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

by J. A. Hammerton

I often thought it was evidence of the dearth of social entertainment that British residents were always eager for an opportunity to dine at any of the hotels, although they could have done as well, if not better, in their own homes, so far as food was concerned. An invitation to dinner at the hotel had evidently all the charm of an “event” for them. Those who maintained a widish circle of friends would also occasionally offer an “At Home” at the hotel most patronised by the English and the Americans. In short, one felt from the straits to which they seemed to be put for amusement and distraction, that there was a great social hunger in the community; but on reflection I could see that even those evidences of pettiness which somewhat grated on one fresh from the larger life of London, were more apparent than real, and the British residents in Buenos Ayres were solving fairly well the problem of existing as social beings in an unfavourable environment. It was the little round of the most ordinary social engagements, magnified into artificial importance, that helped to make their exile pleasant. I can even imagine myself falling into a condition out there that would make the report of the wedding of two local nobodies quite interesting reading.

The various literary societies were also productive of some intellectual intercourse, and although I attended none, thanks to the English dailies I was able to read many papers delivered at their meetings, reprinted at full length, which showed a fair average of literary attainment. On the other hand, the most contemptible rubbish that I have seen in print took the form of letters to the editor of the Standard or the Herald, which gave admittance to good and bad indiscriminately. Ignorant diatribes against English politicians and home affairs from uneducated residents, who rejoiced to sneer at their motherland, too often found their way into type instead of into the waste basket, and could not but exercise a bad influence on other ignorant members of the community.

Nay, it was among the British colony that I found more ignorance and bigotry than I did amongst the natives, the Spaniards, the French, or the Germans. Some of the sanest criticisms of the country to which I listened were made by natives and Spaniards, and also by Italians. I found the Britishers seldom had a well-balanced opinion to deliver: they were either disgusted with everything and longing to be home, or delighted with everything and never wishing to return. Out of many I can recall to mind, I shall select two, both young men, and both typical asses, whom I may describe as pro-Argentines, although neither was naturalised, and both had only been about five years in the country.

The first I shall describe as Mr. Q——, a notorious bore, who must surely have earned a wide reputation for his habit of monopolising the talk in whatever company he finds himself. I first came into contact with him after listening patiently to a long harangue, addressed chiefly to a group of innocent ladies, on the amazing progress of the Argentine. Not a single statement that he made had a remote connection with fact. I sat by uncomplaining until he assured his admiring female group that Buenos Ayres in the last thirty years had not only become the third largest city in the world, but that in fifty years it would unquestionably have exceeded London in the matter of population. This was too much. I offered to bet the gentleman a thousand pesos to one that he was talking nonsense, and that Buenos Ayres, apart from being already notoriously disproportionate in population to the country as a whole, was not third, but thirteenth of the world’s large cities, in proof of which I was fortunately able to produce within ten minutes Whitaker’s Almanac for 1912. I did not, however, receive my peso, as Mr. Q—— declined to accept Whitaker as an authority, stating his information was based on statistics issued by the Argentine Government! Of course no such fool statistics have ever been issued, the third city of the world (Paris) containing twice the population of Buenos Ayres, though covering a much smaller area.

I had many other encounters with the same gentleman, who, having acquired some land which he was endeavouring to transfer to the public on the most philanthropic basis (to himself), had turned himself into a walking advertisement for the glorious Argentine, and never ceased to explain to visitors how completely played out was Great Britain, how rapidly she was sliding down the slippery slope to oblivion, while the Argentine was forging ahead on the path to world-empire! Please do not imagine I am exaggerating one tittle the declarations of this British driveller, who, by the way, hadn’t acquired a single sentence of Spanish in five years! He pictured Buenos Ayres as the future hub of the world’s civilisation, this purely agricultural country of the Argentine (featureless and ill adapted for any purpose other than the growing of luxurious crops and the rearing of vast herds of cattle), as a teeming land of wondrous industries, before which such things as England, America, France, and Germany have achieved would have to pale their ineffectual fires. No argument of sanity that could be advanced disturbed the calm serenity with which this self-constituted trumpeter of the Argentine reiterated stupidities that would have put the most perfervid patriot to the blush.

I have described Mr. Q—— at some little length, because, bore though he is, he is typical of a certain class of Englishman whom one encounters in the Argentine, and for whom Argentine and average Englishman alike have a wholesome contempt. He is one of those aggressive, self-assertive “Anglo-Argentines” who go home occasionally and blow about this new land of promise, to the ultimate disillusionment of such as give ear.

The other Englishman I have in mind, who also typifies a certain class, is less offensively anti-British than Mr. Q——, and his observations being based upon a little knowledge and a large inexperience, he is more amenable to reason than the Mr. Q’s, who are mere windbags, that seek to cloak their lack of success at home by magnifying their changed condition in the new land. Mr. F——, as I shall call the other, had a little knack from time to time of dropping such sage remarks as, “Where in the whole of London will you find such evidence of wealth as you do in a walk along the Avenida Alvear?”—“Where in London will you see so many beautiful dresses, such wealth in millinery, as at Palermo on a Sunday afternoon?”—“Talk about the business of London, what is it in comparison with the business of Buenos Ayres?”—“Were you not astounded at the magnificent buildings when you came to Buenos Ayres, all so bright and clean looking, after London?”—and so on ad nauseam.

We dubbed Mr. F—— “the silly ass observer.” For each of these examples of his acumen in the art of comparative observation breathes of ignorance and thoughtlessness. They are, indeed, almost too stupid to call for notice, but as Mr. F—— was personally a pleasant and amiable young Englishman, I was often at pains to explain matters to him, and always found that at the root of his odious comparisons lay the simple fact that he had lived in London with his eyes shut and his mind untouched by the grandeur that surrounded him. How many hundreds of thousands of young men are like Mr. F——! They look on the old familiar things of home with unseeing eyes, and when, perchance, in some new land they begin to take notice, they lack standards of comparison to guide them. When I explained to poor Mr. F——, who was honestly overwhelmed by the glory that is Buenos Ayres, that Threadneedle Street or Lombard Street in ye antique city of London, though they look as nothing to the eye that cannot see beyond their drab and smoky walls, might comfortably purchase the entire Argentine and all that in it is, from the torrid north to the foggy south, and have something over to be going on with; when I impressed him with the undoubted fact that most of the wealth which he saw around him had come into being thanks to British money, and that a very substantial portion of the profits being derived from the exploitation of the country went every year into London pockets, he began to see things in a new light. To compare the Avenida Alvear with Park Lane, merely shows that one has not observed Park Lane, or that he is not aware that the Avenida Alvear and the few streets thereabout which represent the Mayfair, Belgravia, and West End of London, are as an inch to an ell. Mr. F—— is very representative of the “cable boy” standard of intelligence, but in other respects a fine, clean English type, that one would value all the more as an element in the British Colony were it given to a little reflection before it aired its opinions on Argentine and the world in general, of which its experience has been notably slight.

Hardly at all does the emigrant class enter into the British Colony. British workpeople there are occasionally to be met throughout the Argentine, but the country as a whole is ill adapted for them. Any person who by word of mouth or writing spreads abroad the idea that artisans or those of the labouring class of Great Britain will find the Argentine an attractive field, may be doing a very mischievous thing. The conditions of life in which the Italian emigrants, the Spaniards, Poles, Russians, Syrians, and all the rest of them herd together in the cities or make shift to exist in rough shanties in the Camp are impossible to even the commonest class of English or Scots workpeople, if the language difficulty did not exist to make matters still worse for them.