Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand [82]
She noticed the way he fingered the marbles in his hand. He was not conscious of it, he was looking off into some grim distance, but she felt certain that the action was a relief to him, perhaps as a contrast. His fingers were moving slowly, feeling the texture of the stones with sensual enjoyment. Instead of finding it crude, she found it strangely attractive—as if, she thought suddenly, as if sensuality were not physical at all, but came from a fine discrimination of the spirit.
“And that’s not all they didn’t know,” he said. “They’re in for some more knowledge. There’s that housing settlement for the workers of San Sebastián. It cost eight million dollars. Steel-frame houses, with plumbing, electricity and refrigeration. Also a school, a church, a hospital and a movie theater. A settlement built for people who had lived in hovels made of driftwood and stray tin cans. My reward for building it was to be the privilege of escaping with my skin, a special concession due to the accident of my not being a native of the People’s State of Mexico. That workers’ settlement was also part of their plans. A model example of progressive State housing. Well, those steel-frame houses are mainly cardboard, with a coating of good imitation shellac. They won’t stand another year. The plumbing pipes—as well as most of our mining equipment—were purchased from the dealers whose main source of supply are the city dumps of Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro. I’d give those pipes another five months, and the electric system about six. The wonderful roads we graded up four thousand feet of rock for the People’s State of Mexico, will not last beyond a couple of winters: they’re cheap cement without foundation, and the bracing at the bad turns is just painted clapboard. Wait for one good mountain slide. The church, I think, will stand. They’ll need it.”
“Francisco,” she whispered, “did you do it on purpose?”
He raised his head; she was startled to see that his face had a look of infinite weariness. “Whether I did it on purpose,” he said, “or through neglect, or through stupidity, don’t you understand that that doesn’t make any difference? The same element was missing.”
She was trembling. Against all her decisions and control, she cried, “Francisco! If you see what’s happening in the world, if you understand all the things you said, you can’t laugh about it! You, of all men, you should fight them!”
“Whom?”
“The looters, and those who make world-looting possible. The Mexican planners and their kind.”
His smile had a dangerous edge. “No, my dear. It’s you that I have to fight.”
She looked at him blankly. “What are you trying to say?”
“I am saying that the workers’ settlement of San Sebastián cost eight million dollars,” he answered with slow emphasis, his voice hard. “The price paid for those cardboard houses was the price that could have bought steel structures. So was the price paid for every other item. That money went to men who grow rich by such methods. Such men do not remain rich for long. The money will go into channels which will carry it, not to the most productive, but to the most corrupt. By the standards of our time, the man who has the least to offer is the man who wins. That money will vanish in projects such as the San Sebastián Mines.”
She asked with effort, “Is that what you’re after?”
“Yes.”
“Is that what you find amusing?”
“Yes.”
“I am thinking of your name,” she said, while another part of