"I am very grateful to you, doctor. I hope that in San Hermano you will have enough time to give me your counsel. After you, doctor." Hall took a last drag at his cigar as Marina climbed the plane ladder.
There was a mountain—the Monte Azul which produced the beans of Androtten's rhapsodies—and a plateau in the clouds and below the plateau lay the ocean and the city of San Hermano. The lights were going on in the city when Flight Eighteen ended on the airport in the plateau, for the city was five miles farther from the sinking sun of the moment. On the plateau, the airport lights blended with the brown-orange shades of dusk; in the city the lights cut through the classic blackness of night.
A smartly dressed colonel and a top-hatted functionary of the Foreign Office were waiting with two black limousines for the Ansaldo party. The man from the Foreign Office had cleared all the passport and customs formalities. Jerry had just enough time to tell Hall that she and the doctors were to stay at the Bolivar before the cars started down the winding hill to San Hermano.
Hall rode to town with the rest of the passengers in the sleek Panair bus. He and Androtten were also bound for the Bolivar.
Riding into the valley, the bus descended into the night. It was a night made blacker by the war, as were the nights in San Juan and Havana and New York. San Hermano was the capital of a nation still at peace, but the maws of the war across the seas reached for the oil and coal of the world, and San Hermano could not escape this world. Three lights in every four on the Plaza de la Republica were out, for coal and oil furnished the power for the city's electricity. Two years earlier, Hall had asked Anibal Tabio why coal and oil had to turn the city's dynamos when the nation abounded in thousands of mountain streams which could be harnessed by men with slide rules and logarithm tables, and the gentle President had answered him in a sentence. "Because, my dear Hall, San Hermano has been in the twentieth century for barely a decade, while your own nation has been in our century for forty years." And tonight, looking at the ancient Plaza from the window of his room on the third floor of the Bolivar, Hall remembered Tabio's words with disturbing clarity.
From the balcony of his hotel room, Hall could see both San Hermanos, the Old City and the New. Everyone spoke of the two cities in these terms—the geographers, the tourist guides, the inveterate Hermanitos themselves.
The Old San Hermano had been founded by the Conquistadores in the sixteenth century, a walled speck on the shores of an ocean, a fortress and a thatched church, a handful of flimsy huts. In a century, the thatched church became a proud, gloomy Cathedral; one of the walls was knocked down, and in its place was the cobbled Plaza de Fernando e Isabel. The Plaza was Spain in the New World; opening on to its cobbles stood the huge Moorish stone palaces designed by architects brought over from Seville, the palace of the Captains-General who served as colonial governors, the fortified mint, the Cathedral, the home of the Governor's elder brother, the Duke of La Runa. Enslaved Indians and later chained Negroes from the African coasts had carried on their backs the square stones Spanish masons cut and formed for the edifices of the Plaza, first the Cathedral, next the Governor's Palace and the Mint.
Then, in the days of Hidalgo, Bolivar, and San Martin, the ancient Plaza of the Conquistadores became the Plaza de la Republica, and for a few glorious hours the new nation was in tune with its century. But the great Liberators of the times were to die in embittered exile, far from the scenes of their brightest victories. For one swing of the pendulum the liberated lands teetered on the dizzy heights of freedom, and then the pendulum swung back and stopped swinging for a century. The land remained in the hands of the Spanish nobles, and they won their war against the Industrial Revolution, and all that remained of the hour of triumph was the name the Liberators had given the old Plaza and a hollow Republic controlled by the landowners.
In ways more subtle, but no less real than the old ways, the Republic became a colony again, except that the nation was no longer ruled by a crown but by new and even more potent symbols: the sign of the pound, the sign of the dollar, the sign of the franc. The new order brought a new San Hermano, a new Western city built around the rims of the old fortress seaport. It was a strange and often beautiful mélange of French villas and British banks and American skyscrapers and German town houses.