John Brunner - The Squares of the City

“I haven’t been given much reason to like it.”

“No… But I think you might try to understand people like me, the foreign-born citizens. We—we hitched our wagons to the star of Ciudad de Vados, as the saying goes. We put our hearts and souls into this city. We gave up all the other things our lives might have held for us—chances of possibly greater wealth, greater success, elsewhere—because we saw in Ciudad de Vados something we could shape to our own desires. There was a line of poetry”—he looked suddenly self-conscious—”that used to keep running through my head when I first made up my mind to come to Vados and settle here. It said something like ‘reshape it nearer to the heart’s desire.’ Well, that’s why. That’s why, when we see people like Brown and Sigueiras making an unholy mess of our—our dreams, if you like—we find it pretty hard to take lying down. Oh, maybe they have their reasons, maybe they’re doing right according to their lights, but we gave up everything for the sake of this city, and when people forget that, who never had to give up anything because they never had anything till we came along and gave it to them, it makes us furious.”

I didn’t comment. Angers waited a few seconds, half-hoping for a favorable answer, and at last got to his feet. “Will you be down at the department in the morning?” he asked.

“I’ll be there,” I said. “I’ll be there.”

At about half past ten that same evening Jose Dalban committed suicide.

The astonishment that followed the news was almost solid: thick and cloying, hampering the mind’s attempts to make sense of it like heavy wet clay. Why? He was rich—perhaps only a few thousands short of being a millionaire. He appeared successful and influential; that success was founded, as Guzman had told me, on something not very respectable in the eyes of Vadeanos, but it was not illegal. He had a reputation as a clever speculator. And his private life seemed placid enough: he was married, had four children of whom two were at Mexico City University, and a congenial mistress in Cuatrovientos whom his wife knew about.

It was odd, I reflected, how sometimes one never managed to round out one’s mental picture of a person till that person was dead, as though a subconscious reflex held one back, insisting that until a man was dead no picture of him could be accurate or complete.

Certainly, in the twenty-four hours following Dalban’s death, I got to know very much more about him than I had during his lifetime.

By the end of those twenty-four hours truth was beginning to emerge. Jose Dalban’s enterprises were ripe for the undertaker. Like all speculators, he was operating on other people’s money a lot of the time; it so happened that at the moment he was extended far beyond the limits of his own resources. And in that strange, abstract, barely-more-than-half-real way that seems to turn bits of printed paper into deadly weapons, Luis Arrio had seized the chance to plot Dalban’s destruction.

That destruction was now following his death.

Piece by piece, Arrio had acquired control of every loan Dalban owed, a few mortgages, several advances against security—and had notified Dalban that he intended to foreclose on everything he could. The total amount involved was about two million dolaros; more than three-quarters of a million was due or overdue for repayment.

So, having drunk two glasses of fine brandy, which steadied his nerves and unsteadied his hands, compelling him to slash four times before he achieved success, he cut his throat.

I heard most of this from Isabela Cortes and her husband when they called in for a drink at the Hotel del Principe on Monday evening before going to the opera. I had asked Senora Cortes what she thought of the destruction of the broadcasting center, and she positively exploded with rage.

“When they find the saboteurs, let them be publicly burned alive!” she snapped. “An evil deed belonging to the past that Alejo labored so many years to bury—a past of irresponsible violence and internecine hatred! I feel half ashamed that I still live to walk in the city when Alejo has suffered that dreadful end!”

“On the other hand,” said her husband with unexpected mildness, “this is the first time in many years that we have been able to spend three consecutive evenings together, ‘Belita.”

“Do not joke about death, Leon!” Senora Cortes went pale. “Ciudad de Vados, I swear, has never before been like this, with Jose Dalban dead, and before him Mario Guerrero, and—what can have come over our people? Tell me that!”

Her husband took the question literally, not rhetorically— which in view of his position was reasonable. He rubbed his chin with the back of his hand as he considered.

“Frankly, ‘Belita, you have asked an impossible question. One can assume that some—some crucial factor in the longstanding disputes to which we have become accustomed has now come to a head. But to isolate that factor—why, it would be the work of a lifetime.”

It was then that we spoke of Dalban’s death, and I learned something about the causes of it.

“In one way, Senor Arrio has done a public service,” Cortes mused. “For too long Dalban had been making a fortune out of the base impulses of our people”—this I took to be an oblique reference to his monopoly of the contraceptive market—”and in so doing has encouraged them to continue.”

“In more ways than one—so some people might maintain,” said his wife. “Have you thought of the effect it will have on Senor Mendoza?”

I thought, of course, she was referring to Cristoforo Mendoza, editor of Tiempo. Since Tiempo had been closed down, I didn’t see that the loss of Dalban’s financial aid mattered much one way or the other—unless the order to close the paper down had been rescinded, and if it had been, I hadn’t been told.

But apparently that was not the point, for Cortes gave his wife a stern look.

“Isabela, you are well aware that in my view Mendoza’s books will be no loss to the world, even if he never writes another—”

“Excuse me,” I put in. “I don’t see the connection.” Cortes shrugged. “Dalban’s vanity required him to seem to be also a patron of the arts. In keeping with the pattern of his other activities—all of which seem to have been concerned with pandering to the lower tastes of the people—he had made Felipe Mendoza a protege of his. He had given him a house and had occasionally paid him a salary when the sales of his books were not high.”

“I see. But surely, if Mendoza still needs a patron, he will have no trouble finding another? After all, he has an international reputation—”

“So had the American Henry Miller,” said Cortes stiffly. “But neither he nor Mendoza wrote the sort of book I would permit to be read in my house.”

“Approval or disapproval apart,” said Senora Cortes, “one has to admit that he is creative—and original. No, Senor Hakluyt, Felipe Mendoza may not find it so easy, certainly not in his own country, for as you may perhaps have heard, all his works are on the Index, and consequently he labors under disadvantages.”

“And is that not his fault?” began the professor belligerently. They would have launched on a heated argument had not Senora Cortes abruptly noticed the time and realized they were late for the overture.

I was very thoughtful after they had gone. The girl with the guitar who sometimes turned up here in the evenings, especially when there was to be a big performance at the opera or one of the theaters, was singing—more to herself than an audience—at the other end of the bar. I took my drink and went and sat where I could listen to her.