The Squares of the City

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, proferred 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 effeclive facade. There were three doors of plain glass in the glass face of the loggia; the cab halted before the first of them.

Instantly a trio of ragged youths and one ragged girl, who had been squatting on the sidewalk with their backs against the hardboard side of a portable news kiosk, eyes screwed up against the sun, bounced to their feet. They attempted to open the door, get my bags out, shine my shoes, and show me the way up the hotel steps, all the time keeping one palm free and poised to catch money if it flew in their direction. The cab-driver didn’t move from his seat; he merely spat into the gutter, making the act convey a whole bookful of disgusted annoyance.

At the head of the steps a majestic commissionaire turned toward the commotion. He summed it up in a glance and sent the ragged children running with some awful and probably obscene threat in a raucous voice and coarse accent. Then he walked down and opened my door.

“Buenos dias, señor,” he said affably, but this time in so polite and polished a voice I gave him a sharp stare, almost not believing this could be the same man. “Es Vd… el señor Hakluyt?”

I agreed that I was, and paid the driver, giving him a tip that proved large enough to startle him out of his seat to help the hotel bellhop with my bags. I looked around the plaza again.

“What was going on here just now?” I demanded. “Why had they closed the square to traffic?”

The commissionaire interrupted himself in the middle of instructing the bellhop. He turned a cool and sardonic eye on me. “I do not know, señor,” he said. “It cannot have been of much importance.”

From which, naturally, I deduced that it was of very great importance — sufficiently so to make a bad impression on a new arrival. I reminded myself to find out at the earliest opportunity what it was.

I checked into my room, which was high up in the building and had a good view on the side away from the square. The first thing I had to do was phone the city council offices and make an appointment to see the head of the traffic department the following morning; the second was to clean up after the trip and change clothes; and the third was to do nothing at all for the rest of the day. In my sort of work, at the beginning of a new job it’s usually essential to spend up to fourteen hours a day on absorbing facts and impressions; I might as well make the most of my last chance to relax and be idle.

The bellhop unpacked my bags quickly and efficiently while I was making my appointment; a couple of times when he came to items he did not recognize, like my theodolites and my portable analogue computer, he crossed the room and held them mutely before me, asking with his eyes where he should put them. I indicated that he should dump them on the bed. After he had gone, I gave them a quick inspection to make sure they had suffered no damage on the way.

When I was through, I went down to the lounge in search of a drink and a comfortable chair.

The lounge was large and pleasant. The architect’s fancy had led him to ornament it with palms and colorful-leaved creepers growing inside glass pillars; aside from that, the decor was mainly black-and-white, repeating a motif which appeared explicitly in the low tables whose tops were inlaid with a checkered pattern. I’d been staring for some time at the table beside my own chair, but it was not until I noticed that a man and a woman sitting a few feet from me were brooding over a set of pieces in play that I realized the pattern was actually a chessboard, eight by eight and intended to be used.

Once my attention was caught, the imperious presence of the woman held it. She could have been any age from thirty to fifty; her face was an almost perfect oval, disturbed — but not marred — by a sharp and determined chin, and framed by sleek, shining black hair. I could not see what the color of her eyes was; they were shaded, as she looked down at the game, by sweeping long lashes. She wore a straight dress of a rich dark red; the slimness of her bare arms and the fine carving of her face suggested that the slenderness of her figure would be natural, not dieted down. She was tanned to a gold almost as rich as the gold of the watch on her wrist, and those two together suggested great wealth and much leisure. In the slim hand with which she moved her pieces she held a black Russian cigarette, unlit.

She played well, with a straightforward directness in attack that had already got her opponent into serious difficulties. I shifted a little in my chair to follow the play.

I had been watching for several minutes when a waiter came to call the opponent to the phone. He stood up and excused himself, not — so I thought — without some relief, and the woman nodded to him and sat back in her chair. At last the thin cigarette went to her lips, and she picked up a black handbag to open it and find a lighter.

The fact that I was holding mine before her, open and lit, did not surprise her in the least. I guessed that in her cosmos automatic attention of this kind was predictable. She put her cigarette to the flame, let smoke curl from her nostrils, and looked up at me. Her eyes were violet. “Gracias,” she said pleasantly.

A hovering waiter came up with a tray and was on the point of removing the chessmen; she stopped him with a gesture and waved her hand over the board. “Would you care to complete the game?” she suggested to me.

I smiled and shook my head. White was too near defeat for any attempt at salvage.

She indicated to the waiter that he should take the pieces away, after all, and continued the gesture as an invitation to me to take the chair opposite her.

“The señor is a stranger in Vados,” she said factually. “And it is probably his first visit.”

“Quite right. But is it so obvious?”

“Oh, indeed. From your expression. You seemed surprised a little to find that these chessboards were for use.”

I wondered how she had contrived to study me closely enough to notice that, and shrugged. “I was, a little,” I acknowledged.

“But this is a thing you find everywhere in Vados, indeed throughout the country. It is perhaps our national game so much as it is of the Russians, let us say.” As though mention of the name had reminded her, she took another draw on her Russian cigarette and tapped the first ash into a tray on the table. “It is, of course, a dream of our president that one day such another as the Cuban Capablanca should be found here in Ciudad de Vados. For that reason we play from childhood.”

“Is Vados himself a chess player, then?” I inquired, more for conversation’s sake than out of any real interest.

“Oh, indeed!” She seemed surprised that I asked the question. “He is, they say, very good at the game. You play yourself, perhaps?”

“Badly. But I do play.”

“Then if the señor is staying here, he must do me the honor of a match sometime. May I be acquainted with the señor’s name?”

I gave it, and she repeated it thoughtfully. “Hakluyt. A famous name. I am Maria Posador,” she added, as though by afterthought.

A few more trivialities disposed of, I managed to ask what had been going on in the square when I arrived this afternoon, and she smiled.

“That is a feature of our life in Vados, Señor Hakluyt. It is a daily occurrence.”

“Really? I had the idea you were comparatively free from — uh — such things.”

She smiled, revealing superbly regular teeth. “You mistake my meaning. The arrival of great numbers of police is a rarity. But — well, the señor has perhaps been to London?”

“No, never.”

“But you do perhaps know of a place they call the Corner of Speakers, in one of the great plazas there?”

I caught on. “Ah, Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park. Yes, I know what you mean. Is that the sort of thing you have in the Plaza del Sur?”

“Exactly. Only — our national temperament being what it is — our discussions sometimes grow more heated than among the phlegmatic English.” She laughed; it was a mellow sound that made me think of ripe apples. “Each day about noon there assemble a few persons with ideas to preach or grievances to complain about. Occasionally tempers rise. That is all.”

“And what was all the trouble about today, then?”

She spread one hand gracefully, and I had the impression that she had suddenly drawn a veil over her eyes. “Oh, it may have been one of many things — more than likely a difference about a religious matter. I did not go to inquire.”

She plainly preferred not to pursue the subject. I fell in with the wish and turned back to generalities. “It’s very interesting to hear you have a Speakers’ Corner here. Is that another original notion of your president’s?”

“Possibly. Or perhaps — like many of el President’s more striking innovations — it was the idea of Diaz.” The name meant nothing to me, but she went on without noticing my failure to respond. “Certainly it has proved of benefit to us all; what could be more useful than a theater where the discontents of the people can be brought to light?”

“Who’s Diaz?” I asked. “And what makes you think this idea might have come from him? I thought Vados was the government here.”

“Not at all,” she said crisply. I had the impression that I had touched a sore spot. “Vados would not be the man he is without his cabinet, and most of all without Diaz. Diaz is the Minister of the Interior. Thus, of course, his name comes less before the public than does Vados’s; outside Aguazul Vados’s name is known because the name of his city is known. But surely it is obvious that the strongest ruler depends on the strength of his supporters.”

I agreed that it was obvious, and Señora Posador — though she had not mentioned it, she wore a marriage ring — glanced at her little gold watch.

“Well, Señor Hakluyt, it has been pleasant to speak with you. You are staying in this hotel?”

I said I was.

“Then we shall meet here again and perhaps have thatgame of chess I suggested. But at this moment I fear I must go. Hasta mahana, señor!”

I rose hastily and managed an awkward bow over her hand, which, since she accepted automatically, I took to be still customary. And with a final dazzling smile she was gone.

I sat down again and ordered another drink. There were only two things seriously wrong with all this. The first was that wedding ring, the second the irritating fact that although I was perfectly sure Señora Posador knew very well what had been going on in the plaza when I arrived, I still had not found out what it was about.

I looked for reports in the papers the following morning, because for some reason this question went on irritating me. My Spanish was just about up to newspaper standard, if I took it slowly and guessed every fifth word.

There were two important dailies in Vados: one was the government organ, Liberdad, and the other an independent called Tiempo. Liberdad gave only about twenty lines to the whole affair, saying that arrests had been made and that a certain Juan Tezol was due to appear in court today on a charge of inciting to riot. Tiempo, on the other hand, made this item the main front-page news and gave it a large spread.

Struggling, I managed to make out that the villain of this paper’s version was not Tezol at all; it was someone called Mario Guerrero, who was alleged to have urged his followers to tear down Tezol’s speaker’s platform and burn the owner in the wreckage. The argument that had given rise to this — literally — inflammatory language didn’t seem to be religious, as Señora Posador had tried to make out; it must be political. But the reporters in both papers assumed their readers would be familiar with the background, and the details were tantalizingly inadequate for a stranger like me. There was mention of a Citizens’ Party and a National Party, associated with Guerrero and Tezol respectively, and so far as Tiempo was concerned, the former were inhuman monsters. That was the best I could gather from the reports.

I had been under the impression that — for a Latin American country — Aguazul was comparatively free from internal strife. Seemingly I was wrong. But local politics were outside my province. I brushed the matter to the back of my mind and finished my breakfast. This morning I was due to start work.