The Squares of the City (4 page)

Dodging a fat woman with a large basket on one arm and a little girl on the other, I almost tripped over a boy sitting on the floor.

Between his legs rested a beautiful hand-painted Indian clay pot; around his shoulders was a handsome but threadbare
serape,
with the fringe of which his right hand played endlessly. He had no left hand, and his battered sombrero was tilted back to show that he had no left eye, either—the whole of that quarter of his face was one great weeping sore.

Startled, I halted in mid-stride. He fixed me with his one eye and whined something in a harsh voice. I felt embarrassed and appalled at the sight of him, as though I had found obscene words scribbled on the Parthenon. I kept my eyes averted as I fumbled in my pocket and found about a dolaro and a half in odd coins which I dropped in his clay pot.

Badly shaken, I went on my way. I had seen sights like that in India fifteen years ago, when I was first working away from home, although even then beggars were rapidly disappearing; I’d seen them in the UAR before it quit bickering and settled down to clean house. But I had thought they belonged to past history.

I had gone only a short distance farther when I felt a tap on my shoulder and turned to find a fresh-faced young policeman trying to regard me sternly. He banged some quick-fire Spanish at me, the thread of which I lost after two words.

“
No habla español,
” I told him.

“
Ah, Norteamericano,
” he said with an air of having had everything explained to him. “The señor please not again geev—geev
dinero
to so kind of people.”

“You mean people like that beggar-boy?” I said, and waved in the boy’s direction to clarify the meaning.

He nodded vigorously.
“
Si, si!
Not to geev to heem. We try ver’, ver’ mooch feenish so kind of people—we not want any more. Not good have in Ciudad de Vados,” he added triumphantly.

“You mean he’s allowed to sit there and ask for money, but it’s illegal to give him any?” I felt slightly confused.

“Ah, no, no, no, no, no! He seet zere, a’right. He ask for
dinero,
not good. Señor geev
dinero,
mooch bad.”

“I see,” I said. I wasn’t sure that I did, completely. But they were trying to discourage beggars; that was plain. The boy seemed like a deserving case—still, I wasn’t prepared to take up the question of social welfare services in pidgin Spanish.

The policeman gave me a beaming smile and went back along the subway.

When I came to the next intersection, I found I’d taken a wrong turning
again
and would have to go back. That was how I happened to find the policeman, baton thrust against the beggar-boy’s chest, fumbling in the clay pot for the money I had put there. The boy was weeping and protesting.

The policeman made certain he had all the coins and stood up. He made his baton swish through the air an inch from the boy’s face, yelling at him to be quiet, as though he were a disobedient animal, and turned away.

In the same instant he saw me standing looking at him.

He seemed to turn green—or perhaps that was an illusion caused by the mercury vapor lights. His mouth worked as if he were trying to find words to explain his action. He failed. When I silently put out my hand, he sheepishly dropped his plunder into it.

I just stood there. After a while he gave a foolish, apologetic smile and marched rapidly off down the passage, trying to look as though nothing had happened.

I put the money back in the boy’s pot and got across to him the idea that he would be better off somewhere else. Smiling and nodding his grotesque head, he gathered his
serape
around him, hid the pot under it, and shambled away.

I had no further difficulty in finding my way to the correct exit from the subway, which brought me out on the edge of the Plaza del Norte. I stood there for a moment, getting my bearings by reference to the two statues in the square. One was of
el Liberador,
Fernando Armendariz, first president of the Republic of Aguazul; the other—inevitably—was of Vados. Armendariz faced right, toward the palatial old-gold frontage of the Congress building, Vados left, toward the vast, plain City Hall.

It was only to be expected that there was a tremendous bustle of people coming and going before the City Hall—and nearly complete stillness in front of Congress.

I had just identified the third great building that fronted on the plaza as the Courts of Justice when there was a tug at my sleeve. I turned to find a small man with glasses, a notebook, and a fistful of ball-point pens. Behind him, two identically tall men in dark suits watched me closely. I disliked the look of them at once—“bodyguard” was the word they brought to my mind.

The small man addressed me rapidly in Spanish; it was too much for me to follow, and I said so. He laughed forcedly at his mistake.

“It is an error of mine, señor,” he said importantly. “I am asking the questions for the government, and I regret that I took you for a citizen.”

“What questions for the government?”

“Ah, the señor is perhaps not acquainted with some of our enlightened and progressive ideas!” He beamed at me. “Why, it is simple. When there is a matter of public importance to be decided, we take what is called a random sampling of the people’s opinion.”

“I see,” I nodded. This seemed much of a piece with what señora Posador had told me yesterday about the Speakers’ Corner in the Plaza del Sur; it might even be another of Diaz’s ideas. Governmental public-opinion polls seemed like pretty good insurance for an absolute ruler, to find out which of his proposed decrees he would be unable to shove down his people’s throats.

“And what’s the current survey about?”

“It is on the citizenship rights in Ciudad de Vados,” said the small man. “But since the señor is not a citizen, he will excuse me for returning to my business.”

He bustled back importantly to the subway exit, and I saw him stop and question a pretty girl as she emerged. I wondered, watching her, whether, had I been a citizen, I could have spoken my mind honestly with those two tall and menacing characters staring at me.

I checked my watch and found I had spent five minutes too long on my way to the traffic department. I hurried across the plaza toward City Hall.

The head of the traffic department had signed the contract that brought me to Vados; I knew therefore that his name was Donald Angers, and I had naturally assumed him to be North American.

He wasn’t. He was type-English almost to the point of affectation, and my first reaction to the discovery was to feel that he was almost as much out of place in Vados as the one-eyed beggar-boy.

He studied me hard as he shook my hand and then waved me to a chair. “I see you’ve caught a dose of the local mañana temperament already, Mr. Hakluyt,” he said, with a glance at the clock on his office wall that was just discreet enough not to be offensive.

“I ran into one of your organs of government,” I said, and told him about the public-opinion pollster.

Angers gave a thin, wintry smile. “Ye-es … I suppose President Vados is one of the very few people ever to have put into practice the old saw about a government standing or falling by its public relations.”

He offered me a cigarette, and I accepted. “Is this another of Diaz’s ideas?” I suggested as I held out my lighter.

Angers hesitated momentarily before setting his cigarette to the flame. “What makes you think that?” he countered.

“It seems on a par with this sort of Speakers’ Corner they run in the Plaza del Sur, and a woman I met at my hotel last night told me that was one of Diaz’s notions.”

Again the wintry smile, this time a little broader. “Yes, that’s one of the best pieces of gallery play we have.” He made a note on a memorandum pad before him; he used a fine-nib fountain pen with light blue ink.

“Purely out of curiosity,” I said, “what the hell was going on in the Plaza del Sur when I arrived yesterday afternoon? I see the papers are full of it today, but I don’t speak very good Spanish.”

Angers drew in smoke thoughtfully, looking past me. “That isn’t strictly true,” he said.
“
Tiempo
played it up, as was to be expected, but they naturally magnified it out of all proportion. As it happens, though, it was one minor aspect of a problem with which your work here is directly involved.”

“Oh?”

“Yes. I’ll brief you as well as I can. The situation’s very complex, but I can at least give you an outline at once.” He stretched out a thin arm and tugged down the cord of a roller-mounted wall map on his right.

“You’ve probably made yourself acquainted with the history of Ciudad de Vados?” he added with a passing glance at me.

I nodded.

“Good. Then you’ll know it was planned about as thoroughly as a city could well be. But the human element is always the most difficult to legislate for, particularly when the human element concerned is
not
the population of the city itself, but the extremely balky and obstinate native group.”

There was a pause. I became aware that a comment was expected from me. I said, “This doesn’t sound much like an orthodox traffic problem.”

“Not much in Vados
is
orthodox,” said Angers pointedly. “As you have no doubt gathered. However, the essence of the problem is simple enough.

“Vados, of course, is an exceptionally farsighted and astute man. I believe that he had for a long time envisaged the possibility of building his new capital city before there was a chance of really doing it, but he was forced to admit that if he simply used up the funds and resources he had available in employing—uh—native talent, he would get not the handsome new town he hoped for, but something petty and rather squalid, like Cuatrovientos or Puerto Joaquin. You should visit those towns while you’re here, if you want to see a traffic man’s nightmare.

“Well, there was one possible solution, and he rather courageously went ahead and adopted it, in face—so I’m told—of extremely strong opposition from Diaz and a good few of his other supporters. That was to invite anyone and everyone who could make a positive contribution to his new city to invest their efforts in its building. Naturally enough, he wanted the very best of everything, and the very best simply wasn’t to be found in Aguazul.

“I myself was supervisory engineer on the road-building project between here and Puerto Joaquin, and like everyone who had played a major part in the creation of the city I was granted citizens’ rights and the offer of a permanent post when the job was over. The great majority of us took the posts we were offered, naturally; in fact, about thirty per cent of the city’s present population, the most influential and important section, acquired their citizens’ rights the same way. After all, a city isn’t something you can put down in the middle of nowhere, fill with people, and expect to run itself, is it?”

I murmured that I supposed not.

“Exactly. Some such scheme was essential to the success of the project. The natives could never have produced the Ciudad de Vados you see today without this help from outside—you take that from me.

“A few years ago, however, unforeseen trouble arose. Here’s what I mean about the human element. The people of the villages and half-pint towns up-country from here saw this prosperous new city on their doorstep, so to speak, and decided they wanted to move in. Why, they argued, shouldn’t they cut a slice of this cake? Of course, to people like you and me it’s obvious why not, but imagine trying to explain the facts to an illiterate Indian peasant. Why, until we managed to put a stop to it recently, we were getting whole families moving in not only from the West Indies but even, so help me, from Hawaii—people with no more right to the streets of Vados than—than Laplanders!

“One of the less savory effects of this you may have noticed already—the fringe of shantytowns just outside the city boundary, populated by a shiftless crowd of spongers and beggars: illiterate, forming a positive cesspool of disease, contributing nothing to the life of Vados and expecting everything in return.”

He was growing quite heated with the force of his expostulations. I took advantage of the fact that he seemed to have worked himself up to a climax, and interrupted.

“How exactly does this become my problem, Mr. Angers?”

He relaxed a little, remembered his cigarette, and knocked off its accumulated ash. “Well, as you can understand, we citizens don’t like the situation. We played an indispensable part in creating Vados, and we expect the terms of our citizens’ rights to be honored. We don’t want our town smeared with patches of slum development. Matters came to a head some months ago, and it was obvious that something was going to have to be done—something really drastic. Diaz, who is, strictly speaking, the minister to whom the various administrative departments of the city are responsible, wanted to try to integrate this new floating population into the town. I told him it was ridiculous, because the natives just aren’t city-dwellers—they’re backward peasants. But Diaz is a hard-to-persuade sort of man, son of the soil and all that—I sometimes wonder, actually, whether he’s really superior to these people in the shantytowns or whether he’s just more cunning. It would be hard to imagine two people less alike than Diaz and the president, who’s a very intelligent and cultured man. Still, I suppose it’s for precisely that reason that Diaz managed to make himself indispensable—the common touch, you know, and all that sort of thing.