The craftsmen of Florence send much of their marble handiwork to Florida, and some of the art shops are stocked with beautiful statues and bronzes, while every variety of gorgeous inkstands may be seen in them. The inkstand is an important item of the chic Argentine home. But the taste for graphic art is still undeveloped, and the pictures offered for sale compare very unfavourably with the sculptures. I recall in particular a hideous daub, which was alleged to represent two or three members of a certain familia distinguida (any family that can pay its way and afford a seat at the Opera is so described), being the centre of admiration in a Florida shop window for some days, while the newspapers gave reproductions of it. In London or Paris no art-dealer would have allowed it to be seen on his premises.
As I have already indicated, Florida has every day a brief surcease from the battle of motors and coaches. From four o’clock until seven no vehicles are allowed to pass along it, and only at the crossings is there any traffic. These are the hours of the evening paseo. Ladies and children are now at liberty to saunter along the pavements or in the roadway, while the gilded youth of the town struts by and gazes at them, or more often stands in stolid rows and admires. The ladies are perhaps a trifle too well dressed and the children mostly over-dressed. But this is their “life.” This paseo is what they live for, so they strive to appear at their best and to display their possessions of silks and satins, while the jovenes distinguidos have all had their boots polished to the nth degree just before they came into the street. And the scene is undeniably enchanting, when the electric lights blaze out. There are hundreds of projecting shops-signs, in which changing electric lights are now revealed and now occluded, and the great warehouses are all illuminated as though it were another centenario, news vendors are calling La Razon, El Diario, Caras y Caretas, or Fray Mocho, and the whole has the atmosphere of some brilliant bazaar, rather than of the highway of a great city. It is a feast of light, but not of gaiety, for the Argentines are not given to joyousness and are strangely lacking in humour; everybody is frightfully formal and all are obviously conscious of being well dressed. It is Vanity Fair with the fun left out!
Towards the river, the street of San Martín (inescapable national hero who pursues you everywhere in statue, in street and place-name, in “cocktails,” in every conceivable connection) runs parallel to Florida but bears no resemblance to it except in being equally narrow. It is essentially an earnest business thoroughfare, lined with many fine office buildings, and choking perpetually with traffic. But, by the way, many of these business buildings that look so “up-to-date” from the outside are antiquated within. It is a fact that up to so recently as a year ago builders were in the habit of erecting large tenements which they well knew would be utilised for nothing but offices, yet they built them deliberately for “flats,” or departamentos, as these are called, fitting each with its kitchen and bathroom and disposing the apartments as for bedrooms and salons. Thus you will find to-day hundreds of business firms using such modern flats as offices,—in some cases the bathrooms remaining, in others converted into “enquiry office,” or the like,—all extremely uncomfortable in conditions entirely foreign to their requirements. But San Martín contains several imposing blocks of real office buildings and will presently contain more, for the builders are busy here, as everywhere else, with their work of transformation. A friend of mine, when I called on him at the beginning of May, 1913, had just received notice to quit, by the demolishers arriving and starting to unroof his office! That was his first intimation that the landlord purposed clearing away his old property and putting up a great new business building. Argentine methods are not ours.
One “square” nearer the river runs Reconquista, dignified by the presence of the principal bank buildings, many of which are real ornaments of the town and all suggest a sense of opulence and financial solidity it would be hard to match even in New York or London. Yet the best of them, the richest and the most substantial, are no more than the branches of the Tree of English Gold which has its roots deep-struck in London City. It is a street of all nations this Reconquista. England, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, and the rest have their banking houses here, and there is no more encouraging sight in this remorseless city than to witness the many ill-clad Spanish and Italian labourers going through the long and intricate operation of sending drafts home to those they have left in the old country. Many hundreds have I seen with eager, straining faces, scanning the pink or green slips of paper that would mean so much to some one far away in Lombardy or in Catalonia, and represented so much of the sweat of his brow to the poor sender.
The practice of keeping a bank account is very general, even among the labouring classes, as the poor peon has nowhere to hide his little hoard, living as he does in the most shameful conditions, where a square yard of living-room is more costly than a cottage would be in his native village, and among people who do not hesitate at murder to gain a few pitiful pesos. Thus you will often see a lean and hungry labourer, dressed no better than an English tramp, scrutinising his bank book in the corridor of one of the great banking houses, and the sight is a strange one to English eyes. Turks, Polish Jews, Norwegians, Russians, Cingalese, Swedes, Armenians, all the nations of the world are represented daily in the teeming throngs that flock to the banks in Reconquista, where the innumerable clerks are puffing steadily at cigarettes and attending to their clients with a charming ease that has in it a pleasant suggestion of eternity. For the simplest banking operation will eat away twenty minutes of your time, as your account is balanced whenever you withdraw or lodge any sum, and to secure a draft on London at ninety days, calls for the patience of Job and three-quarters of an hour. Much of this formality is the result of the system of issuing open checks, which makes swindling delightfully simple, and the bank always stands to lose, as there is extreme difficulty in bringing a swindler to book.
The last of the narrow streets riverward is Calle 25 de Mayo, so called from the day in the year 1810 when the movement for Independence began, although the actual date of the Declaration of Independence is 9th July, 1816. They have a curious habit of thinking in dates in Latin countries. Both Paris and Rome give us examples of famous dates as street names, but in South America dates are honoured to a degree that is comic. One of my friends in Montevideo has an office in 25 de Mayo, a show-room in 18 de Julio, and warehouses in 21 de Agosto and in 15 de Octubre! By some odd chance he always found what he needed most in one of the streets named after Uruguay’s historic dates. There was another such, 1 de Mayo, but it offered him no accommodation else he should have taken premises there also, just to complete the series. Calle 25 de Mayo in Buenos Ayres has long been one of the degenerate parts of the town, entirely unworthy of the historic event it commemorates. But it is being gradually reformed and may yet take on an aspect of decency. Near the Plaza de Mayo it contains some fine new buildings, but westward it is still the haunt of undesirables, although the English pro-cathedral stands there, a plain and not undignified structure with which I made no close acquaintance.
Exterior of the Jockey Club, Buenos Ayres.
A good photograph of this famous building cannot be made, the street being too narrow to admit of focus, even from the upper storeys opposite. In the right bottom corner part of a window-sill, or ledge of roof, on the opposite side of the street, appears in this photograph.
From 25 de Mayo the ground falls quickly, to the Paseo de Julio, the former street occupying the level of what, no doubt, was long ago the bank of the river. This is the only semblance of a hill in all the district. Inland for leagues, the city lies flat as the proverbial pancake, while below towards the river, the Paseo and the gardens beyond, with the buildings of the port in the further distance, occupy a lower level of land reclaimed from the river. If anybody wants an enemy “put out of the way” for a matter of twenty dollars or so, he will have no difficulty in finding a villain ready for the job somewhere along the arcaded haunts of the Paseo. In one respect the Paseo de Julio resembles Princess Street, Edinburgh, which, as the Irishman said, “is no more than half a strate, as it has only one side to it.” The Paseo has only one side to it, and it is a bad one. The second stories of the buildings that stand between the Paseo and 25 de Mayo are on the road level of the higher street. Thus it might be possible, for aught I know, to enter one of the low dens on the Paseo and mounting two or three floors within its evil and mysterious interior, emerge on the level of 25 de Mayo. The lower stories of these buildings on the Paseo side are arcaded, and these arcades are the haunt of “all things perverse, abominable.” According to the local press, after nightfall no man dare appear there wearing a collar, and any one who requires the aid of eye-glasses must not venture thither. Often have I wandered among the stinking peones and cosmopolitan criminals who throng the arcades by day, but I know not the Paseo by night. The shops are kept by all sorts of cheap clothiers, general dealers, and many cutlers, whose windows are exclusively given over to the display of long knives or daggers. Probably sixty per cent. of the frequenters of the arcades carry one of these dirks, like the old Scottish Highlander, and the other forty per cent. are armed with revolvers, of which hundreds are exposed for sale in the arcades. There is no lack of “cheap Jacks” with “special lines” to clear at a sacrifice. There are many filthy looking restaurants and provision shops; and more librerías, which expose nothing but the filth of the Continental press translated into Spanish and Italian. If you look at one of their windows for a minute, out pops the greasy owner, spiderlike, to enquire if by any chance you would like to inspect his more secret stock of fotografías muy curiosas, while youths will thrust under your nose an envelope of obscene photographs, with a particularly offensive one exposed. The whole atmosphere is vile. The cinematographs and raree shows that also abound in these arcades may be no more pernicious than many in the Bowery, but that is a matter on which no decent visitor can speak, as none such could risk the contamination of entering therein. It is a male crowd that is always circulating in the Paseo. Never have I seen a decent woman there, and indeed no more than a half-a-dozen hatless sluts are ever to be noticed under its arcades.