A monument in the cemetery of Montevideo
A gentleman of Montevideo depicts in stone his grief at the loss of his life’s companion
Along with its seascape, this situation gives the city a very exhilarating air, especially in the winter season. Then it is often penetratingly cold, and frequently so windy that not only the most securely fastened hat but the hair beneath it threatens to abandon the wearer. On the day of my landing a windstorm caused several deaths and much property damage. Among other things it took the sheet-iron roof off a building in which four fishermen had taken refuge and as these ran away the roof followed and fell upon them. In the third story of the frame hotel that housed me I often woke from a dream of being rocked in a ship at sea, and Punta Brava in a far corner of Montevideo’s suburbs was rightly named indeed on windy days. Fierce thunderstorms also marked my stay in the capital, some of them accompanied by the mightiest of flashes and crashes, during which water fell in such torrents that one could scarcely see across a narrow street—tropical storms they might have been called, had it not kept right on raining long after it had done raging.
Uruguay claims 1,400,000 inhabitants, of whom all but the million are said to live in the capital, though the lack of a definite census makes guessing a popular pastime. But the city is much larger in extent than this number would imply. One can ride for hours on the lines of its two excellent tramway companies without once leaving town. Even in the older sections Montevideo is substantially and handsomely built, with many good modern monuments. Only a few old landmarks are left, such as the purely Spanish cathedral on the Plaza de la Constitución, for Uruguay seems to consider her first demand for independence in 1808 the beginning of her history and makes no effort to preserve the memories of her colonial or pre-colombian days. For all that, the capital has retained a considerable atmosphere of old Spain, a distinctly seventeenth-century echo, along with her South American style of up-to-datedness. The best houses along the fine avenues are generally in colonial style, an almost Moorish one-story building, with lofty ceilings and space-devouring patios. Especially in the roomy suburbs do the dwellings stop abruptly at one story, so abruptly sometimes as to suggest that ruin, or at least a laborer’s strike, has suddenly befallen the owner. The real reason is probably because it would be hard to marry off one’s daughters if their “dragons” had to begin their wooing by shouting up to the second or third floor windows.
Iron-work grilles are universal, and many house-doors have brass-lined peepholes through which the resident can see whether the man knocking is worth admitting. Gardens with subtropical plants are numerous and promenades under palm-trees by no means unusual. Especially along the edge of the sea there are over-ornate quintas, alternating with washerwoman shanties; but there is little oppressive poverty in Montevideo, and at the same time little of the conspicuous plutocracy so familiar across the river, a lack of contrast which adds, perhaps, to the monotony of many a street vista. Poor ranchos are by no means rare in the farther outskirts, but these are open-air and almost clean slums compared with the congested sections of our own large cities. Out beyond the older town are park improvements on an extensive scale. The Prado, with its great Rose Gardens, said to include hundreds of varieties, though but few were in bloom among the dead leaves of June, is worth coming far to see. Here real hills break the monotony of the landward vista and make artificial, over-polished Palermo with its deadly flatness seem disagreeable by contrast. The tale goes that a group of wealthy Porteños once set on foot a movement to buy one of Uruguay’s hills, carry it across the river, and set it up in one of their own plazas. No doubt they could have reimbursed themselves by charging admission and rights of ascension, but like many ambitious Latin-American plans this one died prematurely.
In general Uruguayans are well-dressed, and comfortably well-to-do, if one may judge from appearances; compared with roto Chile the capital is immaculate. “Beachcombers” are rare in this only important port of the country and beggars are seldom seen, though there is a plague of petty vendors. It had been like landing on a hostile shore to make our way through the amazingly impudent mob of hoarse-voiced cabmen, newsboys, hotel touts, lottery-ticket vendors, vagrants, pickpockets, useless policemen, and idle citizens into the tranquil waters of a Sunday morning in the Uruguayan capital; but this common waterfront experience did not last long. There is something extremely pleasant about most of the modest, unpretentious Fluvenses, as the people of Montevideo call themselves, a term we might translate as “rivereens.” They have, as a rule, a natural politeness, a frank and open simplicity all but unknown across the river, a leisurely, contemplative philosophy that will not be broken down even by the material prosperity of a country that is making perhaps the most intelligent use of its situation and resources of all the republics of Latin-America. It is said that the Uruguayan came mainly from the Basque provinces and the Canary Islands, while the argentino is chiefly of southern Spanish origin; that the former brought with him and still retains a sturdier, less facile, but more dependable, more thoroughgoing character. Those of wide commercial experience in the continent say that the Uruguayan is the most honest man south of Panama; every foreign resident I questioned rated Uruguay as the most lovable country in South America—and as a rule foreign residents do not see the best side first. Personally, I found the Uruguayan more sincere, less selfish, somewhat more solid and at the same time more of an impulsive idealist than his materialistic neighbors across the Plata. His country is far enough south to escape the indolence of the tropics, far enough north to make life itself seem of equal importance with making a living. With every natural advantage of the Argentine, except the doubtful one of size, and a more frugal and industrious population not greatly modified by recent immigration, Uruguay is still peopled by a kind of colonial Spaniard, somewhat improved by the breezy, generous quality of his New World domain.
To those who approach it from the south, where they are almost unknown, negroes are noticeable in Montevideo and become more so as one proceeds northward through the country. No doubt they drift down from Brazil and, finding the wide Plata an obstacle, seldom reach its southern shores. Yet they are so few, and slavery is so slightly connected with them in the Uruguayan mind, that there is scarcely a “color-line.” The daughter of a former Uruguayan minister to Washington told me she had always informed inquiring Americans that there were no negroes in Uruguay, and had only discovered her error upon her return with a sharpened color sense. In Uruguay people are often called by nicknames of color, ample proof that there is no sensitiveness about the hue of the skin. These popular terms, usually preceded by the affectionate “Ché” of southeastern South America, run all the gamut of tints,—“Hola, Ché morocha.” “Diga, Ché trigueña!” “Cómo va, Ché negrito?” It is a common experience of visiting Anglo-Saxons to hear themselves addressed by familiar persons as “Ché rubio,” literally “red-head,” as a complimentary distinction from the universally black-haired natives. The latter, particularly the women, are almost always of plump form and comely face, whatever their color, with few of the cadaverous types so numerous in the north temperate zone. Uruguayan women, by the way, are perhaps a trifle more Moorish in their family life than those of Buenos Aires, but they are not wholly unaware of the “advanced” atmosphere of their environment.
Buenos Aires has long had the reputation of being the most expensive city on earth, probably because it is large enough to be famous, for certainly its neighbor Montevideo is still less of a poor man’s paradise. For one thing, the difference in basic coins favors the Uruguayan profiteer. Many things which cost an Argentine peso in Buenos Aires cost an Uruguayan peso, or two and a half times as much, in Montevideo. It is highly to the credit of Uruguay, and a constant source of pride to her citizens, that her dollar is the only one in the world normally worth more than our own; but it is painful for the visitor to be forced to purchase at so high a price pesos that will seldom buy what a quarter should. In hotel charges, public conveyances, laundries, lottery-tickets, and other necessities of life the Uruguayan dollar seems to go little farther than that of the Argentine, and certainly it has nothing like the purchasing power of our own. Not only are there substantial coins in circulation, instead of more or less ragged scraps of paper redeemable only in the imagination, or coins so debased that only a careless speaker would refer to them as silver, but any gold coin is legal tender in Uruguay. Throw down an English sovereign in the smallest shop in the most isolated corner of the republic and it is instantly accepted at a fixed value. An American $10 gold piece passed without argument as $9.66 Uruguayan, though our dollar bill was rated at only ninety centésimos before the war. I chanced to be in a pulpería far out in the interior of Uruguay when the shopkeeper asked the large estate owner of the vicinity to take a hundred pesos to the capital for him. By and by the pulpero returned from a back room with a small handful of gold and a bit of paper on which he had figured out the sum he wished to send. He handed the estanciero several English sovereigns, some German 20-mark pieces, a Brazilian gold coin, an American half-eagle, two French napoleons, and the rest of the sum in Uruguayan paper, silver, and nickel. There was no argument whatever as to the “exchange” on the foreign coins; each had its fixed value anywhere in Uruguay. It was something like what a universal coinage will be when the world grows honest and intelligent enough to establish one—though of course our bankers would not allow any such system to become universal, even did the perversity of human nature make it possible. This ready exchange, and the possibility of turning Uruguayan paper into gold upon demand, are among the reasons which make the Uruguayan dollar normally the most valuable in the world.
Down on one of its beaches the city of Montevideo runs a sumptuous hotel and an official Monte Carlo. Here it brings ambassadors and “distinguished visitors” for afternoon tea or formal banquets, gives balls, keeps an immense staff of liveried menials at public expense the year round, and during the season takes money away from the wealthy “sports” from across the river with an efficiency not exceeded anywhere along the Riviera. More than one passing observer has found this an excellent means of taxing the rich for the benefit of the poor, since the profits of the Casino go into the municipal treasury. As much can scarcely be said for the lottery run by the federal government, with its incessant appeal to the gambling instincts of all classes of the population. The tickets assert that “the lottery is run for the Hospital de Caridad and its profits are destined for exclusively beneficent ends,” but the statement rings as hollow as many similar attempts on the part of Latin-America to coax itself to believe that there is something good in an essentially vicious institution.