CHAPTER I

THE SOUTH AMERICAN METROPOLIS

In Buenos Aires I became what a local newspaper called “office boy” to the American consul general. The latter had turned out to be a vicarious friend of long standing; his overworked staff was sadly in need of an American assistant familiar with Spanish, the one sent down from Washington months before having been lost in transit. Moreover, being a discerning as well as a kind-hearted man, the consul knew that even a rolling stone requires an occasional handful of moss. The salary was sufficient to sustain life just inside what another consular protégé called the “pale of respectability,” and my duties as “outside man” brought me into daily contact with all classes of _Porteños_, as natives of what was reputed the most expensive city in the world are known in their own habitat.

Two years of wandering in the Andes and jungles of South America is, in a way, the best possible preparation for a visit to the largest city south of the United States. The man who approaches it from this corridor will experience to the full the astonishment it is almost certain to produce upon an unprepared visitor; he will be in ideal condition to recognize the urban artificialities which make it so great an antithesis of the rural simplicity of nearly all the southern continent. Like the majority of Americans, I suppose, though I had now and then heard rumors of its increase and improvement, my mental picture of the Argentine capital was as out of date as the spelling “Buenos Ayres” that still persists among even the best of English and American authorities. It was the picture hastily sketched by our school books of not so long ago, and, except in the matter of a few decades of time, it was essentially a true one.

A bare half century back the City of Good Airs had the appearance of a Spanish town of the Middle Ages, and worse. Though it faced the River Plata at a point where it is more than thirty miles wide, it had no real harbor. Travelers landed from ships by first transferring to rowboats far out on the yellow-brown horizon, then to ox-carts driven hub-deep into the shallow, muddy stream. The streets were so innocent of paving that business men often remained at home lest they find it impossible to extricate themselves from the quagmires that masqueraded under the name of _calles_. Temporary wooden bridgelets were laid across corners from one scanty raised sidewalk to another; at the height of the rainy season even horsemen were sometimes mired in the very heart of town. Men still living tell of a pool in the present bustling Calle Rivadavia about which sentinels had to be posted to keep careless people and their horses from drowning in it. Municipal lighting was unknown. A few public-spirited citizens hung up tallow candles before their houses; wealthy residents, obliged to make their way through the bottomless night, were attended by menials carrying lanterns. There were neither water pipes nor sewers; each citizen dug his own well beside his garbage heap. In winter the one-story houses, stretching in solemn yet disordered array down the narrow, reeking streets and built for the most part of sun-baked mud bricks, became slimy, clammy dens in which disease bred and multiplied. The hundred and some thousand inhabitants, mixtures of Spanish adventurers and Indians from the great pampas beyond, had but little contact with the outside world and were correspondingly provincial, conservative and fanatical.

Such was Buenos Aires within the memory of men who do not yet consider themselves old; such it is still in the average imagination of the outside world. It is with something stronger than surprise, therefore, that the newcomer finds the Argentine capital to-day the largest Spanish-speaking city on the globe, second only to Paris among the Latin cities of the world, equal to Philadelphia in population, resembling Chicago in extent as well as in situation, rivaling New York in many of its metropolitan features, and outdoing every city of our land in some of its civic improvements. Personally, I confess to having wandered its endless streets and gazed upon its unexpected cosmopolitan uproar in a semi-dazed condition for some time after my arrival. It was hard to believe that those miles upon miles of modern wharves, surrounding artificial basins capable of accommodating the largest ships in existence, backed by warehouses that measure their capacity in millions of tons, were situated on the same continent as medieval Quito, that the teeming city behind them was inhabited by the same race that rules languid La Paz and sleepy Asunción.

The greatness of Buenos Aires has been mainly thrust upon it. Of all the cities of the earth only Chicago grew up with more vertiginous rapidity. The city of to-day has so completely outreached the plans of its unsuspecting founders that it is constantly faced with the problem of modifying existing conditions to meet metropolitan requirements. It was a comparatively simple matter to fill in and pave the old quagmires that posed as streets; it was quite another thing to widen them to accommodate modern traffic. Laid out by Moorish-influenced Spaniards in a century when the passing of two horsemen constituted the maximum demand for space, the streets of old Buenos Aires are narrower and more congested than the tightest of those at the lower end of Manhattan Island. In most cases the problem has been frankly abandoned, for nothing short of destroying all the buildings on one side or the other of these medieval passageways could improve them. The result is that a walk through what was the entire city fifty years ago, and which is now mainly the business section, is an ordeal or an amusing experience, according to the mood or the haste of the victim.

The _Porteño_ has made various bold attacks upon this problem of congestion. Nearly thirty years ago he hewed his way for a mile and a half through the heart of the old town, destroying hundreds of buildings in his insistence on more space. The result is the Avenida de Mayo, somewhat resembling the boulevards of Paris in the neighborhood of the Opéra and stretching from the already old and inadequate _Casa Rosada_, or presidential palace, to the new congressional building, which resembles and in some ways outdoes in majestic beauty our own national capitol. But this chief artery of downtown travel is, after all, of insignificant length compared with the mammoth Buenos Aires of to-day, and the older flanking street of Rivadavia, once the principal highway to the pampa beyond, cutting the entire city in two from the waterfront to the open plains, is quite incapable of handling the through traffic which refuses to risk itself in the constricted _calles_ of the downtown labyrinth.

Similar heroic treatment has been applied in other parts of the old town. Wherever the stroller wanders he is certain to come out often upon an open space, a little park or a plaza, which has been grubbed out by the bold demolition of a block of houses. I cannot recall another city where parks are anything like as epidemic as they are in Buenos Aires. There is not a point in town out of easy strolling distance of one or more of them, some so tiny that they can be crossed in a hop, skip, and a jump, the largest, aristocratic Palermo, so large that one may wander for hours without crossing the same ground twice.

Buenos Aires is not a city of skyscrapers. Built on a loose soil that is quite the antithesis of the granite hills of Manhattan Island, with unlimited opportunity to spread across the floor-flat plains beyond, it has neither the incentive nor the foundation needed to push its way far aloft. Custom in this respect has crystallized into requirement, and a city ordinance forbids the height of a building to exceed one and one-third the width of the street it faces. The result is that while it has fewer architectural failures, fewer monstrosities in brick and stone, the city on the Plata has nothing that can rival the epic poems among buildings to be found at the mouth of the Hudson. From a distance it looks curiously like one of our own large cities decapitated to an average height of three or four stories, with only here and there an ambitious structure peering timidly above the monotonous general level. Flat and drab are perhaps the two words which most fully describe its general aspect.

On every hand the traveled visitor is reminded of this or that other great city; it is as if one were visiting a newly laid out botanical garden in which the origin of most of the plants, taken from old established gardens elsewhere, is plainly evident, with only here and there a native shrub or a curious hybrid to emphasize the changed conditions of soil and climate. When one has noted the origin of nearly all its human plants, it is no longer surprising that Buenos Aires seems more a European than an American city. Architecturally it most resembles Paris, with hints of Madrid, London and Rome thrown in, not to mention certain features peculiarly its own. This similarity is the pride of the _Porteño_ and every recognition of it is a compliment, for like nearly all Latin-Americans, he is most enamored of French culture. Not only is he accustomed to refer to his city as the “Paris of South America”—all South American capitals are that to their own people—but he copies more or less directly from the earthly paradise of all good _argentinos_. The artistic sense of the Latin comes to his aid in this sometimes almost subconscious endeavor; or, if the individual lacks this, there is the guiding hand of the community ever ready to sustain his faltering steps. City ordinances not only forbid the erection of structures which do not fit into the general scheme of a modified Paris, but Buenos Aires rewards those who most successfully carry out its conception of civic improvement. Every year the building adjudged the greatest addition to the city’s beauty is awarded a bronze façade-plate and is relieved for a decade from the burden of taxes.

It would be unreasonable to expect a community with such pride in its personal appearance to permit itself to be disfigured by an elevated railway system. Besides, as it is spread evenly over an immense space of flat country, “B. A.’s” transportation problem is scarcely serious enough to require this concession to civic comfort. Of street-cars in the ordinary sense it has unlimited numbers, plying in every direction; all they lack is freedom to go their way unhampered in the oldest and busiest section of town. Their one peculiarity, to the American, is that they refuse to be overcrowded. No one may enter a tramcar while its seats are filled; nine persons, and nine only, may ride on the back platform. If you chance to be the tenth, there is no use insisting that you must ride or miss an important engagement. The car will refuse to move as long as you remain on board, and if there happens to be within call one of the spick-and-span, Britishly imperturbable, New-Yorkly impersonal policemen of Buenos Aires, you will probably regret your insistence. It will be far better to accept your misfortune with Latin courtesy and hail one of the taxis that are forever scurrying past. Or, if even the modest demands of these well-disciplined public carriers are beyond your means, there is the ancient and honorable method of footing it. The chances are that if your destination is anywhere within the congested business section you can walk to it and finish your errand by the time the inexorable street-car would have set you down there.

I lost no time in exploring the luxuries of Buenos Aires’ new subway. Only the year before the proud Avenida de Mayo had been disrupted by the upheavals throughout its entire length, and already the “Subterraneo” operated from the Plaza de Mayo behind the Pink House to the Plaza Once, two miles inland and nearly a fifth of the way across the city. Like the surface lines it belongs to the _Tranvías Anglo-Argentina_, a British corporation, the concession requiring the company to pay the city six per cent. of its gross receipts for fifty years, at the end of which time the subway becomes automatically the property of the municipality. The _argentino_ is fully awake to the advantage and possibility of driving good bargains in the exploitation of public utilities and resources.

The descent to any of the subway stations along the Avenue carries the mind instantly back to Manhattan. The underground scent is the same, news-stands and advertising placards are as inevitable; along the white-tile-walled platforms are ranged even penny-in-the-slot scales and automatic vendors, though with the familiar plea, “Drop one cent,” changed to “_Echad 10 centavos_,” which is significant of the difference in cost of most small things in the chief cities of North and South America. Yet the subway fare is a trifle cheaper on the Plata, being the tenth of a _peso_ normally worth barely forty-three cents. One’s impression of being back in “Bagdad-on-the-Subway,” however, is certain to evaporate by the time he steps out of his first _tren subterraneo_. The _Porteño_ believes in moving rapidly, but his interpretation of the word hurry is still far different from our own. There are certain forms of courtesy which he will not cast off for the mere matter of stretching his twenty-four hours a few minutes farther; there are certain racial traits of deliberate formality of which he is incapable of ridding himself. Moreover, the “Subterraneo” is British, and it retains the dignified leisureliness of its nationality. One buys a ticket of a man who is intensely aware of the fact that he is engaged in a financial transaction; at the gate another man solemnly punches the ticket and returns it to the owner, who is warned both by placards and italicized remarks on the ticket itself that he must be constantly prepared instantly to display it to the inspectors who are forever stalking through the cars; where he disembarks, it is solemnly gathered by still another intense employee, who will infallibly make the passenger who has carelessly mislaid the valuable document in question produce another ten-centavo piece and witness the preparation and cancelation of a _billete suplementario_ before he is granted his freedom. There are no express trains; the locals are rather far apart; they cease their labors soon after midnight, and do not begin again until dawn. On the other hand, the cars are roomy, spotless and as comfortable as a club easy-chair; the noisy ringing of bells and slamming of doors by disgruntled guards is lacking; signs to “Prepare yourself to leave the coach before arriving at the station of destination” take the place of any attempt to hustle the crowd. The company loses no courteous opportunity of “recommending to the passenger the greatest rapidity in getting on or off the cars, in order to accelerate the public service,” but mere placards mean nothing to the Spanish-American dowager of the old school, who is still inclined to take her osculatory and deliberate farewell of friends and relatives even though the place of parting be the open door of this new-fangled mode of transportation, surrounded by inwardly impatient, but outwardly courtier-like, subway guards and station employees.

Three important railway companies operate five lines to the suburbs, and every evening great commuters’ trains, more palatial than the average of those out of our own large cities, rush away into the cool summer night with the majority of “B. A.’s” business men. It is perhaps a misnomer to call the score or more of residence sections suburbs, for they are compactly united into the one great city, of which they constitute fully three fourths the capacity. But each district bears its own name, which often suggests its character and history. Even a total stranger might guess that Belgrano and Flores are rather exclusive dwelling-places; Coghlan, Villa Malcolm, Villa Mazzini, and Nueva Pompeya recall some of the races that have amalgamated to form the modern _Porteño_; one would naturally expect to find the municipal slaughter-house and less pleasant living conditions in Nuevo Chicago. In these larger and newer parts of Buenos Aires the broad streets are in striking contrast to the crowded and narrow ones down town. Though the _Porteño_ has inherited the Spaniard’s preference for taking his front yard inside the house, neither the sumptuous dwellings of the aristocratic north suburbs nor the more plebeian residences of the west and south have that shut-in air of most Latin-American cities, where the streets slink like outcast curs between long rows of scowling, impersonal house-walls.

The far-flung limits of Buenos Aires inclose many market gardens, and the land side of the city belongs to the backwoods it faces. But the thousands of makeshift shacks which fringe it are not the abode of hopeless mortals, such as inhabit the hovels of less progressive South American towns. The outskirt dwellers of Buenos Aires have the appearance of people who are moving forward, who insist that another year shall find them enjoying something more of the advantages of civilization. Indeed, this atmosphere pervades the entire city, bringing out in pitiless contrast the social inertia of the great Andean region. There are fewer slums in Buenos Aires than in New York; the children of the poorer classes are less oppressive in appearance; beggars are scarcer. Though there is squalor enough, the _conventillos_, or single-story tenement-houses of the larger west-coast cities are almost unknown. Economic opportunity has here given birth to new hope and brought with it the energy and productiveness which constitute a great people, and by the time the visitor has wandered with due leisure through the vast length and breadth of Buenos Aires he is likely to conclude that there the Latin is coming into his own again.

Though it is not quite so difficult to find a native _argentino_ in Buenos Aires as to run to earth a genuine American in New York, there are many evidences that its growth has come mainly from across the sea. The city is not merely European in its material aspects, but in its human element. The newcomer will look in vain for any costume he cannot find on the streets of Paris or Rome; the wild _gauchos_ from the pampa, the beggars on horseback, the picturesque Carmelite monks and nuns that troop through the pages of “Amalia” and kindred stories of the past century are as scarce as feather-decked Indians along Broadway. No city of our own land is more completely “citified” than the Argentine capital. Though there has as yet been far less European immigration to the Argentine Republic than to the United States—a mere five million who came to stay up to the beginning of the Great War—a disproportionate number of these have remained in Buenos Aires. Fully half the population of the city is foreign born, with Italians in the majority. The long-drawn vowels and doubled consonants of Italian speech are certain to be heard in every block, though more often as a foreign accent in the local tongue than in the native dialect of the speaker. For the Italian fits more snugly into his environment in the Argentine than in the United States. He finds a language nearly enough like his own to be learned in a few weeks; there is a Latin atmosphere about the southern republic, particularly its capital, which makes him feel so fully at home that he is much less inclined to segregate than in the colder Anglo-Saxon North. Add to this that the climate is more nearly that of his homeland, that the Argentine welcomes him not merely with five days’ free hospitality and transportation to any part of the country, but with the communal _abrazo_ as a fellow-Latin and a near relative, and it is easier to understand why ships from Genoa and Naples are turning more and more southward on their journey across the Atlantic. Were it not for the reversal of the seasons on the two sides of the equator, the Argentine would have a still larger permanent Italian population. But as it is summer and grape-picking time in the boot-leg peninsula when it is winter on the pampas, large numbers of Italians flit back and forth like migratory birds from one harvest to the other, or go to spend the money earned where it is plentiful in the place where it will buy more.

The Castilian lisp also stands out frequently in the sibilant native speech of “B. A.” and the _boína_ of the Basques is so common a headdress in the city as to be inconspicuous. After the Spaniard there are French, English, and German residents, decreasing in proportion in the order named, and Americans enough to form a champion baseball team. Jews are less ubiquitous than in our own metropolis, but they are numerous enough to support several synagogues and a company of Yiddish players for a season of several weeks, after which the Thespians find new clientèle in the larger cities of the interior.

It is surprising to most Americans to find that Buenos Aires is strictly a “white man’s town.” The one negro I ever saw there was posted before the door of a theater, as an advance attraction. In the country as a whole African blood is scarcer than in Canada; while the United States has twelve non-Caucasians to the hundred, the Argentine has but five. Nor do there remain any visible remnants of the aborigines, at least in the capital. The caste of color, so intricate and unescapable in the Andes, is completely lacking. Nor are the places of importance in its social structure confined to those of Spanish origin. Along with the Castilian and Basque names that figure in its society and big-business columns are no small number not only Italian and French, but English, Baltic, and Slavic, some of them more or less Spanicized by long Argentine residence. As in Chile there is a little aristocracy of third or fourth generation Irish, retaining the original spelling of their family names, but pronouncing them “O-co-nór,” “Kel-yée,” “O-bree-én” and the like. It was an ordinary experience in running consular errands in Buenos Aires to come across business men with English or Irish names who spoke only Spanish, or men who spoke English with both an Irish brogue and a Spanish accent and accompanied their remarks with a wealth of Latin gesticulation.

To say that these transplanted Irish are active in local and national politics is to utter a tautology. Strictly speaking, Buenos Aires is not self-governing; as a Federal District—the most populous one in the world, by the way—it is ruled by an _intendente_ appointed by the national executive. But its influence on the national life is more potent than that of Washington and New York combined; as it has more “influential citizens” and large property owners than all the rest of the republic, it has roundabout ways of imposing its own will upon itself. Not that those ways are devious in the cynical sense. It is something of a traditional hobby among the heads of aristocratic old families, most of them with ample wealth, to accept municipal office and to seek public approval in it out of family pride, and their privilege to be free from the handicap of listening to every whim of an ignorant electorate. Thus Buenos Aires enjoys the distinction among large cities of the western hemisphere of being for the most part rather well governed. On the whole, perhaps a larger percentage of public funds are actually and advantageously spent in municipal improvement than in the case of most “self-governing” cities. Besides, it is one of the distinctions between North and South America that while the cry of “graft” is more frequent in our municipal than in our national affairs, our neighbors to the south seem more capable of handling a city than a nation.

It is as easy to become a citizen in the Argentine as in the United States, but it is not quite so easy to remain one. The duties of citizenship are more nearly those of continental Europe than of the free and easy Anglo-Saxon type. There is compulsory military service, for instance. In theory every male citizen must enter the army or navy for two years when he reaches maturity; practically there is by no means room for all in the armed force which the Argentine considers it necessary to maintain. Hence the requirement reduces itself to the necessity of drawing lots, and of serving if designated by the finger of fate. This is no new and temporary whim in the Argentine, but was already in force long before the European war. The _argentino_, however, goes his models of the Old World one or two better. The man who does not serve, either for physical or lucky reasons, pays a yearly tax toward the support of the force from which he has been spared. As in continental Europe, every citizen must have a booklet of identity, issued by the police and duplicated in the public archives. This document is so essential that, though I spent less than three months in the country, I found it advantageous to apply for one, that is, the simpler _cédula de identidad_ for non-citizens. The temporary resident, and even the citizen, may “get by” for a time without this little volume, but the day is almost sure to come when he will regret its absence. Of two men whose public altercation chances to attract the attention of the police, the one who can produce his _libreto_ is far less likely to be jailed than the one who cannot. The chauffeur who has an accident, the man who is overtaken by any of the mishaps which call one’s existence to the notice of the public authorities, is much better off if he has been legally registered. Moreover, the citizen can neither vote nor exercise any of his formal rights of citizenship without displaying his booklet. It contains the photograph, a brief verified biography, the signature, and the thumb-print of the holder. The _argentinos_ have carried the use of finger-prints further than perhaps any other nation. Even school children taking formal examinations must often decorate their papers with a thumb-print. Both photograph and _cédula_ are produced by a well-trained public staff in well-arranged public offices, in which prints of all the applicant’s fingers are filed away under the number inscribed on his _libreto_, and where courteous attendants bring him into contact with the lavatory facilities which he requires before again displaying his hands to a pulchritudinous public. In addition to the essentials contained in all booklets, that of the citizen has several extra pages on which may be inscribed from time to time his military and civic record.

But to come to the polls, now that we are armed with the document indispensable to any participation in an election. A new election law had recently been passed, one so well designed to express the real will of the people that pessimists were already prophesying its attempted repeal by the oligarchy of wealthy property owners, from whom it would wrest the control of government. As in most Latin-American countries, Sunday was the day chosen for the casting of ballots. About each polling-place, most of which were in sumptuous public buildings, rather than in barbershops and second-hand shoe stores, were a few of Buenos Aires’ immaculate, imperturbable policemen and the three or four officials in charge. Otherwise there was little animation in the vicinity. The new election law forbids voters to approach the polls “in groups,” and makes electioneering or loitering within a certain considerable distance of the booths penal offenses. Glancing cautiously about him, therefore, to make sure that he was not a group, the _Porteño_ stealthily yet briskly stepped forward to do his civic duty. The officials rose to greet him with dignified courtesy, and requested permission to peruse his booklet. This being found in order, his military service honorably completed, or his military tax paid, they permitted him to cast his ballot, at the same time recording that act on the proper line of his _libreto_. This latter formality is of such importance that the voter himself would protest against its inadvertent omission. For the new law in the Argentine _requires_ each citizen to vote. Unless he can show unquestionable proof that he was seriously ill or unavoidably absent from his home district on election day, the citizen whose _libreto_ does not show, at the next revision by authority, the mark of the election board is subject to a fine.

The most cynical of observers could scarcely have suspected any “crookedness” in the election as it was carried out that day in Buenos Aires. Outside the capital things were perhaps a trifle less ideal; at least tales of strife drifted in for some time afterward from the remote provinces, where the familiar old South American experience of seeing the _cacique_, the hereditary “boss,” impose his will with a heavy and sometimes a bloody hand was still repeated. But there was considerable evidence that the entire country is improving in this respect. Those who lie awake nights worrying about the future development of foreign lands need not lose much sleep over the Argentine, for here at least is one South American country unquestionably able to work out its own destiny.

The _argentino_ is in no such breathless haste as the American to know the result of his elections. The newspapers of the following morning carried many columns of comment on the aspect of the capital and the principal towns of the provinces under the new law, but not a hint of the future make-up of the legislative body. Weeks later the retiring congress met in their new palace, and laboriously fell to counting the ballots from all the republic, announcing the results piecemeal from day to day, and causing the votes to be publicly burned in a corner of the still unfinished grounds when the count had been verified.

It goes without saying, since military service is one of the duties of citizenship, that Argentine women do not vote. In fact, there is almost no evidence of a desire on their part to do so. A very small group of _sufragistas_ did make a demonstration in the capital on election day, sending through the streets an automobile decorated with banners, flowers, and femininity. But as the four young ladies in the tonneau were both comely and exquisitely dressed, the apathetic by-standers took the attitude of considering them rather as exhibits in national beauty and charm than for what they purported to be—all, that is, except the police, who ungallantly took the group into custody for violating the new law against electioneering on the day of balloting.

Perhaps the greatest personal surprise which befell me during the election was to be asked by a policeman at one of the polls before which I illegally loitered for a moment whether I desired to vote. One is so palpably, so noticeably a “gringo” in other Latin-American countries that it had never occurred to me that I might be taken for a citizen in the Argentine. In nearly all the rest of South America the foreign resident remains an _estranjero_ all his days; even his native-born children are apt to be called “_hijo de inglés, de italiano, de alemán_”; in the Argentine he is soon accepted as one of the cosmopolitan race of the Silvery Republic. The Argentine, and perhaps Uruguay, seems to be the only country south of our Rio Grande capable of giving the immigrant an entirely new deal in the game of life and of completely absorbing him into the body politic, at least by the second generation. The sons of Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Italians who took up their residence below the Plata are no more English, French, and Italian than they would be if their fathers had come to the United States. If any reference to their origin comes up in conversation, it is as something casual, unimportant, like the color of their hair and eyes. During my stay in the southern republic the son of an American dentist who had established himself in Buenos Aires a generation ago lost his life in a foolhardy airplane flight undertaken for the delectation of a group of admiring young ladies, on the eve of an official attempt to fly over the Andes. The temperament which caused him to accept such a challenge under the circumstances was as typically Latin-American as were the flowers, poems, and street names which were heaped upon “our national hero” by his bereaved Argentine fellow-countrymen. In Peru or Colombia his exploit might have been noted, but he would still have been an _americano_.

The people of the Argentine, and particularly of Buenos Aires, have much the same feeling toward the _madre patria_ as the average American has toward England—forgiving, though perhaps still a bit resentful of the past, aware of the common heritage, on the whole a trifle disdainful. The popular term for a Spaniard in Buenos Aires is “Gallego” (or, in the slurring Argentine pronunciation, “Gajego”), and the Galician has stood for centuries as all that is stupid, servile, and clumsy, the unfailing butt of Spanish drama. The _Porteño_ never says he speaks Spanish, though his tongue is as nearly that of Spain as ours is that of England; even in his school books he calls it the _idioma nacional_.

But the _argentino_ is still largely Spanish, whether he admits it or not; he is distinctly of the Latin race, for all the influx of other blood. The types one sees in his streets are those same temperamental Latin-Americans to be found from Mexico to Paraguay, a more glorified type, perhaps, more in tune with the great modern moving world, almost wholly free from non-Caucasian mixture, larger and better nourished, and with the ruddiness and vigor of the temperate zone. But they have much the same overdeveloped pride, the same dread of demeaning themselves by anything suggestive of manual labor. No _Porteño_ of standing would dream of carrying his own valise from station to tramway; even the Americans sent down to set up harvesting machinery on the great _estancias_ cannot throw off their coats and pitch in, lest they instantly sink to the caste of the peon in the eyes of the latter as well as in those of the ruling class. Caste lines are sharper in the Argentine than anywhere in western Europe; as in all South America there is little or no “middle class,” few people of moderate wealth, tastes, and station to fill in the great gulf between the day-to-day workman and the powerful landed proprietors who dwell sumptuously in the capital on the income from their vast estates out on the pampas, which they see far less often than the medieval lord did his feudal domain.

The prevailing attitude toward life, including as it does an exaggerated pride in personal appearance, gives Buenos Aires a plethora of labor-fearing fops whose main purpose in life seems to be to establish the false impression that they are the scions of aristocratic old families of uncomputed wealth. Behold one of these frauds in his daily peregrination, for he is too typical of the Buenos Aires point of view to be passed over as a mere individual. At an aristocratic hour of the afternoon he may be seen descending the steps of the far-famed, more than ornate Jockey Club (pronounced “Shocky Cloop” in the Argentine) in the patrician Calle Florida. His faultless black felt hat, carefully creased at the front and back of the crown but full in the middle, the bow of the band at the back of his head, is set at the twenty degree angle, tilting to the rear, of the “last cry” of fashion. A silk scarf of much yet subdued color, a tan suit cut low in front and retreating suddenly below, the two coat buttons close together, displaying much silver-and-gray waistcoat, the cuffed trousers razor-edged, surmounting patent-leather shoes topped by silver-gray spats, one lavendar glove, with what may be a diamond ring bulging through one of the fingers, its wrist folded back over the hand it covers and in which its mate is carried, completes his attire, though not his make-up. A brilliant carnation in the lapel, a green-black overcoat of camel-hair, blanket-like texture, drawn together behind by a half-belt fastened to buttons on the sides, the skirts of the wide-spreading variety, thrown with ostensible carelessness over the left arm, and a silver-headed cane grasped by the middle at the latest approved angle, in the bare hand, complete the sartorial picture. On the chronically disappointed face cultivated by the gilded youth of Latin-America there is an aristocratic pose, beneath which lurks a faint hint of the Bowery, particularly when its possessor turns to ogle those of the passing ladies who are ogle-worthy. Arrived in the street, he opens with grand manner a silver cigarette-case and lights in the latest fashion a monogrammed cigarette, summons a taxi with a languid, world-weary air by slightly raising his cane, steps in and rides out of sight of the Jockey Club, alights, pays the sixty centavos fare of the first fifteen hundred meters—and walks to the ten-dollar-a-month room he shares with a companion. At the Jockey Club races hundreds of these real or counterfeit favorites of fortune may be seen on the hottest days in those same lavendar gloves—or rather, their spotless replica—pulling out little pocket mirrors every few minutes to reassure themselves on their personal charms, or attempting to add to them by giving a new curl to their mustaches.

Physical exertion, even for exercise sake, has little place in the scheme of life of these dandies, or of the majority of youths even of the genuinely wealthy and patrician class. Of late certain influences have been working for improvement in this matter, but they are still hampered by the awkwardness of inexperience as well as laggard _costumbre_. Out at Tigre, a cluster of islands and channels some miles up the bank of the Plata, young men of the class that in the United States would pride themselves on a certain expertness in sports may be seen rowing about with the clumsiness and self-consciousness of old maids, their shirts bunched up under their suspenders, their bodies plainly uncomfortable in trousers inclined by the dictates of fashion, as well as by the unwonted exertion, to climb to their chests, the occasional young woman in the back seat sitting as stiffly as the model in a corset-shop window.

The feminine sex of the same class does not, of course, yield to the males in the matter of personal adornment. At the races, along the shaded drives of Palermo of an afternoon, above all in the narrow Calle Florida a bit later in the day, fashion may be seen preening itself in frank self-admiration. In the material sense the Calle Florida is merely another of those inadequate streets of the old town, four or five blocks back from the waterfront, and given over to the most luxurious shops,—jewelers, _modistes_, _tailleurs de luxe_. But Florida is more than a street; it is an institution. For at least a generation it has been the unofficial gathering-place of the élite, in so far as there can be any such in so large a city, taking the place in a way of the Sunday night promenade in the central plaza of smaller Latin-American towns. Up to a few years ago the carriages drove directly from the daily promenade in Palermo to join the procession that crawled back and forth along the few blocks of Florida between the Avenida de Mayo and the Plaza San Martín, the ladies in them affecting that air of lassitude which seems to be most attractive to the frankly admiring cavalier south of the Rio Grande. But the day came when the narrow _callejón_ could no longer contain all those who demanded admission to the daily parade and mutual admiration party, and the _intendente_ solved the problem by closing the street to vehicles during certain hours of the late afternoon. There is still a procession on wheels from eleven in the morning until noon, given over particularly to débutantes ostensibly on shopping tours, though invariably surrounded by long lines of gallants and would-be _novios_; but the principal daily _corso_ is now made on foot, and admiring males may without offense or conspicuousness pass near enough in the throng that fills the street from wall to wall to their particular ideal to catch the scent of her favorite perfume. Nor does that require undue proximity, for the most circumspect ladies of Buenos Aires see nothing amiss in making an appeal to the olfactory senses which in other lands would lead to unflattering conclusions.

The gowns to be seen in such gatherings are said by authorities on the subject to be no farther behind Paris than the time of fast steamers between French ports and the Plata. To the bachelor more familiar with the backwoods they seem to be as thoroughly up to the minute as their wearers are expert in exhausting every possibility of human adornment. Unfortunately, many of the demure, semi-animate ladies prove on close inspection to be not so beautiful as they are painted. Not a few of them could readily pass as physically good looking, despite the bulky noses so frequent in “B. A.” as to be almost typical, were they satisfied to let nature’s job alone. But the most entrancing lady in the world would risk defeat by entering a beauty contest disguised as a porter in a flour-mill. There are, to be sure, ravishing visions now and then in these Buenos Aires processions, but unpolished candor forces the admission that what to us at least is the refined and dainty type is conspicuous by its rarity. It is a standing observation of critical foreign visitors that the décolleté gowns seen at the Colón during the opera season often disclose cable-like shoulder muscles bequeathed by recent ancestors who carried loads on their heads. That to me is one of the promising signs in Buenos Aires, a proof that the new “aristocracy” is near enough the laboring generations which built it up not to have lost its muscle and its energy; it helps to explain the youthful enthusiasm of the Argentine, similar to our own and so unlike the blasé hopelessness of much of South America. For the southern republic is as truly the land of opportunity as is our own, inferior perhaps only in extent and resources. Along with the fops lounging in the Jockey Club it has many such types as Mihanovitsch, arriving half a century ago with no other possessions than the porter’s rope over his shoulder and retiring recently from the active ownership of the largest steamship company south of the United States, with palatial steamers plying wherever Argentine waters are navigable.

The gaudy ostentation of this _nouveau riche_ city of Latin-Iberian origin is nowhere seen to better advantage than at the Recoleta, the principal cemetery. This is a crowded cement city within a stone wall, as much a promenade and show-ground as a last resting-place. Men sit smoking and gossiping on the tombs; women take in one another’s gowns with critical eye as they turkey-walk along the narrow cement streets between the innumerable family vaults. The tombs are built with the all too evident purpose of showing that one’s dead are, or at least were in life, of more importance in the world than those of one’s neighbors. They have four or more stories below ground, with shelves or pigeon-holes for several coffins on each “floor,” and marble steps leading down to them. On the upper or ground floor, usually surrounded by elaborate statues sculptured in white stone, are ostentatious chapels with plate-glass doors, locked with the latest American safety locks. Everywhere reigns a gaudy luxury wholly out of place in a city of the dead. The self-respecting corpse must feel as if he had been set up in a museum instead of being disposed of in a sanitary and inconspicuous manner. Here and there a tomb bears the sign “For Sale,” with the name of the authorized real estate dealer under it. The seller, who in some cases seems to have tossed out the bones of his forgotten ancestors in the convenient old Spanish way, is certain to benefit financially from the transaction, for the Recoleta is _the_ cemetery of Buenos Aires, absolutely limited in space now by the city that has grown up about it, and accommodations in it are as eagerly sought as boxes at the opera or seats on the stock exchange.

“Le cheval est la plus noble conquête que l’homme ait jamais fait,” runs an inscription, from Buffon, over the portals of the far-famed race-track in Palermo, which, from the intellectual heights of the Jockey Club, is no doubt true. It suggests, however, an attempt on the part of the _argentinos_ to deceive themselves into believing that they attend the races in such hordes every Thursday and Sunday because of their love of horses, rather than to indulge their genuinely Spanish infatuation for gambling. This same hint of hypocrisy, of kow-towing to Mrs. Grundy, which is ordinarily little in evidence in the Latin-American character, also smirks from the tickets of the lottery maintained by the Federal Government, which calls itself the “Loteria de _Beneficencia_ Nacional.” How widespread is this Iberian desire to get something for nothing is shown by the fact that the Argentine not only maintains the national lottery, with regular drawings every ten days and frequent special drawings with enormous prizes, but two other official games of chance, run by the Provinces of Buenos Aires and of Tucumán.

The gambling at Palermo is on the _pari mutuel_, or pooled bets system. That is, those who wish to place a wager on a race—and virtually everyone on the grounds seems to have that desire as often as a race is announced—crowd their way to one of the many windows, and purchase as many bet-tickets as inclination or the state of their pocketbooks suggests. These tickets are of two kinds,—_Ganador_ (Winner) and _Placé_. All money wagered on that race is pooled, the Jockey Club, to which the whole establishment belongs, skimming off ten per cent. for itself and distributing the rest among those holding winning tickets. Thus when a favorite wins there are so many players to share the returns that one often gets little more than his money back. There are none of those hundred-to-one chances to make the excitement of large hopes worth the risk of a small loss. Now and again an “outsider” wins at Palermo, but it is a far more common experience to wager two pesos, to see one’s choice come in a neck or a length ahead of the entire field—and to be paid two pesos and ten centavos at the booking windows.

The _Porteños_ seem to get much entertainment out of their race-track, for all the slimness of the average winnings. The sumptuous pavilion, confined to the use, free of charge, of members of the Jockey Club and their guests, is always well patronized; the adjoining concrete stand, called the “Paddock,” has its throng of seven-peso spectators even on days when weather and grounds are not inviting to the sport; the swarms of garden variety men and women who surrender two pesos for the privilege of jostling one another in the other stands and about the betting booths show an even less blasé interest. On fine days many canopied tea-tables are set out on the smooth gravel space before the Jockey Club pavilion, and there may be seen _Porteño_ fashion at its gaudiest. The entire place is honeycombed with passageways for the use of an army of officials, contestants, bet sellers and bet payers, the latter superhuman in their facility in mental arithmetic. From the upper seats one may look off across three complete racetracks, one within the other and enclosing a lake and a small park, to the red-brown Plata, stretching dull and featureless to the horizon. One might moralize and point out the burden imposed on the mass of the population to support the Jockey Club, perhaps the most ornate place of its kind in the world, and surround the few thousand club members with luxury, could one overlook the fact that if the average _argentino_ were denied the privilege of risking his money on the races or in the lottery, he would find other ways to hazard it, if only by betting on the number of rains a year or the number of traffic blocks per hour in the downtown streets.

Of other forms of public entertainment Buenos Aires has its fair share. The theater list for a given day numbers twenty-five performances, ranging from the opera to a circus and a _frontón_ given over to the Basque game of _pelota_—this, too, without counting the ubiquitous “movie.” Serious drama has comparatively little standing, the popular taste running to flippant one-act Spanish _zarzuelas_ or to the maudlin and undress, with the audiences overwhelmingly male. Vaudeville bills are apt to be cosmopolitan, each “artist” speaking his mother tongue, for there is slight native “talent,” and an American negro doing a clog dance that would not win him a single “hand” at home is much applauded, since, coming from abroad, he must be good. A “national company” giving native plays of real literary and histrionic merit was conspicuous by its rarity.

Night life in Buenos Aires is brilliant at least in the material sense. Though there are fewer blazing advertisements in all the town than along Broadway, municipal lighting is more generous than in pre-war Paris. Entertainments rarely begin before nine, and midnight usually finds the streets crowded. By night, perhaps even more than by day, the visitor is struck by the lack of rowdyism. As the city is less noisy than our own metropolis, thanks to the absence of an “L,” among other things, so it is less “tough.” Even the saloons—it seems more fitting to call them by their local name of café—have little objectionable atmosphere; in them one may order “soft” as well as “hard” drinks without arousing an insinuating look from the waiter. The _Porteño_, like the southern European from whom he is mainly descended, is temperate in his use of liquor, and he expects his drinking-places to be as gentlemanly as any other public rendezvous. Fully as numerous as the “cocktailerías,” often presided over by expert mixers exiled from the United States, are the _lecherías_ at which one may sit down at any hour of the day or evening to a glass of the best of milk at a reasonable price.

The Latin-American privilege of ogling all attractive women has not, of course, been eradicated even in Buenos Aires. But a recent ordinance makes it a penal offense to speak to a woman on the street unless first addressed by her, and the few respectable women who go out after dark without escort are rarely subjected to anything worse than staring, and perhaps an ostensibly unconscious little whispered monologue or popular air. The same restriction has not, however, been placed on the fair sex, and cases of blackmail turning on the point of who spoke first have not been unknown in the municipal courts.

“B. A.” is particularly gay during the winter season, from June to September. Then “Society” has returned from Mar del Plata, the Argentine Atlantic City, or from the Córdoba hills; the few wealthy _estancieros_ who have residences on their estates come in from the pampa; gilded loafers, opera singers, adventuresses turn up from the four points of the compass, and the capital becomes doubly pretentious, expensive, and crowded. Several times I came to it from journeys into the “camp,” as the large English-speaking colony, anglicizing the Spanish word _campo_, calls the country outside the capital, and each time I found it more breathlessly in pursuit of pleasure. With the same latitude as Los Angeles, the South American metropolis does not, of course, have what we would call a real winter. Only once within the memory of the present generation has snow fallen in sufficient quantity to cover the ground. A temperature around the freezing point is the usual limit, and even in the coldest days of July or August the sky is apt to be brilliant and the atmosphere radiant. The cold, when it comes, seems extraordinarily penetrating, just as the _pampero_, the suffocating norther of the summer-time, seems hotter than anything the tropics have to offer. His winter season is so short that the average _argentino_ makes little or no preparation for it, with the result that he probably suffers more from cold than those who live in really cold countries. Both law and custom now require steam heat in hotels and the more important public buildings, but the rank and file rarely come into contact with artificial warmth.

A few years ago Buenos Aires caught a virulent case of puritanism from some unknown source and made a concerted attack on notorious immorality. The more vulgar features of night life were driven across the Riachuelo, a filthy little stream that bounds the city and the federal district on the south. There, beyond the jurisdiction of the city police—since the section is subject only to the laws of the Province of Buenos Aires, with its capital far away at La Plata—though still virtually within the city limits, are gathered sailors’ recreation houses and the most squalid vice. In _Porteño_ speech “beyond the Riachuelo” is the equivalent of “outside the bounds of decency,” and in the moral shambles of this region public entertainments reach a degradation which is beyond American imagination.

In the capital itself things are not yet morally immaculate. The _argentino_ looks upon the “social evil” rather in the French than the American manner,—as something unavoidable, not particularly reprehensible, and to be regulated rather than driven under cover. Vice may be more widely spread than in our own large cities, but it is less openly crude and vulgar, with more of the frankness and at the same time of the chic naughtiness of the French. This is perhaps natural, for not only is Paris the Porteño’s beloved model, but probably at least half the women of this class come from France. Many other nationalities are represented, but the rarest of all are native women. Whether Argentine girls are “virtuous by constraint,” as some cynics have it, or the national wealth is so great that few are forced to resort to the last means of winning a livelihood, the fact remains that the predatory female of Buenos Aires is almost certain to be a foreigner. Yet there are few opportunities for women outside the home. Typists, clerks, and the like are almost all men; in the biggest, and almost the only, department store in Buenos Aires 2360 men and 640 girls were employed on the day that official duties caused me to investigate the question. Women, however, are steadily forging ahead as teachers in the numerous and increasingly excellent public schools. Buenos Aires, by the way, shows an illiteracy of barely ten per cent. for all its continuous immigration. It has given insufficient attention to the development of school playgrounds; its boys do not grow up with that love for athletics which brings with it the worship of good health and physical perfection of the body that is so potent an enemy of bad habits. Moreover, their elders treat certain matters with a levity both of speech and example which is not inclined to reform the rising male generation. In the moral attitude of the Argentine capital there is much that could advantageously be corrected, but there are civic beauties that would be the pride of almost any city of our own land. For all the deadly flatness of its site and its lack of landscape, it has a certain charm; like all great cities it is cruel and heartless, with wrath-provoking contrasts; and on the whole it is not particularly lovable.