John Brunner - The Squares of the City

I wasn’t sure about Cortes any longer. Not now that I’d seen Sigueiras’s place for myself. Of course, Cortes carried great authority, and he wouldn’t be consciously lying in a matter like this. The best one could say, though, was that he had a fertile imagination. Or perhaps he just had a greater capacity for being shocked than most people.

Not greatly put out, Dominguez replied that it wasn’t his unsupported word in question; the report on which he had based his statements was an official one prepared by a special investigator called Guyiran, on the staff of the Ministry of the Interior. In other words, Dominguez implied, if you’re going for anybody, you’ve got to go for Diaz, and if you don’t, your complaints won’t cut any ice.

Apparently Cortes wasn’t prepared to go to such lengths; he preserved a hurt silence.

There seemed to be a fantastic network of interlocking rivalries and fields of influence here. Some of it was due to the peculiar semi-independent constitution of Ciudad de Vados, which wasn’t autonomous and yet didn’t seem to be amenable to the national government as easily as the rest of the country. Doubtless this was due to Vados’s personal relation with his “offspring.” But each development seemed to be laying bare new tensions created by the city’s privileged status, and people seemed to be far more aware of these tensions than they had been five weeks ago, when I arrived.

I wondered how much of the change was due to the loss of Alejandro Mayor and his inspired manipulation of the organs of information. I wondered whether Maria Posador had been right to fear for the future of the country when the creators of its highly individual technique of government died or grew too old.

The way things were now, it seemed she must have been right.

I had an early call again from Angers on Monday morning.

“A pleasant surprise for you, Hakluyt,” he said in a voice that wasn’t wholly ironical. “El Presidente himself is dropping in at the department this morning and wants you to be there. You have exactly thirty minutes—can you make it?”

“No,” I said. I took forty. But Vados was late himself. He looked very much older than he had at our previous meeting, at Presidential House. It might just have been that he was tired and worried, but, of course, to have been in power for so long as he now had, he must in any case be over sixty and perhaps nearing seventy. I found him in Angers’ office, poring over a relief map of the city. Angers wasn’t with him. The only other person present was a man in plain clothes who sat inconspicuously in a corner, his eyes fixed on me, and whom Vados ignored completely.

“Please sit down, Senor Hakluyt,” he said. “It is not at a good time that you have come to our beautiful city, is it?” I nodded wry agreement.

He shifted a little on his chair and leaned back with one hand in the side pocket of his jacket. “In essence, senor, I have called you to ask a favor of you.” He spoke as if he felt slightly shamefaced asking favors of anyone, and the effect was to make me feel—as he obviously intended—rather flattered.

“You’re my employer,” I said, shrugging. “Good.” Vados looked me straight in the eyes and smiled. Even at his present age he was a strikingly handsome and distinguished man. He had been fiddling with something in the pocket where his hand was hidden; now he brought it out, and I saw that it was a beautifully chased silver crucifix, not more than two inches long. He caressed it with the tops of his fingers as he spoke.

“Well, senor, I have seen the memorandum which you prepared regarding the slum below the monorail central. It was sent to Minister of the Interior Diaz, and he had occasion to refer to it at our emergency meeting of the cabinet yesterday. This is an admirable document, senor—high-principled and showing a great regard for the human beings who will be affected. Unhappily, it is worthless.”

He spoke the last sentence without a change of tone or expression, taking me by surprise. I said, “I’m sorry—I don’t see why.”

He shrugged. “Senor, I believe you can be a discreet man. I also believe that since you have never been to our country before and will quite happily be working in Nicaragua or New Zealand or Nebraska as soon as you leave, you will not pass on in haste what I shall say. Effectively then, senor, there is a flaming row going on over this question which you are aiding us so cleverly to solve.”

“That’s fairly obvious,” I said. “Senor Presidente, you must know as a politician and a practical man that someone who is told simultaneously to do a job and only to half-do it realizes very quickly that the people telling him to do it don’t know their own minds. Angers warned me that Senor Diaz would be sure to turn down my suggestion, but it’s the only long-term solution.”

He gave a weary smile. “Long-term solutions are no good to us, senor! In two years, yes, perhaps, but today we are merely trying to gain time, to prevent disaster overwhelming us. As you so rightly state, Diaz is unhappy with your plan. Our government is in a way absolute—that is true. But in all countries men have sometimes to resort to a coalition government in times of emergency, and in many countries on this continent—as you will doubtless realize—there is a perennial state of emergency. I am not a dictator, senor. I am the head of a government composed of men of sometimes conflicting views, who have one desire in common—that our country should be well and firmly ruled. Diaz and I are not only old colleagues—we are old enemies as well.”

He looked at me for a comment; I murmured something about “I fully appreciate…”

“But I have one distinction. This city is—I have perhaps said this to you before, because I say it to everyone, and I say it to everyone because it is the truth—this city is my own child, the child of my mind. I am two official persons: I am president of Aguazul on the one hand, mayor of Ciudad de Vados on the other, and as regards the city, what I say shall be done is what matters.”

I nodded.

“Good! Then I say this. My duty is not alone to the people who belong to this country without having had the choice, who were born here, but also to those who shared my vision and my—my dreams, who gave up everything life could have offered them elsewhere to make Ciudad de Vados a reality. It is not just that I should betray my promises to them. “Senor, although Aguazul has grown more and more prosperous in the years I have ruled, ours is still not a very rich country. If I would give with one hand, I must take away with the other—and there is nothing I can take that is not already promised to others! I cannot allot funds for rehousing and subsidizing the squatters of the shantytowns and of the slum beneath the monorail station, not so long as there are slums in Astoria Negra and Puerto Joaquin, not so long as I require those funds to fulfill the promises I have made to the foreign-born citizens. Without them and their aid, there would be no city here—nothing but scrub and barrens.

“Understanding this, you will understand why I must direct you to prepare a scheme—some or any scheme—to wipe away the slums from this city. That will give us the breathing space we need to settle the disagreements in the cabinet, to prepare the long-term schemes we undoubtedly require. But— have you not reflected, Senor Hakluyt, that if we were today to make plans and place contracts for the building scheme envisaged in your memorandum it would be two years before we could clear out those slums? In two years, with such a focus of unrest as we have at present, there will have been revolution!”

“I think,” I said, “that you’ll get your revolution more quickly if you simply—”