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

by J. A. Hammerton

That there is a fascination about the life of the Camp, most of the Britishers who engage in it are ever ready to bear witness. When you meet a fellow-countryman who is sincerely in love with Argentine life, he is almost invariably “from the Camp.” But this fascination is of slow growth, and such occasional visits as the town dweller is able to pay to the estancia of a friend in the interior go a very little way to create in him a liking for the life. The estancias are very much alike in construction, and vary only according to the resources of the owners. They are usually plain structures of wood and iron, and only occasionally do we find them built of bricks. Those that boast a second story are few, though where the owner controls a large tract of territory and spends much of his time in personal supervision, we occasionally find a more ambitious effort in domestic architecture. There are no gentle valleys surrounded by low hills, or shady woods, where attractive sites may be secured. In this treeless land, the farmer has to make his own shade by planting trees around his house, and usually his home is set within a quadrangle of eucalyptus trees or California poplars. There are no broad, white, firm highways reaching out into the country, along which one may travel in comfort to distant estancias—nothing but mother earth everywhere, and such rude and primitive tracks as the European mind would more readily associate with neolithic man than with one of the richest and most progressive agricultural countries of the modern world. The European traveller who first sets eyes on a camp road in the rainy season experiences a shock from which he does not readily recover.

Let me try to picture, not a mere byway to an estancia but a “main travelled road” in the Camp, such as I have seen it after a few days of rain. It may be twice as wide as the average American highway and is far more like a muddy river-bed than a way for wheeled traffic. Here and there, there may be as much as thirty or forty yards in which the proportion of earth to water is greater, though it will be cut and scored with wheeled tracks a foot or two in depth, the whole surface having the consistency of a mud heap. Then will succeed another twenty or thirty yards of yellow water, deep enough to drown a horse did it fall down, and thus league upon league, alternating between patches of rutted mud and rippling pools, the noble highway goes on its undeviating course through the Camp.

Travel along one of these roads in any kind of wheeled vehicle is the last word in discomfort. All the buggies used for passengers stand very high on tall wheels, so that the axles may clear the inequalities of the mud, and the wagons for conveying grain and goods to the railway stations from forty to one hundred miles away, are fitted with great narrow wheels, the better to cut through the doughy compound. The life of the animals employed to pull these vehicles is one long agony of toil, horses having to make their way at times through liquid earth half-way up their girths. Teams of oxen I have witnessed so buried in the “road” that only a small part of their backs was visible above the surface, while they laboriously dragged their hoofs with a sucking noise from the thicker compost in the unseen depths where they found a precarious foothold. The reader can picture to himself the delights of winter travel along such roads, and further he may imagine how nearly these highways approximate to the conception of a road in our own land when they suddenly dry.

Their summer condition suggests a stream of lava that has cooled down, except that the dust lies thick on it and rises in blinding clouds at every puff of wind. Small wonder, then, that the estanciero who can afford to live in town during the winter is never to be found at his estancia, where, in truth, it would be difficult to find him were he there, as most of these country houses during the winter months are practically isolated, owing to the condition of the roads, and an aeroplane suggests the only practical means of reaching them. None the less, in the long rainless months it is easy enough, and certainly invigorating, to move about the Camp on horseback, and even by motor-car, as there are no tiresome restrictions about keeping to the road, and one may ride or drive at will over long tracts of flat grassy land.

The smaller towns in these boundless prairies are all so much alike, owing to the lack of individuality in the landscape, that any one is representative of the whole country. Most of them are on the railway lines, for the railways have made the towns spring into existence, instead of the railways having been laid to serve the needs of townships. The great majority of them have begun with nothing more than a railway station and an almacén. The station master is thus a person of much importance throughout the Argentine, the link that binds the estancias within his district—and his district will probably stretch a matter of fifty miles or so on both sides of the railway line—to civilisation, as represented by Buenos Ayres and beyond. He receives letters, telegrams, and goods for them, and their gauchos ride in to the station so many times a week to take home the mail.

According as the settled population of the district offers to retail tradesmen opportunities for trafficking to some profit, little one-story buildings begin to spring up near the station, until in a year or two some dozens of houses, with the most oddly assorted stores occupying their front premises, will represent the thriving township, whose possibilities are limited only by the imagination of the vender of the real estate, and his powers of vision would put some of our most imaginative novelists to shame. There will be a few rude cafés, a butcher’s shop, which opens in early morning and again towards evening, displaying a red flag to indicate that warm, freshly killed meat is on sale, a baker’s that hangs out a white flag when there’s a supply of bread for sale, a “general dealer” or two, sellers of “store clothes,” and such craftsmen as joiners and boot repairers, leather workers and the like—“the rude forefathers of the village.” The first almacenero to establish himself will presently be ambitious of marking his progress by converting his corrugated iron shanty into a brick building, and thus the town progresses until ten or fifteen years later it has its municipal authority and its intendencia and begins to think of lighting its still unpaved streets. Wherever one goes throughout the Argentine, there are these germs of possible towns to be seen, all without the slightest touch of beauty, but all speaking eloquently of the new life that is throbbing in the veins of this vast country, to what great issues in the future we can but guess.

In many of these towns where the population runs into a few thousands, the cinematograph represents the sole centre of amusement, and it may be taken as proof that public administration in the larger cities makes for cleanliness of life when I mention that while the moving picture exhibitions so numerous in all the larger towns are conducted in a way that would have the warmest approval of Mrs. Grundy, in these smaller country places it is the custom for the women and children to leave the halls after the ordinary evening exhibition, while the men remain to witness the most obscene films that can be secured from the filth-mongers of Paris or Berlin.

There is probably in all such towns at least one church, but the influence of the priest in the Argentine is slight, and the religious life of the Camp communities exists at a low ebb. Still, I have noted many evidences of a real co-operative spirit in the erection of churches, the men lending a hand with their labour to rear a building likely to serve the needs of the town for years to come, and often, indeed, anticipating in its size and ambitious design a somewhat distant future. Many churches will be seen, in a journey through the country, only half-built, and constructed of rude clay bricks, which it is hoped some day to cover over with cement, their window spaces filled with sheets of tin, that some day may glow with coloured glass. In fine, it may be said of the smaller towns of the Camp that none of them yet exists, but all are in the making, and in judging them we must not be too critical, for we are looking only on the first rough sketches, so to speak, and know not what they may become.

When we come to the large provincial centres, such as Rosario, La Plata, Mendoza, Córdoba, Tucumán, Santa Fé, and others of growing importance, we find ourselves contemplating something that is not merely in the initial stages of its existence, but has “arrived.” Between the forlorn little pueblecito, or even towns of some note, such as Dolores in the province of Buenos Ayres, or Mercedes in that of San Luís, and the important cities I have just named, there is even a greater difference than between the familiar commercial centres of the Northern continent and these emporia of the South. Difficult though it is to be perfectly just in comparing towns where one has been no more than a fleeting visitor, with others in which, voluntarily or involuntarily, one may have had to live for some time, I do venture to say that from what I saw of the provincial cities, I can conceive myself at least as happy (if not more so) settled in such a town as Rosario or La Plata, as in Buenos Ayres itself.

Although noted for their travelling propensities, which take so many Argentines to Europe every year, the visitor will be surprised to find how seldom he will meet a native who knows his own country at first hand. It may be safely said that in Buenos Ayres one will meet as many people of native birth who have visited Europe as have been to Rosario, and most certainly far more who have made the overseas trip than have faced the thousand miles railway journey to Tucumán. The Argentine does not know his own country, and he is scarcely to be blamed. A certain widely travelled native used to entertain me with descriptions of his adventures in London and on the Continent, and would grow dithyrambic in his praise of old England’s capital, where, in his opinion, the whole municipal energy and the efforts of the electric railways, tramways, omnibuses, and all branches of public catering, were devoted to making the lot of the foreign visitor as easy and comfortable as possible. Beyond being able to read our language in an elementary way, he had no command of it, but, armed with one of the multitudinous maps of the “Underground,” and following the arrows which so lavishly decorate the station walls and the insides of the trains that burrow by devious paths through London’s mighty molehill, he felt perfectly happy and never at a loss how to make his way about. Patriot though he was, London and Paris and the great cities of Europe had more to teach him than any of his own, and knowing, as he did, each Argentine city is more or less a replica of another, while the country possesses no scenes of natural beauty within easy reach of the capital, he was content to take his educational trips abroad and leave the seeing of his native land, if ever, to a later time, when there might be better reward for the pains.