The Squares of the City Page 5

  “Uh-huh,” he said, regarding me thoughtfully. And then a second time, “Uh-huh.”

  We spent about twenty minutes after that going into a few of the most significant figures—he sent for some recent records of work done under government contract so that I could get a rough picture of costs, and Angers sat impatiently at the side of the room while we got technical. I was rather surprised to find that under his casual exterior Seixas had a mind like a razor. Of course, I shouldn’t have been—Vados wasn’t the kind of man to tolerate easy riders in his beloved city’s administration.

  Our interview over, Seixas got to his feet, beaming. “A helluva lot of luck, Hakluyt!” he said. “Me, I think it’s too damn much money to spend anyway—we could dig those sonsabitches out in half a day with bayonets. Then they’d come back, though, so maybe it ain’t a waste. See you!”

  Evidently relieved, Angers got up eagerly, shook Seixas’ hand with a distant expression on his face, and hurried me out of the room.

  “Quite a character, isn’t he?” I said when the door was closed behind me.

  “By no means unique, I’m afraid,” said Angers glumly. “I mean—well, you saw for yourself. The empty bottles and the dirty clothes in his office desk—I ask you!” He sighed. “Still, one has to admit he’s clever enough. He’s a native, of course,” he added as an afterthought.

  “He spoke very good English.”

  “Says he taught himself at the cinema.” Angers looked about him as we emerged once more into daylight. “Well, we have to go about a quarter of a mile—do you feel like walking, or shall I call a cab?”

  I mentally pictured the layout of this locality; the police headquarters were in a block a short distance north of the Plaza del Norte, behind the Courts of Justice. “I’d like to walk, if you don’t mind,” I said. “The more I can see of the city on foot, the better, at the moment.”

  “As you like.”

  We walked silently for a while. “By the way,” I said eventually, “why is the chief of police one of the first people I have to see?”

  “Oh, a variety of reasons,” said Angers offhandedly. “I don’t mind saying you may find him a little awkward—he seems to be in two minds about the whole affair.”

  I digested the remark blankly. After a pause Angers explained further.

  “Well—uh—the people squatting in these shantytowns, of course, are a thorn in his side; there’s a tremendous amount of petty thievery that goes on, and often enough a wanted man can just vanish into the hills with the help of relatives of people here. So he wants to get rid of the mess, like the rest of us. On the other hand, he’s rather the same kind of man as Diaz—country-born, not an educated man at all, or rather, not a cultured man. I’m told that this is one of the reasons why Vados preferred him as police chief—he’s far better able to enter the minds of native criminals than anyone from outside Aguazul. But he has a gruff sort of dislike for—well, for people like myself, for example. For the foreign-born citizens.”

  “And what’s his force like?”

  Angers shrugged. “Venal and corrupt by our standards, but pretty good, so I’m assured, for Latin America. Vados cleared out the worst offenders when he took office, and they come down very heavily on policemen who take bribes or falsify evidence out of personal grudges. That’s to say, they come down heavily on the ones they catch; I’m sure there’s a lot more going on than ever comes to light.”

  “That was my impression,” I said, and told him about the policeman who had tried to steal from the beggar-boy’s pot.

  “What can you expect?” said Angers in a tone of unexpected toleration. “After all, it’s probably only the fact that he has both eyes and both hands that divides the policeman from the beggar. It’s going to take a lot of determination to ensure that the substance of Vados matches the appearance of it. Some of these people are a few generations at most away from the Stone Age; it’s really asking too much of them to turn them into civilized city-dwellers. In another twenty years perhaps—not yet.”

  El Jefe—Captain O’Rourke—looked as Irish as his name, aside from an Indian cast to his cheekbones. His short brown hair topped a stage-Irish face, knobby like a potato, with wide lips. He had a wart on his nose and another on the back of his left hand. His fingers were thick, stubby, and ill-kept; there was a mat of coarse hair on the back of each wrist. He wore black uniform pants and boots, a black shirt, and a red tie with the knot pulled down two inches so that he could open his collar. On a peg on the wall behind him hung a shiny-peaked cap and an automatic in a leather holster.

  His office smelled a little of frying-oil, as though the air-conditioning had been turned off at noon and had failed to carry away the smell of his subordinates’ packed meals. A huge array of photographs of himself framed him as he sat behind his desk—from a faded street-photographer’s shot of him as a small boy en route to first communion, to a glossy eight-by-ten of him resplendent in dress uniform shaking hands with el Presidente.

  On other walls there were also photographs—mainly gory ones. Three bodies being dragged out of a wrecked car. A man bleeding from the corner of his mouth, both eyes closed by bruises. A woman drawing down the top of her blouse to expose an ugly burn scar across one shoulder. Probably mementos of past cases.

  He gestured us gruffly to a chair; it was almost a shock to hear his gutteral accented Spanish, in view of his name and his appearance.

  “No habla inglés,” he said shortly, as though confessing to a serious fault—perhaps in his eyes, it was one. He added something else rapid, which I failed to follow. I glanced at Angers.

  “Uh—in spite of his name,” Angers translated with a bad grace. “I’ll have to interpret for you, I suppose.” He turned to O’Rourke and spoke haltingly.

  The interview, such as it was, took a long time and covered very little ground. Since it was practically all platitudes and dull questions to which the answers were obvious, I let Angers do the talking after a while, meantime looking at the pictures on the walls.

  A sudden barking exclamation from O’Rourke brought me back to the here and now with a start. I glanced around to find his brown eyes fixed on me, and Angers looking uncomfortable.

  “What’s the trouble?” I said.

  “I—uh—well, I was telling him about this disgraceful affair of the policeman stealing from a beggar this morning, and—”

  “You what?” I said.

  “Well, it oughtn’t to be allowed to pass without action,” said Angers defensively.

  “All right, if you’ve done it, you’ve done it. What’s the comment?”

  Angers licked his lips, with a sidelong look at O’Rourke, whose face was like thunder. “I—I can’t quite make out. He either wants to sack the offender, because he was stealing from his own people—as though it would have been better for him to steal from you instead—or prove that there’s no truth in the accusation at all.”

  “It wasn’t that important,” I said wearily. “It probably goes on all the time—don’t translate that! Tell him—oh, hell! Tell him the boy got his money back; tell him there oughtn’t to be any need for beggars in Ciudad de Vados.”

  Angers translated hesitantly; astonished, I saw O’Rourke suddenly break into a smile, and he rose from behind his desk to extend his thick-fingered hand.

  “He says you are perfectly right,” Angers interpreted. “He hopes you will do a lot of good for the people of the city.”

  “So do I,” I said, and rose to shake hands. Then I got up to go, and Angers caught at my arm.

  “Not so fast,” he said. “There’s—uh—there’s one other thing.”

  I sat down again while he exchanged a few more sentences with el Jefe. Then the interview was in fact over, and we went out again into the warm afternoon air.

  “What was the bit at the end all about?” I asked.

  Angers shrugged. “Nothing of importance,” he said. “I was just telling him what you’d probably be doing for the next day or two. Officiall
y, or course, aliens have to register with the police and report once a week if they’re staying over a month and all kinds of rigmarole like that—but we can avoid your going to so much trouble, O’Rourke says. You’ll only have to notify the police if you move away from your hotel.”

  “Fine.”

  “Well, that’s about it for tonight, then. Tomorrow I’ll take you out and show you the extent of the problem we have to solve.”

  V

  The first “black spot” due for our inspection was a cheap market that had grown up in what was intended to be a quiet lower-income-group residential backwater in the angle between two of the access roads coming from the main highway nexus. Itinerant merchants had found it a convenient spot to set up shop when the city was being built; they traded there with the construction workers. And somehow, through some loophole in the regulations, it had continued as a permanent feature of the area.

  But if it hadn’t been for the arrival of the squatters in the shantytowns, so Angers told me, it would naturally have withered away, and the area would have continued the way it was designed. Here the squatters garnered practically the whole of their exiguous income, and their tenacious persistence was rapidly making the section degenerate toward a slum.

  Complicating the issue, the high cost of living made many people prefer to buy their vegetables here—too many for a simple city ordinance to decree it out of existence without strong and vocal opposition. It was part of the technique that had made Vados’s regime so durable that he always preferred to replace the substance of a nuisance to himself or his supporters with the fait accompli of a universal benefit.

  And in this case it was going to take a lot of doing.

  The market was colorful—but it stank like a pigsty; picturesque—but so noisy it was hardly to be wondered that the dwellings in the vicinity were going downhill toward tenement standards.

  “Does this go on all day?” I asked Angers. “Every day?”

  “Except for Sunday,” he confirmed. “These people have no conception of time, of course—and nothing better to do anyway. It’s all one to them whether they sit here twelve hours or two hours—look at the flies on that baby’s face! Isn’t it disgusting?—so long as they sell what they’ve brought.”

  I swatted a fly as it buzzed past, but missed. “All right,” I grunted. “Let’s take a look at the next on the list.”

  The next eyesore was—of all places—right underneath the main monorail nexus. Ciudad de Vados had a first-class cross-and around-town network of tracks, in the so-called “spider’s web” pattern that is rather efficient but suffers from one serious drawback—the need for a large central interchange station.

  In Vados, of course, this hadn’t been such a disadvantage as it usually was; they were building from scratch and could afford to be lavish with space for the central. The result was that a good acre or more of surface was barred from the sun by the overhead concrete platforms.

  “What happened here was largely due to sheer greed,” Angers told me flatly. “It’s also a sample of what would probably have been Ciudad de Vados if Diaz had had his way instead of the president. The owner of this land was the original director of the monorail system. He asked for a lease on the area under the station as part of his citizens’ rights endowment when the city was first incorporated. It seemed like an innocuous enough request—everyone assumed he would rent it out as warehouse space, or something harmless like that. So no one took the precaution of placing limitations on his use of it.

  “What happened? He fitted up the spaces between the foundations with flimsy partitions and rickety flooring, let the resulting chicken coops to his friends and relatives, and found it so profitable to be a landlord that he resigned his job. Now he devotes his full time to this.”

  He pointed; I looked at “this,” and it wasn’t pretty.

  The lie of the ground here was a series of sloping ridges over which the platforms of the station jutted out. Standing where we were on the crest of one of the banks that ran between the two main entrances for passengers, we could see directly down into the space between the steel girders and thick concrete pillars that carried the platforms. There was a smell down there of rotting food and close-packed human beings and their waste products. Smoke from fires drifted up to us; the squalling of children merged into one hideous row together with the braying of donkeys, mooing of cows, grunting of pigs, and the wail of an elderly phonograph playing a record long worn past comprehensibility.

  “Tezol lives here, by the way,” Angers informed me.

  “It hardly seems possible that human beings could live down there,” I muttered.

  Angers laughed sourly. “Either the natives desire nothing better, or this is actually an improvement on what they’re used to. I say, we’re honored! Look who’s coming to see us—the proprietor himself.”

  A fat Negro was hauling himself up from the depths beneath the station. The path was very steep and very slippery, for dogs, domestic cattle, and, it appeared, children had used it indiscriminately to relieve themselves, so the landlord was forced to use his arms more than his legs in the ascent.

  He pulled himself over the lip of the bank, grunting, and wiped his face with a large red bandanna. Thrusting it back in the pocket of his bulging jeans, he called out to us.

  “You back again, Señor Angers, hey?”

  “Yes, Sigueiras, I’m back,” said Angers, not trying to hide the distaste on his face. “We’ll be clearing out that muck heap of yours soon.”

  Sigueiras chuckled. “You tried that before, señor! Always it is not possible. If you try to take away my citizens’ rights, what happen to your citizens’ rights? That a big joke, hey?”

  “He’s talking about a legal decision that went in his favor a few months ago,” explained Angers to me in an undertone. Raising his voice, he went on, “But citizens’ rights are subordinate to city development plans, aren’t they, Sigueiras?”

  “Yes, señor. And I would very willingly give up this little patch of darkness—but where else are my people to go? They wish homes, you will give them no homes, I am forced to give them homes!”

  “They must have had homes where they came from,” said Angers sharply.

  “Had, Señor Angers! Had! When they were starving because their water was taken for the city, when their land was dry, where else should they go but to the city? Each night and morning I pray to Our Lady and to Saint Joseph that new homes may be built for these people and work be found for them—”

  “The old hypocrite!” said Angers under his breath.

  Sigueiras interrupted himself. “You say—you say city development plans, Señor Angers? I hear you say that! Is it that my prayers are answered?”

  “Your prayers are more likely to be for some of your tenants to die so you can move in more at higher rents,” said Angers coldly. “This is Señor Hakluyt, who is going to redesign this area so that it’s all turned into a new road. Or something,” he added, glancing at me.

  Sigueiras clubbed his fist and raised it toward me, suppressed fury choking him for a moment. I took a step back for fear he would strike me, almost losing my footing on the bank.

  “So you come to Vados from over sea and take away all the home my people have?” he screamed. “You make your living by taking away home from people? I spit on you! I tread you in the dirt! Señor Angers, this I swear on the name of my dead father, rest his soul.” He uttered the last statement with a peculiar passionless intensity, looking again at my companion. “I swear that if you do this thing, if you take away my people only home, I bring them all—all—their cows, their burros, everything—and I move them into your big, beautiful apartment. Then you see!”

  “Let’s not waste any more time on this hysterical old fool,” said Angers sourly, and turned to go. I, hesitating, was about to follow him, but Sigueiras caught my sleeve.

  “You make your living taking away home from people,” he said, gritting the words. “I give up my living to make home for
people. Which of us do better thing, hey?”

  And he was gone, slipping-sliding down the path back into his personal inferno.

  Angers was already back at the car before I caught up with him again. He was wiping his forehead with a large handkerchief.

  “I’m sorry about that outburst,” he said wryly. “I’d have warned you if I’d known we were likely to run into him. You don’t have to take any notice, of course—he always acts abusive like that.”

  I shrugged and got into the car. But as we rolled back toward the main road, I saw a long-faced man with a bowed head, wearing a bright serape I was sure I had seen the previous afternoon in the Plaza del Sur. Juan Tezol, going home. I wondered if he had found his thousand dolaros yet.

  “It’s a strange comedown for Sigueiras,” said Angers as the car fled along smooth concrete roadway. “I suppose it’s the type—but I remember him as an apparently intelligent and sensible man.”

  “And now?” I said, keeping my face absolutely straight.

  He gave me a sharp glance. “You saw for yourself,” he said. Then he realized there was more to my remark than a foolish question and nodded reluctantly.

  “You’re probably right,” he admitted. “He could still be a formidable person.”

  He lapsed into a thoughtful silence. I wondered if he was picturing scores of peasants, cattle and all, actually forcing their way into his rooms.

  We went next on a tour of the three shantytowns, and all of them were very much like Sigueiras’s slum spread out over a wider area, except that since they weren’t closed in, the smell hanging over them was less repulsive. But although they were Superficially alike, I found that each of them had its own kind of organic structure and function, perhaps due to the fact [??] they were on different sides of Vados and the inhabitants came from districts differing slightly in cultural pattern. There was also, naturally, a marked difference between them because of the local traffic pattern, but this operated at third or fourth remove, and was not especially significant.