Cordoban had been grinning at the inaudible difficulties Rioco was having with his run-through. Now he turned back and saw what I was doing.
“You’ve read that, perhaps?” he suggested. I shook my head. “Not this one. But I read his first book in college. It’s rather an odd sort of book to find in a TV studio, isn’t it?” I stuck it back in the rack. “I wonder what became of that man — I don’t seem to have heard of him for years.”
Cordoban regarded me with mild astonishment. “No?” he said quizzically. “Why—”
He glanced around through the glass wall and stiffened as the door of the studio swung open. “Why, there he is now.”
I followed his gaze and saw the balding, stout man whom I had met with Señora Cortes on my arrival. “Him?” I said blankly.
“But of course. Dr. Mayor has been Minister of Information and Communications in Aguazul for nearly eighteen years.”
“Why — that’s from long before the founding of Ciudad de Vados.”
Cordoban nodded. “That’s right. I’m surprised, though, at your saying his books were strange things to find in a television studio. Why, we regard them as indispensable handbooks.”
I frowned my way back into my memory. “I’m beginning to remember more clearly,” I said. “Didn’t he maintain from the start that communications were the essential tool of modern government? Yes, of course he did.” A further thought struck me. “Eighteen years, did you say? I was still in college then. But I thought Mayor had a chair of social science in Mexico City at that time.”
“I believe he did,” said Cordoban indifferently. “He lectures at the university here, too, of course.”
Out on the studio floor Enrique Rioco had finished his run-through; he seemed satisfied and had gone to have a word with Mayor.
“We just have time for that drink,” Cordoban said. “If you’d like one.”
I nodded, and we hurried out of the studio to a small but comfortable bar at the far end of the corridor. Over our drinks I came back to the previous subject.
“Does Dr. Mayor speak English?” I asked.
“I think so — I don’t know how well. Why? Do you want to meet him?”
“I’d be very interested,” I confirmed. “Maybe he’d be interested, too — he was a great influence on me when I was developing my own style.”
“Traffic analysts have styles?” Cordoban inquired sardonically. “How?”
“Why not? Architects have; they develop designs for living or designs for working; we develop designs for moving. There are half a dozen traffic analysts today with individual styles.”
Cordoban looked down at his glass. “I’m not quite sure I see how that’s possible,” he said. “But it’s interesting to know. Are you one of the half-dozen? I’m sorry — that’s a stupid question. You must be, or they wouldn’t have asked you to Ciudad de Vados.” He laughed. “We always say it, and we always flatter ourselves by saying it — only the best for Ciudad de Vados.”
He glanced at the wall clock and tossed down the rest of his drink.
“Time to get to our places,” he said. “Come on.”
Two minutes before the start of the program we were back in the studio. Cordoban ensconced me in a chair out of camera shot, explaining that he would signal to me to come up and take my place alongside him when he was ready to start the interview. Then he himself took a chair facing the number one camera, glanced at Rioco in the control room, and ringed his finger and thumb to signify okay. The first lines of his commentary went up on the teleprompter beside the camera. The red light came on.
The program was extremely well handled, if rather naive. It ran for thirty-five minutes, much of it on tape, and I watched it all on a master screen set high above Rioco’s head in the goldfish bowl. It started with a few shots of the planning and building of Vados, the opening ceremony with el Presidente himself officiating, and of traffic in the wide streets. I had little trouble following Cordoban’s smooth clear-spoken commentary, and I felt my interest more and more engaged as the program developed. This magnificent city really was, I thought, one of the greatest achievements of the twentieth century.
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.”