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

by J. A. Hammerton

As to the “homes” of the Argentine, they approach more nearly Anglo-Saxon ideas of “comfort” than the French, Spanish, or Italian notions of “home.” French styles of furniture and interior decoration still predominate. There is, however, a growing appreciation of the more solid comfort of English styles, and popularity for these is assured. Our capacious easy chairs are ousting the dainty, elegant and abominably unrestful French affairs. Little progress, however, has been made in the direction of heating the houses, and an Argentine interior in winter, as I have said in an earlier chapter, is apt to be a picture of shivering cheerlessness. But there are signs that even this will be remedied in the increasing approval of what may be described as “English comfort.”

That the Argentine’s home is likely, however, to be thrown open to the freedom of the North American home is inconceivable. His exclusiveness is a heritage of the past. He could not rid himself of it, even though he tried. Nor is he trying very hard. He may in time come to follow European customs in the ordering of his meals, which still remain, in real Argentine homes, a topsy-turvy wonder to the European, the soup usually appearing about the end of the dinner, and the cheese being eaten indiscriminately between the earlier courses. This is no more than a fashion, but the other matter is “bred in the bone.”

Knowing this, it seems quaint to receive from a native a letter on some ordinary affair of business, bearing his home address with the initials “s.c.” or “s.c.u.” appended. Here we have an old Spanish formality, and one of the emptiest of courtesies. The initials stand for su casa de usted, meaning “Your house.” That is to say, he informs you his house is your house! But he has no more intention of ever asking you to enter his house than you have of going there to stay. It reminds one of Mark Twain on his travels in Spain, when expressing admiration for a Spaniard’s jacket, the owner retorted, “It is yours, sir,” and further assured him when he also admired his beautiful waistcoat that it also was at his disposal, so that Mark, out of consideration of the Spaniard’s convenience, refrained from admiring anything else he wore. This is a custom of very primitive peoples, and I am told that something similar obtains among the Maoris of New Zealand, one of whose chiefs pressed upon King George, when, as Prince of Wales, he visited the colony, the acceptance of some venerated object, and was greatly chagrined by the royal visitor, in all innocence and wishing not to offend the chief, accepting the quite useless gift. We must never take Spanish courtesy literally, and we must remember in South America that their courtesy is one of the things they have imported from Spain.

Among the minor characteristics of the Argentine which frequently interested me and for which I endeavoured to find a reason, was the habit of repeating the most ordinary phrases in much the manner of a doddering old person reiterating the same story. Let me try to express this in English. A lady is telling how she narrowly escaped being run down by a tram in the street:

It would be about four o’clock in the afternoon, when I was going down Calle Sarmiento. There was a lot of traffic in the street, and without looking backwards I stepped off the pavement. Just as I stepped off the pavement, I heard the bell of a tram, and looking back, it had nearly reached me, so I gave a scream and stepped back on the pavement, just as the tram passed me, in the Calle Sarmiento, at about four o’clock in the afternoon, when it was very crowded and I had only just stepped off the pavement, when I heard the bell, and had only time to step back when the tram passed me. If I hadn’t heard the bell, I might have been run over, and I gave a scream just as I stepped back on the pavement.

That is no burlesque version of how this most thrilling story would be told. Then, suppose you have to arrange with one of your native employees to purchase a box of purple carbon paper and three shorthand note-books on his way to the office to-morrow morning. You will tell him so, and expect that to be an end of the matter—when you are fresh to Buenos Ayres. But no, after listening attentively to your elaborate instructions, he will then repeat:

So, when I am coming in to-morrow morning, I will go to the stationer’s, and I will get a box of purple carbon paper and three shorthand note-books—a box of carbon paper, purple, and shorthand note-books, three, to-morrow morning on my way into the office. Three note-books and a box of purple carbon paper. Bueno!

This most tantalising habit of trivial repetition is universal, and so endemic that English-born residents speaking both languages translate this mode of thought into the English tongue, with the quaintest results. There is surely no people in the world who can take a longer time to explain a little matter than the South American, and I have often thought that the volume of the Spanish language, which frequently calls for three or four times the number of words that would be used in English to express a simple idea, must have had some influence in producing this strange habit of repetition, in order to fix in the mind precisely what is wanted and the condition under which it is to be secured. The only satisfactory method of conveying ideas from mind to mind was to assume that the person you were addressing was still under fifteen years of age. The swift exchange of thought flashes which is possible between Anglo-Saxons is unknown to users of the Spanish tongue, but the more go-ahead Argentine, who really represents to-day the brightest intelligence that expresses itself in Spanish, is deliberately aiming at the Anglo-Saxon ideal, and, disregarding the circumlocutions of his native speech, is endeavouring to bend that to the brisker uses of modern commercial life. This theory of mine may be entirely wrong, but the facts, as I have endeavoured to illustrate them above, are substantially correct.

If anything is likely to seduce the Argentine away from his oldest and most honoured customs of life, it is the spirit of emulation which pervades the whole social system, though it is present to a much greater degree in those of mixed parentage than in the criollos. By no means peculiar to the Argentine, it attains to almost equal strength in the United States, nor is it at all uncommon in English society. Social rivalry is really the motive force behind much of the commercial activity of the country. The family of Sanchez have just built a swagger new house and bought a 25 horse-power limousine. The Alonso family, having quite as much money and perhaps a trifle more than the Sanchez, cannot brook this ostentation to pass without reply, so up goes a still more florid mansion, a 40 horse-power car is bought, and the chauffeur wears a dozen more brass buttons. This game of “Beggar my Neighbour” in social ostentation is being played merrily through every grade of Argentine society. It is extremely good for business. Not only does it create a brisk demand for luxuries, but it lays upon those who play it the necessity of energising to secure the wherewithal, and is thus productive of creative effort in the making of wealth where formerly the impetus was lacking. So that perhaps it might not be wrong to suppose that what the European observer would write down in the one case as the vulgar striving of social “climbers,” and as rotten economics in the other, is economically good in the development of a young country. But it is imitative and nothing else, for there is as yet no evidence of the growth of a distinctively national taste, and this imitative tendency of the people is destined to bring them steadily nearer to European ideas, so that they will probably emerge with a social system that will bear the same relationship to that of all the European nations as a composite photograph does to all the portraits that have been overlaid on the negative.