Señora Cortes blanched slightly, but replied peaceably, explaining who I was and where she had been. “Go into the studio, Enrique,” she added to Rioco. “Things can’t be in too bad a muddle, but something probably needs setting right.”
Rioco nodded and disappeared through the nearest door. The balding man seemed to have been pacified by what Señora Cortes had to say and shook my hand absent-mindedly. “I’m beginning to think I should have handled the details of this program myself,” he said in a depressed voice, not paying me any more attention. “Please make sure it is good, won’t you, Isabela?”
He turned away and strode down the corridor. Showing signs of relief at his departure, Señora Cortes turned to me again.
“Please come with me,” she said. “I will show you the studio from which we make this broadcast. Much of it is on tape already, of course, but the interview with you and some other parts will transmit live. This way.”
We went through the same door as that which Rioco had taken, picked our way through a tangle of cables snaking across the floor, dodged technicians and avoided cameramen lining up angles. Finally we took refuge in an alcove next to the director’s goldfish bowl.
Rioco had changed his personality as soon as he entered the studio, obviously. Now, standing between a girl in glasses who held a pile of duplicated scripts and a man with cigarette-yellowed fingers who seemed to be the lighting technician, he was crackling out authoritative directions to his staff.
“Francisco!” called Señora Cortes to a pleasant-faced young man crossing the floor. He turned and came up to us, and she introduced him as Francisco Cordoban. “Our regular interviewer on this program,” she explained.
“Glad to meet you, Mr. Hakluyt,” said Cordoban, gripping my hand squarely. “Bit short notice, I’m afraid, asking you to appear for us, but it’s extremely good of you to come. The interview won’t run too long, I’m afraid — I’m figuring on between seven and nine minutes near the end of the program. How’s your Spanish? 1 can run it in either English or Spanish, but we lose a lot of time if I have to interpret, of course.”
I shrugged. “Well, my Spanish is pretty poor, but I’m willing to try it if you like.”
“Excellent. Look, let’s step into the control room for a few minutes — Enrique won’t be ready to come in for a while, I imagine. I can give you an idea of the questions I want to ask and find out if answering them in Spanish gives you any trouble.”
He pushed open the door and stood aside to let me pass. The goldfish bowl was fairly cramped, but of course as soon as the door was closed again it was dead silent. None of the monitor screens was working yet, and only a whisper indicating that current was flowing came from the speakers.
Cordoban gave me a chair and himself leaned back against a panel of lights. “Well, I’ll start off with a bit about your background and the kind of work you do — you’re a traffic analyst, isn’t that correct? And you’ve worked almost all over the world. Anywhere in particular you’d like me to mention?”
“Oh — India, the UAR, the States. And my native Australia, of course.”
“Ah-hah. Good. Well, that bit doesn’t involve you; I’ll just do the spiel with you out of shot. Then I’ll start putting questions to you directly. The first ones will be quite simple, about what you think of Vados. Let’s try it through. Ha estado Vd. otra vez en Ciudad de Vados?”
“Nunca,” I answered.
“Le gusta a Vd. nuestra ciudad?”
And so it went smoothly enough: it was much as I had expected — mostly platitudes about how impressive Vados was. The nearest Cordoban came to treading on the edge of the controversy regarding the proposed redesigning was to ask me if I had yet made up my mind about what I would recommend.
I told him that I had been here only a few days and it was too early to say.
“Bueno!” he exclaimed, pushing himself away from the panel where he had been leaning. “That’ll do nicely, Mr. Hakluyt. Well, we still have twenty minutes before we go on the air — we could step around to the bar for a drink if you like—”
He looked out onto the floor of the studio and corrected himself. “Sorry — Enrique’s doing a run-through, so we’ll have to stick around a moment. Cigarette?”
I accepted the offer.
“Have you been on television before?” Cordoban inquired. “I didn’t think to ask. Maybe you’d be more interested to stay here and watch what’s happening.”
“I get put on TV quite often,” I said. “I’ve been in charge of two or three quite big projects in the States, and reporters sometimes come swarming around when work’s in progress.”
“Ah-hah,” Cordoban nodded. “I can well understand that. We’ll be making a very big feature of the reconstruction when it starts, I imagine.”
“No matter what form it takes?” I couldn’t resist the jab; it missed, and he gave me a puzzled look.
“Does it matter what the details are? It’s news, anyway.”
I passed it off as inconsequential. “Tell me,” I said. “You have quite a setup here — far bigger than I’d expected. Is your broadcasting very extensive?”
“It’s the highest coverage in Latin America, as a matter of fact,” he said with a hint of pride. “We’ve used television a lot over the past twenty-odd years. I’m not sure what the current percentage is, but according to the last survey a year ago, we were getting to two-thirds of the total population, except, of course, at the big festivals like Easter. Even then there’s television playing in bars and places, of course, and the smallest villages have at least one set apiece now. Then we go over the border to some extent, of course, but the number of sets there is so much smaller it’s negligible.”
I was impressed. “How about radio?” I said. “I suppose you don’t pay that much attention if your TV audience is so large.”
“Oh, on the contrary! Except for the hour-a-day educational programs, we only telecast from six in the evening, you know. There isn’t much of an audience during the day, except on Sunday afternoons when we come on at two. But we do radio programs from six in the morning until midnight. Workers in factories listen, peasants take portable radiós into the fields with them, drivers on the road and housewives at home listen in — why should we waste a potential audience like that?”
The way he put it puzzled me slightly; I didn’t press the matter, though, and simply nodded. He looked past me through the glass wall. “Enrique’s still having trouble” he noted. “I don’t think we’d better disturb him for another few moments.”
I glanced around the room; as he spoke, my eye fell on a small row of books alongside the control panel, and I thought there was something familiar about the nearest of them. They were mainly cheap novels, presumably what the technicians or producer read during lulls or transmission of intercut tape. The one that caught my eye, however, was obviously out of place; it was stout and well-thumbed, and its red binding bore several cigarette burns. It looked like a textbook; I presumed it was a manual of television engineering, but — perhaps the author’s name rang a bell with me — I picked it up.
A book whose title, even in Spanish, meant something to me because the name of the author was very well-known to me indeed: Alejandro Mayor.
Several years rolled back in my mind; I was back at the university, arguing heatedly over the most controversial of many controversial books in our social science curriculum. In its English edition the book was called The Administration of the Twentieth-Century State, and the author was this same Alejandro Mayor.
I opened the book with interest; its title was El Hombre de la Ciudad de Hoy — The Modern City Man.I wondered if it was as pungent and original as the earlier work, for I saw it had only been published a matter of five years ago. Probably not, I decided with regret; in those days Mayor had been a firebrand type of youthful iconoclast causing a scandal in academic circles with every lecture course he gave at the Mexico City School of Social Science. Now he was probably a sedate conformist. That fate usually overtakes innovators — their ideas cease to be revolutionary.