Читать книгу The real Argentine: Notes and Impressions of a Year in the Argentine and Uruguay - J. A. Hammerton - Страница 9

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What fascinated me most in the streets of this motley town were the bookshops. Who says there is no culture in Buenos Ayres has to reckon with the evidence of these, for London itself has no more than you might count on the fingers of one hand that excel the librerías of the Argentine capital. Many pleasant hours have I passed inspecting their wonderfully varied stocks of books from all the countries of Europe where the art of printing flourishes, as well as from North and South America. In proportion to their populations, Buenos Ayres excels New York in the number and character of its bookshops.

It was very encouraging to a literary worker to note how every country has sent of its best (though Spain also of its worst) to keep alive the taste for letters in those whom the eternal quest for the elusive dollar has taken to far-away Argentina. There are many German bookshops, stocked with wonderful collections of the classic literature of the Fatherland and the latest works of its indefatigable authors of to-day in every branch of thought and activity. Several admirable French shops there are of which the same may be said; a few Italians—extremely few in proportion to the vast Italian population—and several well-known British shops, where cheap English and American fiction unfortunately outnumbers the books of serious value, though practically no new book of real note that saw the light in England or North America did not have at least a brief showing on the shelves of the British bookshops during my stay. There is even a bookshop where the strange literary products of the Turk and the Syrian are sold to the oriental community.

But the native bookshops have nothing to learn from the foreigners, unless it be a better taste in displaying their wares, which are usually thrown into the window with all the abandon of a country store. In point of variety, they are as richly stocked as any of their colleagues overseas, and it is clear from the most casual examination of their shelves that all the principal French and German publishers are vieing with each other in catering for this rich and ready market of golden South America. I could fill pages with lists of “libraries” which are being produced specially for Latin America (but chiefly for Buenos Ayres) by famous Continental houses, who publish Spanish translations of all their important new books, as well as of a bewildering number of old books that first found popularity in French or German. Spanish publishers lack enterprise, hence Buenos Ayres, where printing is excessively costly and is used almost exclusively for business propaganda, has to get its most worthy Spanish books by way of France or Germany.

I have said Spain also sends of its worst. Most of the trash comes from Barcelona and Madrid houses. It consists chiefly of atrocious translations of English and American detective tales of the crudest “penny blood” variety, badly printed, and stitched within a gaudy and often well-done coloured wrapper, with some preposterously sensational picture thereon. These are sold, not at a penny, but at fourpence (twenty centavos) and are read by young and old alike. There are many shops that show nothing in their windows but this gutter literature, while the kiosks on the Avenida—pale and shabby ghosts of the delightful Paris kiosks these!—are stocked with them, and also with translations of the pornographic French books which the shameless shopmen of the Palais Royal display for the concupiscent foreigner.

Of old bookshops, alas, there are none. To the literary man, a city without its dusty haunts of the bookworm lacks something that all the loads of “latest books” cannot quite replace. Old books there are to be found in the general bookshops, and they are usually offered at prices so excessive that when I set about the formation of a library of South American works, I was eventually forced to discontinue buying any but the most essential, as they are to be picked up in Paris at a fifth the price and with much less searching. I also found that I could secure in London more and better photographs of Buenos Ayres than in the city itself, and at less cost! One day, requiring urgently a photo of a certain aspect of the statue of San Martín, I had all the likely shops and photographers searched in vain, yet in London I could have got it immediately.

The English booksellers (who, of course, also cater for the small North American “colony”) have the habit of hanging out a notice when the English or North American mail has come to hand with its load of new books and the latest periodicals. And once a week the exiles from Old England or from the United States must feel a quickening of the pulse when they see the announcement in good bold letters “MAIL DAY” or “MAIL ARRIVED” at the doors of these thriving bookshops in the Calle Cangallo. But perhaps a time may come to the exile when his pulse is so scant of home-fed blood that he notes these signs with a dim unseeing eye and feels no flush of the old love for his native land arise in him.

If horseshoes brought luck, every exile might be a millionaire, for nowhere have I seen so many cast shoes in the streets. You could wager on filling a cart with them in one day! The workmanship of the smiths is evidently so crude or so little care is taken of the horses that their shoes are allowed to loosen and fall off without any serious attempt to preserve them. Whatever the reason, they are in all the streets like “common objects of the seashore.” But the electric bulb is to Buenos Ayres as the seaweed or the limpet to a rocky shore. Except along Broadway, no New Yorker ever looks on such prodigality of electric lamps. All the public buildings are permanently outlined with them, so often have they to use them on anniversaries or centenaries; for the Argentine dearly loves to celebrate the centenary of any old forgotten “battle” in his glorious history and the anniversaries of all the “epoch-making” events and great men’s birthdays, by illuminating his public buildings and getting some great living Argentine to declaim a type-written speech to an assembly of distinguidos. Even the Cathedral is garlanded with rows of electric bulbs, so that it may take its part with the public buildings and the retail shops in these extremely frequent electrical celebrations. No wonder the electricians love Buenos Ayres! And very beautiful is the city with its millions of little coloured lamps aglow. I saw it many times thus in eight months; but could have wished for some novelty after the fifth or sixth time.

While electricity is comparatively cheap, and the supply of glass lamps evidently inexhaustible, the plate-glass used for lighting underground warehouses from the sidewalk is evidently at a premium, as I noticed that whenever one of these pavement lights was broken it was not replaced by a piece of thick glass, but by wood covered with a layer of cement!

The Colón Theatre, Buenos Ayres.

A general view of this fine cement-covered building, where a short season of State-aided Opera is given each year.

Having thus far dealt with the streets of Buenos Ayres in general terms, let me now glance at certain of the more famous thoroughfares in particular. Florida must naturally come first, for Florida is a microcosm of Buenos Ayres. It is a tramless street, in so far as the electricos only cross it at every 150 yards. It is, moreover, a “two ways” street, traffic being allowed to pass along it in both directions. It is, as I have already indicated, an extremely narrow street. But it is the great highway of the city; its peculiar pride and joy. There throbs the great heart of el gran pueblo Argentino. On a dry day the motors churn up the dust and line the broken asphalt roadway with long tracks of oil, on which the horses “slither” and fall. On a moist day the dust is converted into a pasty coating, which makes progress on sidewalk or roadway a peril to quadrupeds and bipeds alike. On a really wet day—and often it rains in torrents for days on end—the windows of all the shops become obscured with mud and pedestrians are bespattered from head to heels. The habit of wearing waterproofs with hoods, which they flap over their hats, gives a curious aspect to the men on wet days. I had been told in London that the Anglo-Saxon was spotted in Buenos Ayres by his umbrella. My experience was that the first things a newcomer bought in the month of May or June were a waterproof and an umbrella, and it was comic to see the poor Italian and Spanish immigrants disembarking, each clutching a real old “gamp,” for which he was to find abundant use. The coches, being built for fair weather, offer little protection when it rains, a crude apron of leather being stretched in front of the “fare,” but leaving his head and shoulders exposed to the deluge. Yet one is lucky indeed to secure so much protection on a rainy night, and often have I had to walk to my quarters in the drenching rain after shivering for half an hour in a doorway in the vain hope of getting some condescending cochero to accept my patronage. At other times, when I have secured a coach, I have regretted I have not boldly footed it in the rain, as there would be a painful interlude on the journey while the driver struggled to raise up his fallen steeds. They tumble about on the slippery streets like beginners in a skating rink.

But let us look at Florida when the sun is shining. Its shops are full of interest to the curious. The jewellers are especially numerous, and vie with the best in London or Paris. And their contents are of the most beautiful, for the Argentines have taste in jewellery, even though they are inclined to display it with almost barbaric opulence. The furniture shops are equally prodigal in beautiful and unique wares, with perhaps too marked a tendency to the art nouveau, which has not yet grown old in Buenos Ayres. Comfortable chairs, luxurious lounges, no—their preference is for “style” rather than comfort. The milliners and modistas display the most tempting hats—I have seen one ticketed at 500 pesos—and dresses which are the last word in Parisian ingenuity. They have also a childish delight in grouping life-sized and very lifelike female figures arranged in these vanities in their windows. A waxen lady displaying her startling corsets and snowy underwear has a peculiar fascination not only for the women, but even for the men. One evening I overheard a little ragged urchin, who was standing before such a revelation, pressing his hands across his heart, like Caruso in a love scene, exclaiming to the wax idol of his adoration, “Ah, mi querida señorita!” They begin young in Buenos Ayres!

Florida is so much a Vanity Fair that the shops devoted to the more sober necessities of life seem out of place. Some of these still present a “Wild West” aspect in the motley assortment of their wares, cooking ranges, oil stoves, baths, cork-screws, infants’ foods, boots, bedsteads, and travelling trunks being mingled together in pleasing disorder. But such establishments are gradually being elbowed out by the pompous jeweller, the pianoforte-seller, whose chief business is in pianolas and musical boxes—crowds will stand around a shop door to listen to a musical box at work or an automatic organ, in the evening when the street has been closed to wheeled traffic—the furrier, the high-class stationer, the modista, the chemist, and the optician. Nowhere will you find such opticians. It may be that the syphilitic condition of the South American blood is responsible for the myopia of the Argentines, or it may be no more than a fashion, like the monocle with a certain type of Englishman; but the use of glasses is widespread. There is one establishment in Florida which is a veritable palace of optical appliances, employing many scores of assistants. A considerable part of this business is also associated with land-surveying and the most expensive instruments of that science may be seen for sale in many shop windows in Florida. A peculiarity of Buenos Ayres (and Montevideo also) is the public display of surgical appliances. Brilliantly lighted windows present you with the latest things in operating tables, glass service stands for the instruments, and all sorts of uncanny inventions for cutting you up.

The craftsmen of Florence send much of their marble handiwork to Florida, and some of the art shops are stocked with beautiful statues and bronzes, while every variety of gorgeous inkstands may be seen in them. The inkstand is an important item of the chic Argentine home. But the taste for graphic art is still undeveloped, and the pictures offered for sale compare very unfavourably with the sculptures. I recall in particular a hideous daub, which was alleged to represent two or three members of a certain familia distinguida (any family that can pay its way and afford a seat at the Opera is so described), being the centre of admiration in a Florida shop window for some days, while the newspapers gave reproductions of it. In London or Paris no art-dealer would have allowed it to be seen on his premises.

As I have already indicated, Florida has every day a brief surcease from the battle of motors and coaches. From four o’clock until seven no vehicles are allowed to pass along it, and only at the crossings is there any traffic. These are the hours of the evening paseo. Ladies and children are now at liberty to saunter along the pavements or in the roadway, while the gilded youth of the town struts by and gazes at them, or more often stands in stolid rows and admires. The ladies are perhaps a trifle too well dressed and the children mostly over-dressed. But this is their “life.” This paseo is what they live for, so they strive to appear at their best and to display their possessions of silks and satins, while the jovenes distinguidos have all had their boots polished to the nth degree just before they came into the street. And the scene is undeniably enchanting, when the electric lights blaze out. There are hundreds of projecting shops-signs, in which changing electric lights are now revealed and now occluded, and the great warehouses are all illuminated as though it were another centenario, news vendors are calling La Razon, El Diario, Caras y Caretas, or Fray Mocho, and the whole has the atmosphere of some brilliant bazaar, rather than of the highway of a great city. It is a feast of light, but not of gaiety, for the Argentines are not given to joyousness and are strangely lacking in humour; everybody is frightfully formal and all are obviously conscious of being well dressed. It is Vanity Fair with the fun left out!

Towards the river, the street of San Martín (inescapable national hero who pursues you everywhere in statue, in street and place-name, in “cocktails,” in every conceivable connection) runs parallel to Florida but bears no resemblance to it except in being equally narrow. It is essentially an earnest business thoroughfare, lined with many fine office buildings, and choking perpetually with traffic. But, by the way, many of these business buildings that look so “up-to-date” from the outside are antiquated within. It is a fact that up to so recently as a year ago builders were in the habit of erecting large tenements which they well knew would be utilised for nothing but offices, yet they built them deliberately for “flats,” or departamentos, as these are called, fitting each with its kitchen and bathroom and disposing the apartments as for bedrooms and salons. Thus you will find to-day hundreds of business firms using such modern flats as offices,—in some cases the bathrooms remaining, in others converted into “enquiry office,” or the like,—all extremely uncomfortable in conditions entirely foreign to their requirements. But San Martín contains several imposing blocks of real office buildings and will presently contain more, for the builders are busy here, as everywhere else, with their work of transformation. A friend of mine, when I called on him at the beginning of May, 1913, had just received notice to quit, by the demolishers arriving and starting to unroof his office! That was his first intimation that the landlord purposed clearing away his old property and putting up a great new business building. Argentine methods are not ours.

One “square” nearer the river runs Reconquista, dignified by the presence of the principal bank buildings, many of which are real ornaments of the town and all suggest a sense of opulence and financial solidity it would be hard to match even in New York or London. Yet the best of them, the richest and the most substantial, are no more than the branches of the Tree of English Gold which has its roots deep-struck in London City. It is a street of all nations this Reconquista. England, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, and the rest have their banking houses here, and there is no more encouraging sight in this remorseless city than to witness the many ill-clad Spanish and Italian labourers going through the long and intricate operation of sending drafts home to those they have left in the old country. Many hundreds have I seen with eager, straining faces, scanning the pink or green slips of paper that would mean so much to some one far away in Lombardy or in Catalonia, and represented so much of the sweat of his brow to the poor sender.

The practice of keeping a bank account is very general, even among the labouring classes, as the poor peon has nowhere to hide his little hoard, living as he does in the most shameful conditions, where a square yard of living-room is more costly than a cottage would be in his native village, and among people who do not hesitate at murder to gain a few pitiful pesos. Thus you will often see a lean and hungry labourer, dressed no better than an English tramp, scrutinising his bank book in the corridor of one of the great banking houses, and the sight is a strange one to English eyes. Turks, Polish Jews, Norwegians, Russians, Cingalese, Swedes, Armenians, all the nations of the world are represented daily in the teeming throngs that flock to the banks in Reconquista, where the innumerable clerks are puffing steadily at cigarettes and attending to their clients with a charming ease that has in it a pleasant suggestion of eternity. For the simplest banking operation will eat away twenty minutes of your time, as your account is balanced whenever you withdraw or lodge any sum, and to secure a draft on London at ninety days, calls for the patience of Job and three-quarters of an hour. Much of this formality is the result of the system of issuing open checks, which makes swindling delightfully simple, and the bank always stands to lose, as there is extreme difficulty in bringing a swindler to book.

The last of the narrow streets riverward is Calle 25 de Mayo, so called from the day in the year 1810 when the movement for Independence began, although the actual date of the Declaration of Independence is 9th July, 1816. They have a curious habit of thinking in dates in Latin countries. Both Paris and Rome give us examples of famous dates as street names, but in South America dates are honoured to a degree that is comic. One of my friends in Montevideo has an office in 25 de Mayo, a show-room in 18 de Julio, and warehouses in 21 de Agosto and in 15 de Octubre! By some odd chance he always found what he needed most in one of the streets named after Uruguay’s historic dates. There was another such, 1 de Mayo, but it offered him no accommodation else he should have taken premises there also, just to complete the series. Calle 25 de Mayo in Buenos Ayres has long been one of the degenerate parts of the town, entirely unworthy of the historic event it commemorates. But it is being gradually reformed and may yet take on an aspect of decency. Near the Plaza de Mayo it contains some fine new buildings, but westward it is still the haunt of undesirables, although the English pro-cathedral stands there, a plain and not undignified structure with which I made no close acquaintance.

Exterior of the Jockey Club, Buenos Ayres.

A good photograph of this famous building cannot be made, the street being too narrow to admit of focus, even from the upper storeys opposite. In the right bottom corner part of a window-sill, or ledge of roof, on the opposite side of the street, appears in this photograph.

From 25 de Mayo the ground falls quickly, to the Paseo de Julio, the former street occupying the level of what, no doubt, was long ago the bank of the river. This is the only semblance of a hill in all the district. Inland for leagues, the city lies flat as the proverbial pancake, while below towards the river, the Paseo and the gardens beyond, with the buildings of the port in the further distance, occupy a lower level of land reclaimed from the river. If anybody wants an enemy “put out of the way” for a matter of twenty dollars or so, he will have no difficulty in finding a villain ready for the job somewhere along the arcaded haunts of the Paseo. In one respect the Paseo de Julio resembles Princess Street, Edinburgh, which, as the Irishman said, “is no more than half a strate, as it has only one side to it.” The Paseo has only one side to it, and it is a bad one. The second stories of the buildings that stand between the Paseo and 25 de Mayo are on the road level of the higher street. Thus it might be possible, for aught I know, to enter one of the low dens on the Paseo and mounting two or three floors within its evil and mysterious interior, emerge on the level of 25 de Mayo. The lower stories of these buildings on the Paseo side are arcaded, and these arcades are the haunt of “all things perverse, abominable.” According to the local press, after nightfall no man dare appear there wearing a collar, and any one who requires the aid of eye-glasses must not venture thither. Often have I wandered among the stinking peones and cosmopolitan criminals who throng the arcades by day, but I know not the Paseo by night. The shops are kept by all sorts of cheap clothiers, general dealers, and many cutlers, whose windows are exclusively given over to the display of long knives or daggers. Probably sixty per cent. of the frequenters of the arcades carry one of these dirks, like the old Scottish Highlander, and the other forty per cent. are armed with revolvers, of which hundreds are exposed for sale in the arcades. There is no lack of “cheap Jacks” with “special lines” to clear at a sacrifice. There are many filthy looking restaurants and provision shops; and more librerías, which expose nothing but the filth of the Continental press translated into Spanish and Italian. If you look at one of their windows for a minute, out pops the greasy owner, spiderlike, to enquire if by any chance you would like to inspect his more secret stock of fotografías muy curiosas, while youths will thrust under your nose an envelope of obscene photographs, with a particularly offensive one exposed. The whole atmosphere is vile. The cinematographs and raree shows that also abound in these arcades may be no more pernicious than many in the Bowery, but that is a matter on which no decent visitor can speak, as none such could risk the contamination of entering therein. It is a male crowd that is always circulating in the Paseo. Never have I seen a decent woman there, and indeed no more than a half-a-dozen hatless sluts are ever to be noticed under its arcades.

This abomination must pass. It exists merely because landowners have preferred to hold their old rotten properties, and allow them to be used by the scum of the population, until such time as it would pay them to sell out. The transformation has already begun; the pestiferous old buildings are giving way to modern ones, devoted to cleaner purposes. Some day the haunts of the criminals may be utterly wiped out and the Paseo de Julio become, what it might well be, one of the pleasantest thoroughfares of a great city.

Up the little hill from the Paseo, one gains the Plaza de Mayo, whence stretches for a mile and a half in the most approved Haussmannesque straightness the Avenida de Mayo, ending in the massive palace of Congreso. Lined with many handsome buildings, of six, eight, or even a dozen stories, whose shadows are falling athwart the broad and teeming roadway, while the westering sun is making iridescent the white marbles of the great domed Congreso in the far distance, here in the new land of South America is at least one fine city highway that may hold up its head among the world’s best. There is a suggestion of a Paris boulevard in the Avenida; a suggestion of form, but assuredly not of life nor of “atmosphere.” And there the rivalry between the two great Latin cities begins and ends!

The great Avenida Callao runs at right angles with the Avenida de Mayo from the Plaza Congreso. It is badly paved, but contains many attractive buildings of cement. Some day perhaps it may become the central thoroughfare of the city. There are those who believe it will, but in my judgment it will call for a greater revolution than they have ever known in Argentina to shift the centre of gravity from the Calles Maipú, Florida, and San Martín to Callao. Between Florida and Callao there are eleven parallel streets. All are incessantly busy from early morning till nightfall, while Maipú, Esmeralda, and Suipacha, in the order given parallel to Florida, are busy even through the night. All sorts of shops abound in these thoroughfares and business offices innumerable, as well as many places of entertainment, restaurants, and cafés. But, apart from Florida, all these streets that lie to the north of the Avenida de Mayo are so characterless that after many years of residence it would puzzle even those with an abnormal “bump of locality” to say in which street they found themselves if they stepped from a cab in any one of them without having noted some landmark on the way. In the suburbs it is even more difficult to realise at a glance where you may happen to be, and the policeman often cannot tell you the name of the street he is patrolling. I remember asking a policeman in a street near the Plaza Libertad for Frank Brown’s Circus (Brown is an American or an Englishman who has made and lost fortunes in circuses throughout South America). “Oh,” said he, “you are going the wrong way. It is at the corner of Florida and Córdoba.” Now, I knew that some eighteen months or two years before it had stood there, but was deliberately burned to the ground by the jingo youths of the city, who were offended by some quite innocent action of the unfortunate Brown. This policeman, some eight or ten squares away from the scene, had not yet heard the news, and meanwhile a magnificent pile of ferro-concrete architecture, the Centro Naval, had been reared on the spot! I found the new circus by describing to another policeman, who at first denied all knowledge of it, a big building to which thousands of people had been flocking for two or three nights past. Then a light dawned on his Indo-Spanish soul. “Entonces, señor,” said he, “se encuentra sin duda, a la esquina de esta misma calle, porque se ha concurrida mucha gente, por alla, estas ultimas noches.” It was even so, three squares away at the corner of the street in which I had speech with the policeman, I found the circus.

There is no end to what I might write about the streets of Buenos Ayres, but there must be speedily, if not already, to the interest of the reader. I who have tramped them, in fair weather and in foul, on busy week days and on the deadest of dull dead Sundays, mile upon mile, seeking for interest and finding but little, now discover many forgotten impressions coming up on the films of the mind, which, so to say, I have been putting into the developer, and though these amuse me, I doubt if they would equally entertain others.