So far, on the journey down the coast, you have been speaking to people of a basically alien civilization. Here, in Santiago, as soon as you arrive, you note how people speak closer to your mind. They do not stimulate the imagination by dramatic gulfs, but talk in the same way, read the same books, believe in the same things, enjoy the same jokes. An odd thing is the Chilean voice: it is musical. It is strange to hear Spanish spoken musically, without harshness, almost in singsong. In Chilean women, this vivacity is delightful. The formal señorita has given place to la femme; the secluded madonna to the married woman of active mind. She is often fair-haired, a vivid mixture of Northern and Spanish types, with quick nerves and freedom of manners. The women do not dress as well as in Peru—indeed the crowd in the street dresses in the shabby fashion of provincial British; but they excel in the choice of pretty hats. “Ola, hijita” the gay Chilean mother greets her daughter at the airport. They love the affectionate diminutives. The airport at Santiago is the gayest in the continent, crowded with laughing and waving people.
In Santiago the Andes seem to come down into the top of the main avenue. A foreground of wild, yellow poppies, a bruise-colored haze that darkens in the sunlight, and then those sudden helmets of the peaks and the flashing snow. Aconcagua, the highest (22,835 feet) mountain in the Americas, lies in its glaciers beyond, in the pass that leads over to the Argentine. Here, in all central Chile, the light swims and shimmers.
“I don’t feel safe away from the mountains,” says a young Chilean, and that is how you feel about this land. There is no jungle. You are safe. Chile is shut in between its mountain wall and the sea.
In the spring heat, the scent of carnations and roses blows along the roads, the long tresses of the white acacia are in bloom, the broom is in flower; in the pastures, there are the dark orange flowers of the espino tree and those large, broad, drooping willows that stand like green crinolines in the meadows and flow and float in the soft breezes. From the green-painted valleys the mountains rise gracefully. The cactus is cultivated and also the vine. Between Valparaíso and Santiago is the Pan-American highway, no longer a dream or a surface of grit, but a concrete road. Long avenues of poplars or eucalyptus go up straight to the fondas—the small manorlike farms—and brown streams lie under the womanish tresses of the willows. Oxen are plowing fields. Vines are trellised between the adobe cottages; there are fields of carnations in the market gardens, of snapdragons and white roses, beds of arum lilies and geraniums. The chestnuts are heavily in flower and the hydrangea in its electric colors. It is November—the Chilean spring—and the wheat is on the turn from green to gold. There is an annual spring show of flowers in Santiago, an affair of great elegance, with an art and care equaled only in England and Luxembourg.
The walls of the fondas are tiled in blue, in the Spanish fashion. There are oak beams, open fireplaces and fine polished iron such as you see in rich men’s houses in Spain. The furniture and the pottery have the formal style of modern Spanish. The designs came from the famous patterns of Talavera in Spain. The young owner will seem like a gay, horse-riding Andalusian, grave but always with a candid smile and the impulsive gesture. He is, it is clear, a gentleman. He wants immigrants, but from northern Europe. He prays at night, you may be sure, for an oil refinery to be built, for Chilean aircraft, for something to raise the rather faded economy of this beautiful country. He is a parliamentary democrat who fears the miners’ unions. He is like—and yet he is not like—his opposite number in Spain, for he is less formal, less extravagant and fantastic. The New World, by giving people space, has lowered their intensity.
He watches your face inquiringly, divided in the American fashion between uncertainty of himself and a deliberate, warm moving forward to disclaimer and assertion. He laughs at the Old World because he has a sense of his own land and his soil; he feels everything is possible, but he also feels insecure. The geographical and economic madness of Chile gives him a certain defensive irony, but it gives him energy, too, and a quizzical tenacity. In his gaiety, he looks handsome, practical, but lost. He is lost perhaps because the mixture of Scandinavian, English, German, Spaniard and Jew has not quite been made. Or perhaps it is I who was lost.
I thought of the brilliant professor from the University of Concepción who burst out one night in a Santiago café, over his glass of “gin con gin,” with these words: “South America is backward and lost. There was nothing we could bring from eighteenth-century Spain. We turned to French romanticism in the nineteenth century after the Wars of Independence—to Hugo, Chateaubriand, a culture of rhetoric. We have found no culture of our own strong enough to replace it.” Yet in Neruda and Gabriela Mistral his country has two world-famous poets.
I will say this for the young landowner: his family is rich. He could have had a good time. Instead he is a practical farmer, getting down to work on the land and in his community. He rounds up the cattle with his brilliant cowboys—the rodeo is the great sport of Chile. For gaiety he has the rather solemn “boîtes” of Santiago, the packed cinemas. On Sundays he can go down to Viña del Mar, the Rapallo of the southern Pacific. The tea dance starts, the couples sit on the terraces and listen to the sea roll in. The ladies are heavy, voluptuous, lively. Tea—it is the great Chilean extravagance and elegance. With the best food, the most enjoyable fruits, and the only drinkable wine, he has an agreeable life. He can forget how much his country depends on grim copper mines like El Teniente up in the Andes or on Anaconda in the desert.
Argentina
We have reached the halfway mark in our journey. Suddenly, as we leave Santiago and turn to the east—toward Buenos Aires and the Atlantic—after that long journey down the Pacific coast, we feel a change of mood. People on the west coast, in Lima and Santiago, have warned us, “Don’t be taken in by the flashy modernity of the East; the future is here.”
It may be; but, as the plane takes you eastward, you wake up; you feel the unmistakable and irresistible electric shock of the twentieth century. In Buenos Aires you are very near to what you know in London, Paris or New York. Once more you are in contact with the great cities, the million windows built into severe walls; by day impersonal as print, by night a brilliant geometry of light standing still high in the sky or moving in endless traffic along the ground. Every light represents a human being like yourself, the electric man. By instruments the pilot lands you in a city of instruments and tensions. The nerves tighten. You are caught between the artificial screams of the modern world—fire engine, police and ambulance—and a hygienic quiet that is not exactly silence; simply a current that has been switched off.
You feel the tension sixty miles out of Buenos Aires when the lights of this continually spreading urban area begin to form in a countryside that one hundred years ago was a pampas of thistles and clover. The cattle have yielded to the wheat, the wheat has yielded to the market garden, the market garden to the factory and the extravagantly spaced suburbs and their electric railways. The tension increases. It was no great surprise when the pilot came alongside and said: “There’s political trouble in Buenos Aires. We got it over the radio. I would advise you to see about your reservations before leaving the airport.” It was the classical twentieth-century remark of a technician: “Keep moving. Organize.” He did not want his plane grounded. Not to move was his idea of a tragedy. We city people are machines; we break down if the machine stops, or at least so it appears in these new countries which have never known modern war. But we are not so easily rattled; what sane man would miss a revolution ?
There is a splendid airport at Buenos Aires, an excellent fleet of motor coaches meets the planes. “The man who built that place is in prison now,” laughs a man in the bus. It was probably true; the airport was built under Perón and a good many Peronistas are in jail. The modern world again. In Buenos Aires itself there are police cars in the street. There are arguments between groups of men along one of the main avenues; in the innumerable coffee bars, long rows of white cups wait on the counters as innoc
ent as choirboys, untouched. No hiss from the espresso machines; the cash registers are still. The crowds stand outside the newspaper offices waiting with religious, upturned eyes for the news flashes from the upper floors. Yet the cinemas are packed.
Like the other cities of the east coast of South America—São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro—Buenos Aires is a Babylon shot up suddenly out of the prairie, plantation and jungle. It shouts money and progress from its skyscraper tops. It is almost impolite to mention that it was established toward the end of the sixteenth century. The people like to regard themselves as no older than their sudden tremendous wealth and expansion, no older than the furs and diamonds in the street called, with classical Spanish lettering and economy, Florida; they are the latest edition of Bond Street, Fifth Avenue, the Rue de la Paix or the Avenue Hoche. Latin conservatism and sensibility are their weapons against the Anglo-Saxon. If the sense of time is to be valued, for them it is the future. It belongs to them, they feel, yet they cling to the illusion that money can keep the old Faubourg St.-Germain alive. Upon the future they act aggressively and without apology; they have the aggression and arrogance of the Americas mitigated by sensations of loneliness and insecurity.
Argentine writers say that the Argentine is a lonely man not only because behind him is the loneliness of the pampas where he once made all his wealth, but because he has built a city that might be a lovely importation of Paris, Genoa, Madrid or Milan and yet is inconsolably far away from the great centers of power in the United States and Western Europe. The Grands Boulevards glitter with traffic uncontrolled, under the thick plane trees. The Argentine flatters Paris by imitating it, like the newly rich; but he hates it because, in making money out of Europe and America, shaping his life and economy to theirs, he feels he has made nothing that is his own. Or perhaps he has lost what he had in the cattle-raising days.
His blood is Spanish, scarcely touched by Indian. Italian stock has been grafted onto him to redouble the dramatic sense of the virile and masculine sensibility and the ethos of southern Europe. His culture is French and profoundly so. In the nineteenth century the British bankers were his servants; in the twentieth he looks toward New York. A chauvinist and proud, he rails against foreign capital. Yet he will build himself an English Tudor house and racing stables, play polo like a Virginian, re-create Longchamps and throw up a skyscraper or two. Is not the Argentine the most powerful, the most advanced of the South American states, the one chosen to lead, unify and even to conquer? The dilemma has been how to allow the indigenous to grow amid so much assertion of the will and so much copying. Among Spanish Americans, it is he who has the publishing houses, the bookshops, the writers, the newspapers and reviews that have an international standing. He wishes for foreign cultures, as the Mexican and Brazilian seek strength in their own.
What I have just written is taken from the talk of Argentines, but it is important to understand the tone of the talk. It was the talk of people with strong personalities and ambitions. The anti-Peronistas were the more vocal; the others had much to fear. A man in a travel agency, who was also a journalist in his spare time, said he was ill from worry and overwork. “I now have to write my articles; under Perón we just printed the official handouts; it was easier.” A Peronista, he took my notebook and wrote: “Four revolutions. 1930, 17 deaths; 1943, 32 deaths; June 16,1955,4000 deaths; Sept. 16 to 23, 1955, 30,000 deaths.” And handed the book back without a word. He feared arrest.
I dined with anti-Peronistas in what might have been the Paris of the Avenue Hoche, among French books and paintings and the best conversation. Three of the guests had been in prison—a lawyer, a professor, a landowner. They showed me indignantly the blasphemous schoolbooks, done on Nazi lines, that had been issued by Perón to schoolchildren. That week one of the strange sights of Buenos Aires was the daily queue before one of the palaces where Eva Perón’s diamonds and fur coats were on show. Every day there was a new announcement of embezzlement, sexual vice and political terror. The relief at Perón’s downfall was enormous. It amounted to a real liberation but it was tempered by the knowledge of the vacuum he had left. It was infected by uneasiness. There was a strike in the frigoríficos out of which one generation of Argentines had made their fortunes, troops were posted along the miles of empty dockyards, and the red mud-colored water of the Río de la Plata had no moving ships on it. This quarter is a little Marseilles of dock-side bars and fish restaurants, rough but good, where you could come at night and eat octopus cooked in its ink. They were empty.
The Argentines are sufficiently serious-minded to realize they cannot go back to pre-Perón Argentina. They now understand there is an uncomfortable popular movement in South America and in the world at large. One hostile but sensible interventor said: “Perón gave to the working classes with one hand and took with the other, in the Nazi fashion, but he undoubtedly gave them new rights before the law, and those they will never lose.” There was the spring glitter, the sensuous, perfumed Parisian air. The revolutionary situation quieted after a couple of days. The packed gray trams made you jump back against the shop windows in the narrow streets. In the parks the acacias hung their blossoms. “Look,” said a woman as we sat under the flowering creepers on the terrace of her house: a butterfly as big as my hand was on my shoe, opening its huge wings as if yawning in the heat. The voices of people had the dramatic Italian intonation. In the cake shops, mothers and children were eating ice cream; in the coffee bars rows of men stood before the rows of cups; in the cafés they sat drinking beer and eating plates of hors d’oeuvres: the black olives, the slices of salami, the nuggets of hot tripe.
In the streets and the beautiful parks walked the brown-eyed women, with their strong Roman noses and that carriage of body and limb which is meant to display sexual attractiveness to the utmost for admiration only and for its own sake. The men gazed and were provoked by the sight of sexual arrogance and were left staring the Argentine stare, alone, to consider its fatality. You sense in the men and women a mingling of Italian virility and violence with that alternation of passivity and compulsion which is the Spanish inheritance. Buenos Aires is a city of lovely flowers. You may see a girl carrying a bouquet of fifty roses as she walks between two men; and when a private celebration takes place, say a cocktail party for the opening of a new dress shop, scores of superb bouquets of flowers, fit for opera singers, are sent by friends.
Six in the evening is the hour of the paseo, when the street called Florida is closed to traffic and the women, who have spent hours preparing for this moment, walk in groups. This paseo is less militant than the paseos of Spain; the sexes are not segregated, and the exhausting Spanish eye-warfare has been softened by Italian gaiety. The Italians have improved rich, bourgeois Buenos Aires. Diamonds, emeralds, sapphires, pearls are in the shop windows. Inside, the jewelers sit formally at their velvet-topped tables, like croupiers waiting for the rich gambler. For the true inhabitants, Buenos Aires is the delightful city. They have the American gregariousness, the easy feeling for the surface of life. They live in sets and groups that are always in and out of each other’s houses, always giving parties with energetic gaiety, always amusing themselves. They bubble along, hating to be alone. The elegance and liveliness of the rich in the smart bars is diverting; the gaiety is not noisy and it is free of the boring Anglo-American drunkenness. I have never liked the look of the rich so much, the young above all.
In shops, they prefer long transactions. Four assistants will hang about a man buying a hat; it will not be a matter of a hat for hat’s sake, as in London; or a sale for sale’s sake, as in New York; it will be a hat for life’s sake, an opportunity for the buyer to talk about his life, his friends, his family, and a pretense at bargaining which will interest everyone completely. They sigh to see a customer go; a life has gone, they gossip about him afterward. The personal is everything for them. They inherit from Spain the wish to preserve the sense of personal favor, that one is buying a hat there through the influence of a friend of a fri
end of a friend. The dictator, in the personal politics of South America, is simply the dominating personality, the man himself with all his anecdotes, interests, deals, habits, passions, friends, whims. He is not the father of his country, but perhaps, the uncle on the make. To the general American alacrity is added refinement; the cardinal thing in manners is not candor or directness but indirection and the importance of not wounding susceptibility.
There is often a damp haze or a dust haze over Buenos Aires. Its parks and open spaces are gracious, planted with lovely flowering trees of the subtropics, and they sweep in little hills and drives to the reddened waters of the estuary which stains the sea for miles outside. The river is too wide for us to see the farther shore; its mouth is an ocean in itself, but only an hour’s flight away is Montevideo, and on the far windy beaches of Uruguay the sea becomes fresh and blue again. Up the great river Plata, for tens of miles, Buenos Aires has spread its low white-walled houses with their heavy carrot-colored tiles, with all the space of the pampas to use up. Along the modern highways and the cobbled avenues, no police or traffic lights control the traffic, which has its own skin-of-the-teeth methods of cutting across. Occasionally, you see an empty pagoda where the white-helmeted policeman is supposed to stand. He is rarely there.
The light in the Argentine is strong; the sky seems higher and steeper, a vertical wall at the plain’s edge. Trees and buildings stare like cutouts. Clouds are hard. If ever a landscape was made for horse racing, it is this one. The eucalyptus trees and the poplars are planted in platoons around the farms. These trees are immigrants. The characteristic tree of the pampas, where, in its fertility, nature has hardly troubled to make a tree, is the low and spongy ombú. It does not burn, it cannot be used for anything except its rich shade, and, under it, when the land was not wired off and the cattle were wild, the gaucho rested with his horse, his knife and his guitar.
At Home and Abroad Page 5