Soon afterwards his adventures began. He was molested in indirect ways, and finally invited to pay a visit to the Central Police Station. There he was given cigarettes and coffee by the Comisario, who floridly apologized and expressed his deep regret and shame for the treatment an honourable stranger had received. It was, however, but a series of regrettable accidents arising from unfortunate error of certain bad characters who were now in durance vile in consequence.
Here he rang a bell and ordered the answering policeman to bring in the culprits. They were duly brought in and recognized.
“Now,” said the Comisario, “you will have no more trouble. Besides,” he added, “one of our plain-clothes men will accompany you in future wherever you go—for your better protection.”
The plain-clothes man certainly obeyed orders; so persistently that the whole why and wherefore at last dawned on my confused brain.
The intention was to worry me so much in a polite quasi-legitimate fashion that I could have no ostensible cause of complaint; but, at the same time, so that I should incontinently quit the ancient City of Córdoba in disgust. The reason for all this was the fact that, having nothing better to do on the evening of my arrival, I had wandered into the basement of my Hotel and there found a person who looked like, and indeed was, a leading local politician running a roulette to catch the nickels of a crowd of working men. At that time the roulette was the scarcely concealed vice of the town, rife in the back room of every bar.
It is an illegal game in Argentina, as elsewhere except Monte Carlo, and shortly after my visit it was the cause of a great outcry and scandal in which several Provincial High Officials were involved.
I was a journalist and, therefore, dangerous. So a course of delicate hints to me to get out had been planned and executed.
Following the gambling scandal, a leading Opposition politician was shot dead in his carriage on the high road a short way outside the city. When I read this news I was glad that I had not persisted in seeming to pry into cupboards containing Córdoba’s official skeletons, and for similar reasons I am still somewhat shy of Córdobese gentlemen with downcast eyes and soft, measured tread.
All that, however, belongs to Old Córdoba. The parts of the city called New Córdoba and Alta Córdoba are replete with palatial residences as fine and as new as residential palaces need be.
The City of Córdoba is not only the traditional seat of learning par excellence of the Republic, it is also, as a consequence of old-time associations no doubt, its chief centre of clerical influence.