ARGENTINA: Man on the Sidewalk

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In the chill autumn twilight, Pedro Pisani, citizen of Buenos Aires, sat on the sidewalk before his three-room suburban home, sipped unsugared mate (South American tea), and considered his lot. He was worried about the future. Argentine-born son of Italian immigrants, father of three, mild-mannered Pedro had worked for 20 years or more in the offices of Gath & Chaves, a big downtown department store. Until two years ago he earned $50 a month. Since then, Juan Perón's election-time decrees (and the store's voluntary raises) had upped his pay to $63. Still, had not living costs shot up three times faster than his salary in those years?

Nowadays sprawling B.A.'s transport was so old and overburdened that Pedro had to get up an hour early to catch the streetcar to work. To save money, Pedro had also stopped lunching downtown, and that meant another scramble for a ride home. Maria, his wife, knew how to stretch a peso, but the noonday meal seldom varied from the traditional puchero (meat and vegetable stew).

Installment payments took a painful $13 monthly, for Pedro, like most porteños, bought the family clothes (including his own neat, dark suit) on a ten payment credit plan. Lately Pedro had turned a few pesos by keeping books for a nearby almacén (store), and this, with the $35 a month earned by elder son Guillermo, brought the Pisani budget into precarious balance. Pedro shuddered to think of what would happen if sickness struck his home.

The Formula. Politics he heard about mostly from his sons. Guillermo, 22 and just back from a year's compulsory military service, was an enthusiastic Peronista. Gerardo, 18, studying at the university to become a chartered accountant, because Pedro had determined that one of his sons should have the benefit of a good education, was anti-Perón, as most university students. The brothers squabbled endlessly over Perón's foreign projects, domestic reforms.

Such talk confused Pedro, the kind of man who took his wife to the movies twice a month and walked in the park with his twelve-year-old daughter on Sundays. His simple political philosophy: "I worked 20-odd years, and management never did much for me. Now, since the revolution I got a pay increase, a bonus, and an old-age pension. Perón did that. I voted for Perón."

Would Perón also save from devouring inflation those few hundred pesos socked away at the postal-savings bank? Guillermo had an answer for his father: "Perón will fix everything."