One effect of this scarcity of fruit—and the vegetables are only a little less scarce, the country people seldom tasting them!—is the vogue of English preserves, which are served as table delicacies. Jams, which the London workman buys at 12 cts. a pot, are dealt out in the restaurants in spoonfuls at more than 12 cts. a helping! Dulce inglésa is the line on the menu and when you ask for it (which you do but once) you find it means a tablespoonful of common strawberry jam, and you could have had a peche melba for the money at home! Common 12 ct. pots of marmalade are sold in Buenos Ayres at 43 cts. In Montevideo we two Gringos were responsible for the consumption of many a tin of American fruit, such as sells in London at 20 cts. or 25 cts., the uniform price of which in Montevideo was 80 cts.
In the matter of manufactured articles, one naturally expects to pay extra, since everything has to be imported from Europe or the United States. From the latter country comes most of the polished oak office furniture, on which there is an infamous import duty, on top of which again the selling agents exact large profits. In this way the price swells to four or five times the home selling cost. Import duties on ready-made clothes and every variety of household wares are so excessive that the original cost is augmented by 25 per cent. to 50 per cent. before the seller secures possession of the goods. The seller in turn has such enormous expenses in the shape of high wages to assistants and iniquitous rentals, that he must clap on another 25 per cent. or so for handling expenses, and finally, as he himself has heavy outgoings for his own living and will naturally endeavour to secure some little luxuries from the limited possibilities open to him, on must go another 25 per cent. or more for profit.
It is thus one vicious circle, which results in everybody earning far more money than he can earn anywhere else, and spending four or five times more to secure about one-half of the comfort or luxury he would expect to enjoy in any part of Europe or North America. Net result: he is, perhaps, “ahead of the game,” but I am far from being convinced that the European or the North American could not equally keep “ahead of the game” in his own country, earning less, spending less, enjoying more, and saving equally. There is, however, to some temperaments a certain delight in having money pass freely through one’s hands, and assuredly that is what happens in the Argentine. If the money comes easily, it goes with equal ease, and in the getting and the going there is a certain zest which brings with it a feeling of unusual prosperity.
CHAPTER XI
SOME PHASES OF SOCIAL LIFE
Here is a subject which every writer on the general life of a town or a country is expected to deal with, but in the case of Buenos Ayres one is reminded of the famous, “Story? Lord bless you, there’s none to tell, sir!” Save, that in being a civilised people, the inhabitants of the Argentine must needs dwell in communities, “social life,” as we understand it, is difficult to discover in these communities. Certainly, a teeming city of nearly a million and a half population, with crowded streets, palatial houses, theatres, lecture rooms, concert halls, restaurants, would seem to suggest possibilities of “social life”; but it happens to be a city mainly devoted to money-making, those who have already made their money maintaining a centre of social life somewhat remote from the Calle Florida; as far away, indeed, as the Bois de Boulogne and the Champs Élysées, for is not Paris the social Mecca of the successful Argentine?
Still they are few indeed thus privileged, in comparison with the multitude who have to make the best of things as they are in Buenos Ayres. Even during the terrible months of summer, those who can afford to fly from its stifling atmosphere to the rustic surroundings of the Hills of Córdoba, to the sea-washed shores of Mar del Plata, or to the still more attractive riverside suburbs of Montevideo, constitute a small section of the community.
There is, of course, an important section of the community who annually quit the city to pass the spring and summer months in the “Camp.” These are the estancieros, whose wealth comes entirely from their country estates, where life in the winter months declines to the nadir of dismal dulness and discomfort, so that they reside for some seven or eight months of the year in the city, and remove to the country for the warmer season, during which time the head of the family may inspect and revise the work that has been going on in his absence under the direction of his mayordomo, while the members of his family, (which may include what we would consider half-a-dozen separate “families,” as the patriarchal system of family life still obtains among the Argentines) will enjoy themselves in a variety of simple and healthy country pursuits. When residing in Buenos Ayres, the estancieros who have not placed their affairs entirely in the hands of estate agents, as is the custom with those who prefer to live in Paris, maintain offices and clerical staffs like any other business men, for the work of an Argentine estancia entails a vast amount of organisation.
With the family life of the Argentines, however, I do not for the moment wish to concern myself, that being a subject of peculiar interest, which I purpose treating at some length in a later chapter. For the moment, my endeavour is only to register such evidences of the outward social life of the people as came within my range of observation during my stay in Buenos Ayres and my visits to different parts of the country. Conditions in the capital city differ, of course, in various ways, from those in the larger provincial towns, such as Rosario, Córdoba, and Mendoza, and still more widely from the life of the smaller rural communities; but we must always bear in mind in speaking of the Argentine that more than a fifth—and the most important fifth—of the entire population is concentrated in the capital, so that while London is not the embodiment of England, nor New York of the United States, Buenos Ayres does stand for Argentina.