Night life in Buenos Aires is brilliant at least in the material sense. Though there are fewer blazing advertisements in all the town than along Broadway, municipal lighting is more generous than in pre-war Paris. Entertainments rarely begin before nine, and midnight usually finds the streets crowded. By night, perhaps even more than by day, the visitor is struck by the lack of rowdyism. As the city is less noisy than our own metropolis, thanks to the absence of an “L,” among other things, so it is less “tough.” Even the saloons—it seems more fitting to call them by their local name of café—have little objectionable atmosphere; in them one may order “soft” as well as “hard” drinks without arousing an insinuating look from the waiter. The _Porteño_, like the southern European from whom he is mainly descended, is temperate in his use of liquor, and he expects his drinking-places to be as gentlemanly as any other public rendezvous. Fully as numerous as the “cocktailerías,” often presided over by expert mixers exiled from the United States, are the _lecherías_ at which one may sit down at any hour of the day or evening to a glass of the best of milk at a reasonable price.
The Latin-American privilege of ogling all attractive women has not, of course, been eradicated even in Buenos Aires. But a recent ordinance makes it a penal offense to speak to a woman on the street unless first addressed by her, and the few respectable women who go out after dark without escort are rarely subjected to anything worse than staring, and perhaps an ostensibly unconscious little whispered monologue or popular air. The same restriction has not, however, been placed on the fair sex, and cases of blackmail turning on the point of who spoke first have not been unknown in the municipal courts.
“B. A.” is particularly gay during the winter season, from June to September. Then “Society” has returned from Mar del Plata, the Argentine Atlantic City, or from the Córdoba hills; the few wealthy _estancieros_ who have residences on their estates come in from the pampa; gilded loafers, opera singers, adventuresses turn up from the four points of the compass, and the capital becomes doubly pretentious, expensive, and crowded. Several times I came to it from journeys into the “camp,” as the large English-speaking colony, anglicizing the Spanish word _campo_, calls the country outside the capital, and each time I found it more breathlessly in pursuit of pleasure. With the same latitude as Los Angeles, the South American metropolis does not, of course, have what we would call a real winter. Only once within the memory of the present generation has snow fallen in sufficient quantity to cover the ground. A temperature around the freezing point is the usual limit, and even in the coldest days of July or August the sky is apt to be brilliant and the atmosphere radiant. The cold, when it comes, seems extraordinarily penetrating, just as the _pampero_, the suffocating norther of the summer-time, seems hotter than anything the tropics have to offer. His winter season is so short that the average _argentino_ makes little or no preparation for it, with the result that he probably suffers more from cold than those who live in really cold countries. Both law and custom now require steam heat in hotels and the more important public buildings, but the rank and file rarely come into contact with artificial warmth.