The Squares of the City (45 page)

Vados was watching me as I read the report, and when I looked up, I found his dark eyes on my face. “Yes, Señor Hakluyt,” he said levelly. “It would seem that our mistake lay there.”

“That little bastard Flores!” I said between my teeth. “If I’d known, I’d have kicked him off the plane.”

“Do not bear a grudge against him. He was acting exactly as he was ordered. And I ordered him.”

He dropped into a chair and reached toward a bell. “A drink, señor?” he suggested. “I am ready to answer all your questions.”

“No drink,” I said. “Explanations are all I want.”

“You think perhaps that I would poison you.” He smiled faintly. “The time for that is past. But as you wish. Be seated.”

I drew down another half-dozen of the folders at random and put them on a table as I sat down. I glanced at the names they bore, but they hardly meant anything to me. Too much of my mind was taken up in insisting to myself that I was not dreaming.

“You will perhaps not understand much of this that I am about to tell you, Señor Hakluyt,” said Vados with a sigh. “You are, after all—forgive me, but it is true—a man without deep roots, without a real homeland. You have left your home behind and chosen to work all over the world as a mercenary. We misjudged how deeply that had affected you, how it had cut you off from the influences that must have shaped your personality as a young man. However, it is well that we made such a mistake.”

“Look,” I said, “I don’t want to be told platitudes about myself. I want to know what this means.” I tapped the pile of papers on the table. “As far as I can see, it says here you’ve been playing chess with human beings.”

I could hear the still strong disbelief in my voice as if it were coming from a neighboring chair.

Vados inclined his head. “This is exact,” he muttered.

“Are you insane?”

“Perhaps. But not as you mean it. Señor, I have said to you more than once that Ciudad de Vados is to me like a son. If you had a son, would you wish to see him scarred, injured, perhaps crippled for life? That much I can make clear. I love my country! I have been its ruler for many years, and—oh, I have failed in many ways, but in others I have been fortunate enough to achieve great things where someone else would have patched and scraped and ended up with inferior botched work. …

“And there was this disagreement, this mutual hate, growing out of something I had not foreseen and wished to set right—out of the peasant squatters who poison my beautiful city like germs in its bloodstream. Yes, they, too, are men of my country, but they are my soldiers, too, and I am fighting a war. A war against backwardness, señor!

“They tell me sometimes, ‘You were wrong to build Ciudad de Vados when there are slums in Astoria Negra, lairs of criminals in Puerto Joaquin.’ How was I wrong? Before there was a Ciudad de Vados, what did the world know of Aguazul? It was a blot on maps, no more! There was no trade to speak of, no foreign investment, nothing but peasants and their cattle plodding through mud and dust. Oh, there was the oil, but that was not ours—it was leased for a pittance to people who could afford the equipment to work it. Perhaps you did not know that, señor. That was the way twenty years ago. Today we own a quarter of the oil-drilling equipment in Aguazul; tomorrow we shall own all of it.

“I saw this coming! I trod down other men because I had a vision, and I had seen part of the vision come true. All of it might come true, I think—and then there is this problem dragging disaster in its wake. You will have been told that civil war—ah, but I am not here to make excuses, only to tell you the facts so you may judge.

“Diaz is a good man. He, too, loves his country—our country. But he hears all the little cries of the little people and wishes to run to every one of them and give them comfort. Good, good! But I know that some must suffer for the future happiness of all. Suppose I did not allot four millions of dolaros for the task we set you—what do I do with it? Say I give ten dolaros each to four hundred thousand hungry people in Astoria Negra and Puerto Joaquin. They spend it; it has gone. And perhaps a company that was considering setting its Latin American headquarters here, which would have brought us four millions not of our dolaros but of the better, stronger North American dollar in a very few years, decides to go instead to Brasilia because Ciudad de Vados has lowered its standard. Oh, no, señor! (Yet if Diaz were in here, he and I would be shouting argument at one another. …)

“And in the end what happens? Diaz says that if I will not do as he asks, he will compel me to do it. Or he will oust me and do it himself.

“Am I to see my city bombed? See men and women bleeding in the gutters, at the corners of streets? I have seen that, in Cuatrovientos, before I was president. I have seen men thrown through windows; I have seen children shot down while they cried for mercy. Am I to do as others do, across the border—murder Diaz to be free of his opposition? He is a good man! We have worked long and well together, and only now do we begin to hate each other.

“So at the meetings of the cabinet we rage at one another until one day Alejo—Alejandro Mayor whom you knew, may his soul rest in peace—he comes to me and to Estebán Diaz and suggests to us—”

I saw Vados’s hands tighten, one over the other; the veins stood out knotted on their backs. He was not looking at me. He was reliving the moment he was describing.

“—that since we could not resolve our disagreement except by conflict, that conflict must be bound by rules. He said we both knew rules that were acceptable. He said that he could not—oh, remember, señor, this was perhaps the greatest master of government and political science who has ever lived!—he could not determine from day to day all the actions of all the members of our population, but it would be possible to control very subtly individuals about whom one had gathered sufficient knowledge.”

I could imagine Mayor as he made his proposition: his eyes bright behind his spectacles, his face perhaps shiny with excitement, his voice shaking for fear he might not get this chance to carry out the ultimate experiment in government.

“So perhaps it was a kind of madness,” said Vados, his voice dropping. “But we thought it was a better madness than some. I would not see my city torn apart by civil war; Diaz would not see his people die in a bath of blood. So we agreed, and we took our solemn oath upon it: we would fight out our battle on the squares of the city, serving us for a chessboard, with no man knowing such a game was being played.”

I said a little foolishly, still uncertain whether this was a vast hoax or sober truth, “At the chess match last night—I saw that one side of the audience was dark-skinned and the

other was light. …”

“One side of this whole country is dark-skinned and the other light. As Alejo explained it to us, one cannot predict when a man will feel hungry or thirsty unless one knows when and what he last ate or drank, and many other things. But one can say certainly that if he does not die, he will feel hungry and thirsty sooner or later. And there are certain things that do not change—a man who hates the religious will always be anticlerical, whether he be sick or well, drunk or sober. Oh, how small and unworthy it makes a man seem!

“To listen to him, señor—and we listened, for he had been at my right hand for twenty years nearly—you would have said he was a foolish mystic, a clairvoyant claiming to foretell the future. But we had seen what he could do already, and we agreed. If we had not agreed, we should have split Aguazul apart, and like the dog in the fable of Aesop that dropped its bone in the river through greed, we should have lost all that we were fighting to save.

“But no one else knew, Señor Hakluyt. Until you, no one else in the world knew what was being done.”

“I don’t see how it could be
possible
!” I said helplessly. “People—people are—”

“You find it humiliating that you, too, have been employed as a piece on the board.” Vados looked at me unblinkingly. “I understand. But you may take comfort, for you are also the first and only to see what was being done. It is truly quite simple—so simple it can be done without the person knowing there has been a change in his life. Or so I believed, so
we
believed.

“We needed first a people which is well and firmly ruled. We had that; there is order and law in force in Ciudad de Vados.

“A division into sides was also simple. As you shrewdly say, a partial division exists into black and white, or more nearly darker and lighter. But we selected our pieces where their sympathies lay—some, like Brown, the lawyer, though white-skinned and foreigners, were with the black pieces and with Diaz; some others, although native-born, sided by prejudice with the Citizens of Vados Party and thus with the white cause.

“Then we had to agree that certain pieces should be allotted roles equivalent to the power of the pieces on the actual board. Thus Alejandro Mayor himself— I am sure he did not see what would befall him—was my Queen, the most powerful piece on the board, and wielded equivalent power affecting everyone in the country, through the television, the radio, and the newspaper
Liberdad.
And we also agreed that should a piece be taken, it must be rendered incapable of further influencing the real world. That meant—”

“That meant death,” I said. I was looking at some of the names on the files before me. Fats Brown was dead; Felipe Mendoza was dead; Mario Guerrero was dead. …

“For some, it meant death,” agreed Vados grayly. “Not for all. After the first few I felt this was worse than—but no matter, it is finished now. Yes, I was saying, it was then amazingly easy to predict and to coerce one’s pieces. Let us take a very clever thing which Diaz did against me. He wished to—to take Mario Guerrero. He knew Guerrero despised and hated Francis, that if they were brought together, Guerrero would insult him, and that if he insulted Francis’s skin, Francis would strike him in uncontrolled rage. Had Francis not killed Guerrero with his fist, moreover, he would in all probability have sought him out afterwards and killed him then, for every previous time he had been so insulted he had grown insanely violent. He had left two countries because of this … I had hardly believed that people were so uncomplicated!”

“What about me, then?”

“Oh, you obeyed orders, you furnished me with plans which we demanded, in some ways you reacted as foreseen—but you were sometimes so difficult! We thought you would dislike Brown, who was so unlike you and who so much hated distinctions of race. Instead, you became friendly with him. And Maria Posador, widow of the defeated rival, widow of him who had
not
built this city of which you thought so highly—we expected you to be as ice one to the other, perhaps that you would approach her as a beautiful woman and be repelled and insulted by her. But there again, no! So I was faced with an irremediable weakness in one of my pieces, which Diaz might too readily have exploited. In consequence, I moved you only a few times. But in the end the weakness turned against Diaz, and in seeking to take you from the board and also to abide by the agreement that each piece should take what it took, he was forced to an unwieldy contrivance—and it failed.”

“You—you were aware of who the other’s pieces were?”

“All but the pawns we knew of beforehand. We agreed at the beginning that the power and value of pawns vary with the progress of the game, and that therefore we should name our pawns, one to the other, as they came into play. But the officers we named first of all, and agreed on their powers; that took long, even with Alejo as arbitrator.”

“You mean Diaz allowed one of his opponent’s pieces to act as—as referee?”

Vados shrugged. “I think we understood,” he said in low tones, “that what Alejo cared about was not that one or the other of us should emerge the victor, but that the game should be played. It was to him an ultimate goal; whatever the result, nothing in life would ever mean so much to him again.”

“Then he deserved what he got.”

“Perhaps he did.”

I reverted to my questioning. “But I don’t see how you could
move
a piece!” I said despairingly. “How was—how was I
moved
from square to square?”

“Oh, you were very difficult, señor! The others—they almost moved themselves. I knew, for instance, that Judge Romero would condemn the suit against Guerrero as political trickery, because he had dined with me the night before and I had heard it from him. If he had not produced the idea himself, I would have guided him in that direction. And then I knew always what Alejo would broadcast, for although he did not know how the game was progressing—that was a secret between Estebán Diaz and myself—he knew of its existence and acted as I advised him. So likewise did Diaz with Cristoforo Mendoza and
Tiempo.
I knew that Angers hated Brown, regarding him as a traitor, for he was white and English-speaking and had married an Indian woman and gave his services to Sigueiras. Many times it was not necessary to order one piece or another to move—not directly to order it. It sufficed to give a single piece of information or advice and allow it to work in their minds as leaven works in dough. So, to bring about the downfall of José Dalban, I had to do no more than advise Luis Arrio that he—or perhaps an agent of his—had burned down the television center. This was true! Then, said Arrio, if the police will do nothing against him, I will act myself by destroying his business—and he did. But before God, I did not foresee that he would kill himself!”

“And you mean you solemnly stuck to the rules of the game when you knew perfectly well that Dalban had done that—and killed Mayor in doing it?” My voice cracked on the last word. “You mean you let it go so far that you actually stopped the police from going after Dalban so that Arrio could get at him instead?”