Such, then, is the Tigre, of which I had heard so much before I set sail for the River Plate. “There’s such a charming place called the Tigre, to which everybody goes boating and picnicking,” I used to be told. But I was not told that in the summer its mosquitoes’ sting was sharper than serpent’s tooth, or that in the winter you had to wade to the river through mire and thank the gods for a fine dry day when it pleased their extreme sulkinesses to vouchsafe so great a favour.

Still, given the right day, the exile may bless the Tigre and may there dream dreams of home.

CHAPTER X
HOW THE MONEY GOES

Buenos Ayres has somehow achieved the reputation of being “the most expensive city in the world.” But this is not, strictly, correct; for, in my experience, Rio de Janeiro can give it some points and a beating in this respect, and even its near neighbour, Montevideo, on the northern shore of the River Plate, is, in a way presently to be explained, more expensive. To the stranger, however, it is always difficult to understand or account for the wide differences between the living expenses in the principal South American cities, and Buenos Ayres and Montevideo offer a good illustration of this. In the former, “old River Platers” and natives alike will tell you that the cost of living is higher in Montevideo, and this has been confirmed to me on many occasions by visitors to the latter city. But when living for some five months in Montevideo, and finding all the commodities of life more costly than in Buenos Ayres, it seemed odd to be told by natives that so long as they could get profitable occupation in the Uruguayan capital, they would not think of changing to the Argentine metropolis where life was so much more expensive.

After comparing notes with many acquaintances in both towns, and contrasting these with my own experiences, I came to the conclusion that while the householder in Buenos Ayres is confronted with economic conditions which make for excessively high cost of living, a person in the same position in Montevideo lives relatively cheaper, as house rents, criminally high in Buenos Ayres, are moderate in the other city, and domestic labour is somewhat cheaper, while facilities for securing food stuffs are greater and the market prices relatively less. But to the stranger who does not take a house in either city, and prefers the comfortless freedom of hotel life, the conditions are exactly reversed, so that Montevideo would appear to a casual observer the more expensive city in which to live.

The main reason for this is the short-sighted policy of the hotel-keepers in the Uruguayan capital, which, during the summer months—December, January, and February—is an increasingly popular place of resort for wealthy Argentines and the no less wealthy hacendados from the Uruguayan “Camp.” The hotels, then crowded beyond all possibilities of accommodation,—so that I have known an Argentine Minister of State glad to occupy a bathroom, from which he noisily refused to be ejected in the morning to permit of other guests turning the room to its proper uses—raise their prices to absurd heights, and when the season suddenly collapses, the managers still endeavour to screw from their lingering guests as near an approach as possible to the season’s prices. Montevideo hotels that three or four years ago were charging from $3.50 to $4.00 per day (the Uruguayan dollar is worth two cents more than the American) now demand in the season from seven to nine dollars for accommodation which consists of one small room, with full board, half a dollar extra having to be paid for each bath taken on the premises! When I protested against this extra charge for baths, the hotel-keeper said that under no circumstances was he prepared to deduct it, as water in Montevideo was “dearer than wine,” because a maldita English company owned the waterworks, and made the poor townspeople pay dearly for the privilege of keeping themselves clean. Under the circumstances, my wife and I were quite willing to substitute the cheaper wine for the water, but even this condescension on our part did not meet with his approval.

Certain it is that, although Buenos Ayres cannot really maintain the proud claim to be the most expensive city in the world—for I defy you to beat the record of four dollars paid by an acquaintance of mine in Rio de Janeiro for one cake of Pears’ soap, a small packet of tooth-powder, and four ounces of tobacco, all bought in the same shop!—it is in all conscience one of the most remarkably easy places in the world for getting rid of money quickly. Mr. Punch’s immortal Scotsman who wasn’t in London half an hour before “bang went saxpence” would assuredly have had an apoplectic fit within a quarter of an hour of arriving in Buenos Ayres. Fortunately, the preliminary shocks, which ought to be the severest, are the least felt, for one takes some little time to become familiarised with the relative values of the money, and not until one can instantly figure the American or English values of the Argentine notes he is paying away does he quite realise how rapidly his hard-earned cash is slipping from him.

The real unit of value in most transactions is the paper peso,—these notes are usually so dirty that they are in very truth “filthy lucre”—and as the exchange stands about 11.4 to the English sovereign (the standard throughout South America), it will be seen that a peso is value for about 42 cents. Many English residents, in endeavouring to regulate their expenditure, follow the somewhat simple plan of reckoning a peso as a shilling. This method certainly saves worry, though it is extremely bad finance, and worse, when it is known that, even reckoned as a shilling, the peso can purchase nothing that is the equivalent of a shilling’s worth in England. Thus bad begins, but worse remains behind, for,—as we shall all too surely find,—not only have we often to spend three times, and sometimes four times the value of English money to secure what the English unit would have obtained at home, but the article so bought will often prove to be falsificado,—a shoddy imitation!

But what most strikes the observer at first is the seeming negligence with which the Buenos Ayrian throws his money about, and the brazen audacity of the shopkeeper, as illustrated by the price he places upon his wares. The one is, of course, a resultant of the other, though, obviously, there must be other forces at work to inflate prices. Mainly, we have to bear in mind that in this great city, perhaps the most cosmopolitan in the world, with a population of nearly a million and a half gathered from the ends of Earth, a motley multitude of money grubbers, money is the only standard of value. Thus, an art dealer who placed a statue in his window and ticketed it at a reasonable figure, leaving to himself a fair profit after importing it at a fair price, would not long continue to thrive in Buenos Ayres. A very large percentage of the spending class are people who have come by their money easily, and, lacking all knowledge alike of commercial values and intrinsic worth, can judge only that a thing is good or bad according as the seller prices it. It is a happy state of affairs this, which cannot last forever, and already there are signs that the Golden Age is passing. In October of 1912, for instance, I witnessed a portentous demonstration, in which a hundred thousand citizens took part, to petition the Government and Municipality for some immediate legislative action to lessen the cruel burden of the common people, to whom high wages and brisk trade mean absolutely nothing, in view of the excessive prices for the merest necessaries of life. To this I shall make further reference in the present chapter.