CHAPTER III
FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF BUENOS AYRES
Our ship’s doctor, with whom I had passed many agreeable hours, and whose efforts to practise the Spanish speech added not a little to the gaiety of our voyage, was a plain-spoken young man, who assured me, when he heard I was bound for Buenos Ayres, that I was going to “the rottenest place in South America.” This was a blow that struck my puffed-up admiration of the place under the belt. I had read in the papers before leaving London that no fewer than fifteen stowaways from Glasgow had reached the sunshine city of the River Plate on a merchant liner, and of these thirteen were discovered on the same vessel when it was making its homeward trip. Now, Glasgow is noted for its rain, but it had rained in such an appalling manner all the time the vessel was discharging and loading at Buenos Ayres that these sodden thirteen were homesick for the milder rains that wash their native haunts! Doubtless, if the truth were known, the other two had stowed away too much of the vile liquid sold as “Eskotsh weeskee” in Buenos Ayres to be able to stow themselves away a second time, and remained to swell the ranks of the Scotch and Irish rascals who pester their fellow-countrymen for alms in Florida and San Martín—the streets where most of the Britishers may be encountered.
But I had made light of both the doctor’s dictum and the experience of the Glasgow stowaways. Nobody, nothing, was to rob me of my ideal city on the Silver River!
The dirty porter who conveyed our hand-bags to a dirtier coche, with a driver in the full regalia of “hobo” and two horses that ought to have been taken straightway to the knacker’s yard, did his best to rob me of five pesos (value $2.10) for a task which would have been well paid at a dime or a quarter and the money gratefully received. I had given him one peso only (42 cts.) and so loudly and volubly did he denounce me for a “mean, dirty German,” that I gave him one more for peace, and the sorry nags were whipped up and we drove away on our great adventure.
The coach, typical of many I was to see and not greatly inferior to scores it was to be my unhappy fate to ride in for many months, was of the “Victoria” style, so pleasantly familiar to the frequenter of Paris; but it was battered and tattered, the splash-boards broken, the mud-encrusted wheels repaired with odd spokes, the upholstering faded and torn, while the sight of the driver in his greasy rags and the poor worn horses with projecting ribs, broken kneed, and raw flesh showing in patches along their scraggy backs, mortified me that in such a manner I should enter the city of my dreams. Yet the description may stand as representative of a considerable percentage of the things then plying for hire in Buenos Ayres. The tattered ruffian on the box-seat lashed the moribund nags so unmercifully that I had to insist on his refraining, but then, and often afterwards, it was clear to me that only by thrashing could the hapless creatures be made to go.
And what a journey! The roadway reminded me of the Chinese saying, that in China the roads are good for ten years and bad for ten thousand. With a briefer history than China’s it may be said of Buenos Ayres that its roads are good for ten days and bad for ten years. We had evidently arrived on the eleventh day! Made of cobble stones, the road was as choppy as the river on a windy day, the tram lines now projecting half a foot above the level, now dipping into baked-mud hollows. Everywhere the cracking of whips, the clanging of bells, the shouting of drivers, the screeching of ungreased axles, and the slipping and straining of sweating horses, harnessed in threes and fours to uncouth and overladen wagons. A scene of brutal ugliness and sordid brute strife that filled one’s mind with horror. We had plunged into the hell of the horse and the mule. It was heart-rending to see the wretched creatures cut and bruised, with open sores and swollen fetlocks, the cruel chain traces at which they were straining often running in grooves which they had cut in the creature’s flesh and ever the relentless whips descending on the suffering backs with stings that would have touched the heart of any man of feeling. But in all that strange, noisy medley of man and brute there was no sign of feeling; nothing but a dull, blear-eyed urge forward. Forward to what? Ah, he were a bold man who answered that. But what I know and assert is that in a hundred thousand miles of world-travel, and observation, I have never witnessed such a scene of brute suffering as I did that autumn morning in our drive from the Dársena Sud, past the Aduana, by the Paseo Colón and the Paseo de Julio to our hotel.
As for my first impressions of the city, I comforted myself with the reflection that the neighbourhood of docks is in all great seaports the least favourable point of view. Everything that met one’s eyes was mean, or makeshift. The shops along the Paseo were of the lowest class; most of the buildings were crumbling plaster shanties. The people trafficking in them were the dredgings of a lower life than one sees in the region of the Bowery—incomparably more villainous in mien. It is true that the gardens, which adorn the Paseo Colón and the Paseo de Julio and make these appear (in a photograph) one of the pleasantest thoroughfares in all the world (the one is a continuation of the other), looked beautiful, yet none but foul Italians and Semitic scum were to be seen walking there.
It would be all right when we got into the city itself, for had we not feasted our eyes times out of number on alluring pictures of the imposing buildings of this wonder city sent broadcast to the ends of earth by official propagandists? A huge pink-painted plaster building, with the “sham” flaking off in places, showed its spacious back to the green palm-dotted gardens of the Paseo. Was it—could it be?—the famous Casa Rosada, the official home of the president? It was. A little cold shiver zig-zagged down my back, and I ticked off in my mind the Casa Rosada as one of my dream pictures of Buenos Ayres that had not come true.
Presently, up a side-street, crowded with struggling wagons, coaches and clamorous tram-cars, where small buildings were being torn down and large steel-frame ones were being stuck up, we came to our hotel.
The roadway in front was so narrow, the traffic so insistent, and the tramways so continuous, that the mere act of stopping our coach for a minute blocked the whole ill-regulated, restless mass. Nor in the hotel did we find peace. It was in the hands of repairers, who, as we afterwards learned, had been repairing it for three years, and in all that time did no more than could have been achieved in New York inside of a month. As to the moderation of this statement, not only can I vouch from a careful and intimate study of the work of those blundering incompetents through eight long months of residence there, but I could call a cloud of witnesses, whose fate it was to live through a considerable part of the weary years of alteration, as the discomforts we had to suffer were a frequent topic of the “stayers” in what, with all its faults, was at that time the most comfortable and reasonable hotel in Buenos Ayres. (I hear that it has since been much improved in its appointments.)