The Squares of the City Read online

  “I don’t quite understand how you fellows do it,” Angers said as he watched me doodling flow-curves on a scratch pad, standing on the shoulder of the highway overlooking one of the shantytowns.

  “Coming from a highway engineer, that’s a handsome admission,” I said, more sardonically than I’d intended. “Most of the time your boys make me feel I want their permission to breathe in their vicinity.”

  Angers colored a little. “No offense,” he said.

  “I mean it. Oh, it’s largely a matter of instinct and a particular sort of mind. Hard to explain. I suppose the closest analogy is with the way a river deposits silt at a bend—the direction and strength of the current and the nature of the silt determine the way the course of the river develops. In roughly the same way you can establish principles of traffic flow that sometimes—almost invariably in the case of unplanned towns or villages—determine the primary nature and layout of the result.”

  I stripped off the sheet of the pad I’d been working on and screwed it up. “No luck?” Angers suggested.

  “Oh, it could be done. But … well, I suppose you wouldn’t be interested in the obvious solution.”

  Angers raised a sandy eyebrow at me. “I thought we’d considered all the obvious solutions,” he said rather stiffly. “That was why we called in an expert.”

  “It’s still obvious. Use the money to build these people a nice clean new housing development and educate them into living there.”

  “It may be obvious, but it’s superficial,” he said with the relieved air of one who has met and defeated the same argument many times before. “These aren’t the only peasants we have to cope with, remember. What do you think their relations back in the hills would say when they saw Cousin Pedro and his family of fourteen installed—and I mean in a stall, because they’d take their animals with them!—by the government for nothing?” He shook his head. “No, that would merely aggravate the problem.”

  “All right,” I shrugged. “But I can tell you now that if that would aggravate the problem, the best I could do would be to alleviate it. I can make life difficult for these people; I can eliminate their market, so they have to tramp from door to door to sell their vegetables and chickens; I can make their shantytowns into nice clean new—something. But these people are fatalists, damn it! To them it will merely be something new to be endured, like a drought or a famine. The most that can be hoped for is to make things so difficult they can be persuaded back to their villages—but unless something is done there, too, they’ll come back, and you’ll get precisely the same thing happening all over again under new circumstances.”

  “Yes, but—well, frankly, Hakluyt, we aren’t looking for much more than a palliative, you know,” said Angers, blinking. “We’re tackling the other aspects of the problem, but that’s long-term stuff, you know. I mean, there are United Nations teams up in the villages, teaching elementary things like hygiene and baby-care, and there are Vados’s own educational shock troops trying to bring the literacy level up a few per cent. Oh, in another generation these people will probably be pretty well civilized! What we object to, we who are citizens and sweated blood over Vados, is seeing uncivilized people mucking up everything we’ve worked for so hard.”

  I judged it better not to pursue the matter. “Well, I’m a stranger,” I said. “All I can do is warn you.”

  I turned back toward the car and began to stroll down the shoulder of the highway.

  “I think you’ve given me everything I need to be going on with—most other points I can clear up with maps and reference books. For the next week or so I want mainly to be left alone; I can’t say for sure what I’ll be doing, but I’ll most likely be standing around on street corners, taking the mono, getting into crowds wherever they form. Things like that.”

  Angers hesitated. “Well, you’re in charge,” he allowed finally, and I had to hide a smile. Like most traffic men who’ve come up by way of highway engineering, he was used to dealing in—literally—more concrete things. Accordingly, I went into a bit more detail as we returned to the city center.

  “For instance,” I said, “consider the problem of that market you want to get rid of. As you pointed out, one reason why it continued to exist after the city was built was that the shanty-town squatters took over the tradition established by the peddlers who traded with the construction gangs in the first place. But a contributory factor to its survival must have been the absence of heavy traffic flow through the roads it occupies. So we have to create such a flow—and it has to be a functional flow in the sense that people have got to be better off when it operates. Okay, achieve that, and you create a sense that the market is a nuisance because it’s a brake on the smooth passage of people who want to get past it. Six months of that kind of irritation, and a contagious urge to get rid of it will enable the city council to legislate it away with the support of a large majority of the public.”

  Angers nodded his head in reluctant admiration. “It amazes me that the abstract factors you traffic analysts handle can produce such positive results,” he said.

  “It’s the way people work. We’re subject to a lot of pressures we’re not conscious of; some of them influence us out of proportion to their importance. But the problem lies here: a new traffic flow through the market quarter will have to pour into the main traffic nexus—there’s no room for it to do anything else. And that complex of intersections was designed—and very well designed—to cope with exactly its present amount and direction of traffic flow. You can’t just open a new road into it; you might very well slow the traffic down instead of speeding it up.”

  I looked thoughtfully out of the car. We were traversing the Plaza del Este, just in front of the magnificent cathedral. Like ants against the blazing whites, blues, and reds of the frontage, a family of peasants was standing. Their heads were tilted back, staring at the three-hundred-foot aluminum cross rearing into the clear sky overhead, wondering whether the deity inhabiting this august edifice might not be different from the one occupying their little adobe-built village shrine at home.

  “At home”; yes, that was the trouble in Vados. Or a good part of it, anyway. Twenty thousand people who couldn’t regard the city as their home, although they lived in it—simply because it wasn’t their home. They were in a foreign country in their own homeland.

  “Where would you like me to drop you off?” Angers asked as we rolled on toward his office.

  “Anywhere around here will do.”

  “And shall we not be seeing anything of you at all for the next week, then?”

  “I’ll drop in every morning, of course—find out if there is anything important I should know, ask any questions I’ve dreamed up. Don’t worry about me—I’ll make out fine.”

  Angers nodded, looking past me at the street. “Any special time?”

  “After the morning rush is over, probably. I want to get a complete picture of the type and density of the traffic flow in the city center all around the clock, but I’ll probably be out in all the rush hours, for the first week at least.”

  He sighed. “All right. Keep us posted, won’t you? Cheerio.”

  I shook his hand and left him when the car pulled up to the curb, and strolled slowly along the sidewalk back toward the pedestrian underpass at the main traffic nexus.

  Well, one thing that was going to be essential if I was to work completely on my own, as I always preferred in the first stages of a job like this, was for me to do something about my rudimentary Spanish. Another was to post myself in better detail on the attitudes and reactions of the average citizen. I’m a firm believer in the platitude that people get the popular press they deserve; accordingly, I bought a copy of the afternoon edition of the government paper, Liberdad, and took it to a bar to look through it. I had a vest-pocket dictionary I’d bought in Florida, and though it didn’t give some of the words I needed, I got ahead quite well with the paper.

  One headline caught my eye because it mentioned the name of
Mario Guerrero, the chairman of the Citizens of Vados. I struggled through the story under the heading and found that a man called Miguel Dominguez had brought a charge of dangerous driving against Guerrero’s chauffeur, and another of aiding and abetting against Guerrero himself. There was a picture of Guerrero standing beside a big black sedan, the same I had seen roll toward him as he left the Courts of Justice in the Plaza del Norte.

  Once again the reporter failed to include a lot of things I wanted to know; he did, however, make it plain that in his view the whole affair was a plot by the National Party, of which Miguel Dominguez was a prominent supporter, to discredit the chairman of their opponents. Of course, it was ridiculous to suppose that Guerrero would do anything to injure the citizens of his beloved Vados—or anyone in Aguazul, for that matter, Fortunately for Guerrero’s honor, the charge against him would be defeated by the legal skill of his close friend and colleague Andres Lucas, and the stigma on his good name would unfailingly be removed.

  It was that kind of report.

  I inquired for a Tiempo, because I felt pretty sure the independent paper would regard the affair rather differently. But I was told that it wasn’t well enough off to afford more than one edition a day—Liberdad was government subsidized, of course—and in any case it was getting on toward the end-of-work rush hour, so I left it till the following morning.

  I was out early the next day, assessing the incoming traffic as the stores and offices opened up for the day—the regular hours of work seemed to be eight-thirty to noon and two to five-thirty for offices. Around nine-thirty I went back to the hotel for a leisurely late breakfast and found the follow-up I was looking for in Tiempo.

  As I’d guessed, the independent organ had a totally different slant on the matter. Their report explained to the world how Guerrero had ordered his chauffeur to drive through a group of children playing with a ball in a side street; the public-spirited Miguel Dominguez had seen the event and had been so shocked at the risk to the children that he had done his duty as a citizen, fearless of the powerful entrenched interests which were bound to smear his act as a political trick.

  I cursed local politics and turned over to the inside pages.

  Here I found an article that concerned me much more directly—indeed, I was mentioned in it by name, and not at all politely. It was on the shantytown problem; the writer’s name, Felipe Mendoza, rang a bell with me, and I wondered where I had heard it before. I found the clue in the caption to a badly reproduced portrait of Mendoza in a little box at the foot of the page; he was a distinguished local novelist whose work had been published in translation in the States. I’d seen his books but never read any. According to the reviews I’d read, he seemed to be a sort of Latin American William Faulkner, with a dash of Erskine Caldwell.

  According to his view of the matter, I was a hireling brought in by the despots of the government to take away the people’s homes—but this was comparatively mild. He reserved his real scorn for Seixas and the other treasury department officials. Seixas, he alleged, had persuaded the president to choose this way of tackling the shantytown problem, instead of rehousing the squatters, because he held shares in a highway construction company which was likely to benefit.

  I wondered what the laws of libel were like in Aguazul. Fairly elastic, to judge from this.

  As I’d promised, when I was through with breakfast, I went down to the traffic department to look in on Angers and see if there was any news. I found him talking to a pale, fair-haired young man with a slight speech impediment and hornrimmed glasses.

  Angers, serious-faced, interrupted the conversation to introduce his companion as Mr. Caldwell of the city health department, and waved me to a chair.

  “I’ve just been hearing some rather interesting news, Hakluyt,” he said. “Caldwell, maybe you’d tell Hakluyt what you just told me. I think he ought to hear it right away.”

  I sat down and looked attentive. Caldwell cleared his throat nervously and gave me one quick glance before settling his eyes on the wall behind me and speaking in a low, monotonous voice.

  “It was yesterday afternoon,” he said. “I was making my regular visit to S-s-sigueiras’s—his s-slum. We’ve been trying literally for years to get him to improve the c-conditions down there. I th-think I must have been there about the s-same time you were.

  “Because when he came back he was s-saying he was going to file s-suit against Mr. Angers for this attempt to get rid of his s-slum.”

  “Citizens’ rights again, I suppose?” interjected Angers, and Caldwell nodded, swallowing. His Adam’s apple bobbed.

  Angers turned to me. “Of course, immediately I heard this, Hakluyt,” he said, “I felt I must ask you to concentrate on this aspect of the problem first, if you can. We don’t want to exert pressure on you in any way—after all, you’re the expert—but you do see what we’re up against, don’t you?”

  “I hope you see what I’m up against, too,” I answered dryly. “You asked me to keep personal considerations out of this, and I think that had better go on applying. You’ve given me a budget and a problem to solve; suppose you let me be the judge of the best way to tackle it, and you’ll get the best results. Besides—damn it, if the legal mills grind as slowly here as they do most other places, it’ll take months for Sigueiras to show results in his suit.”

  Angers looked unhappy. “Well, that’s the unfortunate part of it,” he said. “The legal mills, as you put it, in Vados grind pretty quickly. It’s a different matter anywhere else in the country, but one of the things that Diaz has always insisted on ever since the city was built was quick handling of law cases—both civil and criminal. He was suspicious of us foreign-born citizens, you see, and he seems to have been afraid that we’d litigate the simple-minded native-born citizens out of their rights. Well, that’s beside the point—in the abstract, it’s a damned good thing that cases don’t hang around for months on end, of course, but Diaz has his own man in as Secretary of Justice—fellow called Gonzales—and he sees to it that if there’s a dispute involving a foreign-born citizen and a native-born citizen, it moves like lightning.”

  He looked down at the top of his desk; he had picked up a paper clip and was nervously toying with it.

  “I’ve got a nasty feeling that I haven’t been told the whole truth about this problem I’ve been asked to solve,” I said. “What is this legal question involving Sigueiras, anyway?”

  “Well, it’s damnably complicated, actually. But I’ll try to boil it down for you.” Angers sat back, avoiding my eyes as Caldwell had done, but for a different reason. “When the city was incorporated, all of us foreign-born citizens, and those native-born citizens who’d qualified in particular ways by contributing to the creation of the city, were given what we call a citizens’ rights endowment. That’s to say, guarantees of options on particular official positions, at fixed levels of salary, or leases on undeveloped land, or something of the kind, and their duration was to be fifty years or the lifetime of the recipient, whichever was shorter. They can’t be inherited, you see—although citizenship as such descends to the progeny and all that.

  “The problem with Sigueiras, of course, is that he managed to fiddle the undisputed use of that land under the monorail central as part of his citizens’ rights endowment, and it’s legally unassailable. The only loophole lies in the proviso that the city council retains powers of development, and it can dispossess any leaseholder on payment of compensation. Well, what we’ve got to try to do is dispossess Sigueiras—using this city development clause.”

  Caldwell had been listening in mounting excitement to Angers; now he burst out as though unable to control himself any longer.

  “We’ve got to get him out. Everybody s-says we must! The health problems are gh-ghastly; the education department is t-terribly worried; it’s affecting the tourists—it’s sh-shocking, Mr. Hakluyt!”

  I got up. “Look,” I said, “for the last time. You hired me to do a job, and I’m going to do it if
it can be done. I don’t have to be told that this slum development is a blot on the face of Ciudad de Vados—I can see. Suppose you try to be patient—and better still, let me get on with the work.”

  I was leaving the traffic department building when I had my first sight of el Presidente in person—from a distance, but unmistakable. Well, how could one mistake him when he drove down the street and into the Plaza del Norte behind a flying wedge of black-uniformed motorcyclists with police sirens howling?

  He sat in the back of an open convertible, one arm resting along the side. Next to him was a dark and very beautiful girl—his second wife, presumably. His first, so I had vaguely heard, was a girl he had married in his twenties and who had died soon after the foundation of Ciudad de Vados. He looked older than he had in the photograph at the airport, even behind the dark glasses that hid his eyes.

  There was no doubt that he was still popular. People on the sidewalks and in the middle of the square stopped talking to turn and wave at the passing cavalcade, and a bunch of children ran yelling behind his car. El Presidente acknowledged the acclaim with no more than a languid lift of his hand, but his wife smiled and blew kisses at the children.

  The car pulled up outside the City Hall, and Vados went inside—to attend to his mayoral duties, presumably. As soon as he had disappeared from sight, his wife leaned forward and said something to the driver; still attended by the motorcycles, the car purred off in the direction of the main shopping streets.

  I strolled away, deep in thought, when the interruption was over. Angers, plainly, hadn’t much liked my parting remarks; it was certain that if he got to hear about my actions for the next few days, he wasn’t going to approve of that, either. I intended to spend the immediate future on foot, looking at the places I was supposed to clear up, with a camera slung around my neck, a white Panama hat on my head, and the biggest dark glasses I could find on my nose.