The Squares of the City (13 page)

“What you should have done—” said Mayor, rapidly setting an enemy pawn back one square and bringing its neighbor forward. “So!”

We all stared at the board in silence for a few moments. Then Mayor grunted and got to his feet.

“Mañana está otra d
ί
a,”
he said comfortingly to Córdoban. “That is enough for today, I think. But there will be another time.
Hasta la vista,
Señor Hakluyt,” he added, turning to me and putting out his hand. If you have time to spare before you leave Aguazul, perhaps it would interest you to pay another visit here and see how our transmitting system operates.”

I shook hands. “Certainly,” I said. “Thanks for the invitation.”

And that was an invitation I would take up, I told myself. Moreover, from now on I was going to look out rather carefully for proof of these assertions Mayor had made—about Aguazul being the most governed country in the world. It sounded to me like wishful thinking; the system, if indeed it operated at all, could hardly be faultless, if only because it was still necessary to call out the police to break up a riot brewing in the Plaza del Sur on the day of my arrival. Possibly it was true compared with the country’s neighbors or with its own past; I didn’t see that this precision to which Mayor made claim was borne out in practice. Unless—and this possibility I found peculiarly disturbing—unless the government did things like turning out the police simply because the people expected it of them. In that case the underlying assumption was that, if it chose, the government could abolish the meeting in the Plaza del Sur without anyone feeling the need for them afterwards.

Could it be like that? Could it? Angers had said something about Vados’s regime taking seriously the saw that a government stands or falls by its public relations. …

I checked myself. I was building a dizzy tower of speculation on secondhand evidence. The only solid facts I had to go on were the fact of my being here, the nature of the job I’d been given, and what I had been able to find out with my own observation. And those combined to indicate that—Mayor’s assertions to the contrary—the government of Aguazul was a reasonably beneficent authoritarian regime, competently administering a rather prosperous country without treading so hard on anyone’s feet that people felt it worth the trouble of changing it. Twenty years’ duration testified to the success of the formula they used—Mayor’s, or whoever else’s it might be.

But “the most governed country in the world”? That was to be taken with a grain of salt.

VIII

“So you starred in a television program yesterday, Señor Hakluyt,” said a quiet, husky voice near me. I looked up from the paper I was reading with my breakfast coffee in the lounge of the Hotel del Principe and saw Maria Posador.

“Buenas d
ί
as, señora,”
I said, indicating the empty chair beside me. “Yes, as a matter of fact I did. You saw the program?”

She sat down, unsmiling, not taking her eyes from my face. “No, I only heard about it,” she said. “It is too dangerous to watch television in Aguazul.”

“Too dangerous?”

She nodded. “You are a stranger in Vados, señor. I cannot blame you for that. But there is information I think it is my duty to give you.”

I searched her exquisite face for a hint of the real meaning behind her obscure words and failed. “Go ahead,” I shrugged. “I’m always willing to listen. Cigarette?”

“If you don’t mind, I prefer these of my own.” She slipped her gold case from her handbag; I held my lighter for her. Then she sat back in her chair and regarded me fixedly.

“You doubtless know,” she began, “that our Minister of Information and Communications is one Alejandro Mayor—a man of certain notoriety.”

“If being the author of a theory of government is a claim to notoriety, I suppose he qualifies,” I agreed.

“No longer a theory only,” corrected Señora Posador, and looked for a brief instant extremely unhappy. “A practical form.”

“It always seemed to me that he had something, when I read his stuff in college.”

“The señor will forgive a personal remark, but I judge that he is about in his late thirties, and his university studies would have been fifteen to twenty years ago, no? Much has changed since then. It would be best if you could read Mayor’s recent books, but they are substantial and very technical, and I do not believe any have been translated into English for many years. He has been too taken up with his duties in Vados—and in any case in most countries speaking English his precepts would be without value.”

“How come? It struck me that he spoke in pretty universal terms.”

“Oh, to some extent one may say so. …” She delicately deposited ash in a tray at her side. “But—let us take this program on which you appeared yesterday. Did you find that it impressed you? Did it appeal to you, excite you?”

“I thought it was very well done and presented the facts in a balanced manner.”

She studied me again with those rich violet eyes. At last she shrugged. “There are indeed things you ought to know. Do you have one hour to spare, Señor Hakluyt? Unless I have badly misjudged your good nature, it will be of great interest to you.”

I couldn’t see what all this was leading up to; I said so. “And,” I added, “if you’re going to try to persuade me that what was said on TV last night was nonsense, you’re out of luck.”

She gave a wan little smile that penetrated her natural sophistication and made her seem suddenly appealing in a little-girl way. “No, I assure you—that is not my aim.”

Like tumblers spinning in a fruit machine, facts were clicking together in my head about this woman. But when they had meshed, they still failed to explain a lot of paradoxes: why she was a friend of Sam Francis, for example; why Angers had specifically warned me to steer clear of her. Something that did make sense, though, was an impression that had just come to me—an impression that for reasons I could not fathom she was trying to approach me on an unemotional level, as a man would approach another man, resolutely not capitalizing on her womanly charm.

“All right,” I said with sudden decision. “One hour.”

Relieved, she rose and led me out of the hotel; before a huge Pegasos sedan parked at the curb, she took keys from her handbag and indicated that I should get in. I hesitated, remembering the possibility that had struck me yesterday evening—that I might be being watched, perhaps for my own protection. I was going to raise that matter with Angers when I went down to the traffic department this morning.

Noticing my hesitation, she gave a faint smile and held out her tiny gold key chain to me.

“You may drive us if you prefer,” she suggested. I shook my head and got in.

The great car moved as though on rails; we hardly seemed to have left the hotel before we were on the outskirts of Vados, in what I knew to be a Class A residential district, with small but palatial houses set in great blossom-crowded gardens. We turned aside from the main road down an avenue lined with feathery-crowned palms; Señora Posador felt for a button on the dash and pressed it. There was a hum. The wrought-iron gates leading into the driveway of one of the houses ahead swung back as though by magic, and the car slid between them. She pressed the same button again; the gates closed silently.

We did not, however, go all the way along the driveway to the house. Instead, we halted before a clump of dark green bushes, into the middle of which a narrow path led.

“We have arrived,” said Señora Posador with a faint smile.

Puzzled, I got out and looked about me. “This way,” she called, and disappeared down the path between the bushes. I followed circumspectly and was surprised to find, completely hidden by the bushes, a small prefabricated shed. Or perhaps more a blockhouse than a shed; the walls were at least four inches thick. A TV antenna reached up from the roof, and a thick power cable was slung over the branch of a nearby tree, leading toward the house.

Señora Posador opened a padlock that held the door fast, and I followed her inside.

At first I could see almost nothing; the only light came from one small barred window. Then she turned a switch and two fluorescents came to life. I looked around the interior. There was a chair, padded, relaxing; a twenty-eight-inch television set; and, of all things, a VERA—a full-size video recorder with two-inch tape and spools a yard wide.

“Please be seated,” said Señora Posador calmly. I perched on one arm of the chair and watched her as she crossed to the recorder. In a moment the spools began to hum, and the big screen lit up.

“I will show you the program in which you appeared last night,” she murmured. And at the same moment Córdoban appeared on the screen, introducing the program.

I watched in puzzlement for a while, until I was satisfied that this was indeed a recording of the same program, and then looked across at Señora Posador.

“I don’t quite see what you’re trying to show me,” I said. “I’ve seen all this before, in the studio.”

She switched off the recorder and spun the spool back to where she had cut it in before answering. Then she spoke without looking directly at me.

“There are few places in Vados where it is safe to watch the television, señor. This is one of them. I have here a device which I think in English is called a ‘blinker.’ Our name for it means ‘sieve.’ I have just played you that recording without the blinker.”

“A blinker, so far as I’m concerned,” I said, “is one of those gadgets that you can set to shut off commercials. You haven’t any advertising on that program.”

“No?” she said, and gave her wan little smile again. “Did you ever hear of a technique called subliminal perception?”

I frowned. “Yes, of course,” I said shortly.

“You accept that that was a recording of the same program as the one you appeared in last night?”

I nodded. “It certainly seemed to be the same.”

“Then watch this, Señor Hakluyt. Watch carefully.”

She spun the spool forward to the first of the series of shots taken in the shantytowns and let it play over, all the time keeping her finger on a small pause switch beside the playing head. “It is sometimes difficult to find what one is looking for,” she murmured. “Ah! There!”

The picture on the screen was somehow familiar, yet it was not anything I could consciously remember seeing either last night or in the playback I had seen a few moments ago. It depicted the interior of a squalid hovel. The central character was a colored man stripped from the waist down. With him were a group of children, all aged about twelve. I won’t take the space to describe what they were doing. I had to turn my head away after a few seconds.

“It is no good trying to ignore this, señor,” said Señora Posador coolly. “Please look at it more closely.”

I got off the arm of the chair and approached the screen. There was something odd about the picture, certainly. …

“It’s not a photograph,” I said suddenly. “It’s a drawing.”

“Or, more precisely, a painting,” she agreed. “Please watch again.”

The spools hummed; she kept her finger on the pause switch, and in a moment came to another shot that was hauntingly familiar like the first. This one showed a small boy, actively encouraged by his mother, defecating on a picture. About all that one could see clearly of the picture was that there was a cross in it, and toward the top of the cross was what might have been a halo.

“Are you a practicing Christian, señor?” asked Señora Posador.

I shook my head.

“Most Vadeanos are Catholics. They would at once recognize that as a copy of the picture of the Crucifixion which hangs over the high altar in our cathedral. It is by one of our most distinguished artists.”

She let the spools run forward a little more. The next picture at which she stopped showed a man with a whip as big as a threshing flail, lashing the naked back of a little girl. After that the one with the Negro was repeated, the children still in their obscene postures; and so through again in order.

“I doubt if I need show you any more of this sequence,” said Señora Posador quietly. “Let us contrast these pictures with what was interspersed in your interview.”

The tape spun forward some distance. Córdoban, on the screen, said,
“Aqu
ί
está el señor Hakluyt,”
I came smiling into the range of the camera, and she stopped the spool.

I saw myself—or at any rate a recognizable likeness of myself—dipping my fingers for holy water into the font at the entrance to the cathedral. Another few yards of tape: I was shaking hands with
el Presidente,
and then in a few more moments I was kneeling before the bishop I had seen coming out of the elevator at the TV studios. Finally, before the sequence began to repeat, I was shown—this was so crude it nearly made me laugh—as an angel in a long white gown, holding a flaming sword over the monorail central, from beneath which little figures ran like frightened ants.

“That is enough, I think,” said Señora Posador. She shut off the recorder. “Now I think you understand, no?”

Confused, I shook my head. “I do not,” I said. “Not at all!”

She pushed aside a number of empty tape-cartons and lifted herself up on the bench beside the recorder, slender legs swinging. She took out one of her black cigarettes and lit it thoughtfully.