Later, several agents were sent from the local comisaría to remove the now almost lifeless Italian, who had been seriously injured in the mêlée and crippled for life owing to the wanton brutality of those who broke into his rancho. He was lodged in jail, and after many months was tried and sentenced to some five years’ imprisonment for the shooting of the two agents sent to arrest him. Surviving the prison ordeal, he was eventually released, though crippled, beggared, and hopeless. But the Italian spirit of revenge burned fiercely within his shattered frame, and obtaining one of the deadly stilettos with which his countrymen are all too familiar, within a few months of regaining his freedom, he succeeded, in the most dramatic manner, in killing not only the comisario who had worked such havoc with his life, but also the brother officer who had so callously aided and abetted him. The one he despatched in a café; the other in his private room at the police station, allowing himself to be arrested immediately thereafter. Of his ultimate fate the Italian doctor could not speak, but he assured me the facts were as stated, and that the man was personally known to him. Nor did he know what sinister fate befell the wife and daughter. Such is one of the little tragedies of the Argentine, and one that I have been assured by those who know is typical of numberless unwritten chapters in its social life.
It may be objected that the killing of the officer in a restaurant and being able to escape to a distant town and kill another, seems improbable; but this you will understand when you know what happens in the event of a public murder in the Argentine. I remember walking along Calle Maipú, in Buenos Ayres, soon after my arrival, when suddenly seven or eight people bolted out of a small café, the entrance to which was down some steps, and whence came the screams of a woman. Presently two policemen came hurrying along and disappeared within. Everybody near the scene took care to avoid the immediate vicinity of the café, lest he might be arrested as a witness! What had happened was this. A man had been shot dead, and his body was lying in the café, where only an old woman who attended the bar remained, every one who had been in the place at the time of the murder incontinently bolted. And well for them that they did so, as it is the custom of the police to make indiscriminate arrests of witnesses in the neighbourhood of any crime that has been committed, and these helpless witnesses are lodged in gaol and treated with greater rigour than the perpetrator of the deed! So notorious is this ludicrous procedure, that there is a saying in Buenos Ayres, “It is better to be a murderer than a witness,” and consequently an enormous number of crimes pass unpunished for the simple reason that no one who values his personal safety cares to come forward as a witness.
The nature of the crimes perpetrated daily throughout Argentina is such that the Anglo-Saxon mind revolts at the mere thought of human beings existing who could be guilty of such enormities. But it is only fair to say that in these crimes of passion and violence, the native Argentine is seldom involved, the lower class Italian, and especially the Neapolitan, being the worst offender. Indeed the Italian doctor who told me the story related above was careful to explain that neither of the comisarios who played such villainous parts were Argentines of pure descent, but were Spanish-Italians. One has only to note the names of the persons concerned in the cases reported in the Press to realise that Italy, and especially that hotbed of vice and criminality of which Naples is the centre, is responsible for the largest percentage of the inhuman outrages that stain the records of the Argentine.
As I have hinted, the Gringo who gets himself involved in any sort of dispute with the police is likely to regret it. The only safe course is to avoid at all costs the intervention of the legal authorities. When one must go to law, then care must be taken to ensure the proper course of justice, either by judicious bribery or personal influence! I have known of cases in the United States where it has been necessary “to purchase justice,” particularly one important judgment which was only placed beyond doubt by liberally feeing the judges. Similarly, the honest man who meekly sits down, and out of his unworldliness allows “justice” to take its course in the Argentine, without doing something to help it along, may live to regret his scrupulousness.
An English acquaintance whose sense of justice is so abnormally developed that he would go to law about the most trumpery matter rather than submit to what he felt to be an injustice, one morning had to make some calls in Buenos Ayres, and, hailing a coach from the rank in front of the hotel, he drove to his first appointment, a matter of some ten minutes, asking the driver—an Italian—to wait for him at a certain point a few hundred yards distant, where coaches were permitted to stand. But after discharging his business and going to the place in question, he could not find the coach. The driver had evidently accepted another fare, hoping to get back in time for my friend. But, behold him at the hotel in the evening, demanding payment of fifteen or sixteen pesos, on the ground that he had waited several hours for the return of the traveller, and only gave up hope of his coming back when it was nearing dinner time! The Englishman declined to disgorge six or seven dollars for his ten minutes’ coach drive, and offered two pesos, exactly double the amount he had legally incurred up to the time of leaving the coach, and thus allowing for the time he had ordered the coachman to wait. This the man indignantly refused, quitting the hotel with vows of vengeance on the Englishman who, by the way, had only a smattering of the language, or sufficient to indicate in a crude and gesticulative manner what he required.
Views of Mar Del Plata.
In the second picture the large building of “El Club,” the gambling centre during the short bathing season, is seen, and the bottom illustration shows the new “Rambla” or promenade of cement structure which has supplanted a rickety wooden one.