The Squares of the City Read online

  “Why do you suppose all those people are standing on the pavement?” he said.

  I followed his arm. Around the doorway of an apartment building ahead, not less than fifty people were milling. Most of them were shabbily dressed. They seemed to be staring in through the ground-floor windows, gesticulating.

  “Whatever it is, they’re enjoying it,” I said. “They seem to be laughing their heads off.”

  As we pulled up, we saw that many of them were literally helpless with amusement. More people were dashing up moment by moment, and the janitor of the apartment house was trying frantically to drive them away with vehement curses.

  “That’s my place they’re looking into!” Angers snapped, starting to open the car door. “What the hell can be going on? Do you suppose there’s a fire, or something?”

  Then one of the windows shivered into sudden fragments, and a bored-looking burro poked its head out, nostrils wide, as though sniffing for fodder.

  “God in heaven!” said Angers, and left the car faster than I had ever seen him move before. He crossed the service road at a run; the janitor caught sight of him and called to him pleadingly, but he took no notice. His goal was a new arrival with a large camera, who was down on one knee focusing for a picture of the burro. Now, having found there was nothing to eat outside, the animal was sampling the gauze curtains and not finding them much to its taste.

  Angers was the last person I’d have cast as a football player. Nonetheless, the kick he launched at the camera was superbly professional. The camera was snatched from the man’s hands; it soared through the air for twenty feet and exploded into fragments against the wall of the building. The would-be photographer shot to his feet with a yell of dismay, but Angers had already spun around and was thrusting his way into the crowd, a look of savage fury on his face.

  I followed more slowly. There was a sound of police sirens coming this way. Once they realized the owner of the apartment was on the scene, the sightseers began to melt rapidly, and I had a clear path to the entrance. I tried to get some sense out of the janitor, but he was distraught with terror—presumably because it was his fault that the burro was in the apartment—so I followed Angers inside.

  He was shaking with rage; he could hardly get his key into the lock, and when he succeeded, the door proved to have been barricaded from the inside. He glanced around wildly, spotted a heavy fire extinguisher hanging on a wall bracket across the foyer, seized it, and used it as a battering ram. The door broke from its hinges on the first blow, and we charged into the apartment.

  There were people here, too—not just a burro by itself. In the foyer there were four naked children playing delightedly with a doll they had found. The doll was an Inca statuette four centuries old, but that didn’t worry them. The excitement had been too much for them, and they had relieved themselves indiscriminately in odd places on the carpet. A woman so old she seemed not to have energy left to breathe or move her eyes sat wrapped in a rebozo on a couch, stroking a fine silk cushion with one hand and telling a rosary with the other.

  At the sound of our crashing entrance, a man with a scarred, simple-looking face looked out from one of the bedrooms. He had one hand full of frijoles, and their sticky traces were all over his face from chin to nostrils. Behind him, a high-pitched woman’s voice demanded in a peasant accent to know what had happened and what had the children broken this time.

  Angers looked slowly around the room. A few slivers of glass left in the frame of a wall mirror, and a heap of colored bits of china in one corner, explained why the woman had not been more startled at the sound of our breaking down the door. A stack of shabby bundles on the floor indicated that this family had moved in with the intention of staying put; indeed, they had already set up the family shrine on a new lightwood sideboard, and several crude candles were trickling streams of grease across the polished surface.

  Then there was a furious rattling and crashing from the door of the other bedroom, and it was flung open by a young woman in her early twenties, cursing with a sonorous obscenity I have seldom heard in any language. In Spanish, the result was magnificent. In spite of all her efforts to prevent it, a fat pig broke away between her legs, ripping off her skirt in passing and carrying it triumphantly wrapped round his nose like a banner as he careened across the lounge. The simple-faced man dropped his handful of frijoles on the carpet, seized the nearest portable object—it happened to be a lamp—and used it as a combined lance and bludgeon to drive the squealing and grunting pig back through the bedroom door. The door slammed. The burro commented on the fact at the top of its voice.

  The young woman grabbed her skirt as the pig fled past her, and knotted it haphazardly back around her waist as though she were used to this kind of thing.

  I came close to admiring Angers in the next second, for he had been standing there quite immobile while the boarpig was chased back to its new sty, and now all he said, in a frozen voice, was, “Qué hacen Vds. en mi casa? What are you doing in my home?”

  Then a squad of policemen crowded through the door. The woman who had called from the bedroom came to see what was happening; she, too, had her hands full of frijoles. The four children began to scream almost in unison, their voices pitched just far enough apart for the result to be a nerve-fraying quadruple discord. The very old woman began to weep quietly. But the young woman, cursing the police as roundly as she had cursed the pig, picked up a dozen wineglasses from the sideboard and began to hurl them with accuracy, and it wasn’t until she had been dragged into the kitchen by two burly policemen and locked in a broom closet that we got any sense out of anybody.

  Looking hurt and puzzled, the simple-faced man explained. They had come from a village in the mountains. Today they had arrived. Their village was short of water this summer, and the people were very hungry. Other people—their cousins, their friends—had come to the city and found good homes, though not so good or so large as this one. So they had arrived and asked someone where they should go, and they had been brought here. It was very good here; there was a separate place for the animals, instead of them having to share the living-room, and there was much water, and the floors were soft. But there was no firewood, and nowhere to make a proper fire, so tomorrow he would have to make an oven. Today they were tired; they had just cooked up some frijoles over a little fire, and wished to sleep soon.

  Simple.

  The “little fire” had been made in the bedroom washbasin; two or three books had contributed to it, and it had left a smear of smoke-grease all the way from the basin to the window through which the smoke had escaped. And they had not, apparently, been able to believe in an unfailing supply of water. They had found out how to work the taps, and had then filled every container they could find and stowed them in cupboards, in drawers, in closets, under the beds—everywhere.

  I would never have believed that so much chaos could be created in such a short time by so few people.

  “This,” said Angers coldly when he had surveyed the damage, “is Sigueiras’s doing. You remember how he threatened to do just this—don’t you, Hakluyt?”

  And then I did recall what I had scarcely thought of since the first visit I had made to Sigueiras’s slum.

  “Ask them!” Angers ordered, whirling to the nearest policeman, throwing his arm out in a gesture that swept across the peasant family. “Ask them whether it was Sigueiras!”

  No, they had never met anyone by that name. They had come to the city and asked where they must go, that was all.

  “Well, how the devil did they get in?” demanded Angers. “Livestock and all! Get that idiot of a hall-porter here!”

  Struggling to control his weeping, the terrified janitor hurried to throw the blame on his young assistant—a youth of twenty, notorious for his National Party sympathies. The janitor himself, it seemed, had not been on duty this afternoon—he had been inspecting complaints of unsatisfactory garbage removal.

  And this young assistant was nowhere to be found.
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  “Go and look for him in Sigueiras’s slum!” Angers ordered. “Quick! And get Sigueiras if he’s there!”

  They went; they found Sigueiras, though not the missing youth, and they arrested him.

  Frankly, I didn’t see what else Sigueiras could have expected. This was a magnificent, publicity-gaining gesture in its conception, but in practice it was bound to backfire. It did. As Angers immediately realized, it cut both ways.

  Defiantly, perhaps characteristically, Sigueiras’s only comment on the affair was that he had given Angers fair warning.

  When things had calmed down a little, and the peasant family had been removed from the apartment, Angers looked about him grimly at the wreckage. “Now,” he announced, “I want a photographer.”

  The pictures were all over Vados the following day: in Liberdad, in leaflets hastily run off on private printing presses, in posters slapped on walls. The message they conveyed was obvious almost without explanation; it ran: “This is what will happen if they rehouse the slum-dwellers! This is the way such people like to live!”

  And they worked.

  At three o’clock that afternoon the police had to use tear-gas and fire hoses to turn back a crowd of self-appointed sanitary inspectors from the monorail central—about two hundred aggressive young men and women who had armed themselves with firebrands and set out to smoke the slum-dwellers from their homes. If the jail had not been very modern and very strongly built, a similar mob would have hauled Sigueiras from his cell and tarred-and-feathered him or stoned him through the streets.

  Three or four shacks were actually burned down in the shantytown on the Cuatrovientos road, and in retaliation a group of peasants rolled oil-drums filled with dirt into the fast lane of the highway. Since most of the traffic in that lane was still doing fifty or sixty miles an hour before slowing to take the city cut-off, they managed to wreck several cars; no one died, but several people were badly hurt.

  Bit by bit, the temper of the city was reapproaching the point at which they had had to put the machine-gun post in the Plaza del Sur. Accordingly, I locked myself away in the hotel over the entire weekend and went for the one last remaining part of the problem: the shantytowns on the outskirts.

  After that makeshift job on Sigueiras’s slum, this was a breath of sweet clean air—straightforward improvement of traffic flow patterns to eliminate the kind of backwater effect that had allowed the first small nucleus of squatters to congregate, and then had directed that the nucleus should grow. It wasn’t bad when I was through; it wasn’t bad at all. I only had to have it computed for costing, file off the rough bits, and then, in a few days if all went well, I could get to hell out of Ciudad de Vados and never—never—come back.

  Feeling and probably looking worn out, I walked into Angers’ office on Monday morning and planted a heap of papers on his desk: sketch-plans, preliminary figures worked out on my portable analogue computer, estimates, the lot. “Done,” I said. “That’s it.”

  Angers looked up at me with a sour expression and shook his head.

  “I’m sorry, Hakluyt,” he said. “Not done. Not by any means. Take a look at this.”

  He thrust a sheet of paper across the desk at me. I took it; it proved to be an interdepartmental memorandum form of a kind I had occasionally seen since arriving in Vados—used by cabinet ministers to issue instructions to junior personnel. This one was headed MINISTRY OF THE INTERIOR and bore Diaz’s personal signature. It ran:

  In the matter of the dispossession of Fernando Sigueiras. Señor Angers is forbidden to take any action to further this plan without specific directions from this Ministry.

  “What on earth is this all about?” I demanded. “Surely he can’t do that!”

  “But he can,” contradicted Angers wearily, sitting back and crossing his legs. “The situation in this lunatic city of ours makes the federal-state relationship in the U.S.A. look like sheer heaven. Don’t you realize, Hakluyt, that in my capacity as traffic manager of Ciudad de Vados I’m solely responsible to Vados as Mayor, while at the same time in my capacity as highway supervisor I’m responsible to Diaz in the Ministry of the Interior? This blasted project is being claimed by both of them! There seems to be nothing left for me to do but comply in one capacity, refuse in the other, and resign in both!”

  “Does this kind of thing happen often?”

  “Oh, about twice a week,” said Angers with bitterness. “But this time it’s different. Look what came with that memo!”

  He passed me a typed list of what looked like references to legal cases. There were about twenty of them. “That’s Do-minguez’s doing, I’ll swear it is,” Angers declared. “Those are cases in which the verdict went against the city council because it was proved that some municipal employee involved in the case had a personal grudge against the defendant—and believe me, I have a personal grudge against Sigueiras now!”

  “Well, what’s that supposed to prove?”

  “If you ask my candid opinion, Hakluyt, it isn’t supposed to prove anything. It’s just hamstringing us. It may take months to prove that these cases are totally irrelevant. Oh, this looks like Dominguez’s doing all right. And devilish clever it is, as a delaying tactic.”

  I folded the list together with the memo and dropped them back on Angers’ desk. “Well, it’s no skin off my nose,” I said, shrugging. “As far as I’m concerned, the job’s just about over. You’ve got your scheme; it’s not my job to put it into effect—it’s yours. I’m through—and by God, Angers, I can never remember a contract I was so glad to finish.”

  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 hers
elf. “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 Joaquin 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.”