John Brunner - The Squares of the City

Looking hurt and puzzled, the simple-faced man explained. They had come from a village in the mountains. Today they had arrived. Their village was short of water this summer, and the people were very hungry. Other people—their cousins, their friends—had come to the city and found good homes, though not so good or so large as this one. So they had arrived and asked someone where they should go, and they had been brought here. It was very good here; there was a separate place for the animals, instead of them having to share the living-room, and there was much water, and the floors were soft. But there was no firewood, and nowhere to make a proper fire, so tomorrow he would have to make an oven. Today they were tired; they had just cooked up some frijoles over a little fire, and wished to sleep soon.

Simple.

The “little fire” had been made in the bedroom washbasin; two or three books had contributed to it, and it had left a smear of smoke-grease all the way from the basin to the window through which the smoke had escaped. And they had not, apparently, been able to believe in an unfailing supply of water. They had found out how to work the taps, and had then filled every container they could find and stowed them in cupboards, in drawers, in closets, under the beds—everywhere.

I would never have believed that so much chaos could be created in such a short time by so few people.

“This,” said Angers coldly when he had surveyed the damage, “is Sigueiras’s doing. You remember how he threatened to do just this—don’t you, Hakluyt?”

And then I did recall what I had scarcely thought of since the first visit I had made to Sigueiras’s slum.

“Ask them!” Angers ordered, whirling to the nearest policeman, throwing his arm out in a gesture that swept across the peasant family. “Ask them whether it was Sigueiras!”

No, they had never met anyone by that name. They had come to the city and asked where they must go, that was all. “Well, how the devil did they get in?” demanded Angers. “Livestock and all! Get that idiot of a hall-porter here!”

Struggling to control his weeping, the terrified janitor hurried to throw the blame on his young assistant—a youth of twenty, notorious for his National Party sympathies. The janitor himself, it seemed, had not been on duty this afternoon—he had been inspecting complaints of unsatisfactory garbage removal.

And this young assistant was nowhere to be found. “Go and look for him in Sigueiras’s slum!” Angers ordered. “Quick! And get Sigueiras if he’s there!”

They went; they found Sigueiras, though not the missing youth, and they arrested him.

Frankly, I didn’t see what else Sigueiras could have expected. This was a magnificent, publicity-gaining gesture in its conception, but in practice it was bound to backfire. It did. As Angers immediately realized, it cut both ways.

Defiantly, perhaps characteristically, Sigueiras’s only comment on the affair was that he had given Angers fair warning. When things had calmed down a little, and the peasant family had been removed from the apartment, Angers looked about him grimly at the wreckage. “Now,” he announced, “I want a photographer.”

The pictures were all over Vados the following day: in Liberdad, in leaflets hastily run off on private printing presses, in posters slapped on walls. The message they conveyed was obvious almost without explanation; it ran: “This is what will happen if they rehouse the slum-dwellers! This is the way such people like to live!”

And they worked.

At three o’clock that afternoon the police had to use tear-gas and fire hoses to turn back a crowd of self-appointed sanitary inspectors from the monorail central—about two hundred aggressive young men and women who had armed themselves with firebrands and set out to smoke the slum-dwellers from their homes. If the jail had not been very modern and very strongly built, a similar mob would have hauled Sigueiras from his cell and tarred-and-feathered him or stoned him through the streets.

Three or four shacks were actually burned down in the shantytown on the Cuatrovientos road, and in retaliation a group of peasants rolled oil-drums filled with dirt into the fast lane of the highway. Since most of the traffic in that lane was still doing fifty or sixty miles an hour before slowing to take the city cut-off, they managed to wreck several cars; no one died, but several people were badly hurt.

Bit by bit, the temper of the city was reapproaching the point at which they had had to put the machine-gun post in the Plaza del Sur. Accordingly, I locked myself away in the hotel over the entire weekend and went for the one last remaining part of the problem: the shantytowns on the outskirts.

After that makeshift job on Sigueiras’s slum, this was a breath of sweet clean air—straightforward improvement of traffic flow patterns to eliminate the kind of backwater effect that had allowed the first small nucleus of squatters to congregate, and then had directed that the nucleus should grow. It wasn’t bad when I was through; it wasn’t bad at all. I only had to have it computed for costing, file off the rough bits, and then, in a few days if all went well, I could get to hell out of Ciudad de Vados and never—never—come back.

Feeling and probably looking worn out, I walked into Angers’ office on Monday morning and planted a heap of papers on his desk: sketch-plans, preliminary figures worked out on my portable analogue computer, estimates, the lot. “Done,” I said. “That’s it.”

Angers looked up at me with a sour expression and shook his head.

“I’m sorry, Hakluyt,” he said. “Not done. Not by any means. Take a look at this.”

He thrust a sheet of paper across the desk at me. I took it; it proved to be an interdepartmental memorandum form of a kind I had occasionally seen since arriving in Vados—used by cabinet ministers to issue instructions to junior personnel. This one was headed MINISTRY OF THE INTERIOR and bore Diaz’s personal signature. It ran:

In the matter of the dispossession of Fernando Sigueiras. Senor Angers is forbidden to take any action to further this plan without specific directions from this Ministry.

“What on earth is this all about?” I demanded. “Surely he can’t do that!”

“But he can,” contradicted Angers wearily, sitting back and crossing his legs. “The situation in this lunatic city of ours makes the federal-state relationship in the U.S.A. look like sheer heaven. Don’t you realize, Hakluyt, that in my capacity as traffic manager of Ciudad de Vados I’m solely responsible to Vados as Mayor, while at the same time in my capacity as highway supervisor I’m responsible to Diaz in the Ministry of the Interior? This blasted project is being claimed by both of them! There seems to be nothing left for me to do but comply in one capacity, refuse in the other, and resign in both!”

“Does this kind of thing happen often?”

“Oh, about twice a week,” said Angers with bitterness. “But this time it’s different. Look what came with that memo!”

He passed me a typed list of what looked like references to legal cases. There were about twenty of them. “That’s Dominguez’s doing, I’ll swear it is,” Angers declared. “Those are cases in which the verdict went against the city council because it was proved that some municipal employee involved in the case had a personal grudge against the defendant—and believe me, I have a personal grudge against Sigueiras now!”

“Well, what’s that supposed to prove?”

“If you ask my candid opinion, Hakluyt, it isn’t supposed to prove anything. It’s just hamstringing us. It may take months to prove that these cases are totally irrelevant. Oh, this looks like Dominguez’s doing all right. And devilish clever it is, as a delaying tactic.”