The Squares of the City (31 page)

I let him find an opening when we had sat down in the hotel lounge. I didn’t say anything; I didn’t even try to look anything in particular.

He had brought a portfolio with him. He covered a minute’s awkward silence by searching in it for some documents, and at last, having found them, cleared his throat.

“I—uh—have bad news, I’m afraid,” he said. “Diaz has studied that plan for the market area you gave me. He says he can’t approve it. Ht wants a lot of changes. I tried to object, of course, but—”

I said wearily, “I warned you. It’s too expensive as it stands, for one thing. And Diaz is at perfect liberty to criticize individual points. So long as he hasn’t questioned the actual traffic flow, that’s fine. I thought I’d made that clear when I gave you the draft in the first place.”

Angers looked at me. He didn’t reply for a moment, and before he did he had to drop his eyes.

“You feel pretty bad about what happened to Brown, don’t you?” he said.

“Yes.”

He opened his hands, palms up, and looked at them, seeming not to know how to go on. Eventually: “So do I, damn it! I—I was
scared,
Hakluyt. You must understand that. When I felt him hit me on the back and I turned around to look into his face—it was like a maniac’s or a wild animal’s! What else was I to do, in Heaven’s name? If I’d hesitated, I’m certain he’d have tried to kill me with his bare hands.”

“You weren’t exactly treating his wife in the way an English gentleman is supposed to,” I said.

He flushed scarlet, all the way to the roots of his hair. “She—she—oh, hell, Hakluyt! Brown was a suspected murderer, whatever else anyone says, and he’d run away to hide instead of staying to face a trial the way an innocent man would have done—”

“Stop trying to convince yourself,” I said. “I saw the way you loved that gun the police gave you. Why the hell can’t you stick to your own job? You’re a highway manager, a traffic organizer, not a one-man crusade for the moral improvement of Ciudad de Vados! And I don’t think the conceited pleasure you got out of playing Sir Galahad was worth the life of a good lawyer and an honest man.”

His face was interesting over the next few moments; it began to go dignified, hesitated, flushed again, and ended up tattered, like a papier-mâché mask that has been out in the rain.

“I don’t suppose there’s anything I can say to convince you you’re wrong,” he said.

“Probably not.”

He took out a cigarette, but didn’t light it. With it waiting between his fingers, he gave a bitter smile. “You just don’t like us or our country, do you, Hakluyt?”

“I haven’t been given much reason to like it.”

“No. … But I think you might try to understand people like me, the foreign-born citizens. We—we hitched our wagons to the star of Ciudad de Vados, as the saying goes. We put our hearts and souls into this city. We gave up all the other things our lives might have held for us—chances of possibly greater wealth, greater success, elsewhere—because we saw in Ciudad de Vados something we could shape to our own desires. There was a line of poetry”—he looked suddenly self-conscious—“that used to keep running through my head when I first made up my mind to come to Vados and settle here. It said something like ‘reshape it nearer to the heart’s desire.’ Well, that’s why. That’s why, when we see people like Brown and Sigueiras making an unholy mess of our—our dreams, if you like—we find it pretty hard to take lying down. Oh, maybe they have their reasons, maybe they’re doing right according to their lights, but we gave up everything for the sake of this city, and when people forget that, who never had to give up anything because they never
had
anything till we came along and gave it to them, it makes us
furious.
”

I didn’t comment. Angers waited a few seconds, half-hoping for a favorable answer, and at last got to his feet. “Will you be down at the department in the morning?” he asked.

“I’ll be there,” I said. “I’ll be there.”

XXII

At about half past ten that same evening José Dalban committed suicide.

The astonishment that followed the news was almost solid: thick and cloying, hampering the mind’s attempts to make sense of it like heavy wet clay.
Why
? He was rich—perhaps only a few thousands short of being a millionaire. He appeared successful and influential; that success was founded, as Guzman had told me, on something not very respectable in the eyes of Vadeanos, but it was not illegal. He had a reputation as a clever speculator. And his private life seemed placid enough: he was married, had four children of whom two were at Mexico City University, and a congenial mistress in Cuatrovientos whom his wife knew about.

It was odd, I reflected, how sometimes one never managed to round out one’s mental picture of a person till that person was dead, as though a subconscious reflex held one back, insisting that until a man was dead no picture of him could be accurate or complete.

Certainly, in the twenty-four hours following Dalban’s death, I got to know very much more about him than I had during his lifetime.

By the end of those twenty-four hours truth was beginning to emerge. José Dalban’s enterprises were ripe for the undertaker. Like all speculators, he was operating on other people’s money a lot of the time; it so happened that at the moment he was extended far beyond the limits of his own resources. And in that strange, abstract, barely-more-than-half-real way that seems to turn bits of printed paper into deadly weapons, Luis Arrio had seized the chance to plot Dalban’s destruction.

That destruction was now following his death.

Piece by piece, Arrio had acquired control of every loan Dalban owed, a few mortgages, several advances against security—and had notified Dalban that he intended to foreclose on everything he could. The total amount involved was about two million dolaros; more than three-quarters of a million was due or overdue for repayment.

So, having drunk two glasses of fine brandy, which steadied his nerves and unsteadied his hands, compelling him to slash four times before he achieved success, he cut his throat.

I heard most of this from Isabela Cortés and her husband when they called in for a drink at the Hotel del Principe on Monday evening before going to the opera. I had asked Señora Cortés what she thought of the destruction of the broadcasting center, and she positively exploded with rage.

“When they find the saboteurs, let them be publicly burned alive!” she snapped. “An evil deed belonging to the past that Alejo labored so many years to bury—a past of irresponsible violence and internecine hatred! I feel half ashamed that I still live to walk in the city when Alejo has suffered that dreadful end!”

“On the other hand,” said her husband with unexpected mildness, “this is the first time in many years that we have been able to spend three consecutive evenings together, ’Belita.”

“Do not joke about death, León!” Señora Cortés went pale. “Ciudad de Vados, I swear, has never before been like this, with José Dalban dead, and before him Mario Guerrero, and—what can have come over our people? Tell me that!”

Her husband took the question literally, not rhetorically—which in view of his position was reasonable. He rubbed his chin with the back of his hand as he considered.

“Frankly, ’Belita, you have asked an impossible question. One can assume that some—some crucial factor in the longstanding disputes to which we have become accustomed has now come to a head. But to isolate that factor—why, it would be the work of a lifetime.”

It was then that we spoke of Dalban’s death, and I learned something about the causes of it.

“In one way, Señor Arrio has done a public service,” Cortés mused. “For too long Dalban had been making a fortune out of the base impulses of our people”—this I took to be an oblique reference to his monopoly of the contraceptive market—“and in so doing has encouraged them to continue.”

“In more ways than one—so some people might maintain,” said his wife. “Have you thought of the effect it will have on Señor Mendoza?”

I thought, of course, she was referring to Cristoforo Mendoza, editor of
Tiempo.
Since
Tiempo
had been closed down, I didn’t see that the loss of Dalban’s financial aid mattered much one way or the other—unless the order to close the paper down had been rescinded, and if it had been, I hadn’t been told.

But apparently that was not the point, for Cortés gave his wife a stern look.

“Isabela, you are well aware that in my view Mendoza’s books will be no loss to the world, even if he never writes another—”

“Excuse me,” I put in. “I don’t see the connection.”

Cortés shrugged. “Dalban’s vanity required him to seem to be also a patron of the arts. In keeping with the pattern of his other activities—all of which seem to have been concerned with pandering to the lower tastes of the people—he had made Felipe Mendoza a protégé of his. He had given him a house and had occasionally paid him a salary when the sales of his books were not high.”

“I see. But surely, if Mendoza still needs a patron, he will have no trouble finding another? After all, he has an international reputation—”

“So had the American Henry Miller,” said Cortés stiffly. “But neither he nor Mendoza wrote the sort of book I would permit to be read in my house.”

“Approval or disapproval apart,” said Señora Cortés, “one has to admit that he is creative—and original. No, Señor Hakluyt, Felipe Mendoza may not find it so easy, certainly not in his own country, for as you may perhaps have heard, all his works are on the Index, and consequently he labors under disadvantages.”

“And is that not his fault?” began the professor belligerently. They would have launched on a heated argument had not Señora Cortés abruptly noticed the time and realized they were late for the overture.

I was very thoughtful after they had gone. The girl with the guitar who sometimes turned up here in the evenings, especially when there was to be a big performance at the opera or one of the theaters, was singing—more to herself than an audience—at the other end of the bar. I took my drink and went and sat where I could listen to her.

The way things were now, it almost appeared that my arrival in Vados had been a trigger to set in motion a chain of violent and sometimes bloody events. But that was ridiculous. It must simply be chance or coincidence. Most likely, both my being brought here and the events that had followed were symptomatic of the same web of rivalries, hatreds, and jealousies. In other words, at the moment everyone in Vados, from
el Presidente
himself down to that girl with the guitar, were puppets dancing at the mercy of forces beyond the control of individuals.

Here in Ciudad de Vados, of course, they had made a determined attempt to control those forces—as Mayor had claimed, this was “the most governed country in the world.” Yes, but maybe the success they had seemed to achieve was no more than illusion. You could only disguise, not govern, the dark impulses at the bottom of the human mind, the inheritance of prejudice with which every man, woman, and child walking the streets in every city on earth was laden down. You couldn’t govern those. At most, you could dictate when they should be turned loose—and sometimes, when the pressure behind them had built up to a climax, you couldn’t even do that.

“Señorita,” I said to the girl with the guitar, and she turned grave dark eyes to me. She wasn’t pretty; she had a large nose and a large mouth, with one crooked tooth in her upper jaw. “Señorita, what is your opinion of the books of Felipe Mendoza?”

She looked taken aback. “I do not know, señor,” she said. “I am a good Catholic, and Catholics are not permitted to read his books. That is all I know.”

I sighed. “What do you think about the death of Señor Dalban?”

“They say he was a very evil man. Perhaps his conscience troubled him. Certainly he must have been a great sinner to have killed himself as he did.”

“Suppose, señorita, that a jealous rival of yours were to steal from you everything that means anything to you, everything whereby you make your living—your guitar, your songs—seduced your boy-friend if you have one, so there was no hope for you—what would you do then?”

She frowned, as if trying to decide my purpose in asking such questions. After a moment’s reflection she said virtuously, “I should pray, señor.”

I turned toward her. “Listen, señorita, I am not an inquisitor. I’m just a stranger in Vados who wants to know what people think about all these happenings of the past few days. Consider! Señor Dalban was
killed,
just as surely as if someone had held the knife with which his throat was cut. His business was ruined, he was plunged suddenly into debts that he couldn’t pay, everything he had worked for all his life was snatched away, not as a visitation from God but because a rival businessman was envious of him. Isn’t envy a sin?”

“Oh, yes, señor! A vile sin!”

“Exactly. Can it be right that somebody like Dalban should have his life’s work destroyed to satisfy a rival’s jealousy?”

She didn’t answer. Probably I was posing her questions which her confessor would regard as highly technical and best left to trained theologians.

“As for the man who was so jealous,” I went on. “You have heard of Señor Arrio?”

“Oh, of course! He is a very good man. My father work in one of his stores; he is assistant manager, and maybe one day he will be manager.” Realization dawned. “You mean—it was Señor Arrio who was so jealous?”