There was sporadic firing from the outskirts shortly before midnight, but the last news bulletin of the evening — broadcast over an army transmitter rigged as emergency substitute for the regular service — claimed that the situation was back to normal.
I wondered.
The first thing I heard in the morning was my bedside phone. The call was from Angers, asking whether I was all right and advising me, if I was, to stay put. I told him I was indeed all right and inquired whether there had been any reaction from Diaz on the memo I had sent him.
“Reaction!” snorted Angers — I could visualize his expression. “Don’t be funny! He’s got both hands full of this bloody rioting!”
The advice to stay put was good. I did walk around the plaza in the course of the morning, and watched a machine-gun post being set up in case someone was foolish enough to try to initiate the regular daily speakers’ meeting. No one took the risk, of course; any crowd collected today would have exploded like so much nitroglycerine.
After reading the paper and the typed bulletin on the board in the lobby, which explained that in the event of serious trouble the hotel’s cellars would be opened to clients, I played a couple of desultory left-hand-against-right games with my new chess set. That used up most of the morning. Eventually it got to be time for lunch, and to try to create an appetite I dropped in the bar for an aperitif.
“What’s the latest scandal, Manuel?” I asked the barman not expecting any news.
His reply almost made me drop my glass. “It is said there will be a duel, señor. It is said that Señor Arrio has challenged Señor Mendoza to a duel.”
“The hell you say!” I stared at him, half-suspecting he might be putting me on, but his face was quite serious. “What about?”
“It is about a story which Señor Mendoza has written — a very funny story about a man of affairs. Señor Arrio says it is meant to describe him. But if he goes to court and complains, then everyone will say, ‘So Señor Arrio thinks this is himself! Ha, ha! Yes, we see that it is very like Señor Arrio, truly.’ And so many people will laugh at Señor Arrio. This he does not like. So—” He spread his hands.
“But dueling isn’t legal in Aguazul — is it?”
“It is against the law, señor. But then, many things are against the law. Everyone knows privately, but of course no one will learn of it officially until afterwards.”
I saw the distinction. “And when is this due to happen?” I inquired.
“Ah, that one does not know,” Manuel answered sagely. “If it were known, many people might go to watch, and then the police would have to interfere. But most probably at dawn tomorrow, and somewhere in the country.”
“And who’s likely to win?”
Manuel assumed the thoughtful look of a racing tipster. “Since Señor Mendoza has been challenged, he has the right to choose the weapons. It is known that Señor Arrio is one of the finest pistol shots in all America. So it will be swords — and so who can foretell?”
The story went afterward that Arrio lost control when he drew first blood, and when his seconds managed to drag him back, Mendoza’s guts were hanging out of the front of his shirt. They got him to the hospital, but he died there two hours later from loss of blood and internal injuries. He was no longer a young man, of course.
I’d never read any of Mendoza’s work, yet the news of his dying — which had no personal meaning to myself — affected me curiously. I thought of the way people thousands of miles away were going to feel regret at his death, when the news of, say, Vados dying would not concern them at all. I felt almost a touch of envy.
And then the unexpected happened. There was this man Pedro Murieta, whom I had seen at Presidential House in company with the Mendozas; he has something to do with Dalban and something to do with the publishing house that issued Felipe Mendoza’s books, and everyone seemed to know of him once his name was mentioned but scarcely thought of it otherwise — thatsort of a man.
And when he was through, Arrio was in jail on a charge of murder.
I wondered what the position of the two rival parties was now. The Nationals seemed to have made up ground; they had lost both Juan Tezol and Sam Francis under discreditable circumstances, but the Citizens had now had Andres Lucas impeached for conspiracy and Arrio jailed for murder. Both sides could now throw an equal amount of mud.
By the weekend, though, the rioting dissolved in a stalemate. Every cell in the city was full of people under arrest. The police had used the machine-gun in the Plaza del Sur — once. After that things were quieter. By Sunday night, aside from the few store windows boarded up and holes in the road where halfhearted attempts had been made to barricade a street, there was no sign that mobs had passed this way.
Nonetheless, I had believed when I came to this city that Aguazul was remarkably free of violence for a Latin American country. Either I’d picked the wrong time to come, or the official propaganda machine had spread a highly convincing untruth.
I was pretty sure that the first alternative was the correct one. Reactions like Angers’s couldn’t have been simulated. Angers dropped in to see me at the hotel on Sunday evening and told me, gray-faced, that he had never known such events in the decade he’d lived in Vados. He had just seen his wife off at the airport; he had sent her to stay with friends in California until the situation calmed down. And that was likely to be some time yet. The only other significant development over the weekend, though, was a stern and dignified challenge against Dominguez by Professor Cortes. Cortes made no attempt to defend Lucas — nobody was attempting to defend Lucas at the moment — but he maintained that Dominguez’s accusations against Caldwell were totally baseless. He had himself, so he claimed, seen far worse things in Sigueiras’s slum and in the shantytowns than found its way into the health department reports.
I wasn’t sure about Cortes any longer. Not now that I’d seen Sigueiras’s place for myself. Of course, Cortes carried great authority, and he wouldn’t be consciously lying in a matter like this. The best one could say, though, was that he had a fertile imagination. Or perhaps he just had a greater capacity for being shocked than most people.
Not greatly put out, Dominguez replied that it wasn’t his unsupported word in question; the report on which he had based his statements was an official one prepared by a special investigator called Guyiran, on the staff of the Ministry of the Interior. In other words, Dominguez implied, if you’re going for anybody, you’ve got to go for Diaz, and if you don’t, your complaints won’t cut any ice.
Apparently Cortes wasn’t prepared to go to such lengths; he preserved a hurt silence.
There seemed to be a fantastic network of interlocking rivalries and fields of influence here. Some of it was due to the peculiar semi-independent constitution of Ciudad de Vados, which wasn’t autonomous and yet didn’t seem to be amenable to the national government as easily as the rest of the country. Doubtless this was due to Vados’s personal relation with his “offspring.” But each development seemed to be laying bare new tensions created by the city’s privileged status, and people seemed to be far more aware of these tensions than they had been five weeks ago, when I arrived.
I wondered how much of the change was due to the loss of Alejandro Mayor and his inspired manipulation of the organs of information. I wondered whether Maria Posador had been right to fear for the future of the country when the creators of its highly individual technique of government died or grew too old.