LAND OF CONTRASTS

Evening Post, Volume CXIII, Issue 9, 12 January 1932, Page 3

LAND OF CONTRASTS

ARGENTINA TODAY

GUEDALLA'S IMPRESSIONS

WEALTH AND POVERTY

Your traveller (that monarch among bores) is never more exasperating than when he begins to talk about contrasts. Tedious upon most themes, a contrast or so will render him barely endurable. Let him once rcaliso that, whereas black coats and bowler hats are the common wear of Cheapside, they arc less frequent in Brazil —and he will run on for hours about the contrast. "To the eye accustomed," he begins, "to the sombre garb . . ."

You know the gambit; and, as you know it, ' 1 refrain (writes Philip Guedalla when describing his Argentine visit in tho "Manchester Guardian." Besides, it is unnecessary, i'or Argentina wears its contrasts not so much with the outer world as with itself. Tho watchful visitor is constantly confronted with sharp differentiations in the scene before him, which stand in vivid contrast with something that ho saw ten minutes earlier. Take Buenos Aires. Someone will interject —they always do —that Buenos Aires is not Argentina. True. Neither is France Paris. But anyone surveying either country without its capital attempts tho impossible. So, 1 repeat, take Buenos Aires. Tho contrasts surge upon the explorer as he puts his nose outside the Customhouse. For ho finds a city with the largest taxis and the smallest streets that lie has ever seen. Nothing more sumptuous than a Buenos Aires taxi was ever dreamt of by a successful negro gambler. The length, tho breadth, the speed, tho cushions, the window-glass engraved with luscious spirals appropriate to a Chicago gunman's hearse compose a whole of unexampled sumptuosity. And a sardonic contrast propels these Juggernauts at speed (for Argentine ■automobilism is nothing if not spirited) along the narrow alleys planned by Spanish forefathers to be traps for shade in the noonday heat, their silence quite unbroken except by the click of an occasional mule. Tho consequences for pedestrians are more than terrifying, since Buenos Aires is tho only city that I know in which the pavements are so narrow as to render single file an almost compulsory formation, while trams scoop off the incautious gazer into shop windows and bear him away upon their ample cowcatchers. NO RESORTS. A city of peculiar contrasts, it wears a name for gaiety without containing one endurable resort where plays or music may bo heard (if you eocempt the solid operatic fare of the Colon, where standardised European opera, imported in large packing-cases from Milan, Vienna, and Covcnt Garden, is admirably presented without Argentine assistance elsewhere than in tho audience). Sometimes, indeed, there is a menace in tho contrasts of Buenos Aires, when the huddled masses round tho docks align themselves in the san\p picture with the Frenchified facades along the stately (though intermittently paved) road to Palermo, behind which charming people talk charming politics and ladies insist prettily that unless the Dictator General is firm with them, these Russian agitators . . . But when ono thinks of urban housing in some quarters of the country one may be pardoned the rebellious Ahought that there is little need .to bo a Russian in order to become an agitator. Contrasts persist even in the solemn sphere of Argentine economics, where gentlemen discuss meat prices (Argentina must surely be the only country in the_ world where elegants discuss the price of meat) and shake solemn heads over the- economic crisis. "The crisis," as my host remarked, leaning across tho dinner-table, "is of a gravity beyond belief." Since I was his guest, this statement commanded my immediate and unqualified assent. There was no other lino to take. Besides, assent conveyed my faith in its gravity -while truthfully expressing at the same time my private feeling that it was beyond belief; because the main difficulty experienced by British visitors in Buenos Aires is the simulation of polite credulity in face of loud cries of distress from a community quite innocent as yot of any income tax. My host announced a crisis, though; and his admirable pictures gleamed on the wall behind him. For Argentina still displayed her aptitude for contrasts. BOOTS OF TROUBLE. Unhappily there is a crisis. Less complicated than the economic portents which beset the path of -European nations, crisis in Argentina wears an air of uncomfortable simplicity. Not quite, perhaps, the painful simplicity of Chile's problem, which resides in the single fact that Europe has learnt to manufacture nitrates for herself. For Chile is the victim of Germany's war-time necessities, which taught her to make a chemical substitute, in precisely the same way that sugar-planters in the West Indies were ruined when Nelson's blockade taught the subjects of Napoleon to go without sugar-cane and make beet-sugar. States that depend upon the marketing of a single commodity load precarious lives. For production, if it is to be secure, should be broad-based upon a wide range of markets; and when a nation's output is of a single product tho pyramid of its production is inverted and balances precariously upon its point. That is the beginning and end of Chile's troubles. But Argentina's are not quite so simple. For the milking-stool upon which happy Argentina sat to milk the world was a three-legged affair, resting upon : meat, wheat, and wool. But when commodity prices are low throughout the world, even a State that rests on the production of three essential commodities goes through uncomfortable moments. That is tho present state of Argentina; and her anxietios stand |in uneasy contrast with the- lavish evidences of recent opulence—the ■ monumental solemnity of the Jockoy Club, the dainty houses near the Park, the whole tradition oC Argentine ; wealth. But that is contradicted still nearer home by the suburban aspect of tho . city itself. Tho New World is nearly , always slovenly in its back areas. For . the magnificence of Alain street is often contradicted by the grim untidiness of : ragged wildernesses of suburban build-ing-lots. These growing belles are a ■ triile apt to leave loose cuds in thoir ■ toilette; and the aptitudes of a young ' city are rather for the shop-window . than for the backyard. ; THE ANDES' WALL. But what contrast in the world can bo more glaring than that between the marble dignity of central Buenos Aires and tho disreputable fringo of huts in • which it shades off into the country? [ Ono does not ask too much of suburbs. \ But there is no need, even in young and growing cities, to build them of 3 petrol tins; and these crudities, which 3 hover uncertainly between tho ash- : heap and tho native village, afford tho ; linal ingredient in the contrasts of Buenos Aires. t Contrasts persist oven bryond the - city limits. J'or Providence built i Argentina out of ronlrasts—first the yellow wafers of the River Plate con-

trasting with the blue Atlantic; and then tho endless vistas of the pampas stretching away to meet the sky until they meet the stateliest contrast of all —the great wall of tho Andes. I have not seen the Himalayas stand up out of India. But no European range will bear comparison for the suddenness of its effect with tho Cordillera of the Andes. Even the steep ascent of the Rocky Mountains above Colorado and the Groat Plains seems almost gradual when it is set beside tho piled and towering obstruction of the Andes, where they lie across the long, level road from Buenos Aires to the l'ai:iiu-.. For tho endless plain tilts suddenly toward the sky. A line of outworks, then tho brown bastions of the foothills outlined against the white behind them, and tho great fortress climbs toward tho central keep of Aconcagua. All the mouutaiiis stand in line, watched by respectful villages among the level vineyards of Mendoza. That is perhaps the greatest, certainly the most sublime, of Argentina's contrasts.