The Squares of the City

VIII

“So you starred in a television program yesterday, Señor Hakluyt,” said a quiet, husky voice near me. I looked up from the paper I was reading with my breakfast coffee in the lounge of the Hotel del Principe and saw Maria Posador.

“Buenos días, señora,” I said, indicating the empty chair beside me. “Yes, as a matter of fact I did. You saw the program?”

She sat down, unsmiling, not taking her eyes from my face. “No, I only heard about it,” she said. “It is too dangerous to watch television in Aguazul.”

“Too dangerous?”

She nodded. “You are a stranger in Vados, señor. I cannot blame you for that. But there is information I think it is my duty to give you.”

I searched her exquisite face for a hint of the real meaning behind her obscure words and failed. “Go ahead,” I shrugged. “I’m always willing to listen. Cigarette?”

“If you don’t mind, I prefer these of my own.” She slipped her gold case from her handbag; I held my lighter for her. Then she sat back in her chair and regarded me fixedly.

“You doubtless know,” she began, “that our Minister of Information and Communications is one Alejandro Mayor — a man of certain notoriety.”

“If being the author of a theory of government is a claim to notoriety, I suppose he qualifies,” I agreed.

“No longer a theory only,” corrected Señora Posador, and looked for a brief instant extremely unhappy. “A practical form.”

“It always seemed to me that he had something, when I read his stuff in college.”

“The señor will forgive a personal remark, but I judge that he is about in his late thirties, and his university studies would have been fifteen to twenty years ago, no? Much has changed since then. It would be best if you could read Mayor’s recent books, but they are substantial and very technical, and I do not believe any have been translated into English for many years. He has been too taken up with his duties in Vados — and in any case in most countries speaking English his precepts would be without value.”

“How come? It struck me that he spoke in pretty universal terms.”

“Oh, to some extent one may say so…” She delicately deposited ash in a tray at her side. “But — let us take this program on which you appeared yesterday. Did you find that it impressed you? Did it appeal to you, excite you?”

“I thought it was very well done and presented the facts in a balanced manner.”

She studied me again with those rich violet eyes. At last she shrugged. “There are indeed things you ought to know. Do you have one hour to spare, Señor Hakluyt? Unless I have badly misjudged your good nature, it will be of great interest to you.”

I couldn’t see what all this was leading up to; I said so. “And,” I added, “if you’re going to try to persuade me that what was said on TV last night was nonsense, you’re out of luck.”

She gave a wan little smile that penetrated her natural sophistication and made her seem suddenly appealing in a little-girl way. “No, I assure you — that is not my aim.”

Like tumblers spinning in a fruit machine, facts were clicking together in my head about this woman. But when they had meshed, they still failed to explain a lot of paradoxes: why she was a friend of Sam Francis, for example; why Angers had specifically warned me to steer clear of her.

Something that did make sense, though, was an impression that had just come to me — an impression that for reasons I could not fathom she was trying to approach me on an unemotional level, as a man would approach another man, resolutely not capitalizing on her womanly charm.

“All right,” I said with sudden decision. “One hour.”

Relieved, she rose and led me out of the hotel; before a huge Pegasos sedan parked at the curb, she took keys from her handbag and indicated that I should get in. I hesitated, remembering the possibility that had struck me yesterday evening — that I might be being watched, perhaps for my own protection. I was going to raise that matter with Angers when I went down to the traffic department this morning.

Noticing my hesitation, she gave a faint smile and held out her tiny gold key chain to me.

“You may drive us if you prefer,” she suggested. I shook my head and got in.

The great car moved as though on rails; we hardly seemed to have left the hotel before we were on the outskirts of Vados, in what I knew to be a Class A residential district, with small but palatial houses set in great blossom-crowded gardens. We turned aside from the main road down an avenue lined with feathery-crowned palms; Señora Posador felt for a button on the dash and pressed it. There was a hum. The wrought-iron gates leading into the driveway of one of the houses ahead swung back as though by magic, and the car slid between them. She pressed the same button again; the gates closed silently.

We did not, however, go all the way along the driveway to the house. Instead, we halted before a clump of dark green bushes, into the middle of which a narrow path led.

“We have arrived,” said Señora Posador with a faint smile.

Puzzled, I got out and looked about me. “This way,” she called, and disappeared down the path between the bushes. I followed circumspectly and was surprised to find, completely hidden by the bushes, a small prefabricated shed. Or perhaps more a blockhouse than a shed; the walls were at least four inches thick. A TV antenna reached up from the roof, and a thick power cable was slung over the branch of a nearby tree, leading toward the house.

Señora Posador opened a padlock that held the door fast, and I followed her inside.

At first I could see almost nothing; the only light came from one small barred window. Then she turned a switch and two fluorescents came to life. I looked around the interior. There was a chair, padded, relaxing; a twenty-eight-inch television set; and, of all things, a VERA — a full-size video recorder with two-inch tape and spools a yard wide.

“Please be seated,” said Señora Posador calmly. I perched on one arm of the chair and watched her as she crossed to the recorder. In a moment the spools began to hum, and the big screen lit up.

“I will show you the program in which you appeared last night,” she murmured. And at the same moment Cordoban appeared on the screen, introducing the program.

I watched in puzzlement for a while, until I was satisfied that this was indeed a recording of the same program, and then looked across at Señora Posador.

“I don’t quite see what you’re trying to show me,” I said. “I’ve seen all this before, in the studio.”

She switched off the recorder and spun the spool back to where she had cut it in before answering. Then she spoke without looking directly at me.

“There are few places in Vados where it is safe to watch the television, señor. This is one of them. I have here a device which I think in English is called a ‘blinker.’ Our name for it means ‘sieve.’ I have just played you that recording without the blinker.”

“A blinker, so far as I’m concerned,” I said, “is one of those gadgets that you can set to shut off commercials. You haven’t any advertising on that program.”

“No?” she said, and gave her wan little smile again. “Did you ever hear of a technique called subliminal perception?” I frowned. “Yes, of course,” I said shortly. “You accept that that was a recording of the same program as the one you appeared in last night?” I nodded. “It certainly seemed to be the same.”

“Then watch this, Señor Hakluyt. Watch carefully.”

She spun the spool forward to the first of the series of shots taken in the shantytowns and let it play over, all the time keeping her finger on a small pause switch beside the playing head. “It is sometimes difficult to find what one is looking for,” she murmured. “Ah! There!”

The picture on the screen was somehow familiar, yet it was not anything I could consciously remember seeing either last night or in the playback I had seen a few moments ago. It depicted the interior of a squalid hovel. The central character was a colored man stripped from the waist down. With him were a group of children, all aged about twelve. I won’t take the space to describe what they were doing. I had to turn my head away after a few seconds.

“It is no good trying to ignore this, señor,” said Señora Posador coolly. “Please look at it more closely.”

I got off the arm of the chair and approached the screen. There was something odd about the picture, certainly…

“It’s not a photograph,” I said suddenly. “It’s a drawing.”

“Or, more precisely, a painting,” she agreed. “Please watch again.”

The spools hummed; she kept her finger on the pause switch, and in a moment came to another shot that was hauntingly familiar like the first. This one showed a small boy, actively encouraged by his mother, defecating on a picture. About all that one could see clearly of the picture was that there was a cross in it, and toward the top of the cross was what might have been a halo.

“Are you a practicing Christian, señor?” asked Señora Posador.

I shook my head.

“Most Vadeanos are Catholics. They would at once recognize that as a copy of the picture of the Crucifixion which hangs over the high altar in our cathedral. It is by one of our most distinguished artists.”

She let the spools run forward a little more. The next picture at which she stopped showed a man with a whip as big as a threshing flail, lashing the naked back of a little girl. After that the one with the Negro was repeated, the children still in their obscene postures; and so through again in order.

“I doubt if I need show you any more of this sequence,” said Señora Posador quietly. “Let us contrast these pictures with what was interspersed in your interview.”

The tape spun forward some distance. Cordoban, on the screen, said, “aquí esta el señor Hakluyt,” I came smiling into the range of the camera, and she stopped the spool.

I saw myself — or at any rate a recognizable likeness of myself — dipping my fingers for holy water into the font at the entrance to the cathedral. Another few yards of tape: I was shaking hands with el Presidente, and then in a few more moments I was kneeling before the bishop I had seen coming out of the elevator at the TV studios. Finally, before the sequence began to repeat, I was shown — this was so crude it nearly made me laugh — as an angel in a long white gown, holding a flaming sword over the monorail central, from beneath which little figures ran like frightened ants.

“That is enough, I think,” said Señora Posador. She shut off the recorder. “Now I think you understand, no?”

Confused, I shook my head. “I do not,” I said. “Not at all!”

She pushed aside a number of empty tape-cartons and lifted herself up on the bench beside the recorder, slender legs swinging. She took out one of her black cigarettes and lit it thoughtfully.

“Then I will do my best to make it clear,” she said offhandedly. “You know, you say, what subliminal perception is?”

I frowned. “Well, I know the principle — you project a message on a TV screen or a movie screen for a fraction of a second, and it’s, alleged to impress the subconscious mind. They tried it out in movie houses with simple words like ‘ice cream,’ and some people said it worked and others said it didn’t. I thought it had gone out of fashion, because it proved unreliable or something.”

“Not exactly. Oh, it is true that it was not reliable. But indisputably it worked at least part of the time, and of course in most civilized countries it was immediately recognized as a powerful political weapon. If it could be made consistent in its effect, it could be used to indoctrinate the population. One of the first people to emphasize this was — Alejandro Mayor.”

Memories of hints contained in Mayor’s first book confirmed this. I nodded.

“It so happened,” said Señora Posador, looking at the glowing tip of her cigarette, “that twenty years ago Juan Sebastian Vados was campaigning for the presidency In our country. It was the first election after an unpopular dictatorship. The television service had just been brought to the country — at first it served only Cuatrovientos, Astoria Negra, and Puerto Joaquín — and its director supported Vados.

“Who first saw the possibilities? I cannot say. It was all kept very secret. In most countries use of subliminal perception is banned by law, because its effectiveness — oh, it has been made reliable by testing! — it is inhuman. But in Aguazul there was no law. The single obstacle was that most of our people were, still are, illiterate. Yet that in its way was an advantage; it was soon found that even for persons who could read, pictures worked better than words. A message in words you can argue with, but pictures have the impact of something seen con los ojos de si.”

She was still staring at her cigarette, but plainly was not seeing it, because the ash was growing and trembling and she made no move to disturb it. Her voice became taut and a little harsh.

“Vados, with advice from Mayor who had become a friend of his, employed this knowledge. He broadcast very often in this technique a picture of his opponent copulating with a donkey, and — since television was rather new to us and very many people watched very much of the time — his opponent was called foul names as he went through the streets, his house was stoned daily, and — and in the end he killed himself.”

There was a pause.

At length Señora Posador recollected herself, shifted a little on her perch, and threw the ash from her cigarette aside.

“And so, my friend, it has continued. Those of us who know what we know — and object — never go to the movies; we never watch the television without a blinker. With practice has come skill, and what you have seen here is typical of the technique as it is employed today.

“It is now known for certain to many of our citizens that the squatters in the shantytowns practice bestial cruelty to their children, that they offend the morals of the young, that they elaborately blaspheme against the Christian religion. It is likewise known that you are a good man, a good Catholic, and a close friend of the president, whom you may never have seen in your life.”

“Once, in a car the other day,” I said. “That’s all.” She shrugged. “I saw you smile at the picture of yourself as an avenging angel,” she went on. “Yet even that is carefully planned. Many persons watching the program may have been children who believe in such things. Others — many, many more in the small towns and villages and even in Cuatrovientos and Puerto Joaquín — are simple and uneducated, and likewise hold such things to be literally true. You are a free man, Señor Hakluyt, compared to anyone walking the streets of Vados. You come here; you can go away again; it will not matter that your thinking has been influenced in Aguazul. But it would be better to watch no more television.”

“Are you trying to tell me that all the TV programs are loaded with this kind of crap?” I demanded.

She slipped from her perch and bent to open a sliding door set under the bench where she was sitting. “Choose any of these,” she invited, indicating a row of tape spools filed on a shelf. “They are programs transmitted during the last few months. I will do the same again for you.”

“Don’t trouble,” I said distractedly.

She looked at me with something approaching pity. “As I imagined, Señor Hakluyt, you are a good man. It shocks you to discover what methods are employed in the most governed country in the world!”

I lit a cigarette, staring at her. “I was talking to Dr. Mayor last night,” I said after a pause. “He used that same phrase. What does it mean? What does it really mean?”

“To the ordinary citizen? Oh, not very much. Our government is subtle as governments go — always it is the velvet glove where possible. For most of our people, the twenty years of Vados’s rule may truly be described as happy. Never before was Aguazul so prosperous, so peaceful, so satisfied. But we who know — and there are not many of us, señor — what long invisible chains we carry, fear for the future. If Mayor were to die, for example, who can predict the consequences? For all his elaborate theories, he is still a brilliant improvisateur; his gift is to trim his sails to the wind of change a moment before it begins to blow. With him, Vados, who is growing old — who can tell whether he has planned well enough for another to take the controls when he has gone, and keep our country on a steady forward course? And there is a still further danger: the danger that this disguised control may have worked all too well, that if change becomes necessary, we may have been too skillfully guided for too long to respond, so that before we can again forge ahead we must fall back in chaos.”

She made a helpless gesture with one superbly manicured hand and cast down the butt of her cigarette.

“I try not to speak politics to you, Señor Hakluyt. I know you are a foreigner and a good man. But it is of concern to all the world what happens here in Aguazul; we have laid claim to a government of tomorrow to match our city of tomorrow, and if we have gone wrong, then the world must take notice and avoid the same mistakes. Your hour is up, señor. I will drive you wherever you wish to go.”