The Squares of the City

I

On the flight down from Florida I talked with my seat companion — or, to be more exact, he talked at me. He was a European-born Jew in his middle fifties whose family had been thrown out by a Nazi invasion early in World War Two, but although he was very proud of the fact that he spoke with a European accent and said so at least a dozen times — “You have noticed my accent, of course!” — I didn’t manage to establish his actual place of origin.

He had not been “home” for four years, and in fact appeared to have spent much more time in the States than he had in Aguazul, but there was no questioning his fervor for his adopted country. He insisted on addressing the stewardess in ludicrously bad Spanish — worse even than mine — although on this route, of course, all the stewardesses spoke English, Spanish, and Portuguese with equal fluency. And when the plane was circling in toward landing, he almost climbed into my lap in an effort to point past me through the porthole and indicate locations of interest in Vados.

Eventually the stewardess commanded him sternly — in English — to fasten his seat belt. I think it was more the fact that she addressed him in a “foreign” language than the actual order that made him calm himself and sit down. After that I was able to close my mind, if not my ears, to his glowing descriptions.

I forebore to tell him (it would have been very unkind) that although I had never set foot in Vados, I almost certainly knew more about the city than he did — more indeed than any of its citizens who hadn’t deliberately tramped the streets for a week on end, exploring and observing. I knew that ten years or so before they had gone to a barren, rocky stretch of land and decreed that there should be a new capital city; they had built roads and put wild mountain torrents into concrete conduits and hoisted solar electricity generators into the surrounding hills, first on muleback and then by helicopter into places where even a mule could not scramble. Now it was a flourishing city of half a million people.

I had studied the essential structure of the city, too: developed organically from four gigantic plazas or squares, modulated by the three great traffic arteries — six-lane superhighways with ten-foot shoulders clear from Astoria Negra and Puerto Joaquín on the coast, and Cuatrovientos, the oil center on which the wealth of Aguazul — and therefore the city — was ultimately based.

But, looking down on the reality as the plane nosed toward the airport cut in the mountainside, I felt a stir of my seat companion’s excitement.

For I suppose I had never before seen anything so completely of the twentieth century.

“Ten years ago,” I said to myself, “this was wasteland. Scrub. Rock. And now look at it.” A shiver of awe clambered down my spine. My feelings must have shown in my expression, for my companion chuckled.

“Magnifico,no?” he said with a smirk of satisfaction, as though he himself had been responsible for the graceful towers, the splendid avenues, the richly flowering parks.

It did indeed look magnificent. But — if it was as good as it looked, I wouldn’t have been here. I hesitated over whether or not I should try to explain, and in the end said nothing.

When we parted in the customs hall of the air terminal, my temporary acquaintance insisted on shaking my hand and giving me his card. The name on it was Flores, with an address on Madison Avenue and another right here in Vados.

Flores. Blum? I wondered. Rosenblum? Possibly; the intervening years had smoothed out his vaunted European accent till it was cosmopolitan, featureless.

He was torn between a desire to continue bragging of his adopted homeland to a stranger and the wish to take his place in the citizens’ line at the customs desk, asserting his national rights. In the end the latter pull triumphed. But before we separated, his hand shot out and indicated a picture placed — not conspicuously, but visibly — behind the customs officers.

“That’s a great man!” he said impressively. “The man they named Vados for, of course. El Presidente!”

Iwas apparently the only alien aboard the plane this flight, and, as happens most places these days, the natives received precedence. I went to a bench across the narrow hall and lit a cigarette, composing myself to wait.

The hall was quiet, lined with sound-absorptive material; although the sun beat down pitilessly on the gray concrete of the runways outside, in here it was cool. The light came through high green louvers, and not a single fly buzzed through the still air. That in these latitudes was an achievement. I occupied myself by looking at the picture. It was not only that I was interested in the appearance of a man who could have a city called after him in his own lifetime, and a capital city, moreover. He was also indirectly my new employer. Officially I would be responsible to the Ciudad de Vados city council, but Vados was mayor of the city as well as president of the republic, and from everything I had heard it seemed that what he said was what counted.

The portrait — which, of course, had no caption — showed el Presidente in a plain white suit. A thin black tie seemed to cut his chest into equal halves. His heavy-set body was carried erectly, in a military posture; he gave the impression of tall-ness, and I knew he was in fact over six feet. He had been taken gazing directly into the camera and so directly at me where I sat studying him. The picture was very well done and suggested a certain immediacy of presence. His face was very pale in contrast to his thin black moustache and smooth dark hair. He grasped a gold-knobbed swagger cane in both hands as if intending to twist the ends in opposite directions and make it as spiral as a piece of sugar-candy.

Juan Sebastian Vados. A lucky man, an astute man. And, Flores had claimed, a great man. Certainly a brilliant one: for more than twenty years now he had ruled Aguazul, and he had prosperity and contentment to show for it — not to mention Ciudad de Vados, the greatest showpiece of all.

I grew aware that I was being beckoned. I dropped my cigarette in a sand bowl and crossed the resilient floor to the customs desk. A porter trundled my bags down a roller conveyor to within reach of the official who had waved to me. This was a swarthy man in a severe black uniform with silver rank badges; his fingers were discolored with the blue chalk used for okaying passengers’ bags.

He glanced down at the passenger manifest and said in a bored tone, “Quiere Vd. decirme su nombre?”

“Me llamo Boyd Hakluyt,” I told him, reaching into my pocket for my passport. “Habla Vd. ingles?”

He put his elbow on the desk top, hand outstretched. “Si,” he agreed. “The señor is Norteamericano?”

“No, Australian. I’ve been in the States some time.” His eyebrows arched a little as he studied my Australian passport. Quite probably he hadn’t seen one before. “And what is it brings the señor to Aguazul?” he asked, as though genuinely interested. “Tourism, yes?”

He took up the stub of blue chalk lying nearest his hand and began to move it toward my bags. I told him no, in fact I was working in Vados as of the following day.

His eyes narrowed a very little. The hand with the chalk stopped an inch from the first bag. “So?” he said. “And what is the señor’s profession?”

“I’m a traffic analyst,” I answered. “I specialize in such problems as how to get cars moving faster in busy streets, how to prevent people blocking the exits at subway stations—”

He nodded impatiently. “Yo comprendo,” he snapped, as if I had implied he was of inferior intelligence. “And what do you do here in Vados?”

“I’m supposed to suggest a solution to a traffic problem.” This was factually accurate, and as I said it, I felt again a tingle of excitement — the same excitement that I had felt on first being assigned the job. Perhaps it wasn’t so much simple excitement as a sense of being awarded an accolade — Ciudad de Vados was more than a brand-new city in the circles where I worked; it was a byword for ultimate achievement in city planning and traffic analysis. And to be chosen to improve on near perfection was a kind of climax to a career.

Of course, it was to be expected that improvement had now become possible; it was twelve years since the plans had been approved, and there had been progress in that time. More to the point, the finest analogue computers in the world couldn’t get all the bugs out of a traffic plan — experiment was the only way of establishing where faults might lie.

And yet…

The customs officer seemed to be affected by the same kind of puzzlement as I. But he had a way of resolving it. He tossed the chalk in the air and as it fell closed his hand around it with a gesture of finality. “I shall require to examine your baggage, Señor Hakluyt,” he said.

I sighed, wondering what had made him change his mind. But experience had taught me it was always quicker not to raise objections. So I said only, “Everything I have with me is my personal property, and I checked with your consulate in Miami to make sure I wasn’t bringing any proscribed items.”

“Puede ser,” he answered noncommittally, and took my keys.

He asked questions about almost everything he found, but it was the quantity of clothing I had with me that he harped on most. He kept trying to insist that I could not possibly need everything I had brought; again and again I had to explain that my work often took me out on highway and other construction projects where there were no laundry facilities, and if I was to dress reasonably well, I had to bring as much as this.

“Señor Hakluyt, then, is a very wealthy man?” he pressed, altering his line of attack.

I resisted the growing temptation to make a smart crack in reply and shook my head.

“The señor is not wealthy and yet has so much baggage,” he said, as though propounding a major philosophical paradox to himself. “Will the señor tell me at what rate he is to be paid for the work he does in Vados?”

That was a little too much. “Is it any of your business?” I countered.

He showed his teeth, with the air of a card-player producing a fourteenth trump. I disliked him intensely from that moment on. “Señor Hakluyt is perhaps not aware that I am a police officer,” he purred. “But I am — and it is therefore illegal to refuse an answer to any question I may put.”

I gave ground. “I’m being paid twenty thousand dolaros and expenses,” I said.

He pushed down the lid on the last of my bags and slashed crosses on each item with the blue chalk. Then he dusted his hands off against each other in a way that suggested he was getting rid of something more than just smears of chalk. “It is to be hoped, then, that the señor is generous with his money,” he said. “Perhaps it is there, the reason why be is not already a wealthy man.”

He turned on his heel and stalked away. The examination had taken so long that the airline buses had all left for the center of town. I dug into my inadequate knowledge of Spanish and managed to persuade a porter to call me a cab and load my bags into it while I went to a change booth and turned a few dollars into a supply of dolaros — crisp new red-and-yellow paper bearing portraits of el Presidente, nominally at par to the United States dollar but worth in actual purchasing power about eighty-five cents. They were a monument to one of Vados’s first great achievements — the major currency reform he had carried through a year after coming to power. It was said that he had called his new monetary unit the dolaro in hope that it would become as hard a currency as its North American original; by Latin American standards he had worked miracles in even approaching this goal.

When I came to tip the porter who’d called my cab, I remembered what the customs officer had said about being generous with my money. By way of experiment I gave him two dolaros and looked for a reaction. There wasn’t one. He probably thought I was a tourist who couldn’t be bothered keeping track of foreign currency because he subconsciously felt it wasn’t real money anyway. I tried to shrug the whole thing off.

However, it wasn’t until the cab was on its way down from the mountainside airport that the matter was driven to the back of my mind. The road swung around in a wide quarter circle to ease the sharp descent into Vados, and since the air was clear and the sun was shining brilliantly, I had a perfect bird’s-eye view out over the area. I could even make out Puerto Joaquín, forty-odd miles distant, as a dark blur where the land merged into the ocean.

But after a superficial glance around, I didn’t again trouble to look so far away. I was too fascinated by Ciudad de Vados in the immediate foreground.

There was an impressive quality about the city that no amount of maps and plans had been able to convey to me. Without the distraction of Flores importuning me to look at things, I was able to soak up the true magnificence of it all.

Somehow — it was hard to define how — those who had planned this city had managed to give it an organic vitality akin to that of a giant machine. There was a slumbering controlled power that could be felt, implying business to be done; yet it was matched by a functional perfection that meant economy, simplicity, unity without uniformity. Just about everything, in fact, that idealistic city-planners had ever hoped for.

I told the cabdriver to pull off the road for a moment and got out to stare down through the limpid air from the edge of a bushy bluff. I recognized almost everything I could see: residential there, business there, government offices there, the parks, the museums, the opera house, the four great plazas, the viaducts carrying the superhighways. Fantastic. On the surface not a single flaw. I stayed long enough on the bluff to smoke half a cigarette; then I went back to the cab and told the driver to take me into town. I went on staring out of the window as we hurried down the mountainside.

Then something came between the window and the view, and I turned my head barely in time to see a sort of shack parked — it didn’t look substantial enough for one to say it was built — alongside the road. I had no chance to take in details, but that didn’t matter; fifty yards farther on there was another, and then a whole cluster of them — matchboard shanties roofed with flattened oildrums, their walls made gaudy here and there by advertising placards, ragged washing hung out to dry between them on poles and lines. Naked or nearly naked children played around the huts in company with straggly roosters, goats, and the odd emaciated piglet.

I was so taken aback I had no chance to order the driver to stop again before the road straightened for its final nose dive into Vados proper. But as we passed the gate of the first real house on the outskirts — it was a handsome colonial-style villa set among palms — I saw a peasant family trudging up the hill: father carrying a bundle on the traditional strap around his forehead, mother with one child in her arms and another wearily plodding at her heels. They paid the cab no attention as it hummed past, except to screw up their eyes against dust. A memory filled my mind suddenly: the memory of a man I had met while working on the clearance of an industrial slum area. He had been born there; he had been lucky enough to climb out of it and all that it implied. And he had said, as we talked about what was being abolished, “You know, I always knew it wasn’t permanent. That was what enabled me to get the hell out, when other people gave up. Because it was a shock to me, every time I saw a paving stone taken up, to find that there was earth underneath — the aboriginal dirt. Most of the time the town seemed so implacable, so solid and squat and loathsome — but whenever I was reminded that the earth was underneath, I managed to see through that facade and go on fighting.”

It was as though cold water had been thrown in my face. I suddenly saw a possible explanation of why I was here. And — in the most peculiar way — the explanation frightened me.