The fires themselves would be serious enough, were there not the bomberos to make them doubly so. There are no professional fire departments in Chile. The glorious honor of fighting the flames is appropriated by the élite, much as certain regiments and squadrons are open only to a certain caste in our largest cities. The youthful males of Santiago’s “best families” become bomberos because it is considered one of their aristocratic privileges to parade before their enamored ladies in fancy uniforms and glistening brass helmets. As often as a fire bell rings, all upper-class functions are temporarily suspended and all the young bloods run—to the fire? Certainly not! They hasten home to don their splendid bombero uniforms, without which, naturally, it would be highly improper to attack the flames. The newspapers always include in their report of a fire the assertion that “the bomberos arrived with their customary promptitude,” which has the advantage of being both true and courteous.
There being no National Guard in Chile, gilded youth has no other convenient way of showing off in uniform than to join the bomberos. The regular army would be too serious an undertaking for them, even if it were not below their dignity. Moreover, this is founded on conscription, with a year’s service for those who “draw unlucky,” and as the influence of caste is powerful in manipulating the drawings, the ranks are filled almost entirely with rotos or the poorer classes. The Chilean army is German in tone and uniform, even to the big gray Prussian capes of the officers, many of whom, as well as the commander-in-chief, were of that nationality up to the outbreak of the World War. The army is much in evidence and its splendor is in great contrast to the shoddy, ragged dress of the bulk of the civilian population. Its immediate neighbors credit Chile with a strong Prussian temperament, and it, in turn, sends officers to train the troops of its more distant neighbors. Those who should know maintain that it is only the army that saves the oligarchy in power from the revolutions that are frequently on the point of breaking out, but of which the outside world seldom hears. Chile has no conscription for her navy, and for the first time outside my own land I found placards picturing the ideal life recruiting officers would have us believe is led on warships. As the Chilean on his narrow strip of beach is almost English in his feeling for the sea, there seems to be no great difficulty in manning the best, or at least the second best, navy in South America.
Chileans themselves frequently refer to the prevalence of thieving among their national characteristics, and explain it by saying that the Araucanian Indians, who make up the basis of the population, had communal ownership and still have little conception of the line between mine and thine. Half the nation is by its own official admission of illegitimate birth. In various parts of Santiago there are doors fitted with a turno, known among the English-speaking residents as a “bastard barrel,” softly upholstered, into which a baby may be dropped, the turno given a half turn and a bell beside it rung, when nuns or their agents on the inside take charge of the mite without asking questions. Thousands of “orphans,” whose parents are still running about town, are housed by charity, and long troops of them may be seen any fine day taking an airing in the streets. This condition is by no means entirely the fault of the roto class. None but the civil marriage is now legal in Chile, whether by priest, minister, missionary, or rabbi; but the poor man must take a day or more off and disentangle much red tape to get married, only to be informed by his priest that in the eyes of the church he is not married at all, until he produces a handful of pesos to have the union religiously sanctioned. As throughout Latin-America, he is apt to conclude that the ceremony is a mere waste of time and money.
Small as is the foreign population of Chile, the church is largely in the hands of foreigners, so that “a Chilean cannot be born or married or die without the permission of a Spanish, Italian, or French priest.” German monks and nuns are also numerous, yet Chileans are not admitted to most of the monasteries and convents. The foreign priest not only makes the native pay high for his confessions and other formalities, but frequently refuses him a pass through purgatory unless he leaves the church a large legacy to cover his unquestionably numerous sins. Though this property is ostensibly used to aid Chile with schools and the like, even devout Chileans assert that their foreign priests send most of the proceeds to the “Capital of the Christian World.” Complaints against these conditions are legion, but the Chilean, like most Latin-Americans, is more noted for criticism than for effective action.
Though Santiago rises late, and usually takes a siesta from twelve until two, it retires early. Being the social and fashionable, as well as the political, center of the republic, it has, of course, its elaborate “functions,” and it is still near enough to the colonial days to retain the weekly plaza promenade. On gala occasions this is worth seeing. Santiago is one of the countless cities which claim to have the most beautiful women in the world, and some of the claimants to this distinction are comely even under their deluges of rice powder. Chilean women of the better class, with their pale, oval faces and their velvety black eyes, have a vague sort of melancholy in their manner, as if they were thinking of the great world on the other side of the tropics, or at least over the wall of the Andes. But evening entertainments are scarce and poor in Santiago, and by ten at night the streets are commonly deserted, except by the stolid pacos wrapped in their heavy black uniforms, and all doors are closed save those of a few cafés that drag on until midnight. Half a dozen cinemas unroll their nightly rubbish, usually fantastic and volcanic dramas from Italian film houses, woven around the eternal triangle; now and then a zarzuela company succeeds in making a passable season of it. The favorite zarzuelas are such gems as “La Señora no Quiere Comer Sola” (Madam does not wish to eat alone), or “No Hagas Llorar á Mamá” (Do not make Mama weep), the surest way to avoid which would seem to be to keep her away from the histrionic efforts of the Chilean capital. Yet the élite of Santiago attend these mishaps in considerable force and fancy garb, including overcoats or wraps in the unheated buildings, all laboring under the delusion that they are being entertained. There is opera for a month or two in the winter; on rare occasions a really good dramatic company, rather Italian than Spanish, makes a brief stay—and generally loses money, since, as a Chilean novelist puts it, “the artistic taste of our public is better suited to the slap-stick of short plays or the immaturity of some circus of wild animals.” But the audiences which these entertainments turn out toward midnight quickly fade away and leave the streets to solitude.
Among the poorer classes the zamacueca, the native dance of Chile, popularly called a “’cueca,” is a principal diversion. A man and woman, each waving a large gay handkerchief, move back and forth, as if alternately repelling and inciting each other, to the tune of a harp and a guitar and the clapping of many hands, while a big pitcher of chicha de manzana or de uva, which roughly correspond to our cider and grape-juice respectively, passes from mouth to mouth. The better-dressed class has certain simple pastimes in which both sexes join, though not often and never without an awe-inspiring display of chaperons on the side lines. There is, for instance, the “whistling game.” A man in competition with several of his spatted fellows runs four hundred meters, stops in front of a lady and whistles a tune, the name of which she hands him on a slip of paper, the first one to finish the tune without error and to return to the starting-point, being adjudged the winner. On the whole, the Spanish spoken by this class of Chileans is better than that heard in the Argentine, though there are many “chilenismos,” expressions peculiar to the country. Chile usually gives the “ll” its full sound, rather than reducing it to a poor “j,” but the “s” is largely suppressed. In spelling the country has certain rules of its own, the most noticeable being the use of “j” in many places where Spaniards use “g,” a legacy left by the Venezuelan, Andrés Bello, first president of the University of Chile.
I had looked forward with some interest to that far-famed feature of Santiago, her female street-car conductors. Familiar as they have since become, Chilean women led the world in this particular, the custom dating back to the war with Peru, a long generation ago. The street-cars of Chile are of two stories. Most of them are operated by a woman and a boy, about half the force being female and few of the rest grown to man’s estate. The boy is the conductor, which in Spanish means the motorman, and the woman cobrador, or collector. Far from inspiring the protection of wealthy rakes or causing enamored youths to squander their income riding back and forth in the car presided over by some unrelenting Dulcinea, however, most of the latter excite such repugnance that the more squeamish prefer to suffer a slight financial loss to accepting change from their unsoaped hands. On the back platform of the dingy electric double-deckers usually stands as un-entrancing a member of the fair sex as could be found by long search, her dismal appearance enhanced by the mournful, raven-black costume she wears. She is sure to be part Indian, her coarse hair tied in an ugly knob at the back of her head, high on top of which sits a hat of polished black, with a long pin stuck through it to add to the perils of life. In short, Chile’s female conductors are not giddy young girls, but stolid women of the working-class, very intent on their duties and only rarely whiling away an odd moment in harmless gossip with the youthful motorman of the car behind. Some romancer has written that the beautiful members of the clan are quickly recruited to more romantic service. Perhaps they are, for they certainly are not on the cars.
Street-car fares are absurdly cheap in Chile, so cheap, in fact, that the service cannot but be poor and dirty. Inside the cars riders pay ten centavos; up on the impériale they pay five, which at the commonly prevailing rate of exchange is less than two and one cents respectively. Not the least amusing thing about Santiago is the street-car caste, or the line of demarcation between the upstairs and downstairs riders. The white-collar, non-laboring class will stand packed like cordwood in the closed car rather than go up on the impériale, which is not only preferable in every way but cheaper. It is this latter detail that makes the upper story forbidden ground for the gente decente. As a Chilean-born business man of English parents, educated in London and widely traveled, put it in criticizing my “bad habit” of riding on top:
“I would much rather ride up there, too; it is airy, cleaner than inside, you can see the sights, and the weather is generally fine in Santiago. But if I did, my friends would look up from the sidewalk, nudge one another, and say, ‘Hullo, by Jove! There’s Johnny Edwards up there with the rotos. What’s the matter; can’t he afford a penny to ride inside? I’d better collect that little debt he owes me before he goes bankrupt,’—and within a day or two my creditors would be down upon me in droves.”
The Chilean peso is a mere rag of paper, originally engraved in New York and more nearly resembling our own bills than those of most South American countries. Theoretically worth a French franc, it is as doubtful of value as legibility, being unredeemable either in gold or silver and waking up each morning to find itself different from the day before. On the face of the few bills that still have visible words runs the statement, “The government of Chile recognizes this as a peso fuerte,” which is by no means the same thing as promising to pay a “strong peso” to the holder upon demand. The congress of Chile has decreed that the peso shall be worth ten English pence; but there is nothing quite so incorrigible in disobeying the laws of a country as its national currency, particularly one in which it is the custom, when in need of money, to go to a printing office instead of to a bank. No wonder there is no national lottery in Chile; playing the exchange is gambling enough to suit anyone.