey through
Latin-America, and a companion-piece to my “Vagabonding Down the Andes.”
The entrance of the United States into the World War made it impossible
until the present time to continue that narrative from the point where
the story above mentioned left it; but though several years have elapsed
since the journey herein chronicled was made, the conditions encountered
are, with minor exceptions, those which still prevail. South American
society moves with far more inertia than our own, and while the war
brought a certain new prosperity to parts of that continent and a
tendency to become, by force of necessity, somewhat more self-supporting
in industry and less dependent upon the outside world for most
manufactured necessities, the countries herein visited remain for the
most part what they were when the journey was made.
Readers of books of travel have been known to question the wisdom of
including foreign words in the text. A certain number of these, however,
are almost indispensable; without them not only would there be a
considerable loss in atmosphere, but often only laborious
circumlocutions could take their place. Every foreign word in this
volume has been included for one of three reasons, because there is no
English equivalent; because the nearest English word would be at best a
poor translation; or because the foreign word is of intrinsic interest,
for its origin, its musical cadence, picturesqueness, conciseness, or
for some similar cause. In every case its meaning has been given at
least the first time it is introduced; the pronunciation requires little
more than giving the Latin value to vowels and enunciating every letter;
and the slight trouble of articulating such terms correctly instead of
slurring over them cannot but add to the rhythm, as well as to the
understanding, of those sentences in which they occur.
HARRY A. FRANCK.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I THE SOUTH AMERICAN METROPOLIS 3
II ON THE STREETS OF BUENOS AIRES 24
III FAR AND WIDE ON THE ARGENTINE PAMPAS 38
IV OVER THE ANDES TO CHILE 64
V CHILEAN LANDSCAPES 82
VI HEALTHY LITTLE URUGUAY 111
VII BUMPING UP TO RIO 138
VIII AT LARGE IN RIO DE JANEIRO 173
IX BRAZIL PAST AND PRESENT 193
X MANNERS AND CUSTOMS OF THE CARIOCAS 215
XI STRANDED IN RIO 242
XII A SHOWMAN IN BRAZIL 270
XIII ADVENTURES OF AN ADVANCE AGENT 295
XIV WANDERING IN MINAS GERAES 315
XV NORTHWARD TO BAHIA 342
XVI EASTERNMOST AMERICA 372
XVII THIRSTY NORTH BRAZIL 399
XVIII TAKING EDISON TO THE AMAZON 430
XIX UP THE AMAZON TO BRITISH GUIANA 456
XX STRUGGLING DOWN TO GEORGETOWN 502
XXI ROAMING THE THREE GUIANAS 554
XXII THE TRACKLESS LLANOS OF VENEZUELA 610
ILLUSTRATIONS
Bush Negroes of Dutch Guiana _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
In Buenos Aires I became “office-boy” to the American
consul general 32
The new Argentine capitol building in Buenos Aires 32
A Patagonian landscape 33
The government ferry to Choele Choel Island, in the Rio
Negro of southern Argentine 33
A rural policeman of the Argentine 48
My travels in Patagonia were by rail and in what the
_Argentino_ calls a “soolky” 48
A typical “boliche” town of the Argentine pampa, and
some of its inhabitants 49
A family of Santiago del Estero 49
A woman of Córdoba, _mate_ bowl in hand 64
Even a lady would not look unladylike in the _bombachas_
of southeastern South America 64
The highway over the Andes into Chile was filled with
snow 65
A bit of the transandean highway in the wintry month of
May 65
At last I came out high above the famous “Christ of the
Andes” in a bleak and arid setting 80
The “Lake of the Inca” just over the crest in Chile 80
On the way down I passed many little dwellings tucked in
among the boulders 81
The stream that had trickled from under the snows at the
summit had grown to a considerable river, watering a
fertile valley 81
The street cars of Chile are of two stories and have
women conductors 96
Talcahuano, the second harbor of Chile, is only a bit
less picturesque than Valparaiso 96
The central plaza of Concepción, third city of Chile 97
Valdivia, in far southern Chile, is one of the few South
American cities built of wood, even the streets being
paved with planks 97
Countrymen of southern Chile in May to September garb 112
A woman of the Araucanians, the aborigines of southern
Chile 112
A monument in the cemetery of Montevideo 113
A gentleman of Montevideo depicts in stone his grief at
the loss of his life’s companion 113
A rural railway station in Uruguay 128
The fertile Uruguayan plains in the Cerro Chato (Flat
Hills) district 128
“Pirirín” and his cowboys at an _estancia_ round-up in
northern Uruguay 129
Freighting across the gentle rolling plains of the
“Purple Land” 129
A _gaucho_ of Uruguay 132
A rural Uruguayan in full Sunday regalia 133
An ox-driver of southern Brazil, smeared with the
blood-red mud of his native heath 133
The parasol pine-trees of southern Brazil 140
Dinner time at a railway construction camp in Rio Grande
do Sul 140
A horse ran for seven miles along the track in front of
us and made our train half an hour late 141
A cowboy of southern Brazil 141
The admirable Municipal Theater of São Paulo 160
Santos, the Brazilian coffee port 160
A glimpse of the Rio sky-line from across the bay in
Nictheroy 161
The slums of Rio de Janeiro are on the tops of her rock
hills 161
An employee of the “Snake Farm” of São Paulo 176
Residents of Rio’s hilltop slums, in a chosen pose 176
The heart of Rio, with its Municipal Theater, the
National Library, the old Portuguese aqueduct, and, on
the left, a shack-built hilltop 177
A news-stand on the mosaic sidewalk of the Avenida Rio
Branco 224
A hawker of Rio, with his license and his distinctive
noise-producer 224
The brush-and-broom man on his daily round through the
Brazilian capital 225
The sweetmeat seller announces himself with a
distinctive whistle 240
The opening of the “Kinetophone” in Brazil 240
The ruins of an old plantation house on the way to
Petropolis, backed by the pilgrimage church of Penha 241
At a suburban cinema of São Paulo the colored youth
charged with the advertising painted his own portrait
of Edison. He may be made out leaning affectionately
on the right shoulder of his masterpiece 288
The central praça of Campinas 288
Catalão and the plains of Goyaz, from the ruined church
above the town 289
Amparo, like many another town of São Paulo, is
surrounded on all sides by coffee plantations 289
Itajubá, state of Minas Geraes, the home of a former
Brazilian president 304
Ouro Preto, former capital of Minas Geraes 305
The walls of many a residence in the new capital, Bello
Horizonte, are decorated with paintings 305
Diamantina spills down into the stream in which are
found some of its gold and diamonds 320
A hydraulic diamond-cutting establishment of Diamantina 320
In the diamond fields of Brazil 321
Diamond diggers do not resemble those who wear them 321
Victoria, capital of the state of Espiritu Sancto, is a
tiny edition of picturesque Rio 352
Bahia from the top of the old “Theatro São João” 352
Beggars of Bahia, backed by some of our advertisements 353
A family of Bahia, and a familiar domestic chore 353
The site on which Bahia was founded 368
Not much is left of the clothes that have gone through a
steam laundry of Bahia 368
Taking a jack-fruit to market 369
The favorite Sunday diversion of rural northern Brazil 372
The waterworks of a Brazilian city of some 15,000
inhabitants 372
A Brazilian laundry 373
Brazilian milkmen announcing their arrival 373
The mailboat leaves Aracajú for the towns across the bay 380
Another Brazilian milkman 380
Carnival costumes representing “A Crise,” or hard times 381
A Brazilian piano van needs neither axle-grease nor
gasoline 381
Ladies of Pernambuco 384
A minstrel of Pernambuco—and a Portuguese shopkeeper 384
Advertising the Kinetophone in Pernambuco, with a monk
and a dancing girl. “Tut” on the extreme left, Carlos
behind the drummer 385
The pungent odor of crude sugar is characteristic of
downtown Recife 400
In the dry states north of Pernambuco cotton is the most
important crop 400
Walking up a cocoanut palm to get a cool drink 401
Wherever a train halts long enough in Brazil the
passengers rush out to have a cup of coffee 401
The houses of northeastern Brazil are often made
entirely of palm leaves 416
Transportation in the interior of Brazil is
primitive—and noisy 416
Our advertising matter parading the streets of a
Brazilian town off the main trail of travel 417
The _carnauba_ palm of Ceará, celebrated for its utility
as well as its beauty 417
Rural policemen of Ceará, in the heavy leather hats of
the region 432
From town to port in São Luis de Maranhão—and a street
car 433
A street of São Luis de Maranhão 433
My baggage on its way to the hotel in Natal. At every
station of northern Brazil may be seen happy-go-lucky
negroes with nothing on their minds but a couple of
trunks 448
Dolce far niente between shows in Pará 448
The cathedral of Pará 449
Pará has been called the “City of beautiful Trees” 449
Ice on the equator. It is sent out from the factory in
Pará to the neighboring towns in schooners of
varicolored sails, a veritable fog rising from it
under the equatorial sun 464
Two Indians of the Island of Marajó, the one a native,
the other imported from India to improve the native
stock 464
A family dispute on the Amazon 465
The captain and mate of our _gaiola_ were both
Brazilians of the north 465
An Amazonian landscape 480
A boatload of “Brazil nuts.” The Amazonian paddle is
round 480
An inter-state customhouse at the boundary of Pará and
Manaos, and the Brazilian flag 481
A lace maker on the Amazon 496
The Municipal Theater of Manaos 496
Here and there our _batelão_ stopped to pick up a few
balls of rubber 497
Now and then we halted to land something at one of the
isolated huts along the Rio Branco 497
Our _batelão_ loaded cattle at sunrise from the corrals
on the banks 500
The captain of my last Brazilian _batelão_, and his wife 500
Though families are rare, there is no race suicide along
the Rio Branco 501
Dom Antonito and one of the ant-hills that dot the open
campo of the upper Rio Branco 508
I crossed the boundary between Brazil and British Guiana
in a leaky craft belonging to Ben Hart, who lived on
the further bank of the Mahú 508
Hart had built himself a native house on the extreme
edge of British Guiana 509
Hart and his Macuxy Indian helpers 509
Fortunately Hart was a generous six feet or my baggage
might not have got across what had been trickling
streams a few days before 512
We impressed an Indian father and son into service as
carriers 512
Macuxy Indians with teeth filed or chipped to points 513
An Indian village along the Rupununi 513
The father and son turned boatmen, against their wills,
and paddled us down the Rupununi 528
Two of my second crew of paddlers 528
One of my Indians shooting fish from our dugout 529
“Harris,” my “certified steersman” on the Essequibo 529
We set off down the Essequibo in the same worm-eaten old
dugout 532
“Harris” and his wife at one of their evening campfires 533
Battling with the Essequibo 533
More trouble on the Essequibo 540
High Street, Georgetown, capital of British Guiana 540
Cayenne, capital of French Guiana, from the sea 541
The “trusties” among the French prisoners of Cayenne
have soft jobs and often wear shoes 541
A former Paris lawyer digging sewers in Cayenne, under a
negro boss 560
Schoelcher, author of the act of emancipation of the
negroes of the French possessions in America 560
The human scavengers of Cayenne are ably assisted by the
vultures 561
In the market-place of Cayenne. The chief stock is
cassava bread wrapped in banana leaves 561
A market woman of Cayenne, and a stack of cassava bread 576
Homeward bound from market 576
French officers in charge of the prisoners of Cayenne 577
White French convicts who would like to go to France,
rowing out to our ship black French conscripts who
would rather stay at home 577
Along the road in Dutch Guiana 580
A Mohammedan Hindu of Dutch Guiana 580
A Chinese woman of Surinam who has adopted the native
headdress 581
A lady of Paramaribo 581
Javanese women tapping rubber trees after the fashion of
the Far East 588
Javanese and East Indian women clearing up a _cacao_
plantation in Dutch Guiana 588
Javanese celebrating the week-end holiday with their
native musical instruments 589
Wash-day in Dutch Guiana 589
An East Indian woman of Surinam 592
A Javanese woman of the Surinam plantations 592
A gold mining camp in the interior of Dutch Guiana 593
Pouring out the sap of the bullet-tree into the pans in
which it hardens into “balata,” an inferior kind of
rubber 593
A ferry across the Surinam River, joining two sections
of the railroad to the interior 596
A Bush negro family on its travels. Less than half the
dugout is shown 596
A Bush negro watching me photograph our engine 597
A “gran man,” or chieftain of the Bush negroes,
returning from his yearly visit to the Dutch governor
of Surinam, with his “commission” from Queen
Wilhelmina, and followed by his obsequious and
footsore valet 597
The main street of Paramaribo, capital of Dutch Guiana,
with its row of often mortgaged mahogany trees in the
background 604
An East Indian and an escaped Madagascar prisoner from
Cayenne cutting down a “back dam” on a Surinam
plantation in order to kill the ants that would
destroy it 604
Javanese workmen opening pods of _cacao_ that will
eventually appear in our markets as chocolate and
cocoa 605
A landscape in Hindu-inhabited British Guiana 608
Indentured East Indians enjoying a Saturday half-holiday
before one of their barrack villages 608
Prisoners at work on a leaking dam in Ciudad Bolívar on
the Orinoco 609
The trackless _llanos_ of Venezuela 609
An Indian family of eastern Venezuela 612
Lopez, the hammock-buyer, and the charm he always wears
on his travels 612
A Venezuelan landscape 613
Hammock-makers at home 620
The palm-leaf threads of the hammocks are made pliable
by rubbing them on a bare leg in the early morning
before the dew has dried 620
Lopez buying hammocks 621
We were delighted to find a rare water-hole in which to
quench our raging thirst 621
Lopez uncovers as he passes the last resting-place of a
fellow-traveler 624
Dinner time in rural Venezuela 624
Lopez enters his native village in style 625
The hammock-buyer in the bosom of his family 628
Policemen of Barcelona, and a part of the city
waterworks 628
A glimpse of the Venezuelan capital 629
The statue of Simón Bolívar in the central plaza of
Caracas 629
A bread-seller of Caracas 636
The birthplace of Simón Bolívar of Caracas, the
“Washington of South America” 636
A street in Caracas 637
The Municipal Theater of Caracas 637
WORKING NORTH FROM PATAGONIA
CHAPTER I
THE SOUTH AMERICAN METROPOLIS
In Buenos Aires I became what a local newspaper called “office boy” to
the American consul general. The latter had turned out to be a vicarious
friend of long standing; his overworked staff was sadly in need of an
American assistant familiar with Spanish, the one sent down from
Washington months before having been lost in transit. Moreover, being a
discerning as well as a kind-hearted man, the consul knew that even a
rolling stone requires an occasional handful of moss. The salary was
sufficient to sustain life just inside what another consular protégé
called the “pale of respectability,” and my duties as “outside man”
brought me into daily contact with all classes of _Porteños_, as natives
of what was reputed the most expensive city in the world are known in
their own habitat.
Two years of wandering in the Andes and jungles of South America is, in
a way, the best possible preparation for a visit to the largest city
south of the United States. The man who approaches it from this corridor
will experience to the full the astonishment it is almost certain to
produce upon an unprepared visitor; he will be in ideal condition to
recognize the urban artificialities which make it so great an antithesis
of the rural simplicity of nearly all the southern continent. Like the
majority of Americans, I suppose, though I had now and then heard rumors
of its increase and improvement, my mental picture of the Argentine
capital was as out of date as the spelling “Buenos Ayres” that still
persists among even the best of English and American authorities. It was
the picture hastily sketched by our school books of not so long ago,
and, except in the matter of a few decades of time, it was essentially a
true one.
A bare half century back the City of Good Airs had the appearance of a
Spanish town of the Middle Ages, and worse. Though it faced the River
Plata at a point where it is more than thirty miles wide, it had no real
harbor. Travelers landed from ships by first transferring to rowboats
far out on the yellow-brown horizon, then to ox-carts driven hub-deep
into the shallow, muddy stream. The streets were so innocent of paving
that business men often remained at home lest they find it impossible to
extricate themselves from the quagmires that masqueraded under the name
of _calles_. Temporary wooden bridgelets were laid across corners from
one scanty raised sidewalk to another; at the height of the rainy season
even horsemen were sometimes mired in the very heart of town. Men still
living tell of a pool in the present bustling Calle Rivadavia about
which sentinels had to be posted to keep careless people and their
horses from drowning in it. Municipal lighting was unknown. A few
public-spirited citizens hung up tallow candles before their houses;
wealthy residents, obliged to make their way through the bottomless
night, were attended by menials carrying lanterns. There were neither
water pipes nor sewers; each citizen dug his own well beside his garbage
heap. In winter the one-story houses, stretching in solemn yet
disordered array down the narrow, reeking streets and built for the most
part of sun-baked mud bricks, became slimy, clammy dens in which disease
bred and multiplied. The hundred and some thousand inhabitants, mixtures
of Spanish adventurers and Indians from the great pampas beyond, had but
little contact with the outside world and were correspondingly
provincial, conservative and fanatical.
Such was Buenos Aires within the memory of men who do not yet consider
themselves old; such it is still in the average imagination of the
outside world. It is with something stronger than surprise, therefore,
that the newcomer finds the Argentine capital to-day the largest
Spanish-speaking city on the globe, second only to Paris among the Latin
cities of the world, equal to Philadelphia in population, resembling
Chicago in extent as well as in situation, rivaling New York in many of
its metropolitan features, and outdoing every city of our land in some
of its civic improvements. Personally, I confess to having wandered its
endless streets and gazed upon its unexpected cosmopolitan uproar in a
semi-dazed condition for some time after my arrival. It was hard to
believe that those miles upon miles of modern wharves, surrounding
artificial basins capable of accommodating the largest ships in
existence, backed by warehouses that measure their capacity in millions
of tons, were situated on the same continent as medieval Quito, that the
teeming city behind them was inhabited by the same race that rules
languid La Paz and sleepy Asunción.
The greatness of Buenos Aires has been mainly thrust upon it. Of all the
cities of the earth only Chicago grew up with more vertiginous rapidity.
The city of to-day has so completely outreached the plans of its
unsuspecting founders that it is constantly faced with the problem of
modifying existing conditions to meet metropolitan requirements. It was
a comparatively simple matter to fill in and pave the old quagmires that
posed as streets; it was quite another thing to widen them to
accommodate modern traffic. Laid out by Moorish-influenced Spaniards in
a century when the passing of two horsemen constituted the maximum
demand for space, the streets of old Buenos Aires are narrower and more
congested than the tightest of those at the lower end of Manhattan
Island. In most cases the problem has been frankly abandoned, for
nothing short of destroying all the buildings on one side or the other
of these medieval passageways could improve them. The result is that a
walk through what was the entire city fifty years ago, and which is now
mainly the business section, is an ordeal or an amusing experience,
according to the mood or the haste of the victim.
The _Porteño_ has made various bold attacks upon this problem of
congestion. Nearly thirty years ago he hewed his way for a mile and a
half through the heart of the old town, destroying hundreds of buildings
in his insistence on more space. The result is the Avenida de Mayo,
somewhat resembling the boulevards of Paris in the neighborhood of the
Opéra and stretching from the already old and inadequate _Casa Rosada_,
or presidential palace, to the new congressional building, which
resembles and in some ways outdoes in majestic beauty our own national
capitol. But this chief artery of downtown travel is, after all, of
insignificant length compared with the mammoth Buenos Aires of to-day,
and the older flanking street of Rivadavia, once the principal highway
to the pampa beyond, cutting the entire city in two from the waterfront
to the open plains, is quite incapable of handling the through traffic
which refuses to risk itself in the constricted _calles_ of the downtown
labyrinth.
Similar heroic treatment has been applied in other parts of the old
town. Wherever the stroller wanders he is certain to come out often upon
an open space, a little park or a plaza, which has been grubbed out by
the bold demolition of a block of houses. I cannot recall another city
where parks are anything like as epidemic as they are in Buenos Aires.
There is not a point in town out of easy strolling distance of one or
more of them, some so tiny that they can be crossed in a hop, skip, and
a jump, the largest, aristocratic Palermo, so large that one may wander
for hours without crossing the same ground twice.
Buenos Aires is not a city of skyscrapers. Built on a loose soil that is
quite the antithesis of the granite hills of Manhattan Island, with
unlimited opportunity to spread across the floor-flat plains beyond, it
has neither the incentive nor the foundation needed to push its way far
aloft. Custom in this respect has crystallized into requirement, and a
city ordinance forbids the height of a building to exceed one and
one-third the width of the street it faces. The result is that while it
has fewer architectural failures, fewer monstrosities in brick and
stone, the city on the Plata has nothing that can rival the epic poems
among buildings to be found at the mouth of the Hudson. From a distance
it looks curiously like one of our own large cities decapitated to an
average height of three or four stories, with only here and there an
ambitious structure peering timidly above the monotonous general level.
Flat and drab are perhaps the two words which most fully describe its
general aspect.
On every hand the traveled visitor is reminded of this or that other
great city; it is as if one were visiting a newly laid out botanical
garden in which the origin of most of the plants, taken from old
established gardens elsewhere, is plainly evident, with only here and
there a native shrub or a curious hybrid to emphasize the changed
conditions of soil and climate. When one has noted the origin of nearly
all its human plants, it is no longer surprising that Buenos Aires seems
more a European than an American city. Architecturally it most resembles
Paris, with hints of Madrid, London and Rome thrown in, not to mention
certain features peculiarly its own. This similarity is the pride of the
_Porteño_ and every recognition of it is a compliment, for like nearly
all Latin-Americans, he is most enamored of French culture. Not only is
he accustomed to refer to his city as the “Paris of South America”—all
South American capitals are that to their own people—but he copies more
or less directly from the earthly paradise of all good _argentinos_. The
artistic sense of the Latin comes to his aid in this sometimes almost
subconscious endeavor; or, if the individual lacks this, there is the
guiding hand of the community ever ready to sustain his faltering steps.
City ordinances not only forbid the erection of structures which do not
fit into the general scheme of a modified Paris, but Buenos Aires
rewards those who most successfully carry out its conception of civic
improvement. Every year the building adjudged the greatest addition to
the city’s beauty is awarded a bronze façade-plate and is relieved for a
decade from the burden of taxes.
It would be unreasonable to expect a community with such pride in its
personal appearance to permit itself to be disfigured by an elevated
railway system. Besides, as it is spread evenly over an immense space of
flat country, “B. A.’s” transportation problem is scarcely serious
enough to require this concession to civic comfort. Of street-cars in
the ordinary sense it has unlimited numbers, plying in every direction;
all they lack is freedom to go their way unhampered in the oldest and
busiest section of town. Their one peculiarity, to the American, is that
they refuse to be overcrowded. No one may enter a tramcar while its
seats are filled; nine persons, and nine only, may ride on the back
platform. If you chance to be the tenth, there is no use insisting that
you must ride or miss an important engagement. The car will refuse to
move as long as you remain on board, and if there happens to be within
call one of the spick-and-span, Britishly imperturbable, New-Yorkly
impersonal policemen of Buenos Aires, you will probably regret your
insistence. It will be far better to accept your misfortune with Latin
courtesy and hail one of the taxis that are forever scurrying past. Or,
if even the modest demands of these well-disciplined public carriers are
beyond your means, there is the ancient and honorable method of footing
it. The chances are that if your destination is anywhere within the
congested business section you can walk to it and finish your errand by
the time the inexorable street-car would have set you down there.
I lost no time in exploring the luxuries of Buenos Aires’ new subway.
Only the year before the proud Avenida de Mayo had been disrupted by the
upheavals throughout its entire length, and already the “Subterraneo”
operated from the Plaza de Mayo behind the Pink House to the Plaza Once,
two miles inland and nearly a fifth of the way across the city. Like the
surface lines it belongs to the _Tranvías Anglo-Argentina_, a British
corporation, the concession requiring the company to pay the city six
per cent. of its gross receipts for fifty years, at the end of which
time the subway becomes automatically the property of the municipality.
The _argentino_ is fully awake to the advantage and possibility of
driving good bargains in the exploitation of public utilities and
resources.
The descent to any of the subway stations along the Avenue carries the
mind instantly back to Manhattan. The underground scent is the same,
news-stands and advertising placards are as inevitable; along the
white-tile-walled platforms are ranged even penny-in-the-slot scales and
automatic vendors, though with the familiar plea, “Drop one cent,”
changed to “_Echad 10 centavos_,” which is significant of the difference
in cost of most small things in the chief cities of North and South
America. Yet the subway fare is a trifle cheaper on the Plata, being the
tenth of a _peso_ normally worth barely forty-three cents. One’s
impression of being back in “Bagdad-on-the-Subway,” however, is certain
to evaporate by the time he steps out of his first _tren subterraneo_.
The _Porteño_ believes in moving rapidly, but his interpretation of the
word hurry is still far different from our own. There are certain forms
of courtesy which he will not cast off for the mere matter of stretching
his twenty-four hours a few minutes farther; there are certain racial
traits of deliberate formality of which he is incapable of ridding
himself. Moreover, the “Subterraneo” is British, and it retains the
dignified leisureliness of its nationality. One buys a ticket of a man
who is intensely aware of the fact that he is engaged in a financial
transaction; at the gate another man solemnly punches the ticket and
returns it to the owner, who is warned both by placards and italicized
remarks on the ticket itself that he must be constantly prepared
instantly to display it to the inspectors who are forever stalking
through the cars; where he disembarks, it is solemnly gathered by still
another intense employee, who will infallibly make the passenger who has
carelessly mislaid the valuable document in question produce another
ten-centavo piece and witness the preparation and cancelation of a
_billete suplementario_ before he is granted his freedom. There are no
express trains; the locals are rather far apart; they cease their labors
soon after midnight, and do not begin again until dawn. On the other
hand, the cars are roomy, spotless and as comfortable as a club
easy-chair; the noisy ringing of bells and slamming of doors by
disgruntled guards is lacking; signs to “Prepare yourself to leave the
coach before arriving at the station of destination” take the place of
any attempt to hustle the crowd. The company loses no courteous
opportunity of “recommending to the passenger the greatest rapidity in
getting on or off the cars, in order to accelerate the public service,”
but mere placards mean nothing to the Spanish-American dowager of the
old school, who is still inclined to take her osculatory and deliberate
farewell of friends and relatives even though the place of parting be
the open door of this new-fangled mode of transportation, surrounded by
inwardly impatient, but outwardly courtier-like, subway guards and
station employees.
Three important railway companies operate five lines to the suburbs, and
every evening great commuters’ trains, more palatial than the average of
those out of our own large cities, rush away into the cool summer night
with the majority of “B. A.’s” business men. It is perhaps a misnomer to
call the score or more of residence sections suburbs, for they are
compactly united into the one great city, of which they constitute fully
three fourths the capacity. But each district bears its own name, which
often suggests its character and history. Even a total stranger might
guess that Belgrano and Flores are rather exclusive dwelling-places;
Coghlan, Villa Malcolm, Villa Mazzini, and Nueva Pompeya recall some of
the races that have amalgamated to form the modern _Porteño_; one would
naturally expect to find the municipal slaughter-house and less pleasant
living conditions in Nuevo Chicago. In these larger and newer parts of
Buenos Aires the broad streets are in striking contrast to the crowded
and narrow ones down town. Though the _Porteño_ has inherited the
Spaniard’s preference for taking his front yard inside the house,
neither the sumptuous dwellings of the aristocratic north suburbs nor
the more plebeian residences of the west and south have that shut-in air
of most Latin-American cities, where the streets slink like outcast curs
between long rows of scowling, impersonal house-walls.
The far-flung limits of Buenos Aires inclose many market gardens, and
the land side of the city belongs to the backwoods it faces. But the
thousands of makeshift shacks which fringe it are not the abode of
hopeless mortals, such as inhabit the hovels of less progressive South
American towns. The outskirt dwellers of Buenos Aires have the
appearance of people who are moving forward, who insist that another
year shall find them enjoying something more of the advantages of
civilization. Indeed, this atmosphere pervades the entire city, bringing
out in pitiless contrast the social inertia of the great Andean region.
There are fewer slums in Buenos Aires than in New York; the children of
the poorer classes are less oppressive in appearance; beggars are
scarcer. Though there is squalor enough, the _conventillos_, or
single-story tenement-houses of the larger west-coast cities are almost
unknown. Economic opportunity has here given birth to new hope and
brought with it the energy and productiveness which constitute a great
people, and by the time the visitor has wandered with due leisure
through the vast length and breadth of Buenos Aires he is likely to
conclude that there the Latin is coming into his own again.
Though it is not quite so difficult to find a native _argentino_ in
Buenos Aires as to run to earth a genuine American in New York, there
are many evidences that its growth has come mainly from across the sea.
The city is not merely European in its material aspects, but in its
human element. The newcomer will look in vain for any costume he cannot
find on the streets of Paris or Rome; the wild _gauchos_ from the pampa,
the beggars on horseback, the picturesque Carmelite monks and nuns that
troop through the pages of “Amalia” and kindred stories of the past
century are as scarce as feather-decked Indians along Broadway. No city
of our own land is more completely “citified” than the Argentine
capital. Though there has as yet been far less European immigration to
the Argentine Republic than to the United States—a mere five million who
came to stay up to the beginning of the Great War—a disproportionate
number of these have remained in Buenos Aires. Fully half the population
of the city is foreign born, with Italians in the majority. The
long-drawn vowels and doubled consonants of Italian speech are certain
to be heard in every block, though more often as a foreign accent in the
local tongue than in the native dialect of the speaker. For the Italian
fits more snugly into his environment in the Argentine than in the
United States. He finds a language nearly enough like his own to be
learned in a few weeks; there is a Latin atmosphere about the southern
republic, particularly its capital, which makes him feel so fully at
home that he is much less inclined to segregate than in the colder
Anglo-Saxon North. Add to this that the climate is more nearly that of
his homeland, that the Argentine welcomes him not merely with five days’
free hospitality and transportation to any part of the country, but with
the communal _abrazo_ as a fellow-Latin and a near relative, and it is
easier to understand why ships from Genoa and Naples are turning more
and more southward on their journey across the Atlantic. Were it not for
the reversal of the seasons on the two sides of the equator, the
Argentine would have a still larger permanent Italian population. But as
it is summer and grape-picking time in the boot-leg peninsula when it is
winter on the pampas, large numbers of Italians flit back and forth like
migratory birds from one harvest to the other, or go to spend the money
earned where it is plentiful in the place where it will buy more.
The Castilian lisp also stands out frequently in the sibilant native
speech of “B. A.” and the _boína_ of the Basques is so common a
headdress in the city as to be inconspicuous. After the Spaniard there
are French, English, and German residents, decreasing in proportion in
the order named, and Americans enough to form a champion baseball team.
Jews are less ubiquitous than in our own metropolis, but they are
numerous enough to support several synagogues and a company of Yiddish
players for a season of several weeks, after which the Thespians find
new clientèle in the larger cities of the interior.
It is surprising to most Americans to find that Buenos Aires is strictly
a “white man’s town.” The one negro I ever saw there was posted before
the door of a theater, as an advance attraction. In the country as a
whole African blood is scarcer than in Canada; while the United States
has twelve non-Caucasians to the hundred, the Argentine has but five.
Nor do there remain any visible remnants of the aborigines, at least in
the capital. The caste of color, so intricate and unescapable in the
Andes, is completely lacking. Nor are the places of importance in its
social structure confined to those of Spanish origin. Along with the
Castilian and Basque names that figure in its society and big-business
columns are no small number not only Italian and French, but English,
Baltic, and Slavic, some of them more or less Spanicized by long
Argentine residence. As in Chile there is a little aristocracy of third
or fourth generation Irish, retaining the original spelling of their
family names, but pronouncing them “O-co-nór,” “Kel-yée,” “O-bree-én”
and the like. It was an ordinary experience in running consular errands
in Buenos Aires to come across business men with English or Irish names
who spoke only Spanish, or men who spoke English with both an Irish
brogue and a Spanish accent and accompanied their remarks with a wealth
of Latin gesticulation.
To say that these transplanted Irish are active in local and national
politics is to utter a tautology. Strictly speaking, Buenos Aires is not
self-governing; as a Federal District—the most populous one in the
world, by the way—it is ruled by an _intendente_ appointed by the
national executive. But its influence on the national life is more
potent than that of Washington and New York combined; as it has more
“influential citizens” and large property owners than all the rest of
the republic, it has roundabout ways of imposing its own will upon
itself. Not that those ways are devious in the cynical sense. It is
something of a traditional hobby among the heads of aristocratic old
families, most of them with ample wealth, to accept municipal office and
to seek public approval in it out of family pride, and their privilege
to be free from the handicap of listening to every whim of an ignorant
electorate. Thus Buenos Aires enjoys the distinction among large cities
of the western hemisphere of being for the most part rather well
governed. On the whole, perhaps a larger percentage of public funds are
actually and advantageously spent in municipal improvement than in the
case of most “self-governing” cities. Besides, it is one of the
distinctions between North and South America that while the cry of
“graft” is more frequent in our municipal than in our national affairs,
our neighbors to the south seem more capable of handling a city than a
nation.
It is as easy to become a citizen in the Argentine as in the United
States, but it is not quite so easy to remain one. The duties of
citizenship are more nearly those of continental Europe than of the free
and easy Anglo-Saxon type. There is compulsory military service, for
instance. In theory every male citizen must enter the army or navy for
two years when he reaches maturity; practically there is by no means
room for all in the armed force which the Argentine considers it
necessary to maintain. Hence the requirement reduces itself to the
necessity of drawing lots, and of serving if designated by the finger of
fate. This is no new and temporary whim in the Argentine, but was
already in force long before the European war. The _argentino_, however,
goes his models of the Old World one or two better. The man who does not
serve, either for physical or lucky reasons, pays a yearly tax toward
the support of the force from which he has been spared. As in
continental Europe, every citizen must have a booklet of identity,
issued by the police and duplicated in the public archives. This
document is so essential that, though I spent less than three months in
the country, I found it advantageous to apply for one, that is, the
simpler _cédula de identidad_ for non-citizens. The temporary resident,
and even the citizen, may “get by” for a time without this little
volume, but the day is almost sure to come when he will regret its
absence. Of two men whose public altercation chances to attract the
attention of the police, the one who can produce his _libreto_ is far
less likely to be jailed than the one who cannot. The chauffeur who has
an accident, the man who is overtaken by any of the mishaps which call
one’s existence to the notice of the public authorities, is much better
off if he has been legally registered. Moreover, the citizen can neither
vote nor exercise any of his formal rights of citizenship without
displaying his booklet. It contains the photograph, a brief verified
biography, the signature, and the thumb-print of the holder. The
_argentinos_ have carried the use of finger-prints further than perhaps
any other nation. Even school children taking formal examinations must
often decorate their papers with a thumb-print. Both photograph and
_cédula_ are produced by a well-trained public staff in well-arranged
public offices, in which prints of all the applicant’s fingers are filed
away under the number inscribed on his _libreto_, and where courteous
attendants bring him into contact with the lavatory facilities which he
requires before again displaying his hands to a pulchritudinous public.
In addition to the essentials contained in all booklets, that of the
citizen has several extra pages on which may be inscribed from time to
time his military and civic record.
But to come to the polls, now that we are armed with the document
indispensable to any participation in an election. A new election law
had recently been passed, one so well designed to express the real will
of the people that pessimists were already prophesying its attempted
repeal by the oligarchy of wealthy property owners, from whom it would
wrest the control of government. As in most Latin-American countries,
Sunday was the day chosen for the casting of ballots. About each
polling-place, most of which were in sumptuous public buildings, rather
than in barbershops and second-hand shoe stores, were a few of Buenos
Aires’ immaculate, imperturbable policemen and the three or four
officials in charge. Otherwise there was little animation in the
vicinity. The new election law forbids voters to approach the polls “in
groups,” and makes electioneering or loitering within a certain
considerable distance of the booths penal offenses. Glancing cautiously
about him, therefore, to make sure that he was not a group, the
_Porteño_ stealthily yet briskly stepped forward to do his civic duty.
The officials rose to greet him with dignified courtesy, and requested
permission to peruse his booklet. This being found in order, his
military service honorably completed, or his military tax paid, they
permitted him to cast his ballot, at the same time recording that act on
the proper line of his _libreto_. This latter formality is of such
importance that the voter himself would protest against its inadvertent
omission. For the new law in the Argentine _requires_ each citizen to
vote. Unless he can show unquestionable proof that he was seriously ill
or unavoidably absent from his home district on election day, the
citizen whose _libreto_ does not show, at the next revision by
authority, the mark of the election board is subject to a fine.
The most cynical of observers could scarcely have suspected any
“crookedness” in the election as it was carried out that day in Buenos
Aires. Outside the capital things were perhaps a trifle less ideal; at
least tales of strife drifted in for some time afterward from the remote
provinces, where the familiar old South American experience of seeing
the _cacique_, the hereditary “boss,” impose his will with a heavy and
sometimes a bloody hand was still repeated. But there was considerable
evidence that the entire country is improving in this respect. Those who
lie awake nights worrying about the future development of foreign lands
need not lose much sleep over the Argentine, for here at least is one
South American country unquestionably able to work out its own destiny.
The _argentino_ is in no such breathless haste as the American to know
the result of his elections. The newspapers of the following morning
carried many columns of comment on the aspect of the capital and the
principal towns of the provinces under the new law, but not a hint of
the future make-up of the legislative body. Weeks later the retiring
congress met in their new palace, and laboriously fell to counting the
ballots from all the republic, announcing the results piecemeal from day
to day, and causing the votes to be publicly burned in a corner of the
still unfinished grounds when the count had been verified.
It goes without saying, since military service is one of the duties of
citizenship, that Argentine women do not vote. In fact, there is almost
no evidence of a desire on their part to do so. A very small group of
_sufragistas_ did make a demonstration in the capital on election day,
sending through the streets an automobile decorated with banners,
flowers, and femininity. But as the four young ladies in the tonneau
were both comely and exquisitely dressed, the apathetic by-standers took
the attitude of considering them rather as exhibits in national beauty
and charm than for what they purported to be—all, that is, except the
police, who ungallantly took the group into custody for violating the
new law against electioneering on the day of balloting.
Perhaps the greatest personal surprise which befell me during the
election was to be asked by a policeman at one of the polls before which
I illegally loitered for a moment whether I desired to vote. One is so
palpably, so noticeably a “gringo” in other Latin-American countries
that it had never occurred to me that I might be taken for a citizen in
the Argentine. In nearly all the rest of South America the foreign
resident remains an _estranjero_ all his days; even his native-born
children are apt to be called “_hijo de inglés, de italiano, de
alemán_”; in the Argentine he is soon accepted as one of the
cosmopolitan race of the Silvery Republic. The Argentine, and perhaps
Uruguay, seems to be the only country south of our Rio Grande capable of
giving the immigrant an entirely new deal in the game of life and of
completely absorbing him into the body politic, at least by the second
generation. The sons of Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Italians who took up
their residence below the Plata are no more English, French, and Italian
than they would be if their fathers had come to the United States. If
any reference to their origin comes up in conversation, it is as
something casual, unimportant, like the color of their hair and eyes.
During my stay in the southern republic the son of an American dentist
who had established himself in Buenos Aires a generation ago lost his
life in a foolhardy airplane flight undertaken for the delectation of a
group of admiring young ladies, on the eve of an official attempt to fly
over the Andes. The temperament which caused him to accept such a
challenge under the circumstances was as typically Latin-American as
were the flowers, poems, and street names which were heaped upon “our
national hero” by his bereaved Argentine fellow-countrymen. In Peru or
Colombia his exploit might have been noted, but he would still have been
an _americano_.
The people of the Argentine, and particularly of Buenos Aires, have much
the same feeling toward the _madre patria_ as the average American has
toward England—forgiving, though perhaps still a bit resentful of the
past, aware of the common heritage, on the whole a trifle disdainful.
The popular term for a Spaniard in Buenos Aires is “Gallego” (or, in the
slurring Argentine pronunciation, “Gajego”), and the Galician has stood
for centuries as all that is stupid, servile, and clumsy, the unfailing
butt of Spanish drama. The _Porteño_ never says he speaks Spanish,
though his tongue is as nearly that of Spain as ours is that of England;
even in his school books he calls it the _idioma nacional_.
But the _argentino_ is still largely Spanish, whether he admits it or
not; he is distinctly of the Latin race, for all the influx of other
blood. The types one sees in his streets are those same temperamental
Latin-Americans to be found from Mexico to Paraguay, a more glorified
type, perhaps, more in tune with the great modern moving world, almost
wholly free from non-Caucasian mixture, larger and better nourished, and
with the ruddiness and vigor of the temperate zone. But they have much
the same overdeveloped pride, the same dread of demeaning themselves by
anything suggestive of manual labor. No _Porteño_ of standing would
dream of carrying his own valise from station to tramway; even the
Americans sent down to set up harvesting machinery on the great
_estancias_ cannot throw off their coats and pitch in, lest they
instantly sink to the caste of the peon in the eyes of the latter as
well as in those of the ruling class. Caste lines are sharper in the
Argentine than anywhere in western Europe; as in all South America there
is little or no “middle class,” few people of moderate wealth, tastes,
and station to fill in the great gulf between the day-to-day workman and
the powerful landed proprietors who dwell sumptuously in the capital on
the income from their vast estates out on the pampas, which they see far
less often than the medieval lord did his feudal domain.
The prevailing attitude toward life, including as it does an exaggerated
pride in personal appearance, gives Buenos Aires a plethora of
labor-fearing fops whose main purpose in life seems to be to establish
the false impression that they are the scions of aristocratic old
families of uncomputed wealth. Behold one of these frauds in his daily
peregrination, for he is too typical of the Buenos Aires point of view
to be passed over as a mere individual. At an aristocratic hour of the
afternoon he may be seen descending the steps of the far-famed, more
than ornate Jockey Club (pronounced “Shocky Cloop” in the Argentine) in
the patrician Calle Florida. His faultless black felt hat, carefully
creased at the front and back of the crown but full in the middle, the
bow of the band at the back of his head, is set at the twenty degree
angle, tilting to the rear, of the “last cry” of fashion. A silk scarf
of much yet subdued color, a tan suit cut low in front and retreating
suddenly below, the two coat buttons close together, displaying much
silver-and-gray waistcoat, the cuffed trousers razor-edged, surmounting
patent-leather shoes topped by silver-gray spats, one lavendar glove,
with what may be a diamond ring bulging through one of the fingers, its
wrist folded back over the hand it covers and in which its mate is
carried, completes his attire, though not his make-up. A brilliant
carnation in the lapel, a green-black overcoat of camel-hair,
blanket-like texture, drawn together behind by a half-belt fastened to
buttons on the sides, the skirts of the wide-spreading variety, thrown
with ostensible carelessness over the left arm, and a silver-headed cane
grasped by the middle at the latest approved angle, in the bare hand,
complete the sartorial picture. On the chronically disappointed face
cultivated by the gilded youth of Latin-America there is an aristocratic
pose, beneath which lurks a faint hint of the Bowery, particularly when
its possessor turns to ogle those of the passing ladies who are
ogle-worthy. Arrived in the street, he opens with grand manner a silver
cigarette-case and lights in the latest fashion a monogrammed cigarette,
summons a taxi with a languid, world-weary air by slightly raising his
cane, steps in and rides out of sight of the Jockey Club, alights, pays
the sixty centavos fare of the first fifteen hundred meters—and walks to
the ten-dollar-a-month room he shares with a companion. At the Jockey
Club races hundreds of these real or counterfeit favorites of fortune
may be seen on the hottest days in those same lavendar gloves—or rather,
their spotless replica—pulling out little pocket mirrors every few
minutes to reassure themselves on their personal charms, or attempting
to add to them by giving a new curl to their mustaches.
[Illustration: SOUTH AMERICA]
Physical exertion, even for exercise sake, has little place in the
scheme of life of these dandies, or of the majority of youths even of
the genuinely wealthy and patrician class. Of late certain influences
have been working for improvement in this matter, but they are still
hampered by the awkwardness of inexperience as well as laggard
_costumbre_. Out at Tigre, a cluster of islands and channels some miles
up the bank of the Plata, young men of the class that in the United
States would pride themselves on a certain expertness in sports may be
seen rowing about with the clumsiness and self-consciousness of old
maids, their shirts bunched up under their suspenders, their bodies
plainly uncomfortable in trousers inclined by the dictates of fashion,
as well as by the unwonted exertion, to climb to their chests, the
occasional young woman in the back seat sitting as stiffly as the model
in a corset-shop window.
The feminine sex of the same class does not, of course, yield to the
males in the matter of personal adornment. At the races, along the
shaded drives of Palermo of an afternoon, above all in the narrow Calle
Florida a bit later in the day, fashion may be seen preening itself in
frank self-admiration. In the material sense the Calle Florida is merely
another of those inadequate streets of the old town, four or five blocks
back from the waterfront, and given over to the most luxurious
shops,—jewelers, _modistes_, _tailleurs de luxe_. But Florida is more
than a street; it is an institution. For at least a generation it has
been the unofficial gathering-place of the élite, in so far as there can
be any such in so large a city, taking the place in a way of the Sunday
night promenade in the central plaza of smaller Latin-American towns. Up
to a few years ago the carriages drove directly from the daily promenade
in Palermo to join the procession that crawled back and forth along the
few blocks of Florida between the Avenida de Mayo and the Plaza San
Martín, the ladies in them affecting that air of lassitude which seems
to be most attractive to the frankly admiring cavalier south of the Rio
Grande. But the day came when the narrow _callejón_ could no longer
contain all those who demanded admission to the daily parade and mutual
admiration party, and the _intendente_ solved the problem by closing the
street to vehicles during certain hours of the late afternoon. There is
still a procession on wheels from eleven in the morning until noon,
given over particularly to débutantes ostensibly on shopping tours,
though invariably surrounded by long lines of gallants and would-be
_novios_; but the principal daily _corso_ is now made on foot, and
admiring males may without offense or conspicuousness pass near enough
in the throng that fills the street from wall to wall to their
particular ideal to catch the scent of her favorite perfume. Nor does
that require undue proximity, for the most circumspect ladies of Buenos
Aires see nothing amiss in making an appeal to the olfactory senses
which in other lands would lead to unflattering conclusions.
The gowns to be seen in such gatherings are said by authorities on the
subject to be no farther behind Paris than the time of fast steamers
between French ports and the Plata. To the bachelor more familiar with
the backwoods they seem to be as thoroughly up to the minute as their
wearers are expert in exhausting every possibility of human adornment.
Unfortunately, many of the demure, semi-animate ladies prove on close
inspection to be not so beautiful as they are painted. Not a few of them
could readily pass as physically good looking, despite the bulky noses
so frequent in “B. A.” as to be almost typical, were they satisfied to
let nature’s job alone. But the most entrancing lady in the world would
risk defeat by entering a beauty contest disguised as a porter in a
flour-mill. There are, to be sure, ravishing visions now and then in
these Buenos Aires processions, but unpolished candor forces the
admission that what to us at least is the refined and dainty type is
conspicuous by its rarity. It is a standing observation of critical
foreign visitors that the décolleté gowns seen at the Colón during the
opera season often disclose cable-like shoulder muscles bequeathed by
recent ancestors who carried loads on their heads. That to me is one of
the promising signs in Buenos Aires, a proof that the new “aristocracy”
is near enough the laboring generations which built it up not to have
lost its muscle and its energy; it helps to explain the youthful
enthusiasm of the Argentine, similar to our own and so unlike the blasé
hopelessness of much of South America. For the southern republic is as
truly the land of opportunity as is our own, inferior perhaps only in
extent and resources. Along with the fops lounging in the Jockey Club it
has many such types as Mihanovitsch, arriving half a century ago with no
other possessions than the porter’s rope over his shoulder and retiring
recently from the active ownership of the largest steamship company
south of the United States, with palatial steamers plying wherever
Argentine waters are navigable.
The gaudy ostentation of this _nouveau riche_ city of Latin-Iberian
origin is nowhere seen to better advantage than at the Recoleta, the
principal cemetery. This is a crowded cement city within a stone wall,
as much a promenade and show-ground as a last resting-place. Men sit
smoking and gossiping on the tombs; women take in one another’s gowns
with critical eye as they turkey-walk along the narrow cement streets
between the innumerable family vaults. The tombs are built with the all
too evident purpose of showing that one’s dead are, or at least were in
life, of more importance in the world than those of one’s neighbors.
They have four or more stories below ground, with shelves or
pigeon-holes for several coffins on each “floor,” and marble steps
leading down to them. On the upper or ground floor, usually surrounded
by elaborate statues sculptured in white stone, are ostentatious chapels
with plate-glass doors, locked with the latest American safety locks.
Everywhere reigns a gaudy luxury wholly out of place in a city of the
dead. The self-respecting corpse must feel as if he had been set up in a
museum instead of being disposed of in a sanitary and inconspicuous
manner. Here and there a tomb bears the sign “For Sale,” with the name
of the authorized real estate dealer under it. The seller, who in some
cases seems to have tossed out the bones of his forgotten ancestors in
the convenient old Spanish way, is certain to benefit financially from
the transaction, for the Recoleta is _the_ cemetery of Buenos Aires,
absolutely limited in space now by the city that has grown up about it,
and accommodations in it are as eagerly sought as boxes at the opera or
seats on the stock exchange.
“Le cheval est la plus noble conquête que l’homme ait jamais fait,” runs
an inscription, from Buffon, over the portals of the far-famed
race-track in Palermo, which, from the intellectual heights of the
Jockey Club, is no doubt true. It suggests, however, an attempt on the
part of the _argentinos_ to deceive themselves into believing that they
attend the races in such hordes every Thursday and Sunday because of
their love of horses, rather than to indulge their genuinely Spanish
infatuation for gambling. This same hint of hypocrisy, of kow-towing to
Mrs. Grundy, which is ordinarily little in evidence in the
Latin-American character, also smirks from the tickets of the lottery
maintained by the Federal Government, which calls itself the “Loteria de
_Beneficencia_ Nacional.” How widespread is this Iberian desire to get
something for nothing is shown by the fact that the Argentine not only
maintains the national lottery, with regular drawings every ten days and
frequent special drawings with enormous prizes, but two other official
games of chance, run by the Provinces of Buenos Aires and of Tucumán.
The gambling at Palermo is on the _pari mutuel_, or pooled bets system.
That is, those who wish to place a wager on a race—and virtually
everyone on the grounds seems to have that desire as often as a race is
announced—crowd their way to one of the many windows, and purchase as
many bet-tickets as inclination or the state of their pocketbooks
suggests. These tickets are of two kinds,—_Ganador_ (Winner) and
_Placé_. All money wagered on that race is pooled, the Jockey Club, to
which the whole establishment belongs, skimming off ten per cent. for
itself and distributing the rest among those holding winning tickets.
Thus when a favorite wins there are so many players to share the returns
that one often gets little more than his money back. There are none of
those hundred-to-one chances to make the excitement of large hopes worth
the risk of a small loss. Now and again an “outsider” wins at Palermo,
but it is a far more common experience to wager two pesos, to see one’s
choice come in a neck or a length ahead of the entire field—and to be
paid two pesos and ten centavos at the booking windows.
The _Porteños_ seem to get much entertainment out of their race-track,
for all the slimness of the average winnings. The sumptuous pavilion,
confined to the use, free of charge, of members of the Jockey Club and
their guests, is always well patronized; the adjoining concrete stand,
called the “Paddock,” has its throng of seven-peso spectators even on
days when weather and grounds are not inviting to the sport; the swarms
of garden variety men and women who surrender two pesos for the
privilege of jostling one another in the other stands and about the
betting booths show an even less blasé interest. On fine days many
canopied tea-tables are set out on the smooth gravel space before the
Jockey Club pavilion, and there may be seen _Porteño_ fashion at its
gaudiest. The entire place is honeycombed with passageways for the use
of an army of officials, contestants, bet sellers and bet payers, the
latter superhuman in their facility in mental arithmetic. From the upper
seats one may look off across three complete racetracks, one within the
other and enclosing a lake and a small park, to the red-brown Plata,
stretching dull and featureless to the horizon. One might moralize and
point out the burden imposed on the mass of the population to support
the Jockey Club, perhaps the most ornate place of its kind in the world,
and surround the few thousand club members with luxury, could one
overlook the fact that if the average _argentino_ were denied the
privilege of risking his money on the races or in the lottery, he would
find other ways to hazard it, if only by betting on the number of rains
a year or the number of traffic blocks per hour in the downtown streets.
Of other forms of public entertainment Buenos Aires has its fair share.
The theater list for a given day numbers twenty-five performances,
ranging from the opera to a circus and a _frontón_ given over to the
Basque game of _pelota_—this, too, without counting the ubiquitous
“movie.” Serious drama has comparatively little standing, the popular
taste running to flippant one-act Spanish _zarzuelas_ or to the maudlin
and undress, with the audiences overwhelmingly male. Vaudeville bills
are apt to be cosmopolitan, each “artist” speaking his mother tongue,
for there is slight native “talent,” and an American negro doing a clog
dance that would not win him a single “hand” at home is much applauded,
since, coming from abroad, he must be good. A “national company” giving
native plays of real literary and histrionic merit was conspicuous by
its rarity.
Night life in Buenos Aires is brilliant at least in the material sense.
Though there are fewer blazing advertisements in all the town than along
Broadway, municipal lighting is more generous than in pre-war Paris.
Entertainments rarely begin before nine, and midnight usually finds the
streets crowded. By night, perhaps even more than by day, the visitor is
struck by the lack of rowdyism. As the city is less noisy than our own
metropolis, thanks to the absence of an “L,” among other things, so it
is less “tough.” Even the saloons—it seems more fitting to call them by
their local name of café—have little objectionable atmosphere; in them
one may order “soft” as well as “hard” drinks without arousing an
insinuating look from the waiter. The _Porteño_, like the southern
European from whom he is mainly descended, is temperate in his use of
liquor, and he expects his drinking-places to be as gentlemanly as any
other public rendezvous. Fully as numerous as the “cocktailerías,” often
presided over by expert mixers exiled from the United States, are the
_lecherías_ at which one may sit down at any hour of the day or evening
to a glass of the best of milk at a reasonable price.
The Latin-American privilege of ogling all attractive women has not, of
course, been eradicated even in Buenos Aires. But a recent ordinance
makes it a penal offense to speak to a woman on the street unless first
addressed by her, and the few respectable women who go out after dark
without escort are rarely subjected to anything worse than staring, and
perhaps an ostensibly unconscious little whispered monologue or popular
air. The same restriction has not, however, been placed on the fair sex,
and cases of blackmail turning on the point of who spoke first have not
been unknown in the municipal courts.
“B. A.” is particularly gay during the winter season, from June to
September. Then “Society” has returned from Mar del Plata, the Argentine
Atlantic City, or from the Córdoba hills; the few wealthy _estancieros_
who have residences on their estates come in from the pampa; gilded
loafers, opera singers, adventuresses turn up from the four points of
the compass, and the capital becomes doubly pretentious, expensive, and
crowded. Several times I came to it from journeys into the “camp,” as
the large English-speaking colony, anglicizing the Spanish word _campo_,
calls the country outside the capital, and each time I found it more
breathlessly in pursuit of pleasure. With the same latitude as Los
Angeles, the South American metropolis does not, of course, have what we
would call a real winter. Only once within the memory of the present
generation has snow fallen in sufficient quantity to cover the ground. A
temperature around the freezing point is the usual limit, and even in
the coldest days of July or August the sky is apt to be brilliant and
the atmosphere radiant. The cold, when it comes, seems extraordinarily
penetrating, just as the _pampero_, the suffocating norther of the
summer-time, seems hotter than anything the tropics have to offer. His
winter season is so short that the average _argentino_ makes little or
no preparation for it, with the result that he probably suffers more
from cold than those who live in really cold countries. Both law and
custom now require steam heat in hotels and the more important public
buildings, but the rank and file rarely come into contact with
artificial warmth.
A few years ago Buenos Aires caught a virulent case of puritanism from
some unknown source and made a concerted attack on notorious immorality.
The more vulgar features of night life were driven across the Riachuelo,
a filthy little stream that bounds the city and the federal district on
the south. There, beyond the jurisdiction of the city police—since the
section is subject only to the laws of the Province of Buenos Aires,
with its capital far away at La Plata—though still virtually within the
city limits, are gathered sailors’ recreation houses and the most
squalid vice. In _Porteño_ speech “beyond the Riachuelo” is the
equivalent of “outside the bounds of decency,” and in the moral shambles
of this region public entertainments reach a degradation which is beyond
American imagination.
In the capital itself things are not yet morally immaculate. The
_argentino_ looks upon the “social evil” rather in the French than the
American manner,—as something unavoidable, not particularly
reprehensible, and to be regulated rather than driven under cover. Vice
may be more widely spread than in our own large cities, but it is less
openly crude and vulgar, with more of the frankness and at the same time
of the chic naughtiness of the French. This is perhaps natural, for not
only is Paris the Porteño’s beloved model, but probably at least half
the women of this class come from France. Many other nationalities are
represented, but the rarest of all are native women. Whether Argentine
girls are “virtuous by constraint,” as some cynics have it, or the
national wealth is so great that few are forced to resort to the last
means of winning a livelihood, the fact remains that the predatory
female of Buenos Aires is almost certain to be a foreigner. Yet there
are few opportunities for women outside the home. Typists, clerks, and
the like are almost all men; in the biggest, and almost the only,
department store in Buenos Aires 2360 men and 640 girls were employed on
the day that official duties caused me to investigate the question.
Women, however, are steadily forging ahead as teachers in the numerous
and increasingly excellent public schools. Buenos Aires, by the way,
shows an illiteracy of barely ten per cent. for all its continuous
immigration. It has given insufficient attention to the development of
school playgrounds; its boys do not grow up with that love for athletics
which brings with it the worship of good health and physical perfection
of the body that is so potent an enemy of bad habits. Moreover, their
elders treat certain matters with a levity both of speech and example
which is not inclined to reform the rising male generation. In the moral
attitude of the Argentine capital there is much that could
advantageously be corrected, but there are civic beauties that would be
the pride of almost any city of our own land. For all the deadly
flatness of its site and its lack of landscape, it has a certain charm;
like all great cities it is cruel and heartless, with wrath-provoking
contrasts; and on the whole it is not particularly lovable.