Читать книгу The real Argentine: Notes and Impressions of a Year in the Argentine and Uruguay - J. A. Hammerton - Страница 7

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Our ship’s doctor, with whom I had passed many agreeable hours, and whose efforts to practise the Spanish speech added not a little to the gaiety of our voyage, was a plain-spoken young man, who assured me, when he heard I was bound for Buenos Ayres, that I was going to “the rottenest place in South America.” This was a blow that struck my puffed-up admiration of the place under the belt. I had read in the papers before leaving London that no fewer than fifteen stowaways from Glasgow had reached the sunshine city of the River Plate on a merchant liner, and of these thirteen were discovered on the same vessel when it was making its homeward trip. Now, Glasgow is noted for its rain, but it had rained in such an appalling manner all the time the vessel was discharging and loading at Buenos Ayres that these sodden thirteen were homesick for the milder rains that wash their native haunts! Doubtless, if the truth were known, the other two had stowed away too much of the vile liquid sold as “Eskotsh weeskee” in Buenos Ayres to be able to stow themselves away a second time, and remained to swell the ranks of the Scotch and Irish rascals who pester their fellow-countrymen for alms in Florida and San Martín—the streets where most of the Britishers may be encountered.

But I had made light of both the doctor’s dictum and the experience of the Glasgow stowaways. Nobody, nothing, was to rob me of my ideal city on the Silver River!

The dirty porter who conveyed our hand-bags to a dirtier coche, with a driver in the full regalia of “hobo” and two horses that ought to have been taken straightway to the knacker’s yard, did his best to rob me of five pesos (value $2.10) for a task which would have been well paid at a dime or a quarter and the money gratefully received. I had given him one peso only (42 cts.) and so loudly and volubly did he denounce me for a “mean, dirty German,” that I gave him one more for peace, and the sorry nags were whipped up and we drove away on our great adventure.

The coach, typical of many I was to see and not greatly inferior to scores it was to be my unhappy fate to ride in for many months, was of the “Victoria” style, so pleasantly familiar to the frequenter of Paris; but it was battered and tattered, the splash-boards broken, the mud-encrusted wheels repaired with odd spokes, the upholstering faded and torn, while the sight of the driver in his greasy rags and the poor worn horses with projecting ribs, broken kneed, and raw flesh showing in patches along their scraggy backs, mortified me that in such a manner I should enter the city of my dreams. Yet the description may stand as representative of a considerable percentage of the things then plying for hire in Buenos Ayres. The tattered ruffian on the box-seat lashed the moribund nags so unmercifully that I had to insist on his refraining, but then, and often afterwards, it was clear to me that only by thrashing could the hapless creatures be made to go.

And what a journey! The roadway reminded me of the Chinese saying, that in China the roads are good for ten years and bad for ten thousand. With a briefer history than China’s it may be said of Buenos Ayres that its roads are good for ten days and bad for ten years. We had evidently arrived on the eleventh day! Made of cobble stones, the road was as choppy as the river on a windy day, the tram lines now projecting half a foot above the level, now dipping into baked-mud hollows. Everywhere the cracking of whips, the clanging of bells, the shouting of drivers, the screeching of ungreased axles, and the slipping and straining of sweating horses, harnessed in threes and fours to uncouth and overladen wagons. A scene of brutal ugliness and sordid brute strife that filled one’s mind with horror. We had plunged into the hell of the horse and the mule. It was heart-rending to see the wretched creatures cut and bruised, with open sores and swollen fetlocks, the cruel chain traces at which they were straining often running in grooves which they had cut in the creature’s flesh and ever the relentless whips descending on the suffering backs with stings that would have touched the heart of any man of feeling. But in all that strange, noisy medley of man and brute there was no sign of feeling; nothing but a dull, blear-eyed urge forward. Forward to what? Ah, he were a bold man who answered that. But what I know and assert is that in a hundred thousand miles of world-travel, and observation, I have never witnessed such a scene of brute suffering as I did that autumn morning in our drive from the Dársena Sud, past the Aduana, by the Paseo Colón and the Paseo de Julio to our hotel.

As for my first impressions of the city, I comforted myself with the reflection that the neighbourhood of docks is in all great seaports the least favourable point of view. Everything that met one’s eyes was mean, or makeshift. The shops along the Paseo were of the lowest class; most of the buildings were crumbling plaster shanties. The people trafficking in them were the dredgings of a lower life than one sees in the region of the Bowery—incomparably more villainous in mien. It is true that the gardens, which adorn the Paseo Colón and the Paseo de Julio and make these appear (in a photograph) one of the pleasantest thoroughfares in all the world (the one is a continuation of the other), looked beautiful, yet none but foul Italians and Semitic scum were to be seen walking there.

It would be all right when we got into the city itself, for had we not feasted our eyes times out of number on alluring pictures of the imposing buildings of this wonder city sent broadcast to the ends of earth by official propagandists? A huge pink-painted plaster building, with the “sham” flaking off in places, showed its spacious back to the green palm-dotted gardens of the Paseo. Was it—could it be?—the famous Casa Rosada, the official home of the president? It was. A little cold shiver zig-zagged down my back, and I ticked off in my mind the Casa Rosada as one of my dream pictures of Buenos Ayres that had not come true.

Presently, up a side-street, crowded with struggling wagons, coaches and clamorous tram-cars, where small buildings were being torn down and large steel-frame ones were being stuck up, we came to our hotel.

The roadway in front was so narrow, the traffic so insistent, and the tramways so continuous, that the mere act of stopping our coach for a minute blocked the whole ill-regulated, restless mass. Nor in the hotel did we find peace. It was in the hands of repairers, who, as we afterwards learned, had been repairing it for three years, and in all that time did no more than could have been achieved in New York inside of a month. As to the moderation of this statement, not only can I vouch from a careful and intimate study of the work of those blundering incompetents through eight long months of residence there, but I could call a cloud of witnesses, whose fate it was to live through a considerable part of the weary years of alteration, as the discomforts we had to suffer were a frequent topic of the “stayers” in what, with all its faults, was at that time the most comfortable and reasonable hotel in Buenos Ayres. (I hear that it has since been much improved in its appointments.)

In the small and crowded lounge, where we humbly waited for the privilege of securing accommodation, there was a mingling of the coming and the parting guests. The former one could recognise at a glance by their creased clothing, the latter notably chiefly for their bucolic touches. The room was uninviting, the shabby wallpaper in pendulous bulges, mouldy with damp, every item worthy only of a small country hotel. The gentleman in the temporary office, who carried out his duties amidst plasterers’ ladders and plumbers’ tools, was willing to concede us a small room with a bath for twenty-six pesos ($11) per day, including “board” but excluding certain “extras.” The terms would be the same for a stay of one night or for a stay of one year. I accepted with a feeling of disappointment, after discovering that a bedroom and a sitting-room of the most ordinary description were to cost me seventeen dollars per day. And had I to stay again for eight whole months in Buenos Ayres I should most willingly return to the same conditions which at first I regarded with frank contempt. It is a sadder and a wiser man that writes these lines than he who stepped hopefully into the best-recommended hotel in Buenos Ayres that chill morning of autumn.

The window of our room looked upon a street so narrow that, when all the high buildings in process of erection are completed, no faint ray of sun will ever enter it. At the corner immediately opposite stood one of the old single-story structures of the colonial type, which in the centre of the city are giving way to the multi-storied edifices of steel and concrete. This old shanty-like building was a centre of swarming life—Turks, Greeks, Swedes, Syrians, Italians, in short, the off-scourings of all nations, were to be our neighbours, and their babel of tongues sounded from the little drinking den into which our window looked as though the brawlers were in the hotel itself. A nice quiet neighbourhood! Being so near the corner, we had the advantage of two sets of tramways, and with the windows open it was almost necessary to use a megaphone to make one’s voice heard in the bedroom. The narrow streets intensified all noises to an extraordinary degree. Bedlam must be peaceful compared to that corner—and that is but one of thousands similar.

“We must clear out of here as soon as possible,” said my wife. But a woman’s “must” dwindles into the meekest acquiescence when pitted against the “must” of Buenos Ayres. “There must be quieter places in the centre of the town, away from these cramped and crowded back streets,” she opined. Alas, there are no back streets in Buenos Ayres. Or rather, there are few other.

As soon as possible I went forth to find the great open avenues where, perchance, I could move at my ease and enjoy the spectacle of the myriad life of the great metropolis. I half hoped that we had entered the hotel by a back door and would find on turning the corner that it had a noble frontage to some spacious street. Vain hope of a “Gringo”—as the native dubs the foreigner in South America. I found myself in a buzzing thoroughfare, where there were no tramways, but where coaches and motor cars were dashing along in the most reckless manner and with quite superfluous speed, as at nearly every corner they had to pull up suddenly in muddled mobs to allow the streaming traffic of the cross-streets to pass. The street was lined with splendid shops, many displaying the most luxurious articles of furniture, jewellery, or wearing apparel, and reminding one of London’s Bond Street. It was about the width of Wall Street, New York City. It was the Calle Florida, the very core and pride of Buenos Ayres!

The Changing Heart of Buenos Ayres.

Plaza de Mayo, looking westward along the Avenida towards Congreso. The appearance of this square has recently been modified, and two great diagonal avenues are now in construction, the one starting from the right-hand corner of the square and running northwest, the other from the left-hand corner southwestward.

As I went along, stepping off the narrow sidewalk every few yards to pass any two people inconsiderate enough to walk side by side, I recalled the one spark of wit I had heard from a youth of the “Rube” variety who had been a shipmate of ours. We were having dinner on board the river steamer and had reached the fifth or sixth course of the weirdest mixtures, when he said, “I wonder when they are going to bring us something to eat.” In all these thoroughfares, I wondered when I was going to find a street. I had heard much of the famous Avenida. That at least would not disappoint me.

The sun was now strong and the temperature must have risen fifteen or twenty degrees since the bitterly cold morning. Horses were sweating and giving off an offensive odour—the result, I fancy, of their “alfalfa” feeding—and were covered with a thick white lather along the parts of their bodies where the harness rubbed. I, too, was perspiring, though I was conscious of a brisk buoyancy in the air, as I continued southwards towards the Avenida.

Near the end of Florida, I noticed among the throng an acquaintance of mine who lives a few streets from me and whom I had not seen at home for more than two years. He was only on a short visit to the country, but I was soon to find that New Yorkers and Londoners who have business anywhere in Argentina and may never see each other for years at home are certain to meet in Calle Florida, which is a sort of funnel through which the whole stream of Argentine traffic must pass.

The Avenida at last! Except where the narrow cross-streets debouched into it, every inch of the splendid roadway was boarded up and only the sidewalks, crowded with jostling humanity, remained. They were then making the underground railway from the Plaza Mayo to the Estacion Once. In this state for many months it continued, an eyesore and a source of illimitable dust and dirt to all the centre of the city. No more than a scrap of the dome of Congress, away to the west, was visible above the earthworks and barricades, while the Plaza Mayo, with the historic Independence Monument, was a scene of shapeless confusion.

I ventured along Maipú, where the ceaseless rattle of traffic is surely more disturbing than the battle whence it takes its name could have been. Longing for a quiet corner to rest, I regained my hotel, where my wife reminded me of a certain old Scotswoman who came to visit her daughter in London and was taken to Westminster Abbey. She had got as far as the choir and stood looking quietly at the massy columns and noble spring of the arches, the iridescent beauty of the windows, before she spoke, and then she said: “Weel, do ye ken, Jeenie, I’m awfu’ disappointed!”

The afternoon was unpleasantly hot and enervating, but the evening was cool with a fresh and pleasant breeze. We were in a Latin city—the Paris of South America, we had heard it called—we were both lovers of Paris, my wife and I; so we sauntered out after dinner to take our ease at “some café, somewhere, in one of the squares.” But all seemed dead. A mere handful of stragglers in Florida; in the Avenida a few soft-hatted loungers, who stared at my wife with rude animal interest; no café anywhere in any square, where we were tempted to linger for a moment. So a coche rattled us back as quickly as possible to the already friendly hotel, going by way of Esmeralda and Corrientes, where the bright exteriors of some cinemas and other places of amusement punctuated the dulness with points of brightness.

It was no later than half-past nine, and we thought once more of that old Scotswoman in Westminster Abbey.