ARGENTINA: Piropo Time

One of the surest signs of spring in Buenos Aires is the piropo, the compliment whispered to girls by young men on the prowl. Sometimes it is a simple: “Ah, mi corazón, where are you going?” More frequently it is a formularized gambit of a sort that has been used for generations. Thus, overhauling a girl in a green dress, a gay blade breathes into her ear: “You are a miracle when green; what will you be when you are ripe?”

Legs Visible. On the broad boulevards of the Argentine capital last week, many a piropo was whispered, for spring, although a bit late, had finally come. The dry weather had ill portents for the grain crop, but if Porteños were worried, they did not show it. The city’s parks, well shaded with ombú, palm, ceiba, and shiny-leafed magnolias, were crowded with lovers, fashionable ladies with fashionable dogs, plain people out for a stroll. Many a piropeador audibly admired the spring styles which spurned the New Look and kept legs before the male eye. Buenos Aires cemeteries, always a favored gathering place for somber Argentines, were unusually crowded, and tombs were cluttered with waxy calla lilies.

Seekers after culture swarmed Peuser’s gallery to see an impressive exhibit of Matisse drawings, attended symphony concerts, heard visiting U.S. composer Aaron Copland conduct his Appalachian Spring ballet suite. Others put their money on the horses at Palermo, San Isidro and La Plata, rattled by train to the mosquito-infested waterways at Tigre for the weekend.

President & Señora Perón helped usher in spring by attending a regatta at Tigre, where photogenic Evita shocked the decorous by appearing in white slacks and a new hairdo, with hair slicked back into a knot at the nape of the neck and parted on the left instead of in the middle.

Juicy Item. The faded springtime appetite of the newspaper-reading public was stimulated by a savory item on Fritz Mandl’s latest marital difficulties. Mandl’s third wife, Herta Schneider, sued for legal separation (divorce is outlawed in Argentina), charged Fritz dragged her around their swanky apartment by the hair. Scandal-loving Crítica plastered the story all over the paper, complete with cheesecake pictures of Hedy Lamarr, Mandl’s second wife, recounted Mandl’s efforts to suppress the film Ecstasy.

Government newspapers continued to attack the U.S. and its press, but spring fever obviously afflicted the editorial writers. La Epoca referred to “the New York newspaper, the Washington Post”; another sheet, with an equally fine disregard of the facts, damned the United Press, “whose figureheads called Roy, Scripp and Howard, also direct the New York Post, the Nation, and the New York Journal-American”

Spring even appeared to soften the heart of Argentine economic czar Miguel Miranda. Last week Miranda closed a deal with a U.S. Army mission for the sale of 28,110 tons of Argentine corn at the reasonable price of $104 a ton ($2.66 a bushel). He also announced that Argentina, if it could get oil and other transportation necessities, would be happy to sell all grains at the “world price.” No one knew exactly what the “world price” was, but the U.S. hoped it would be less than the exorbitant $5.90 a bushel Argentina has been getting from hungry Europe for its wheat.