The gowns to be seen in such gatherings are said by authorities on the subject to be no farther behind Paris than the time of fast steamers between French ports and the Plata. To the bachelor more familiar with the backwoods they seem to be as thoroughly up to the minute as their wearers are expert in exhausting every possibility of human adornment. Unfortunately, many of the demure, semi-animate ladies prove on close inspection to be not so beautiful as they are painted. Not a few of them could readily pass as physically good looking, despite the bulky noses so frequent in “B. A.” as to be almost typical, were they satisfied to let nature’s job alone. But the most entrancing lady in the world would risk defeat by entering a beauty contest disguised as a porter in a flour-mill. There are, to be sure, ravishing visions now and then in these Buenos Aires processions, but unpolished candor forces the admission that what to us at least is the refined and dainty type is conspicuous by its rarity. It is a standing observation of critical foreign visitors that the décolleté gowns seen at the Colón during the opera season often disclose cable-like shoulder muscles bequeathed by recent ancestors who carried loads on their heads. That to me is one of the promising signs in Buenos Aires, a proof that the new “aristocracy” is near enough the laboring generations which built it up not to have lost its muscle and its energy; it helps to explain the youthful enthusiasm of the Argentine, similar to our own and so unlike the blasé hopelessness of much of South America. For the southern republic is as truly the land of opportunity as is our own, inferior perhaps only in extent and resources. Along with the fops lounging in the Jockey Club it has many such types as Mihanovitsch, arriving half a century ago with no other possessions than the porter’s rope over his shoulder and retiring recently from the active ownership of the largest steamship company south of the United States, with palatial steamers plying wherever Argentine waters are navigable.
The gaudy ostentation of this nouveau riche city of Latin-Iberian origin is nowhere seen to better advantage than at the Recoleta, the principal cemetery. This is a crowded cement city within a stone wall, as much a promenade and show-ground as a last resting-place. Men sit smoking and gossiping on the tombs; women take in one another’s gowns with critical eye as they turkey-walk along the narrow cement streets between the innumerable family vaults. The tombs are built with the all too evident purpose of showing that one’s dead are, or at least were in life, of more importance in the world than those of one’s neighbors. They have four or more stories below ground, with shelves or pigeon-holes for several coffins on each “floor,” and marble steps leading down to them. On the upper or ground floor, usually surrounded by elaborate statues sculptured in white stone, are ostentatious chapels with plate-glass doors, locked with the latest American safety locks. Everywhere reigns a gaudy luxury wholly out of place in a city of the dead. The self-respecting corpse must feel as if he had been set up in a museum instead of being disposed of in a sanitary and inconspicuous manner. Here and there a tomb bears the sign “For Sale,” with the name of the authorized real estate dealer under it. The seller, who in some cases seems to have tossed out the bones of his forgotten ancestors in the convenient old Spanish way, is certain to benefit financially from the transaction, for the Recoleta is the cemetery of Buenos Aires, absolutely limited in space now by the city that has grown up about it, and accommodations in it are as eagerly sought as boxes at the opera or seats on the stock exchange.
“Le cheval est la plus noble conquête que l’homme ait jamais fait,” runs an inscription, from Buffon, over the portals of the far-famed race-track in Palermo, which, from the intellectual heights of the Jockey Club, is no doubt true. It suggests, however, an attempt on the part of the argentinos to deceive themselves into believing that they attend the races in such hordes every Thursday and Sunday because of their love of horses, rather than to indulge their genuinely Spanish infatuation for gambling. This same hint of hypocrisy, of kow-towing to Mrs. Grundy, which is ordinarily little in evidence in the Latin-American character, also smirks from the tickets of the lottery maintained by the Federal Government, which calls itself the “Loteria de Beneficencia Nacional.” How widespread is this Iberian desire to get something for nothing is shown by the fact that the Argentine not only maintains the national lottery, with regular drawings every ten days and frequent special drawings with enormous prizes, but two other official games of chance, run by the Provinces of Buenos Aires and of Tucumán.
The gambling at Palermo is on the pari mutuel, or pooled bets system. That is, those who wish to place a wager on a race—and virtually everyone on the grounds seems to have that desire as often as a race is announced—crowd their way to one of the many windows, and purchase as many bet-tickets as inclination or the state of their pocketbooks suggests. These tickets are of two kinds,—Ganador (Winner) and Placé. All money wagered on that race is pooled, the Jockey Club, to which the whole establishment belongs, skimming off ten per cent. for itself and distributing the rest among those holding winning tickets. Thus when a favorite wins there are so many players to share the returns that one often gets little more than his money back. There are none of those hundred-to-one chances to make the excitement of large hopes worth the risk of a small loss. Now and again an “outsider” wins at Palermo, but it is a far more common experience to wager two pesos, to see one’s choice come in a neck or a length ahead of the entire field—and to be paid two pesos and ten centavos at the booking windows.
The Porteños seem to get much entertainment out of their race-track, for all the slimness of the average winnings. The sumptuous pavilion, confined to the use, free of charge, of members of the Jockey Club and their guests, is always well patronized; the adjoining concrete stand, called the “Paddock,” has its throng of seven-peso spectators even on days when weather and grounds are not inviting to the sport; the swarms of garden variety men and women who surrender two pesos for the privilege of jostling one another in the other stands and about the betting booths show an even less blasé interest. On fine days many canopied tea-tables are set out on the smooth gravel space before the Jockey Club pavilion, and there may be seen Porteño fashion at its gaudiest. The entire place is honeycombed with passageways for the use of an army of officials, contestants, bet sellers and bet payers, the latter superhuman in their facility in mental arithmetic. From the upper seats one may look off across three complete racetracks, one within the other and enclosing a lake and a small park, to the red-brown Plata, stretching dull and featureless to the horizon. One might moralize and point out the burden imposed on the mass of the population to support the Jockey Club, perhaps the most ornate place of its kind in the world, and surround the few thousand club members with luxury, could one overlook the fact that if the average argentino were denied the privilege of risking his money on the races or in the lottery, he would find other ways to hazard it, if only by betting on the number of rains a year or the number of traffic blocks per hour in the downtown streets.
Of other forms of public entertainment Buenos Aires has its fair share. The theater list for a given day numbers twenty-five performances, ranging from the opera to a circus and a frontón given over to the Basque game of pelota—this, too, without counting the ubiquitous “movie.” Serious drama has comparatively little standing, the popular taste running to flippant one-act Spanish zarzuelas or to the maudlin and undress, with the audiences overwhelmingly male. Vaudeville bills are apt to be cosmopolitan, each “artist” speaking his mother tongue, for there is slight native “talent,” and an American negro doing a clog dance that would not win him a single “hand” at home is much applauded, since, coming from abroad, he must be good. A “national company” giving native plays of real literary and histrionic merit was conspicuous by its rarity.
Night life in Buenos Aires is brilliant at least in the material sense. Though there are fewer blazing advertisements in all the town than along Broadway, municipal lighting is more generous than in pre-war Paris. Entertainments rarely begin before nine, and midnight usually finds the streets crowded. By night, perhaps even more than by day, the visitor is struck by the lack of rowdyism. As the city is less noisy than our own metropolis, thanks to the absence of an “L,” among other things, so it is less “tough.” Even the saloons—it seems more fitting to call them by their local name of café—have little objectionable atmosphere; in them one may order “soft” as well as “hard” drinks without arousing an insinuating look from the waiter. The Porteño, like the southern European from whom he is mainly descended, is temperate in his use of liquor, and he expects his drinking-places to be as gentlemanly as any other public rendezvous. Fully as numerous as the “cocktailerías,” often presided over by expert mixers exiled from the United States, are the lecherías at which one may sit down at any hour of the day or evening to a glass of the best of milk at a reasonable price.
The Latin-American privilege of ogling all attractive women has not, of course, been eradicated even in Buenos Aires. But a recent ordinance makes it a penal offense to speak to a woman on the street unless first addressed by her, and the few respectable women who go out after dark without escort are rarely subjected to anything worse than staring, and perhaps an ostensibly unconscious little whispered monologue or popular air. The same restriction has not, however, been placed on the fair sex, and cases of blackmail turning on the point of who spoke first have not been unknown in the municipal courts.
“B. A.” is particularly gay during the winter season, from June to September. Then “Society” has returned from Mar del Plata, the Argentine Atlantic City, or from the Córdoba hills; the few wealthy estancieros who have residences on their estates come in from the pampa; gilded loafers, opera singers, adventuresses turn up from the four points of the compass, and the capital becomes doubly pretentious, expensive, and crowded. Several times I came to it from journeys into the “camp,” as the large English-speaking colony, anglicizing the Spanish word campo, calls the country outside the capital, and each time I found it more breathlessly in pursuit of pleasure. With the same latitude as Los Angeles, the South American metropolis does not, of course, have what we would call a real winter. Only once within the memory of the present generation has snow fallen in sufficient quantity to cover the ground. A temperature around the freezing point is the usual limit, and even in the coldest days of July or August the sky is apt to be brilliant and the atmosphere radiant. The cold, when it comes, seems extraordinarily penetrating, just as the pampero, the suffocating norther of the summer-time, seems hotter than anything the tropics have to offer. His winter season is so short that the average argentino makes little or no preparation for it, with the result that he probably suffers more from cold than those who live in really cold countries. Both law and custom now require steam heat in hotels and the more important public buildings, but the rank and file rarely come into contact with artificial warmth.
A few years ago Buenos Aires caught a virulent case of puritanism from some unknown source and made a concerted attack on notorious immorality. The more vulgar features of night life were driven across the Riachuelo, a filthy little stream that bounds the city and the federal district on the south. There, beyond the jurisdiction of the city police—since the section is subject only to the laws of the Province of Buenos Aires, with its capital far away at La Plata—though still virtually within the city limits, are gathered sailors’ recreation houses and the most squalid vice. In Porteño speech “beyond the Riachuelo” is the equivalent of “outside the bounds of decency,” and in the moral shambles of this region public entertainments reach a degradation which is beyond American imagination.