The Squares of the City

XXII

At about half past ten that same evening Jose Dalban committed suicide.

The astonishment that followed the news was almost solid: thick and cloying, hampering the mind’s attempts to make sense of it like heavy wet clay. Why? He was rich — perhaps only a few thousands short of being a millionaire. He appeared successful and influential; that success was founded, as Guzman had told me, on something not very respectable in the eyes of Vadeanos, but it was not illegal. He had a reputation as a clever speculator. And his private life seemed placid enough: he was married, had four children of whom two were at Mexico City University, and a congenial mistress in Cuatrovientos whom his wife knew about.

It was odd, I reflected, how sometimes one never managed to round out one’s mental picture of a person till that person was dead, as though a subconscious reflex held one back, insisting that until a man was dead no picture of him could be accurate or complete.

Certainly, in the twenty-four hours following Dalban’s death, I got to know very much more about him than I had during his lifetime.

By the end of those twenty-four hours truth was beginning to emerge. Jose Dalban’s enterprises were ripe for the undertaker. Like all speculators, he was operating on other people’s money a lot of the time; it so happened that at the moment he was extended far beyond the limits of his own resources. And in that strange, abstract, barely-more-than-half-real way that seems to turn bits of printed paper into deadly weapons, Luis Arrio had seized the chance to plot Dalban’s destruction.

That destruction was now following his death.

Piece by piece, Arrio had acquired control of every loan Dalban owed, a few mortgages, several advances against security — and had notified Dalban that he intended to foreclose on everything he could. The total amount involved was about two million dolaros; more than three-quarters of a million was due or overdue for repayment.

So, having drunk two glasses of fine brandy, which steadied his nerves and unsteadied his hands, compelling him to slash four times before he achieved success, he cut his throat.

I heard most of this from Isabela Cortes and her husband when they called in for a drink at the Hotel del Principe on Monday evening before going to the opera. I had asked Señora Cortes what she thought of the destruction of the broadcasting center, and she positively exploded with rage.

“When they find the saboteurs, let them be publicly burned alive!” she snapped. “An evil deed belonging to the past that Alejo labored so many years to bury — a past of irresponsible violence and internecine hatred! I feel half ashamed that I still live to walk in the city when Alejo has suffered that dreadful end!”

“On the other hand,” said her husband with unexpected mildness, “this is the first time in many years that we have been able to spend three consecutive evenings together, ’Belita.”

“Do not joke about death, Leon!” Señora Cortes went pale. “Ciudad de Vados, I swear, has never before been like this, with Jose Dalban dead, and before him Mario Guerrero, and — what can have come over our people? Tell me that!”

Her husband took the question literally, not rhetorically — which in view of his position was reasonable. He rubbed his chin with the back of his hand as he considered.

“Frankly, ’Belita, you have asked an impossible question. One can assume that some — some crucial factor in the longstanding disputes to which we have become accustomed has now come to a head. But to isolate that factor — why, it would be the work of a lifetime.”

It was then that we spoke of Dalban’s death, and I learned something about the causes of it.

“In one way, Señor Arrio has done a public service,” Cortes mused. “For too long Dalban had been making a fortune out of the base impulses of our people” — this I took to be an oblique reference to his monopoly of the contraceptive market — “and in so doing has encouraged them to continue.”

“In more ways than one — so some people might maintain,” said his wife. “Have you thought of the effect it will have on Señor Mendoza?”

I thought, of course, she was referring to Cristoforo Mendoza, editor of Tiempo. Since Tiempo had been closed down, I didn’t see that the loss of Dalban’s financial aid mattered much one way or the other — unless the order to close the paper down had been rescinded, and if it had been, I hadn’t been told.

But apparently that was not the point, for Cortes gave his wife a stern look.

“Isabela, you are well aware that in my view Mendoza’s books will be no loss to the world, even if he never writes another—”

“Excuse me,” I put in. “I don’t see the connection.” Cortes shrugged. “Dalban’s vanity required him to seem to be also a patron of the arts. In keeping with the pattern of his other activities — all of which seem to have been concerned with pandering to the lower tastes of the people — he had made Felipe Mendoza a protege of his. He had given him ahouse and had occasionally paid him a salary when the sales of his books were not high.”

“I see. But surely, if Mendoza still needs a patron, he will have no trouble finding another? After all, he has an international reputation—”

“So had the American Henry Miller,” said Cortes stiffly. “But neither he nor Mendoza wrote the sort of book I would permit to be read in my house.”

“Approval or disapproval apart,” said Señora Cortes, “one has to admit that he is creative — and original. No, Señor Hakluyt, Felipe Mendoza may not find it so easy, certainly not in his own country, for as you may perhaps have heard, all his works are on the Index, and consequently he labors under disadvantages.”

“And is that not his fault?” began the professor belligerently. They would have launched on a heated argument had not Señora Cortes abruptly noticed the time and realized they were late for the overture.

I was very thoughtful after they had gone. The girl with the guitar who sometimes turned up here in the evenings, especially when there was to be a big performance at the opera or one of the theaters, was singing — more to herself than an audience — at the other end of the bar. I took my drink and went and sat where I could listen to her.

The way things were now, it almost appeared that my arrival in Vados had been a trigger to set in motion a chain of violent and sometimes bloody events. But that was ridiculous. It must simply be chance or coincidence. Most likely, both my being brought here and the events that had followed were symptomatic of the same web of rivalries, hatreds, and jealousies. In other words, at the moment everyone in Vados, from el Presidente himself down to that girl with the guitar, were puppets dancing at the mercy of forces beyond the control of individuals.

Here in Ciudad de Vados, of course, they had made a determined attempt to control those forces — as Mayor had claimed, this was “the most governed country in the world.” Yes, but maybe the success they had seemed to achieve was no more than illusion. You could only disguise, not govern, the dark impulses at the bottom of the human mind, the inheritance of prejudice with which every man, woman, and child walking the streets in every city on earth was laden down. You couldn’t govern those. At most, you could dictate when they should be turned loose — and sometimes, when the pressure behind them had built up to a climax, you couldn’t even do that.

“Señorita,” I said to the girl with the guitar, and she turned grave dark eyes to me. She wasn’t pretty; she had a large nose and a large mouth, with one crooked tooth in her upper jaw. “Señorita, what is your opinion of the books of Felipe Mendoza?”

She looked taken aback. “I do not know, señor,” she said. “I am a good Catholic, and Catholics are not permitted to read his books. That is all I know.”

I sighed. “What do you think about the death of Señor Dalban?”

“They say he was a very evil man. Perhaps his conscience troubled him. Certainly he must have been a great sinner to have killed himself as he did.”

“Suppose, señorita, that a jealous rival of yours were to steal from you everything that means anything to you, everything whereby you make your living — your guitar, your songs — seduced your boy-friend if you have one, so there was no hope for you — what would you do then?”

She frowned, as if trying to decide my purpose in asking such questions. After a moment’s reflection she said virtuously, “I should pray, señor.”

I turned toward her. “Listen, señorita, I am not an inquisitor. I’m just a stranger in Vados who wants to know what people think about all these happenings of the past few days. Consider! Señor Dalban was killed, just as surely as if someone had held the knife with which his throat was cut. His business was ruined, he was plunged suddenly into debts that he couldn’t pay, everything he had worked for all his life was snatched away, not as a visitation from God but because a rival businessman was envious of him. Isn’t envy a sin?”

“Oh, yes, señor! A vile sin!”

“Exactly. Can it be right that somebody like Dalban should have his life’s work destroyed to satisfy a rival’s jealousy?”

She didn’t answer. Probably I was posing her questions which her confessor would regard as highly technical and best left to trained theologians.

“As for the man who was so jealous,” I went on. “You have heard of Señor Arrio?”

“Oh, of course! He is a very good man. My father work in one of his stores; he is assistant manager, and maybe one day he will be manager.” Realization dawned. “You mean — it was Señor Arrio who was so jealous?”

“Of course, Señor Arrio is very rich; Señor Dalban was also quite rich. Naturally they were rivals.”

“That I do not believe,” she said firmly. “Señor Arrio must be a good man. All the people who work for him say so, and he has set up many good stores in our country, not only in Ciudad de Vados.”

“Somebody ask Job’s opinion of that,” I muttered to myself.

“Besides,” she said, as though arriving at an important conclusion, “if Señor Dalban cared more about money than about saving his immortal soul — and he must have if he killed himself merely because he lost his money — he was certainly a wicked man. The love of money is the root of evil.”

“Then who loved money the more — Señor Dalban or Señor Arrio, who took all Dalban’s money away from him although he himself is already very rich?”

That floored her completely; she sat staring wide-eyed at me as if I were stirring her personal cosmos around and around with a spoon, and she had lost all her bearings. I tried another tack.

“You remember Señor Brown, who was killed the other day?”

“Yes, señor. I read about it in the newspaper.”

“What do you actually know about the matter? What do you think he had done?”

She looked down and spoke hesitantly. “Well, señor, everyone knew what Estrelita Jaliscos was like, so what he had done — wel…”

I was about to rescue her from her painful embarrassment when the significance of what she had actually said went through my stupidly thick skull. I almost spilled my drink as I shot forward in my chair.

“Did you say ‘everyone knew’ what she was like?”

“Why, yes!” She put her hand up to her throat as though my violent reaction had made her dizzy. “What is wrong?”

“You did say they knew?” I insisted. “Not ‘everyone knows’? You knew what sort of girl Estrelita Jaliscos was before all this happened? You haven’t come to that idea because of what the bishop has said on television, for example?”

“No, señor! What would we need to be told, in the district where I live? We have seen for many years how she carried on. She was going out alone with young men when she was only fourteen; she drank liquor — aguardiente, even tequila and rum. And it was said she — she even sold her honor.” The girl uttered these last remarks with a faintly defiant air, as though challenging anyone to contradict them.

“In short,” I said, “Estrelita Jaliscos had a reputation as an accomplished tart.”

“Señor!” she said reproachfully, and blushed brightly. I turned and signaled the bartender.

“If you were really as sheltered as you try to make out,” I said, “you wouldn’t even have known what the word means. You’ve given me some very valuable information, and I’m going to buy you a drink on the strength of it. What’ll it be?”

She giggled nervously. “First I must sing you a song,” she said. “Manuel, there behind the bar, is a friend of my father, and all the time I am here he keeps his eyes on me. I will sing, and then when you give me the drink you will say it is because you like my singing, understand?”

I gave her a sarcastic look. “I suppose you go out with boys, too,” I said. “Señor!”

“All right, that wasn’t an invitation. Go ahead and sing. How about La Cucaracha?”

“That is a bad song, señor. It is all about marijuana. Let me sing you a song of my own.”

It was an ordinary sort of pop, such as one might have heard over the radio any day anywhere in Latin America. I watched her as she sang, and came to the decision that she was about one-tenth as much of a shy violet as she liked to make out. Probably Manuel let his eyes wander occasionally.

So nothing was what it seemed, I now discovered. Estrelita Jaliscos had been a real tart, going downhill since she was fourteen. And for her sake Fats Brown was being buried tomorrow. If he’d come to trial and evidence of character had been brought, surely the prosecution’s case would have collapsed like cardboard!

Then why hadn’t he risked trial? He’d said himself on the night I found him getting drunk to “celebrate” that he was sure Estrelita Jaliscos was a tart. He knew the legal setup in Vados; he could have built a case against her for blackmail stronger than any case against himself for murder.

There was only one reason that fitted his actions. He must have been damned sure that this demand by Estrelita hadn’t simply been hatched in the brain of a teen-age gold-digger. He must have known, or have convinced himself, that he would never be permitted to clear himself.

Who could be gunning for him that hard? His rival lawyer Lucas?

No, of course not. Lucas didn’t need that kind of out.

Or — didn’t he?

There were a lot of things I needed to know about Lucas before I could answer that question. The best person to tell me them would be his other legal opponent, who had also been a good friend of Fats Brown’s — Miguel Dominguez.

I wondered if I could get hold of him at this time of the evening. I got up from my chair, and the girl singing broke off with a hurt look.

“Oh, yes!” I said, remembering. “Manuel!”

The barman came down toward me, smiling.

“Bring the young lady her usual, and charge it up to me. I’ll be back.”

“Her — usual, señor?” He looked at me expressionlessly.

“Yes, whatever she has on these occasions. A double tequila con sangrita de la viuda, I should imagine.” I grinned at the girl’s outraged expression. “I’m sorry, señorita, but I think your song is terrible. Never mind — have two drinks on me while you’re about it, and you’ll get to be a big girl one day.” And why she didn’t spit in my eye I’m still not sure.