The Squares of the City

XXVIII

More in my job than perhaps in any other, there’s a complete change of viewpoint which sets in on termination of an assignment. I thought about the sometimes paradoxical consequences of this as I sat over a drink in the hotel lounge, watching passersby through the glass front wall.

Yesterday this city had been a problem to me: I was seeing its people as figures, units of pedestrian traffic. Today and from now on until I left, I was on holiday.

Oh, tomorrow, of course, I’d find out whether they’d decided to go ahead with the Pietermaritzburg expressway, and if they had, I’d offer my services. They’d probably hire me. I didn’t have to be vain, but I didn’t have to be modest, either — there weren’t at any one time more than half a dozen specialists available with my peculiar blend of skills.

Today, though…

I sipped my drink and tried to imagine that I was a well-heeled tourist who had come to Ciudad de Vados in order to see, hear, feel, taste, and smell this city with more air-conditioning units per head of population than any other in the world, this monumental creation of twentieth-century man, this town without traffic jams -

And, currently, without television or an opposition newspaper. I found myself frowning into my drink, drove my inside knowledge of the situation to the back of my mind, and tried to reassume my status as a tourist.

It wouldn’t work. I sighed and gave up trying. In the same moment I realized that someone had sat down in a chair next to me and was waiting for me to acknowledge the fact. It was Maria Posador, so I did so quickly.

“I haven’t seen you in here very often lately, señora,” I said. “A pity.”

She gave a smile tinged with weariness. “Much has been going on,” she answered obliquely. “I am told that your stay in Vados is over, also.”

“Pretty well.”

“Does that mean you are now leaving?”

“Not quite now, unfortunately. I’ll have to hang around for a few days — perhaps as long as a week — while they finish the costings and so forth and make up their minds to pay my fee. But I’ve done my share of the work.”

“You sound bitter,” she said after a pause. “Have you not enjoyed your time here?”

“You don’t have to ask that. Most of the time I’d have given anything to be a thousand miles away.”

She took out her gold cigarette case thoughtfully, selected one of the thin black cigarettes, lit it herself. “I am told,” she said through aromatic smoke, “you are not pleased with what you have done.”

“I haven’t tried to make a secret of that, either. In fact I’ve done the opposite, I hope. Hell, I was told when I first got here that my job was going to be that of a sort of white corpuscle killing off disease germs in the bloodstream of the city. I rather liked the idea at first. Then I found it was a filthy job. A white cell isn’t much different from the bacteria it has to dispose of — do you imagine the germs plead with it to spare their lives?”

“No,” said Señora Posador rather frigidly.

“All right,” I shrugged.

She was regarding me with her deep violet gaze as though trying to phrase difficult thoughts into words. She said in the end, “Señor Hakluyt, I am not greatly impressed by your disclaimers of responsibility. I think you are a shallow person; you judge too much by appearances and have little gift for understanding what lies deeper.”

Nettled, I answered, “Part of my job is to understand what lies deeper!”

“Then you cannot be so good at your work as you think you are.” She put it flatly, not admitting contradiction. “What is your opinion of el Presidente, for example?”

“As a man or as a president? They’re two different things.”

“The man and the president are one,” she retorted. “I wish you to answer directly.”

“All I can say, then, is that he’s a pretty good ruler, as his kind go. He’s ambitious, but he’ll certainly leave behind some solid achievements when he kicks off—”

“And they will still be cursing his name in the back streets of Astoria Negra,” said Señora Posador unemotionally. “Also there are places in Puerto Joaquín where they nightly roast his image at the fireside before falling asleep. Oh, perhaps I am unjust to say you are shallow — but you appear shallow because you are a rootless man; you live where you work, and you work everywhere. Do not let this brief stay in Aguazul delude you into thinking you understand the situation.”

And more quietly she added almost to herself, “For it will go on after you have left the city.”

“I know that,” I said soberly. “I think I do understand, pretty well, what forces are at work. But I haven’t had time to explore them, trace them to their source. I’ve just seen them impersonally affecting the lives of people I know. You say I’m shallow, but it isn’t true. It’s simply that detachment is necessary to my job. I’m pretty good at remaining detached now, and yet there are some times when I can’t. A few moments ago, when you arrived, I was thinking how different it is to be able to regard Vadeanos as people instead of units of traffic — but you can’t separate the two completely. A person is a unit of traffic if he lives in a social group; he’s a lot more besides, but that doesn’t prevent it. And in a way you can parallel the behavior of people as traffic and people as just people. I’m certain that someone like — oh, Alejandro Mayor, for example, if he’d lived — could develop the kind of math I employ to describe far more general activities than simple point-to-point progress.”

“Please go on, señor.” Sudden interest showed in Señora Posador’s face; she leaned forward as though not to miss a word.

A familiar-looking trio came in through the main entrance; people I had seen before, on my first day in the city. The mousy man with the notebook and the sheaf of pens was still shadowed by the same two gigantic escorts. He marched importantly up to one of the waiters, asked him a solemn question, which the waiter answered respectfully, and then went out again.

“What’s the question this time?” I asked Señora Posador, reflecting in passing that I hadn’t yet seen the result of one of these opinion polls published.

“Something to do with dispossessing Sigueiras,” came the impatient answer. “But please continue!”

I was only too ready. “Yes, in fact, I had an impression from some of Mayor’s early work that he might be aiming for something of the kind. Look, I can generalize about people as though they were identical molecules of gas; in fact, most of the formulae I employ are adapted from hydrodynamics and fluid mechanics. When people crowd into a subway on the way to work, they’re driven by a force which may be more abstract but is certainly no less efficient than a high-powered fan. That force doesn’t care if Auntie Mae has had a bad night, or the baby cried till foura.m., or Pedro overslept and hasn’t had his cup of coffee to quiet his grumbling belly. There’s a definite force at work, moving people, compelling them to form a visible flow.

“Now take advertising. Advertising isn’t actually a force — the motive power is compounded of some basic impulses, like hunger, thirst, the need for clothing and shelter, and some superficial impulses. The urge to keep up with the neighbors, for instance. Nonetheless, advertising men can and do channel this impalpable flux. They can launch a campaign of which the end-product is once again physical action, visible movement. In other words, people will go to a store and buy. That’s infinitely more subtle, but it’s still capable of direction, it can still be defined in predictable terms. You can say, ‘So many people will probably buy this product in such a period,’ quite as confidently as I can say, ‘So many people under such and such circumstances will be fouling up the subway system ten minutes after the offices close.’

“So as far as I can see only the sheer impossibility of gathering a totality of data about all the individuals involved prevents us from developing a system of forecasting and influencing all the actions of a person in his entire daily life.”

“Señor,” said Maria Posador a little faintly, “it is well-known that Alejandro Mayor sought to achieve total control of our people — I myself showed you one method he employed. But are you saying that people can be controlled in this way?”

“People are controlled,” I said in surprise. “Look, the man in the subway going to work of a morning has no more real control over his own activities than — well, than a piece on a chessboard! Because he has to earn a wage, he has to go to work. He can choose his kind of work, within strict limits. Maybe he likes — oh, meeting people and talking to them. So he wants to be a salesman. Unfortunately, that product doesn’t sell very well. His family gets hungry, so he takes a job he loathes, processing company data for computers. It pays more, perhaps, but it pays in practice slightly less than what it would cost to install a machine to read ledger-postings with a scanner system.

“What other choices has he? He could quit work altogether, but if he has a family to support, he won’t. He could cut his throat; sometimes people do. But he’s a Catholic, and suicide is a mortal sin. So there he is, on that subway train at the same time as everyone else.”

“You’re a cynic, señor,” said Señora Posador. Her face was pale under its golden tan; her breath came so quickly that even in those few words I could hear a quaver.

“No, I was lucky,” I said. “I think — I hope — I actually saw this sort of thing coming when I was in college. I read Mayor’s first book, The Administration of the Twentieth-Century State, and as I said, there were pointers in it.… So I picked a job where there were openings for only a few specialists, so few their work wouldn’t be worth automation. Result: I have comparative freedom to choose my jobs, I enjoy the work I do because I’m good at it — and am, as you tell me, rootless.”

“So you are master of your fate, and we in Ciudad de Vados are not?” suggested Señora Posador, her violet eyes troubled.

I shook my head. “I said comparative freedom. Ultimately, I’m at the mercy of the same impersonal forces. I have to eat and drink and sleep and wear clothes and all the rest of it, and I have a fair burden of nonessential desires created by advertising and habit — I smoke, I drink alcohol, I like to enjoy myself when I’m off the job. I’m still a chessman. A pawn being shifted hither and yon across the face of the earth by the same processes that have shaped history since man first discovered how to walk on his hind feet.”

“You puzzle me, Señor Hakluyt,” said Señora Posador after a pause. “You must be aware that your work here has laid the foundations for a long and bloody struggle—”

I interrupted her by slamming my fist into my open palm. “Laid the foundations hell!” I snapped. “Don’t accuse me of not understanding the situation, much less being fooled by remarks like that. The current situation was implicit in Vados’s first decision to found his city, and that in its turn may have depended on the fact that his wife was too damned vain to spoil her figure by having children — or maybe he’s impotent or sterile, but whichever way it happened, he needed a surrogate. Whatever the reason, the same forces are driving him that drive the rest of us. I’ve done my best to make things better, not worse. Oh, I’ve been under orders, so all I could do was cushion the blow where I could, but if Vados manages to avoid open revolt within the next few weeks, then he’ll get two years of comparative peace — that’s my guess — and two years from now the situation will be no better, no worse, than it is today. The problems will be different, but they’ll still exist. Maybe then they’ll tackle the root causes — poverty, lack of education, those things. Then, again, maybe they won’t. People don’t do logical things like that.”

“A few moments ago you were saying people were predictable. Does that not imply that they are logical, too?”

“No-o-o… You run out of logic about the time you start taking imponderables like religion into account, or genetic predisposition. In theory, I imagine, there are logical reasons to be got at; one can imagine in some far future society people will say, ‘This man has propinkidinkidol of utterbimollic acid in his genes, so he’ll have cold feet, so he’ll be a good customer for electric blankets — only even then it’d probably turn out he got shocked as a kid and he’s so scared of electricity he won’t use anything but a plain hot-water bottle.”

Señora Posador was staring into space. “I remember the first time — oh, when I was at school, señor, learning English in a junior class. That was when I first heard the word ‘cussed.’ The teacher said it was slang, and we should not use it. But I like the word. It expresses something so — so human—”

She spread her graceful hands in a helpless gesture, at a loss for a precise definition. “But if what you say is to be believed, if one could — given the time and the necessary information — treat individuals as readily as you forecast the behavior of crowds, hurrying for a train, why, there is nothing left for anyone. Except to be one of the persons who gathers and uses this information, rather than a — a victim.”

I shook my head. “No, no. There is so simple a way of interfering with the process that it could never become reality.”

“How so? You have said just the opposite—”

“Well, you yourself provided me with one example. After you showed me how television was used to force ideas on Vadeanos, I simply stopped watching it. Do you suppose that a chessman possessed of conscious thought would calmly sit on its square and wait to be taken if it knew the rules and the state of the game? Not likely. It would sidle quietly to another square where it was safer, or scuttle across the board when the players weren’t looking, to crown itself a queen.

“No, the sort of absolute system I’ve been talking about couldn’t work unless everyone was ignorant of what was happening. Outwardly there would have to be no change at all in everyday life. You and I and that waiter over there would have to be able to eat and drink and sleep and fall in love and get indigestion as always — so what would be the difference, anyway? Maybe such a system is already in operation — how would we know? We’re like pawns on a chessboard who do know the rules and the state of the game, but we prefer to ignore that knowledge because we have no legs, and we can’t leave our squares unless we’re moved.”

Señora Posador sat without moving, looking at nothing, for a long moment. She said at length, “You paint a bleak picture of the world, Señor Hakluyt.”

“Not very. We’re bound to accept that we’re restricted by forces beyond our control. So long as they remain beyond anyone’s control, we’re all in the same boat, and we don’t care. But to be ruled, and to know one was ruled, by people who were controlling those impersonal forces — -that would be different.”

“Yet we are ruled by people; often there have been absolute regimes, and even you, with your freedom of action — are you not ruled by men controlling economic forces, by those who pay you, in the most immediate case?”

“That’s nothing to disturb me, is it? But what I am afraid of is — let’s say the situation where in a restaurant at noon the cooks prepare exactly so many of each different dish, because they know that, faced with the day’s menu with such-and-such items on it, just that number of their patrons will select just those dishes, and nothing at all will be left over. You see, there is a subtle horror in that. No one, except the cooks, and perhaps not even the cooks, would realize that anything had changed.”

Visibly, literally, Señora Posador shivered.

“I’m sorry if I’ve upset you,” I said. She came back to herself with a start, and glanced at her watch.

“Not at all, señor. Not more than usually, to be frank. I find you a disturbing person in some ways — but I cannot say how.”

She rose to her feet, still with a faraway expression. “You will forgive me, but I have an appointment in a little while. I hope that” — she smiled slightly — “the impersonal forces will direct that we meet again before you leave. Hasta la vista, señor. And — good moves in your game.”

I stood up quickly. “Thank you. I hope the same. Will you not have dinner with me before I have to leave — perhaps help me make the best of my few days’ holiday?”

She shook her head, not smiling. “No,” she said calmly. “I cannot see you any longer as a person, you understand. I can see you only as an agent of the forces against which I am struggling. I would prefer it otherwise — but…”

She shrugged and turned away.