LAND OF CONTRASTS

Evening Star, Issue 21012, 28 January 1932, Page 11

LAND OF CONTRASTS

ARGENTINA TO-DAY GUEDALLA'S IMPRESSIONS WEALTH AND POVERTY Your traveller (that monarch among bores) is never more exasperating than when he begins to talk about con-, trusts. Tedious upon most themes, a contrast or' so will render him barely endurable. Let him once realise that, whereas black coats and bowler hats are the common wear of Cheapside, they are 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 I refrain . (writes Philip Guedalla when describing his Argentine visit in the ‘ Manchester Guardian.’ Besides, it is unnecessary. For Argentina wears its contrasts not. so much with the outer world as with itself. The watchful visitor is constantly confronted with sharp differentiations in the scene before him, which stand in vivjd contrast with something that he 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 the impossible. So, I repeat, take Buenos Aires. The contrasts surge upon the explorer as he puts his nose outside the Customhouse. For he finds a city with the largest taxis and the smallest streets that he has ever seen. Nothing more sumptuous than a Buenos Aires taxi was ever 'dreamt of by a successful negro gambler. The length, the breadth, the speed, the 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. JThe consequences for pedestrians are more than testifying, since Buenos Aires is the 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 his away upon their ample cowcatchers. NO RESORTS. A city of peculiar contrasts, it wears a. name for gaity without containing one endurable resort where plays or music may be heard (if you exempt the solid operatic fare of the Colon, where standardised European opera, imported in large packing cases from Milan, Vienna, and Covent Garden, is admirably presented without Argentine assistance elsewhere than in the audience). Sometimes, indeed, there is a menace in. the contrasts of Buenos Aires when the huddled masses round the docks align themselves in the'same 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 hrm with them, these Russian agitators But when one thinks of urban housing in some .quarters of t{i e country one may be pardoned the rebellious thought that there is little need to be a Russian in order to become an agitaContrasts 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 the dinner table, is or a gravity beyond belief. Since I was his guest this statement commanded my immediate and unqualified assent.. There was no other line 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 yet of any income tax. My host announced a crisis though, and his admirable pictures gleamed on the wall behind him. For still displayed her aptitude for contrasts.. ROOTS 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 lead precarious lives. For production, if it is to be secure, should be broad-based upon a wide range of markets; , and wnen a nation’s output is of a single product the 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 wprld was a threelegged 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 the present state of Argentina; and her anxieties stand in uneasy contrast with the lavish evidences of recent opulence —the monumental solemnity of the Jockey Club, the dainty houses near the park, the whole tradition of Argentine wealth. . , .... But that is contradicted still nearer home by the suburban aspect of the city itself. Tim New World is nearly always slovenly in its back areas. For the magnificence of Main street is often contradicted by the grim untidiness of ragged wildernesses of suburban building lots. These growing belles are a trifle apt to leave loose ends in their toilet; 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 be more glaring than that between the marble dignity of central Buenos Aires and the disreputable, fringe of huts in which it shades*off into the country? One does not ask too much of suburbs. But there is no, need, even in young and growing cities, to build thehi of petrol tins; and these crudities, •.which hover uncertainly between the ash heap and the native village, afford the final ingredient in the contrasts of Buenos Contrasts persist even beyond the city limits. For Providence built Argentina out of contrasts—first the yellow waters of the River Plate contrasting with the blue Atlantic, and then the endless vistas of the pampas stretching away to meet the sky until they meet the stateliest contrast of all—the great wall of the 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 the Cordillera of the Andes. Even the steep ascent of the Rocky Mountains above Colorado and the Great Plains seems almost gradual when it is set beside the piled and towering obstruction of the Andes, where they lie across the long, level road from Buenos Aires, to the Pacific. For the endless plain tilts suddenly toward the sky. A line of outworks, then the brown bastions of the foothills outlined against the white behind them, and the great fortress climbs toward the central Keep, of Aconcagua. All the mountains 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.