Needless, almost, to say, Florida deals exclusively in imported goods and a very great majority of its shopkeepers are foreigners; among whom the purveyors of “Modes,” “Robes” and “Lingerie” are, naturally, mostly French.
No vehicular traffic whatever is now allowed in Calle Florida between certain hours of the afternoon; in order not to incommode the throngs of fashionable shoppers with whom it is usually crowded. It is the only street in which Argentine ladies of high degree are to be seen on foot. In bygone and less crowded times it was the scene of the afternoon Corso; when play was made with fans and gallants ogled from the edges of the pavement.
There is at present still a lack of Hotel accommodation suitable for Europeans of moderate means. There are great numbers of Hotels in Buenos Aires, but the good ones are very expensive while the cheaper ones are not very good. That is to say, one must have got accustomed to the South American haphazard fashion of service and general arrangements before being able to regard the latter as in any way comfortable. Montevideo is still worse off; having few Hotels which can be regarded as good (though there are one or two), while prices, as in everything else, run higher than in Buenos Aires.
A word must be said in defence of the latter City against a prevailing impression, created, goodness knows how, of its intense immorality. This charge simply is not true. Buenos Aires is no more immoral than and certainly not as vicious as are most European Capitals.
True, it is not in South American human nature to be puritanical but the lower classes in Argentina and Uruguay are but non-moral, to use a somewhat fashionable term, with the non-morality of grown-up children, which they are. They have not the faintest idea of the vice which abounds in the great cities of the Northern Hemisphere. Montevideo is more staid than cosmopolitan Buenos Aires; even at Carnival time the former City seems to take its merrymaking seriously. Any real vice which can be found in either Capital is an imported article.
If among the lower classes of both countries the whole advantages of the marriage ceremony seem not to be duly appreciated, this is due, in the vast majority of cases, to motives of economy. A religious marriage service is a costly item in the equipment of a young couple, and a purely civil ceremony is even less favourably looked on by neighbours than a postponement of any ceremony at all. Later, such couples usually do marry with due pomp and circumstance, including the invitation of all and sundry to the humble wedding feast. After that, all is in order in the case of the death of the husband and father; for marriage legitimatizes previously born children. Indeed, the writer was once present at a fiesta in a rural district, not forty minutes’ run by train from the City of Buenos Aires, organized to honour the occasion of the visit of a Priest who in a very short space of time married the parents and christened a whole batch of their children.
An old custom still chiefly prevailing among the humbler classes, both urban and rural, is one which may be called the “waking” of the dead. The news of a bereavement spreads quickly among neighbours; who do not wait to be invited but arrive, in groups organized extemporaneously by themselves, at the house of mourning. There, one of such groups succeeds another, and so on throughout the night after a death; sitting silently and only moving to partake of the necessary refreshment provided in view of their sure coming.
As in most other countries where modernity has not yet suppressed all local colour with its neutral tints, the lower classes in both Argentina and Uruguay are much the most interesting. The free-and-easy Bohemian sort of life in a conventillo[16] is curious. In each of its many rooms lives a family, while the court is common to all for cooking (a charcoal brazier usually stands at the side of each door), washing of clothes and, last but not least, the discussion of mate and gossip. All sorts of people dwell in a single conventillo, artisans, hawkers, washerwomen, milliners, factory hands, poor employees, etc. etc., and all group themselves in the common courtyard of an evening when work is done, frequently to the music of a guitar.
The upper classes, on the other hand, strive chiefly to reflect the latest moods of European fashion in general and of that of Paris in particular—even, since the War, to the extent of making retrenchment in living expenses the fashion. A fashion which, if it last, will not be the least of the good which has come to Argentina from the European upheaval which has forced the River Plate countries to learn to rely on their own resources and individual efforts. Gone, already, are the battalions of motor-cars of very latest pattern with which every wealthy Argentine family has hitherto thought it necessary to its dignity to be provided—one each for father, mother and each son and daughter—economy is now “De Moda” and ostentation therefore become old-fashioned and bad taste. An immense change to have taken place, as it did, in the course of only a few months.
Montevideo had no need of such a volte face of habit. Uruguayans never developed the love of display so characteristic of Argentine aristocracy.