The Squares of the City

VII

The slab-sided bulk of the television and radio center was set high up on the hillside across the city from the airport, so as to keep the towering antennae well clear of incoming planes. We whirled up toward it in a luxuriously comfortable car driven by a girl in a dark green uniform.

The evening lights of Ciudad de Vados spread out below us like a carpet of jewels. It was the finest view I had yet had of the city; I said so to Señora Cortes.

“Yes, we have a beautiful city,” she answered, smiling faintly. “It is good to know that you, señor, will help us to keep it so.”

Rioco, sitting in the front beside the driver, gave a short laugh, perhaps not at Señora Cortes’s remark.

Like everything else in Vados, the studio building was spacious and impressive. We pulled up in front of the brilliantly lit main foyer whose high glass doors stood open to the warm night. An attendant — a man, but uniformed in the same shade of green as the girl driving our car — whisked the door open for us to get out.

In the foyer people were coming and going with an air of quiet busyness; several of them greeted Señora Cortes as we entered. There were bored-looking actors, actresses, and commentators whose makeup gave them a slightly inhuman appearance; executives and technicians dashing from office to office: a man leading a trio of carefully clipped French poodles by blue ribbons around their necks; an unshaven man with narrow eyes, carrying a trumpet without a case, who looked lost; several tall, slim girls who from their movements could only be precision dancers — it was the sort of mixture one might see anywhere in the vicinity of a TV studio.

Altogether unexpected, though, was what happened when our elevator arrived.

We crossed the floor of the foyer directly to the elevator doors; Señora Cortes pressed the button and stood tapping her foot impatiently while the signal light over the door moved from 3 to 2 to 1. The moment the door started to slide open, she moved forward, only to fall back in astonishment and confusion.

There was a bishop in the car, in full episcopal regalia.

He nodded to us, eyes twinkling, and moved forward with the stateliness of a one-man procession, surrounded by lesser clerics, and a hush fell on the foyer as he approached the exit. I glanced back as we got into the elevator, and saw one of the dancers stop him and drop on one knee to kiss his ring.

Noting my amazement, Rioco chuckled. “That is our good Bishop Cruz,” he said. “He comes each week to record a — a — how do you say it? A lecture?”

“A sermon,” I said, and he nodded.

“A sermon, that would be it. But that’s the first time I ever saw him go out in all his fine clothes like that.” He chuckled again. “Me, I thought for a moment it was someone dressed up for a show!”

The elevator disgorged us on the top floor, and as we emerged into the corridor, a stout man going thin on top caught sight of my companions and addressed them sternly in Spanish.

“Where in the name of the good God have you been, Isabela? You know this evening’s program has to be good! What was the reason for running off and taking Enrique with you?” He flung out an arm in a grandiose gesture. “The chaos in the place is beyond conceiving!”

Señora Cortes blanched slightly, but replied peaceably, explaining who I was and where she had been. “Go into the studio, Enrique,” she added to Rioco. “Things can’t be in too bad a muddle, but something probably needs setting right.”

Rioco nodded and disappeared through the nearest door. The balding man seemed to have been pacified by what Señora Cortes had to say and shook my hand absent-mindedly. “I’m beginning to think I should have handled the details of this program myself,” he said in a depressed voice, not paying me any more attention. “Please make sure it is good, won’t you, Isabela?”

He turned away and strode down the corridor. Showing signs of relief at his departure, Señora Cortes turned to me again.

“Please come with me,” she said. “I will show you the studio from which we make this broadcast. Much of it is on tape already, of course, but the interview with you and some other parts will transmit live. This way.”

We went through the same door as that which Rioco had taken, picked our way through a tangle of cables snaking across the floor, dodged technicians and avoided cameramen lining up angles. Finally we took refuge in an alcove next to the director’s goldfish bowl.

Rioco had changed his personality as soon as he entered the studio, obviously. Now, standing between a girl in glasses who held a pile of duplicated scripts and a man with cigarette-yellowed fingers who seemed to be the lighting technician, he was crackling out authoritative directions to his staff.

“Francisco!” called Señora Cortes to a pleasant-faced young man crossing the floor. He turned and came up to us, and she introduced him as Francisco Cordoban. “Our regular interviewer on this program,” she explained.

“Glad to meet you, Mr. Hakluyt,” said Cordoban, gripping my hand squarely. “Bit short notice, I’m afraid, asking you to appear for us, but it’s extremely good of you to come. The interview won’t run too long, I’m afraid — I’m figuring on between seven and nine minutes near the end of the program. How’s your Spanish? 1 can run it in either English or Spanish, but we lose a lot of time if I have to interpret, of course.”

I shrugged. “Well, my Spanish is pretty poor, but I’m willing to try it if you like.”

“Excellent. Look, let’s step into the control room for a few minutes — Enrique won’t be ready to come in for a while, I imagine. I can give you an idea of the questions I want to ask and find out if answering them in Spanish gives you any trouble.”

He pushed open the door and stood aside to let me pass. The goldfish bowl was fairly cramped, but of course as soon as the door was closed again it was dead silent. None of the monitor screens was working yet, and only a whisper indicating that current was flowing came from the speakers.

Cordoban gave me a chair and himself leaned back against a panel of lights. “Well, I’ll start off with a bit about your background and the kind of work you do — you’re a traffic analyst, isn’t that correct? And you’ve worked almost all over the world. Anywhere in particular you’d like me to mention?”

“Oh — India, the UAR, the States. And my native Australia, of course.”

“Ah-hah. Good. Well, that bit doesn’t involve you; I’ll just do the spiel with you out of shot. Then I’ll start putting questions to you directly. The first ones will be quite simple, about what you think of Vados. Let’s try it through. Ha estado Vd. otra vez en Ciudad de Vados?”

“Nunca,” I answered.

“Le gusta a Vd. nuestra ciudad?”

And so it went smoothly enough: it was much as I had expected — mostly platitudes about how impressive Vados was. The nearest Cordoban came to treading on the edge of the controversy regarding the proposed redesigning was to ask me if I had yet made up my mind about what I would recommend.

I told him that I had been here only a few days and it was too early to say.

“Bueno!” he exclaimed, pushing himself away from the panel where he had been leaning. “That’ll do nicely, Mr. Hakluyt. Well, we still have twenty minutes before we go on the air — we could step around to the bar for a drink if you like—”

He looked out onto the floor of the studio and corrected himself. “Sorry — Enrique’s doing a run-through, so we’ll have to stick around a moment. Cigarette?”

I accepted the offer.

“Have you been on television before?” Cordoban inquired. “I didn’t think to ask. Maybe you’d be more interested to stay here and watch what’s happening.”

“I get put on TV quite often,” I said. “I’ve been in charge of two or three quite big projects in the States, and reporters sometimes come swarming around when work’s in progress.”

“Ah-hah,” Cordoban nodded. “I can well understand that. We’ll be making a very big feature of the reconstruction when it starts, I imagine.”

“No matter what form it takes?” I couldn’t resist the jab; it missed, and he gave me a puzzled look.

“Does it matter what the details are? It’s news, anyway.”

I passed it off as inconsequential. “Tell me,” I said. “You have quite a setup here — far bigger than I’d expected. Is your broadcasting very extensive?”

“It’s the highest coverage in Latin America, as a matter of fact,” he said with a hint of pride. “We’ve used television a lot over the past twenty-odd years. I’m not sure what the current percentage is, but according to the last survey a year ago, we were getting to two-thirds of the total population, except, of course, at the big festivals like Easter. Even then there’s television playing in bars and places, of course, and the smallest villages have at least one set apiece now. Then we go over the border to some extent, of course, but the number of sets there is so much smaller it’s negligible.”

I was impressed. “How about radio?” I said. “I suppose you don’t pay that much attention if your TV audience is so large.”

“Oh, on the contrary! Except for the hour-a-day educational programs, we only telecast from six in the evening, you know. There isn’t much of an audience during the day, except on Sunday afternoons when we come on at two. But we do radio programs from six in the morning until midnight. Workers in factories listen, peasants take portable radiós into the fields with them, drivers on the road and housewives at home listen in — why should we waste a potential audience like that?”

The way he put it puzzled me slightly; I didn’t press the matter, though, and simply nodded. He looked past me through the glass wall. “Enrique’s still having trouble” he noted. “I don’t think we’d better disturb him for another few moments.”

I glanced around the room; as he spoke, my eye fell on a small row of books alongside the control panel, and I thought there was something familiar about the nearest of them. They were mainly cheap novels, presumably what the technicians or producer read during lulls or transmission of intercut tape. The one that caught my eye, however, was obviously out of place; it was stout and well-thumbed, and its red binding bore several cigarette burns. It looked like a textbook; I presumed it was a manual of television engineering, but — perhaps the author’s name rang a bell with me — I picked it up.

A book whose title, even in Spanish, meant something to me because the name of the author was very well-known to me indeed: Alejandro Mayor.

Several years rolled back in my mind; I was back at the university, arguing heatedly over the most controversial of many controversial books in our social science curriculum. In its English edition the book was called The Administration of the Twentieth-Century State, and the author was this same Alejandro Mayor.

I opened the book with interest; its title was El Hombre de la Ciudad de Hoy — The Modern City Man.I wondered if it was as pungent and original as the earlier work, for I saw it had only been published a matter of five years ago. Probably not, I decided with regret; in those days Mayor had been a firebrand type of youthful iconoclast causing a scandal in academic circles with every lecture course he gave at the Mexico City School of Social Science. Now he was probably a sedate conformist. That fate usually overtakes innovators — their ideas cease to be revolutionary.

Cordoban had been grinning at the inaudible difficulties Rioco was having with his run-through. Now he turned back and saw what I was doing.

“You’ve read that, perhaps?” he suggested. I shook my head. “Not this one. But I read his first book in college. It’s rather an odd sort of book to find in a TV studio, isn’t it?” I stuck it back in the rack. “I wonder what became of that man — I don’t seem to have heard of him for years.”

Cordoban regarded me with mild astonishment. “No?” he said quizzically. “Why—”

He glanced around through the glass wall and stiffened as the door of the studio swung open. “Why, there he is now.”

I followed his gaze and saw the balding, stout man whom I had met with Señora Cortes on my arrival. “Him?” I said blankly.

“But of course. Dr. Mayor has been Minister of Information and Communications in Aguazul for nearly eighteen years.”

“Why — that’s from long before the founding of Ciudad de Vados.”

Cordoban nodded. “That’s right. I’m surprised, though, at your saying his books were strange things to find in a television studio. Why, we regard them as indispensable handbooks.”

I frowned my way back into my memory. “I’m beginning to remember more clearly,” I said. “Didn’t he maintain from the start that communications were the essential tool of modern government? Yes, of course he did.” A further thought struck me. “Eighteen years, did you say? I was still in college then. But I thought Mayor had a chair of social science in Mexico City at that time.”

“I believe he did,” said Cordoban indifferently. “He lectures at the university here, too, of course.”

Out on the studio floor Enrique Rioco had finished his run-through; he seemed satisfied and had gone to have a word with Mayor.

“We just have time for that drink,” Cordoban said. “If you’d like one.”

I nodded, and we hurried out of the studio to a small but comfortable bar at the far end of the corridor. Over our drinks I came back to the previous subject.

“Does Dr. Mayor speak English?” I asked.

“I think so — I don’t know how well. Why? Do you want to meet him?”

“I’d be very interested,” I confirmed. “Maybe he’d be interested, too — he was a great influence on me when I was developing my own style.”

“Traffic analysts have styles?” Cordoban inquired sardonically. “How?”

“Why not? Architects have; they develop designs for living or designs for working; we develop designs for moving. There are half a dozen traffic analysts today with individual styles.”

Cordoban looked down at his glass. “I’m not quite sure I see how that’s possible,” he said. “But it’s interesting to know. Are you one of the half-dozen? I’m sorry — that’s a stupid question. You must be, or they wouldn’t have asked you to Ciudad de Vados.” He laughed. “We always say it, and we always flatter ourselves by saying it — only the best for Ciudad de Vados.”

He glanced at the wall clock and tossed down the rest of his drink.

“Time to get to our places,” he said. “Come on.”

Two minutes before the start of the program we were back in the studio. Cordoban ensconced me in a chair out of camera shot, explaining that he would signal to me to come up and take my place alongside him when he was ready to start the interview. Then he himself took a chair facing the number one camera, glanced at Rioco in the control room, and ringed his finger and thumb to signify okay. The first lines of his commentary went up on the teleprompter beside the camera. The red light came on.

The program was extremely well handled, if rather naive. It ran for thirty-five minutes, much of it on tape, and I watched it all on a master screen set high above Rioco’s head in the goldfish bowl. It started with a few shots of the planning and building of Vados, the opening ceremony with el Presidente himself officiating, and of traffic in the wide streets. I had little trouble following Cordoban’s smooth clear-spoken commentary, and I felt my interest more and more engaged as the program developed. This magnificent city really was, I thought, one of the greatest achievements of the twentieth century.

After opening on a grandiose note, Cordoban tinged his voice with sadness as he referred to the recent problems that had developed in and around Vados. Shots of the most squalid dwellings imaginable, of diseased children sharing huts with pigs and burros, of overcrowding and overbreeding. The contrast with the clean, attractive city itself was appalling. Apparently one of the cameramen had actually gone down into Sigueiras’s slum under the monorail station; effective shots stressed the difference between the bright sunlit platforms of the station above and the dark, unsanitary warren below.

There was a brief taped interview with Caldwell, the young man from the city health department whom I had met in Angers’ office, who gave some alarming figures about disease and malnutrition in the shantytowns; then another, slightly longer, with Angers, taped in his office with the wall map of Vados unrolled behind him. He deplored the existing situation in tones of grave concern, and then cheered up slightly as he explained that the enlightened president had taken steps to remedy the evils now current.

He mentioned my name, and Cordoban signaled to me. I went over to the chair alongside his and sat down just out of shot.

Cheerfully Cordoban announced to the audience that he was privileged to have the person responsible for setting things to rights in the studio this evening.

“aquí esta el señor Hakluyt—” and the camera turned on me.

After what I had seen from the taped shots, I got rather more heated in my replies to Cordoban’s questions than I had in the rehearsal, but my command of Spanish held out okay, and I received nods of approval and encouragement from Cordoban whenever he was off-camera. I really was feeling that it was a hell of a shame to mar the sleek beauty of Ciudad de Vados with these slums, and I did my best to reassure the viewers that a way would be found to cure the trouble. Then the program was suddenly over; Cordoban was getting up, smiling, to congratulate me on getting through it in Spanish; Señora Cortes came from the control room with Rioco to thank me for appearing, and as I was trying to find words to express my appreciation, the door of the studio opened and Mayor came in, beaming plumply and apologizing to Señora Cortes for doubting her ability to make a success of the program.

Gradually the turmoil subsided; some of the technicians departed for the bar, talking volubly, and others set about rearranging the cameras and lighting for another transmission later on. Cordoban gestured to me to hang on for a moment; he himself hovered at Mayor’s side, and when the balding man had finished reviewing the program with Señora Cortes, caught his attention.

Sharp brown eyes, the whites a little bloodshot, skewered me as Mayor swiveled his head toward me; he listened to Cordoban intently, paused — not hesitated; there was something about his manner that suggested he never needed to hesitate over a decision — and then nodded and smiled.

His smile was quick, unforced, and unlasting: a tool, an expression that communicated a particular implication, to be ended when the significance had been put across. I went up to him with a feeling that this meeting was not quite real; for so long Alejandro Mayor’s name had not been associated in my mind with a man, but with a set of precepts, and to find them embodied in an individual was disconcerting.

He shook my hand, briefly. “I have heard all about you,” he said in good English. “All, that is, except what I only now hear from Francisco here — that in one sense I can claim you as a pupil of mine.”

He cocked his head a little to one side, as though he had thrown out a challenging statement in a debate and wanted me to worry about it. I said, “In one sense, yes, doctor. I was much influenced by your book The Administration of the Twentieth-Century State.”

He frowned — briefly again; it seemed that he did everything by precisely measured small doses. “Ah, that,” he said distastefully. “My first book, señor — full of inaccurate theorizing and pure guesswork. I disclaim it; it was a firework, nothing better.”

“How so?”

Mayor spread his hands. “Why, when I wrote it, I was innocent of experience in practical government. There were a thousand, a hundred thousand errors in points of detail, which only practical government could expose for what they were. I can excuse it on only one good ground — that it caused our president to interest himself in my work.”

A technician signaled for his attention; he excused himself for a moment and listened to what the man had to say. I used the interlude to run over in my mind what I could remember of that first book which had so impressed me and which he now declared to have been full of mistakes.

A firework, he called it — well, that was accurate enough. It was a virtuoso display of paradoxes: opposing arguments brilliantly set forth so that one could hardly question the logic on either side. He presented, among other things, a picture of the free democratic state as the high point of the social evolution of man; then, with shattering precision, he proceeded to demonstrate that the free democratic state was far too unstable to endure and therefore guaranteed its citizens misery and destruction. He presented totalitarian systems as stable, enduring, reliable — and then mercilessly exposed one by one the factors which rendered their eventual downfall inevitable. By the time the reader was dizzy, Mayor was tossing out provocative suggestions for remedying these defects, and the total impression left on students like myself — who went through college faced with what seemed like equally appalling alternative futures: nuclear war or a population explosion that would pass the six billion mark by the end of the century — was that for the first time the West had produced a man capable of forging social techniques to match the situation. For myself, convinced as I had been that the ant heap state of People’s China was the only place where adequate social techniques to cope with the population explosion were being evolved, his book had been a revelation. Even now, eighteen years after I had first read it, I could hardly imagine where lay these flaws of which Mayor had just spoken. Of course, if I were actually to reread it or read some of his newer work in which presumably these faults had been rectified, I’d see what he meant.

I watched him as he disposed crisply of the problem raised by the inquiring technician. So he had been a minister here since the time I read that first book of his… The fact struck me as amazing at first — my automatic reaction was that if he had in fact been applying his theory of government and administration of the state, practically every move he made ought to have had sensation value.

Then I recalled a passage from his first book which had stuck in my mind: “People do not object to government; to be governed, whether by custom or by decree, is part of the human condition. People object to what might be called the scaffolding of government. With the spread of literacy and the drawing together by communications of our small planet, more and more individuals became aware of that scaffolding; more and more individuals oppose it because they can see it. How do we create government without scaffolding? There is a central problem for modern society.”

Well, of course, if he hadn’t dismissed that, too, as an error, it would explain a lot.

He was turning back toward us now — toward me in particular. “You have dined this evening, Señor Hakluyt?” he was asking.

I shook my head.

“Then please join us here. Consider it a fee for your appearance; I may say it has been most valuable to us.”

I pondered the significance of that all through the meal, which we had in the bar where Cordoban had bought me a drink before the program. Señora Cortes, Rioco, and Cordoban came with us; they discussed future current affairs broadcasts in Spanish with Mayor, which rather irritated me, because I had hoped to probe further into the evolution of his theory which Mayor had hinted at. It was only toward the end of the meal that I managed to gain his undivided attention and put some of the questions that were irking me.

“Dr. Mayor,” I said, “you mentioned errors in your first book. What were they? Or what were the important ones? I’ve been thinking back, and I can’t decide.”

“I underestimated progress,” said Mayor shortly. “Señor Hakluyt, you are a stranger in Aguazul. You will therefore be inclined to dispute the dogmatic assertion that this is the most governed country in the world.”

Again that air of throwing down a gauntlet in debate, again that cocking of the head to imply a challenge. I said, “All right — I dispute it. Demonstrate.”

“The demonstration is all about you. We make it our business, first, to know what people think; we make it our business, next, to direct that thinking. We are not ashamed of that, señor, incidentally. Shall we say that — just as specific factors influence the flow of traffic, and you understand the factors and can gauge their relative importance — we now understand many of the factors that shape and direct public opinion? What is a man, considered socially? He is a complex of reactions; he takes the line of least resistance. We govern not by barring socially unhealthy paths, but by opening most wide those paths which are desirable. That is why you are here.”

“Go on,” I invited after a pause.

He blinked at me. “Say rather what is your view. Why is it we have adopted this round-and-round policy of inviting an expensive expert to solve our problems subtly, instead of saying, ‘Do this!’ and seeing it done?”

I hesitated, then counter-questioned. “Is this, then, the extension of an existing policy rather than a compromise between opposed personal interests?”

He threw up his hands. “But naturally!” he exclaimed, as though surprised to find me so obtuse. “Oh, it is ostensibly that there is conflict between one faction and another — but we create factions in this country! Conformism is a slow death; anarchy is a rapid one. Between the two lies a control which” — he chuckled — “like a lady’s corset in an advertisement, constricts and yet bestows a sense of freedom. We govern our country with a precision that would amaze you, I believe.”

His eyes shone suddenly, like a crusader’s faced with the first glimpse of Jerusalem. Like the crusader, too, his fire was somewhat quenched by the fact that his imagined ideal city was far from divine in appearance. But I had no chance to press the questions further; Cordoban, who had been following our talk with an air of repressed boredom, crumbling a roll on his dessert plate, seized his opportunity to interrupt.

“Chess, doctor?” he proposed, and Mayor turned to him with a sardonic expression.

“You wish to try again, Francisco?”

He did not wait for an answer, but snapped his ringers at a passing waiter, who cleared the table and deposited a board and pieces on it. Señora Cortes and Rioco shifted their chairs and bent forward with an air of expectancy which I found it hard to emulate — though a mediocre player myself, I had never found watching chess so fascinating. Obviously, though, these two were old opponents; their first half-dozen moves chased across the board. Then Cordoban, with a smug expression, made a pawn move that departed from the established pattern, and Mayor blinked and rubbed his chin.

“You learn, Francisco — piece by piece you learn,” he rumbled approvingly, and took the pawn. A series of exchanges as devastating as machine-gun fire cleared the board down to essentials, and then the pair of them settled to a long, thoughtful end game with three pawns apiece.

That part of chess had never seemed to me much more enthralling than checkers; obviously, though, Señora Cortes and Rioco did not share my opinion. They were as tense with excitement as fans at a Shield match waiting to see if the third wicket of a hat-trick would fall or not.

It fell. After fifteen or so more moves, Mayor rubbed his chin, shook his head, and indicated the square next to his opponent’s king. The significance of the gesture was lost on me, but the other two watching sighed in unison and Cordoban sat back with a crestfallen expression.

“What you should have done—” said Mayor, rapidly setting an enemy pawn back one square and bringing its neighbor forward. “So!”

We all stared at the board in silence for a few moments. Then Mayor grunted and got to his feet.

“Mañana esta otra dia,” he said comfortingly to Cordoban. “That is enough for today, I think. But there will be another time. Hasta la vista, Señor Hakluyt,” he added, turning to me and putting out his hand. If you have time to spare before you leave Aguazul, perhaps it would interest you to pay another visit here and see how our transmitting system operates.”

I shook hands. “Certainly,” I said. “Thanks for the invitation.”

And that was an invitation I would take up, I told myself. Moreover, from now on I was going to look out rather carefully for proof of these assertions Mayor had made — about Aguazul being the most governed country in the world. It sounded to me like wishful thinking; the system, if indeed it operated at all, could hardly be faultless, if only because it was still necessary to call out the police to break up a riot brewing in the Plaza del Sur on the day of my arrival. Possibly it was true compared with the country’s neighbors or with its own past; I didn’t see that this precision to which Mayor made claim was borne out in practice. Unless — and this possibility I found peculiarly disturbing — unless the government did things like turning out the police simply because the people expected it of them. In that case the underlying assumption was that, if it chose, the government could abolish the meeting in the Plaza del Sur without anyone feeling the need for them afterwards.

Could it be like that? Could it? Angers had said something about Vados’s regime taking seriously the saw that a government stands or falls by its public relations…

I checked myself. I was building a dizzy tower of speculation on secondhand evidence. The only solid facts I had to go on were the fact of my being here, the nature of the job I’d been given, and what I had been able to find out with my own observation. And those combined to indicate that — Mayor’s assertions to the contrary — the government of Aguazul was a reasonably beneficent authoritarian regime, competently administering a rather prosperous country without treading so hard on anyone’s feet that people felt it worth the trouble of changing it. Twenty years’ duration testified to the success of the formula they used — Mayor’s, or whoever else’s it might be.

But “the most governed country in the world”? That was to be taken with a grain of salt.