The Squares of the City (2 page)

“No, Australian. I’ve been in the States some time.”

His eyebrows arched a little as he studied my Australian passport. Quite probably he hadn’t seen one before. “And what is it brings the señor to Aguazul?” he asked, as though genuinely interested. “Tourism, yes?”

He took up the stub of blue chalk lying nearest his hand and began to move it toward my bags. I told him no, in fact I was working in Vados as of the following day.

His eyes narrowed a very little. The hand with the chalk stopped an inch from the first bag. “So?” he said. “And what is the señor’s profession?”

“I’m a traffic analyst,” I answered. “I specialize in such problems as how to get cars moving faster in busy streets, how to prevent people blocking the exits at subway stations—”

He nodded impatiently.
“Yo comprendo,”
he snapped, as if I had implied he was of inferior intelligence. “And what do you do here in Vados?”

“I’m supposed to suggest a solution to a traffic problem.”

This was factually accurate, and as I said it, I felt again a tingle of excitement—the same excitement that I had felt on first being assigned the job. Perhaps it wasn’t so much simple excitement as a sense of being awarded an accolade—Ciudad de Vados was more than a brand-new city in the circles where I worked; it was a byword for ultimate achievement in city planning and traffic analysis. And to be chosen to improve on near perfection was a kind of climax to a career.

Of course, it was to be expected that improvement had now become possible; it was twelve years since the plans had been approved, and there had been progress in that time. More to the point, the finest analogue computers in the world couldn’t get all the bugs out of a traffic plan—experiment was the only way of establishing where faults might lie.

And yet …

The customs officer seemed to be affected by the same kind of puzzlement as I. But he had a way of resolving it. He tossed the chalk in the air and as it fell closed his hand around it with a gesture of finality. “I shall require to examine your baggage, Señor Hakluyt,” he said.

I sighed, wondering what had made him change his mind. But experience had taught me it was always quicker not to raise objections. So I said only, “Everything I have with me is my personal property, and I checked with your consulate in Miami to make sure I wasn’t bringing any proscribed items.”

“Puede ser,”
he answered noncommittally, and took my keys.

He asked questions about almost everything he found, but it was the quantity of clothing I had with me that he harped on most. He kept trying to insist that I could not possibly need everything I had brought; again and again I had to explain that my work often took me out on highway and other construction projects where there were no laundry facilities, and if I was to dress reasonably well, I had to bring as much as this.

“Señor Hakluyt, then, is a very wealthy man?” he pressed, altering his line of attack.

I resisted the growing temptation to make a smart crack in reply and shook my head.

“The señor is not wealthy and yet has so much baggage,” he said, as though propounding a major philosophical paradox to himself. “Will the señor tell me at what rate he is to be paid for the work he does in Vados?”

That was a little too much. “Is it any of your business?” I countered.

He showed his teeth, with the air of a card-player producing a fourteenth trump. I disliked him intensely from that moment on. “Señor Hakluyt is perhaps not aware that I am a police officer,” he purred. “But I am—and it is therefore illegal to refuse an answer to any question I may put.”

I gave ground. “I’m being paid twenty thousand dolaros and expenses,” I said.

He pushed down the lid on the last of my bags and slashed crosses on each item with the blue chalk. Then he dusted his hands off against each other in a way that suggested he was getting rid of something more than just smears of chalk. “It is to be hoped, then, that the señor is generous with his money,” he said. “Perhaps it is there, the reason why he is not already a wealthy man.”

He turned on his heel and stalked away.

The examination had taken so long that the airline buses had all left for the center of town. I dug into my inadequate knowledge of Spanish and managed to persuade a porter to call me a cab and load my bags into it while I went to a change booth and turned a few dollars into a supply of dolaros—crisp new red-and-yellow paper bearing portraits of
el Presidente,
nominally at par to the United States dollar but worth in actual purchasing power about eighty-five cents. They were a monument to one of Vados’s first great achievements—the major currency reform he had carried through a year after coming to power. It was said that he had called his new monetary unit the
dolaro
in hope that it would become as hard a currency as its North American original; by Latin American standards he had worked miracles in even approaching this goal.

When I came to tip the porter who’d called my cab, I remembered what the customs officer had said about being generous with my money. By way of experiment I gave him two dolaros and looked for a reaction. There wasn’t one. He probably thought I was a tourist who couldn’t be bothered keeping track of foreign currency because he subconsciously felt it wasn’t real money anyway. I tried to shrug the whole thing off.

However, it wasn’t until the cab was on its way down from the mountainside airport that the matter was driven to the back of my mind. The road swung around in a wide quarter circle to ease the sharp descent into Vados, and since the air was clear and the sun was shining brilliantly, I had a perfect bird’s-eye view out over the area. I could even make out Puerto Joaquin, forty-odd miles distant, as a dark blur where the land merged into the ocean.

But after a superficial glance around, I didn’t again trouble to look so far away. I was too fascinated by Ciudad de Vados in the immediate foreground.

There was an impressive quality about the city that no amount of maps and plans had been able to convey to me. Without the distraction of Flores importuning me to look at things, I was able to soak up the true magnificence of it all.

Somehow—it was hard to define how—those who had planned this city had managed to give it an organic vitality akin to that of a giant machine. There was a slumbering controlled power that could be felt, implying business to be done; yet it was matched by a functional perfection that meant economy, simplicity, unity without uniformity. Just about everything, in fact, that idealistic city-planners had ever hoped for.

I told the cabdriver to pull off the road for a moment and got out to stare down through the limpid air from the edge of a bushy bluff. I recognized almost everything I could see: residential there, business there, government offices there, the parks, the museums, the opera house, the four great plazas, the viaducts carrying the superhighways.

Fantastic. On the surface not a single flaw.

I stayed long enough on the bluff to smoke half a cigarette; then I went back to the cab and told the driver to take me into town. I went on staring out of the window as we hurried down the mountainside.

Then something came between the window and the view, and I turned my head barely in time to see a sort of shack parked—it didn’t look substantial enough for one to say it was
built
—alongside the road. I had no chance to take in details, but that didn’t matter; fifty yards farther on there was another, and then a whole cluster of them—matchboard shanties roofed with flattened oildrums, their walls made gaudy here and there by advertising placards, ragged washing hung out to dry between them on poles and lines. Naked or nearly naked children played around the huts in company with straggly roosters, goats, and the odd emaciated piglet.

I was so taken aback I had no chance to order the driver to stop again before the road straightened for its final nose dive into Vados proper. But as we passed the gate of the first real house on the outskirts—it was a handsome colonial-style villa set among palms—I saw a peasant family trudging up the hill: father carrying a bundle on the traditional strap around his forehead, mother with one child in her arms and another wearily plodding at her heels. They paid the cab no attention as it hummed past, except to screw up their eyes against dust.

A memory filled my mind suddenly: the memory of a man I had met while working on the clearance of an industrial slum area. He had been born there; he had been lucky enough to climb out of it and all that it implied. And he had said, as we talked about what was being abolished, “You know, I always knew it wasn’t permanent. That was what enabled me to get the hell out, when other people gave up. Because it was a shock to me, every time I saw a paving stone taken up, to find that there was earth underneath—the aboriginal dirt. Most of the time the town seemed so implacable, so solid and squat and loathsome—but whenever I was reminded that the earth was underneath, I managed to see through that façade and go on fighting.”

It was as though cold water had been thrown in my face. I suddenly saw a possible explanation of why I was here. And—in the most peculiar way—the explanation frightened me.

II

The layout of Ciudad de Vados was so straightforward and logical it would probably have been impossible for a cabby to try taking even a complete stranger by a roundabout route. Nonetheless, force of habit and professional interest made me follow the track of my cab on a mental map, at the same time as I studied the buildings and the people on the streets.

With the twentieth-century homogenization of culture, most of the route we took could have been approximated in any large city in the Americas or Western Europe, aside from obvious differences, such as the language on the street signs and the frequent appearance of priests and nuns in their religious habits. Here a trio of pretty girls in new summer frocks stood waiting for a crosstown monorail; the high platform was windy, and their skirts whirled as they laughed and chattered. Below, a thoughtful youth in an open convertible eyed them with careful consideration; a few yards away two respectable women debated whether to be more disapproving of the girls for being attractive or the boy for being attracted.

Huge stores, designed according to modern sales-promotion techniques, preferred their goods; money flowed like a river over their counters. The cars and cabs whirled forward; despite the fact that the traffic flow was nowhere near its theoretical optimum, there were still fifty per cent fewer traffic holdups than I had ever before seen in a city this size. Bright clothes and bright faces on the sidewalks; bright sunlight on the bright light walls of the tall buildings and on the clean—incredibly clean—streets.

I looked around, and the buildings said proudly, “Progress!” The laughter on the faces of youths and girls said, “Success!” The satisfied look of businessmen said, “Prosperity!”

But even in that moment, in my first hour in Vados, I found myself wondering what the peasant family would have answered, trudging up the hill toward their shantytown.

My hotel—the Hotel del Principe—was on the Plaza del Sur, one of the four main squares of Ciudad de Vados. The squares had been named unimaginatively enough after the four points of the compass. We were nearing the end of the trip when that part of my mind that had been following our route on an imaginary map warned me that we had taken a wrong turn at a traffic signal. I was leaning forward to remonstrate with the driver when I saw that the whole stream of cars and other vehicles was being diverted from the entrance to the Plaza del Sur. I caught one glimpse of the palms and flowers in the parklike center of the square, and then the cab pulled in at the side of the road and the driver reached for a cigarette.

I asked him what was happening; he shrugged an enormous and expressive Latin American shrug.

“No tengo la culpa,”
he said defensively, but giving one brief glance at the meter clocking up my fare. “It isn’t my fault.”

I opened the window and craned my head around. An excited crowd (but where in Latin America is a crowd not excited?) had gathered at the entrance to the square. It had a holiday atmosphere about it, for peddlers were going to and fro with tamale wagons and trays of knickknacks, but it was plain from the many parked trucks and cars bearing the neatly lettered word POLICIA that there was nothing festive about whatever had happened.

After a few minutes a line of police appeared from inside the square and began to disperse the crowd with extravagant waves of their long white batons. My driver snuffed his cigarette out, carefully returning the unfinished butt to his pocket, and pulled the wheel down hard. We crossed the road to an accompaniment of other cars’ brakes shrieking and entered the square.

Though there were still many people on the gravel walks between the trees, there was no sign of anything police might have been needed to break up. The single indicative point was that a man in a shabby cotton uniform—a municipal street cleaner, perhaps—was going carefully about picking up bits of paper that looked like leaflets and stuffing them in a long gray bag.

The cab rolled around the square to the Hotel del Principe, a white-and-bronze building with a kind of loggia along its line of frontage, and three shallow steps underlining the effective façade. There were three doors of plain glass in the glass face of the loggia; the cab halted before the first of them.