“Well, don’t take my verdict,” Angers answered. “It’s up to Vados and Diaz to fight it out. But it sounds fair enough. A year, you say? A long year it will be. Still… And how about that eyesore of Sigueiras’s?”
“As I’ve said before, that’s far less important than it looks. The way things are moving already, Sigueiras can be legislated out of his slum without any opposition except from his tenants. Frankly, I’m surprised it’s taking so long.”
“Maybe the reason is — you’ve seen Liberdad this morning?”
“The piece about — what’s he called? — Castaldo? Yes, I saw it. I was much more interested to see the hole in the front page of Tiempo. ”
Angers looked smug. “Yes, I was right to suggest you get on to Lucas, wasn’t I?”
“I must call him up and thank him.”
“Any further trouble from Dalban? No? I was having a word with Arrio last night; it seems he’s likewise interested in Dalban’s goings-on. Something to do with his business, mainly. But he’s also learned a few things about the wealthy supporters of the National Party — like Dalban — which he says aren’t exactly nice. This question of Tezol’s fine, for example. I mean, Tezol was just an illiterate villager, but he was very useful to Dalban and his associates because of the influence he had with the uneducated classes, and it seems like a rotten thing to do to let him be jailed for want of a sum any of them could have given without noticing. There are some pretty unpleasant characters on the National side, Hakluyt.”
“You’ve said almost exactly what I thought,” I agreed.
Angers glanced at the clock. “Well, can’t jaw all day,” he said. “I hope your plans work out well.”
I spent the rest of the day translating processed data into man-hours and cubic meters of concrete and gave the results to the costing clerks at five-thirty. My head was spinning with figures; I decided to take a break before I got a headache and went out for a drink while they started the costing.
I walked out into a changed city — a city suddenly come to life like a sleeping giant irritated by the biting of a flea, turning and twitching this way and that without being able to trace the cause of its discomfort.
Someone had thrown red paint all over Vados’s statue. Police in the Calle del Sol were bundling young men into trucks; there was blood on the ground, and one of the police held two wet-bladed knives.
During the lunch-hour meeting in the Plaza del Sur, Arrio had been hanged in effigy from a tree by enraged supporters of Juan Tezol, in protest against his being jailed. Police had had to clear that up, too; the evening edition of Liberdad spoke of a hundred arrests.
My car had had the air let out of its tires.
And Sam Francis had committed suicide in jail…
XVIII
That night Ciudad de Vados reacted as a sleeping lion reacts when it becomes aware of a human presence. The lion does not move, except to open its eyes. Yet its body ceases to be relaxed. Inside the tawny pelt a thousand living springs are wound up instantly to maximum tension.
The only occasions when I’d ever walked up to a sleeping lion had been on the outside of a cage of steel bars. But I was inside Ciudad de Vados. I was inside the mouth of the lion.
I did something that night that I hadn’t done for years. I felt the need to get loaded with Dutch courage. When I was through at the traffic department — not that much work got done — I went to the bar of the hotel and drank steadily for three hours. The lights went out around me; at one in the morning I was still looking at my hands and seeing them shake. I wanted to leave this place. Now. Today.
Once, a long time ago, I met a newspaperman who had had to cover the great Chicago race riot of the twenties. He had found it difficult, he said, to describe to me exactly how he felt to be in a city divided against itself. If he had walked up to me now in the bar of the Hotel del Principe, I could have told him to save his reminiscences — I knew from the inside how he felt.
He was an old man, but he still closed his eyes and shivered gently when he recalled those terrible days. I wondered between drinks whether I, too, would remember with similar clarity when I was sixty-odd — and decided that I probably would.
Have you ever seen a fragment of ice dropped into supercooled water? The mass sets solid on the instant, like a man confronted with the head of Medusa — and in just such a way had Vados frozen in face of the news first of Tezol’s imprisonment, now of Francis’s suicide.
Suicide?whispered gossip at every street corner. No, of course not. A beating by the police? How should I know? But -
Enter rumor, painted full of tongues.
A fine of a thousand dolaros? Why did so small a sum go unpaid? We are poor — but there are those who say they agree with us, and some of them are rich!
Hence: The defenders of our rights have been robbed! And from there it was a slip of a mental gear, a less-than-jump to a conclusion close at hand, an automatic identification by thousands of people given to thinking in identities, to the plain statement.
“We, the people, have been robbed!”
I ought never to drink on my own. A few drinks give me mental clarity; in company, I could keep my consumption down because of the amount of talking I did. I’d got two reputations that way — as a good conversationalist and as a bore. On my own, I always reached too far too fast in search of still greater clarity, and wound up fuddled.
When I threw myself into bed, I fell deeply asleep for the first part of the night. About four or five o’clock I began to toss and dream. I was wearing an awkward nightshirt that kept tangling my legs; I had gone to a Latin American carnival dressed as an angel with a flaming sword, but the sword was pasteboard. Dark, piteous faces kept rising before me. I slashed at them with the sword, knowing it would not harm them. Yet every time I slashed, the heads rolled and spurts of blood two feet high leaped into the air. Desperately I tried to control the sword, but even when I let go of it it kept slashing and slashing, and the heads rolled until they made a monstrous grinning pile around my feet and my nightshirt was soaked with blood.
In the morning my bed was damp with sweat, and that was not due to the warmth of the night. It had been warm every night since I arrived.
I washed and shaved and went down to the lounge without having eaten my breakfast. I had that curious unsatisfied hollow feeling that isn’t quite a hangover but is compounded of too many cigarettes, slightly too much to drink, and not at all enough sleep. I called for the morning papers and then didn’t bother to open them; my mind was too distraught. I wasted a bit of time smoking a couple of cigarettes and went down to the traffic department to see Angers.
“Morning, Hakluyt,” he greeted me. “Just looking at those costings. Your scheme seems pretty sound — works out under two and a half million dolaros.”
“That’s bad,” I contradicted grumpily. “It oughtn’t to take more than half the appropriation — after all, it’s only half the job. I’ll take a look at it and cut the corners off: then if I can’t get it below two million I’ll have to start over.”
“But there’s no need for that,” said Angers, looking at me in mild surprise. “I’m sure we can raise the additional—”