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

by J. A. Hammerton

Thus it might have been supposed we were in for an agreeable change from our experiences on the other side of the river. Resembling a quiet backwater to the great turbulent main stream in comparison with its mighty commercial neighbour, one might have expected here in Montevideo to find quiet. Certainly, in some of its suburban districts, such a search would not be fruitless, but the restfulness once secured would only coexist with dulness, and after all it were thus a choice of evils. In any case, it better suited my affairs that we should live in the centre of the town, where, indeed, dwellings of all kinds mingle familiarly with shops and warehouses. How we fared at our hotel may be gathered from the following passages, with which I find I began an essay on a literary subject while living in the town:

I have left my room with the turret window that overlooked the pleasant Plaza Matriz. It was perfectly planned for the meditative life, and but for the vileness of man and the supineness of the municipal authorities one could have passed some months tolerably there, looking out upon the panorama of Montevidean life and setting one’s thoughts on paper when the mood came. But the men who drive motor cars in this far land are the vilest of the breed. The plaza is filled with gorgeous cars that ply for hire, each handled by a rascal who is no better than a highway-robber by day and a beast of prey by night. The law of the town prohibits the use of the “cut out,” or opening of the exhaust pipe of the motor, but no one respects the law, and it is the custom for the demons who drive these cars to keep one foot all the time on the pedal which opens the exhaust! The consequent noise is so appalling that the main streets of Montevideo have become a veritable pandemonium.

Thus bad begins, but worse continues when the hour has passed midnight. The endless stream of electric “trams” with hideous clanging of superfluously clamorous bells goes on till two, mingled with every variety of motor noises; then between two and four the motorists delight to “test” their engines, running round the plaza with open exhausts! Sleep is impossible, especially when you add a temperature anywhere between 80 and 90, and mosquitoes buzzing through your room athirst for your blood.

So we are no longer tenants of “the room with a view.” After some weeks of suffering bravely borne, we have fled the hotel and are now living seaward in the Calle Sarandí, where there is no view by day and few motors by night, and where the noise of the electricos only keeps one awake until two in the morning. How soon one becomes thankful for small mercies in lands of little comfort!

But after all we were lucky in Montevideo, for by some providential arrangement it was decided to remake the principal streets of the city, relaying them with asphalt, and this involved the upsetting of the whole elaborate tramway system, whereby certain streets were for several months debarred the privilege of the electricos. Sarandí, where we had settled ourselves very comfortably in the home of a foreign consul, was thus, after our first few weeks, deprived of its tram-cars, and except during the time of Carnival, our surroundings there were as quiet as in a country village. Not until within a few days of the end of our stay of nearly five months did the cars begin again.

Montevideo, like most of the South American cities in which it has been my lot to linger for a time, seems to me to be greatly “over-trammed.” There is hardly a street along which tram-cars do not rattle at all hours of the day and night, and how they pay is to me something of a mystery, for they may be seen in streams going their noisy rounds, empty or with a mere handful of passengers. Many a time have I seen a half-dozen pass along at intervals of fifty yards, and the total passengers carried would be two or three negroes and a sleeping Italian. One street in particular, the Calle Rincón, where we narrowly escaped the calamity of renting rooms, is probably, for its length, without an equal in any city for the quantity of cars that pass through it per hour. It is a short and narrow street, and I doubt if at any moment of the day, from four or five in the morning till two the next morning, while the electric cars are running, Rincón can be seen without one. At times I have counted fifteen or sixteen, with only a few yards between each, and yet foot passengers in this street, as in most of the highways and byways of the city, are few.

The tramway system is curiously arranged, and while grossly oversupplying the business part of the town, undersupplies the farther suburbs. Imagine the aforesaid peninsula on which the older part of the city stands, as the handle of a fan, and all the outspread part of the fan as the remainder of the city, every rib extending from the handle as a tramline, and there you have very roughly a map of the Montevideo system. Picture, then, how congested the handle becomes as the cars rattle inward from all parts of the fan, turn round in the handle, and set forth once more to the outer parts! All the same, I am far from complaining about the service, for once the system is clearly understood, it is found to work admirably, and enables one to reach all parts of the wide-spreading town with comparative ease and at little expense, the regulation fare for a journey of a few hundred yards or two miles being 4 cts.

As I have indicated, there is no lack of public motor cars for hire, but the rate is so excessive that, except for those on holiday bent, it is prohibitive. Personally, I made occasional use of them, though the necessity of paying something like $4 or $5 for a journey of some three or four miles from the Plaza Matriz and back, with a comparatively short wait, added to the reckless manner in which the car would be driven, did not commend them to me for frequent use, while the stony streets made a journey in a coche extremely unpleasant. The native newspapers were continually agitating against the iniquitous charges of the hired motor cars, whose tariff was based upon the cupidity of the highwayman in charge, and what he deemed the limit he might bleed from his victim, the fare. I remember one evening being attracted to a large crowd assembled around one of these cars, and found an Irish porteño from Buenos Ayres in the hands of the police, while his wife and sister-in-law were in a state of great excitement at the possibility of losing that night’s steamer. It appeared that the driver of the car he had hired to take him and the ladies to the landing stage had marked up on the taximeter certain charges warranted by his tariff, but so grossly excessive even to Buenos Ayres ideas, that the porteño immediately protested and would not proceed in the car. He also refused to accept my advice to pay up and catch his boat. I did not linger to see the final issue of the dispute, but the cause of it was typical of many little differences one was to discover which made life in Montevideo considerably more expensive than in Buenos Ayres.

Mention of the police, by the way, reminds me that they are one of the most engaging features of the town to the Gringo. If the authorities had advertised for the most undersized, debilitated and ignorant members of the community that could be found, they could not possibly have excelled the extraordinary collection of miserable humanity, clothed in ill-fitting uniforms, used as sentinels at every other street corner. Many of these police are Indian half-castes or Negro-Indian meztísos. They are wretchedly paid, and seem incapable of all responsibility, as their efforts to direct the traffic are ignored, and were they followed would lead to more confusion than order. Hardly any of them—with helmets two or three sizes too large, their trousers so long that they bag about their boots, over which, by the way, they wear white spats, their ill-fitting coats of blue caught at the waist with a belt, from which depends a sword—is sufficiently educated to write his name.

There are two classes in the service, however, the superior policeman, with sufficient education to write a report of any occurrence and exercise authority, being mounted, and when anything happens, the mannikin at the corner blows his whistle (which he uses to the disturbance of the town at frequent intervals through the day and night, merely to advertise that he is still at his corner) and presently, answering the call, along clatters on horseback one of the superior class, presumably competent to deal with the case. On the whole, the police service struck me as inferior to that of Buenos Ayres, and I imagine that, shameful though the wages of the Buenos Ayres police may be, those of the lower class in Montevideo must be still less. Yet these policemen are regarded as so much fighting material for the Government, and it used to be the practice, on the outbreak of a revolution, to send forward the police as the first objects (objects, indeed, they are!) to be fired at by the revolutionaries. The organisation is a quasi-military one, and so fond do some of the agentes appear to be of saluting, that every time I crossed the Plaza Zabala, I had to undergo the ordeal of receiving a full military salute from the elderly policeman at the corner of one of the streets converging on that square, so that to avoid this attention I frequently chose another route.