In the capital itself things are not yet morally immaculate. The argentino looks upon the “social evil” rather in the French than the American manner,—as something unavoidable, not particularly reprehensible, and to be regulated rather than driven under cover. Vice may be more widely spread than in our own large cities, but it is less openly crude and vulgar, with more of the frankness and at the same time of the chic naughtiness of the French. This is perhaps natural, for not only is Paris the Porteño’s beloved model, but probably at least half the women of this class come from France. Many other nationalities are represented, but the rarest of all are native women. Whether Argentine girls are “virtuous by constraint,” as some cynics have it, or the national wealth is so great that few are forced to resort to the last means of winning a livelihood, the fact remains that the predatory female of Buenos Aires is almost certain to be a foreigner. Yet there are few opportunities for women outside the home. Typists, clerks, and the like are almost all men; in the biggest, and almost the only, department store in Buenos Aires 2360 men and 640 girls were employed on the day that official duties caused me to investigate the question. Women, however, are steadily forging ahead as teachers in the numerous and increasingly excellent public schools. Buenos Aires, by the way, shows an illiteracy of barely ten per cent. for all its continuous immigration. It has given insufficient attention to the development of school playgrounds; its boys do not grow up with that love for athletics which brings with it the worship of good health and physical perfection of the body that is so potent an enemy of bad habits. Moreover, their elders treat certain matters with a levity both of speech and example which is not inclined to reform the rising male generation. In the moral attitude of the Argentine capital there is much that could advantageously be corrected, but there are civic beauties that would be the pride of almost any city of our own land. For all the deadly flatness of its site and its lack of landscape, it has a certain charm; like all great cities it is cruel and heartless, with wrath-provoking contrasts; and on the whole it is not particularly lovable.
CHAPTER II
ON THE STREETS OF BUENOS AIRES
In my daily rounds as “errand boy” I soon discovered that the Porteño is not a particularly pleasant man with whom to do business. To begin with, he is overwhelmed with a sense of his own importance, of that of his city as the greatest, or at least soon to be greatest, city on the footstool, and seems constantly burdened with the dread of not succeeding in impressing those importances upon all visitors. There is as great an air of concentrated self-sufficiency in Buenos Aires as in New York, a similar self-complacency, the same disdainfulness of anything from the insignificant bit of backwoods outside the city limits, a frank attitude of disbelief in the possibility of ever learning anything from those uncouth persons who have the misfortune not to be Porteños, and with it all a provincialism scarcely to be equaled off the Island of Manhattan. But the Porteño has less reason to boast of efficiency in his business methods than has his prototype of the North. From the American point of view he is decidedly slow. The telephone, for instance, has never been developed into a real aid to business in Buenos Aires. The service is incredibly deficient, not simply sometimes imperfect, but deficient in the sense which that word has to those who have lived and attempted to telephone in Paris. At the time of my erranding there were seven thousand telephone subscribers in Buenos Aires—with a population rapidly approaching two million; and it was so impossible to be added to the list that persons surrendering their instrument had only to mention that fact in the “Want” columns of a newspaper to sell at a price equal to the bonus paid for an opera box the privilege of being the next to rent it. Yet once the telephone is in, one’s troubles have only begun. Most Porteño business men prefer to do without one and go in person to see their professional adversaries. In fact the atrociousness of the telephone service was the chief raison d’être of my position in the consulate.
Having squirmed and shouldered one’s way through the narrow human streams of the business district to the door of the building sought, there begins the serious problem of reaching the desired individual. The elevator service, in the few cases where there is one, is on a par with the telephone. Nor is it reassuring to the timid, for on the ground-floor cage there is almost certain to be a conspicuous sign to the effect that, “As there exists a stairway, persons riding in the elevator do so at their own peril.” Buenos Aires has not quite shaken off the suspicion of a diabolical nature in all such new-fangled contraptions. A man was killed by an elevator in an office building during my days in the capital; when I chanced to pass the place nearly two weeks later, the entire elevator-shaft had been gutted by municipal order and three policemen were still stationed at the foot of it, apparently to prevent anyone from climbing the shaft instead of using the stairway.
Arrived at the proper floor, you find yourself face to face with the greatest difficulty of all. From that moment you must wage pitched battle, for the inevitable door-keepers are insolent beyond measure, though sometimes with a veneer of Latin-American-style courtesy, and so numerous that to pass them is like running a gantlet. To get as far as the subsecretary’s subsecretary is often a strenuous day’s work. It makes no difference how important your errand may be. These stupid Cerebuses see no distinction whatever between the official spokesman of the august Consul General de los Estados Unidos de Norte América and a book agent. Nor will foresight help you. For the great man inside is invariably behind his schedule, scores of other applicants are sure to be lined up in the anteroom, and though you have an appointment with him for two, you are more likely than not to be still waiting at four. This waiting in the anteroom is so customary in the Argentine that antesalar has become an accepted verb of the idioma nacional. Public officials, from ministers to the lowest class of secretary, have mobs before their doors during all their office hours, but instead of increasing the latter until they cover the work to be done, or hurrying things up in order to receive all applicants, they come late, fritter away much of their time in non-essentials, and leave early, so that most of the crowd has the pleasure of coming again the next day, and the next. Doctors and dentists are particularly remiss in this form of inefficiency. They, by the way, charge an admission fee, that must be paid to the door-keeper before the patient can get in, and which has no bearing on the regular charges “for professional services.”
The reason for this stagnation in the anteroom becomes apparent when you at last step across the magic threshold. The American business man presses a button as soon as he has heard you, and the thing is done at once; the argentino hems and haws, spends considerable time on drawing-room courtesies and formalities, murmurs, “Ah-er-why-sí, señor-er, come around to-morrow at three,” though it would be quite as easy to make his decision at once. Most Porteño business men with whom I came in contact seemed to keep their minds on ice, or in a safety vault somewhere, and to require time to go and consult them—for no one who knows the Latin-American can even suspect that they wished to talk the matter over with their wives. The saddest part of the whole story is that when you come around mañana at three, the man either will not be there or will be conferring with those who have appointments from twelve to one, and will not have given your question an instant’s thought since his door closed behind you.
There is a certain English and German influence in “B. A.” business houses, and a corresponding native influence on the rather numerous English and German business men in the city which makes them almost as prone to procrastination as the Porteño. Five o’clock tea is served in all offices, including congress and newspaper rooms. Of late years this is often really tea, rather than mate, though black coffee and liqueurs are still found on most portable sideboards. A British air of deliberation pervades the commercial caste, though the pressure of competition and high cost of living is gradually having its effect, both in the increased pace of business and the lengthening of office hours, which, if they begin late and are broken by tea-time, often last until seven or even eight in the evening. “B. A.” still retains, however, a few of those features which visiting Americans below the Rio Grande are wont in their exasperation to dub “Spig.” There is the post-office, for instance. It is as unsafe to assume common sense on the part of Buenos Aires postal officials as of those in the most backward parts of South America. Red tape, indifference, languor, and stupidity flourish almost as vigorously in the correo principal in the Casa Rosada as at the crest of the Andes. You will probably find your letters filed under the name “Esquire,” if your correspondents affect that medieval title; if you wish to buy a stamp, the customary way is to go to one of the tobacco-shops obliged to keep them, and buy it at a premium. Those who insist on getting their stamps at the legal price must travel long distances to the post office and shove and jostle their way through a throng of Italians bent on sending home a part of their wages, to reach at last a wholly inadequate hole in the wall behind which the female clerks are deeply engrossed in gossip.
There is a reminder of some of our own overambitious towns in the argentino’s eagerness to boost population, as if there were some virtue in mere figures, even though those be false. The national census was taken during my sojourn in the republic—all in a single day by the way, which was declared a holiday—and the method of computing the population was not one to cause it to shrink. Long beforehand walls and windows were covered with so many placards resembling those of a vaudeville performance that the cynical observer might easily have been justified in supposing that the printers had a special influence with the government. On the day set not only was every foreigner included, even though he happened only to be spending a few hours in crossing the country, but orders were issued to count, through the consuls, all argentinos living abroad and all persons of whatever nationality at the moment under the Argentine flag, whether on the high seas or on steamers far up the Paraná and Uruguay rivers quite outside the national jurisdiction. I was counted at my hotel, filling in a blank under the eye of the Italian proprietor, though I had only the day before returned from a foreign country and was on the point of leaving for another. The enumerators received ten centavos for each person enumerated, which naturally did not tend toward a decrease of population, that sum being paid by the government—though it turned out later that in many backwoods districts it had also been collected from the enumerated. Placards were then posted ordering any person within the republic who had not been counted on the date set to come to town and present himself before the Census Commission. These intensive methods resulted eventually in the announcement that 1,490,675 persons were living in Buenos Aires on the day in question.
If there chanced to be no “outside work” for the moment to keep me scurrying through the avalanche of taxicabs, or no “office boy” duties about the consulate, there was always plenty of recreation to be found in watching the assorted humanity that filed in and out of the outer office. Now a penniless sailor would drift in, to address the work-swamped vice consul in such words as, “General, I ayn’t goin’ t’ tell you no stories, ’cause you’re a bright man an’ you’d ketch me up at it an’ make a fool out o’ me. Only, I took just that one drink, general, just that one drink, an’ they shanghaied me an’ ’ere I am an’ I ’as a family in the States, general, s’welp me Gawd, general, an’ what am I goin’ t’ do ...” and so on, until to my multitudinous duties was added that of bouncer. Or perhaps a clean, neatly dressed young American, perpetual outdoors in his face, would step up with, “I come from Texas, that’s where my paw an’ maw lives, an’ I come down here to raise hawgs an’ I thought I’d come in an’ tell you I was in the country an’ now where can I get the best land to raise hawgs on an’ ...” another task for the overworked “office boy.” If it was one of those rare days when this continual procession of human quandaries was broken, I had only to reach at random into the files to pull out a written one:
Buenos Aires, April 25,