Authors: Robert A. Heinlein
Montevideo lies less than a hundred and fifty miles down Río de la Plata from Buenos Aires; we were there in the morning. The estuary is about thirty miles wide at Buenos Aires; at Montevideo it is more than a hundred miles wide and is practically open ocean although technically still a river. It was here that the British chased the
Graf Spee
almost up onto the beach and fought a naval battle well inside the legal borders of Uruguay, for which they paid an indemnity and an apology with their tongues in their cheeks; the
Graf
was not a prize to let slip on a technicality.
The usual boarders swarmed into the ship before we were up. We arranged a tourist trip before we went to breakfast, as the schedule of the ship permitted but two days in Uruguay and there was no time for leisurely poking around. Señor Roitman, guide, interpreter, and host-by-temperament, agreed to have a car waiting for us and two others after breakfast.
The other two were an English lady (I use the word intentionally) and a shaggy young gentleman from the Canadian diplomatic service who had that careful carelessness in his appearance which characterizes the "top drawer." We found both of them extremely "veddy, veddy" at first. But I knew from other experience that the English are not actually unfriendly; they are merely shy, embarrassed, rather afraid of strangers. Ticky and I firmly ignored the chill they handed us and went on being friendly, informal, and talkative; it worked, as it almost always does. Almost all Englishmen are nice people individually, once you get past their guard, and they are quite willing to decide that you are a nice person, too-for a Yank, that is.
Montevideo is a large city, as big as Saint Louis. The first impression of it is its cleanliness. Underlying this surface impression is a standard of real sanitation as high as any in the world and higher than that of many of our own cities-Philadelphia, for example. You need not fear the water nor the food in Montevideo; they are clean.
The second impression is one in reverse: no policemen. This negative condition probably would not have impressed us had we come directly from home, since we don't see many policemen at home and the few that are seen are usually controlling traffic. But in most of Latin America a cop or a soldier (they are much the same thing there) is always staring down the back of your neck. They won't bother a gringo tourist ordinarily but they are always there, as ubiquitous, conspicuous, and depressing as a chaperone on a hay ride.
There probably are some policemen in Uruguay but I do not recall seeing a single one even though I looked for them. I don't think you could stir out a policeman in Montevideo even by parking in front of a fire plug.
I asked Señor Roitman about this and he got straight to the (Latin American) point. "Our President doesn't need any bodyguards." We were seated at the time in a sidewalk cafe; he glanced across the plaza and added, "In the afternoon when he finishes his day's work he comes out over there and walks across the plaza alone. He runs across you and you know each other, so you sit down right here with everybody else and you have
café exprés
together. Nobody takes any notice; it wouldn't be polite."
The President of Uruguay is not the boss and he most certainly is not a dictator ruling by decree; the system resembles the Swiss system in that he is chairman of an executive council. I do not recall the name of the incumbent, as his name was not plastered all around in public places as in Argentina.
The third impression was the usual one in South America of parks and plazas and monuments and outdoor statuary. I had assumed up until then that the superior beauty of South American cities was a result of age. But Montevideo is a mere youngster, founded in 1726, more than a hundred years after the founding of New York. Where are New York's statues and monuments? Not that thing over the pond at Radio City, surely? And don't mention Grant's Tomb; I've
seen
Grant's Tomb. They shouldn't do it to a dead man.
My passion for statuary almost got me into difficulty. We were driving through one of the many parks and passed their monument to the Covered Wagon; I insisted on stopping for a good look. It was a fine academic bronze, a life-size group consisting of covered wagon, pioneers on horseback, triple span of oxen, relief oxen following behind, all executed in detailed realism which nevertheless achieved satisfying composition from any approach. It was an opus suited to crown the career of a great master and it made much "modern" sculpture look like the kindergarten blobs so many of them are.
I was interested in it from three points of view: as a work of art, in the strong parallel to our own pioneer history portrayed by the group, and in the mechanical and engineering problems which in a thing of that size are as difficult as the artistic problems. I stepped up onto the base of the group to take a closer look at one of the figures.
A park attendant sprang up out of nowhere and informed me emphatically that it was
prohibido
to molest the statues. I tried to explain most humbly that I had not meant any harm and that I had not touched anything but my frail Spanish broke down completely and Mr. Roitman had to intervene. He made himself personally responsible for my good behavior and I left sheepishly, under parole.
I suppose the park attendant could be classed as a policeman but he was armed with a rake instead of a gun.
We drove for many miles through the old city and through the new city which spreads downstream along Playa de Carrasco. Much of old town was rococo in style, even baroque, but in Carrasco we found miles of the light-hearted, imaginative modern architecture which we had first noticed in Lima, then had encountered repeatedly in Chile and Argentina-and were to encounter again in Brazil. I again asked to see slums, sticking to my theory that a worm's-eye view of a culture is the only one with a true perspective.
Mr. Roitman did his best to oblige. Presently I said to him, "When do we get to where the poor people live?" He stopped the car. "This is it."
I looked around and said, "No, no, I mean the
really
poor people," then explained what we had seen elsewhere.
"But these
are
the poor people. These are the poorest people in Montevideo."
I looked around me again and was tempted to call him a liar. These were not tenements nor the hovels of the poverty-stricken; these were small and simple single-family houses, each with its flower garden, quite evidently the homes of self-respecting lower-middle class. I already knew that Mr. Roitman was proudly patriotic and I suspected that his national pride had caused him not to show me the seamy side of his city. My own home town of Colorado Springs has little poverty and its slums are not slums at all in the sense in which the word applies to New York, Chicago, Rio, or Sydney, but I knew and was graveled by the knowledge that the worst of Colorado Springs was depressingly worse than this by many stages.
Unsatisfied, I checked on him later. Señor Roitman was right; these were their "poor." Uruguay has no poor. It is a welfare state that works, without, so far as we could see, the dreary drawbacks of other welfare states. How they have managed this I do not know, for I have seen other welfare states which appeared to have much the same sort of legislation and the results I did not like at all-repressive laws, endless bureaucracy, chain gang regulations. Uruguay is not that sort of a place, yet it has cradle-to-grave social security, free education through college, free medicine for the lower incomes, and retirement at fifty without loss of comforts for anyone who wants to retire that young.
Maybe there is a catch in it; if so, we did not find it. Our investigation was as quick and superficial as a congressional junket to Europe; nevertheless I am for the present convinced that they have somehow managed to work a miracle. Someday I plan to go back and dig in deeply; if there is a secret to be learned, we must learn it. Just now I feel strong sympathy for the farmer who said on seeing the giraffe, "There ain't no sech animal!"
Uruguay has the Latin fondness for designating famous events simply by their dates. (Was it Mark Twain who said that a French politician could make an impassioned and effective patriotic speech simply by rattling off a list of dates?) In driving around I noticed the following street names: 14 July, 18 July, 25 May, 26 March, 4 July, 31 December, and 24 September. This is a random sampling, not a complete tally; they may have the calendar (and their streets) as loaded up as we are with Mother's Day and Chew-More-Gum Week.
Note that they complimented us with a street named for the Fourth of July, our only holiday that fits into the date system. This sort of gracious gesture is to be found throughout South America; one is always coming across Woodrow Wilson Boulevard, Roosevelt Highway, George Washington Plaza-nor is it a matter of toadying to Tío, for they have not neglected the national figures of other nations besides ours. I wonder to what extent, if at all, we return these courtesies? I have never run across at home Bolivar Boulevard or San Martín Road. Perhaps I did not look in the right places.
While all of our neighbors to the south follow this gentle custom Uruguay really goes whole hog. Here are a few samples: Avenida Simon Bolivar, Rambla República de Argentina, R.R. de Peru, Rambla Presidente Wilson, Calle George Washington, Parque Franklin Delano Roosevelt (the biggest one in the city), Rambla Presidente Bernardo O'Higgins, more ramblas named for Mexico, Chile, France, and Great Britain (a
rambla
is a fancy boulevard, one with trees and flowers and a view), Avenida Italia, Avenida General San Martín, and even Calle Missouri and Calle Mississippi. After that comes heroes, heroes, and more heroes; they rarely waste a street by naming it something like Chestnut, Pine, or Fifth.
A man can get into their street guide without being a general, a politician, or a Uruguayan celebrity. Emile Zola and Herbert Spencer both made it; you can too. So did Darwin, Cervantes, Clemenceau, Magellan, and somebody named Samuel Blixen. Go climb a mountain or write an epic poem; eventually the city council of Montevideo will award you a few miles of paved immortality.
I think that the only word for this custom is "gracious."
The following morning we drove out to the cattle market, which differs from that in Buenos Aires in that it is some miles outside the city and affords thereby more opportunity to see gauchos at work. It still is not real cattle country, which is farther to the north in the great plains; the countryside around Montevideo is more like Iowa farms, except that some of the vegetation is subtropical. It never frosts in Uruguay, but there are not many really hot days and there is enough rain, around thirty inches a year over all.
I could not see much difference between the gauchos of Uruguay and the ones of Argentina, but their horses here seemed to be finer boned with more Arabian strain and so far as I could see they were not taught to breast the cattle. Representatives of the major North American meat packers are stationed permanently at this cattle market and buy a large portion of the supply, this being their major export to us. We "took maté" with them and the gauchos in the gauchos' clubhouse at the market-"
tomar
maté" is the idiom, literally "to take the pot" but it means to drink
yerba
herb tea through a silver pipe from a gourd pot called a "maté." Socially it means still more; it is the Uruguayan symbol of hospitality.
Custom requires that all in the same circle of friendliness drink from the same pot and the same silver pipe. The English lady with us was offered it first, then Ticky, and then myself, after which it made the rest of the rounds. There is a belief that germs cannot live on the hot silver pipe, that it is self sterilizing. I hope that the belief is true, for the rite is as unavoidable as kissing the bride.
Maté is not unpleasant, being much like green tea, but it is an acquired taste. Uruguayans and Argentinos set much store by it and believe that it is food, drink, and vitamins all wrapped in the same package. There is a story of a besieged garrison that lived for weeks on maté alone. The story is almost certainly true but I would find it a thin diet.
Returning from the cattle market we drove to the top of the Cerro. This is the mountain from which the city got its name: Montevideo-"I see a mountain." There is an old fort there which once dominated the harbor; now it is an historical museum and Uruguay, very sensibly for a country of three million people, simply has given up competing in the military arms race. Mr. Roitman pointed out an island to us in the harbor spread before us and referred to it as the "political prison."
I jumped on the remark. "I thought this was a land of freedom? No political prisoners?"
"Oh," he said, "that is what it used to be, more than a century ago, when the Spaniards ran things. It is empty now, just a landmark."
I thought of the anti-Peronista refugees in Uruguay and looked out across the water at Argentina, invisible but close over the horizon. "Aren't you a little afraid that 'Papá' may come over someday and change all that?"
He smiled grimly. " 'Papá' would like to-but he knows we have an 'Uncle.' "
Later on that day Ticky and I were walking alone down Avenida 18 de Julio, the major shopping street. We were much surprised to hear a cheerful voice say, "Hello! You're Mr. and Mrs. Heinlein."
Facing us was a handsome young chap with a wide smile on his face. He was not one of our fellow passengers, I was fairly sure, and we knew no one in Uruguay-but his face was familiar. I shook hands while saying, "I
know
we've met you, but I can't for the life of me remember where or when."
"Don't you remember? The little dog?"
On the day before, Ticky and I had been seated in a sidewalk cafe in Plaza Independencia. Near us was a party of people and with them was a little butterfly spaniel bitch. Ticky offered the spaniel peanuts and a potato chip or two. The international amity established with the dog soon extended to the dog's people and we chatted between tables with them. They were a family party, father, mother, and grown son; the two men could speak English.