Next in proportion to those offering the Argentino a myriad cures for his estómago, come the shops that are dedicated to cleaning his boots. Indeed, one might reasonably suppose this to be the national industry. The abundant energy devoted to this lowly calling if turned to other channels might go far to fortify the republic. Even in the Calle Florida, where land values and shop-rents rival the highest known on Fifth Avenue, one finds certain enviable positions occupied by nothing better than salones de lustrar, and in all the central streets such establishments—often employing upwards of a dozen men—abound. Nay, go where you will, even to the outer suburbs, you will never fail to find a druggist’s or a bootblack’s shop.
A real Argentine citizen must have his boots polished several times a day, else these multitudinous slaves of the blacking brush could not be kept so busy. The saloons are sometimes fitted up in quite a luxurious manner, with long platforms on which are raised padded chairs with high foot rests in front, and while you sit in this elevated position the polisher performs the most elaborate operation on your shoes, using a bewildering variety of pastes, brushes, and cloths. When you think he has done, he begins all over again and not until he has completed what must be the tenth or eleventh stage of the operation, which consists in taking a piece of silk from his trouser pocket, where it has been lodged to absorb the warmth of his body, and working it with furious friction over your shoes, are you free to step down. Meanwhile you have been listening to Caruso and Tetrazzini on the gramophone,—I have even heard a customer insist on a tune being stopped and his favourite substituted!—so that when you step out with shining feet you feel the threepence or fourpence you have paid has been well-earned. But you won’t have gone twenty paces along the street until a bawling door-man, shouting “Se lustra! se lustra!” will point to your feet and invite you into his shop, with “Shine, sir?”
Many of these boot-blacks run their prosperous business in conjunction with an agency for lottery tickets and most of them sell cigars and cigarettes as “sidelines.” The shops dedicated to the sale of lottery tickets present at first a very unusual sight to the visitor. Their name is legion. All the numerous money-changers deal in these tickets, which are spread out in their windows so that the passer-by may scrutinise the numbers and see if his lucky combination is among them. Many tobacconists also sell them, and there are numerous street-hawkers to offer you the chance of scores of thousands of dollars for fifty cents or so—a thirty-thousand-to-one chance. It is a study in Hope to watch a poor workman outside the window of one of these lottery-ticket vendor’s pointing out the particular ticket which he trusts may bring him a sudden fortune and take him home to Italy or Spain by the next steamer—the ultimate hope that flickers in all their breasts.
There is much parade of luxury in the barbers’ shops, which form a good third, in point of number, to the druggists and boot-blacks. Mirrors gleam along the walls and the basins and pipes for performing the mysteries of an Argentine’s “shave and haircut” are many and glittering. The assistants seem almost as numerous as the customers at any hour of the day and all wear the white jackets that cover a multitude of sins. A simple haircut in an establishment of just middling style—regular, no mas—costs you eighty centavos, leaving twenty out of the peso for the artist who has treated you. Forty-two cents for a mere haircut is moderately “stiff”; but have a shampoo, a singe and a shave at the same time, and you will find that, like Sampson, your strength has oozed away with your hair, when the barber names his price!
CHAPTER V
MORE SCENES FROM THE STREETS OF BUENOS AYRES
What fascinated me most in the streets of this motley town were the bookshops. Who says there is no culture in Buenos Ayres has to reckon with the evidence of these, for London itself has no more than you might count on the fingers of one hand that excel the librerías of the Argentine capital. Many pleasant hours have I passed inspecting their wonderfully varied stocks of books from all the countries of Europe where the art of printing flourishes, as well as from North and South America. In proportion to their populations, Buenos Ayres excels New York in the number and character of its bookshops.
It was very encouraging to a literary worker to note how every country has sent of its best (though Spain also of its worst) to keep alive the taste for letters in those whom the eternal quest for the elusive dollar has taken to far-away Argentina. There are many German bookshops, stocked with wonderful collections of the classic literature of the Fatherland and the latest works of its indefatigable authors of to-day in every branch of thought and activity. Several admirable French shops there are of which the same may be said; a few Italians—extremely few in proportion to the vast Italian population—and several well-known British shops, where cheap English and American fiction unfortunately outnumbers the books of serious value, though practically no new book of real note that saw the light in England or North America did not have at least a brief showing on the shelves of the British bookshops during my stay. There is even a bookshop where the strange literary products of the Turk and the Syrian are sold to the oriental community.
But the native bookshops have nothing to learn from the foreigners, unless it be a better taste in displaying their wares, which are usually thrown into the window with all the abandon of a country store. In point of variety, they are as richly stocked as any of their colleagues overseas, and it is clear from the most casual examination of their shelves that all the principal French and German publishers are vieing with each other in catering for this rich and ready market of golden South America. I could fill pages with lists of “libraries” which are being produced specially for Latin America (but chiefly for Buenos Ayres) by famous Continental houses, who publish Spanish translations of all their important new books, as well as of a bewildering number of old books that first found popularity in French or German. Spanish publishers lack enterprise, hence Buenos Ayres, where printing is excessively costly and is used almost exclusively for business propaganda, has to get its most worthy Spanish books by way of France or Germany.
I have said Spain also sends of its worst. Most of the trash comes from Barcelona and Madrid houses. It consists chiefly of atrocious translations of English and American detective tales of the crudest “penny blood” variety, badly printed, and stitched within a gaudy and often well-done coloured wrapper, with some preposterously sensational picture thereon. These are sold, not at a penny, but at fourpence (twenty centavos) and are read by young and old alike. There are many shops that show nothing in their windows but this gutter literature, while the kiosks on the Avenida—pale and shabby ghosts of the delightful Paris kiosks these!—are stocked with them, and also with translations of the pornographic French books which the shameless shopmen of the Palais Royal display for the concupiscent foreigner.