Plaza 25 de Mayo, Pergamino
Viewed from the housetops, Pergamino appears a city of windmills; they rise everywhere. Water being scarce makes them a necessity. The city which is compactly built is fundamentally Italian. It is compactly built but has only one main street, that named San Nicolás, which is paved with wooden creosote blocks. The buildings are mostly but a single story high, and the nomenclatures over the store entrances savor of the River Po or the Etruscan Hills. With the exception of Calle San Nicolás, the other thoroughfares are unpaved. The edifices that flank them are of reddish brown brick with a minimum of mortar or lime between the cracks. Like the outskirts and side streets of most of the small towns of Argentina, the aspect is hideous and dismal, for the edifices are mere brick hovels bordering dusty lanes, abounding with mongrel curs that munch offal and garbage thrown from the front windows of the morgue-like habitations. There is in Pergamino a plaza, named 25 de Mayo, several blocks from the business section. It is large and poorly kept up, and is bordered on all sides by double rows of pine trees, which have attained a tall but slender growth, large enough however to make saw timber. These trees were planted thirty years ago; at home it would take them one hundred years to have attained the same proportions.
Street in Mercedes
From Pergamino to Buenos Aires, 166 miles by the General Railroad of the Province of Buenos Aires, only two towns are passed that have any pretext for importance. They are Salto, thirty-six miles from Pergamino, and Mercedes, sixty-nine miles from Buenos Aires. Mercedes has a population of more than thirty thousand inhabitants, and strange to say its streets are numbered instead of being named. This system is different from ours for 1st Street crosses 25th Street, and 34th Street crosses 16th Street, and so forth. It is so arranged that the high-numbered streets are in the center of the town while the low-numbered ones are on the outskirts. When the trains make their first stop it is at the 25th Street station. The stranger traveling through is apt to say: "Gee, but this is quite a town," judging by the high numbers of its streets, while in reality 1st Street is way out in the meadows far from the activity of central life. Mercedes was formerly the stamping ground of Irish immigrants. Many of these have become rich and powerful, and to-day retain their Hibernian names without speaking a word of English. I met a girl in Buenos Aires whose patronymic was O'Grady, yet she was conversant in no language but Spanish. Some of the Irish settlers did not prosper as well as the minority of the rich landed proprietors of Mercedes; this is testified by the native born whiskered Irish bums who immigrated from Mercedes to Buenos Aires who are seen wandering about the streets of the Argentine capital, garbed in rags and invariably drunk on ginevra, a low-grade gin.
CHAPTER VII
ASUNCIÓN
Overeating, oversleeping, and overindulgence in liquid refreshments (this applies to soft drinks as well as to others) constitute the whole time of the stranger in Buenos Aires, who has nothing else to do, than, seated at a table in front of one of the cafés on the Avenida de Mayo, to study human nature, and watch the endless stream of humanity, horses, cabs, and automobiles pass by. Tiring of this I thought of going to Mar del Plata and from some good point of vantage gaze in admiration at the attractions of that spa, and look with pleasure at the latest Parisian and Bonaerense creations that bedecked and showed off to advantage the well-molded female forms of the high aristocracy as they pass in parade in front of the Hotel Bristol and the Casino.
Quite suddenly, and very unusual for this time of the year, for it was late in February, a great climatic change took place and the temperature which had been hovering around the 100° mark dropped into the fifties. One gloomy morning, as I stood gazing from the balcony of my room into the Avenida de Mayo, watching the boulevardiers being hurried along by the strong wind, I decided that Mar del Plata would be no place for me. My thoughts diverted to warmer climes, Paraguay and Brazil. There is a Paraguayan store on the Avenida, a favorite shopping place for ladies and curio seekers. It has displays of egrets, feathers, stuffed birds, stuffed toads, crocodiles, iguanos, armadillo shells, yerba maté leaves, native headdresses of parrot wings, and beetles. But by far the most attractive of anything in the store is the fine Paraguayan girl, about twenty years old, who waits on the customers. I cannot call her beautiful, yet there is something so hypnotically fascinating about her that, after I first saw her, I was always returning to the store again to feast my eyes on her with the pretense of making some trivial purchase. Whether it was her eyes, her face, her voice, her figure or her natural complexion, or all these attractions combined that charmed me, I am unable to say, and my friends whom I called in to look at her all said that she exerted over them the same spell. Every time I saw this girl I had the longing to revisit Paraguay, and this, combined with the horrid weather, decided me at once to visit the land where San Martin, Francia, and Francisco Solano Lopez first saw the light of day.
I had been in Paraguay before, once when Asuncion was under martial law, and although I now knew that I would see nothing new in visiting the country, there are always some places that the traveler enjoys seeing more than once. Upon my leaving there before, great was my rejoicing when I saw the blue, white, and blue flag of Argentina floating from the flagstaff over the custom-house at Corrientes, for I knew that I was once more in a country of law and order. At that time Paraguay was at the height of one of the many revolutions that have continuously stained her history for the last forty-five years, and Asuncion was like a tomb. Now since everything was tranquil I would enjoy myself more.