John Brunner - The Squares of the City

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 f.ow. 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.