The music in these revues usually consisted of a rechauffé of such up-to-date tunes as “Ta, ra, ra, boom de ay!” “A Bicycle Built for Two,” “There are nice girls everywhere,” and many others that have run their little day in the “halls” of New York and London. In a word, anything more despicable in the matter of entertainment could not be conceived, yet in these poor, pitiful play-houses the young men and older bucks of Buenos Ayres were supposed to be “seeing life.”
At one of the theatres mentioned, a group of fourteen English girls were employed as dancers and singers practically all the time I stayed in Buenos Ayres. They would certainly have found the greatest difficulty in earning a livelihood in the same way in their own land, and it made me sad to hear their poor thin voices uttering some drivel about “coons” and “moons” which to me was only partially intelligible in my native language, and must have been so much meaningless rubbish to the majority of the audience. The few painted ladies who frequented those places in the evenings were a sorrowful group of regular attenders, admitted, I believe, at half price, and gave the final touch of squalid meanness to the scene.
Prize Bulls at the Agricultural Show in Buenos Ayres.
So much for the “gaiety” of Buenos Ayres! The reader will probably now begin to realise what an attractive place it is for the young American or Britisher. Poor young man, there is no one for whom I feel more pity. He is at his wits’ end for wholesome amusement after business hours, and his case is even worse than that of the young Frenchman or the Spaniard, who can occasionally, at least, enjoy some reasonably good performance in his native tongue, for English dramatic companies cannot possibly find sufficient support to warrant the expense of the long voyage out and back. When I come to deal with the life of the British community, I shall describe the straits they are put to for social amusement and distraction, and the ingenuity with which they contrive to render their lives a little less unpleasant than circumstances conspire to make them. But in the general social life of the town, the English take little or no part, keeping to themselves with their usual exclusiveness, rendered the greater here by the almost impenetrable barrier which the criollos, or older native families present to all advances from without.
In this regard, the British are not singular, as the French, German, Spanish, Italian, and other nationalities all maintain in a very marked degree their racial sympathies, although assimilating more quickly with the native element in the matter of language, which remains the great stumbling block of the Anglo-Saxons. Each community maintains its own clubs, with many sub-divisions among Italians and Spaniards, the Neapolitans, for instance, having their meeting-places apart from other Italians—indeed most decent Italians refuse to recognise the Neapolitans as fellow-countrymen—and, among Spaniards, the Asturians especially maintaining their local patriotism and racial interests in this way. These clubs, almost innumerable, afford the men a common meeting place to discuss their fortunes in the new land of promise and to recall their old days at home, and as the social side of them includes frequent concerts, banquets, and balls, the women of the company have also opportunities for appearing in their best clothes and seeing photographs of themselves in groups published in Caras y Caretas, the principal illustrated weekly, whose every issue contains a large number of such items.
The social side of journalism is even more highly developed in Buenos Ayres and in South America generally than in North America, so that one judging only by the newspapers and the illustrated periodicals might suppose there was nowhere in the world such sociability as in these Latin Republics. In Buenos Ayres and in Montevideo elaborate guías sociales are published annually, containing lists of “At-home Days” and other information of a personal character, while La Prensa, La Nacion, El Diario, and all the other newspapers devote whole columns daily to the movements of the local nobodies. No possible occasion for a banquete is allowed to pass, and to the English reader Caras y Caretas is a weekly joy, with its dozens of photographs of these quaint little functions.
Señor Don Alonso Moreno Martínez (let us say) is going to Rio de Janeiro on business for two or three weeks. The friends of Don Alonso thereupon ask him to dine with them at the Sportsman Restaurant, where, in two hours’ time, they will demolish a quite eatable dinner of five or six courses. Meanwhile, one of the ten or fifteen hosts of Don Alonso has taken care to warn the photographer of Caras y Caretas, of Fray Mocho, and perhaps of P. B. T., and these three photographers turn up in the course of the two hours, make flashlight photographs of the little handful of diners, none of whom will be in evening dress, the group presenting the oddest assortment of clothes, and, behold, in the next issues of these widely circulated periodicals, excellent reproductions of the said photographs, inscribed: “Banquet offered by his friends to Señor Don Alonso Moreno Martínez, in view of his departure for Rio de Janeiro, where he will absent himself for a few weeks on affairs of importance.” It is no exaggeration to say that thousands of these photographs are published yearly in the pictorial press, and when the honoured guest is a little more important than my imaginary Don Alonso, then the big daily newspapers are pleased to publish the photograph, while the provinces send up to Buenos Ayres scores of them every week. It is all very pathetic, but very eloquent of the low level of social interest.
Even the Races, so important an institution in Buenos Ayres, are conducted in a way that almost entirely eliminates the social element. Among the vast crowd that frequent the splendid course at Palermo on Thursday and Sunday afternoons, except in the enclosure belonging to the Jockey Club, very few women are to be seen. The men are there in mobs, not to enjoy the races, in which they take no genuine sportive interest, but in the hope of making a bit of money. An American lady said to me she had never been at so quiet a demonstration before; she considered King Edward’s funeral was altogether a livelier ceremony! The undemonstrative character of the people is, to us supposedly phlegmatic Anglo-Saxons, really extraordinary. I have an impression that it arises from an inborn laziness of character which is not altogether foreign to their nature. They are chary of giving applause in the theatre, and they sit dull and motionless before the most exciting films in the picture palaces. At the Races there is a feeling of sullen determination to get back twenty pesos or more for the two they have speculated.
With all this lack of wholesome interest in life, outside the brute struggle for the dollar, it is not surprising that there should be a widespread devotion to gambling and the card table, most of the social centres already mentioned being also resorts of gamblers. And with all its veneer of socialness, there is no genuine public spirit throughout the heterogeneous community. In a minor way this was illustrated in February of 1913, when, owing to certain regulations which the Chancellor of the Exchequer imposed upon the shops selling drugs and perfumes, some 1,340 hairdressers and about 400 drugshops declared themselves “on strike” by temporarily closing their premises, to the serious inconvenience of the invalids and the dandies. The action drew forth the strongest denunciation of the Press for its anti-humanitarian character, but I noticed that quite as much sympathy was expressed with the male population who would thus be placed under the painful necessity of shaving themselves for a day or two, as with the suffering humanity whose need for medicine makes the druggist’s one of the most successful businesses in the city.