The gowns to be seen in such gatherings are said by authorities on the subject to be no farther behind Paris than the time of fast steamers between French ports and the Plata. To the bachelor more familiar with the backwoods they seem to be as thoroughly up to the minute as their wearers are expert in exhausting every possibility of human adornment. Unfortunately, many of the demure, semi-animate ladies prove on close inspection to be not so beautiful as they are painted. Not a few of them could readily pass as physically good looking, despite the bulky noses so frequent in “B. A.” as to be almost typical, were they satisfied to let nature’s job alone. But the most entrancing lady in the world would risk defeat by entering a beauty contest disguised as a porter in a flour-mill. There are, to be sure, ravishing visions now and then in these Buenos Aires processions, but unpolished candor forces the admission that what to us at least is the refined and dainty type is conspicuous by its rarity. It is a standing observation of critical foreign visitors that the décolleté gowns seen at the Colón during the opera season often disclose cable-like shoulder muscles bequeathed by recent ancestors who carried loads on their heads. That to me is one of the promising signs in Buenos Aires, a proof that the new “aristocracy” is near enough the laboring generations which built it up not to have lost its muscle and its energy; it helps to explain the youthful enthusiasm of the Argentine, similar to our own and so unlike the blasé hopelessness of much of South America. For the southern republic is as truly the land of opportunity as is our own, inferior perhaps only in extent and resources. Along with the fops lounging in the Jockey Club it has many such types as Mihanovitsch, arriving half a century ago with no other possessions than the porter’s rope over his shoulder and retiring recently from the active ownership of the largest steamship company south of the United States, with palatial steamers plying wherever Argentine waters are navigable.
The gaudy ostentation of this _nouveau riche_ city of Latin-Iberian origin is nowhere seen to better advantage than at the Recoleta, the principal cemetery. This is a crowded cement city within a stone wall, as much a promenade and show-ground as a last resting-place. Men sit smoking and gossiping on the tombs; women take in one another’s gowns with critical eye as they turkey-walk along the narrow cement streets between the innumerable family vaults. The tombs are built with the all too evident purpose of showing that one’s dead are, or at least were in life, of more importance in the world than those of one’s neighbors. They have four or more stories below ground, with shelves or pigeon-holes for several coffins on each “floor,” and marble steps leading down to them. On the upper or ground floor, usually surrounded by elaborate statues sculptured in white stone, are ostentatious chapels with plate-glass doors, locked with the latest American safety locks. Everywhere reigns a gaudy luxury wholly out of place in a city of the dead. The self-respecting corpse must feel as if he had been set up in a museum instead of being disposed of in a sanitary and inconspicuous manner. Here and there a tomb bears the sign “For Sale,” with the name of the authorized real estate dealer under it. The seller, who in some cases seems to have tossed out the bones of his forgotten ancestors in the convenient old Spanish way, is certain to benefit financially from the transaction, for the Recoleta is _the_ cemetery of Buenos Aires, absolutely limited in space now by the city that has grown up about it, and accommodations in it are as eagerly sought as boxes at the opera or seats on the stock exchange.