The Squares of the City Page 19

  “That explains nothing.”

  “On the contrary. Are you an angel, señor?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You would not claim to be an angel. Yet have you raised so many objections to the way the television service has presented you? Against this, Tiempo tried to present something less favorable, admitted, but perhaps nearer the true state of things. We are all human, fallible, not all-knowing. And of course, you deny permission to state this side of the case. I do not blame you. I wish only that we spoke for the same cause.”

  “For the hundredth time,” I retorted, “I’m not taking sides in the internal affairs of Vados. I’m hired help, and treating me as though I were—were a hired assassin is unjustifiable.”

  “Whether you recognize the fact or not,” she said calmly, “you are a symbol now. Better that you should leave with your work unfinished than that you should altogether lose your power of decision and perhaps be destroyed by the disaster that now impends.”

  “You seem very certain that there will be a disaster,” I said. “And what are your friends the Mendozas doing to stop it? Nothing. They seem to be helping it along. I saw a knife fight on Sunday evening over that attack Tiempo published against Dr. Ruiz. Fortunately it doesn’t seem to have caused anything worse so far.”

  “Only because the case collapsed, señor. Only because Señor Brown disappeared. I think Felipe was foolish to insist on publication of that attack; still, as I have told you, I have no influence on the policy of Tiempo. I merely believe it right and necessary for there to be counter-propaganda of some sort in Ciudad de Vados.”

  “All right, so there has to be an opposition press. I grant that. What I want to know is: must it be libelous and irresponsible?”

  “Under the circumstances, it must be as extreme as the law permits. Milk and water, señor, will not tempt readers away from stronger drink. As to Dr. Ruiz—well, his time of reckoning will come. I am glad Felipe did not continue as he had intended, though—otherwise there might now be barricades in the square, and perhaps you would have been knifed.”

  She looked down at the chess problem on the table. “Believe me, Señor Hakluyt, I am sympathetic; our problems are not your problems, but they exist. And we in Vados cannot cease to fight our own battles merely because one stranger is involved, to whom we wish no harm. Is that reasonable? Will you agree with me?”

  I threw up my hands. “I have to hand it to you, señora, you put up a most rational case. It still doesn’t make me happy about this treatment I’m getting. Just one more thing, though. Are you also acquainted with a man called José Dalban?”

  Her eyes widened fractionally. She gave a quick nod.

  “Then tell him from me next time you see him that if he lets out another peep about me I’ll have him hit from so many sides he won’t know what’s happening.”

  “Explain further.”

  “He’ll know what I mean. He’s threatened me more than once now; the third time I promise to spit in his eye.” I took a deep breath. “Frankly, Señora Posador, I was told it was a tossup who out of you and Dalban, was responsible for the attacks on me. I’ll accept your assurance; from Dalban I wouldn’t take an oath on a crucifix.”

  Her voice kept carefully neutral, she said, “I will tell him. If I see him. You must understand, Señor Hakluyt, that again you have preconceptions. It is my impression that you think in terms of ordinary political parties; you mistake the similarities between our government and other governments for identities. There is a president, a congress, a cabinet which as in the Estados Unidos is appointed by the president—but these parties, the Citizens of Vados and the National Party, exist only in Ciudad de Vados. You knew that, possibly. But you did not go on to think that Puerto Joaquin has more than twice so many people as this city, and that our other two large cities, Cuatrovientos and Astoria Negra, combine to make as many people as live here. Beyond that, there is the whole country. It is against the isolation of this city that we fight—against the city as a privileged country-within-the-country. How long have you been here? Three weeks, is it not? This is a struggle that has continued for more than ten years, and in the course of its growth it has struck its roots in every corner of all our lives.”

  Her long fingers sorted the chessmen on the table before her. “Almost,” she finished musingly, “it threatens to replace chess as the national obsession.”

  I made no reply.

  “I think it would be appropriate,” she said after a pause, not looking up from the board, “to play that game I suggested now. In token of our—friendly enmity?” She added the last two words on a rising, questioning note.

  I hesitated before nodding. She smiled, deftly concealed a black and a white pawn in her hands, and offered their smooth gold backs to me. I indicated the right one; it proved to contain white.

  “Your honor,” she said, and at last lit the cigarette she had kept waiting between her fingers for so long.

  Well, she was bound to wipe the floor with me, I thought. I’d never played seriously, and probably most schoolchildren in this chess-mad country would make hay out of any opposition I could muster. Still—I tried pawn to queen four and lit a cigarette for myself.

  Queen’s Gambit Accepted: that shook me a little, but I ploughed on, trying to remember the orthodox attack. I soon found that Black wasn’t doing anything orthodox at all, aside from developing major pieces brilliantly. After move eight, I leaned back, cogitating.

  “I think I’ve done something rather stupid,” I said. “As far as I can see, I’ve laid myself open to massacre somewhere.”

  Señora Posador nodded without smiling. “I regret that you have. This combination of mine was played against our champion Pablo Garcia in the Caribbean tournament last month—it so happened that I was discussing it with him yesterday, and I thought I might try it out.”

  “Well, but Garcia is a grand master,” I said. “I suppose this was one of the games he lost.”

  “Not at all,” said Señora Posador indifferently. “He won in twenty-seven moves.”

  I looked at the board. I was faced with a choice between losing my Queen or putting her back on the home square; either way I got a move behind and lost material in a few moves’ time.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m no grand master.”

  “If you will permit, then. …” She leaned over and delicately tipped pieces back to restore the position at move four. “I recommend this—you see why, of course. Then as previously; now so, so, so. Then take the pawn, and the situation is altogether different, no?”

  “Is that what Garcia did?” I suggested, studying the new setup.

  “Oh, no. That is what he decided afterward he should have done. It leads to a resignation by Black in fifteen moves or so. Garcia is a lazy man, he says. He only plays long games when it is unavoidable.”

  “Well, the one that was acted out at the president’s garden party in his honor was long enough,” I said. “About ninety moves, I think.”

  “His opponent refused the offer of a draw; he was stubborn. Which would you prefer, señor—to continue or start afresh?”

  “Let me try again,” I said. “I haven’t played for months, and I never played well. But I ought to do better than that.”

  We started over; this time I managed to hang on, and the game went to about forty-five moves before I found my queen neatly trapped and resigned to avoid systematic slaughter.

  “Better,” said Señora Posador with clinical approval. “If you would permit me to give you some advice, Señor Hakluyt …”

  “Of course.”

  “It is a matter of combination. Each move must be seen in relation to the whole. And this applies also in real life. I suggest you consider this point. Good morning, señor.”

  And with that final cryptic remark she rose, smiling, and was gone.

  I told a waiter to take the chessmen away and bring me a copy of this morning’s Liberdad; having seen Tiempo, I wanted to know how the day’
s news looked through government eyes.

  As usual, here were substantially the same items in a completely different order of precedence. Almost half the front page was given over to an attack on Sigueiras’s slum, with editorial comment to the effect that now his rearguard action to preserve his notorious public nuisance had failed, the citizens of Ciudad de Vados should take vigorous action to hasten the process of clearing it away.

  There was a change of attitude detectable here: almost, I thought, I could discern a note of hysteria. Up till now Liberdad had soothingly been at pains to explain that the matter was in hand and the paternal government would soon put things to rights. Today there was distinct impatience and more than one hint that the government wasn’t doing as well as it should. A heavy black box beside some pictures of the ragged slum-dwellers contained an accusation of the kind I thought was Tiempo’s prerogative here—Castaldo, deputy to Diaz in the Ministry of the Interior and one of the many officials I’d seen talking with Diaz at Presidential House, was supposed to have tried to shield Sigueiras from the long overdue clearance of his human pigsties. What he’d done, it seemed, was chiefly to nominate the substitute lawyer who took over Sigueiras’s case from Brown. Having seen this substitute in action, I couldn’t find that a particularly heinous offense—Sigueiras would probably have got on better with no lawyer at all. However, there it was; presumably, since Liberdad was the official organ, Señor Castaldo was being readied for dismissal.

  Well, if Liberdad was going to start throwing mud like this, what kind of fireworks would Tiempo have to produce? Most likely they’d reopen their broadsides against Dr. Ruiz, and I wasn’t looking forward to the probable consequences.

  It struck me as curious that I hadn’t heard anything for some time of the attempt to disqualify Judge Romero after his behavior in the Guerrero case. Maybe, because of public sympathy with Guerrero after his murder and public antipathy to Fats Brown after his disappearance, Dominguez had judged it unwise to press the matter too hard. Still, I wasn’t complaining; Romero had issued me with that injunction against Tiempo, and so long as that remained in force, Romero, for my money, could sit on the judicial bench here or anywhere.

  I folded the paper and sat thinking for a while. Or more exactly, not thinking so much as feeling. Feeling the city in terms of people. Trying to fit it into the country as a whole, as Maria Posador had suggested.

  I couldn’t. The trouble was this: Ciudad de Vados didn’t fit into the country. It wouldn’t fit, perhaps, into any country in the world. Had it been just its buildings, you could, of course, have fitted those in; the difficulty stemmed from the people, the particular people, the particular types, classes, beliefs, prejudices under which they labored. I had a moment of insight, trying to see the city through the eyes of a villager whose water supply had been taken for it: I, as it were, remembered with the peasant’s memory how other people from across the sea had come with strange and wonderful things—horses, guns, metal armor—and how the world had turned topsy-turvy.

  Maybe the Conquistadores were here again. Maybe I was—without wishing it—one of them.

  I got up, sighing, and went down to the traffic department.

  I now had a considerable mass of data processed; not unnaturally, Angers was eager to know what the results would be. It cost me something of an effort to reorientate my thinking in the correct direction.

  “The heart of the problem,” I said when I’d succeeded, “is definitely the market area. There’s nowhere else in Ciudad de Vados, except in the middle of the Plaza del Oeste, where a market could organically grow up—and there’s legislation covering the plazas, so that’s all right. If you can get your costing department to run a rough estimate on what I give them, we can find out by tomorrow morning how much of my four million my draft scheme will eat up. Then there’ll be a matter of a few more days to iron out snags. Not long, I think.

  “Then once your market is disposed of, your squatters’ livelihood is largely gone; they’ll have to beg or peddle their stuff. In a few months, especially if the government gives ’em a shove, the trickle back to the villages will become a torrent; pretty soon the number of squatters will drop to a handful, and inside a year the climate of opinion should permit evicting those who remain. As I get it, this is the Vados technique.”

  “Well, don’t take my verdict,” Angers answered. “It’s up to Vados and Diaz to fight it out. But it sounds fair enough. A year, you say? A long year it will be. Still … And how about that eyesore of Sigueiras’s?”

  “As I’ve said before, that’s far less important than it looks. The way things are moving already, Sigueiras can be legislated out of his slum without any opposition except from his tenants. Frankly, I’m surprised it’s taking so long.”

  “Maybe the reason is—you’ve seen Liberdad this morning?”

  “The piece about—what’s he called?—Castaldo? Yes, I saw it. I was much more interested to see the hole in the front page of Tiempo.”

  Angers looked smug. “Yes, I was right to suggest you get on to Lucas, wasn’t I?”

  “I must call him up and thank him.”

  “Any further trouble from Dalban? No? I was having a word with Arrio last night; it seems he’s likewise interested in Dalban’s goings-on. Something to do with his business, mainly. But he’s also learned a few things about the wealthy supporters of the National Party—like Dalban—which he says aren’t exactly nice. This question of Tezol’s fine, for example. I mean, Tezol was just an illiterate villager, but he was very useful to Dalban and his associates because of the influence he had with the uneducated classes, and it seems like a rotten thing to do to let him be jailed for want of a sum any of them could have given without noticing. There are some pretty unpleasant characters on the National side, Hakluyt.”

  “You’ve said almost exactly what I thought,” I agreed.

  Angers glanced at the clock. “Well, can’t jaw all day,” he said. “I hope your plans work out well.”

  I spent the rest of the day translating processed data into man-hours and cubic meters of concrete and gave the results to the costing clerks at five-thirty. My head was spinning with figures; I decided to take a break before I got a headache and went out for a drink while they started the costing.

  I walked out into a changed city—a city suddenly come to life like a sleeping giant irritated by the biting of a flea, turning and twitching this way and that without being able to trace the cause of its discomfort.

  Someone had thrown red paint all over Vados’s statue.

  Police in the Calle del Sol were bundling young men into trucks; there was blood on the ground, and one of the police held two wet-bladed knives.

  During the lunch-hour meeting in the Plaza del Sur, Arrio had been hanged in effigy from a tree by enraged supporters of Juan Tezol, in protest against his being jailed. Police had had to clear that up, too; the evening edition of Liberdad spoke of a hundred arrests.

  My car had had the air let out of its tires.

  And Sam Francis had committed suicide in jail. …

  XVIII

  That night Ciudad de Vados reacted as a sleeping lion reacts when it becomes aware of a human presence. The lion does not move, except to open its eyes. Yet its body ceases to be relaxed. Inside the tawny pelt a thousand living springs are wound up instantly to maximum tension.

  The only occasions when I’d ever walked up to a sleeping lion had been on the outside of a cage of steel bars. But I was inside Ciudad de Vados. I was inside the mouth of the lion.

  I did something that night that I hadn’t done for years. I felt the need to get loaded with Dutch courage. When I was through at the traffic department—not that much work got done—I went to the bar of the hotel and drank steadily for three hours. The lights went out around me; at one in the morning I was still looking at my hands and seeing them shake. I wanted to leave this place. Now. Today.

  Once, a long time ago, I met a newspaperman who had had to cover the great Chicago race
riot of the twenties. He had found it difficult, he said, to describe to me exactly how he felt to be in a city divided against itself. If he had walked up to me now in the bar of the Hotel del Principe, I could have told him to save his reminiscences—I knew from the inside how he felt.

  He was an old man, but he still closed his eyes and shivered gently when he recalled those terrible days. I wondered between drinks whether I, too, would remember with similar clarity when I was sixty-odd—and decided that I probably would.

  Have you ever seen a fragment of ice dropped into supercooled water? The mass sets solid on the instant, like a man confronted with the head of Medusa—and in just such a way had Vados frozen in face of the news first of Tezol’s imprisonment, now of Francis’s suicide.

  Suicide? whispered gossip at every street corner. No, of course not. A beating by the police? How should I know? But—

  Enter rumor, painted full of tongues.

  A fine of a thousand dolaros? Why did so small a sum go unpaid? We are poor—but there are those who say they agree with us, and some of them are rich!

  Hence: The defenders of our rights have been robbed! And from there it was a slip of a mental gear, a less-than-jump to a conclusion close at hand, an automatic identification by thousands of people given to thinking in identities, to the plain statement.

  “We, the people, have been robbed!”

  I ought never to drink on my own. A few drinks give me mental clarity; in company, I could keep my consumption down because of the amount of talking I did. I’d got two reputations that way—as a good conversationalist and as a bore. On my own, I always reached too far too fast in search of still greater clarity, and wound up fuddled.