I spent May twenty-fifth, the Argentine Independence Day, in Mendoza. An official salute woke the town at sunrise, to find itself already fluttering with flags, the blue-and-white Argentine banner predominating, but with many others, the yellow-and-red of Spain in particular—and one lone Stars and Stripes, in front of a sewing-machine agency. The uninformed stranger might have suspected that there is more patriotism to the square yard in the Argentine than in any other land. Had he inquired a bit, however, he would have learned that the law requires all inhabitants—not merely citizens, be it noted—to fly the national flag on May 25 and July 9, as it requires all men to uncover when the national anthem is played, and all school children to learn by rote certain chauvinistic platitudes. Nor should the fact be overlooked that the “Veinticinco de Mayo”—for which Argentine towns, streets, shops, cafés, and even dogs are named—is perilously near the end of the month.
In the morning everyone went to church, from white-haired generals lop-shouldered with the weight of the gleaming hardware across their chests to newly-rich Spaniards who still wore shoes with less ease than they would have cloth alpargatas. Scores of police, dozens of firemen, still wearing their hats or helmets, as is the custom throughout South America, lined the aisles from entrance to altar. When all the élite and high government officials had gathered, the archbishop himself preached a sermon founded on the not wholly unique assertion that politicians seek government places for their own good rather than for that of the governed, ending with the warning that the Argentine was sliding pellmell to perdition because the teaching of the Catholic religion is not permitted in the public schools. The governor of the province lent an attentive ear throughout this harangue, and watched the service with attentive Latin-American politeness; but it was noticeable that he did not show enthusiasm, and that no ceremony was included that required kneeling or crossing oneself on the part of the congregation, for Argentine government officials are often noted for their anticlerical attitude. There was an entirely different atmosphere here than at the Te Deum I had attended on Colombia’s Independence Day two years before in cloistered Bogotá.
The municipal band met us outside the cathedral and led the parade of police and firemen—marching like men long accustomed to drilling—of citizens and ecclesiastics, the archbishop, still in his purple, surrounded by a guard of honor with drawn bayonets. The procession broke up at the entrance to the Parque del Oeste, said to be the largest city park in South America. Miniature trains, astride which human beings look gigantic, carried those who did not care to walk, or hire other transportation, out to this extensive civic improvement, spreading over all the landscape at the base of the Andes to the west of the city. The crowning feature of this enormous new park, with an artificial lake nearly a mile long, concrete grandstands, and broad shaded avenues, is a solid rock rising from the plain on which the city is built, the first outpost of the Andes that bulk into the heavens close behind it. The entire top of this hill, reached by a roadway cut in a complete circuit of it, has been blasted off, and on this great platform has been reared a gigantic creation of granite and bronze called “The Armies of the Andes.” It commemorates the passage of the Andes by San Martín’s troops early in the last century to free Chile from Spanish rule, one of the most heroic expeditions in American history,—a badly equipped, half starved force struggling through snow-blocked passes on what seemed then an almost quixotic mission. Yet the conception and execution of the monument, magnificent in proportions, rarely surpassed in dignity, is worthy of its subject. Behind and above the splendid equestrian statue of San Martín are his officers and the army of liberation, ranging all the way from low relief to detached figures, the whole surmounted by an enormous winged victory, while around the monument hover huge bronze condors. All this, be it noted, was planned and carried out by a provincial town of fifty thousand inhabitants. Of the view to be had from it, on one side the plains of the Argentine, flat as a motionless sea, on the other this same plain, bursting suddenly into mountains, which climb in more and more jagged formation to the snow-clad summits of the Andes almost sheer overhead, mere words are but weak symbols to describe.
Meanwhile the excellent municipal band had been playing all the afternoon in a kiosk nearer the park entrance. Soon after noonday we low-caste promenaders on foot had begun to gather about it; then a few poor public vehicles took to ambling around it; better and better carriages appeared, with coachmen in high hats and livery; finally private automobiles, large and gleamingly new, joined the now crowded cortège. Pedestrians had become too many for free movement; the carriages and automobiles circled in unbroken procession farther and farther out on the horseshoe-shaped drive, until each heard only occasional snatches of the music as they passed near it. A few silk-clad ladies and their perfumed escorts deigned to descend and stroll a bit. Policemen on magnificent horses, white plumes waving from their helmets, directed the traffic with princely gestures. By dusk all Mendoza was there, every class of society from the proud hidalgo descendent of the conquistadores to the millionaire Spaniard who came out forty years ago with his worldly possessions in a cardboard suitcase, and who now took care to avoid the old Spanish match-seller who was his boon companion on that memorable voyage. Vendors, hawkers and fakers, announcing their wares as loudly as they dared without arousing the wrath of the haughty army officer, master of ceremonies, who would presently vent his spleen upon those who failed to snatch off their hats at the first note of the national anthem, mingled with honest European workmen in boínas and alpargatas and sun-faded shirts, enjoying a rare day of recreation in the life-time of toil which they naïvely consider their natural lot. Though wine flows as freely in Mendoza as in Italy, not a suggestion of drunkenness did I see during the day.
As evening advanced, the crowd became more and more silk-hatted in looks and temperament, a better bred, less provincial, more cosmopolitan, yet also more blasé throng than similar gatherings over the Andes. The bony, ungraceful women numerous in northern countries were rare, the plump type not only of Mendoza but of all the Argentine most in evidence being physically attractive in spite of overdress and enameled faces. Soon after full darkness had fallen some of the most regal equipages fell out of the procession by failing to turn the outside corner of the drive, and wended their way homeward. The better class of hired vehicles gradually followed their example; the public hacks, whose occupants were having perhaps their one spree of the year, at last got tardy, regretful orders to turn townward, until the place was left again to the foot-going classes, many of the hawkers, fakers and vendors still wandering among them, emitting rather helpless yelps in a last effort to be rid of what remained of their wares. There came a hurried last number by the band, cut unseemly short as the players dropped out and fell to stuffing their instruments into their covers, and behind the hurrying musicians the last stragglers took up the march to town. Not a firecracker had exploded all day; no fireworks enlivened the evening, though the grounds of the chief plaza and several smaller parks were gaudy with colored electric lights set out in the form of flower-plots, and similar lights outlined the municipal theater into which all those who had attended services in the morning, with the exception of the ecclesiastics, crowded to hear “Rigoletto” sung by fresh young Italian voices with more power than polish.
The “Buenos Aires al Pacífico” has several lines in and about Mendoza province, with frequent trains out through the vineyard districts. One train travels an S-shaped route and comes back to the station from which it starts without covering any of the ground twice, then makes the same trip in the opposite direction. When I rose at dawn, the Andes stood out against the sky as if they had been cut out of cardboard; by the time I had reached the station long banks of steel-gray clouds were rising like a steam curtain under the rays of the red sun, until the range was all but hidden from view. My journey through the vineyards uncovered great peaks capped with snow and glaciers that seemed to touch the sky, and everywhere were grapevines, stretching away in endless rows, between some of which oxen were plowing and men hoeing, vineyards limited only by the horizon or the Cordilleras in the background. As there is little natural campo on which to fatten herds in Mendoza province and insufficient rainfall to make wheatfields productive, grapes were introduced here half a century ago by Spaniards who brought them over from Chile. The torrents pouring down from mighty Aconcagua were caught and put to work, and wherever there is irrigation grapes grow abundantly in what was a bushy Arizona when the first settlers came, until to-day the province does indeed resemble California. For a long time Mendoza furnished the Argentine all its wine. Then Europe began sending it over at prices that competed, the vineyards spread into neighboring provinces along the base of the Andes, and Mendoza lost its monopoly. When the railroad came, it brought French, Spanish, and Italian peasants who knew grapes as they knew their own families, and the Argentine became the greatest wine-producing country in all the world outside western Europe. Now there is a little corn, alfalfa, and grain, though all these are insignificant compared to the principal product. Spaniards I met along the way asserted that corn or wheat paid better now than grapes, so low in price as to be scarcely worth picking, and that olives would do best of all, if only the growers would bring in experienced workmen and give the trees proper care.
I left Mendoza on a crisp May morning, and the autumn leaves I had not seen for years were falling so abundantly that a line from “Cyrano de Bergerac” kept running through my head, “Regardez les feuilles, comme elles tombent.” Here they lay drifted under the rows of slender yellowed poplars which stretched away through the vineyards, endless brown vineyards everywhere covered with the dead leaves of autumn standing in straight rows as erect as the files of an army and backed far off by the dawn-blue Andes, their white heads gradually peering forth far above as the day grew. Between the rows glided Oriental looking people, lightly touching them on either side, bent on unknown errands, for the fruit was nowhere being gathered. Unpicked grapes, shriveled to the appearance of raisins, covered even the roofs and bowers and patios of the flat adobe houses. Here and there a weeping willow or an alfalfal showing the advantages of irrigation gave a contrasting splotch of deep green to the velvety-brown immensity. Before his majestic entrance the god of the Incas gilded to flaming gold a fantastic white cloud high up above his eastern portal, then lighted up the files of yellowing poplars, then brought out the golden-brown of the vast vineyards, gave a delicate pink shade to the range of snow-clads away to the west, and at last burst forth from the realms of night in a fiery glory that quickly flooded all the landscape.
I am not sure that I have ever seen nature so nearly outdo herself as in this dawn and sunrise across the vineyards of Mendoza, while we crept upward from the Argentine toward the Cordilleras. No other hour of the day, certainly, could have equaled this, and it made up amply for the discomfort of being routed out of our comfortable cabins on the “International” before daybreak, to wash in icy water and stumble about in the starlight until we were thoroughly chilled, before we had been permitted to board the little narrow-gauge transandino train, so tiny in contrast to the roomy express that had carried us across the pampas that one seemed crowded into unseemly intimacy with one’s fellow-travelers. Across the aisle sat a priest with an open church-book, mumbling his devotions and crossing himself at frequent intervals, but never once raising his head to glance out the window. No doubt when he gets to Heaven he will falsely report that the earth has no landscapes to vie with those of the celestial realms. Over me swept a desire to get off and walk, to stride up over the steep trails and feel the exhilarating mountain air cut deep down into my lungs, sweeping through every limb like a narcotic, and to take in all the magnificent scene bit by bit, instead of being snatched along, however slowly, without respect either for nature or my own inclinations.
The day turned out brilliant and cloudless; in full sunshine the scene lost some of its delicate beauty of coloring, though still retaining its grandiose majesty. The vast pampa sank gradually below us as we turned away toward the mountains, the irrigated green patches grew almost imperceptible. Slowly the plain itself was succeeded by fields of loose rocks on which vegetated a few gaunt, deformed trees, spiny bushes, gnarled and crabbed clumps of brush scattered in unneighborly isolation. The sun flooded the barren, fantastic, million-ridged and valleyed foothills of many colors, rolling up to the base of abrupt mountains that climbed, rugged and unkempt and independent of all law and order, like some stupendous stairway to heaven, to the clouds in which their tops disappeared. Cliffs washed into every imaginable shape by centuries of hail, snow, and mountain winds—for there is no rain in this region—cast dense black shadows, which in the narrow valleys and tiny scoops and hollows contrasted with the thousand sun-flaming salient knobs and points and spires and hillocks—a lifeless stony barrenness only enhanced by the scattered tufts of a hardy yellow-brown bush barely a foot high.
Hour after hour we wound back and forth across the river Mendoza, fed by the glaciers above, taking advantage of its two flat banks to rise ever higher, while the river itself grew from a phlegmatic stream of the plain to a nervous mountain brook racing excitedly past through deep, narrow, rock gorges. The rare stations were “beautified” with masses of colored flowers that would have been pretty enough in their place, but which here looked tawdry and seemed to mock man’s feeble efforts to vie with nature in her most splendid moods. Above Cachueta, noted for its hot baths exploited by the city of Mendoza, in so dismal a landscape that visitors come only from dire necessity, all vegetation had disappeared and all the visible world had grown dry and rocky and barren as only the Andes can be in their most repellant regions. Not even the cactus remained to give a reminder of life; not even a condor broke the deadness of the peaks which seemed cut out with a knife from the hard heavens. After several bridges and tunnels there came an agreeable surprise,—the valley of Uspallata, with a little pasture for cattle. But this oasis did not last long, and soon the dull, reddish-brown cliffs shut us in again. Broken and irregular peaks eroded into thousands of valleys of all shapes and sizes gave lurking-places in which shadows still hid from the searching sun, like smugglers on a frontier. Though a certain grandiose beauty grew out of these crude, planless forms of nature, they ended by giving the beholder a disquieting sadness. One seemed imprisoned for life within these enormous walls; the utter absence of life, the uniformity of the dry desolation, especially the oppressive, monotonous solitude, enhanced by a dead silence broken only by the panting of the sturdy little locomotive crawling upward on its narrow cogwheel track and the creaking of the inadequate little cars behind it, seemed to hypnotize the travelers and plunge them into a sort of stupor from which nothing short of imminent disaster would arouse them.