In short, Argentine weather is either too much of a good thing or too much of a bad thing. The dear old lady already mentioned told me that she had to live in Buenos Ayres during the winter because the roads to her estancia were quite impassable whenever it rained, but it was lovely there for a few weeks in the spring, though she had to clear out as soon as summer came, as the place was so infested by flies and mosquitoes that the family had to live in darkness, never daring to raise the blinds! Buenos Ayres being equally obnoxious in summer, she went to the Hills of Córdoba, and came back to town with the autumn. Thus she was able to spend a few short weeks of each year at her home in the “Camp,” and the rest of the year, from a chair in the hotel drawing-room she sang the praises of the glorious Argentine weather and of the country that blossoms as the rose.
The final touch of unloveliness is the loss of the ruddy glory of the fall. In the province of Buenos Ayres especially, there is no gorgeous funeral for King Summer; no shimmering gold of hedge and bough. The leaves rot on the trees suddenly, wither into pale colourless things that to-morrow’s wind sweeps away and, behold, so many gaunt and shivering skeletons of trees. When man dies in Buenos Ayres, they coffin him and consign him to his corner of Chacarita within twenty-four hours. Summer dies and is buried with similar despatch, but Nature relatively provides less pomp at the funeral of Summer than the experts in pompas fúnebres supply for the average Argentine who yesterday was and to-day is not.
Insect life is, of course, conditioned by the weather. Yet the Argentine mosquito has a wonderful power of surviving into the winter. It is a worker. Its industry is unquestionable. I shall not readily forget how I was plagued by this small product of a great country. On various occasions I had to limp about my affairs with absurdly swollen feet, thanks to the attentions of these tiny pests. An afternoon siesta could only safely be indulged in under a mosquito net. Even as I write I still bear traces on my right foot of a particularly venomous bite that dates back more than six months!
“Haw, yes, the mosquitoes always get the Gringos,” said a pimply faced young Englishman to me, when I was mentioning my first experiences nearly a year later in Montevideo.
“How long have you been out here?” I inquired.
“Oh, nearly three years now,” said he.
“So that you are a three years’ Gringo, I suppose.”
The English youth makes haste to range himself with the “old timers” and will lie to you abominably to convey the impression that he is no longer a tenderfoot (though a Gringo he must ever be), and tell you that the mosquitoes never touch him, while you can see him scratching his latest bite! The fact is that some people are more subject than others to mosquito bite and there are many thousands of native-born who never outgrow the susceptibility. I sincerely sympathise with all such, as the mosquito has the power to make their lives a misery for at least six months of the year. Fleas and bugs (the loathsome bed-hunter) also abound in the City of Good Airs. A gentleman of my acquaintance who took lodgings in a native doctor’s house was told by the housekeeper, when he complained about the bugs in his bed, that she couldn’t help them—“they were natural.” That was his complaint; he would rather they had been artificial. The bicho colorado is another busy little fellow, the size of a pin-head. He haunts the grass and as you walk over that he removes his habitat to your foot, bores a hole in your skin, burrows merrily into your flesh and produces a sore which you will have cause to remember for many a day. The chemists do brisk business in selling innumerable “preventatives” and “cures” for the bites of mosquitoes and bichos colorados, but all that I tried were failures, until I discovered in that familiar product, liquid ammonia, a really effective banisher of the pain.
On the whole, I do not seem to have formed an extremely favourable opinion of the weather in Buenos Ayres. Like that famous little girl, “when it is good it is very, very good; but when it is bad it is horrid.” And I have a notion that the little girl in question was none too often “good.” As for the insects; well, Stalky’s pet aversions, the “bug-hunters,” can always be sure of a busy time in and around Buenos Ayres.