John Brunner - The Squares of the City

“So you won’t have any more unofficial news for me, Manuel?” I suggested.

Manuel smiled. “Senor, behind a bar one has the news anyway.”

It was not a rash boast. A day later he was able to inform me of something else to which Cortes had refused space in Liberdad and time on the radio, which was scarcely known to most Vadeanos. General Molinas had pledged his entire support and that of the army for O’Rourke and the police; he had said that if rioting started because the squatters were evicted, he would be unable to keep his forces at the disposal of the Vados government. I found this far more interesting than what Ruiz had been saying, and what was reported at length by the official organs, which was approximately, “No smoke without fire,” in the question of immorality in Sigueiras’s slum. It looked as if Professor Cortes were making a desperate effort to save face over the Caldwell affair.

And that was the situation when Sigueiras exploded his bomb.

I hadn’t given another thought to the threat he had made to Angers on the first occasion when he took me to see the slum; I’d dismissed it as fine words and hot air. I’d realized that the Negro was a determined man, but now, when things were practically all going the Citizens’ way, he capped every desperate move the National Party had ever made with a gesture of spectacular defiance that made people all over the city—myself included—regard him with astonished admiration. The one person who didn’t, of course, was Angers.

A couple of times since be had sent his wife off to California to avoid the disturbances in Vados, Angers had invited me to drop around to his apartment after work and have a drink with him. The first time I’d dodged out of it; the second time I couldn’t—and in any case I was beginning to feel sorry for the guy. Somewhere under that shell he had cultivated there was a human being; I’d even managed bit by bit to recover from his playing cops and robbers at the cost of Fats Brown’s life.

So I finally gave in.

We set off, after sewing up the day’s computer figures, in Angers’ car, and he’d just told me we were only half a block from his home when he slowed down abruptly and pointed ahead.

“Why do you suppose all those people are standing on the pavement?” he said.

I followed his arm. Around the doorway of an apartment building ahead, not less than fifty people were milling. Most of them were shabbily dressed. They seemed to be staring in through the ground-floor windows, gesticulating.

“Whatever it is, they’re enjoying it,” I said. “They seem to be laughing their heads off.”

As we pulled up, we saw that many of them were literally helpless with amusement. More people were dashing up moment by moment, and the janitor of the apartment house was trying frantically to drive them away with vehement curses.

“That’s my place they’re looking into!” Angers snapped, starting to open the car door. “What the hell can be going on? Do you suppose there’s a fire, or something?”

Then one of the windows shivered into sudden fragments, and a bored-looking burro poked its head out, nostrils wide, as though sniffing for fodder.

“God in heaven!” said Angers, and left the car faster than I had ever seen him move before. He crossed the service road at a run; the janitor caught sight of him and called to him pleadingly, but he took no notice. His goal was a new arrival with a large camera, who was down on one knee focusing for a picture of the burro. Now, having found there was nothing to eat outside, the animal was sampling the gauze curtains and not finding them much to its taste.

Angers was the last person I’d have cast as a football player. Nonetheless, the kick he launched at the camera was superbly professional. The camera was snatched from the man’s hands; it soared through the air for twenty feet and exploded into fragments against the wall of the building. The would-be photographer shot to his feet with a yell of dismay, but Angers had already spun around and was thrusting his way into the crowd, a look of savage fury on his face.

I followed more slowly. There was a sound of police sirens coming this way. Once they realized the owner of the apartment was on the scene, the sightseers began to melt rapidly, and I had a clear path to the entrance. I tried to get some sense out of the janitor, but he was distraught with terror— presumably because it was his fault that the burro was in the apartment—so I followed Angers inside.

He was shaking with rage; he could hardly get his key into the lock, and when he succeeded, the door proved to have been barricaded from the inside. He glanced around wildly, spotted a heavy fire extinguisher hanging on a wall bracket across the foyer, seized it, and used it as a battering ram. The door broke from its hinges on the first blow, and we charged into the apartment.

There were people here, too—not just a burro by itself. In the foyer there were four naked children playing delightedly with a doll they had found. The doll was an Inca statuette four centuries old, but that didn’t worry them. The excitement had been too much for them, and they had relieved themselves indiscriminately in odd places on the carpet. A woman so old she seemed not to have energy left to breathe or move her eyes sat wrapped in a rebozo on a couch, stroking a fine silk cushion with one hand and telling a rosary with the other.

At the sound of our crashing entrance, a man with a scarred, simple-looking face looked out from one of the bedrooms. He had one hand full of frijoles, and their sticky traces were all over his face from chin to nostrils. Behind him, a high-pitched woman’s voice demanded in a peasant accent to know what had happened and what had the children broken this time.

Angers looked slowly around the room. A few slivers of glass left in the frame of a wall mirror, and a heap of colored bits of china in one corner, explained why the woman had not been more startled at the sound of our breaking down the door. A stack of shabby bundles on the floor indicated that this family had moved in with the intention of staying put; indeed, they had already set up the family shrine on a new lightwood sideboard, and several crude candles were trickling streams of grease across the polished surface.

Then there was a furious rattling and crashing from the door of the other bedroom, and it was flung open by a young woman in her early twenties, cursing with a sonorous obscenity I have seldom heard in any language. In Spanish, the result was magnificent. In spite of all her efforts to prevent it, a fat pig broke away between her legs, ripping off her skirt in passing and carrying it triumphantly wrapped round his nose like a banner as he careened across the lounge. The simple-faced man dropped his handful of frijoles on the carpet, seized the nearest portable object—it happened to be a lamp—and used it as a combined lance and bludgeon to drive the squealing and grunting pig back through the bedroom door. The door slammed. The burro commented on the fact at the top of its voice.

The young woman grabbed her skirt as the pig fled oast her, and knotted it haphazardly back around her waist as though she were used to this kind of thing.

I came close to admiring Angers in the next second, for he had been standing there quite immobile while the boarpig was chased back to its new sty, and now all he said, in a frozen voice, was, “Que hacen Vds. en mi casa? What are you doing in my home?”

Then a squad of policemen crowded through the door. The woman who had called from the bedroom came to see what was happening; she, too, had her hands full of frijoles. The four children began to scream almost in unison, their voices pitched just far enough apart for the result to be a nerve-fraying quadruple discord. The very old woman began to weep quietly. But the young woman, cursing the police as roundly as she had cursed the pig, picked up a dozen wineglasses from the sideboard and began to hurl them with accuracy, and it wasn’t until she had been dragged into the kitchen by two burly policemen and locked in a broom closet that we got any sense out of anybody.