After opening on a grandiose note, Cordoban tinged his voice with sadness as he referred to the recent problems that had developed in and around Vados. Shots of the most squalid dwellings imaginable, of diseased children sharing huts with pigs and burros, of overcrowding and overbreeding. The contrast with the clean, attractive city itself was appalling. Apparently one of the cameramen had actually gone down into Sigueiras’s slum under the monorail station; effective shots stressed the difference between the bright sunlit platforms of the station above and the dark, unsanitary warren below.
There was a brief taped interview with Caldwell, the young man from the city health department whom I had met in Angers’ office, who gave some alarming figures about disease and malnutrition in the shantytowns; then another, slightly longer, with Angers, taped in his office with the wall map of Vados unrolled behind him. He deplored the existing situation in tones of grave concern, and then cheered up slightly as he explained that the enlightened president had taken steps to remedy the evils now current.
He mentioned my name, and Cordoban signaled to me. I went over to the chair alongside his and sat down just out of shot.
Cheerfully Cordoban announced to the audience that he was privileged to have the person responsible for setting things to rights in the studio this evening.
“aquí esta el señor Hakluyt—” and the camera turned on me.
After what I had seen from the taped shots, I got rather more heated in my replies to Cordoban’s questions than I had in the rehearsal, but my command of Spanish held out okay, and I received nods of approval and encouragement from Cordoban whenever he was off-camera. I really was feeling that it was a hell of a shame to mar the sleek beauty of Ciudad de Vados with these slums, and I did my best to reassure the viewers that a way would be found to cure the trouble. Then the program was suddenly over; Cordoban was getting up, smiling, to congratulate me on getting through it in Spanish; Señora Cortes came from the control room with Rioco to thank me for appearing, and as I was trying to find words to express my appreciation, the door of the studio opened and Mayor came in, beaming plumply and apologizing to Señora Cortes for doubting her ability to make a success of the program.
Gradually the turmoil subsided; some of the technicians departed for the bar, talking volubly, and others set about rearranging the cameras and lighting for another transmission later on. Cordoban gestured to me to hang on for a moment; he himself hovered at Mayor’s side, and when the balding man had finished reviewing the program with Señora Cortes, caught his attention.
Sharp brown eyes, the whites a little bloodshot, skewered me as Mayor swiveled his head toward me; he listened to Cordoban intently, paused — not hesitated; there was something about his manner that suggested he never needed to hesitate over a decision — and then nodded and smiled.
His smile was quick, unforced, and unlasting: a tool, an expression that communicated a particular implication, to be ended when the significance had been put across. I went up to him with a feeling that this meeting was not quite real; for so long Alejandro Mayor’s name had not been associated in my mind with a man, but with a set of precepts, and to find them embodied in an individual was disconcerting.
He shook my hand, briefly. “I have heard all about you,” he said in good English. “All, that is, except what I only now hear from Francisco here — that in one sense I can claim you as a pupil of mine.”
He cocked his head a little to one side, as though he had thrown out a challenging statement in a debate and wanted me to worry about it. I said, “In one sense, yes, doctor. I was much influenced by your book The Administration of the Twentieth-Century State.”
He frowned — briefly again; it seemed that he did everything by precisely measured small doses. “Ah, that,” he said distastefully. “My first book, señor — full of inaccurate theorizing and pure guesswork. I disclaim it; it was a firework, nothing better.”
“How so?”
Mayor spread his hands. “Why, when I wrote it, I was innocent of experience in practical government. There were a thousand, a hundred thousand errors in points of detail, which only practical government could expose for what they were. I can excuse it on only one good ground — that it caused our president to interest himself in my work.”
A technician signaled for his attention; he excused himself for a moment and listened to what the man had to say. I used the interlude to run over in my mind what I could remember of that first book which had so impressed me and which he now declared to have been full of mistakes.
A firework, he called it — well, that was accurate enough. It was a virtuoso display of paradoxes: opposing arguments brilliantly set forth so that one could hardly question the logic on either side. He presented, among other things, a picture of the free democratic state as the high point of the social evolution of man; then, with shattering precision, he proceeded to demonstrate that the free democratic state was far too unstable to endure and therefore guaranteed its citizens misery and destruction. He presented totalitarian systems as stable, enduring, reliable — and then mercilessly exposed one by one the factors which rendered their eventual downfall inevitable. By the time the reader was dizzy, Mayor was tossing out provocative suggestions for remedying these defects, and the total impression left on students like myself — who went through college faced with what seemed like equally appalling alternative futures: nuclear war or a population explosion that would pass the six billion mark by the end of the century — was that for the first time the West had produced a man capable of forging social techniques to match the situation. For myself, convinced as I had been that the ant heap state of People’s China was the only place where adequate social techniques to cope with the population explosion were being evolved, his book had been a revelation. Even now, eighteen years after I had first read it, I could hardly imagine where lay these flaws of which Mayor had just spoken. Of course, if I were actually to reread it or read some of his newer work in which presumably these faults had been rectified, I’d see what he meant.
I watched him as he disposed crisply of the problem raised by the inquiring technician. So he had been a minister here since the time I read that first book of his… The fact struck me as amazing at first — my automatic reaction was that if he had in fact been applying his theory of government and administration of the state, practically every move he made ought to have had sensation value.
Then I recalled a passage from his first book which had stuck in my mind: “People do not object to government; to be governed, whether by custom or by decree, is part of the human condition. People object to what might be called the scaffolding of government. With the spread of literacy and the drawing together by communications of our small planet, more and more individuals became aware of that scaffolding; more and more individuals oppose it because they can see it. How do we create government without scaffolding? There is a central problem for modern society.”
Well, of course, if he hadn’t dismissed that, too, as an error, it would explain a lot.
He was turning back toward us now — toward me in particular. “You have dined this evening, Señor Hakluyt?” he was asking.
I shook my head.
“Then please join us here. Consider it a fee for your appearance; I may say it has been most valuable to us.”
I pondered the significance of that all through the meal, which we had in the bar where Cordoban had bought me a drink before the program. Señora Cortes, Rioco, and Cordoban came with us; they discussed future current affairs broadcasts in Spanish with Mayor, which rather irritated me, because I had hoped to probe further into the evolution of his theory which Mayor had hinted at. It was only toward the end of the meal that I managed to gain his undivided attention and put some of the questions that were irking me.