Nacha Regules

An August night! Hot with the fever of her adolescence as a national capital, Buenos Aires was ablaze with millions of lights and rejoicing in noisy revelry.

The Centennial festivities had been going on since May. Thousands of people had flocked in from every corner of the country, from neighboring states and even from Europe. During these great days of a nation’s coming of age, the crowd, in one enormous, slowly moving procession, thronged the asphalt pavements of the principle avenues. The very streets and houses appeared to be in motion. When, toward evening, the multitude increased, the congestion caused a swelling which, it seemed, must at a given moment burst the bounds on either side. At night some forty theatres, and innumerable movie-houses and concert halls, crammed overflowing masses into their hungry maws, while in the cabarets boisterous licence rubbed elbows with curiosity.

The cabaret, of “the Port”—as Argentina calls its chief city—is a public dance hall: it provides a room, tables for drinking, and an orchestra. The patrons are young men of the upper classes with their mistresses; tourists and rustic sight-seers; and girls “of the town,” who come alone. The tango, almost the only dance seen there, and the orchestra, composed usually of white gangsters and mulattos are—with the champagne bottle and the tuxedo—the normal expressions of the Argentine suburban “soul”!