The Squares of the City (34 page)

I was pretty sure that the first alternative was the correct one. Reactions like Angers’s couldn’t have been simulated. Angers dropped in to see me at the hotel on Sunday evening and told me, gray-faced, that he had never known such events in the decade he’d lived in Vados. He had just seen his wife off at the airport; he had sent her to stay with friends in California until the situation calmed down.

And that was likely to be some time yet.

The only other significant development over the weekend, though, was a stern and dignified challenge against Dominguez by Professor Cortés. Cortés made no attempt to defend Lucas—nobody was attempting to defend Lucas at the moment—but he maintained that Dominguez’s accusations against Caldwell were totally baseless. He had himself, so he claimed, seen far worse things in Sigueiras’s slum and in the shantytowns than found its way into the health department reports.

I wasn’t sure about Cortés any longer. Not now that I’d seen Sigueiras’s place for myself. Of course, Cortés carried great authority, and he wouldn’t be consciously lying in a matter like this. The best one could say, though, was that he had a fertile imagination. Or perhaps he just had a greater capacity for being shocked than most people.

Not greatly put out, Dominguez replied that it wasn’t his unsupported word in question; the report on which he had based his statements was an official one prepared by a special investigator called Guyiran, on the staff of the Ministry of the Interior. In other words, Dominguez implied, if you’re going for anybody, you’ve got to go for Diaz, and if you don’t, your complaints won’t cut any ice.

Apparently Cortés wasn’t prepared to go to such lengths; he preserved a hurt silence.

There seemed to be a fantastic network of interlocking rivalries and fields of influence here. Some of it was due to the peculiar semi-independent constitution of Ciudad de Vados, which wasn’t autonomous and yet didn’t seem to be amenable to the national government as easily as the rest of the country. Doubtless this was due to Vados’s personal relation with his “offspring.” But each development seemed to be laying bare new tensions created by the city’s privileged status, and people seemed to be far more aware of these tensions than they had been five weeks ago, when I arrived.

I wondered how much of the change was due to the loss of Alejandro Mayor and his inspired manipulation of the organs of information. I wondered whether Maria Posador had been right to fear for the future of the country when the creators of its highly individual technique of government died or grew too old.

The way things were now, it seemed she must have been right.

I had an early call again from Angers on Monday morning.

“A pleasant surprise for you, Hakluyt,” he said in a voice that wasn’t wholly ironical. “
El Presidente
himself is dropping in at the department this morning and wants you to be there. You have exactly thirty minutes—can you make it?”

“No,” I said. I took forty. But Vados was late himself.

He looked very much older than he had at our previous meeting, at Presidential House. It might just have been that he was tired and worried, but, of course, to have been in power for so long as he now had, he must in any case be over sixty and perhaps nearing seventy. I found him in Angers’ office, poring over a relief map of the city. Angers wasn’t with him. The only other person present was a man in plain clothes who sat inconspicuously in a corner, his eyes fixed on me, and whom Vados ignored completely.

“Please sit down, Señor Hakluyt,” he said. “It is not at a good time that you have come to our beautiful city, is it?”

I nodded wry agreement.

He shifted a little on his chair and leaned back with one hand in the side pocket of his jacket. “In essence, señor, I have called you to ask a favor of you.” He spoke as if he felt slightly shamefaced asking favors of anyone, and the effect was to make me feel—as he obviously intended—rather flattered.

“You’re my employer,” I said, shrugging.

“Good.” Vados looked me straight in the eyes and smiled. Even at his present age he was a strikingly handsome and distinguished man. He had been fiddling with something in the pocket where his hand was hidden; now he brought it out, and I saw that it was a beautifully chased silver crucifix, not more than two inches long. He caressed it with the tops of his fingers as he spoke.

“Well, señor, I have seen the memorandum which you prepared regarding the slum below the monorail central. It was sent to Minister of the Interior Diaz, and he had occasion to refer to it at our emergency meeting of the cabinet yesterday. This is an admirable document, señor—high-principled and showing a great regard for the human beings who will be affected. Unhappily, it is worthless.”

He spoke the last sentence without a change of tone or expression, taking me by surprise. I said, “I’m sorry—I don’t see why.”

He shrugged. “Señor, I believe you can be a discreet man. I also believe that since you have never been to our country before and will quite happily be working in Nicaragua or New Zealand or Nebraska as soon as you leave, you will not pass on in haste what I shall say. Effectively then, señor, there is a flaming row going on over this question which you are aiding us so cleverly to solve.”

“That’s fairly obvious,” I said. “
Señor Presidente,
you must know as a politician and a practical man that someone who is told simultaneously to do a job and only to half-do it realizes very quickly that the people telling him to do it don’t know their own minds. Angers warned me that Señor Diaz would be sure to turn down my suggestion, but it’s the only long-term solution.”

He gave a weary smile. “Long-term solutions are no good to us, señor! In two years, yes, perhaps, but today we are merely trying to gain time, to prevent disaster overwhelming us. As you so rightly state, Diaz is unhappy with your plan. Our government is in a way absolute—that is true. But in all countries men have sometimes to resort to a coalition government in times of emergency, and in many countries on this continent—as you will doubtless realize—there is a perennial state of emergency. I am not a dictator, señor. I am the head of a government composed of men of sometimes conflicting views, who have one desire in common—that our country should be well and firmly ruled. Diaz and I are not only old colleagues—we are old enemies as well.”

He looked at me for a comment; I murmured something about “I fully appreciate …”

“But I have one distinction. This city is—I have perhaps said this to you before, because I say it to everyone, and I say it to everyone because it is the truth—this city is my own child, the child of my mind. I am two official persons: I am president of Aguazul on the one hand, mayor of Ciudad de Vados on the other, and as regards the city, what
I
say shall be done is what matters.”

I nodded.

“Good! Then I say this. My duty is not alone to the people who belong to this country without having had the choice, who were born here, but also to those who shared my vision and my—my dreams, who gave up everything life could have offered them elsewhere to make Ciudad de Vados a reality. It is not
just
that I should betray my promises to them.

“Señor, although Aguazul has grown more and more prosperous in the years I have ruled, ours is still not a very rich country. If I would give with one hand, I must take away with the other—and there is nothing I can take that is not already promised to others! I cannot allot funds for rehousing and subsidizing the squatters of the shantytowns and of the slum beneath the monorail station, not so long as there are slums in Astoria Negra and Puerto Joaquin, not so long as I require those funds to fulfill the promises I have made to the foreign-born citizens. Without them and their aid, there would be no city here—nothing but scrub and barrens.

“Understanding this, you will understand why I must direct you to prepare a scheme—some or any scheme—to wipe away the slums from this city. That will give us the breathing space we need to settle the disagreements in the cabinet, to prepare the long-term schemes we undoubtedly require. But—have you not reflected, Señor Hakluyt, that if we were today to make plans and place contracts for the building scheme envisaged in your memorandum it would be two years before we could clear out those slums? In two years, with such a focus of unrest as we have at present, there will have been revolution!”

“I think,” I said, “that you’ll get your revolution more quickly if you simply—”

He interrupted me, eyes blazing. “Señor, if I were a dictator and an autocrat, I could order troops into the shantytowns and drive their people into the country, have the shacks burned to the ground. I could have Sigueiras shot today and the squatters in a concentration camp tomorrow! But I am not that sort of man. I would rather that the citizens of my country threw flowers at my feet than bombs.”

He slammed the little crucifix down on top of the table beside him; it gave a solid thud. “Please, señor, do not instruct me how to rule my country. Do I tell you how to solve your traffic problems?”

“Frankly,” I said, “yes.”

He stared at me and then began to chuckle. “Very true, alas, señor,” he admitted. “But I wish only that you see my difficulty. Do you?”

“You must also see mine, then,” I answered. “I have no choice except to do as you tell me, of course. But the result will be artificial. It’ll be a pretext. It will be neither improvement nor development—merely change for the sake of change. I’ll do the best I can. But you won’t have achieved any more than if you had, as you said, sent troops to clear the shanty-towns. You will only have pretended to achieve more, and you’ll have spent a lot of money on a sham.”

He was silent for a while. Then, sighing, he got to his feet. “Do not ever enter politics, Señor Hakluyt. You are too much of an idealist. More than twenty years of ruling has taught me that all too often men are ruled better by shams than by realities. Thank you, nonetheless; I look forward to seeing the results of your work soon.”

He extended his hand, realizing only at the last moment that he was still holding the crucifix. As he made to put it away, he saw my eyes on it and mutely displayed it to me on his open palm.

“You are a Catholic?” he inquired.

I shook my head.

He closed his hand around the crucifix. “In some ways I envy you. It is often hard to be both a good Christian and a good statesman.”

“I’d have said it was impossible,” I countered. “A state is concerned with people’s condition here and now; almost all religions are concerned with their state hereafter. And the two pretty often contradict each other.”

“Still, there is the ideal toward which we work.” He sighed heavily. “A Christian government for a Christian community—and almost all my people are believers. … Señor, you must come and dine with me at Presidential House sometime soon. It has become rare for me to meet foreigners who have no personal interest in the way I run my country. I meet bankers negotiating loans, oilmen seeking favorable tariffs, importers and exporters desirous of exploiting our markets—and who else? Sometimes I even envy the man who might, had things been different, have ruled in my place. … But I waste your time in empty talk, señor.
Hasta la vista
!”

He pocketed the crucifix, shook my hand, and returned to his study of the relief map of the city as I left the room.

XXV

I had a dim recollection that when I came to Vados five weeks ago I’d felt excited and proud of having been selected to do this job.

Well, the excitement and the pride were finished. Now I was reduced to doing a scrappy job, collecting my pay, and getting the hell out. The only part of that I wouldn’t regret would be getting the hell out.

It took me about four and a half hours to work out a scheme for the monorail central that was exactly what Vados wanted: two new passenger access ways, extra storage room, and a parking lot that might be half full on saints’ days and holidays. It looked all right superficially, of course; I’ve worked the basic rhythms so far into my system that I don’t think I could any longer design a bad-looking layout. But there wasn’t any
need
for any of this. There was no organic unity about it. It was like—well, creating a demand artificially by clever advertising and then complimenting oneself on having filled a long-felt want. Compared with the scheme I’d worked out for the market district—which was real development, worthy, I liked to think, of the painstaking original planning of the whole city—this was patchwork.

I turned it in for computing at the end of the afternoon. It would cost more than it was worth—but then, anything of this kind was essentially worth nothing. The hell with it. I went back to the hotel and had dinner.

Vados’s directive had amounted to an ultimatum. What else was I to do except get this thing over quickly?

Not long after I entered the dining room at the hotel, Maria Posador also came in. I hadn’t seen her for some days, and at the back of my mind I’d been wondering where she might have got to. Now she showed up with someone I failed to recognize at first, because I’d never before seen him in plain clothes. It was
el Jefe
O’Rourke, looking incredibly wrong as a foil to Señora Posador’s effortless elegance.

For someone who supposedly enjoyed a merely tolerated status in Ciudad de Vados, a bitter enemy of the president, who was alleged to be permitted to remain in the country only so that an eye could be kept on her subversive activities, Maria Posador had a respectably long list of influential friends. This particular mismatch just about capped all the others. I watched covertly while I was eating and saw that O’Rourke ate with gusto and was talking little, while Maria Posador ate rather little and seemed to be saying a lot. Occasionally O’Rourke rumbled into laughter, while his companion looked on with a tolerant smile. Their whole manner was that of old and close friends.