This abomination must pass. It exists merely because landowners have preferred to hold their old rotten properties, and allow them to be used by the scum of the population, until such time as it would pay them to sell out. The transformation has already begun; the pestiferous old buildings are giving way to modern ones, devoted to cleaner purposes. Some day the haunts of the criminals may be utterly wiped out and the Paseo de Julio become, what it might well be, one of the pleasantest thoroughfares of a great city.
Up the little hill from the Paseo, one gains the Plaza de Mayo, whence stretches for a mile and a half in the most approved Haussmannesque straightness the Avenida de Mayo, ending in the massive palace of Congreso. Lined with many handsome buildings, of six, eight, or even a dozen stories, whose shadows are falling athwart the broad and teeming roadway, while the westering sun is making iridescent the white marbles of the great domed Congreso in the far distance, here in the new land of South America is at least one fine city highway that may hold up its head among the world’s best. There is a suggestion of a Paris boulevard in the Avenida; a suggestion of form, but assuredly not of life nor of “atmosphere.” And there the rivalry between the two great Latin cities begins and ends!
The great Avenida Callao runs at right angles with the Avenida de Mayo from the Plaza Congreso. It is badly paved, but contains many attractive buildings of cement. Some day perhaps it may become the central thoroughfare of the city. There are those who believe it will, but in my judgment it will call for a greater revolution than they have ever known in Argentina to shift the centre of gravity from the Calles Maipú, Florida, and San Martín to Callao. Between Florida and Callao there are eleven parallel streets. All are incessantly busy from early morning till nightfall, while Maipú, Esmeralda, and Suipacha, in the order given parallel to Florida, are busy even through the night. All sorts of shops abound in these thoroughfares and business offices innumerable, as well as many places of entertainment, restaurants, and cafés. But, apart from Florida, all these streets that lie to the north of the Avenida de Mayo are so characterless that after many years of residence it would puzzle even those with an abnormal “bump of locality” to say in which street they found themselves if they stepped from a cab in any one of them without having noted some landmark on the way. In the suburbs it is even more difficult to realise at a glance where you may happen to be, and the policeman often cannot tell you the name of the street he is patrolling. I remember asking a policeman in a street near the Plaza Libertad for Frank Brown’s Circus (Brown is an American or an Englishman who has made and lost fortunes in circuses throughout South America). “Oh,” said he, “you are going the wrong way. It is at the corner of Florida and Córdoba.” Now, I knew that some eighteen months or two years before it had stood there, but was deliberately burned to the ground by the jingo youths of the city, who were offended by some quite innocent action of the unfortunate Brown. This policeman, some eight or ten squares away from the scene, had not yet heard the news, and meanwhile a magnificent pile of ferro-concrete architecture, the Centro Naval, had been reared on the spot! I found the new circus by describing to another policeman, who at first denied all knowledge of it, a big building to which thousands of people had been flocking for two or three nights past. Then a light dawned on his Indo-Spanish soul. “Entonces, señor,” said he, “se encuentra sin duda, a la esquina de esta misma calle, porque se ha concurrida mucha gente, por alla, estas ultimas noches.” It was even so, three squares away at the corner of the street in which I had speech with the policeman, I found the circus.
There is no end to what I might write about the streets of Buenos Ayres, but there must be speedily, if not already, to the interest of the reader. I who have tramped them, in fair weather and in foul, on busy week days and on the deadest of dull dead Sundays, mile upon mile, seeking for interest and finding but little, now discover many forgotten impressions coming up on the films of the mind, which, so to say, I have been putting into the developer, and though these amuse me, I doubt if they would equally entertain others.
CHAPTER VI
WHAT WE THOUGHT OF THE WEATHER AND THE MOSQUITOES
I cannot go further in the story of my stay in Buenos Ayres without saying something very definite about the weather. Passing references have already been made to that all-important topic; but it requires a chapter to itself, and it insists on having it here and now.
As I have said, we were seekers of sunshine. Well, we found it—and also some fine samples of most sorts of weather known between the Equator and the Poles.
We arrived early in April, which is the beginning of autumn in the Argentine. As the reader has heard, the morning of our arrival was a “perisher.” Next day I found my hands, for the first time since boyhood, sore and “chapped.” The cold wind was so keen that it had instantly roughened all exposed parts of the skin, and I had recourse to lanoline to soften my hands and to heal my cracked lips. But on the third day the sun came forth again and for nearly a fortnight the heat was almost as trying as in a New York summer. Everybody was mopping his forehead; men who, a day or two before, had been going about in great-coats, were walking the streets with handkerchiefs tucked inside their collars to absorb the sweat. And suddenly it would change to a bitter night; or perhaps one went forth in the sunny morning in summer clothes, and by noon the temperature had precipitately dropped fifteen or twenty degrees, so that one went shivering hotel-ward for lunch and a change of clothes.
Yet a Scotsman, long resident in Chile, told me that I would find Buenos Ayres had the finest climate in the world! I wonder where he will go to when he dies.