The Squares of the City (41 page)

I was restless that evening. I had intended to relax in the hotel bar, but I couldn’t relax at all, and in the end I decided to go for a stroll; the evening was fine and clear, and there was a light breeze.

I was thinking as I started out about the man who had been my seat-companion in the plane coming down from Florida, the one who had boasted about his European accent and his country of adoption in equal proportions. I had found his card again in my wallet as I was paying for dinner this evening. The name was Flores. I recalled telling myself that I knew more about his city than he probably did, although I had never visited it.

What
had
I known? Anything at all? I couldn’t have said then, as I could now, that that man driving a European sports car rather too fast through the main highway nexus was probably a supporter of the Citizens of Vados, and that consequently the long-faced Amerind lighting a candle and crossing himself before the wall shrine in the market was prepared to hate him on principle. I couldn’t have said that the old woman carrying a sleepy-eyed baby through the glittering evening streets probably worried more about the health of the family livestock than of the child—for a crippled and sickly child might still be able to beg, while a crippled and sickly animal was good for nothing at all.

Lord, there was power waiting for anyone who had the determination and patience to employ knowledge of human beings!

Of course, demagogues and dictators all through history had used such techniques. Only they had been amateurs, empiricists, and their lack of knowledge led to eventual ruin. You couldn’t rule people totally—they were, as Maria Posador put it, too cussed—unless you were responsible not only for externals like their living conditions, their right to walk the streets in freedom, their binding laws and regulations, but also for far more subtle things: for their prejudices, their fears, beliefs, and hatreds.

I’d been talking wildly about developing mathematical tools on the analogy of the ones I used every day, to cope with general as well as particularized behavior. Now it occurred to me that perhaps I already had some of those tools.

Suppose, for example, I went from here to work on the Pietermaritzburg project. It would certainly be the biggest planned traffic system in Africa if it came off. There I’d have to make allowances for the local system; I’d have to complicate simple suggestions to make provision for
blankes
and
nie-blankes.
Even here that held good. Making allowances for the local system …

Why had I been brought into this, anyway? Not because a genuine traffic problem existed; rather, because legal and political factors combined to dictate that a traffic problem be solved in order to smooth over an unpopular decision. I wanted desperately to believe that I had done the best I could. But the fact remained: I hadn’t done my job. I mean, I hadn’t done
my
job. I’d done the dirty work for people without the necessary special knowledge to do it themselves.

It was as well that I was an outsider. I could leave Ciudad de Vados behind me, and with it the dispute between the Nationals and the Citizens, between foreign-born and natives, between Vados and Diaz; and when the results were all in, I might be found to have set a precedent.

Oh, there were similar cases on the books—there was Baron Haussmann’s work in Paris, and there was the clearing of the St. Giles rookery in London, when street-planning and slum clearance had been used to get rid of nests of crime and vice. But there the primary object had been to improve the city. To coerce social change by altering the balance of factors that had led to undesirable conditions—that was subtler, and very different. Inherently different.

Good God, I had been right, at that!

I had been walking, lost in thought, for several hundred yards without knowing where I was going. Now I stopped in my tracks, and a young man and a girl coming arm-in-arm behind me bumped into me. I apologized, let them pass, and resumed my aimless stroll, repeating under my breath, “I
was
right!”

Sometimes you can have knowledge right in the palm of your hand and never use it, because you don’t recognize it for what it’s worth, or because you aren’t the kind of person it’s worth anything to. I hoped the second alternative applied to myself.

For I had just realized I had power I never knew about.

I explained it to myself step by step, saying
look at it this way.
Here in Vados, capital city of the “most governed country in the world,” they conceive the idea of applying my indirect leverage to enforce a desired social change. They don’t have the knowledge to work the trick themselves; they know the next best thing, though—where to lay hands on the knowledge, as I would look up figures in a table of logs.

Now it had been done, it would be copied. Recipe: specialized knowledge.

I remembered hearing about a time-and-motion man—forerunner in some ways of my own discipline—who achieved one of the earliest major successes in the field when they gave him the problem of improving the ground-to-upper-floor communications of a skyscraper, whose lobby was swamped with people entering and leaving and whose elevators were crammed to capacity.

He studied the situation—and recommended putting an information booth in the lobby. Result: people entering slowed down, perhaps went to the desk, at least hesitated while they decided not to. And the flow of people thereafter moved at a pace which the elevators could handle.

I could do that. In South Africa the hatreds engendered by
apartheid
smoldered always below the surface. Suppose I designed a main station so that two segregated streams bumped each other or crossed each other, so that neither had the easiest access to its own part of the train, or to waiting rooms and conveniences. Plan skillfully; estimate the irritation caused and allow for it to become unbearable on a blazing hot day at the time when, tempers frayed, people are going home from work tired out. It needs just one man in a crowd to push another, to be struck down—and explosion!

If the critical points were too obvious, people might see them in the plans and demand changes. But who would think such factors had been built-in deliberately?

Almost, they could have done this when they were planning Ciudad de Vados. They didn’t have access to enough information, of course. They couldn’t have foreseen that Fernando Sigueiras would be a stubborn man with a streak of mulelike tenacity, or that Felipe Mendoza would become famous outside his own country and language group, or that Judge Romero would become incompetent and crotchety in his old age.

But they could have deduced that peasants deprived of water would move to the city. They could have guessed that the native-born citizens would be jealous of the foreign-born. They could have guessed a good many more things—no, not guessed. Reasoned out. Only they didn’t know what they knew.

And I did have the knowledge, and I had been used. Made to go through motions like a—a pawn on a chessboard.

I found myself on the fringe of a large crowd and looked to see where I had got to. I had somehow found my way to the Plaza del Oeste, and I was now facing the public tournament hall. Posters announced that tonight the finals of the Ciudad de Vados regional competition in the series for the national chess championship were being played off. Pablo Garcia was advertised to play.

When I paid attention to what the crowd around me was saying, I discovered that they had all come in the hope of seeing the grand master because there was no television any more.

On an impulse, I thrust my way through the crowd to the box office. There were many people in the lobby, hurrying to their seats. The girl clerk in the box office shook her head with a smile.

“The señor is plainly a stranger in Vados,” she said smugly. “Otherwise he would know that all tickets were sold—as usual—the day before yesterday.”

She turned to exchange someone else’s reservation form for his tickets; I went back to the entrance, wondering why I had taken the trouble to go and ask anyway, since there were few things I fancied less this evening than sitting and watching a chess match.

Obviously, though, a lot of people didn’t share my tastes. I could hardly get down the steps now for a huge swarm of schoolchildren eagerly waving their tickets and chattering with excitement.

Suddenly a siren sounded outside. As though by magic half a dozen policemen appeared, thrusting the bystanders off the sidewalk and clearing the approach to the hall. One of the officers recognized me just as he was about to shove me back with the rest of the crowd, and courteously asked me to stand back from the entrance. I did so, just as
el Presidente
’s car pulled up.

A dapper little man in full evening dress—probably the manager of the hall—and a stout woman whose gown was ornamented with an official-looking rosette incorporating a checkered motif greeted Vados and his wife as they emerged from the car. Smiling and bowing in response to the claps of the onlookers, they came toward the entrance.

And as he passed, Vados caught sight of me.

“Señor Hakluyt!” he exclaimed, halting in his tracks. “You have been unlucky in obtaining a ticket?”

I admitted that I had. “But it’s of no importance,” I said. “I was just walking past, and I came in on the spur of the moment—”

“But it is of the greatest importance!” said Vados with enthusiasm. “I am told your work is finished and you will be leaving us soon. It is unthinkable that you should go without seeing a great national institution like a chess match!” He turned peremptorily to the dapper man following him. “Place another chair in the presidential box!” he commanded. “Señor Hakluyt is my guest.”

I cursed the man’s generosity, but I could hardly get out of it now, so I murmured dutiful thanks and fell in behind.

The box was large, with an excellent view of the four tables which were in play together. Even so I was a bit of a nuisance, for in addition to Vados and his wife and the stout woman with the rosette—who turned out to be the organizing secretary of the city chess federation—there was also Diaz, who was already in his place when we entered.

He rose to shake hands with Vados, and a flash from the body of the hall immortalized the moment on film. A gust of applause swept the packed audience, and the national anthem was played—recorded, presumably, for there certainly wasn’t room in the hall for a seventy-piece symphony orchestra. A one-man band would have had trouble finding space.

The various grand masters who had come through to the finals took their places; Garcia, bobbing his head and smiling, received a tremendous ovation. Then the chief referee called for silence, and play began.

Everyone in the hall could follow the play easily enough; there were opera glasses to study the tables in direct view, and additionally the various moves were repeated on large hanging illuminated signs, grouped in fours, all around the hall. I remembered having seen similar signs, not yet illuminated, outside the entrance, without realizing their purpose.

For a while I made a great show of appreciating the opportunity of seeing the match. Then the heavy thinking set in, and I began to get bored.

I stole a covert glance at Señora Vados; she sat with her face in an expression of absolute blank tranquillity, and I judged she had mastered the art, so useful to a public figure, of turning off her mind.

I also looked at Diaz, wondering what was going on inside that dark skull. Having directly countermanded Vados’s instructions to Angers, he must be feeling pretty tense in his president’s company; indeed, I saw the muscles on the backs of his large hands knot and unknot, and sometimes he swiveled his eyes to scan Vados’s face.

As for Vados, he seemed utterly absorbed in the play.

A scatter of applause which the stewards failed to kill ran through the audience, closely pursued by indignant hushing sounds. I saw that Garcia was sitting back with a smug expression, while his opponent literally scratched his head in cogitation.

A clever move, presumably. But I was getting more interested in the audience than in the play. Who were these chess fans? They seemed to be a complete cross-section of Vadeanos; there a shabby man like a factory hand was playing through Garcia’s game on a much-worn pocket set balanced across his knee—he was on the wrong side of the hall to see Garcia’s board clearly and had to take the moves off a sign. Two places from him a woman was knitting and chewing gum while staring at the players; then there was a block packed solid with children under eighteen and over twelve.

Across the hall, in the more expensive places that commanded a perfect view of the most popular table—Garcia’s, of course—were men in tails and women in low-cut dresses who looked as though they had set out for boxes at the opera rather than seats at a chess match. Yes, both the
blankes
and the
nie-blankes
were—

What
was that? I caught the idea by its disappearing tail and hauled it back into the front of my mind. Surely I must have been dreaming about the pieces on the boards: black opposed to white. For this was the wrong country.

I looked again, straining my eyes past the brilliant hanging lights, and felt a shiver down my spine. Coincidence, perhaps—but it was true. Diaz, for instance, sat on Vados’s right, and for the most part the audience on that side of the hall were long-faced Amerinds or recognizably mulatto. Oh, there were plenty of Caucasian faces, too, but on this side dark skins lined up in groups of half a dozen together. The situation across the hall was reversed: the dark skins were spaced singly among the rows of lighter faces.