The Squares of the City

XXIV

I drove back to Vados in the evening, after about twenty-eight hours’ absence. And in that time things had been happening.

Of course, the city hadn’t been truly quiet for weeks, but it had at least displayed the sullen tranquillity of a dormant volcano; it did no more than burst a bubble of searing hot gas on the surface of its lava pool occasionally. Now, though…

There were police beacons on the highway two miles out of the city; at the third of them the traffic was cut to single line and armed police officers stood guard. Each car in turn was halted, and some were turned back.

When it came to my turn, I demanded to know what was going on. The officer inspecting my papers didn’t answer directly; he merely said in a neutral tone, “It might be dangerous for you to go about the city unescorted, Señor Hakluyt. You must go directly to your hotel and telephone to police headquarters that you have arrived safely. We will send to search for you if you are not there within” — he glanced at his watch — “a half hour.”

“What’s the reason for all this?” I pressed again. “When the señor enters the city, he will see for himself,” was the reply. He stepped back and waved me on. I did see.

No word of rioting had reached Astoria Negra as far as I knew, and the outside news services might well have been censored also. But rioting there must have been. I passed one of Arrio’s department stores which had had a home-made bomb thrown through a display window — firemen were still damping down the wreckage, and there was a strong smell of stale kerosene. There were several burnt-out cars along the streets; one street was closed because a monorail car had been sabotaged and had fallen to the ground there. The whole city now was ominously quiet.

The armed police on every street corner had now been reinforced by the National Guard. Militiamen looking uncomfortable but determined in ill-fitting fatigues, with carbines slung on their shoulders, were patrolling sidewalks, and I was stopped a couple more times to show my papers before I reached the Hotel del Principe and safety.

A newspaper placard had given me the key to these events as I drove past, and now people in the hotel bar confirmed what it said. No wonder Dominguez had been cagy when I spoke to him about Estrelita Jaliscos; he had already been preparing a pretty devastating attack, and while I was away he had fired his entire broadside.

Which is to say he had produced a witness — the dead girl’s brother — who swore not only that she had been put up to blackmailing Fats Brown, but that it was Andres Lucas who had made her do it.

The National Party had marched through the streets demanding retribution, Lucas’s house had been stormed and nearly set on fire, and Lucas himself was now in custody “for his own protection.”

It took me a little while to fill in all the subsidiary details, but it made one thing plain: whether he denied it or not, Miguel Dominguez was temporarily the most influential man in Ciudad de Vados, el Presidente himself not excepted.

I got hold of a paper and read the text of the announcement Dominguez had released to the press; it was a measure of his sudden eminence that Liberdad had printed it practically in full. Not content with going for Lucas alone, Dominguez had described this shameful affair as just one aspect of the widespread corruption of the moment; another, he declared, was Seixas’s barefaced insistence on new traffic developments to put business in the way of the construction companies in which he had an interest, and still another was the way in which Caldwell of the health department had exaggerated the situation in Sigueiras’s slum to secure public support for its clearance.

Enraged followers of the Citizens’ Party had come out on the streets to drive off the Nationals, and the National Guard had been called out to deal with the resulting riot. A curfew was now in force and would not be lifted till six o’clock in the morning.

I was very glad indeed to have missed this little set-to. Especially when Manuel, the hotel barman, pointed out to me the scar left by a rifle bullet that had careened through a window and ricocheted off his beautifully polished bar.

There was sporadic firing from the outskirts shortly before midnight, but the last news bulletin of the evening — broadcast over an army transmitter rigged as emergency substitute for the regular service — claimed that the situation was back to normal.

I wondered.

The first thing I heard in the morning was my bedside phone. The call was from Angers, asking whether I was all right and advising me, if I was, to stay put. I told him I was indeed all right and inquired whether there had been any reaction from Diaz on the memo I had sent him.

“Reaction!” snorted Angers — I could visualize his expression. “Don’t be funny! He’s got both hands full of this bloody rioting!”

The advice to stay put was good. I did walk around the plaza in the course of the morning, and watched a machine-gun post being set up in case someone was foolish enough to try to initiate the regular daily speakers’ meeting. No one took the risk, of course; any crowd collected today would have exploded like so much nitroglycerine.

After reading the paper and the typed bulletin on the board in the lobby, which explained that in the event of serious trouble the hotel’s cellars would be opened to clients, I played a couple of desultory left-hand-against-right games with my new chess set. That used up most of the morning. Eventually it got to be time for lunch, and to try to create an appetite I dropped in the bar for an aperitif.

“What’s the latest scandal, Manuel?” I asked the barman not expecting any news.

His reply almost made me drop my glass. “It is said there will be a duel, señor. It is said that Señor Arrio has challenged Señor Mendoza to a duel.”

“The hell you say!” I stared at him, half-suspecting he might be putting me on, but his face was quite serious. “What about?”

“It is about a story which Señor Mendoza has written — a very funny story about a man of affairs. Señor Arrio says it is meant to describe him. But if he goes to court and complains, then everyone will say, ‘So Señor Arrio thinks this is himself! Ha, ha! Yes, we see that it is very like Señor Arrio, truly.’ And so many people will laugh at Señor Arrio. This he does not like. So—” He spread his hands.

“But dueling isn’t legal in Aguazul — is it?”

“It is against the law, señor. But then, many things are against the law. Everyone knows privately, but of course no one will learn of it officially until afterwards.”

I saw the distinction. “And when is this due to happen?” I inquired.

“Ah, that one does not know,” Manuel answered sagely. “If it were known, many people might go to watch, and then the police would have to interfere. But most probably at dawn tomorrow, and somewhere in the country.”

“And who’s likely to win?”

Manuel assumed the thoughtful look of a racing tipster. “Since Señor Mendoza has been challenged, he has the right to choose the weapons. It is known that Señor Arrio is one of the finest pistol shots in all America. So it will be swords — and so who can foretell?”

The story went afterward that Arrio lost control when he drew first blood, and when his seconds managed to drag him back, Mendoza’s guts were hanging out of the front of his shirt. They got him to the hospital, but he died there two hours later from loss of blood and internal injuries. He was no longer a young man, of course.

I’d never read any of Mendoza’s work, yet the news of his dying — which had no personal meaning to myself — affected me curiously. I thought of the way people thousands of miles away were going to feel regret at his death, when the news of, say, Vados dying would not concern them at all. I felt almost a touch of envy.

And then the unexpected happened. There was this man Pedro Murieta, whom I had seen at Presidential House in company with the Mendozas; he has something to do with Dalban and something to do with the publishing house that issued Felipe Mendoza’s books, and everyone seemed to know of him once his name was mentioned but scarcely thought of it otherwise — thatsort of a man.

And when he was through, Arrio was in jail on a charge of murder.

I wondered what the position of the two rival parties was now. The Nationals seemed to have made up ground; they had lost both Juan Tezol and Sam Francis under discreditable circumstances, but the Citizens had now had Andres Lucas impeached for conspiracy and Arrio jailed for murder. Both sides could now throw an equal amount of mud.

By the weekend, though, the rioting dissolved in a stalemate. Every cell in the city was full of people under arrest. The police had used the machine-gun in the Plaza del Sur — once. After that things were quieter. By Sunday night, aside from the few store windows boarded up and holes in the road where halfhearted attempts had been made to barricade a street, there was no sign that mobs had passed this way.

Nonetheless, I had believed when I came to this city that Aguazul was remarkably free of violence for a Latin American country. Either I’d picked the wrong time to come, or the official propaganda machine had spread a highly convincing untruth.

I was pretty sure that the first alternative was the correct one. Reactions like Angers’s couldn’t have been simulated. Angers dropped in to see me at the hotel on Sunday evening and told me, gray-faced, that he had never known such events in the decade he’d lived in Vados. He had just seen his wife off at the airport; he had sent her to stay with friends in California until the situation calmed down. And that was likely to be some time yet. The only other significant development over the weekend, though, was a stern and dignified challenge against Dominguez by Professor Cortes. Cortes made no attempt to defend Lucas — nobody was attempting to defend Lucas at the moment — but he maintained that Dominguez’s accusations against Caldwell were totally baseless. He had himself, so he claimed, seen far worse things in Sigueiras’s slum and in the shantytowns than found its way into the health department reports.

I wasn’t sure about Cortes any longer. Not now that I’d seen Sigueiras’s place for myself. Of course, Cortes carried great authority, and he wouldn’t be consciously lying in a matter like this. The best one could say, though, was that he had a fertile imagination. Or perhaps he just had a greater capacity for being shocked than most people.

Not greatly put out, Dominguez replied that it wasn’t his unsupported word in question; the report on which he had based his statements was an official one prepared by a special investigator called Guyiran, on the staff of the Ministry of the Interior. In other words, Dominguez implied, if you’re going for anybody, you’ve got to go for Diaz, and if you don’t, your complaints won’t cut any ice.

Apparently Cortes wasn’t prepared to go to such lengths; he preserved a hurt silence.

There seemed to be a fantastic network of interlocking rivalries and fields of influence here. Some of it was due to the peculiar semi-independent constitution of Ciudad de Vados, which wasn’t autonomous and yet didn’t seem to be amenable to the national government as easily as the rest of the country. Doubtless this was due to Vados’s personal relation with his “offspring.” But each development seemed to be laying bare new tensions created by the city’s privileged status, and people seemed to be far more aware of these tensions than they had been five weeks ago, when I arrived.

I wondered how much of the change was due to the loss of Alejandro Mayor and his inspired manipulation of the organs of information. I wondered whether Maria Posador had been right to fear for the future of the country when the creators of its highly individual technique of government died or grew too old.

The way things were now, it seemed she must have been right.

I had an early call again from Angers on Monday morning.

“A pleasant surprise for you, Hakluyt,” he said in a voice that wasn’t wholly ironical. “El Presidente himself is dropping in at the department this morning and wants you to be there. You have exactly thirty minutes — can you make it?”

“No,” I said. I took forty. But Vados was late himself. He looked very much older than he had at our previous meeting, at Presidential House. It might just have been that he was tired and worried, but, of course, to have been in power for so long as he now had, he must in any case be over sixty and perhaps nearing seventy. I found him in Angers’ office, poring over a relief map of the city. Angers wasn’t with him. The only other person present was a man in plain clothes who sat inconspicuously in a corner, his eyes fixed on me, and whom Vados ignored completely.

“Please sit down, Señor Hakluyt,” he said. “It is not at a good time that you have come to our beautiful city, is it?” I nodded wry agreement.

He shifted a little on his chair and leaned back with one hand in the side pocket of his jacket. “In essence, señor, I have called you to ask a favor of you.” He spoke as if he felt slightly shamefaced asking favors of anyone, and the effect was to make me feel — as he obviously intended — rather flattered.

“You’re my employer,” I said, shrugging. “Good.” Vados looked me straight in the eyes and smiled. Even at his present age he was a strikingly handsome and distinguished man. He had been fiddling with something in the pocket where his hand was hidden; now he brought it out, and I saw that it was a beautifully chased silver crucifix, not more than two inches long. He caressed it with the tops of his fingers as he spoke.

“Well, señor, I have seen the memorandum which you prepared regarding the slum below the monorail central. It was sent to Minister of the Interior Diaz, and he had occasion to refer to it at our emergency meeting of the cabinet yesterday. This is an admirable document, señor — high-principled and showing a great regard for the human beings who will be affected. Unhappily, it is worthless.”

He spoke the last sentence without a change of tone or expression, taking me by surprise. I said, “I’m sorry — I don’t see why.”

He shrugged. “Señor, I believe you can be a discreet man. I also believe that since you have never been to our country before and will quite happily be working in Nicaragua or New Zealand or Nebraska as soon as you leave, you will not pass on in haste what I shall say. Effectively then, señor, there is a flaming row going on over this question which you are aiding us so cleverly to solve.”

“That’s fairly obvious,” I said. “Señor Presidente, you must know as a politician and a practical man that someone who is told simultaneously to do a job and only to half-do it realizes very quickly that the people telling him to do it don’t know their own minds. Angers warned me that Señor Diaz would be sure to turn down my suggestion, but it’s the only long-term solution.”

He gave a weary smile. “Long-term solutions are no good to us, señor! In two years, yes, perhaps, but today we are merely trying to gain time, to prevent disaster overwhelming us. As you so rightly state, Diaz is unhappy with your plan. Our government is in a way absolute — that is true. But in all countries men have sometimes to resort to a coalition government in times of emergency, and in many countries on this continent — as you will doubtless realize — there is a perennial state of emergency. I am not a dictator, señor. I am the head of a government composed of men of sometimes conflicting views, who have one desire in common — that our country should be well and firmly ruled. Diaz and I are not only old colleagues — we are old enemies as well.”

He looked at me for a comment; I murmured something about “I fully appreciate…”

“But I have one distinction. This city is — I have perhaps said this to you before, because I say it to everyone, and I say it to everyone because it is the truth — this city is my own child, the child of my mind. I am two official persons: I am president of Aguazul on the one hand, mayor of Ciudad de Vados on the other, and as regards the city, what I say shall be done is what matters.”

I nodded.

“Good! Then I say this. My duty is not alone to the people who belong to this country without having had the choice, who were born here, but also to those who shared my vision and my — my dreams, who gave up everything life could have offered them elsewhere to make Ciudad de Vados a reality. It is not just that I should betray my promises to them. “Señor, although Aguazul has grown more and more prosperous in the years I have ruled, ours is still not a very rich country. If I would give with one hand, I must take away with the other — and there is nothing I can take that is not already promised to others! I cannot allot funds for rehousing and subsidizing the squatters of the shantytowns and of the slum beneath the monorail station, not so long as there are slums in Astoria Negra and Puerto Joaquín, not so long as I require those funds to fulfill the promises I have made to the foreign-born citizens. Without them and their aid, there would be no city here — nothing but scrub and barrens.

“Understanding this, you will understand why I must direct you to prepare a scheme — some or any scheme — to wipe away the slums from this city. That will give us the breathing space we need to settle the disagreements in the cabinet, to prepare the long-term schemes we undoubtedly require. But — have you not reflected, Señor Hakluyt, that if we were today to make plans and place contracts for the building scheme envisaged in your memorandum it would be two years before we could clear out those slums? In two years, with such a focus of unrest as we have at present, there will have been revolution!”

“I think,” I said, “that you’ll get your revolution more quickly if you simply—”

He interrupted me, eyes blazing. “Señor, if I were a dictator and an autocrat, I could order troops into the shantytowns and drive their people into the country, have the shacks burned to the ground. I could have Sigueiras shot today and the squatters in a concentration camp tomorrow! But I am not that sort of man. I would rather that the citizens of my country threw flowers at my feet than bombs.”

He slammed the little crucifix down on top of the tab’e beside him; it gave a solid thud. “Please, señor, do not instruct me how to rule my country. Do I tell you how to solve your traffic problems?”

“Frankly,” I said, “yes.”

He stared at me and then began to chuckle. “Very true, alas, señor,” he admitted. “But I wish only that you see my difficulty. Do you?”

“You must also see mine, then,” I answered. “I have no choice except to do as you tell me, of course. But the result will be artificial. It’ll be a pretext. It will be neither improvement nor development — merely change for the sake of change. I’ll do the best I can. But you won’t have achieved any more than if you had, as you said, sent troops to clear the shanty-towns. You will only have pretended to achieve more, and you’ll have spent a lot of money on a sham.”

He was silent for a while. Then, sighing, he got to his feet. “Do not ever enter politics, Señor Hakluyt. You are too much of an idealist. More than twenty years of ruling has taught me that all too often men are ruled better by shams than by realities. Thank you, nonetheless; I look forward to seeing the results of your work soon.”

He extended his hand, realizing only at the last moment that he was still holding the crucifix. As he made to put it away, he saw my eyes on it and mutely displayed it to me on his open palm.

“You are a Catholic?” he inquired.

I shook my head.

He closed his hand around the crucifix. “In some ways I envy you. It is often hard to be both a good Christian and a good statesman.”

“I’d have said it was impossible,” I countered. “A state is concerned with people’s condition here and now; almost all religions are concerned with their state hereafter. And the two pretty often contradict each other.”

“Still, there is the ideal toward which we work.” He sighed heavily. “A Christian government for a Christian community — and almost all my people are believers… Señor, you must come and dine with me at Presidential House sometime soon. It has become rare for me to meet foreigners who have no personal interest in the way I run my country. I meet bankers negotiating loans, oilmen seeking favorable tariffs, importers and exporters desirous of exploiting our markets — and who else? Sometimes I even envy the man who might, had things been different, have ruled in my place… But I waste your time in empty talk, señor. Hasta la vista!”

He pocketed the crucifix, shook my hand, and returned to his study of the relief map of the city as I left the room.