The Avenida at last! Except where the narrow cross-streets debouched into it, every inch of the splendid roadway was boarded up and only the sidewalks, crowded with jostling humanity, remained. They were then making the underground railway from the Plaza Mayo to the Estacion Once. In this state for many months it continued, an eyesore and a source of illimitable dust and dirt to all the centre of the city. No more than a scrap of the dome of Congress, away to the west, was visible above the earthworks and barricades, while the Plaza Mayo, with the historic Independence Monument, was a scene of shapeless confusion.
I ventured along Maipú, where the ceaseless rattle of traffic is surely more disturbing than the battle whence it takes its name could have been. Longing for a quiet corner to rest, I regained my hotel, where my wife reminded me of a certain old Scotswoman who came to visit her daughter in London and was taken to Westminster Abbey. She had got as far as the choir and stood looking quietly at the massy columns and noble spring of the arches, the iridescent beauty of the windows, before she spoke, and then she said: “Weel, do ye ken, Jeenie, I’m awfu’ disappointed!”
The afternoon was unpleasantly hot and enervating, but the evening was cool with a fresh and pleasant breeze. We were in a Latin city—the Paris of South America, we had heard it called—we were both lovers of Paris, my wife and I; so we sauntered out after dinner to take our ease at “some café, somewhere, in one of the squares.” But all seemed dead. A mere handful of stragglers in Florida; in the Avenida a few soft-hatted loungers, who stared at my wife with rude animal interest; no café anywhere in any square, where we were tempted to linger for a moment. So a coche rattled us back as quickly as possible to the already friendly hotel, going by way of Esmeralda and Corrientes, where the bright exteriors of some cinemas and other places of amusement punctuated the dulness with points of brightness.
It was no later than half-past nine, and we thought once more of that old Scotswoman in Westminster Abbey.
CHAPTER IV
PICTURES OF STREET LIFE IN BUENOS AYRES
It is a reasonable proposition that there are at least as many ways of studying a strange town as Mr. Kipling allows in the writing of tribal lays—“and every single one of them is right.” I claim no more than that for my own particular way.
My first concern is to gain a general impression, by wandering the streets and letting the spirit of the place “soak” into me, almost unconsciously. Later, I assume an attitude of mind more critical and less subjective, becoming an active observer, open-eyed for everything that is strange or unusual; finally I compare all that has especially appealed to my mind with impressions long since etched thereon by visits to other cities.
In this way I should probably describe the same town somewhat differently in the varying stages of my observation, and each would be a true description so far as I was able to convey any notion at all. But after passing from the impressionary stage to the critical and eventually to that of the comparative observer, it is difficult to recover the first impressions once these have been overlaid, like some palimpsest of the memory, with later records. In the preceding chapter I have made some slight attempt at this, simply because it seemed to me worth trying and the progress of my narrative suggested it. A book of first impressions, however, would be of small value, no matter how interesting it might prove, and I deliberately refrained throughout my stay of twelve months in the cities of the River Plate from keeping a diary, even from making notes, except on two subjects, to wit: the price of commodities, and cruelty to animals, which I shall discuss in special chapters. In what I now proceed to describe, I shall be guided by my last and abiding impressions of all that I saw or experienced, and for this purpose a continuous narrative is no longer feasible.
My way, then, in studying a foreign city is first to observe the panorama of its street-life so closely that I can ever after recall it in minute detail; then to store away finished pictures of its characteristic buildings in my memory; next to watch narrowly the ways of the people, as expressed in all forms of their social life and business activities, gleaning on every hand from others and exchanging opinions even with persons with whom I should hate to agree. In such wise, or as nearly as may be, I shall now continue.