The Squares of the City (33 page)

“I’ll let you have the memo this afternoon. While it’s fermenting, I’m going to take a day off. I’m going to go and take a look at these traffic nightmares you told me about in the rest of the country. This bloody town has about driven me insane, with its hypermodern façade and its seething primitive instincts. I want to go somewhere dirty for a change.”

“You’ll find things very different outside Vados,” said Angers neutrally. “I’ll tell the police you’re going, so no one will worry. When do you expect to get back?”

“Tomorrow some time. Depends how bored I am.”

“Enjoy yourself.” The thin smile came and went. “They say a change is as good as a rest, you know.”

Since my arrival, I hadn’t been farther than to the outskirts of Vados. Now I took the coast road and went to take a look at what I’d been missing.

Puerto Joaquin: a bustling sprawl of a town, at the mouth of the Rio Rojo, with vast modern dock facilities only a few years old because of the great fire that had destroyed part of the city. And nonetheless, after the clean graciousness of Vados, seeming to belong to the dead past.

Cuatrovientos: the former capital, the city of riches, the oil town. With the lower labor costs obtaining here and the highly favorable level of taxation, it was a better proposition to work fields down here rather than open up known but so far untapped North American resources.

And Astoria Negra: farther south than Puerto Joaquin, also on the coast. That was as far as the likeness went. Astoria Negra was farther south, not so favorably located, lacked the facilities to handle such large vessels and had no pipeline from the oilfields. Its life was dominated by the harbor; the harbor was dominated by coastal trading, mostly in guano, and by fishing. There was a small naval station.

For me, it was like taking three steps out of modern times into the nineteenth century to come to Astoria Negra. It was almost impossible to accept how bad things were here. The average standard of living might have compared with that in the shantytowns around Vados; it was the kind of town where you scratch a house and find a slum. Not all of it was like that, of course—there were fine recent apartment blocks and a few magnificent old houses in time-blessed gardens—but most of it was like an Italian neo-realist film made soon after World War II: crumbling walls, irregular streets, puddles of water splashing underfoot.

The echoes of the conflict in the capital had hardly spread this far. It seemed that the main highway ran directly from Vados to the outer world, and its line was never touched by the local citizens. I talked with people—an old Indian, a young man with a chip on his shoulder, a peasant who carved traditional wooden figurines for the occasional tourists who came by sea and stopped over to exclaim at the quaintness of Astoria Negra before going on—in most cases thankfully—to the air-conditioning of Vados. Everyone I spoke to had just two subjects of conversation: lack of money and the local chess championships currently in progress. The woodcarver was a chess fanatic; he had in his store a dozen sets he had carved himself, all different, yet all strangely alike, the pieces having the squat, blocky appearance of Aztec idols.

No one seemed to be concerned about the future of the city, yet if there was a place crying out for some of those four million dolaros, this was it. The wrangling in Vados, to those people, was something that concerned the government, an amorphous body of ill-defined individuals who usually did the wrong thing and couldn’t be got at to put matters right again—hence had been given up as of no concern to the man in the street of Astoria Negra.

Wherever I looked, I found new ways of spending money. I had hardly to give a glance along a street before my mind was crowded with plans for redevelopment and improvement. Suppose Vados had rebuilt this town instead of founding his new one—what then? Would it have repaid the effort? Of course not. This town was past help; ideally, it should now be left to die a natural death, stripped to its harbor facilities and to a widely spread out, clean new city a quarter the size extending much farther inland.

Only that would cost around a hundred million dolaros before you began to worry about demolition costs, and it would have to wait till next century, or the century after.

I went back to the woodcarver’s store and bought one of his chess sets.

XXIV

I drove back to Vados in the evening, after about twenty-eight hours’ absence. And in that time things had been happening.

Of course, the city hadn’t been truly quiet for weeks, but it had at least displayed the sullen tranquillity of a dormant volcano; it did no more than burst a bubble of searing hot gas on the surface of its lava pool occasionally.

Now, though …

There were police beacons on the highway two miles out of the city; at the third of them the traffic was cut to single line and armed police officers stood guard. Each car in turn was halted, and some were turned back.

When it came to my turn, I demanded to know what was going on. The officer inspecting my papers didn’t answer directly; he merely said in a neutral tone, “It might be dangerous for you to go about the city unescorted, Señor Hakluyt. You must go directly to your hotel and telephone to police headquarters that you have arrived safely. We will send to search for you if you are not there within”—he glanced at his watch—“a half hour.”

“What’s the reason for all this?” I pressed again.

“When the señor enters the city, he will see for himself,” was the reply. He stepped back and waved me on.

I did see.

No word of rioting had reached Astoria Negra as far as I knew, and the outside news services might well have been censored also. But rioting there must have been. I passed one of Arrio’s department stores which had had a home-made bomb thrown through a display window—firemen were still damping down the wreckage, and there was a strong smell of stale kerosene. There were several burnt-out cars along the streets; one street was closed because a monorail car had been sabotaged and had fallen to the ground there. The whole city now was ominously quiet.

The armed police on every street corner had now been reinforced by the National Guard. Militiamen looking uncomfortable but determined in ill-fitting fatigues, with carbines slung on their shoulders, were patrolling sidewalks, and I was stopped a couple more times to show my papers before I reached the Hotel del Principe and safety.

A newspaper placard had given me the key to these events as I drove past, and now people in the hotel bar confirmed what it said. No wonder Dominguez had been cagy when I spoke to him about Estrelita Jaliscos; he had already been preparing a pretty devastating attack, and while I was away he had fired his entire broadside.

Which is to say he had produced a witness—the dead girl’s brother—who swore not only that she had been put up to blackmailing Fats Brown, but that it was Andres Lucas who had made her do it.

The National Party had marched through the streets demanding retribution, Lucas’s house had been stormed and nearly set on fire, and Lucas himself was now in custody “for his own protection.”

It took me a little while to fill in all the subsidiary details, but it made one thing plain: whether he denied it or not, Miguel Dominguez was temporarily the most influential man in Ciudad de Vados,
el Presidente
himself not excepted.

I got hold of a paper and read the text of the announcement Dominguez had released to the press; it was a measure of his sudden eminence that
Liberdad
had printed it practically in full. Not content with going for Lucas alone, Dominguez had described this shameful affair as just one aspect of the widespread corruption of the moment; another, he declared, was Seixas’s barefaced insistence on new traffic developments to put business in the way of the construction companies in which he had an interest, and still another was the way in which Caldwell of the health department had exaggerated the situation in Sigueiras’s slum to secure public support for its clearance.

Enraged followers of the Citizens’ Party had come out on the streets to drive off the Nationals, and the National Guard had been called out to deal with the resulting riot. A curfew was now in force and would not be lifted till six o’clock in the morning.

I was very glad indeed to have missed this little set-to. Especially when Manuel, the hotel barman, pointed out to me the scar left by a rifle bullet that had careened through a window and ricocheted off his beautifully polished bar.

There was sporadic firing from the outskirts shortly before midnight, but the last news bulletin of the evening—broadcast over an army transmitter rigged as emergency substitute for the regular service—claimed that the situation was back to normal.

I wondered.

The first thing I heard in the morning was my bedside phone. The call was from Angers, asking whether I was all right and advising me, if I was, to stay put. I told him I was indeed all right and inquired whether there had been any reaction from Diaz on the memo I had sent him.

“Reaction!” snorted Angers—I could visualize his expression. “Don’t be funny! He’s got both hands full of this bloody rioting!”

The advice to stay put was good. I did walk around the plaza in the course of the morning, and watched a machine-gun post being set up in case someone was foolish enough to try to initiate the regular daily speakers’ meeting. No one took the risk, of course; any crowd collected today would have exploded like so much nitroglycerine.

After reading the paper and the typed bulletin on the board in the lobby, which explained that in the event of serious trouble the hotel’s cellars would be opened to clients, I played a couple of desultory left-hand-against-right games with my new chess set. That used up most of the morning. Eventually it got to be time for lunch, and to try to create an appetite I dropped in the bar for an apéritif.

“What’s the latest scandal, Manuel?” I asked the barman not expecting any news.

His reply almost made me drop my glass. “It is said there will be a duel, señor. It is said that Señor Arrio has challenged Señor Mendoza to a duel.”

“The
hell
you say!” I stared at him, half-suspecting he might be putting me on, but his face was quite serious. “What about?”

“It is about a story which Señor Mendoza has written—a very funny story about a man of affairs. Señor Arrio says it is meant to describe him. But if he goes to court and complains, then everyone will say, ‘So Señor Arrio thinks this is himself! Ha, ha! Yes, we see that it is very like Señor Arrio, truly.’ And so many people will laugh at Señor Arrio. This he does not like. So—” He spread his hands.

“But dueling isn’t legal in Aguazul—is it?”

“It is against the law, señor. But then, many things are against the law. Everyone knows privately, but of course no one will learn of it officially until afterwards.”

I saw the distinction. “And when is this due to happen?” I inquired.

“Ah, that one does not know,” Manuel answered sagely. “If it were known, many people might go to watch, and then the police would have to interfere. But most probably at dawn tomorrow, and somewhere in the country.”

“And who’s likely to win?”

Manuel assumed the thoughtful look of a racing tipster. “Since Señor Mendoza has been challenged, he has the right to choose the weapons. It is known that Señor Arrio is one of the finest pistol shots in all America. So it will be swords—and so who can foretell?”

The story went afterward that Arrio lost control when he drew first blood, and when his seconds managed to drag him back, Mendoza’s guts were hanging out of the front of his shirt. They got him to the hospital, but he died there two hours later from loss of blood and internal injuries. He was no longer a young man, of course.

I’d never read any of Mendoza’s work, yet the news of his dying—which had no personal meaning to myself—affected me curiously. I thought of the way people thousands of miles away were going to feel regret at his death, when the news of, say, Vados dying would not concern them at all. I felt almost a touch of envy.

And then the unexpected happened. There was this man Pedro Murieta, whom I had seen at Presidential House in company with the Mendozas; he has something to do with Dalban and something to do with the publishing house that issued Felipe Mendoza’s books, and everyone seemed to know of him once his name was mentioned but scarcely thought of it otherwise—
that
sort of a man.

And when he was through, Arrio was in jail on a charge of murder.

I wondered what the position of the two rival parties was now. The Nationals seemed to have made up ground; they had lost both Juan Tezol and Sam Francis under discreditable circumstances, but the Citizens had now had Andres Lucas impeached for conspiracy and Arrio jailed for murder. Both sides could now throw an equal amount of mud.

By the weekend, though, the rioting dissolved in a stalemate. Every cell in the city was full of people under arrest. The police had used the machine-gun in the Plaza del Sur—once. After that things were quieter. By Sunday night, aside from the few store windows boarded up and holes in the road where halfhearted attempts had been made to barricade a street, there was no sign that mobs had passed this way.

Nonetheless, I had believed when I came to this city that Aguazul was remarkably free of violence for a Latin American country. Either I’d picked the wrong time to come, or the official propaganda machine had spread a highly convincing untruth.