The Squares of the City (11 page)

The evening lights of Ciudad de Vados spread out below us like a carpet of jewels. It was the finest view I had yet had of the city; I said so to Señora Cortés.

“Yes, we have a beautiful city,” she answered, smiling faintly. “It is good to know that you, señor, will help us to keep it so.”

Rioco, sitting in the front beside the driver, gave a short laugh, perhaps not at Señora Cortés’s remark.

Like everything else in Vados, the studio building was spacious and impressive. We pulled up in front of the brilliantly lit main foyer whose high glass doors stood open to the warm night. An attendant—a man, but uniformed in the same shade of green as the girl driving our car—whisked the door open for us to get out.

In the foyer people were coming and going with an air of quiet busyness; several of them greeted Señora Cortés as we entered. There were bored-looking actors, actresses, and commentators whose makeup gave them a slightly inhuman appearance; executives and technicians dashing from office to office; a man leading a trio of carefully clipped French poodles by blue ribbons around their necks; an unshaven man with narrow eyes, carrying a trumpet without a case, who looked lost; several tall, slim girls who from their movements could only be precision dancers—it was the sort of mixture one might see anywhere in the vicinity of a TV studio.

Altogether unexpected, though, was what happened when our elevator arrived.

We crossed the floor of the foyer directly to the elevator doors; Señora Cortés pressed the button and stood tapping her foot impatiently while the signal light over the door moved from 3 to 2 to 1. The moment the door started to slide open, she moved forward, only to fall back in astonishment and confusion.

There was a bishop in the car, in full episcopal regalia.

He nodded to us, eyes twinkling, and moved forward with the stateliness of a one-man procession, surrounded by lesser clerics, and a hush fell on the foyer as he approached the exit. I glanced back as we got into the elevator, and saw one of the dancers stop him and drop on one knee to kiss his ring.

Noting my amazement, Rioco chuckled. “That is our good Bishop Cruz,” he said. “He comes each week to record a—a—how do you say it? A lecture?”

“A sermon,” I said, and he nodded.

“A sermon, that would be it. But that’s the first time I ever saw him go out in all his fine clothes like that.” He chuckled again. “Me, I thought for a moment it was someone dressed up for a show!”

The elevator disgorged us on the top floor, and as we emerged into the corridor, a stout man going thin on top caught sight of my companions and addressed them sternly in Spanish.

“Where in the name of the good God have you been, Isabela? You know this evening’s program has to be good! What was the reason for running off
and
taking Enrique with you?” He flung out an arm in a grandiose gesture. “The chaos in the place is beyond conceiving!”

Señora Cortés blanched slightly, but replied peaceably, explaining who I was and where she had been. “Go into the studio, Enrique,” she added to Rioco. “Things can’t be in too bad a muddle, but something probably needs setting right.”

Rioco nodded and disappeared through the nearest door. The balding man seemed to have been pacified by what Señora Cortés had to say and shook my hand absent-mindedly. “I’m beginning to think I should have handled the details of this program myself,” he said in a depressed voice, not paying me any more attention. “Please make sure it is good, won’t you, Isabela?”

He turned away and strode down the corridor. Showing signs of relief at his departure, Señora Cortés turned to me again.

“Please come with me,” she said. “I will show you the studio from which we make this broadcast. Much of it is on tape already, of course, but the interview with you and some other parts will transmit live. This way.”

We went through the same door as that which Rioco had taken, picked our way through a tangle of cables snaking across the floor, dodged technicians and avoided cameramen lining up angles. Finally we took refuge in an alcove next to the director’s goldfish bowl.

Rioco had changed his personality as soon as he entered the studio, obviously. Now, standing between a girl in glasses who held a pile of duplicated scripts and a man with cigarette-yellowed fingers who seemed to be the lighting technician, he was crackling out authoritative directions to his staff.

“Francisco!” called Señora Cortés to a pleasant-faced young man crossing the floor. He turned and came up to us, and she introduced him as Francisco Córdoban. “Our regular interviewer on this program,” she explained.

“Glad to meet you, Mr. Hakluyt,” said Córdoban, gripping my hand squarely. “Bit short notice, I’m afraid, asking you to appear for us, but it’s extremely good of you to come. The interview won’t run too long, I’m afraid—I’m figuring on between seven and nine minutes near the end of the program. How’s your Spanish? I can run it in either English or Spanish, but we lose a lot of time if I have to interpret, of course.”

I shrugged. “Well, my Spanish is pretty poor, but I’m willing to try it if you like.”

“Excellent. Look, let’s step into the control room for a few minutes—Enrique won’t be ready to come in for a while, I imagine. I can give you an idea of the questions I want to ask and find out if answering them in Spanish gives you any trouble.”

He pushed open the door and stood aside to let me pass. The goldfish bowl was fairly cramped, but of course as soon as the door was closed again it was dead silent. None of the monitor screens was working yet, and only a whisper indicating that current was flowing came from the speakers.

Córdoban gave me a chair and himself leaned back against a panel of lights. “Well, I’ll start off with a bit about your background and the kind of work you do—you’re a traffic analyst, isn’t that correct? And you’ve worked almost all over the world. Anywhere in particular you’d like me to mention?”

“Oh—India, the UAR, the States. And my native Australia, of course.”

“Ah-hah. Good. Well, that bit doesn’t involve you; I’ll just do the spiel with you out of shot. Then I’ll start putting questions to you directly. The first ones will be quite simple, about what you think of Vados. Let’s try it through.
Ha estado Vd. otra vez en Ciudad de Vados?”

“Nunca,”
I answered.

“Le gusta a Vd. nuestra ciudad?”

And so it went smoothly enough: it was much as I had expected—mostly platitudes about how impressive Vados was. The nearest Córdoban came to treading on the edge of the controversy regarding the proposed redesigning was to ask me if I had yet made up my mind about what I would recommend.

I told him that I had been here only a few days and it was too early to say.

“Bueno!”
he exclaimed, pushing himself away from the panel where he had been leaning. “That’ll do nicely, Mr. Hakluyt. Well, we still have twenty minutes before we go on the air—we could step around to the bar for a drink if you like—”

He looked out onto the floor of the studio and corrected himself. “Sorry—Enrique’s doing a run-through, so we’ll have to stick around a moment. Cigarette?”

I accepted the offer.

“Have you been on television before?” Córdoban inquired. “I didn’t think to ask. Maybe you’d be more interested to stay here and watch what’s happening.”

“I get put on TV quite often,” I said. “I’ve been in charge of two or three quite big projects in the States, and reporters sometimes come swarming around when work’s in progress.”

“Ah-hah,” Córdoban nodded. “I can well understand that. We’ll be making a very big feature of the reconstruction when it starts, I imagine.”

“No matter what form it takes?” I couldn’t resist the jab; it missed, and he gave me a puzzled look.

“Does it matter what the details are? It’s news, anyway.”

I passed it off as inconsequential. “Tell me,” I said. “You have quite a setup here—far bigger than I’d expected. Is your broadcasting very extensive?”

“It’s the highest coverage in Latin America, as a matter of fact,” he said with a hint of pride. “We’ve used television a lot over the past twenty-odd years. I’m not sure what the current percentage is, but according to the last survey a year ago, we were getting to two-thirds of the total population, except, of course, at the big festivals like Easter. Even then there’s television playing in bars and places, of course, and the smallest villages have at least one set apiece now. Then we go over the border to some extent, of course, but the number of sets there is so much smaller it’s negligible.”

I was impressed. “How about radio?” I said. “I suppose you don’t pay that much attention if your TV audience is so large.”

“Oh, on the contrary! Except for the hour-a-day educational programs, we only telecast from six in the evening, you know. There isn’t much of an audience during the day, except on Sunday afternoons when we come on at two. But we do radio programs from six in the morning until midnight. Workers in factories listen, peasants take portable radios into the fields with them, drivers on the road and housewives at home listen in—why should we waste a potential audience like that?”

The way he put it puzzled me slightly; I didn’t press the matter, though, and simply nodded. He looked past me through the glass wall. “Enrique’s still having trouble” he noted. “I don’t think we’d better disturb him for another few moments.”

I glanced around the room; as he spoke, my eye fell on a small row of books alongside the control panel, and I thought there was something familiar about the nearest of them. They were mainly cheap novels, presumably what the technicians or producer read during lulls or transmission of intercut tape. The one that caught my eye, however, was obviously out of place; it was stout and well-thumbed, and its red binding bore several cigarette burns. It looked like a textbook; I presumed it was a manual of television engineering, but—perhaps the author’s name rang a bell with me—I picked it up.

A book whose title, even in Spanish, meant something to me because the name of the author was very well-known to me indeed: Alejandro Mayor.

Several years rolled back in my mind; I was back at the university, arguing heatedly over the most controversial of many controversial books in our social science curriculum. In its English edition the book was called
The Administration of the Twentieth-Century State,
and the author was this same Alejandro Mayor.

I opened the book with interest; its title was
El Hombre de la Ciudad de Hoy—The Modern City Man.
I wondered if it was as pungent and original as the earlier work, for I saw it had only been published a matter of five years ago. Probably not, I decided with regret; in those days Mayor had been a firebrand type of youthful iconoclast causing a scandal in academic circles with every lecture course he gave at the Mexico City School of Social Science. Now he was probably a sedate conformist. That fate usually overtakes innovators—their ideas cease to be revolutionary.

Córdoban had been grinning at the inaudible difficulties Rioco was having with his run-through. Now he turned back and saw what I was doing.

“You’ve read that, perhaps?” he suggested.

I shook my head. “Not this one. But I read his first book in college. It’s rather an odd sort of book to find in a TV studio, isn’t it?” I stuck it back in the rack. “I wonder what became of that man—I don’t seem to have heard of him for years.”

Córdoban regarded me with mild astonishment. “No?” he said quizzically. “Why—”

He glanced around through the glass wall and stiffened as the door of the studio swung open. “Why, there he is now.”

I followed his gaze and saw the balding, stout man whom I had met with Señora Cortés on my arrival.

“Him?” I said blankly.

“But of course. Dr. Mayor has been Minister of Information and Communications in Aguazul for nearly eighteen years.”

“Why—that’s from long before the founding of Ciudad de Vados.”

Córdoban nodded. “That’s right. I’m surprised, though, at your saying his books were strange things to find in a television studio. Why, we regard them as indispensable handbooks.”

I frowned my way back into my memory. “I’m beginning to remember more clearly,” I said. “Didn’t he maintain from the start that communications were the essential tool of modern government? Yes, of course he did.” A further thought struck me. “Eighteen years, did you say? I was still in college then. But I thought Mayor had a chair of social science in Mexico City at that time.”

“I believe he did,” said Córdoban indifferently. “He lectures at the university here, too, of course.”

Out on the studio floor Enrique Rioco had finished his run-through; he seemed satisfied and had gone to have a word with Mayor.

 
“We just have time for that drink,” Córdoban said. “If you’d like one.”

I nodded, and we hurried out of the studio to a small but comfortable bar at the far end of the corridor. Over our drinks I came back to the previous subject.

“Does Dr. Mayor speak English?” I asked.

“I think so—I don’t know how well. Why? Do you want to meet him?”

“I’d be very interested,” I confirmed. “Maybe he’d be interested, too—he was a great influence on me when I was developing my own style.”

“Traffic analysts have styles?” Córdoban inquired sardonically. “How?”