John Brunner - The Squares of the City

“Not at all,” she said crisply. I had the impression that I had touched a sore spot. “Vados would not be the man he is without his cabinet, and most of all without Diaz. Diaz is the Minister of the Interior. Thus, of course, his name comes less before the public than does Vados’s; outside Aguazul Vados’s name is known because the name of his city is known. But surely it is obvious that the strongest ruler depends on the strength of his supporters.”

I agreed that it was obvious, and Senora Posador—though she had not mentioned it, she wore a marriage ring—glanced at her little gold watch.

“Well, Senor Hakluyt, it has been pleasant to speak with you. You are staying in this hotel?”

I said I was.

“Then we shall meet here again and perhaps have that game of chess I suggested. But at this moment I fear I must go. Hasta mahana, senor!”

I rose hastily and managed an awkward bow over her hand, which, since she accepted automatically, I took to be still customary. And with a final dazzling smile she was gone.

I sat down again and ordered another drink. There were only two things seriously wrong with all this. The first was that wedding ring, the second the irritating fact that although I was perfectly sure Senora Posador knew very well what had been going on in the plaza when I arrived, I still had not found out what it was about.

I looked for reports in the papers the following morning, because for some reason this question went on irritating me. My Spanish was just about up to newspaper standard, if I took it slowly and guessed every fifth word.

There were two important dailies in Vados: one was the government organ, Liberdad, and the other an independent called Tiempo. Liberdad gave only about twenty lines to the whole affair, saying that arrests had been made and that a certain Juan Tezol was due to appear in court today on a charge of inciting to riot. Tiempo, on the other hand, made this item the main front-page news and gave it a large spread.

Struggling, I managed to make out that the villain of this paper’s version was not Tezol at all; it was someone called Mario Guerrero, who was alleged to have urged his followers to tear down Tezol’s speaker’s platform and burn the owner in the wreckage. The argument that had given rise to this— literally—inflammatory language didn’t seem to be religious, as Senora Posador had tried to make out; it must be political. But the reporters in both papers assumed their readers would be familiar with the background, and the details were tantalizingly inadequate for a stranger like me. There was mention of a Citizens’ Party and a National Party, associated with Guerrero and Tezol respectively, and so far as Tiempo was concerned, the former were inhuman monsters. That was the best I could gather from the reports.

I had been under the impression that—for a Latin American country—Aguazul was comparatively free from internal strife. Seemingly I was wrong. But local politics were outside my province. I brushed the matter to the back of my mind and finished my breakfast. This morning I was due to start work.

The city administration was housed in buildings near the government quarter, north and east of the Plaza del Norte and about a mile from my hotel on the Plaza del Sur. Since it was fine and warm and I had time to spare before my appointment, I decided to walk there and get a preliminary feel of the city.

I came quickly to the central traffic intersection that lay at the focal point of the flow generated and governed by the four great squares. I stopped there for some time on the sidewalk, watching the vehicles move—and they did move, with no breaks. Ingenious use of precedence lanes and total avoidance of same-level crossing had eliminated the need for stoppages altogether, and there wasn’t a traffic signal in sight—nothing but one bored-looking policeman filing his nails in a small booth high above the middle of the maze. A bright red telephone handset was his only visible equipment, connected presumably to the public address system whose speakers formed bulbs like coconuts on nearby lamp posts.

With the feeder roads for the three superhighways debouching here, and seven access roads for local traffic, pedestrians had to be kept well out of the way. Accordingly, there was a complex network of subways forming an underpass. After the bright morning sun outside, I found the mercury vapor lighting hard to adjust to at first when I’d finally dragged myself away from admiring the smooth flow of traffic. Somehow I overlooked one of the direction signs and found myself going the wrong way; while trying to retrace my steps, I had the first and less pleasant of two major surprises.

Dodging a fat woman with a large basket on one arm and a little girl on the other, I almost tripped over a boy sitting on the floor.

Between his legs rested a beautiful hand-painted Indian clay pot; around his shoulders was a handsome but threadbare serape, with the fringe of which his right hand played endlessly. He had no left hand, and his battered sombrero was tilted back to show that he had no left eye, either—the whole of that quarter of his face was one great weeping sore.

Startled, I halted in mid-stride: He fixed me with his one eye and whined something in a harsh voice. I felt embarrassed and appalled at the sight of him, as though I had found obscene words scribbled on the Parthenon. I kept my eyes averted as I fumbled in my pocket and found about a dolaro and a half in odd coins which I dropped in his clay pot.

Badly shaken, I went on my way. I had seen sights like that in India fifteen years ago, when I was first working away from home, although even then beggars were rapidly disappearing; I’d seen them in the UAR before it quit bickering and settled down to clean house. But I had thought they belonged to past history.

I had gone only a short distance farther when I felt a tap on my shoulder and turned to find a fresh-faced young policeman trying to regard me sternly. He banged some quick-fire Spanish at me, the thread of which I lost after two words.

“No habla espanol,” I told him.

“Ah, Norteamericano,” he said with an air of having had everything explained to him. “The senor please not again geev—geev dinero to so kind of people.”

“You mean people like that beggar-boy?” I said, and waved in the boy’s direction to clarify the meaning.

He nodded vigorously. “Si, si! Not to geev to heem. We try ver’, ver’ mooch feenish so kind of people—we not want any more. Not good have in Ciudad de Vados,” he added triumphantly.

“You mean he’s allowed to sit there and ask for money, but it’s illegal to give him any?” I felt slightly confused.

“Ah, no, no, no, no, no! He seet zere, a’right. He ask for dinero, not good. Senor geev dinero, mooch bad.”

“I see,” I said. I wasn’t sure that I did, completely. But they were trying to discourage beggars; that was plain. The boy seemed like a deserving case—still, I wasn’t prepared to take up the question of social welfare services in pidgin Spanish.

The policeman gave me a beaming smile and went back along the subway.

When I came to the next intersection, I found I’d taken a wrong turning again and would have to go back. That was how I happened to find the policeman, baton thrust against the beggar-boy’s chest, fumbling in the clay pot for the money I had put there. The boy was weeping and protesting.

The policeman made certain he had all the coins and stood up. He made his baton swish through the air an inch from the boy’s face, yelling at him to be quiet, as though he were a disobedient animal, and turned away.