Working north from Patagonia : being the narrative of a journey, earned on the way, through southern and eastern South America

Front matter

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Foreword

Though it stands by itself as a single entity, the present volume is a continuation and the conclusion of a four-year journey through Latin-America, and a companion-piece to my "Vagabonding Down the Andes." The entrance of the United States into the World War made it impossible until the present time to continue that narrative from the point where the story above mentioned left it; but though several years have elapsed since the journey herein chronicled was made, the conditions encountered are, with minor exceptions, those which still prevail. South American society moves with far more inertia than our own, and while the war brought a certain new prosperity to parts of that continent and a tendency to become, by force of necessity, somewhat more self-supporting in industry and less dependent upon the outside world for most manufactured necessities, the countries herein visited remain for the most part what they were when the journey was made.

Readers of books of travel have been known to question the wisdom of including foreign words in the text. A certain number of these, however, are almost indispensable ; without them not only would there be a considerable loss in atmosphere, but often only laborious circumlocutions could take their place. Every foreign word in this volume has been included for one of three reasons, because there is no English equivalent ; because the nearest English word would be at best a poor translation ; or because the foreign word is of intrinsic interest, for its origin, its musical cadence, picturesqueness, conciseness, or for some similar cause. In every case its meaning has been given at least the first time it is introduced ; the pronunciation requires little more than giving the Latin value to vowels and enunciating every letter ; and the slight trouble of articulating such terms correctly instead of slurring over them cannot but add to the rhythm, as well as to the understanding, of those sentences in which they occur.

Harry A. Franck.

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I The South American Metropolis 3

II On the Streets of Buenos Aires 24

Chapter I

IN Buenos Aires I became what a local newspaper called "office boy" to the American consul general. The latter had turned out to be a vicarious friend of long standing; his overworked staff was sadly in need of an American assistant familiar with Spanish, the one sent down from Washington months before having been lost in transit. Moreover, being a discerning as well as a kind-hearted man, the consul knew that even a rolling stone requires an occasional handful of moss. The salary was sufficient to sustain life just inside what another consular protege called the "pale of respectability,'' and my duties as "outside man" brought me into daily contact with all classes of Portenos, as natives of what was reputed the most expensive city in the world are known in their own habitat.

Two years of wandering in the Andes and jungles of South America is, in a way, the best possible preparation for a visit to the largest city south of the United States. The man who approaches it from this corridor will experience to the full the astonishment it is almost certain to produce upon an unprepared visitor ; he will be in ideal condition to recognize the urban artificialities which make it so great an antithesis of the rural simplicity of nearly all the southern continent. Like the majority of Americans, I suppose, though I had now and then heard rumors of its increase and improvement, my mental picture of the Argentine capital was as out of date as the spelling "Buenos Ayres" that still persists among even the best of English and American authorities. It was the picture hastily sketched by our school books of not so long ago, and, except in the matter of a few decades of time, it was essentially a true one.

A bare half century back the City of Good Airs had the appearance of a Spanish town of the Middle Ages, and worse. Though it faced the River Plata at a point where it is more than thirty miles wide, it had no real harbor. Travelers landed from ships by first transferring to rowboats far out on the yellow-brown horizon, then to oxcarts driven hub-deep into the shallow, muddy stream. The streets were so innocent of paving that business men often remained at home lest they find it impossible to extricate themselves from the quagmires that masqueraded under the name of calles. Temporary wooden bridgelets were laid across corners from one scanty raised sidewalk to another; at the height of the rainy season even horsemen were sometimes mired in the very heart of town. Men still living tell of a pool in the present bustling Calle Rivadavia about which sentinels had to be posted to keep careless people and their horses from drowning in it. Municipal lighting was unknown. A few public-spirited citizens hung up tallow candles before their houses ; wealthy residents, obliged to make their way through the bottomless night, were attended by menials carrying lanterns. There were neither water pipes nor sewers ; each citizen dug his own well beside his garbage heap. In winter the one-story houses, stretching in solemn yet disordered array down the narrow, reeking streets and built for the most part of sun-baked mud bricks, became slimy, clammy dens in which disease bred and multiplied. The hundred and some thousand inhabitants, mixtures of Spanish adventurers and Indians from the great pampas beyond, had but little contact with the outside world and were correspondingly provincial, conservative and fanatical.

Such was Buenos Aires within the memory of men who do not yet consider themselves old ; such it is still in the average imagination of the outside world. It is with something stronger than surprise, therefore, that the newcomer finds the Argentine capital to-day the largest Spanish-speaking city on the globe, second only to Paris among the Latin cities of the world, equal to Philadelphia in population, resembling Chicago in extent as well as in situation, rivaling New York in many of its metropolitan features, and outdoing every city of our land in some of its civic improvements. Personally, I confess to having wandered its endless streets and gazed upon its unexpected cosmopolitan uproar in a semi-dazed condition for some time after my arrival. It was hard to believe that those miles upon miles of modern wharves, surrounding artificial basins capable of accommodating the largest ships in existence, backed by warehouses that measure their capacity in millions of tons, were situated on the same continent as medieval Quito, that the teeming city behind them was inhabited by the same race that rules languid La Paz and sleepy Asuncion.

The greatness of Buenos Aires has been mainly thrust upon it. Of all the cities of the earth only Chicago grew up with more vertigenous rapidity. The city of to-day has so completely outreached the plans of its unsuspecting founders that it is constantly faced with the problem of modifying existing conditions to meet metropolitan requirements. It was a comparatively simple matter to fill in and pave the old quagmires that posed as streets ; it was quite another thing to widen them to accommodate mo'dern traffic. Laid out by Moorish-influenced Spaniards in a century when the passing of two horsemen constituted the maximum demand for space, the streets of old Buenos Aires are narrower and more congested than the tightest of those at the lower end of Manhattan Island. In most cases the problem has been frankly abandoned, for nothing short of destroying all the buildings on one side or the other of these medieval passageways could improve them. The result is that a walk through what was the entire city fifty years ago, and which is now mainly the business section, is an ordeal or an amusing experience, according to the mood or the haste of the victim.

The Porteno has made various bold attacks upon this problem of congestion. Nearly thirty years ago he hewed his way for a mile and a half through the heart of the old town, destroying hundreds of buildings in his insistence on more space. The result is the Avenida de Mayo, somewhat resembling the boulevards of Paris in the neighborhood of the Opera and stretching from the already old and inadequate Casa Rosada, or presidential palace, to the new congressional building, which resembles and in some ways outdoes in majestic beauty our own national capitol. But this chief artery of down-town travel is, after all, of insignificant length compared with the mammoth Buenos Aires of to-day, and the older flanking street of Rivadavia, once the principal highway to the pampa beyond, cutting the entire city in two from the waterfront to the open plains, is quite incapable of handling the through traffic which refuses to risk itself in the constricted calles of the downtown labyrinth.

Similar heroic treatment has been applied in other parts of the old town. Wherever the stroller wanders he is certain to come out often upon an open space, a little park or a plaza, which has been grubbed out by the bold demolition of a block of houses. I cannot recall another city where parks are anything like as epidemic as they are in Buenos Aires. There is not a point in town out of easy strolling distance of one or more of them, some so tiny that they can be crossed in a hop, skip, and a jump, the largest, aristocratic Palermo, so large that one may wander for hours without crossing the same ground twice.

Buenos Aires is not a city of skyscrapers. Built on a loose soil that is quite the antithesis of the granite hills of Manhattan Island, with unlimited opportunity to spread across the floor-flat plains beyond, it has neither the incentive nor the foundation needed to push its way far aloft. Custom in this respect has crystallized into requirement, and a city ordinance forbids the height of a building to exceed one and one-third the width of the street it faces. The result is that while it has fewer architectural failures, fewer monstrosities in brick and stone, the city on the Plata has nothing that can rival the epic poems among buildings to be found at the mouth of the Hudson. From a distance it looks curiously like one of our own large cities decapitated to an average height of three or four stories, with only here and there an ambitious structure peering timidly above the monotonous general level. Flat and drab are perhaps the two words which most fully describe its general aspect.

On every hand the traveled visitor is reminded of this or that other great city ; it is as if one were visiting a newly laid out botanical garden in which the origin of most of the plants, taken from old established gardens elsewhere, is plainly evident, with only here and there a native shrub or a curious hybrid to emphasize the changed conditions of soil and climate. When one has noted the origin of nearly all its human plants, it is no longer surprising that Buenos Aires seems more a European than an American city. Architecturally it most resembles Paris, with hints of Madrid, London and Rome thrown in, not to mention certain features peculiarly its own. This similarity is the pride of the Portefio and every recognition of it is a compliment, for like nearly all Latin-Americans, he is most enamored of French culture. Not only is he accustomed to refer to his city as the "Paris of South America" — all South American capitals are that to their own people — but he copies more or less directly from the earthly paradise of all good argentinos. The artistic sense of the Latin comes to his aid in this sometimes almost subconscious endeavor; or, if the individual lacks this, there is the guiding hand of the community ever ready to sustain his faltering steps. City ordinances not only forbid the erection of structures which do not fit into the general scheme of a modified Paris, but Buenos Aires rewards those who most successfully carry out its conception of civic improvement. Every year the building adjudged the greatest addition to the city's beauty is awarded a bronze faqadeplate and is relieved for a decade from the burden of taxes.

It would be unreasonable to expect a community with such pride in its personal appearance to permit itself to be disfigured by an elevated railway system. Besides, as it is spread evenly over an immense space of flat country, "B. A.'s" transportation problem is scarcely serious enough to require this concession to civic comfort. Of street-cars in the ordinary sense it has unlimited numbers, plying in every direction ; all they lack is freedom to go their way unhampered in the oldest and busiest section of town. Their one peculiarity, to the American, is that they refuse to be overcrowded. No one may enter a tram-car while its seats are filled ; nine persons, and nine only, may ride on the back platform. If you chance to be the tenth, there is no use insisting that you must ride or miss an important engagement. The car will refuse to move as long as you remain on board, and if there happens to be within call one of the spick-and-span, Britishly imperturbable, New-Yorkly impersonal policemen of Buenos Aires, you will probably regret your insistence. It will be far better to accept your misfortune with Latin courtesy and hail one of the taxis that are forever scurrying past. Or, if even the modest demands of these well-disciplined public carriers are beyond your means, there is the ancient and honorable method of footing it. The chances are that if your destination is anywhere within the congested business section you can walk to it and finish your errand by the time the inexorable street-car would have set you down there.

I lost no time in exploring the luxuries of Buenos Aires' new subway. Only the year before the proud Avenida de Mayo had been disrupted by the upheavals throughout its entire length, and already the "Subterraneo" operated from the Plaza de Mayo behind the Pink House to the Plaza Once, two miles inland and nearly a fifth of the way across the city. Like the surface lines it belongs to the Tranvias Anglo-Argentina, a British corporation, the concession requiring the company to pay the city six per cent, of its gross receipts for fifty years, at the end of which time the subway becomes automatically the property of the municipality. The argentino is fully awake to the advantage and possibility of driving good bargains in the exploitation of public utilities and resources.

The descent to any of the subway stations along the Avenue carries the mind instantly back to Manhattan. The underground scent is the same, news-stands and advertising placards are as inevitable ; along the white-tile-walled platforms are ranged even penny-in-the-slot scales and automatic vendors, though with the familiar plea, "Drop one cent," changed to "Echad 10 ccntavos," which is significant of the difference in cost of most small things in the chief cities of North and South America. Yet the subway fare is a trifle cheaper on the Plata, being the tenth of a peso normally worth barely forty-three cents. One's impression of being back in "Bagdad-on-the-Subway," however, is certain to evaporate by the time he steps out of his first tren subterraneo. The Portcno believes in moving rapidly, but his interpretation of the word hurry is still far different from our own. There are certain forms of courtesy which he will not cast off for the mere matter of stretching his twenty-four hours a few minutes farther; there are certain racial traits of deliberate formality of which he is incapable of ridding himself. Moreover, the "Subterraneo" is British, and it retains the dignified leisureliness of its nationality. One buys a ticket of a man who is intensely aware of the fact that he is engaged in a financial transaction ; at the gate another man solemnly punches the ticket and returns it to the owner, who is warned both by placards and italicized remarks on the ticket itself that he must be constantly prepared instantly to display it to the inspectors who are forever stalking through the cars; where he disembarks, it is solemnly gathered by still another intense employee, who will infallibly make the passenger who has carelessly mislaid the valuable document in question produce another ten-centavo piece and witness the preparation and cancelation of a billetc suplementario before he is granted his freedom. There are no express trains ; the locals are rather far apart ; they cease their labors soon after midnight, and do not begin again until dawn. On the other hand, the cars are roomy, spotless and as comfortable as a club easy-chair; the noisy ringing of bells and slamming of doors by disgruntled guards is lacking; signs to "Prepare yourself to leave the coach before arriving at the station of destination" take the place of any attempt to hustle the crowd. The company loses no courteous opportunity of "recommending to the passenger the greatest rapidity in getting on or off the cars, in order to accelerate the public service," but mere placards mean nothing to the Spanish- American dowager of the old school, who is still inclined to take her osculatory and deliberate farewell of friends and relatives even though the place of parting be the open door of this new-fangled mode of transportation, surrounded by inwardly impatient, but outwardly courtier-like, subway guards and station employees.

Three important railway companies operate five lines to the suburbs, and every evening great commuters' trains, more palatial than the average of those out of our own large cities, rush away into the cool summer night with the majority of "B. A.'s" business men. It is perhaps a misnomer to call the score or more of residence sections suburbs, for they are compactly united into the one great city, of which they constitute fully three fourths the capacity. But each district bears its own name, which often suggests its character and history. Even a total stranger might guess that Belgrano and Flores are rather exclusive dwelling-places ; Coghlan, Villa Malcolm, Villa Mazzini, and Nueva Pompeya recall some of the races that have amalgamated to form the modern Portcno; one would naturally expect to find the municipal slaughter-house and less pleasant living conditions in Nuevo Chicago. In these larger and newer parts of Buenos Aires the broad streets are in striking contrast to the crowded and narrow ones down town. Though the Porteno has inherited the Spaniard's preference for taking his front yard inside the house, neither the sumptuous dwellings of the aristocratic north suburbs nor the more plebeian residences of the west and south have that shut-in air of most Latin- American cities, where the streets slink like outcast curs between long rows of scowling, impersonal house-walls.

The far-flung limits of Buenos Aires inclose many market gardens, and the land side of the city belongs to the backwoods it faces. But the thousands of makeshift shacks which fringe it are not the abode of hopeless mortals, such as inhabit the hovels of less progressive South American towns. The outskirt dwellers of Buenos Aires have the appearance of people who are moving forward, who insist that another year shall find them enjoying something rpore of the advantages of civilization. Indeed, this atmosphere pervades the entire city, bringing out in pitiless contrast the social inertia of the great Andean region. There are fewer slums in Buenos Aires than in New York ; the children of the poorer classes are less oppressive in appearance; beggars are scarcer. Though there is squalor enough, the conventillos, or singlestory tenement-houses of the larger west-coast cities are almost unknown. Economic opportunity has here given birth to new hope and brought with it the energy and productiveness which constitute a great people, and by the time the visitor has wandered with due leisure through the vast length and breadth of Buenos Aires he is likely to conclude that there the Latin is coming into his own again.

Though it is not quite so difficult to find a native argentino in Buenos io WORKING NORTH FROM PATAGONIA

Aires as to run to earth a genuine American in New York, there are many evidences that its growth has come mainly from across the sea. The city is not merely European in its material aspects, but in its human element. The newcomer will look in vain for any costume he cannot find on the streets of Paris or Rome ; the wild gauchos from the pampa, the beggars on horseback, the picturesque Carmelite monks and nuns that troop through the pages of "Amalia" and kindred stories of the past century are as scarce as feather-decked Indians along Broadway. No city of our own land is more completely "citified" than the Argentine capital. Though there has as yet been far less European immigration to the Argentine Republic than to the United States — a mere five million who came to stay up to the beginning of the Great War — a disproportionate number of these have remained in Buenos Aires. Fully half the population of the city is foreign born, with Italians in the majority. The long-drawn vowels and doubled consonants of Italian speech are certain to be heard in every block, though more often as a foreign accent in the local tongue than in the native dialect of the speaker. For the Italian fits more snugly into his environment in the Argentine than in the United States. He finds a language nearly enough like his own to be learned in a few weeks ; there is a Latin atmosphere about the southern republic, particularly its capital, which makes him feel so fully at home that he is much less inclined to segregate than in the colder Anglo-Saxon North. Add to this that the climate is more nearly that of his homeland, that the Argentine welcomes him not merely with five days' free hospitality and transportation to any part of the country, but with the communal abrazo as a fellow-Latin and a near relative, and it is easier to understand why ships from Genoa and Naples are turning more and more southward on their journey across the Atlantic. Were it not for the reversal of the seasons on the two sides of the equator, the Argentine would have a still larger permanent Italian population. But as it is summer and grape-picking time in the boot-leg peninsula when it is winter on the pampas, large numbers of Italians flit back and forth like migratory birds from one harvest to the other, or go to spend the money earned where it is plentiful in the place where it will buy more.

The Castilian lisp also stands out frequently in the sibilant native speech of "B. A." and the boina of the Basques is so common a headdress in the city as to be inconspicuous. After the Spaniard there are French, English, and German residents, decreasing in proportion in the order named, and Americans enough to form a champion baseball

THE SOUTH AMERICAN METROPOLIS n

team. Jews are less ubiquitous than in our own metropolis, but they are numerous enough to support several synagogues and a company of Yiddish players for a season of several weeks, after which the Thespians find new clientele in the larger cities of the interior.

It is surprising to most Americans to find that Buenos Aires is strictly a "white man's town." The one negro I ever saw there was posted before the door of a theater, as an advance attraction. In the country as a whole African blood is scarcer than in Canada ; while the United States has twelve non-Caucasians to the hundred, the Argentine has but five. Nor do there remain any visible remnants of the aborigines, at least in the capital. The caste of color, so intricate and unescapable in the Andes, is completely lacking. Nor are the places of importance in its social structure confined to those of Spanish origin. Along with the Castilian and Basque names that figure in its society and big-business columns are no small number not only Italian and French, but English, Baltic, and Slavic, some of them more or less Spanicized by long Argentine residence. As in Chile there is a little aristocracy of third or fourth generation Irish, retaining the original spelling of their family names, but pronouncing them "O-co-nor," "Kel-yee," "O-bree-en" and the like. It was an ordinary experience in running consular errands in Buenos Aires to come across business men with English or Irish names who spoke only Spanish, or men who spoke English with both an Irish brogue and a Spanish accent and accompanied their remarks with a wealth of Latin gesticulation.

To say that these transplanted Irish are active in local and national politics is to utter a tautology. Strictly speaking, Buenos Aires is not self-governing; as a Federal District — the most populous one in the world, by the way — it is ruled by an intend cut e appointed by the national executive. But its influence on the national life is more potent than that of Washington and New York combined ; as it has more "influential citizens" and large property owners than all the rest of the republic, it has roundabout ways of imposing its own will upon itself. Not that those ways are devious in the cynical sense. It is something of a traditional hobby among the heads of aristocratic old families, most of them with ample wealth, to accept municipal office and to seek public approval in it out of family pride, and their privilege to be free from the handicap of listening to every whim of an ignorant electorate. Thus Buenos Aires enjoys the distinction among large cities of the western hemisphere of being for the most part rather well governed. On the whole, perhaps a larger percentage of public funds are actually and advantageously spent in municipal improvement than in the case of most "self-governing" cities. Besides, it is one of the distinctions between North and South America that while the cry of "graft" is more frequent in our municipal than in our national affairs, our neighbors to the south seem more capable of handling a city than a nation.

It is as easy to become a citizen in the Argentine as in the United States, but it is not quite so easy to remain one. The duties of citizenship are more nearly those of continental Europe than of the free and easy Anglo-Saxon type. There is compulsory military service, for instance. In theory every male citizen must enter the army or navy for two years when he reaches maturity ; practically there is by no means room for all in the armed force which the Argentine considers it necessary to maintain. Hence the requirement reduces itself to the necessity of drawing lots, and of serving if designated by the finger of fate. This is no new and temporary whim in the Argentine, but was already in force long before the European war. The argentino, however, goes his models of the Old World one or two better. The man who does not serve, either for physical or lucky reasons, pays a yearly tax toward the support of the force from which he has been spared. As in continental Europe, every citizen must have a booklet of identity, issued by the police and duplicated in the public archives. This document is so essential that, though I spent less than three months in the country, I found it advantageous to apply for one, that is, the simpler cedilla de identidad for non-citizens. The temporary resident, and even the citizen, may "get by" for a time without this little volume, but the day is almost sure to come when he will regret its absence. Of two men whose public altercation chances to attract the attention of the police, the one who can produce his libreto is far less likely to be jailed than the one who cannot. The chauffeur who has an accident, the man who is overtaken by any of the mishaps which call one's existence to the notice of the public authorities, is much better off if he has been legally registered. Moreover, the citizen can neither vote nor exercise any of his formal rights of citizenship without displaying his booklet. It contains the photograph, a brief verified biography, the signature, and the thumb-print of the holder. The argentinos have carried the use of finger-prints further than perhaps any other nation. Even school children taking formal examinations must often decorate their papers with a thumb-print. Both photograph and cedida are produced by a well-trained public staff in well-arranged public offices, in which prints of all the applicant's fingers are filed away under the number inscribed on his libreto, and where courteous attendants bring him into contact with the lavatory facilities which he requires before again displaying his hands to a pulchritudinous public. In addition to the essentials contained in all booklets, that of the citizen has several extra pages on which may be inscribed from time to time his military and civic record.

But to come to the polls, now that we are armed writh the document indispensable to any participation in an election. A new election law had recently been passed, one so well designed to express the real will of the people that pessimists were already prophesying its attempted repeal by the oligarchy of wealthy property owners, from whom it would wrest the control of government. As in most Latin-American countries, Sunday was the day chosen for the casting of ballots. About each polling-place, most of which were in sumptuous public buildings, rather than in barbershops and second-hand shoe stores, were a few of Buenos Aires' immaculate, imperturbable policemen and the three or four officials in charge. Otherwise there was little animation in the vicinity. The new election law forbids voters to approach the polls "in groups," and makes electioneering or loitering within a certain considerable distance of the booths penal offenses. Glancing cautiously about him, therefore, to make sure that he was not a group, the Porteno stealthily yet briskly stepped forward to do his civic duty. The officials rose to greet him with dignified courtesy, and requested permission to peruse his booklet. This being found in order, his military service honorably completed, or his military tax paid, they permitted him to cast his ballot, at the same time recording that act on the proper line of his libreto. This latter formality is of such importance that the voter himself would protest against its inadvertent omission. For the new law in the Argentine requires each citizen to vote. LTnless he can show unquestionable proof that he was seriously ill or unavoidably absent from his home district on election day, the citizen whose librcta does not show, at the next revision by authority, the mark of the election board is subject to a fine.