John Brunner - The Squares of the City

Well, if Liberdad was going to start throwing mud like this, what kind of fireworks would Tiempo have to produce? Most likely they’d reopen their broadsides against Dr. Ruiz, and I wasn’t looking forward to the probable consequences. It struck me as curious that I hadn’t heard anything for some time of the attempt to disqualify Judge Romero after his behavior in the Guerrero case. Maybe, because of public sympathy with Guerrero after his murder and public antipathy to Fats Brown after his disappearance, Dominguez had judged it unwise to press the matter too hard. Still, I wasn’t complaining; Romero had issued me with that injunction against Tiempo, and so long as that remained in force, Romero, for my money, could sit on the judicial bench here or anywhere. I folded the paper and sat thinking for a while. Or more exactly, not thinking so much as feeling. Feeling the city in terms of people. Trying to fit it into the country as a whole, as Maria Posador had suggested.

I couldn’t. The trouble was this: Ciudad de Vados didn’t fit into the country. It wouldn’t fit, perhaps, into any country in the world. Had it been just its buildings, you could, of course, have fitted those in; the difficulty stemmed from the people, the particular people, the particular types, classes, beliefs, prejudices under which they labored. I had a moment of insight, trying to see the city through the eyes of a villager whose water supply had been taken for it: I, as it were, remembered with the peasant’s memory how other people from across the sea had come with strange and wonderful things—horses, guns, metal armor—and how the world had turned topsy-turvy.

Maybe the Conquistadores were here again. Maybe I was— without wishing it—one of them.

I got up, sighing, and went down to the traffic department.

I now had a considerable mass of data processed; not unnaturally, Angers was eager to know what the results would be. It cost me something of an effort to reorientate my thinking in the correct direction.

“The heart of the problem,” I said when I’d succeeded, “is definitely the market area. There’s nowhere else in Ciudad de Vados, except in the middle of the Plaza del Oeste, where a market could organically grow up—and there’s legislation covering the plazas, so that’s all right. If you can get your costing department to run a rough estimate on what I give them, we can find out by tomorrow morning how much of my four million my draft scheme will eat up. Then there’ll be a matter of a few more days to iron out snags. Not long, I think.

“Then once your market is disposed of, your squatters’ livelihood is largely gone; they’ll have to beg or peddle their stuff. In a few months, especially if the government gives ‘em a shove, the trickle back to the villages will become a torrent; pretty soon the number of squatters will drop to a handful, and inside a year the climate of opinion should permit evicting those who remain. As I get it, this is the Vados technique.”

“Well, don’t take my verdict,” Angers answered. “It’s up to Vados and Diaz to fight it out. But it sounds fair enough. A year, you say? A long year it will be. Still… And how about that eyesore of Sigueiras’s?”

“As I’ve said before, that’s far less important than it looks. The way things are moving already, Sigueiras can be legislated out of his slum without any opposition except from his tenants. Frankly, I’m surprised it’s taking so long.”

“Maybe the reason is—you’ve seen Liberdad this morning?”

“The piece about—what’s he called?—Castaldo? Yes, I saw it. I was much more interested to see the hole in the front page of Tiempo. ”

Angers looked smug. “Yes, I was right to suggest you get on to Lucas, wasn’t I?”

“I must call him up and thank him.”

“Any further trouble from Dalban? No? I was having a word with Arrio last night; it seems he’s likewise interested in Dalban’s goings-on. Something to do with his business, mainly. But he’s also learned a few things about the wealthy supporters of the National Party—like Dalban—which he says aren’t exactly nice. This question of Tezol’s fine, for example. I mean, Tezol was just an illiterate villager, but he was very useful to Dalban and his associates because of the influence he had with the uneducated classes, and it seems like a rotten thing to do to let him be jailed for want of a sum any of them could have given without noticing. There are some pretty unpleasant characters on the National side, Hakluyt.”

“You’ve said almost exactly what I thought,” I agreed.

Angers glanced at the clock. “Well, can’t jaw all day,” he said. “I hope your plans work out well.”

I spent the rest of the day translating processed data into man-hours and cubic meters of concrete and gave the results to the costing clerks at five-thirty. My head was spinning with figures; I decided to take a break before I got a headache and went out for a drink while they started the costing.

I walked out into a changed city—a city suddenly come to life like a sleeping giant irritated by the biting of a flea, turning and twitching this way and that without being able to trace the cause of its discomfort.

Someone had thrown red paint all over Vados’s statue. Police in the Calle del Sol were bundling young men into trucks; there was blood on the ground, and one of the police held two wet-bladed knives.

During the lunch-hour meeting in the Plaza del Sur, Arrio had been hanged in effigy from a tree by enraged supporters of Juan Tezol, in protest against his being jailed. Police had had to clear that up, too; the evening edition of Liberdad spoke of a hundred arrests.

My car had had the air let out of its tires.

And Sam Francis had committed suicide in jail…

That night Ciudad de Vados reacted as a sleeping lion reacts when it becomes aware of a human presence. The lion does not move, except to open its eyes. Yet its body ceases to be relaxed. Inside the tawny pelt a thousand living springs are wound up instantly to maximum tension.

The only occasions when I’d ever walked up to a sleeping lion had been on the outside of a cage of steel bars. But I was inside Ciudad de Vados. I was inside the mouth of the lion.

I did something that night that I hadn’t done for years. I felt the need to get loaded with Dutch courage. When I was through at the traffic department—not that much work got done—I went to the bar of the hotel and drank steadily for three hours. The lights went out around me; at one in the morning I was still looking at my hands and seeing them shake. I wanted to leave this place. Now. Today.

Once, a long time ago, I met a newspaperman who had had to cover the great Chicago race riot of the twenties. He had found it difficult, he said, to describe to me exactly how he felt to be in a city divided against itself. If he had walked up to me now in the bar of the Hotel del Principe, I could have told him to save his reminiscences—I knew from the inside how he felt.

He was an old man, but he still closed his eyes and shivered gently when he recalled those terrible days. I wondered between drinks whether I, too, would remember with similar clarity when I was sixty-odd—and decided that I probably would.

Have you ever seen a fragment of ice dropped into supercooled water? The mass sets solid on the instant, like a man confronted with the head of Medusa—and in just such a way had Vados frozen in face of the news first of Tezol’s imprisonment, now of Francis’s suicide.

Suicide? whispered gossip at every street corner. No, of course not. A beating by the police? How should I know? But—

Enter rumor, painted full of tongues.