John Brunner - The Squares of the City

Then something came between the window and the view, and I turned my head barely in time to see a sort of shack parked—it didn’t look substantial enough for one to say it was built —alongside the road. I had no chance to take in details, but that didn’t matter; fifty yards farther on there was another, and then a whole cluster of them—matchboard shanties roofed with flattened oildrums, their walls made gaudy here and there by advertising placards, ragged washing hung out to dry between them on poles and lines. Naked or nearly naked children played around the huts in company with straggly roosters, goats, and the odd emaciated piglet.

I was so taken aback I had no chance to order the driver to stop again before the road straightened for its final nose dive into Vados proper. But as we passed the gate of the first real house on the outskirts—it was a handsome colonial-style villa set among palms—I saw a peasant family trudging up the hill: father carrying a bundle on the traditional strap around his forehead, mother with one child in her arms and another wearily plodding at her heels. They paid the cab no attention as it hummed past, except to screw up their eyes against dust. A memory filled my mind suddenly: the memory of a man I had met while working on the clearance of an industrial slum area. He had been born there; he had been lucky enough to climb out of it and all that it implied. And he had said, as we talked about what was being abolished, “You know, I always knew it wasn’t permanent. That was what enabled me to get the hell out, when other people gave up. Because it was a shock to me, every time I saw a paving stone taken up, to find that there was earth underneath—the aboriginal dirt. Most of the time the town seemed so implacable, so solid and squat and loathsome—but whenever I was reminded that the earth was underneath, I managed to see through that facade and go on fighting.”

It was as though cold water had been thrown in my face. I suddenly saw a possible explanation of why I was here. And—in the most peculiar way—the explanation frightened me.

The layout of Ciudad de Vados was so straightforward and logical it would probably have been impossible for a cabby to try taking even a complete stranger by a roundabout route. Nonetheless, force of habit and professional interest made me follow the track of my cab on a mental map, at the same time as I studied the buildings and the people on the streets.

With the twentieth-century homogenization of culture, most of the route we took could have been approximated in any large city in the Americas or Western Europe, aside from obvious differences, such as the language on the street signs and the frequent appearance of priests and nuns in their religious habits. Here a trio of pretty girls in new summer frocks stood waiting for a crosstown monorail; the high platform was windy, and their skirts whirled as they laughed and chattered. Below, a thoughtful youth in an open convertible eyed them with careful consideration; a few yards away two respectable women debated whether to be more disapproving of the girls for being attractive or the boy for being attracted.

Huge stores, designed according to modern sales-promotion techniques, proferred their goods; money flowed like a river Over their counters. The cars and cabs whirled forward; despite the fact that the traffic flow was nowhere near its theoretical optimum, there were still fifty per cent fewer traffic holdups than I had ever before seen in a city this size. Bright clothes and bright faces on the sidewalks; bright sunlight on the bright light walls of the tall buildings and on the clean— incredibly clean—streets.

I looked around, and the buildings said proudly, “Progress!” The laughter on the faces of youths and girls said, “Success!” The satisfied look of businessmen said, “Prosperity!”

But even in that moment, in my first hour in Vados, I found myself wondering what the peasant family would have answered, trudging up the hill toward their shantytown.

My hotel—the Hotel del Principe—was on the Plaza del Sur, one of the four main squares of Ciudad de Vados. The squares had been named unimaginatively enough after the four points of the compass. We were nearing the end of the trip when that part of my mind that had been following our route on an imaginary map warned me that we had taken a wrong turn at a traffic signal. I was leaning forward to remonstrate with the driver when I saw that the whole stream of cars and other vehicles was being diverted from the entrance to the Plaza del Sur. I caught one glimpse of the palms and flowers in the parklike center of the square, and then the cab pulled in at the side of the road and the driver reached for a cigarette.

I asked him what was happening; he shrugged an enormous and expressive Latin American shrug.

“No tengo la culpa,” he said defensively, but giving one brief glance at the meter clocking up my fare. “It isn’t my fault.”

I opened the window and craned my head around. An excited crowd (but where in Latin America is a crowd not excited?) had gathered at the entrance to the square. It had a holiday atmosphere about it, for peddlers were going to and fro with tamale wagons and trays of knickknacks, but it was plain from the many parked trucks and cars bearing the neatly lettered word POLICIA that there was nothing festive about whatever had happened.

After a few minutes a line of police appeared from inside the square and began to disperse the crowd with extravagant waves of their long white batons. My driver snuffed his cigarette out, carefully returning the unfinished butt to his pocket, and pulled the wheel down hard. We crossed the road to an accompaniment of other cars’ brakes shrieking and entered the square.

Though there were still many people on the gravel walks between the trees, there was no sign of anything police might have been needed to break up. The single indicative point was that a man in a shabby cotton uniform—a municipal street cleaner, perhaps—was going carefully about picking up bits of paper that looked like leaflets and stuffing them in a long gray bag.

The cab rolled around the square to the Hotel del Principe, a white-and-bronze building with a kind of loggia along its line of frontage, and three shallow steps underlining the effeclive facade. There were three doors of plain glass in the glass face of the loggia; the cab halted before the first of them.

Instantly a trio of ragged youths and one ragged girl, who had been squatting on the sidewalk with their backs against the hardboard side of a portable news kiosk, eyes screwed up against the sun, bounced to their feet. They attempted to open the door, get my bags out, shine my shoes, and show me the way up the hotel steps, all the time keeping one palm free and poised to catch money if it flew in their direction. The cab-driver didn’t move from his seat; he merely spat into the gutter, making the act convey a whole bookful of disgusted annoyance.

At the head of the steps a majestic commissionaire turned toward the commotion. He summed it up in a glance and sent the ragged children running with some awful and probably obscene threat in a raucous voice and coarse accent. Then he walked down and opened my door.

“Buenos dias, senor,” he said affably, but this time in so polite and polished a voice I gave him a sharp stare, almost not believing this could be the same man. “Es Vd.. el senor Hakluyt?”

I agreed that I was, and paid the driver, giving him a tip that proved large enough to startle him out of his seat to help the hotel bellhop with my bags. I looked around the plaza again.

“What was going on here just now?” I demanded. “Why had they closed the square to traffic?”