LIFE IN THE “CAMP” AND THE PROVINCIAL TOWNS
To the European imagination, the Argentine _gaucho_ typifies the rural
life of the country. And a fine figure he cuts in his showy _poncho_ (a
shawl with a slit in the centre to thrust the head through), the graceful
folds of it, with fringed edges and embroidery, falling as low as his
top-boots with their jingling spurs. On his head he wears any variety of
soft felt hat, but never the “Panama hat” of popular imagination. He is
more inclined to cultivate a beard and fierce moustache than to shave,
and above his poncho, which covers a complete suit of “store” clothes,
he usually wears a black or white silk handkerchief tied loosely around
his neck. On horseback, an admirable figure, the poncho serves also as
partial covering for his steed, which he rides with unrivalled grace and
confidence.
He has a soul for music, too, this rough and somewhat villainous-looking
knight of the Pampa. The guitar is his favourite instrument, and he is
no gaucho who cannot strum a tune thereon, or improvise some lines of
verse, the old Spanish custom of singing a couplet to the accompaniment
of the guitar still retaining high favour in the Argentine Camp, to such
an extent, indeed, that a weekly paper, _La Pampa Argentina_, exists for
no other purpose than to collect and circulate the latest efforts of the
_coplistas_ and reprint famous couplets of the past. His sports, too, are
rendered picturesque by the part which his horse, almost inseparable
from himself, performs in them.
An agreeable sense of old-fashioned courtesy still clings to him, and
while I fear his morals will not bear too close an inspection, nor are
his habits of life quite as cleanly as domestic legislation has contrived
to make those of most European and North American people, the gaucho is
by no means unlikable, although I never felt quite so kindly towards
him in the flesh as I have done imaginatively through the pages of Mr.
Cunninghame-Graham and Mr. W. H. Hudson. For all his courtesies, his
nature retains much of the old Spanish cruelty. To see him bury his spurs
in the flanks of his horse with a vicious dig, and pull the animal up on
his haunches by throwing his whole weight backwards on the reins, that
are fixed to a long and brutal curb bit, is not a sight that makes you
long to go up and take him by the hand as a man and a brother.
His origin is the mixture of Spanish and Indian blood, in which it is
not improbable that some of the worser qualities of both races may have
been retained, along with a curious strain of sentimentality. That he
is a veritable devil of cruelty I cannot assert from anything I have
witnessed, but from much that I have read and heard from eye-witnesses,
he seems no person to quarrel with. “A merciful man is merciful to his
beast.” If this be any true test, then the gaucho is not a merciful
man. One of the most disgusting performances it has ever been my lot
to witness was one of a series widely advertised in Buenos Ayres, and
patronised by the Spaniards and natives with high approval. It took
place in the grounds of the Sports Club, near Palermo, and consisted
of exhibitions of gauchos breaking in supposedly wild and savage horses
(_potros_). As a matter of fact, the horses were poor, spiritless
creatures, that could be made to buck only by the riders gashing them
with their cruel spurs in the tenderest parts of their bodies. A more
degrading or beastly exhibition I have never seen, yet it amused the
Spanish-Argentine audience vastly. No, among the gauchos there is nothing
of the Arab’s traditional attachment to his horse. His horse is to him a
brute that has cost a few pesos and may be ridden to death with no great
loss. Here, however, it is not my intention to enlarge on this subject,
which I am reserving for more specific treatment in a later chapter, and
I shall merely record one instance of gaucho brutality, as described to
me by an Argentine lady.
It dates back some eight or ten years, when, together with her husband
and a party, she was on the way to a very remote settlement on the
Andine frontier, where her husband had taken over a large estancia. The
diligence was driven by a team of six or eight horses, and while going
along, a gaucho who accompanied the driver and assisted him in the “care”
of the animals, managed, by his skill in throwing the lasso, to capture a
wild mare, whom they surprised in the solitude of the pampa. More as an
exhibition of the driver’s power to control the animals than out of need,
this wild thing was harnessed up with the others and attached immediately
to the coach. It very soon became unmanageable, and presently in its
struggles fell down, the heavy coach rolling over it and breaking its
hind legs. Quick as a flash, the gaucho who had captured it, leapt to
the ground, and before any of the travellers realised what he was doing,
he was dangling in front of them the mare’s tongue, which he had cut out
by the roots with his long-bladed knife, the animal being still alive!
The husband of the lady who related to me this pleasant little episode of
native life, immediately shot the animal dead, and would willingly have
done the same to the man, but that his services were essential to their
journey. Mare’s tongue is considered among the gauchos a great delicacy,
and they are evidently not particular about waiting for the mare to be
done with it.
I have no wish whatever to blacken the character of the gaucho, nor yet
have I come to praise him, for I found myself but little in touch with
his class, and such as I met I shall hope were not the finest specimens.
Later, however, I did meet an old German who had lived among them for
some thirty years, and still had his home in a lonely corner of the
Andes. When I encountered him he was carrying what seemed an unusually
large revolver of an antique type, and I asked him if he could count up
how many people he had killed with it, living all those years where the
arm of the law can scarcely reach out. “Never once in my life have I had
to use it against a human being,” was his surprising reply, and with that
must disappear some of our boys’ book fictions of gaucho ferocity.
[Illustration: TEAMS OF OXEN PLOUGHING IN THE ARGENTINE PAMPA.]
The gaucho is to South America what the cowboy is to the North, and so
far as life in the larger towns is concerned, the one is as seldom seen
as the other, where streets are paved and electric trams are running.
If anything, I should suspect the gaucho of entertaining a greater
dislike for town life than does his counterpart of North America. He is
essentially a child of nature, delighting to be in the saddle, roaming
the plains, rounding up the cattle, living to the full his outdoor
life, eating enormous quantities of beef and mutton, sipping his _mate_
and strumming his guitar at eventide by the open door of his rudely
furnished rancho. It seems to me that his opportunities for scoundrelism
are somewhat limited by nature, and if there is no denying his cruelty,
that is no more than acknowledging his origin. He seldom owns property
of much importance, and there are not many families of gaucho origin
who have risen to wealth, although one full-blooded member of the race,
the ever notorious Rosas, who held the Argentine in an iron grip as
dictator from 1833 to 1852, has left his mark on its history. It is more
than likely that he is fated to disappear in the onward march of the
Republic. Nowhere has he the field to himself, as he had say thirty years
ago, for, as I have already pointed out, the Italian, the Russian, and
indeed the labourers of all nations, have spread throughout the country
to such extent that there is probably no estancia where the newcomers
do not outnumber the gauchos. Proud of his national origin, he does not
mix readily with them, and this self-isolation will surely have but one
result, although the time may still be distant for the passing of his
picturesque figure from the Argentine scene.
That there is a fascination about the life of the Camp, most of the
Britishers who engage in it are ever ready to bear witness. When you
meet a fellow-countryman who is sincerely in love with Argentine life,
he is almost invariably “from the Camp.” But this fascination is of
slow growth, and such occasional visits as the town dweller is able to
pay to the estancia of a friend in the interior go a very little way to
create in him a liking for the life. The estancias are very much alike
in construction, and vary only according to the resources of the owners.
They are usually plain structures of wood and iron, and only occasionally
do we find them built of bricks. Those that boast a second story are few,
though where the owner controls a large tract of territory and spends
much of his time in personal supervision, we occasionally find a more
ambitious effort in domestic architecture. There are no gentle valleys
surrounded by low hills, or shady woods, where attractive sites may be
secured. In this treeless land, the farmer has to make his own shade
by planting trees around his house, and usually his home is set within
a quadrangle of eucalyptus trees or California poplars. There are no
broad, white, firm highways reaching out into the country, along which
one may travel in comfort to distant estancias—nothing but mother earth
everywhere, and such rude and primitive tracks as the European mind would
more readily associate with neolithic man than with one of the richest
and most progressive agricultural countries of the modern world. The
European traveller who first sets eyes on a camp road in the rainy season
experiences a shock from which he does not readily recover.
Let me try to picture, not a mere byway to an estancia but a “main
travelled road” in the Camp, such as I have seen it after a few days of
rain. It may be twice as wide as the average American highway and is
far more like a muddy river-bed than a way for wheeled traffic. Here
and there, there may be as much as thirty or forty yards in which the
proportion of earth to water is greater, though it will be cut and scored
with wheeled tracks a foot or two in depth, the whole surface having the
consistency of a mud heap. Then will succeed another twenty or thirty
yards of yellow water, deep enough to drown a horse did it fall down, and
thus league upon league, alternating between patches of rutted mud and
rippling pools, the noble highway goes on its undeviating course through
the Camp.
Travel along one of these roads in any kind of wheeled vehicle is the
last word in discomfort. All the buggies used for passengers stand very
high on tall wheels, so that the axles may clear the inequalities of the
mud, and the wagons for conveying grain and goods to the railway stations
from forty to one hundred miles away, are fitted with great narrow
wheels, the better to cut through the doughy compound. The life of the
animals employed to pull these vehicles is one long agony of toil, horses
having to make their way at times through liquid earth half-way up their
girths. Teams of oxen I have witnessed so buried in the “road” that only
a small part of their backs was visible above the surface, while they
laboriously dragged their hoofs with a sucking noise from the thicker
compost in the unseen depths where they found a precarious foothold. The
reader can picture to himself the delights of winter travel along such
roads, and further he may imagine how nearly these highways approximate
to the conception of a road in our own land when they suddenly dry.
Their summer condition suggests a stream of lava that has cooled down,
except that the dust lies thick on it and rises in blinding clouds at
every puff of wind. Small wonder, then, that the estanciero who can
afford to live in town during the winter is never to be found at his
estancia, where, in truth, it would be difficult to find him were he
there, as most of these country houses during the winter months are
practically isolated, owing to the condition of the roads, and an
aeroplane suggests the only practical means of reaching them. None the
less, in the long rainless months it is easy enough, and certainly
invigorating, to move about the Camp on horseback, and even by motor-car,
as there are no tiresome restrictions about keeping to the road, and one
may ride or drive at will over long tracts of flat grassy land.
The smaller towns in these boundless prairies are all so much alike,
owing to the lack of individuality in the landscape, that any one is
representative of the whole country. Most of them are on the railway
lines, for the railways have made the towns spring into existence,
instead of the railways having been laid to serve the needs of townships.
The great majority of them have begun with nothing more than a railway
station and an almacén. The station master is thus a person of much
importance throughout the Argentine, the link that binds the estancias
within his district—and his district will probably stretch a matter of
fifty miles or so on both sides of the railway line—to civilisation, as
represented by Buenos Ayres and beyond. He receives letters, telegrams,
and goods for them, and their gauchos ride in to the station so many
times a week to take home the mail.
According as the settled population of the district offers to retail
tradesmen opportunities for trafficking to some profit, little one-story
buildings begin to spring up near the station, until in a year or two
some dozens of houses, with the most oddly assorted stores occupying
their front premises, will represent the thriving township, whose
possibilities are limited only by the imagination of the vender of
the real estate, and his powers of vision would put some of our most
imaginative novelists to shame. There will be a few rude cafés, a
butcher’s shop, which opens in early morning and again towards evening,
displaying a red flag to indicate that warm, freshly killed meat is on
sale, a baker’s that hangs out a white flag when there’s a supply of
bread for sale, a “general dealer” or two, sellers of “store clothes,”
and such craftsmen as joiners and boot repairers, leather workers and
the like—“the rude forefathers of the village.” The first _almacenero_
to establish himself will presently be ambitious of marking his progress
by converting his corrugated iron shanty into a brick building, and thus
the town progresses until ten or fifteen years later it has its municipal
authority and its _intendencia_ and begins to think of lighting its still
unpaved streets. Wherever one goes throughout the Argentine, there are
these germs of possible towns to be seen, all without the slightest touch
of beauty, but all speaking eloquently of the new life that is throbbing
in the veins of this vast country, to what great issues in the future we
can but guess.
In many of these towns where the population runs into a few thousands,
the cinematograph represents the sole centre of amusement, and it may
be taken as proof that public administration in the larger cities makes
for cleanliness of life when I mention that while the moving picture
exhibitions so numerous in all the larger towns are conducted in a way
that would have the warmest approval of Mrs. Grundy, in these smaller
country places it is the custom for the women and children to leave the
halls after the ordinary evening exhibition, while the men remain to
witness the most obscene films that can be secured from the filth-mongers
of Paris or Berlin.
There is probably in all such towns at least one church, but the
influence of the priest in the Argentine is slight, and the religious
life of the Camp communities exists at a low ebb. Still, I have noted
many evidences of a real co-operative spirit in the erection of churches,
the men lending a hand with their labour to rear a building likely
to serve the needs of the town for years to come, and often, indeed,
anticipating in its size and ambitious design a somewhat distant future.
Many churches will be seen, in a journey through the country, only
half-built, and constructed of rude clay bricks, which it is hoped some
day to cover over with cement, their window spaces filled with sheets of
tin, that some day may glow with coloured glass. In fine, it may be said
of the smaller towns of the Camp that none of them yet exists, but all
are in the making, and in judging them we must not be too critical, for
we are looking only on the first rough sketches, so to speak, and know
not what they may become.
When we come to the large provincial centres, such as Rosario, La Plata,
Mendoza, Córdoba, Tucumán, Santa Fé, and others of growing importance, we
find ourselves contemplating something that is not merely in the initial
stages of its existence, but has “arrived.” Between the forlorn little
_pueblecito_, or even towns of some note, such as Dolores in the province
of Buenos Ayres, or Mercedes in that of San Luís, and the important
cities I have just named, there is even a greater difference than between
the familiar commercial centres of the Northern continent and these
emporia of the South. Difficult though it is to be perfectly just in
comparing towns where one has been no more than a fleeting visitor, with
others in which, voluntarily or involuntarily, one may have had to live
for some time, I do venture to say that from what I saw of the provincial
cities, I can conceive myself at least as happy (if not more so) settled
in such a town as Rosario or La Plata, as in Buenos Ayres itself.
Although noted for their travelling propensities, which take so many
Argentines to Europe every year, the visitor will be surprised to find
how seldom he will meet a native who knows his own country at first
hand. It may be safely said that in Buenos Ayres one will meet as many
people of native birth who have visited Europe as have been to Rosario,
and most certainly far more who have made the overseas trip than have
faced the thousand miles railway journey to Tucumán. The Argentine does
not know his own country, and he is scarcely to be blamed. A certain
widely travelled native used to entertain me with descriptions of his
adventures in London and on the Continent, and would grow dithyrambic in
his praise of old England’s capital, where, in his opinion, the whole
municipal energy and the efforts of the electric railways, tramways,
omnibuses, and all branches of public catering, were devoted to making
the lot of the foreign visitor as easy and comfortable as possible.
Beyond being able to read our language in an elementary way, he had no
command of it, but, armed with one of the multitudinous maps of the
“Underground,” and following the arrows which so lavishly decorate the
station walls and the insides of the trains that burrow by devious paths
through London’s mighty molehill, he felt perfectly happy and never at a
loss how to make his way about. Patriot though he was, London and Paris
and the great cities of Europe had more to teach him than any of his own,
and knowing, as he did, each Argentine city is more or less a replica of
another, while the country possesses no scenes of natural beauty within
easy reach of the capital, he was content to take his educational trips
abroad and leave the seeing of his native land, if ever, to a later time,
when there might be better reward for the pains.
This is the attitude of the average Argentine, so that the Italian
labourer who has had to move about the country in quest of employment
comes to know the Republic better than its natural citizens, while the
European engineers, commercial travellers, and business men in general,
can tell the Argentine native a great deal more about his country
from personal observation than he himself is ever like to know. He
has heard so much about it, too, from foreign writers, and he is so
frequently treated to the dazzling products of the National Department
of Statistics, that he is given to take its wonders for granted and
leave it to others to perform the task of personal inspection. Myself,
I had planned to go as far afield as Tucumán, merely to have a glimpse
of the sugar cane and orange-growing district, so different in character
and climate from the agricultural regions of the Centre and the South,
but being assured by three different gentlemen who had their business
headquarters in that thriving city of the North that half a day would
be ample in which to exhaust its interests, while the journey thither
and back again would consume some four or five days, I decided to range
myself with the native, and take Tucumán for granted. But opportunity
serving, during my stay, to visit a number of provincial centres between
the River Plate and the Andes, I shall now set down a few recollections
of some of these visits.
A very acute American gentleman of my acquaintance, carrying on an
important export business with South America, disputed an assertion of
mine, based entirely on something that I had read years before, that the
city of La Plata in the province of Buenos Ayres was a more important
centre of population than Bahía Blanca, the rising southern port of the
province. He was perfectly satisfied that I was in error, and even went
so far as to doubt the very existence of such a city, suggesting that
I was confusing it with the fashionable holiday resort on the Atlantic
seaboard, Mar del Plata. That a town of fully 100,000 inhabitants could
exist anywhere near Buenos Ayres and on the very banks of the River
Plate seemed to him impossible, especially as he had just returned from
a business visit to the country. This I mention merely as a passing
illustration of the lack of knowledge among even the most intelligent
people as to the topography of the Argentine.
Not only was I confident of the existence of La Plata, concerning whose
famous museum I had frequently read, but it was one of the cities I
intended to give myself the pleasure of visiting. So, one fine day I hied
me hither, forty minutes from Plaza Constitucion. This is one of the
pleasantest little train journeys in the province, passing through some
of the oldest settled country, where woods and water combine to form many
a little landscape like the reproduction of some old-world scene.
La Plata is essentially a thing of the New World. It is not a town that
has grown. It has been made, or, more correctly, it has been nearly
made, and stopped short temporarily for lack of funds. It is the capital
city of the Province of Buenos Ayres, which in 1881, under the policy
of President Roca, became a distinct entity from the newly created
federal district of Buenos Ayres. The explanation of this in due detail
is matter for the historian, and involves the tracing of the growth of
the Republic, its evolution from the Confederation of the River Plate,
and the ultimate settling of political rivalry by the creation of Buenos
Ayres as the federal capital, in which struggle Córdoba had fought a
fierce fight against heavy geographical odds and against “the Fox” of
modern Argentine politics, General Roca. Córdoba still looks with
jealous eye on Buenos Ayres as a usurper city.
Before the 19th of November, 1882, the site of La Plata, twenty-four
miles southeast of Buenos Ayres, and inland some five miles from the
south shore of the River Plate, was a barren waste, but on that day
the corner stone of the new capital of the province was laid. The plan
adopted for the making of the city was sufficiently ambitious, following
that of Washington, with great diagonal avenues ninety-seven and a
half feet wide, streets of fifty-eight and a half feet in width, and
many spacious public squares. Ten million pounds went to the laying
out of this model provincial capital and the erection of its public
buildings. Its importance may be judged from the fact that the provincial
legislature having its seat here controls territory as large as the
British Isles, and a population to-day numbering upwards of two millions.
So quickly was the work of construction pushed forward, that in less
than three years from the date of its foundation, La Plata had already
a population of thirty thousand, and in addition to the splendid public
buildings which had sprung up on what so lately was a barren waste, there
were nearly 4,000 houses erected or in course of construction. For a time
the building went on merrily, and then the funds began to give out, so
that to-day we find the city at once an evidence of a great outburst of
energy and an earnest of what it may become when the provincial treasury
is again sufficiently well filled to permit of finishing much that has
lain for years incomplete.
The province having lost control of the port of Buenos Ayres by the
Federal Act, set about another great undertaking in which four million
pounds more were spent. This was the building of a port at Ensenada,
about five miles away on the River Plate, connecting that by means of a
canal and railroad with La Plata. Ensenada is now the port for several
lines of steamships engaged in the frozen meat traffic, and carrying many
thousands of passengers annually to and from the River Plate.
The railway station of La Plata is a very tasteful and commodious
building, which gives the visitor an agreeable first impression on
arrival, while the spacious streets, villainously paved though many
of them remain, offer a welcome sense of freedom and airiness to one
who has been cooped up for any length of time in the choking byways
of Buenos Ayres. There is none of that eddying and surging traffic of
the metropolis. The current of life flows with an old-world leisure;
everywhere there is a sense of “ampler air.” The public buildings are
numerous and imposing, the Government House, the Capitol, the Treasury,
the Law Courts, and all the other departments of the provincial
legislature being housed in handsome quarters, though naturally much that
looks as if it had been built forever is really found on inspection to be
in keeping with the universal “sham” of Argentine architecture. French
influence predominates, and while there is much in the city that recalls
a French provincial capital, there is nothing beyond its ground plan
and the width of its streets to liken it to the splendid capital of the
United States.
The houses in the residential part are chiefly of the familiar one-story
variety, with here and there a modification of a French Renaissance
building, austere, withdrawn, and always somewhat dusty. Grass sprouts
luxuriously between the cobbles in all the streets a little way from the
centre, and the great avenues that cut athwart the town in all directions
still lack many finishing touches in the way of pavement, while most
of the public squares speak of plans stopped short of completion. The
great public park, amply shaded with lofty eucalyptus trees and no
lack of shrubbery, though a worthy monument and an adornment to any
town, has still that unkempt appearance of a partly finished exhibition
ground. Some day, I do not doubt, it will receive its finishing touches,
and will probably be a nearer approach, as indeed it is at present,
to our notions of a public park than anything to be seen elsewhere in
the South American continent. The museum in the park presents a rather
scabby face of flaking cement, which goes ill with its severe Greek
modelling. Interiorly, it is admirably arranged, and noteworthy chiefly
for its wonderful collection of glyptodons, those giant armadillos of
the country’s prehistoric past. In no museum have I seen such splendid
specimens and so many have here found house room, that later on, when
the other provinces come to organise their local museums, it should be
possible to supply them all with specimens and still leave sufficient to
make a brave show at La Plata. Noteworthy also is the famous stucco cast
of the monstrous brontosaurus, taken from the original in New York Museum
of Natural History and presented by Mr. Andrew Carnegie.
La Plata is not ill supplied with hotels and restaurants, and contains
a number of well-designed churches, as well as two or three handsome
theatres, while its race-course is second in the Argentine only to that
of Buenos Ayres. Withal, a beautiful, and in many ways an attractive
city, where it would be no ill lot to pass one’s life, though I am
prepared to be told it is a hotbed of political bickerings; inevitable
that, in any centre of South American government. One drawback it has,
which would plague me sorely, I must confess. On the occasion of my first
visit, a beautiful calm day of winter sunshine changed in an instant,
on the rising of a sharp wind, to the greyness of a London fog, but ten
thousand times more abominable in character than any fog could ever
be, for the greyness came from dense clouds of finest dust, raised in
such abundance from the sand-laden streets that even the great public
buildings, one of which I was in the act of photographing, were suddenly
blotted from sight, and everybody out of doors was making a desperate
dash for shelter. I saw it again in rain, and once more in sunshine, and
I shall prefer to think of it in the last condition, and always to defend
it from those who will tell me it is not worth the forty minutes’ journey
from the capital.
[Illustration: MONTEVIDEO FROM THE SOUTH, SHOWING THE CERRO WITH ITS
FORT.]
[Illustration: SHIPPING IN THE ROADSTEAD AT MONTEVIDEO AND THE MACIEL
QUAY.]
Entirely different in character from La Plata is the busy, go-ahead,
self-reliant, commercial town of Rosario, on the right bank of the Paraná
River, some 160 miles northwest of Buenos Ayres. This splendid city is no
costly product of political ambitions, but the quick flowering of a great
trade centre, Rosario being the market-place of the vast and bountiful
provinces that lie between the Paraná and the Andes, and a river port of
great and growing activity. The province in which it is situated, that of
Santa Fé, still contains considerable less than a million inhabitants,
and of these about 150,000 live and work in Rosario, yet this great town,
the second in commercial importance in the entire Republic, is under the
political control of the city of Santa Fé, the capital of the province,
with a population of less than 40,000. These two cities, by the way, have
equal appropriations for public education! In a country where population
and commerce are the determining factors of importance, it can easily be
imagined how Rosarians chafe under the domination of the political groups
in sleepy Santa Fé. That is a state of things that cannot endure, and
some day the agitation, periodically renewed, for the shifting of the
seat of provincial government, will surely succeed, and give to Rosario
the political importance which the enterprise of its citizens and its
commercial prosperity demand.
It is one of the Argentine towns from which I have carried away the
pleasantest memories. I am not at all certain that its superior hotel
accommodation does not to some extent colour my recollections. Nor is
that a small matter, for had it been possible to secure in the capital
city so near an approach to European comfort as may be obtained in at
least two of the excellent and ably conducted hotels of Rosario, I fancy
I should have passed my long months in Buenos Ayres more agreeably.
As a provincial city, Rosario undoubtedly approximates more nearly
to our ideals than Buenos Ayres does as a capital. It is hardly less
cosmopolitan in character, and there is a large and agreeable sense of
commercial movement everywhere in its bright and ample thoroughfares.
Lacking in public buildings, for the reason stated, the city contains
many fine commercial edifices, while its shopping centres are wonderfully
well-furnished with world-wide products, one large establishment,
devoted to sanitary appliances, excelling anything I have ever seen in
the quantity and variety of its wares, having a huge show-room devoted
entirely to all sorts of porcelain and enamel baths.
All the principal banks have substantial-looking buildings, and the
residences of the merchants of the town are no unworthy competitors with
those of Buenos Ayres itself. There are several good theatres, where
the best foreign companies that come to Buenos Ayres invariably make an
appearance. The principal park, a favourite centre of social life, is
admirably laid out, and has its inevitable statue of Garibaldi, for the
Italians are here as plentiful as elsewhere, and wherever a colony of
Italians can get together sufficient money for a statue of their national
hero, there will he be seen in some heroic pose. M. Huret was reminded
of Bluebeard, in looking upon the Garibaldi of Rosario, and I confess
the somewhat ferocious aspect of the hero of Italian Independence as
portrayed in this particular statue, would fit not ill that ogre of our
childhood.
But what interested me most in my peregrinations around the city was the
wonderful dock accommodation. The building of its splendid port began in
1902, and I should judge that it is now complete, or as near completion
as will be necessary for some years to come, for the Rosarians, with a
fine sense of future development, determined, in providing a port for
the ever-growing traffic of the town, to base its accommodation upon the
estimated needs of the year 1932! By reason of this generous anticipation
of the future, the port, where at present a traffic valued at nearly
$120,000,000 per annum is handled, looks almost idle. The quays stretch
along the river front for some miles, dotted here and there with big
grain elevators, and railway trucks unloading their freight for shipment
into the steamers, which, though mustering a considerable fleet, seem
“few and far between,” the accommodation for them being so enormous.
The River Paraná is wide and easily navigable for sea-going vessels of
considerable tonnage at Rosario, and this, combined with the privileged
situation of the town in the centre of one of the richest agricultural
regions of the Republic, marks Rosario out for a future of the greatest
prosperity. Its history already is second to none as a modern romance
of commercial expansion, and the brisk business air that pervades the
community, exhaled by all its citizens, legitimately proud of its rapid
progress, render it a most attractive centre for the commercial man.
Here we find a considerable British Colony, for which in 1912 a local
English newspaper was started, and the town is also a favourite shipping
centre with the English estancieros of the closely settled agricultural
region to the north and west, to which five or six railway lines branch
out from the city.
The railway run between Rosario and Buenos Ayres is perhaps the most
comfortable of any in the Republic, and the Pullman service is
excellently maintained, the journey occupying from about eight or nine
o’clock in the morning until about half-past six in the evening. The
departure of the Rosario express from Retiro every day is usually a scene
of much male embracing and female kissing. Like most train journeys in
the Argentine, there is never a tunnel, scarcely a perceptible change in
the gradient, and only an occasional low bridge over some small stream to
be crossed. You skim along through endless fields of alfalfa, of maize,
of linseed, or through vast pasture lands dotted with innumerable herds
of cattle, which always reminded me of Meredith’s sonnet where he says
that Shakespeare’s laugh is
Broad as ten thousand beeves at pasture!
A trip to Córdoba, involving another day’s journey north and west
from Rosario, offers a more appreciable change of scene. Here we find
ourselves in a city that has caught but little of the new spirit of the
Argentine and rather prides itself on being the shrine of the ancient
spirit. For the first time, too, we can witness something resembling
scenery, as the country in the neighbourhood of Córdoba, tired of being
flat and uninteresting for so many hundred miles, begins to take on some
picturesque inequalities, and at no great distance beyond the antique
city, the Hills of Córdoba, wooded and picturesque, come gratefully to
the eye. The city itself is essentially Spanish, with its narrow streets
and old colonial houses, its numerous churches and black-gowned priests.
Less than any of the Argentine towns do we find here that cosmopolitan
mixture of humanity; here the old customs have fought a longer fight
against modern innovations. M. Huret mentions an amusing example of
this. He says: “No more than twelve years ago, it would not have been
decent for any Córdoba woman walking through the public streets to have
raised her skirt slightly; it was allowed to sweep the pavement with
its tail. Two fashionable young ladies who had returned from Paris were
the occasion of a scandal, by having ventured to show their ankles. But
they continued doing so, and ended by conquering public opinion, so that
to-day the ladies of the town are no longer afraid to raise their skirts
in the street, but even have come to the point of wearing short dresses!”
This is very characteristic of Córdoba, whose university (founded in 1605
by the Bishop of Tucumán, and sharing with that of Lima the distinction
of being the oldest in South America) has done so much to maintain
the spirit of times past, at the very threshold of the most insistent
modernity. Little though I admire the Roman Catholic Church as I find it
in South America, it seems to me that the Argentine is the better for
its Córdoba. It is good that in a young republic, where commerce and the
making of money have suddenly and inevitably become the great ambitions
of the populace, the spirit of veneration for the past, even to the point
of narrow-mindedness in social relationships, should somewhere survive as
a leaven to the lump. Intensely provincial, parochial indeed, the life
of Córdoba has still about it something of the aroma of a grey, old,
historic place, and may not that be as fine a possession as great docks
and grain elevators, and new-made banks stuffed with money?
Of Mendoza I shall have something to say in a later chapter, and of Bahía
Blanca I need only state that it is no more than a town in the making—the
raw materials of a great possibility, which in another decade may have
grown into something not unlike Rosario to-day. Its life is naturally
lacking in that rhythm I find in the great established emporium of the
Paraná, but on every hand the evidences of activity are so patent that
it requires no remarkable vision to see Bahía Blanca some day with a
population running into six figures, with finished streets and settled
conditions, where so much at present is in the travail of birth.
To sum up, the provincial life of the Republic reflects in high degree
the conditions of the capital from which all the commercial centres
take their cue. Buenos Ayres is the great exemplar, and it is only to
be expected that the newer towns springing into greatness should aim
at reproducing in themselves what they admire in the capital, avoiding
always the creation of such unduly narrow thoroughfares as Buenos Ayres
has inherited from the old colonial city. In the smaller towns, life is
attended with many hardships and calls for stern self-denial, for plain
living, if not for high thinking, and the impression of their inhabitants
which survives in my memories of those I visited is that of their sullen
determination to become rich, at no matter what inconvenience for the
present. So, everywhere one finds the people looking to the future rather
than endeavouring to “live along the way.” For hundreds of thousands,
the Future may have a full hand. For hundreds of thousands more, perhaps,
it is well the Future is veiled, that they may at least toil on in hope.