The real Argentine: Notes and Impressions of a Year in the Argentine and Uruguay

by J. A. Hammerton

At the northwest corner of the Plaza de Mayo stands the Cathedral. Although I passed it daily for some eight months, I never mustered up sufficient interest to go inside—I who have spent so many months of my life among the musty old cathedrals and churches of France. I felt there was little historic about this common and defective imitation of a Grecian façade, vulgarised by wreaths of electric bulbs around its Corinthian columns. At first glance it suggests a stock exchange rather than a place of Christian worship. There is a dome of glazed tiles, so far away from the low and squat entrance colonnade—which faces due south—that it seems to have no relation to it. I do not remember noting the material of the building—so little did it attract me—but I fancy it consists of the usual plastered brick. One day I did seek to enter, but could find no door that was open and never do I remember to have seen the main door open on a week day. This is characteristic of the churches of South America, where one misses that generous invitation of the fine old fanes of France. Mainly, the Cathedral of Buenos Ayres will stay in my memory as a great stock exchange building gone wrong, or—illuminated on any of the numerous national feast days—as a municipal theatre on a noche de gala.

A stone-throw from the Cathedral stands the Municipal Building, or Intendencia, at the corner of the Avenida and the Plaza de Mayo. It is of no account, and does not compare in interest with the splendid palace of La Prensa adjoining it. I confess that as a journalist I had more desire to inspect the famous building of the great Buenos Ayres daily than any other sight in the city. During my stay I had frequent business with the management of La Prensa and was privileged to examine every corner of its wonderful home, on one occasion spending some hours in the building after midnight, when the sight of Buenos Ayres from the globe on which stands the Prensa’s Goddess of Light, who holds aloft her flaring torch over the restless city, is surely one that can be rarely equalled in the world. No doubt if one were to look at Paris by night from the apex of the dome over the Sacré Coeur, or London, say from the Clock Tower at Westminster, the sight would be more beautiful, but it could scarcely be more impressive, as the extraordinary flatness of Buenos Ayres permits the observer on the Prensa tower to survey the whole vast city to its utmost limits and even to distinguish the twinkling lights of La Plata, the provincial capital, twenty-four miles away. I shall not readily forget that starry night when, at two o’clock, I stood up there in the lookout beneath the Goddess of Light and saw the great noisy, cruel city as a prodigious map of stars. The prodigality of Buenos Ayres in electric light was evident even at that hour, for mile upon mile the eye could follow the main streets with their double lines of radiant dots, thinning gradually as they flickered into the boundless plain beyond, while on the fringes of the mighty metropolis appeared numerous constellations betokening the suburbs which the Federal Capital threatens to engulf.

The interior of the Prensa building would require a chapter to itself to describe it with any attempt at detail. That is not possible here and a mere glimpse of it must suffice. It is almost everything that our English ideas would expect a newspaper office not to be. If you enter from the front, there is nothing in the business department to strike your attention. There are many newspaper offices in the United States quite as imposing. Nor is there anything particularly worthy of note in the reportorial rooms, the library, or any of the workaday departments, though the note of luxury is probably more pronounced in the apartments of the editor and the editorial writers than in most American offices. The machine room is splendidly equipped. The overseer, I was told, was an Argentine, but I suspect he was of British or German parentage, for the native has little aptitude for mechanics. His assistant was a Britisher.

There is a series of “show” rooms which made it hard for one, like myself, whose life has been spent in newspaper offices at home amid the well-loved odour of printer’s ink, to imagine himself within a building devoted to the production of a daily newspaper. At two o’clock in the morning what a scene of hustle is a daily newspaper office in New York! Here everything was as quiet and orderly as in a museum when the visitors have gone! And in truth it reminded me not a little of a museum. There was a magnificent concert hall, superbly decorated, with painted panels for the doing of which artists had come especially from France. Here many of the most famous operatic stars who have visited Buenos Ayres have appeared before select audiences invited by the Prensa; celebrated actors have tried new plays and illustrious visitors from foreign lands have addressed privileged audiences in many different tongues. The value of such a hall to a newspaper is so obvious that it is surprising none of the New York journals has yet attempted anything of the kind. I think the Prensa salon accommodates an audience of some five hundred, and it is smaller than the very charming little theatre of Femina, the Paris ladies’ journal, in the Champs Élysées.

Then there is a suite of living-rooms, fronting to the Avenida, worthy of a prince. These have been placed at the disposition of distinguished visitors to the Argentine with a liberality that has not always been duly appreciated, for I was told that this very pleasant custom of honouring the country’s guests has more than once been abused by a visitor staying so long that he threatened to become a permanent boarder of the Prensa. Hence, it may be, that the custom is no longer to be maintained, and I can imagine the business side of the newspaper can make even better use of the space. A sports-room for the staff includes appliances for every variety of indoor sport and exercise, from billiards to fencing, nor need one ever be at a loss for a cooling bath in the hot summer days, as the bathrooms and lavatories are worthy of a first-class New York hotel. But, most curious of all, perhaps, are the medical and dental departments. The rooms for the physicians and surgeons on the staff of the Prensa are supplied with all the latest medical and surgical appliances, and readers of the paper can come here free of charge for advice and treatment. There is also a legal department, where skilled lawyers look into the troubles of the newspaper’s subscribers!

In short, the Prensa building is one of the most interesting sights of Buenos Ayres and a notable ornament of the Avenida. It is an epitome of Argentine progress, for less than fifty years ago the journal was a humble little four-page sheet, issued from some scrubby little shanty, while to-day it is one of the wealthiest, as it is one of the largest, newspapers in the world, housed in a palace that cost $1,500,000 to build. Its enterprising founder, the late Dr. José Paz, died at Nice a week or two before I left England and I was later present at the ceremony of receiving his remains in Buenos Ayres for interment at Recoleta, the last resting place of the Argentine’s aristocrats. He had built another palace for the whole Paz family in the Plaza San Martín, one of the most magnificent buildings in the city and one of the most princely private residences I have ever seen in any land, but he was not spared to see it occupied.

If we cross the Avenida and go some four squares down the Calle Defensa we shall come to one of the few historic buildings in the city—the church of Our Lady of the Rosary—Nuestra Señora del Rosario.

There is nothing worthy of note in its architecture, but in the tower which surmounts the front entrance—to the north—a number of cannon balls are embedded in the mortar of which the church is built. These are said to be relics of the British bombardment of 1806 and within are the flags which the Spanish viceroy, Liniers (a Frenchman, by the way), took from the British troops under General Carr Beresford when they were compelled to surrender to superior forces after their brief and ill-advised occupation of the citadel from June to August of that year. Liniers promised the flags of the conquered British to Nuestra Señora del Rosario before he went forth to engage Beresford on the 12th of August, and there they hang, objects of no small pride to the patriotic Argentine. (This on the authority of the native historian, Señor José Manuel Eizaguirre, though Mr. Cunninghame Graham states that the flags were taken from the incompetent General Whitelock in his disastrous attempt to retake the town in 1807, and that they hang in the Cathedral.)

There are indeed few churches in Buenos Ayres that will repay a visit. All are edifices of little note and, almost without exception, stuck rather shamefacedly among other buildings where you may pass a dozen times and never notice them once. Buenos Ayres has other business in hand than matters of the soul. No one could describe it as an aggressively religious city. The Jockey Club is more to its taste. It stands rather more than half-way along the Calle Florida, going from the Avenida towards the Plaza San Martín. That admirable English word of recent invention, “swank,” was surely coined by some one familiar with the Jockey Club of Buenos Ayres. But for the moment I shall not seek to illustrate this by attempting to describe the spirit that animates this bizarre and curious institution. In this chapter I am concerned only with its outward appearance. That is by no means unpleasing, though the façade of the building is constricted and the narrowness of the street prevents one from obtaining a satisfactory view of it. It is covered with an infinity of electric bulbs and no occasion to light these is ever allowed to pass unregarded. Often have I seen the building aglow like Aladdin’s Palace in a Drury Lane pantomime and scarce a soul within sight to feast his eyes on the outward magnificence of this great national institution which exists for the maintenance of the best breeds of man’s devoted servant, the horse (no me parece, as they say in Buenos Ayres, or “I don’t think,” as they say elsewhere).

Westward some six or seven squares from Florida one encounters in the Plaza Lavalle several noteworthy buildings. On the west side of that fine plaza the new Tribunales, or Law Courts, have just been completed, and Buenos Ayres has nothing finer in the way of architecture to show. Conceived on a massive scale and carried out with unusual thoroughness of detail, this is a magnificent palace for the housing of Justice, and as Justice is by no means blind in the Argentine she will find much in her palace to occupy her attention, even to distract it from those duties which in other lands she is supposed best to perform with shut eyes. Why a style that is reminiscent of Assyria and Byzantium should have been chosen, I know not, unless Argentine Justice is of Oriental origin; but the effect is undoubtedly imposing. The six massy columns of the central façade spring upwards to the height of five tall stories, with a large sense of strength and permanence, though it is true they begin in noble stone only to continue upward in concrete. The five entrances are generously inviting, but every Argentine knows that when he enters there to lodge a suit Heaven alone can guess how old he will be, how grey his hairs, when he comes out again with a verdict. Three more stories tower above the great plinth of the pillars, and over the entrance runs a fine, spacious colonnade of Ionic columns.