The Dancer Upstairs

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  “Success might have come sooner had we reacted earlier, with a clear policy and an image of the state as just, generous and firm. Unfortunately the state wasn’t that. It was directionless and its mongrel policies fuelled Ezequiel’s appeal to the country people and, of course, eventually also to people in the cities. By the time we decided to take note of him, it was too late. He had gathered momentum to such a degree that he could not be contained.

  “I was glad to be entrusted with the case. My vocation, for which I had abandoned a prosperous position, had fallen short of my hopes for it. So I dedicated myself to the pursuit of Ezequiel.

  “From the start, I was amazed by the fanaticism of his followers, by the degree of their subjection to his discipline. His cells proved impossible to penetrate. They relied on no outside group. They stole dynamite from the mines, their weapons from the police. We rarely made arrests because their intelligence was better than ours. The few we captured refused to speak. When someone talks it’s to get off the hook, but not in the case of Ezequiel’s people. It was evident they had been training since they were children. A good many of them were children. And when Ezequiel tapped a child on the shoulder, that child became a killer. To a ten-year-old boy or girl it was a game. They competed. Put a satchel of dynamite or an AK47 in the hands of a ten-year-old and annoy him – you don’t want to be around.

  “The finding of Ezequiel and his top echelon was my aim. My orders to my men didn’t change. To defeat our enemy we must be aware of his attractions. If we wanted to capture Ezequiel, whoever he was, we must win over the same people. In no circumstances must we kill or torture a suspect. Frustrating though it was, we stood for the rule of law. Oppression must be seen to come from the other side. Intimidation wouldn’t give us the answer. We might learn about the past, what had happened. But we forfeited a suspect’s co-operation in the future.

  “We were far more likely to achieve success by ‘turning’ a suspect. We should concentrate on scrutinizing those in the community who betrayed any sympathy for Ezequiel. Through details, however tiny, that’s how we’d find him. The colour of a wallpaper, the pattern of a dress, the contents of a dustbin.

  “So we stacked up the evidence.

  “We rifled dustbins. We watched houses. We noted what suspects wore. Slowly, patiently we would build up a picture until we could present our suspect with a stark alternative: Prosecution or Reward. Any human being when faced with two doors, one saying ‘Life’, the other ‘Death’ . . . well, you can predict which one they will choose.

  “Which is what happened when I confronted the sacristan in Jaci.”

  He was awkwardly thin, his crinkled skin hanging on his face like something borrowed. I found him in the church, removing the candle stubs from a row of spikes. It was vital that he should not view me as yet another official from the coast conversing in a language he didn’t understand. This was why the General had asked if I spoke Quechua.

  We sat on the front bench.

  “This is you?”

  “Yes.”

  In the photograph, taken from the roof of the village school, he was receiving money from a masked figure. His benefactor’s other hand clutched a captured police rifle.

  “And this?”

  The sacristan sat in a boat, two armed men in the prow.

  “I can explain.” The hospital would do nothing without money. He had taken it to pay for an operation. His mother was dying. Cancer of the lymph glands.

  “A judge would give you twenty years. Maybe more.”

  “You don’t understand.”

  “I do.”

  There were four more photographs, but he had seen from the start that I had the evidence to convict him. His face collapsed.

  After he had agreed to help, I spoke to him with sympathy. I promised to have a word with the hospital. I tried to win him round. I don’t know if I succeeded. But he said he would have the information ready – names, dropping-off points, dates and places of future actions – when I returned.

  I came back in plain clothes. The village lay in a bowl surrounded by steep, treeless hills, by a river with little water. It took three days to reach by bus and another morning in the back of a lorry. The driver was buying cheap potatoes. Passing as his mate, I helped load them into sacks.

  I had arranged to meet the sacristan at midday. As I walked towards the church, I heard hooves galloping over loose timbers. In the street, there was a stirring. People gathered up their produce, speaking in quick, hushed voices. Doors slammed. The horses must have crossed the bridge because the clatter faded. Then they rounded the high wall of the school.

  I could tell who the riders were. They were masked, about ten of them. Teenagers, led by a woman, her hair tucked beneath a baseball cap. Her short legs, bulging in their faded jeans, kicked the horse in the direction of the church where I was headed. The ground vibrated as she galloped past. She rode up to the church door, urging the horse up on to the stone step until its head and bristling shoulders filled the doorway. Then she got down. One of the masked riders took her reins. She hoisted up her belt, from which hung a machete in a leather scabbard, and walked into the vestry where the sacristan awaited me with his information.

  I fled uphill, up a narrow twisting street, to find a hiding place. The villagers had vanished behind their shutters, but I could feel their eyes. Eventually I took refuge behind an adobe wall – nothing but empty fields behind me – from where I looked down on the church. Minutes later, to the ringing of bells, five men were pushed into the square. The riders had known who to take, where to find them. The Mayor, two adulterers, the driver of the lorry which had brought me. And the sacristan. They were forced to their knees while the villagers watched. The bells fell silent and a young woman’s voice burst from the loudspeaker tethered to the ankle of a stone figure above the church door. She spoke in fluent Quechua on behalf of Ezequiel. He had come to free them from their past. For Ezequiel the past was dead, as – shortly – these criminals would be. The five men symbolized a world in total disorder. The only way to change it drastically was not through reliance on natural political means, but through the agency of someone divine. Ezequiel was this divinity. He was the Eternal Fire, the Red Sun, the Puka Inti, beyond human control. In his presence it was impossible to remain neutral. He was not just a law of nature, but the fulfilment of our oldest prophecies.

  “Weren’t you promised clinics?”

  Several heads nodded.

  “Weren’t you promised roads?”

  “Yes.”

  “Weren’t you promised telephones?”

  “That’s right!”

  “Ezequiel will bring you telephones, clinics, roads. He will strip the flesh of the reactionaries who denigrate your customs, and throw the scraps of their offal into the flames.” She held up a fist. Her voice rose to a strident pitch. “Under his banner the unbribable soul of the people will triumph over the genocidal forces of the law.”

  From the wall, after adjusting her shawl, an old woman hurled a stone at the men kneeling in the dust. I had stopped at her stall earlier to drink coca tea.

  “This Ezequiel, you support him?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “I am no longer a cabbage,” she had said, not looking at me.

  “Have you seen him ever?”

  “Yes.”

  “What does he look like?”

  She had pointed to a configuration of stones on the hillside.

  Below, the campesinos were being as easily won over as a child with a sweet. Terrifying. He was using our myths for his purposes. But even had the villagers understood, they wouldn’t have cared. Today in this square he offered what for five centuries the government had denied them.

  A murmur fluttered through the crowd. In the sun, something metal flashed. There was a shout and one of the masked riders jabbed a rifle into the sacristan’s back.

  “Forward!”

  The man’s head rested, bowed and shaking, on his clasp
ed hands. The force of the blow had knocked his cap to the ground.

  “Go forward!”

  Another blow on his shoulders. I heard him whimpering. He babbled about his sick mother, how she needed medicine. My fingers scratched the earth. He was about to be punished because of me. If I had been there, I would have been seized too. Who had betrayed him? Where was the information he had prepared for me?

  He threw back his head. In a hoarse summons to the surrounding bowl he shouted: “Rejas!”

  My name ricochetted from hill to hill.

  “Forward, traitor!”

  One knee tested the ground an inch ahead. Then the other. In minuscule shuffles he advanced towards the masked figure with the machete.

  She tested the blade with her thumb.

  “Rejas!” And madly his eyes followed the echoes, as if they would delve me into the open.

  “Viva El Presidente Ezequiel!”

  I tell you, I still wake up and it’s his call I’m hearing. Rejas, Rejas, REJAS.

  In this fashion Ezequiel persuaded the people to consider him divine. As a man of flesh and blood, he had ceased to exist. He had dismembered and scattered his body, and now thrived like a monstrous Host in the heart of anyone invoking his name. One day he was in Jaci, his name daubed in dripping letters on the church wall. On the same day he was six hundred miles east, robbing the Banco Weise. If ever we approached him, the old coca lady had warned, he would transform himself into a canopy of feathers and lift into the sky. “He can never be caught.”

  But Ezequiel was no condor or circle of stones. He existed, all right. Who he was and what he looked like – small, large, one-legged, wall-eyed – we had not the least idea. But someone who condoned public beheading; well, we didn’t think to look for a man of culture. We had marked him as a jungle-tested leader in the mould of Guevara or Castro, or those revolutionaries whom the General had fought in the Sixties. Which is why it was such an extraordinary shock when we discovered Ezequiel’s true background.

  Six months after the execution at Jaci, Sucre led into the office a senior lecturer in philosophy from the Catholic University.

  “He says he knows who Ezequiel is.”

  The philosopher – stooped, bloodshot eyes, white moustache – was frightened. A colleague had overheard his boast and mentioned it to another colleague, who at some point had told Sucre’s cousin, a second-year student in the same faculty.

  Contemptuously, Sucre piloted him to a chair. “He now denies it.”

  “Who were you talking about?”

  “It doesn’t matter. It was a quarrel, a long time ago.”

  He wore a maroon corduroy jacket buttoned up, which he undid to reveal a brown cardigan, also unbuttoned, covered in biscuit crumbs. His skin was drink-ruined, and he had the deflated cheeks of a boaster.

  “Tell me about this quarrel.”

  It was nothing serious. Just an academic squabble.

  “About Ezequiel?”

  “No, with Ezequiel.”

  “You’re telling me Ezequiel was an academic at your university?”

  In the corner Sucre chewed air.

  “He was a philosopher of no small distinction.” Tetchily he drew the wings of his cardigan over his shirt. “Only he didn’t answer to Ezequiel. His name was Edgardo Rodriguez Vilas.”

  And slowly it came out.

  It had happened in Villoria, in the mid-Sixties. Our informant – let us call him Pascual – had been recruited to the newly opened University of Santa Eufemia. He had been happy in his position, until the appointment of this man Vilas to the same faculty.

  Vilas was a Maoist, Pascual a Marxist. It was the time of the Sino-Soviet split. They’d argued.

  “I was pro-Castro. Vilas thought Castro was a chorus girl.”

  One day Pascual complained to the Dean. Said he didn’t approve of what Vilas was doing. A sinister, anti-humanist influence. So fixed in his political ideal all things became instrumental to it.

  Somehow his complaint reached the ears of Vilas. In charge of personnel, he removed Pascual from the faculty board.

  There was an added complication. One student over whom Vilas had exerted his influence was Pascual’s girl. Vilas had gone off with her.

  “You mean an affair?”

  “To my knowledge he did not actually have a physical relationship with her,” he said coldly.

  “Then why did she leave you?”

  “I understand she found his absolutism attractive. Such people are always hungry for imperatives when those imperatives coincide with their own.”

  “Which were?”

  “Like a lot of types unable to relate to others, he could excite in them a romantic possibility of violent revolution.”

  “Which you couldn’t?”

  He buttoned up his cardigan. “I tend to see the other side of the coin.”

  “And your colleague Vilas, he was capable of violence?”

  “Possibly. He was always talking world revolution. But it was the Sixties. Weren’t you?”

  “Where is he now?”

  “Look, he’s probably still in Villaria.”

  “Describe him.”

  “This was twenty years ago.”

  “Concentrate.”

  “Average height, glasses, black hair, thin.”

  “Do you have photos?” My attention had waned. At that time a lot of radical professors, because of the expansion of the universities, woke up in positions they didn’t have the intelligence to maintain. Suddenly they had power. They possessed the truth. So they used revolutionary ideology to shatter the system. Until it threatened their pension plans.

  “He would never be photographed,” Pascual was saying.

  “Really? Why not?”

  “Hated it. Which we found odd because he wasn’t shy. If you ask me it was vanity. He had this skin complaint.”

  My interest quickened. “Get the albums, Sucre.”

  There were six of them. “Take a look.”

  The philosopher turned the laminated pages. On one side we had stuck pictures of Ezequiel’s victims; opposite, the faces of those so far interrogated.

  “I didn’t realize . . .”

  “No one here does.”

  He leafed through the album. Page after page of mutilation.

  “He was responsible for this?” He stared at the sacristan’s corpse. He was frightened. He remembered something. Something was coming back to him.

  He reached the end. “No, not there.”

  “Try an earlier one.”

  With relief he closed the second book. “Nothing.”

  “Another.”

  We were nearly done. His cardigan buttoned up, he wanted to go.

  “Tell me. You’re a man who understands history,” I said. “If you want to start a revolution, why not issue a manifesto? Why not show the people who you are, what you’re doing?”

  He leaned back, grateful to explain. “That’s perfectly understandable. Socrates wrote nothing down. Neither did Jesus. The problem with text is that it assumes its own reality. It cannot answer, and it cannot explain.”

  “So if you wanted to be effective, you’d leave no trace?”

  “That’s right.”

  I opened another album, the earliest. “Last one.”

  Impatiently he turned the pages. Half way into the album he dislodged a photograph. I retrieved the print from the floor and inserted it back under the plastic sheet. Pascual lifted the next page, and even though he had not been concentrating, I saw the hairline hesitation. His hand came up, scratched the side of his nose. Something forced him to hurry on, cover up the image which had made his eyes contract.

  “Stop!” I pressed my hand down on the album, turned the page back.

  “Is that him?”

  The philosopher’s cheeks sagged. His eyes flicked wildly over the face. I could only see it upside-down. I wrenched the album from him. He had been trapped by a photograph of a man wearing a brown alpaca scarf, taken on a scalding morning
near Sierra de Pruna. Taken by me.

  A curious and not very comfortable feeling comes over me when I look at prints of my wedding or of Laura’s christening: as soon as I see them, my memory of the occasion is subverted. In a vital way what they celebrate has ceased to exist for me.

  So it was with that photograph of Ezequiel. Each time I looked at it I remembered less. The image, already distant, became encrusted with a further memory of my failure to remember anything more. The live face was, if you like, lost, bullied out by subsequent events.

  At the office there was jubilation. At last we knew who he was and what he looked like. Professor Edgardo Vilas was the labourer Melquiades Artemio Duran who was the Maoist revolutionary leader Ezequiel. The General hoped the sight of him might prompt additional memories, as if, by remembering one tiny detail extra, all would be solved.

  “Think hard, Tomcat. Think back. There must be something other than his Yankee cigarettes and the rash on his neck.”

  But there wasn’t. Lifeless, unreal, boiled in time, he had become a non-face. He wasn’t a man any more. Not someone you could see in a café drinking tea and say “Yes!” He had become an icon. When I looked into those narrow black eyes all I saw was a stiff tail sticking out of a sack.

  Pascual couldn’t help. Two days later, when he was required to come back in and verify the photograph before General Merino, the faculty informed me that he had taken unexpected leave. He never did come back.

  It does seem incredible in the age of the camera that someone can avoid having their picture taken for thirty-four years. From outer space it is possible to frame the scowl of a man perching on a beer crate in a country yard, yet for all this time what printed image did we have of Ezequiel? Apart from that black-and-white print, not one. Think of it: no high school portrait, no family picnic, no face gazing from among a group of friends. That this distinction should have been achieved by the holder of a prominent chair at Santa Eufemia University is remarkable.

  With the same reverence for detail that characterized his dissertation on the Kantian theory of space, he had excised from the record all trace of his physical presence. When I inspected his dissertation, his appointment to the professorship, his library card, I found in each case the same rough, near transparent patch, lighter in colour than the surrounding page, where a photograph had been torn out or removed with a knife.