Tramp Royale (16 page)

In many ways Perón looks good compared with his predecessors. We heard contemptuous remarks about the President he chucked out, to the effect that he spent all his time enjoying the night life of Buenos Aires and never did any work. No one can accuse Perón of being lazy. His working day starts about six a.m. and almost anyone who wants a personal audience with him can get it if they will get up in time to see him at that hour.

His love for children seems to be sincere and it certainly adds to his popularity. He recently gave his country home to the children of Argentina, stating that a bachelor had no need of it. Everywhere in Buenos Aires one runs across this quotation:
"En la Nueva Argentina los únicos privilegiados son los niños."
-President Juan Perón. ("In the new Argentina the only privileged ones are the children.") This boast is not entirely true by a great deal but he seems to be sincere in making it and it fits beautifully the temperament of the people; children are highly valued there.

In addition to the above he is a skilled spellbinder. We heard him speak once; his style was as effective as Hitler's. The content was a semantic blank; he was boasting that Argentina was a great nation because it had ideals and heart and such like vague abstractions. But at one point he stopped suddenly, changed his manner abruptly and snapped, "Tell those policemen to quit bothering the citizens and to go away!"

The crowd ate it up.

It might have been a spur of the moment inspiration of a talented public speaker, or it might have been a carefully prepared plant. Either way it was smart politics.

Now let's drop the subject of politics. It took us three hours to fly across South America and three more hours from touching down until we reached our hotel, what with entrance formalities and an interminable ride from the airport downtown. Airplanes have done half the job of making travel simple and fast; the other half remains to be done.

As we registered at the Plaza Hotel, we were politely told to surrender our passports; the police wanted them. Ticky firmly said, "No!"

The desk clerk was embarrassed, patient, and equally firm. I finally agreed that we would but insisted on receipts by the serial numbers of the passports, which the clerk gravely provided, as well as police cards for each of us. I have not the slightest idea what Perón's police wanted our passports for, but they kept them for several days, then returned them.

The Plaza Hotel is not as new as the Carrera but it is equally luxurious. Our room, a semi-suite twice the size of most hotel rooms, could be split into living room and bedroom by big drapes. The furnishings and decorations reminded me of the Mauve Decade but the beds were modern. The most startling item was the bath towels which were much too much of a muchness. They were enormous Turkish bath sheets, five feet by six feet, large enough to wear as a toga. I would wear myself out trying to get dry with one; I needed a flunky to hold the other end. A chunk cut off one end would have been much more practical. But after the modest scraps of water-resistant rag issued as towels in some United States motor courts I was not disposed to complain.

The next day was Sunday. The shops were closed and the streets deserted; we strolled and tried to get the feel of the city. Buenos Aires is a really big city, big as Los Angeles or Chicago and much handsomer than either. It is so large indeed that it is too large for its back country, from a standpoint of healthy economic balance. If New York City were proportionately large, New York would have
forty million
people.

But it is not surprising that most Argentinos want to live in the capital, if possible; it is a charming, beautiful metropolis, not an overgrown village in search of a soul like some of our own that I won't mention for fear of being lynched. It has more than two hundred parks and plazas, some of them of great size, all of them of great beauty, abounding in flowers and trees and statuary. I happen to be very fond of statuary and I have searched the United States from border to border and coast to coast, looking at statues wherever I could find them. It is a very poor crop. Why the richest people in the world who will willingly dig down in their pockets for anything from flood relief for Siam to a 21" TV screen won't pitch in together and buy statues I do not know-but there it is. Any city in South America is loaded with statues, some of them run-of-the-mill equestrian, some of them excellent, quite a few superb.

Buenos Aires being a big city has many statues, possibly more than its proportionate share. Most of them were academic in concept but in a large park near the President's city residence we saw something that looked vaguely like a ship, or equally like a giant prospector's hammer balanced on its head. It was heroic in size and conception and the shape was pleasing but I could not figure out what it was intended to be; I asked the guide who was with us at the time.

He smiled gently. "Uruguay gave that to us as a mark of friendship between our two countries, so we set it up here. But we never have been able to find out what it is."

On Monday it seemed time to get down to serious sightseeing. In any country for most travelers, such as ourselves, it is an always frustrating choice whether to see things haphazardly, enjoying oneself and trying to soak up the flavor of the country, or to set about it with grim determination to get the maximum use out of limited time and money. The first method is by far the best-provided you are wealthy in time and money and can afford to spend several months in each country and a lifetime in traveling. The second method is almost Hobson's choice for most of us, but it is hard work.

Ticky and I usually tried to do a little of both, which meant that we necessarily missed a lot of things. ("What? You were in Ruritania and you didn't see the
labyrinth
? My dear, you wasted your whole trip!") The world is a giant smorgasbord; you can sample a bit here and there with pleasure, but if you try to gulp down everything, you will simply become ill. It may be more important to visit with a cat and her kittens in an open-air book market than to try to see all the labyrinths in all the Ruritanias.

Ticky and I went down to the head porter's desk at the Plaza and asked if there was a taxi driver around who spoke English. We knew that Buenos Aires had a subway system that would get us anywhere faster and cheaper than would a taxi, but sightseeing from a subway is something like kissing over a telephone. The porter found us such a driver, a licensed guide named Herman Freudenberger, who was to become our closest friend in Argentina. He was a handsome, well setup young man and was a college graduate in ranch management, but he had given up agriculture to become a tourist guide. As he explained it, an assistant to the manager of a large agricultural estate has nothing to look forward to but the death of the manager; he wanted to get married and the guide business was quicker.

Herman spoke Spanish, Portuguese, English, German, and French; it was a rare tourist who could stump him. He had something else of equal importance: he loved his country, was proud of it, and knew its history. His parents were German Jewish; Herman was as Argentino as San Martín the Liberator.

He did not have his hand out. If we added a gift for special service he accepted it courteously, but if we paid the exact fare by mileage or time he was equally gracious, being at all times a Latin American gentleman and our host in his country, rather than a hired employee.

Herman took us first for a quick tour of the major points of the city. Let's take it for granted that we saw such things as Casa Rosada, the statue of San Martín, the monument to Columbus, embassies, ministries, Plaza Congreso, the Obelisk commemorating four centuries of Buenos Aires, the national art gallery; of course we saw such things and so will you when you go there. But you can learn more about such from five minutes of looking at pictures in the
National Geographic
than you can from ten thousand words of description. Describing a public building is as futile as describing a beautiful woman; the proper medium is a picture.

All of the above took more than one trip on more than one day; Buenos Aires is big. But we saw other things. Herman drove us down to the estuary to let us see the Dutch ship we were to sail in the following week. The waterfront in Buenos Aires is prettier than most, although docks and warehouses of a big and busy port cannot compete with other sights in beauty. But while we were there he gestured toward a big municipal steam-electric plant. "There is where we burned coffee during the War."

"Coffee?"
I answered, thinking with horror of the present dollar-a-pound prices.

"Yes. We had coffee we couldn't sell or give away and we were short on coal. It gave the whole area quite an aroma."

I was too stunned to comment. It struck me as the most tragic waste of raw material since the time of the Aztec practice of sacrificing virgins.

Later he showed us Avenida Nueve de Julio, the widest street in the world. If you translate the name as "Fourth of July" instead of "Ninth of July," you end up with the proper local meaning: Independence Day Boulevard. It was certainly wide, making even Canal Street in New Orleans look like an alley-about eight taxicabs to a side, not counting broad, gardened parkways.

"How did it get so big?"

"Oh, President Perón decided that we needed a major boulevard through the heart of the city so he told them to tear down all the buildings in one row of blocks and merge the adjoining streets. Look at this."

We drove down a chute and found ourselves in an underground parking and service garage. "This is the biggest underground parking space in the world. This is where the Buenos Aires businessmen leave their cars during the day."

I was not prepared to dispute it; the caverns seemed to run endlessly on back until lost in the gloom. It accounted in part for what seemed to be a total absence of parking lots in downtown Buenos Aires and very few places to park at the curb. This four-hundred-year-old city was not laid out for automobiles. "But suppose they do park here," I objected, "that would still leave most of them a mile or more from their offices."

"Eh? Why, their chauffeurs drive them to their offices, then leave the cars here, then pick them up later."

"But how about those who don't have chauffeurs?"

"Excuse me? Oh . . . here in Argentina any man who can afford to own a private automobile can certainly afford to hire a driver."

I learned that the car he drove was not his own but was an investment on the part of a wealthy man for whom he drove it on shares. We were finding and were still to learn that the Detroit automobile is the most universally coveted piece of wealth in the world. In Argentina and in many other countries import of American cars is strictly controlled and a license to do so is hard to obtain; often it is a cherished piece of political patronage. Under these conditions a car from the U.S.A. is fantastically expensive, not just a mark-up for ocean freightage and tariff, but with the F.O.B. Detroit price tripled, quadrupled, even quintupled.

But even at such monstrous prices they are greatly desired; we were assured that, despite the cost, they were more automobile for the money than were the much cheaper European cars. A Ford or a Chevrolet will be driven "three times around the clock," more than three hundred thousand miles, and will stand up under it; a European car, except the Rolls Royce, will fall to pieces under much less abuse.

I am neither an automotive expert nor a field agent for the Detroit Chamber of Commerce; I report what I heard from drivers on four continents, many of whom were not especially friendly to the United States-in fact in many cases they seemed to blame us for the fact that their own governments had made it so hard to import American cars. The answer to this is tied up with the knotty question of dollar exchange and controlled currencies, but there is a potential market abroad for millions of American automobiles which we are not at present able to use.

Herman took us out to the cattle market, which looked much like the stockyards in Kansas City or Chicago and was comparable in size and in modern methods, Argentina being butcher to the whole world. The cattle were mostly big, beautiful Herefords, large square steaks with ears at one end and tail at the other. Being from cattle country ourselves, they were interesting but not novel. What did interest us were the gauchos and their horses.

Cattlemen are cattlemen, no matter what language they speak. While the gauchos looked odd in their dress to us their costume is as practical as the typical gear of our own cowboys. They wear baggy pants (
bombachas
) in place of Levi's and chaps, a different style of sun hat, and different styling in their boots; these differences are no more significant than the differences in uniform and insignia between American Marines and French Legionnaires. Poncho and
bombachas
make a gaucho look fat; our western dress makes a man look leaner than he is-no matter, they are both colorful and dressed for the work they do.

But their horses are not like our dainty, little cow ponies. The gaucho makes little or no use of the lasso; he has instead the
boleadoras,
three strands of braided rawhide bent together at one end of each and with a metal weight fastened to each of the other ends. He can swing this over his head, let it sail through the air, and bring down an animal by tangling it around the beast's legs from a greater distance than is possible with a lariat.

But the gaucho does not use even this tool very often against cattle, but saves it for ostrich or simply for hunting for sport. They believe in treating cattle gently-no sense in subjecting a cow brute to a spill and a nervous shock when you are trying to fatten it for market. Their horses are bred short, wide in the chest, and heavily muscled; they are trained to manage cattle by breasting against them, nudging them the way they want them to go.

Later we discovered that the cattlemen of Australia do not use any sort of rope. If an Australian cowboy finds it necessary to throw a steer for any purpose-which is not often-he will ride up to it, reach down and twist its tail and trip it. Australians do not use the lariat either. Nor did we see any roping equipment being carried by the cattle hands in South Africa. I begin to wonder whether or not the proud art of the American rodeo might not simply be an obsolete stunt, about as useful as rapier fencing. Maybe we shake a lot of hamburger off our brutes unnecessarily just to show how clever we are with a rope.