The Squares of the City (7 page)

A sudden barking exclamation from O’Rourke brought me back to the here and now with a start. I glanced around to find his brown eyes fixed on me, and Angers looking uncomfortable.

“What’s the trouble?” I said.

“I—uh—well, I was telling him about this disgraceful affair of the policeman stealing from a beggar this morning, and—”

“You
what
?” I said.

“Well, it oughtn’t to be allowed to pass without action,” said Angers defensively.

“All right, if you’ve done it, you’ve done it. What’s the comment?”

Angers licked his lips, with a sidelong look at O’Rourke, whose face was like thunder. “I—I can’t quite make out. He either wants to sack the offender, because he was stealing from his own people—as though it would have been better for him to steal from you instead—or prove that there’s no truth in the accusation at all.”

“It wasn’t that important,” I said wearily. “It probably goes on all the time—don’t translate that! Tell him—oh, hell! Tell him the boy got his money back; tell him there oughtn’t to be any need for beggars in Ciudad de Vados.”

Angers translated hesitantly; astonished, I saw O’Rourke suddenly break into a smile, and he rose from behind his desk to extend his thick-fingered hand.

“He says you are perfectly right,” Angers interpreted. “He hopes you will do a lot of good for the people of the city.”

“So do I,” I said, and rose to shake hands. Then I got up to go, and Angers caught at my arm.

“Not so fast,” he said. “There’s—uh—there’s one other thing.”

I sat down again while he exchanged a few more sentences with
el Jefe.
Then the interview was in fact over, and we went out again into the warm afternoon air.

“What was the bit at the end all about?” I asked.

Angers shrugged. “Nothing of importance,” he said. “I was just telling him what you’d probably be doing for the next day or two. Officially, or course, aliens have to register with the police and report once a week if they’re staying over a month and all kinds of rigmarole like that—but we can avoid your going to so much trouble, O’Rourke says. You’ll only have to notify the police if you move away from your hotel.”

“Fine.”

“Well, that’s about it for tonight, then. Tomorrow I’ll take you out and show you the extent of the problem we have to solve.”

V

The first “black spot” due for our inspection was a cheap market that had grown up in what was intended to be a quiet lower-income-group residential backwater in the angle between two of the access roads coming from the main highway nexus. Itinerant merchants had found it a convenient spot to set up shop when the city was being built; they traded there with the construction workers. And somehow, through some loophole in the regulations, it had continued as a permanent feature of the area.

But if it hadn’t been for the arrival of the squatters in the shantytowns, so Angers told me, it would naturally have withered away, and the area would have continued the way it was designed. Here the squatters garnered practically the whole of their exiguous income, and their tenacious persistence was rapidly making the section degenerate toward a slum.

Complicating the issue, the high cost of living made many people prefer to buy their vegetables here—too many for a simple city ordinance to decree it out of existence without strong and vocal opposition. It was part of the technique that had made Vados’s regime so durable that he always preferred to replace the substance of a nuisance to himself or his supporters with the
fait accompli
of a universal benefit.

And in this case it was going to take a lot of doing.

The market was colorful—but it stank like a pigsty; picturesque—but so noisy it was hardly to be wondered that the dwellings in the vicinity were going downhill toward tenement standards.

“Does this go on all day?” I asked Angers. “Every day?”

“Except for Sunday,” he confirmed. “These people have no conception of time, of course—and nothing better to do anyway. It’s all one to them whether they sit here twelve hours or two hours—look at the flies on that baby’s face! Isn’t it disgusting?—so long as they sell what they’ve brought.”

I swatted a fly as it buzzed past, but missed. “All right,” I grunted. “Let’s take a look at the next on the list.”

The next eyesore was—of all places—right underneath the main monorail nexus. Ciudad de Vados had a first-class cross-and around-town network of tracks, in the so-called “spider’s web” pattern that is rather efficient but suffers from one serious drawback—the need for a large central interchange station.

In Vados, of course, this hadn’t been such a disadvantage as it usually was; they were building from scratch and could afford to be lavish with space for the central. The result was that a good acre or more of surface was barred from the sun by the overhead concrete platforms.

“What happened here was largely due to sheer greed,” Angers told me flatly. “It’s also a sample of what would probably have been Ciudad de Vados if Diaz had had his way instead of the president. The owner of this land was the original director of the monorail system. He asked for a lease on the area under the station as part of his citizens’ rights endowment when the city was first incorporated. It seemed like an innocuous enough request—everyone assumed he would rent it out as warehouse space, or something harmless like that. So no one took the precaution of placing limitations on his use of it.

“What happened? He fitted up the spaces between the foundations with flimsy partitions and rickety flooring, let the resulting chicken coops to his friends and relatives, and found it so profitable to be a landlord that he resigned his job. Now he devotes his full time to
this.”

He pointed; I looked at “this,” and it wasn’t pretty.

The lie of the ground here was a series of sloping ridges over which the platforms of the station jutted out. Standing where we were on the crest of one of the banks that ran between the two main entrances for passengers, we could see directly down into the space between the steel girders and thick concrete pillars that carried the platforms. There was a smell down there of rotting food and close-packed human beings and their waste products. Smoke from fires drifted up to us; the squalling of children merged into one hideous row together with the braying of donkeys, mooing of cows, grunting of pigs, and the wail of an elderly phonograph playing a record long worn past comprehensibility.

“Tezol lives here, by the way,” Angers informed me.

“It hardly seems possible that human beings
could
live down there,” I muttered.

Angers laughed sourly. “Either the natives desire nothing better, or this is actually an improvement on what they’re used to. I say, we’re honored! Look who’s coming to see us—the proprietor himself.”

A fat Negro was hauling himself up from the depths beneath the station. The path was very steep and very slippery, for dogs, domestic cattle, and, it appeared, children had used it indiscriminately to relieve themselves, so the landlord was forced to use his arms more than his legs in the ascent.

He pulled himself over the lip of the bank, grunting, and wiped his face with a large red bandanna. Thrusting it back in the pocket of his bulging jeans, he called out to us.

“You back again, Señor Angers, hey?”

“Yes, Sigueiras, I’m back,” said Angers, not trying to hide the distaste on his face. “We’ll be clearing out that muck heap of yours soon.”

Sigueiras chuckled. “You tried that before, señor! Always it is not possible. If you try to take away
my
citizens’ rights, what happen to
your
citizens’ rights? That a big joke, hey?”

“He’s talking about a legal decision that went in his favor a few months ago,” explained Angers to me in an undertone. Raising his voice, he went on, “But citizens’ rights are subordinate to city development plans, aren’t they, Sigueiras?”

“Yes, señor. And I would very willingly give up this little patch of darkness—but where else are my people to go? They wish homes, you will give them no homes, I am
forced
to give them homes!”

“They must have had homes where they came from,” said Angers sharply.

“Had, Señor Angers! Had! When they were starving because their water was taken for the city, when their land was dry, where else should they go but to the city? Each night and morning I pray to Our Lady and to Saint Joseph that new homes may be built for these people and work be found for them—”

“The old hypocrite!” said Angers under his breath.

Sigueiras interrupted himself. “You say—you say city development plans, Señor Angers? I hear you say that! Is it that my prayers are answered?”

“Your prayers are more likely to be for some of your tenants to die so you can move in more at higher rents,” said Angers coldly. “This is Señor Hakluyt, who is going to redesign this area so that it’s all turned into a new road. Or something,” he added, glancing at me.

Sigueiras clubbed his fist and raised it toward me, suppressed fury choking him for a moment. I took a step back for fear he would strike me, almost losing my footing on the bank.

“So you come to Vados from over sea and take away all the home my people have?” he screamed. “You make your living by taking away home from people? I spit on you! I tread you in the dirt! Señor Angers, this I swear on the name of my dead father, rest his soul.” He uttered the last statement with a peculiar passionless intensity, looking again at my companion. “I swear that if you do this thing, if you take away my people only home, I bring them all—all—their cows, their burros, everything—and I move them into your big, beautiful apartment.
Then
you see!”

“Let’s not waste any more time on this hysterical old fool,” said Angers sourly, and turned to go. I, hesitating, was about to follow him, but Sigueiras caught my sleeve.

“You make your living taking away home from people,” he said, gritting the words. “I give up my living to make home for people. Which of us do better thing, hey?”

And he was gone, slipping-sliding down the path back into his personal inferno.

Angers was already back at the car before I caught up with him again. He was wiping his forehead with a large handkerchief.

“I’m sorry about that outburst,” he said wryly. “I’d have warned you if I’d known we were likely to run into him. You don’t have to take any notice, of course—he always acts abusive like that.”

I shrugged and got into the car. But as we rolled back toward the main road, I saw a long-faced man with a bowed head, wearing a bright
serape
I was sure I had seen the previous afternoon in the Plaza del Sur. Juan Tezol, going home. I wondered if he had found his thousand dolaros yet.

“It’s a strange comedown for Sigueiras,” said Angers as the car fled along smooth concrete roadway. “I suppose it’s the type—but I remember him as an apparently intelligent and sensible man.”

“And now?” I said, keeping my face absolutely straight.

He gave me a sharp glance. “You saw for yourself,” he said. Then he realized there was more to my remark than a foolish question and nodded reluctantly.

“You’re probably right,” he admitted. “He could still be a formidable person.”

He lapsed into a thoughtful silence. I wondered if he was picturing scores of peasants, cattle and all, actually forcing their way into his rooms.

We went next on a tour of the three shantytowns, and all of them were very much like Sigueiras’s slum spread out over a wider area, except that since they weren’t closed in, the smell hanging over them was less repulsive. But although they were Superficially alike, I found that each of them had its own kind of organic structure and function, perhaps due to the fact [??] they were on different sides of Vados and the inhabitants came from districts differing slightly in cultural pattern. There was also, naturally, a marked difference between them because of the local traffic pattern, but this operated at third or fourth remove, and was not especially significant.

“I don’t quite understand how you fellows do it,” Angers said as he watched me doodling flow-curves on a scratch pad, standing on the shoulder of the highway overlooking one of the shantytowns.

“Coming from a highway engineer, that’s a handsome admission,” I said, more sardonically than I’d intended. “Most of the time your boys make me feel I want their permission to breathe in their vicinity.”

Angers colored a little. “No offense,” he said.

“I mean it. Oh, it’s largely a matter of instinct and a particular sort of mind. Hard to explain. I suppose the closest analogy is with the way a river deposits silt at a bend—the direction and strength of the current and the nature of the silt determine the way the course of the river develops. In roughly the same way you can establish principles of traffic flow that sometimes—almost invariably in the case of unplanned towns or villages—determine the primary nature and layout of the result.”

I stripped off the sheet of the pad I’d been working on and screwed it up. “No luck?” Angers suggested.

“Oh, it could be done. But … well, I suppose you wouldn’t be interested in the obvious solution.”

Angers raised a sandy eyebrow at me. “I thought we’d considered all the obvious solutions,” he said rather stiffly. “That was why we called in an expert.”