FAR AND WIDE ON THE ARGENTINE PAMPAS
The traveler who visits only Buenos Aires will almost certainly carry
away a mistaken notion of the Argentine. There is perhaps no national
capital in the world so far in advance of, so out of proportion to its
nation as is the great city on what the English called the “Plate.” We
of the northern hemisphere are not accustomed to cities which _are_
their countries to the extent that Buenos Aires is the Argentine.
American editors and publicists expressed astonishment, and in some
cases misgiving, when our latest census showed that one tenth the
population of the United States dwells in its three largest cities. Of
all the people inhabiting the Argentine Republic virtually one fourth
live in the capital.
The contrast between this and the great background of pampas is
incredible; Buenos Aires is far more closely allied to Paris or Rome
than to the broad country over which it rules. There are several reasons
for this disparity, besides the general South American tendency to dress
up the capital like an only son and trust that the rest of the country
will pass unnoticed, like a flock of poor relatives or servants. The two
principal crops of the Argentine, cattle and wheat, do not require a
compact rural population. Being the chief port as well as the metropolis
and capital, Buenos Aires has first choice of those who cross the sea
seeking new occupations and homes. It sucks the life blood from the
constant stream of immigration, leaving the “camp” a sparsely settled
expanse of boundless plain and the other cities mere provincial towns,
sometimes pleasant places to live in, but wholly devoid of metropolitan
features. Buenos Aires is as large as Philadelphia; the second city of
the Argentine is smaller than Akron, Ohio.
Numerous efforts have been made to bring about a better balance. The
government offers the immigrant free transportation to any part of the
country. Down on the Paseos of Colon and Julio, beneath the arcades of
which Spanish and Armenian petty merchants, cheap Italian restaurants,
and den-like second-hand shops make first appeal to the thin purse of
the newly arrived fortune seeker, the broad brick pillars are covered
with the enticements of employment agencies,—a _cuadrilla_ of such a
size wanted for railroad work three hundred miles west; so many laborers
needed on an _estancia_ in a distant province, free fare, nominal
fee—just such signs as may be seen on the corner of Madison and Canal
Streets in Chicago and in a score of our western cities. The wages
offered are from twenty to thirty per cent. lower than for the same
grade of labor in the United States at the same period, and the cost of
meals somewhat higher. But it is something more than this that causes
the majority of immigrants to pause and read and wander on in quest of
some occupation financially less attractive in or near the capital.
Possibly it is a subconscious dread of the horizonless pampas which
stretch away into the unknown beyond the city; some attribute it to the
now happily decreasing autocracy of grafting rural officials and the
lack of government protection in districts out of touch with the
capital. Or it may be nothing more than the world-wide tendency to
congregate in cities. The fact remains that Buenos Aires is congested
with the very laborers who are sadly needed on the great undeveloped
plains of the interior.
A railroad map of the Argentine is a striking illustration of this
concentration of population. As all roads once led to Rome, so do all
railway lines of the Argentine converge upon Buenos Aires. Tracks
radiate from the capital in every direction in which there is Argentine
territory, a dense network which suggests on a larger scale the railroad
yards of our great centers of transportation. No other city of the land
is more than a way station compared with the all-absorbing capital.
There is probably no country in the world in which it is easier to lay
rails, though it is sometimes difficult to keep them above the surface.
With the beginning of its real exploitation, therefore, new lines sprang
up almost overnight. As in the United States beyond the Alleghenies,
railroads came in most cases before highways; for though Spaniards
settled in the Argentine four centuries ago, the scattered _estancieros_
and their peons were content to ride their horses across the open
plains, and the modern movement is as yet scarcely a generation old.
There are many regions where the railroad is to this day the only real
route; those who do not use it drive or ride at will across the
trackless pampas, with thistles or waving brown grass threshing their
wheels or their horses’ knees. To-day there are railways not only from
Buenos Aires to every town of the adjoining provinces, but to Bolivia
and Paraguay on the north, to Chile on the west, and Patagonia in the
South. Long palatial trains roll out of the capital in every direction,
entire trains bound for cities of which the average American has never
heard the name, the destination announced by placards on the sides of
the cars as in Europe—and as it should be in the United States.
With the exception of a minor French line or two, and some rather
unimportant government roads of narrow gauge, all the railways of the
Argentine are English, very English, in fact, with British managers and
chiefs of departments, engines without bells, and with the nerve-racking
screech of European locomotives, to say nothing of the British “staff”
system which forces even “limited” trains to slow down at every station
enough for the engineer to snatch the sort of iron scepter which is his
authority for entering another section. The rolling stock, however, is
more nearly American in appearance. The freight cars are large, the
passenger coaches—of two classes—are built on a modified American plan,
without compartments. Both in comfort and speed the main Argentine lines
rival our own, though there are fewer through expresses which maintain
what we would call a high rate throughout their runs. For one thing the
government assesses a fine against those trains which are more than a
little late without palpable excuse, and it is natural that the
companies so arrange their schedules as to make such punishment
unlikely, with the result that many trains have a tendency to wait at
stations for the time-table to catch up with them. Nor, with the
exception of the through lines to the neighboring republics, do most of
the tracks forming that great network out of Buenos Aires fetch up
anywhere in particular. Nearly all of them have the air of pausing in
doubt on the edge of the great expanses they set out to explore, with
the result that while the provinces bordering Buenos Aires are so
thickly strewn with tracks that the map suggests there is not room to
set down a foot between them, there are enormous tracts of territory in
the central and western portions of the country wholly untouched by
modern transportation. Life slows down on these many arteries of travel,
too, in exact proportion to the distance from the heart from which all
the Argentine is nourished. But there are indications in most cases that
the pause at nowhere is only temporary, that presently the lines will
summon up breath and courage to push on across the still trackless
pampas.
The great drawback to travel in the Argentine is the cost, both in time
and money. Distances are so great, places of any importance so far
apart, that while fares are not much higher than in the United States,
it takes many hours and many pesos to get anywhere worth going. Towns
which look but a cannon-shot apart on the map may be reached only by
several hours of travel, saddened by the despairing flatness and
monotony of the desolate pampas, where there is rarely a tree to give a
pleasing touch of shade, no spot of green to attract and rest the eyes,
a landscape as uninviting as an unfurnished apartment.
In my double capacity of consular protégé and prospective “booster,”
however, I was furnished with general passes by all the important
railways, and time is no object to a mere wanderer. But for this
official recognition of my unstable temperament I should probably have
seen little of the Argentine, for even the man who has tramped the
length of the Andes would scarcely have the patience to face on foot the
endless horizon of the pampas; and “hoboing” has never been properly
developed on Argentine railways. Rarely had I been given temporary carte
blanche on almost every train in the country when, as a second stroke of
fortune, consular business turned up which took me into various sections
of the “camp” without cutting me off from my modest official income. I
hastened to lay in a supply of heavy garments, for the first trip was to
be south, and the end of April had brought an autumn chill even in
Buenos Aires, over which birds were flying northward in great V-shaped
flocks.
A general pass is more than a saving of money; it gives train officials
an exalted notion of the holder’s importance, and it permits him to jump
off anywhere on the spur of the moment. Yet for many miles south I saw
nothing worthy of a stop. When one has already visited La Plata, capital
of the Province of Buenos Aires, a short hour below the metropolis and
noted for its university and its rows of venerable eucalyptus trees,
there remains little to attract the eye in the flat expanse of that
province as it unrolls hour after hour on any of the lines of the “Great
Southern.” Several dairies, which maintain their own _lecherías_
throughout the federal capital, punctuate the first miles; otherwise the
landscape is a mere reminder of our own western prairies. Here is the
same scanty grass and clumps of bushes resembling sagebrush, the same
flat plain with its horizon barely rising and falling perceptibly with
the motion of the train. The only unfamiliar note is the ostrich,
scattered groups of which go scuttling away like huge ungainly chickens
as the express disturbs them at their feeding. At least we should call
this Argentine curiosity an ostrich, though science distinguishes it
from a similar species in the Old World under the name of _rhea
darwini_, and to the natives it is a _ñandú_. Time was when tawny
horsemen pursued these great birds across the pampas, entangling their
legs in the _bolas_, two or three ropes ending in as many heavy balls,
which they swung over their heads as they rode; but that is seen no
more. Even the waving plains of grass, across which the nomadic Indian
roamed and the gaucho careered lassooing wild cattle, are gone. Wheat
fields, bare with the finished harvest in this autumn season, alternate
with short brown grass, cropped by the cattle which everywhere dot the
landscape for hour after monotonous hour.
The gaucho, with his long, sharp _facón_ stuck through his belt, who
lighted his _fogón_ out on the open pampa to prepare his _asado con
cuero_, his beef roasted in the hide, who killed a steer for his morning
beefsteak or slaughtered a lamb for a pair of chops, who rolled up in
his saddle-blanket wherever night overtook him, with his daytime leather
seat as pillow, has degenerated into the “hired man,” the mere peon,
usually from Spain or Italy, who would be dismayed at the thought of a
night without shelter or a day without prepared food. Only a scattered
remnant of the real cowboys of the pampas are left, just enough to show
the present domesticated generation the stuff of which their forerunners
were forged; and even these are usually far away in the remotest corners
of the country.
Yet the newcomers take on gradually something of the gaucho’s look, a
hardiness, an air of abstraction, as if through gazing long at
monotonous nothingness they come to concentrate their attention inwardly
and become meditative of soul, with that solemn, self-reliant manner of
men who never turn the leaves of any book but nature’s. The countrymen
of Nevada or Arizona have the same weathered appearance as the groups
gathered about the rare stations at which the through train momentarily
halts; the saddled horses tied to wooden rails before the more
pretentious buildings among the little clusters of houses set out on the
unsheltered open prairie might easily be mistaken for Texas mustangs. In
these groups one begins to see suggestions of Indian blood, _mestizos_
with the yellowish-brown skin and thick black hair of the aborigines,
yet with a stronger hint of European origin.
Ordinarily this region is swirling with dust, but this year the rains
had been early and excessive, and the monotonous brown prairie was often
flooded, the dismal houses dripping; the wide public roads were
knee-deep sloughs along which tramping would indeed have been an
experience. Clusters of farm buildings, generally new, stood here and
there in groves of trees, planted trees, which in the Argentine are a
sign of opulence, a sort of seigneurial luxury, like diamonds or
liveried footmen. The trees native to the pampas being rare and scrubby,
it is chiefly the imported eucalyptus standing in little clumps, English
sparrows noisily gossiping among them, or rising in broken lines from
the frequent lakes of mirage or shallow reality. Boisterous hackmen,
sprinkled to the ears with mud, attacked in force the descending
passengers at every station serving a town of size and bore them away in
clumsy bespattered coaches. Huge two-wheeled carts reminiscent of
England here and there labored along the bottomless road from station to
town under incoming freight or outgoing country produce. Town after town
was monotonously alike, the houses built of crude bricks, with an
unfinished air suggesting that they were at most mere temporary
stopping-places of men ready to pursue fortune elsewhere on a moment’s
notice.
The chief characteristic of Argentine towns is their roominess. The
space they cover is several times that of Andean cities of equal
population. Though the houses often toe the street in the Arab-Spanish
fashion, they are frequently far apart and the streets are wider than
even Buenos Aires would care to have in her most congested section. No
doubt each hamlet has a secret hint that it is soon to become a great
city, and lays its plans accordingly. Next to their spaciousness and the
dreary plainness of their architecture, these towns of the pampas strike
the experienced South American traveler by the scarcity of their
churches. The largest of them seldom shows more than a single steeple;
many seem to have no places of worship whatever. Nowhere is there that
suggestion common to the atmosphere of the languid cities of the Andes
of a present world so unpromising that life can most advantageously be
spent in preparation for the next.
The “Great Southern” carried me so far into the south that only by
straining my neck could I see the Southern Cross, a tilted, less
striking constellation now than when I had first made it out in far-off
Central America by standing on tiptoe and peering over the horizon. The
journey might almost better be made by night than by day, for Argentine
sleeping-cars are comfortable and the dreary, unfurnished landscape is
almost oppressive. The only natural features to arouse a flicker of
interest are some rock hills near Tandil, duplicated farther on in
another little rocky range known as the Sierra de la Ventana. In the
first of these Buenos Aires quarries some of the stone for its building
and paving, the rest being brought across the Plata from Uruguay. Few
large countries have been more neglected than the Argentine in the
matter of natural resources, other than agricultural. Its rare deposits
of stone are far distant from where the material is needed, it has no
precious minerals, almost no forests, even the coal used on its
railroads must be brought from abroad. Yet it would gladly be rid of
some of its stone. Through much of the south it is hampered by a
_tosca_, a shelf of limestone a few feet below the surface, which
neither water nor the long roots of the alfalfa can penetrate. In the
more tropical north, particularly along the Paraná, the _alfalfales_
produce luxuriantly for twenty years and more without renewal. In the
south the calerous soil makes vigorous pastures on which fatten
succulent beef and mutton, highly prized by the _frigorí ficos_; but the
frequent droughts are disastrous in the thin soil regions, and at such
times endless trains carry the sheep and “horned cattle,” as the local
distinction has it, a thousand miles north to feed in the Córdoba hills.
The plain which seems never to have an end converges at last, like all
the railroads to the south, in Bahía Blanca. This bustling port and
considerable city, with its immense grain elevators and its facilities
for transferring half the produce of the Argentine from trains to ships,
is the work of a generation. It is nearly a century now since the
federal government sent soldiers to establish in the vicinity of this
great bay a line of defense against the Indians of Patagonia, but the
town itself took on importance only toward the end of the last century.
From a cluster of huts among the sand-dunes it sprang to the size of
Duluth, to which it bears a resemblance in occupation, point of view,
and paucity of historical background. The Argentine is third or fourth
among the wheat producing countries of the world, and of later years
Bahía Blanca, natural focal point of all the great southern pampas, has
outstripped even Buenos Aires as a grain port, to say nothing of the
frozen meat from its immense _frigorí ficos_. Of all the cities of the
Argentine it is the most nearly autonomous, for though La Plata remains
the provincial capital, the overwhelming commercial importance of Bahía
Blanca has given it a self-assertiveness that threatens some day to make
it the capital of a newly formed province.
A long vestibuled train carried us on into northern Patagonia, better
known now in the Argentine as the territories of Rio Negro, Chubut, and
Santa Cruz. I say “us” because I had been joined by a former assistant
secretary of agriculture of our own land, recently attached as an
adviser to the similar Argentine bureau. He was as profoundly ignorant
of Spanish as I of agricultural matters, and our companionship proved of
mutual advantage. All that night we rumbled south and west, halting now
and then at little pampa stations, if we were to believe the time-table.
For we were both snugly ensconced in our berths, the ex-secretary doubly
so, since nature had provided him with a more than imposing bulk—until
the breaking of a rail over a wash-out bounced us out of them.
Sleeping-cars are as customary in the Argentine as in our own land of
long distances, and more comfortable. At the height of the season at Mar
del Plata as many as a hundred sleepers a night make the journey between
that watering-place and Buenos Aires. The normal Argentine railroad
gauge is nearly ten inches wider than our own, which is one of the
reasons why the _dormitorios_ seem so much more roomy than a Pullman. As
in the international expresses of Europe, these have a corridor along
one side of the car, from which open two-berth staterooms, with doors
that lock and individual toilet facilities. The cross-car berths, one
soon discovers, are easier to sleep in than our lengthwise couches, and
the _dormitorios_ do away with what Latin-Americans consider, not
entirely without reason, our “shockingly indecent” system of forcing
strangers, of either sex, to sleep in the same compartment, shielded
only by a curtain.
The unconvertible cabins, preferable by night, become mere cells by day,
however, and drive most of the passengers to sit in the dining cars.
Here the waiters, like the _dormitorio_ porters, are white, with
king’s-bed-chamber manners; and the six course meals are moderate in
price and usually excellent—except the dessert, the ubiquitous,
unfailing, never-varying _dulce de membrillo_, a stone-hard quince jelly
which brings to a sad end virtually every public repast in the
Argentine. The trains are not heated; instead there are thick doormats
under each seat, and it is a rare traveler in the south between April
and October who does not carry with him a blanket bound with a
shawl-strap.
The mud-bespattered countrymen at the stations that appeared with the
dull autumn daylight seemed to be largely Spanish in origin, some still
wearing _boínas_ and other reminders of Europe that looked out of
keeping with the soil-caked saddle horses awaiting them behind the
railroad buildings. Most of them appeared to have ridden in to buy
lottery tickets, or to find which tickets had won in the latest drawing;
the raucous-voiced train-boys sold more to these modern gauchos than on
the train, especially the list of winning numbers at ten centavos. The
thought came to us that even if there are no other reprehensible
features to a national lottery, the habit it breeds among workmen of
spending their time hoping for a prize a week, instead of pitching in
and earning a weekly prize, is at least sufficient to condemn it.
My companion was making the trip for the purpose of studying the soil. A
splendid chance he had to do so with most of it under water! The
distribution of rain seems to be poorly managed in the Argentine. If the
country is not suffering from drought, it is apt to be complaining of
floods, or, in the warmer and more fertile north, of the locusts, which
sometimes sweep in from the wilderness of the Chaco in such clouds that
the project has seriously been considered of erecting an enormous net,
supported perhaps by balloons, to stop them.
We brought up late that afternoon in the frontier town of Neuquén, in
the national territory of the same name. A _garçon_ corseted into a
tuxedo served us dinner, for so they dared call it, in a rambling
one-story wooden hotel scattered over the block nearest the station, the
only thing worth considering on the bill of fare being “bife” (beefee)
or, as the waiter more exactly put it, “asado de vaca,” requiring the
teeth of a stone-crusher and the digestion of a _ñandú_. There is
something of the atmosphere of our own frontier towns in those of the
Argentine, but not the same studied roughness of character, no display
of shooting-irons. The tamest of our western cowboys would probably have
shot on sight those prancing, tuxedoed waiters and sent the proprietor
to join them for the atrociousness of his meals. Just what would have
been his reaction to the beds to which we were afterward assigned—sky
blue and pink landscapes so gorgeously painted on foot and headboards
that we thought it was dawn every time we woke up—is more than I can
guess.
The line which the “Great Southern” hopes soon to push over the Andes to
join the railways of Chile in the vicinity of Temuco ran no trains
beyond Neuquén on the Sunday which finally dawned in earnest over our
picturesque beds, but as pass-holders we had no great difficulty in
foisting ourselves upon a young English superintendent westward bound on
an inspection tour. In his track automobile we screamed away across the
bleak pampas of Patagonia, a hundred and twenty miles and back to
Zapala, the vast monotonous plain steadily rising to an elevation of
seven thousand feet and bringing us almost to the foot of the great
snow-bound range of the Andes forming the Chilean border. The air was
cool, dry, and bracing even down at Neuquén; at Zapala the
winter-and-mountain cold was so penetrating as to cause us not only to
wonder at but to protest volubly against the strange strain of
puritanism which had invaded even this distant corner of the Argentine
and made it a felony for the frontier shopkeeper to sell anything
stronger than beer on Sundays. Forty years ago all this region was an
unproductive waste across which roamed half-naked Indians, _boleando_
the _ñandúes_ for their sustenance and living in _toldos_, easily
transportable skin tents like those of certain tribes of Arab Bedouins.
To-day we were not even armed. Nowhere was there a remnant of those
“Patagones,” people of footprints so large that the southern end of
South America was named for them. The young Argentine general who was
once assigned the task of clearing northern Patagonia of the nomadic,
bandit-like aborigines had done his work with such Spanish thoroughness
that the entire tribe was annihilated, their chiefs dying as prisoners
on the island of Martín García. The government paid the expenses of this
expedition by dividing among the officers (not, be it noted, the
soldiers) the hundred million acres of land it added to the national
domain, and by selling the rest of it in enormous tracts at such
magnificent prices as three cents an acre. To-day intelligent
_argentinos_ are figuratively kicking themselves that they did not issue
government bonds instead and save this immense territory for the
homesteaders who would now gladly settle upon it.
To tell the truth the region did not look like one for which men would
die of home-sickness,—dry and bushy, like parts of Texas or northern
Mexico, with chaparral and bristling clumps of stunted growth bunched
out here and there across a plain that struck one as essentially arid
for all the pools of water left by the unprecedented rain. My
authoritative companion assured us, however, that it had every sign of
great fertility, though requiring irrigation on a large scale, a
beginning of which has already been made in the vicinity of the Rio
Negro. Yet only a rude and solitary nature surrounded us on all the
journey, the same flat monotony, dotted here and there with flocks of
sheep guarded by lonely half-Indian or Gallego shepherds, which
stretches all the way to the Straits of Magellan.
Flocks of pheasants flew up every little while as we screamed past them;
the hoarse cry of the _chajás_, a species of wild turkey, alternated
with the piercing call of the little _teru-teru_. Only at rare intervals
did a scattered flock of sheep or an isolated makeshift _rancho_ with a
saddled horse behind it give a human touch to the monotonous desolation.
Where the foothills of the Andes began to send us undulating over great
smooth ridges, like a bark rocked by a distant storm at sea, there
appeared wagon caravans bound for Chile, still days away over the lofty
pass ahead. Gradually the great snow-thatched wall of the Andes, endless
to the north and south, rose to shut off all the horizon before us,
wind-rent clouds dashing themselves to shreds against it. Yet here in
the temperate south the snow and ice-fields seemed less striking, much
less beautiful than when towering above the sun-flooded tropics.
On our return to Buenos Aires we stopped at an agricultural station near
the town of Rio Negro, where irrigation was already showing results.
Baled alfalfa lay in quantities at the stations; large vineyards, much
as they looked out of place in this landscape-less region, were
producing well. There being no passenger train to rescue us, we got
telegraphic permission to take the first east-bound freight. Before the
delay became unduly monotonous a train rose over the flat horizon and
rolled in upon us. We made our way along the thirty-odd cars loaded with
sheep to what in our own land would have been a comfortable caboose—and
climbed into an ordinary box-car that had all too evidently been
recently and often used for the transportation of coal. There was not
even an improvised seat in it; trainmen and the sheep care-takers sat on
the bare floor with their backs against the sooty wall and bumped along
like penniless and unresourceful hoboes. I would have given several
pesos to have heard the remarks of an American brakeman who could have
looked in upon his Argentine fellows as we jolted across the apparently
level plains with the bitter chill of the pampas settling down upon us.
We gladly dropped off at Darwin, where we hired next morning what the
_argentino_ calls a “soolkee” and drove to the island of Choele-Choel,
with the assistance of a cumbersome government ferry. This thirteen
square leagues of fertile loam soil between two branches of the Rio
Negro is one of the most prosperous communities in southern Argentine,
with half a dozen villages, roads sometimes passable even in the wet
season, and noted for the variety of immigration with which it has been
peopled. My companion, weary perhaps of talking through an interpreter,
was particularly eager to see what remnants remained of a Welsh colony
once established here. We drove zigzagging along the wide checkerboard
earth roads between endless wire fences behind which many men were
plowing with oxen and a few with up-to-date riding gang-plows. Once we
paused to talk with one Villanova, political boss of the island, but
when my companion brought up the subject nearest his heart, the man
instantly showed opposition to the establishment of agricultural
schools.
[Illustration: A rural policeman of the Argentine]
[Illustration: My travels in Patagonia were by rail and in what the
_Argentino_ calls a “soolky”.]
[Illustration: A typical “boliche” town of the Argentine pampa, and some
of its inhabitants]
[Illustration: A family of Santiago del Estero]
“We have no middle class in the Argentine,” he explained, “and we do not
want one. We want only absentee landlords—or at least we have no way of
getting rid of them—and laborers, men who actually work and produce.
Agricultural schools would give us a class too proud of their schooling
to work, and at the same time without property. The distinction between
the man who toils and the man who owns is wide in the Argentine, but it
would be no improvement to fill in the gulf with a lot of haughty,
penniless drones.”
My companion had all but given up hope of using his native tongue
directly when there was pointed out to us a farm said to be owned by a
Welshman. But only his lanky daughter of sixteen was at home. The
ex-secretary addressed her eagerly; here at last he would get first-hand
information. The girl shifted from one undeveloped shank to the other,
backed away toward the unpainted frame farmhouse from which she had
emerged, struggling to answer a question in English, then turning to me,
she burst forth, all suggestion of embarrassment gone, in rapid-fire
Spanish:
“You see I was born in the Chubut, and English is only my third tongue,
for Spanish is my native language and father and mother always speak
Welsh at home and I almost never hear English and ...”
My companion bowed his head in resignation and turned our weary horse
back across the island toward the ferry.
The chill of autumn gradually disappeared from the air as the fastest
train in South America dashed in less than five hours, with only one
three-minute stop to change engines, from Buenos Aires to Rosario, two
hundred miles northwest of the federal capital. The rich-green immensity
of the well cultivated fields bordering the River Paraná were a contrast
to the bleak, bare, brown prairies of the south, and the gang-plow,
up-to-date methods of our great West were everywhere in evidence. In the
seat behind me two men were assuring each other that “the lands of this
region are worth ten times those of the interior,” and it was easy to
believe them. The rich black loam soil that came to light behind the
plows is said to produce two crops of splendid potatoes annually without
the use of fertilizer and with no change in crops for twenty years.
Though the day was warm and sunny, the cars remained hermetically sealed
throughout the journey, for the _argentino_ is true to type in his dread
of a breath of fresh air. Scarcely a glimpse of the River Paraná did we
catch, though we skirted it all the way to Rosario.
This second city of the republic has been called the Chicago of the
Argentine. It is more nearly the Omaha or Atlanta, not merely in size
but in the material prosperity, and the appearance and point of view
that go with it, which its position as a river port open to large ocean
steamers and as the natural outlet of all the fertile provinces of
northern Argentine has given it. Like Buenos Aires it has almost no
factory chimneys to emphasize its air of activity, which concentrates in
the vicinity of the wharves. A stroll through its busy, citified streets
is worth the exertion, or, better still, a round of its electric car
lines; but one would no more expect to find the picturesque and the
legendary past in Rosario than in Newark. Large and prosperous as it has
grown, it is not the capital of its province, much to the disgust of its
energetic citizens, but is ruled from Santa Fé, a languid little town of
several times the age but scarcely one eighth the population of the
bustling provincial metropolis. There are advantages in being a capital
in the Argentine which we of the north would hardly suspect.
I slipped on up the Paraná to have a look at this capital which the
Rosarians so universally tongue-lash. A splendidly fertile, softly
rolling, velvety-green country, with dark-red cattle standing in groups
here and there to give contrast, was the chief impression left by a
journey of several hundred kilometers through the province of Santa Fé.
Yet for some reason the city of the same name, though barely a hundred
miles north of Rosario, was humidly hot and swarming with flies, its
atmosphere that of an ambitionless town of the tropics content to dawdle
through life on what the frequent influxes of politicians bring it. Far
across the river, which here spreads out into an immense lagoon, lay
hazy white on a distant knoll the city of Paraná, capital of the
province of Entre Rios, between the rivers Paraná and Uruguay, which
unite at length to form the Plata.
Another floor-flat, fertile plain, with many ranchos and villages, with
“soolkees” jogging along the broad earth roads between wheat and alfalfa
fields and pastures dotted with fat cattle and plump sheep until the
eyes tired of seeing them, marked the trip westward from Santa Fé. Here,
to all appearances, was the best farming land imaginable, though one
could easily imagine better farming. Crowds of shaggy yet
prosperous-looking countrymen gathered at every station. The alfalfales
were still deep-green, though it was already becoming late autumn;
golden ears of corn of a size that even Kansas would envy were being
husked from the standing stalks and heaped to overflowing into huge
_trojes_, stack-shaped bins made of split palm-trunks or other open-work
material.
I came at length to one of the oldest and most famous of Argentine
towns, a yellow-white city in a shallow valley, with an almost Oriental
aspect, and backed by hills—and hills alone are noteworthy enough to
bring a city fame in the Argentine. In fact, Córdoba sits in the only
rugged section of the country, except where the Andes begin to climb out
of it to the west. Among these ranges, sometimes called, with the
exaggeration natural to young nations, the “Argentine Switzerland,” are
many summer hotels and colonies, strange as it may seem to go north for
the summer in the south temperate zone.
Córdoba, the geographical center of the Argentine Republic, is centuries
old, with more traditions, more respect for age, than Buenos Aires, with
many reminders of old Spain and of the conservative, time-marked towns
of the Andes. In Córdoba it is easy to imagine the atmosphere of the
federal capital of a century ago. There is still a considerable
“colonial” atmosphere; respect for old customs still survives; age
counts, which is rare in the Argentine, a country like our own full of
youth and confidence in the future, and the corresponding impatience
with the past, with precedent. Peru had already been conquered and
settled when Córdoba was made a halfway station between the unimportant
river-landing called Buenos Aires and the gold mines of the former Inca
Empire, and it was founded by Spanish nobles of a better class than the
adventurers who followed Pizarro on his bloody expedition. Many of the
families of Córdoba boast themselves descendants of those hidalgos,
though to most _argentinos_ ancestry seems as unimportant, compared with
the present, as it does to the average American. The Córdobans, like the
ancient families of the Andes, look down upon newly won wealth as
something infinitely inferior to shabby gentility, though the latter has
been refurbished of late years by increasing incomes from the
neighboring estates. The _Porteño_ has little sympathy for the Córdoban
attitude toward life. He pokes fun at the conservative old city, calling
it the “Mecca” of the Argentine because of the pilgrims who come at
certain seasons of the year to worship its bejeweled saints; he asserts
that its ostensibly “high-brow” people “buy books but do not read them.”
The Córdoban retaliates by rating Córdoba, and perhaps Salta, the only
“aristocratic” towns in the Argentine, and has kept the old Spanish
disdain of commerce, which is naturally a disdain of Buenos Aires.
The conservative old families do not, of course, accept newcomers
easily. There is a strong race, as well as class, prejudice. Up to half
a century ago no student was admitted to the university unless he could
show irrefutable proof of “pure” blood, that is, of unbroken European
ancestry. That rule might be in force to this day but for the strong
hand of the federal government. The famous university, founded in 1605
by the Jesuits, and ranking with that of Lima as the oldest in America,
is outwardly an inconspicuous two-story building, though there are
artistic old paintings and cedar-of-Tucumán carvings inside that are
worth seeing. The students who attend it are, however, by no means
unobtrusive, though they do not seem to give quite such exclusive
attention to the color of their gloves and the brand of their perfumes
as do their prototypes in the federal capital. It is natural, too, that
such a community should retain an air of piety. Its ancient moss-grown
cathedral, likewise of Jesuit construction, with a far-famed tower, is
but one of some thirty churches in a town of a scant thirty thousand
inhabitants. Priests and monks give it by their number and
conspicuousness an atmosphere quite unlike Buenos Aires, with its
scarcely noticeable low Grecian cathedral, its lack of church towers,
and its rare priests. In Córdoba there are even beggar monks who make
regular tours of the province, reminiscent of medieval Spain. The church
and its functionaries own many fine estancias, for pilgrims have always
come in numbers, and society is pious to the point of fanaticism. If one
may believe the _Porteño_, the conservatism and fanaticism of Córdoba
would be worse than it is had not the central government sent to the
university a number of German Protestant professors, who have had some
influence on the community, not so much in Germanizing as in breaking
down ancient prejudices.
Among the amusing old customs that remain are some that lend a touch of
the picturesque to offset a certain tendency toward the modern. Cows are
still driven through the streets, attended by their calves, and are
milked before each client’s door; the conservative Córdoban will have
none of this new-fangled notion of having his milk brought in bottles,
in which there may be a percentage of water. Here there is still the
weekly band concert and plaza promenade, with the two sexes marching in
opposite directions; here the duenna is in her glory and prospective
husbands whisper their assertions through iron-grilled windows. The
_gente del pueblo_, or rank-and-file citizens, nearly all with a
considerable proportion of that Indian blood almost unknown in Buenos
Aires, live in adobe thatched houses in the outskirts and have the
appearance, as well as repute, of little industry, with the Andean
tendency to work only a few days a week since foreign industry has
raised their wages to a point where frequent vacations are possible.
Cactus and donkeys add a suggestion of Andean aridity in the outskirt
section, over which floats now and then a subtle breath of the tropics.
Córdoba in its shallow valley, veiled by thick banks of white mist, was
more beautiful on the morning I left than when more plainly seen. As our
train rose above it to the vast level pampa the city disappeared, but
all along the western horizon lay its famous mountains, a long ridge,
saw-like in places, turning indigo blue when the sun went down on a
brilliant day. On the other side of the train still lay the monotonous,
flat, low Argentine pampa, without hedges, ditches, almost without
trees, the roads mere wide spaces reserved for travel. The law requires
that federal roads be fifty meters broad, but in this land of unlimited
space and little stone no law can keep them from being impassable
sloughs in the rainy season and rivers of dust in the dry. Even here
were many enormous _estancias_, single estates of half a million acres,
which the train took hours to cross, though they are small compared with
some in the frontier country of the south. Here are _estancieros_ who
have the impression that the sun rises and sets on their property—which
is not without its influence on their characters and especially on those
of their children. In the “good old days,” which were not so long ago in
the Argentine, persons with money, political influence, or a military
record could acquire vast tracts of territory at trifling cost, and up
to the present generation these landed proprietors, among them most of
the old families of Córdoba, were virtually monarchs of all they
surveyed. Now the government, once so prodigal with its land, is
beginning to see the error of its ways, and is forming the habit of
talking in terms of square kilometers instead of square leagues, as well
as favoring bona fide settlers, though it still does not require those
who buy public lands at a song to settle upon and improve them.
Perhaps once each half hour did a more pretentious _estancia_ house,
surrounded by its thin grove of precious eucalyptus, break the monotony
of flat plain and makeshift _ranchos_. It is the scarcity of trees no
doubt that makes birds so rare in the Argentine. The two-compartment,
oven-shaped mud nests of the _hornero_ on the crosspieces of the
telegraph poles were almost the only signs of them, except of course the
occasional _ñandúes_ loping away across the pampa. The more and more
open-work reed shacks began to suggest almost perpetual summer. Then all
at once I ceased feeling the increasing heat, suddenly put down my
window, and a moment later was hurrying into a sweater. For a _pampero_
had blown up from the south, and seemed bent on penetrating to the
marrow of my bones.
When I peered out of my sleeping-car cabin next morning, a considerable
change of landscape met the eye. The “rápido” was crawling into Santiago
del Estero, and I seemed to have been transported overnight from the
rich green fields of the Paraná back to the dreary Andes, or, more
exactly, to the coastlands of Peru or Bolivia. Founded in the middle of
the sixteenth century, on the bank of a river that becomes salty a
little farther on, and forms in the rainy season large _esteros_, or
brackish backwaters and lagoons, “St. James of the Swamp” still suffers
intensely for lack of water. It is unfortunate that nature does not
divide her rains more evenly in the Argentine. Farther south only the
tops of the fence posts were protruding from the flood in some places;
here the country seemed to be habitually dying of thirst.
The main line of the “Central Argentine” does not run into Santiago, but
operates a little branch from La Banda (“Across the River”), because of
the treachery of the wide, shifty, sandy stream on which it lies. To-day
the railroad has a great iron bridge some two miles long, successor to
the several less hardy ones, the ruins of which may be seen just
protruding from the sandy bed along the way. The company asserts that it
spends more to keep up its road into Santiago than it gets back from
that city in traffic, but its concession requires it to maintain contact
with what is reputed the most “native” capital of province still left in
the Argentine. Center of what is said to be the least fertile section of
the country, it remains, for a time at least, to the part-Indian race
which the South American calls native, the ambitionless _cholo_ or
_mestizo_, with his Mohammedan indifference to the future, his inertia
before modern progress. In other words, Santiago is an example of how
immigration is driving the native town as it is the native individual
into the most distant and poorest corners of the Argentine.
The town is built of crude bricks or baked mud, the only material
available, and except in the center it is a disintegrated collection of
huts with ugly high fronts and the air of never having reached maturity
in growth, though they have long since in age. It has few paved streets
and no street-cars, though it is overrun by a veritable plague of those
noisy, impudent hackmen who swarm in rural and provincial Argentine and
over whom the police seem to have neither influence nor authority. A
dead-dry, yellow prairie grass spreads wherever the ground is not
frankly sterile; chaparral and other desert brush grows even within the
town. Its thatched _ranchos_ of reeds, to be found anywhere a few blocks
back of the central plaza, are overrun with goats, pigs, cur dogs, and
naked children, like the most backward towns of the Andes. Here are to
be found the _choclo_, _locro_, _chicha_, and other corn products common
to the Andean cuisine, the same thin sheets of sun-dried beef, the
swarming _gente del pueblo_ so common to Peru and Ecuador, so unknown in
Buenos Aires. The popular speech is again the Quichua of the Incas,
Santiago being the only Argentine town of any size where it has
survived, though it is a Quichua as different from that of Cuzco as the
Italian of Florence is from that of Naples. Most of the children and
many of the adults go barefooted, a rare custom in the Argentine;
virtually all citizens have the incorrigible Latin-American habit of
stopping all talk to gaze open-mouthed at a passing stranger, entire
groups of men on the street corners turning their heads to stare after
him until one feels genuine misgiving lest they permanently dislocate
their ostrich necks.
There are reminders, too, of the gypsy section of Granada or Seville,
hints of Luxor or Assuan in Upper Egypt, as well as of the somnolent
towns in the half-tropical valleys of the Andes. The thatched mud huts
are surrounded with cactus hedges on which the family wash hangs drying;
everything is coated with the fine white dust of the unpaved streets,
through which the half-Indian women wade almost ankle deep, their
slattern skirts sweeping it into clouds behind them. Now and then there
passes one of these _chola_ females leading through the dust-river a
donkey bestridden by a girl of the same race and drawing by two ropes
tied to knobs in its ends a rolling barrel of water, the
chocolate-colored river water on which the town seems chiefly to
subsist. A dry, cracked soil under an ardent sun, thin animals eating
greedily at poor tufts of scanty vegetation, cactus used as field fences
as well as inclosing the miserable _ranchos_, cactus with twisted trunks
that look like enormous snakes about to strike, immense cactus
candelabras of ten or fifteen branches, a few poor chickens picking at
the sterile soil about the _ranchos_ by day and roosting by night in the
rare scraggly trees, scores of hungry-looking goats browsing on nothing,
yet somehow keeping energy enough to gambol about a scene usually devoid
of any form of unnecessary activity, a few almost leafless scrub trees
on which hang rags of raw meat sun-drying into _charqui_, or, as they
call it in southeastern South America, _tasajo_—these make up the
background of almost any picture of Santiago. Against this stand out in
slight relief bronzed _cholos_ loafing in the shade of the huts, pigs
and children disputing the same dreary playgrounds, men shirtless or in
shirt sleeves, with rather lifeless, inexpressive brown features, women
dressed in shapeless thin cotton gowns of brilliant colors—apple-green,
pink, shrieking red—their rarely washed faces surmounted by masses of
coarse, thick, straight black hair knotted carelessly together at the
neck, little girls carrying naked babies almost as large as themselves,
nearly all holding in one hand the dried-gourd bowl of _mate_ heated
over a fagot fire in the open air, sucking it eagerly yet languidly
through the straw-shaped metal _bombilla_. A completely naked gamin of
five gallops about astride a stick, his slightly older and no more
expensively attired brother doing the like on a scrubby horse without
saddle or bridle, both scattering the pigs, dogs, and chickens at every
turn. From the hut doors or the midst of such families seated _al
fresco_ and taking their _mate_ from a single bowl that circulates round
and round the group come languid calls of “Ché Maria!” “Ché compadre!”
“Ché Gringa!” “Ché” is the popular nickname of affection or familiarity
in southern South America, corresponding roughly to our once widespread
pseudonym “kid.”
I had the customary _santiagueño_ pleasure of rising at an unearthly
hour to catch the morning train to La Banda, only to find there that the
“mixed” daily from Buenos Aires into the sugar-fields of the far north
was seven hours late. Over the way stood a hotel poetically named “El
Dia de Nosotros,” but that day was evidently past, for the place was
irrevocably closed, and it was only by a streak of luck that long after
my customary breakfast hour I got from an uninviting street stand a cup
of what purported to be black coffee. During the delay I fell into
conversation with two young Austrians who had been all the way up to
Salta in quest of fortune. The best chance for work they had found was
at cutting sugar-cane at terms under which no one but the most expert
could earn more than two pesos a day. Much as it resembles our own land
in some ways, the Argentine does not give one the impression of being
any such Eldorado for the newcomer whose stock in trade consists solely
of two brawny arms.
The _mixto_ crawled in at last, covered with a thick blanket of fine
dust. At the station of Araoz, on the boundary line between the
provinces of Santiago and Tucumán, the sterile, bushy country suddenly
gave way to sugar-cane, vast fields, veritable prairies of cane, not the
little patches of light-green that dot and decorate many an Andean
landscape, but prosaic, heavily productive stretches as unromantic as
Iowa cornfields, spreading as far as the eye could see in any direction.
Cutting had begun, for it was late April, and all the way to Tucumán the
dull, sullen rumble of the massive rollers was as incessant as the
pungent smell of molasses in the air, while everywhere great brick
stacks rose from the flat green landscape, belching forth their heavy
clouds of smoke on the hazy, humid atmosphere.
Tucumán, my farthest north in the Argentine, in a latitude similar to
that of southern Florida, was once under the Inca, though the casual
observer would scarcely suspect of any such past this bustling modern
Argentine town and capital of the smallest yet most prosperous province
of the republic. It is a town that lives, breathes, and dreams sugar,
accepting proudly the national nickname of the “City of Sugar.” A
checkerboard place, some of its wide streets paved with wooden blocks,
its houses of the old Spanish one-story style, yet often seventy or
eighty meters deep, with two flowery patios hidden away behind the bare,
though gaily smeared, façades, it has mildly the “feel” of the tropics
intermingled with its considerable modern activity. Electric tramways
and lights are very much in evidence, yet horsemen resembling those of
the Andean wilds may be seen riding along under the trolley wires. In
the central Plaza de la Independencia are orange-trees laden with ripe
fruit, pepper-trees, palms, and cactus, not to mention a highly
unsuccessful marble statue of Liberty, holding in her hands the links of
her broken chains as if they were considerably too hot for comfort.
About this never-failing civic focus are the government buildings, the
cathedral, the bishop’s palace, and several pretentious clubs, though
the entire circuit brings to view no architecture of interest. In one of
several other squares there is a statue of Belgrano, who defeated the
Spaniards in this vicinity in 1812 with the aid of “Our Lady of
Mercies,” whom the general rewarded by appointing her a generalísimo of
his armies. Near the central plaza, surrounded with an almost religious
atmosphere, is Independence Hall, in which was signed what amounts to
Argentine’s Declaration of Independence. It is a little adobe structure,
long and low, like many of the poor men’s _ranchos_ scattered about the
pampas, carefully whitewashed, with a restored wooden roof and other
improvements to make it look new and unnatural, after the approved
Latin-American style of disguising what it is feared may be taken for
the commonplace. All this is covered by a large modern concrete building
in charge of a _chinita_, who is theoretically always on hand to admit
visitors who desire to see the two good bronze reliefs, the medals, the
portraits of the signers of the declaration, to sit down in the
century-old presidential chair long enough for a snapshot, and to add
their autographs to the register locked away in the former presidential
desk, in approved tourist fashion. From Tucumán one can make out the dim
blue outline of the lower Andes to the west, and in clear sunny weather
the snow peaks of Bolivia stand out distinctly to the north. Indeed, it
is within the district embracing Tucumán and Santiago del Estero that
Argentine life begins to shade imperceptibly into the Bolivian or
Andean.
Virtually the entire province of Tucumán is covered with sugar-cane and
orange groves. The rivalry between these two products has been acute for
decades, now one, now the other usurping the center of the stage. Toward
the end of the last century the northern part of the republic “went
sugar crazy” and burned whole forests of orange-trees in order to plant
cane. The result was a year of overproduction, the only period in which
the Argentine exported sugar, though she should easily be able to supply
half South America. On the contrary she habitually imports sugar, her
own in many cases, for the crude sugar shipped to Europe is often the
very sugar which was served in tissue-wrapped lumps in nearly every
restaurant and _lechería_ of Buenos Aires long before that sanitary
provision was thought of in the United States. But then, so does the
Argentine import garlic, and onions, peppers, _garbanzos_ (the Spanish
chickpeas of which she is still so fond), cheese, and millions of
“fresh” eggs, not only from Uruguay across the river but from Spain and
Portugal across the sea, though all these commodities might easily be
produced at home. Sugar pays what we would consider a heavy internal
duty, which is reputed to be one of the causes why there are so few
national refineries. In her one year of overproduction Tucumán province
gave the country nearly twice the sugar it could consume. The terrified
planters banded together to build up the export trade, got a bounty from
the federal government, which was later forbidden by the Brussels
convention, and forced the provincial government to pass a law limiting
sugar plantations. In carrying this out the _tucumanos_, who had burned
forests of orange-trees a few years before to plant cane, now burned
square leagues of cane-fields that were producing too generously. The
government indemnified the men who fired their fields and furnished them
free seeds of corn, wheat, and barley with which to replant them. But in
time the pendulum swung back again and to-day the province has little
interest in anything but sugar.
Tucumán retains none of the primitive methods by which cane is turned
into brown lumps of _panela_ or _chancaca_ on the little plantations
scattered through the Andes. Some sixty immense _engenios_ grind
incessantly during the rather short but exceedingly busy season. The
capacity of many of these mills is large, though they work less than
those of Cuba. These, and the often enormous estates about them, are in
most cases owned by English or other foreign firms, the American being
most conspicuous by his absence. Not only are we unrepresented in
ownership but in the machinery used, which is with rare exceptions
British, French, Belgian, and German, for the _argentino_ seems to have
an instinct which draws him toward Europe and causes him to avoid all
unnecessary contact with what he calls the “North American.” It is not
that he fears the “Collosus of the North,” like so many of the smaller,
bad-boy republics nearer the Gulf of Mexico, rather is he firmly
convinced that his country is as powerful and self-sufficient as our
own, but he is inclined by temperament and custom to turn his eyes
eastward rather than northward.
In this busy season of the Argentine autumn and winter Tucumán province
is a hive of activity. Thousands of workmen of many races are scattered
among the horseman-high plants which stretch to the horizon in every
direction, slashing off the canes at the ground, clearing them of leaves
and useless top with a few quick swings of the machete, and tossing them
with graceful easy gesture upon piles often several meters away. Along
the wide and soft dirt roads which cut into squares the dense jungles of
cane, there is a constant stream of cumbersome two-wheeled carts,
usually drawn by five mules, the _meztizo_ driver in his ragged garments
and soiled, broad-brimmed hat astride the off hind animal, as they
strain toward the points of concentration. There the load is weighed and
lifted in a single bundle by huge cranes which are the only American
contribution to the average estate, and dropped into the cars of the
private railroads that crisscross all the province, or directly into the
carriers that feed the three sets of mammoth inexorable rollers. The
_bagasa_ left over from the crushing is burned at once in the mill
engines, along with the wood brought in from constantly increasing
distances; the _mosta_, or saccharine residue so poor and dirty that it
will not produce even the lowest of the three grades of unrefined sugar,
is turned into alcohol. Every important factory has a village clustered
about it, a community complete from bakers to priest. Field workers have
an unalienable right to the two finest canes they cut or load during the
day, and at dusk long broken lines of them may be seen returning from
the fields carrying their poles over one shoulder, like homeward bound
fishermen, or seated on the ground, machete in hand, peeling the cane
and cutting it into sections, to thrust these in their mouths, crush and
suck them, and spit them out upon the earth about them.
No traveler with a bit of time to spare should leave the Argentine
without visiting her chief “holy place,” presided over by _La Virgen de
Luján_. If we are to believe all we are told, it is this patron saint
who has made the Argentine the prosperous, happy land it is to-day. To
her groups of pious women, headed by the archbishop, made pilgrimage
from Buenos Aires when the bill of the new socialist deputies threatened
to become a divorce law; to her the country turns when it gets too much,
or too little, rain; here the Irish-Argentinos gather en masse on St.
Patrick’s day.
Genuine pilgrims are expected to fast on the day they visit Luján.
We—for a friend made the journey with me—came nearly carrying out this
requirement in spite of ourselves, having missed the train we planned to
take and unwisely set out on foot without waiting for the next. For once
outside the city limits, it is a long way from Buenos Aires to the next
shop or restaurant. Luján is something more than forty miles west of the
capital, the usual “boliche” town of the pampas and a slough of mud in
this autumn season, the unfinished dull-red brick “basilica” bulking
high above it and visible many miles away. The legend, which still finds
a surprisingly large number of believers in the Argentine, runs that in
the time of the Spanish dominion a community of Spanish monks set out
with great ceremony to transport a statue of the Virgin from Buenos
Aires to Peru. Arrived at the hamlet of Luján, the cart in which it was
being carried stopped. Nothing could induce it to move on. No doubt it
was the rainy season and there was excellent reason for its
immovability, but the good monks concluded that the Virgin was
expressing a desire to remain where she was, and her wishes were
respected. A small chapel was erected and her cult perpetuated. When
immigration increased and swarms of devout Italians, not to mention the
Spanish and Irish, began to settle in the vicinity and make frequent
pilgrimages to the shrine, the bishop in charge took it as an indication
that the powers of a better world wished the Virgin to be housed in a
building befitting her increasing popularity. He undertook the erection,
from popular subscriptions, of a “Gothic cathedral” which should be the
most imposing in the Argentine, though this, to be sure, is not saying
much. It was planned to spend six million pesos, half of which are
already gone, and as soon as the walls had been raised the bishop
insisted on opening the building, which perhaps is why there is so
little suggestion of Gothic about the bare brick, towerless,
façade-less, on the whole dismal structure.
Though we might be willing to fast, when there was no choice in the
matter, not all the patron saints on the globe could have forced us to
wallow through the mile or more of black mud between the station and the
“basilica.” For that matter, we noted that even the pious pilgrims who
had arrived with us in their gleaming patent-leather shoes climbed
unhesitatingly into the comfortable, if tiny, horsecar, and that not one
of them gave a suggestion of dropping off to finish the journey on his
knees, or even on foot. We were no less astounded, if secretly more
pleased, to find that one of the rascals keeping the restaurants tucked
away among the many _santerías_, shops in which are sold tin “saints”
which _los fieles_ may carry home to perform their cures by hand, was
willing to jeopardize our future salvation by providing us, before we
had consummated the object of every visit to Luján, with as much of a
repast as one learns to hope for in an Argentine “boliche” town.
Inside the unfinished but already richly decorated “basilica” the
curved-stone back of the altar and the stairway rising above it was
already carved with the names of those who credited the Virgin with
curing them of incurable ailments. There were other less conspicuous
places for similar testimonials from those with less mesmerism over the
root of evil. About the altar were gathered groups of pilgrims engaged
in the preliminary formalities of the faithful who come seeking aid.
Peasants still wearing the garb of Lombardy or Piedmont, and no doubt
come to ask the Virgin for a little less rain and a better price for
their corn, that they might buy the coveted piece of land next their own
or send more money to the old people they had left behind in Italy,
mingled with richly garbed _Porteñas_ who were praying perhaps for
motherhood or the welfare of a lover.
“But where is the statue?” asked my impious companion of a young priest
who was marching back and forth committing to memory some password to
heaven.
“Why—er,” gasped the startled ecclesiastic, “do you mean the Blessed
Virgin?”
“Yes,” returned my companion, carelessly.
“Follow those broad curving stairs and you will find our Blessed Lady of
Luján in that little room above the altar,” replied the horrified youth,
crossing himself fervently.
Above we found a single worshipper, a working woman dressed in the most
nearly whole and spotless gown she possessed, kneeling on the marble
floor, to which she bowed her forehead now and then, her eyes fixed on a
doll some two feet high overdressed in heavy gilded robes and covered
with bracelets, necklaces and girdles of false pearls and diamonds—for
the real ones, worth a king’s ransom, are deposited in a safety vault in
Buenos Aires and are used only on the anniversary of the Virgin’s halt
in Luján. Back of the woman her son of five was climbing high up the
iron grill surrounding the chapel, in his own particular effort to reach
heaven. I lifted him down before he broke his neck, whereupon he sidled
over to the lunch-basket the pair had brought with them and, keeping a
weather eye on his devout parent, stealthily drew out a quart bottle of
wine wrapped in a newspaper. Setting his teeth in the protruding cork,
he tugged at it for some time, like a puppy at a root, drew it at last,
and with an eye still on his mother, deep in her communing with the
Virgin, gulped down nearly half a liter, re-corked the bottle, and
slipped it back into its place.
On the way down we halted to speak with a well-dressed warden, who
assured us that he had personally known of “thousands of supernatural
cures” performed by the Virgin of Luján.
“Why,” he cried, growing more specific, “I have known many rich ladies
to come out here from Buenos Aires on crutches, make a promise to our
Blessed Virgin and go back home and—and by and by _they would send out
the crutches_ as proof of being cured, and perhaps a diamond necklace to
show their gratitude to Our Lady. There is no ailment that Our Lady
cannot cure.”
“Curious,” I mused, “but as I came in I noticed just outside the gates
four beggars,—a blind woman, a one-legged man, a man without legs, and a
paralytic.”
“Ah, _esa_ gente! _That_ class of people!” cried the warden, with a
world of disgust in his voice and a deprecatory shrug of the shoulders.