The argentino is in no such breathless haste as the American to know the result of his elections. The newspapers of the following morning carried many columns of comment on the aspect of the capital and the principal towns of the provinces under the new law, but not a hint of the future make-up of the legislative body. Weeks later the retiring congress met in their new palace, and laboriously fell to counting the ballots from all the republic, announcing the results piecemeal from day to day, and causing the votes to be publicly burned in a corner of the still unfinished grounds when the count had been verified.
It goes without saying, since military service is one of the duties of citizenship, that Argentine women do not vote. In fact, there is almost no evidence of a desire on their part to do so. A very small group of sufragistas did make a demonstration in the capital on election day, sending through the streets an automobile decorated with banners, flowers, and femininity. But as the four young ladies in the tonneau were both comely and exquisitely dressed, the apathetic by-standers took the attitude of considering them rather as exhibits in national beauty and charm than for what they purported to be—all, that is, except the police, who ungallantly took the group into custody for violating the new law against electioneering on the day of balloting.
Perhaps the greatest personal surprise which befell me during the election was to be asked by a policeman at one of the polls before which I illegally loitered for a moment whether I desired to vote. One is so palpably, so noticeably a “gringo” in other Latin-American countries that it had never occurred to me that I might be taken for a citizen in the Argentine. In nearly all the rest of South America the foreign resident remains an estranjero all his days; even his native-born children are apt to be called “hijo de inglés, de italiano, de alemán”; in the Argentine he is soon accepted as one of the cosmopolitan race of the Silvery Republic. The Argentine, and perhaps Uruguay, seems to be the only country south of our Rio Grande capable of giving the immigrant an entirely new deal in the game of life and of completely absorbing him into the body politic, at least by the second generation. The sons of Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Italians who took up their residence below the Plata are no more English, French, and Italian than they would be if their fathers had come to the United States. If any reference to their origin comes up in conversation, it is as something casual, unimportant, like the color of their hair and eyes. During my stay in the southern republic the son of an American dentist who had established himself in Buenos Aires a generation ago lost his life in a foolhardy airplane flight undertaken for the delectation of a group of admiring young ladies, on the eve of an official attempt to fly over the Andes. The temperament which caused him to accept such a challenge under the circumstances was as typically Latin-American as were the flowers, poems, and street names which were heaped upon “our national hero” by his bereaved Argentine fellow-countrymen. In Peru or Colombia his exploit might have been noted, but he would still have been an americano.
The people of the Argentine, and particularly of Buenos Aires, have much the same feeling toward the madre patria as the average American has toward England—forgiving, though perhaps still a bit resentful of the past, aware of the common heritage, on the whole a trifle disdainful. The popular term for a Spaniard in Buenos Aires is “Gallego” (or, in the slurring Argentine pronunciation, “Gajego”), and the Galician has stood for centuries as all that is stupid, servile, and clumsy, the unfailing butt of Spanish drama. The Porteño never says he speaks Spanish, though his tongue is as nearly that of Spain as ours is that of England; even in his school books he calls it the idioma nacional.
But the argentino is still largely Spanish, whether he admits it or not; he is distinctly of the Latin race, for all the influx of other blood. The types one sees in his streets are those same temperamental Latin-Americans to be found from Mexico to Paraguay, a more glorified type, perhaps, more in tune with the great modern moving world, almost wholly free from non-Caucasian mixture, larger and better nourished, and with the ruddiness and vigor of the temperate zone. But they have much the same overdeveloped pride, the same dread of demeaning themselves by anything suggestive of manual labor. No Porteño of standing would dream of carrying his own valise from station to tramway; even the Americans sent down to set up harvesting machinery on the great estancias cannot throw off their coats and pitch in, lest they instantly sink to the caste of the peon in the eyes of the latter as well as in those of the ruling class. Caste lines are sharper in the Argentine than anywhere in western Europe; as in all South America there is little or no “middle class,” few people of moderate wealth, tastes, and station to fill in the great gulf between the day-to-day workman and the powerful landed proprietors who dwell sumptuously in the capital on the income from their vast estates out on the pampas, which they see far less often than the medieval lord did his feudal domain.
The prevailing attitude toward life, including as it does an exaggerated pride in personal appearance, gives Buenos Aires a plethora of labor-fearing fops whose main purpose in life seems to be to establish the false impression that they are the scions of aristocratic old families of uncomputed wealth. Behold one of these frauds in his daily peregrination, for he is too typical of the Buenos Aires point of view to be passed over as a mere individual. At an aristocratic hour of the afternoon he may be seen descending the steps of the far-famed, more than ornate Jockey Club (pronounced “Shocky Cloop” in the Argentine) in the patrician Calle Florida. His faultless black felt hat, carefully creased at the front and back of the crown but full in the middle, the bow of the band at the back of his head, is set at the twenty degree angle, tilting to the rear, of the “last cry” of fashion. A silk scarf of much yet subdued color, a tan suit cut low in front and retreating suddenly below, the two coat buttons close together, displaying much silver-and-gray waistcoat, the cuffed trousers razor-edged, surmounting patent-leather shoes topped by silver-gray spats, one lavendar glove, with what may be a diamond ring bulging through one of the fingers, its wrist folded back over the hand it covers and in which its mate is carried, completes his attire, though not his make-up. A brilliant carnation in the lapel, a green-black overcoat of camel-hair, blanket-like texture, drawn together behind by a half-belt fastened to buttons on the sides, the skirts of the wide-spreading variety, thrown with ostensible carelessness over the left arm, and a silver-headed cane grasped by the middle at the latest approved angle, in the bare hand, complete the sartorial picture. On the chronically disappointed face cultivated by the gilded youth of Latin-America there is an aristocratic pose, beneath which lurks a faint hint of the Bowery, particularly when its possessor turns to ogle those of the passing ladies who are ogle-worthy. Arrived in the street, he opens with grand manner a silver cigarette-case and lights in the latest fashion a monogrammed cigarette, summons a taxi with a languid, world-weary air by slightly raising his cane, steps in and rides out of sight of the Jockey Club, alights, pays the sixty centavos fare of the first fifteen hundred meters—and walks to the ten-dollar-a-month room he shares with a companion. At the Jockey Club races hundreds of these real or counterfeit favorites of fortune may be seen on the hottest days in those same lavendar gloves—or rather, their spotless replica—pulling out little pocket mirrors every few minutes to reassure themselves on their personal charms, or attempting to add to them by giving a new curl to their mustaches.
SOUTH AMERICA
Physical exertion, even for exercise sake, has little place in the scheme of life of these dandies, or of the majority of youths even of the genuinely wealthy and patrician class. Of late certain influences have been working for improvement in this matter, but they are still hampered by the awkwardness of inexperience as well as laggard costumbre. Out at Tigre, a cluster of islands and channels some miles up the bank of the Plata, young men of the class that in the United States would pride themselves on a certain expertness in sports may be seen rowing about with the clumsiness and self-consciousness of old maids, their shirts bunched up under their suspenders, their bodies plainly uncomfortable in trousers inclined by the dictates of fashion, as well as by the unwonted exertion, to climb to their chests, the occasional young woman in the back seat sitting as stiffly as the model in a corset-shop window.
The feminine sex of the same class does not, of course, yield to the males in the matter of personal adornment. At the races, along the shaded drives of Palermo of an afternoon, above all in the narrow Calle Florida a bit later in the day, fashion may be seen preening itself in frank self-admiration. In the material sense the Calle Florida is merely another of those inadequate streets of the old town, four or five blocks back from the waterfront, and given over to the most luxurious shops,—jewelers, modistes, tailleurs de luxe. But Florida is more than a street; it is an institution. For at least a generation it has been the unofficial gathering-place of the élite, in so far as there can be any such in so large a city, taking the place in a way of the Sunday night promenade in the central plaza of smaller Latin-American towns. Up to a few years ago the carriages drove directly from the daily promenade in Palermo to join the procession that crawled back and forth along the few blocks of Florida between the Avenida de Mayo and the Plaza San Martín, the ladies in them affecting that air of lassitude which seems to be most attractive to the frankly admiring cavalier south of the Rio Grande. But the day came when the narrow callejón could no longer contain all those who demanded admission to the daily parade and mutual admiration party, and the intendente solved the problem by closing the street to vehicles during certain hours of the late afternoon. There is still a procession on wheels from eleven in the morning until noon, given over particularly to débutantes ostensibly on shopping tours, though invariably surrounded by long lines of gallants and would-be novios; but the principal daily corso is now made on foot, and admiring males may without offense or conspicuousness pass near enough in the throng that fills the street from wall to wall to their particular ideal to catch the scent of her favorite perfume. Nor does that require undue proximity, for the most circumspect ladies of Buenos Aires see nothing amiss in making an appeal to the olfactory senses which in other lands would lead to unflattering conclusions.