It is not the first time an intense search has yielded nothing. At the Police Academy we were lectured on the American D. B. Cooper, who was the first person to hijack an aircraft. Our tutor credited Cooper with being the fore-runner of modern terrorism. Decades later, he may be still at large, walking cheerfully down some main street in Mississippi, popping his pink gum at the sky. For three hours, the length of the flight, he existed as D. B. Cooper, after which no one saw him again. He parachuted out of history, and the last image anyone had of him was the light on his silk chute drifting towards the pines.
Once he had climbed back into his pick-up, that’s how it was with Ezequiel.
I won’t go into detail about the months and years which followed. The people who had met him, the rooms he had lived in, the shop where he had bought his mineral water – all these I traced until the moment of his disappearance. But I was trying to carve a statue out of shadows. I might have been excavating one of those burial mounds at Paracas. To the General my exhibits appeared indistinguishable from the sand.
It proved impossible to conjure Ezequiel from such remnants. He was not a man to whom stories attached themselves. His character, assembled from hundreds of interviews, was a hollow, papier maché construction. The sentences cancelled each other out. You heard only the echoes.
“He wouldn’t hurt a fly.” Classmate, San Agustin College, Galiteo.
“He said that violent revolution was the only way to seize power and transform the world.” Classmate.
“He had no girlfriends.” Classmate.
“Women pushed and shoved to be near him.” Pupil, Santa Eufemia.
“His lectures were repetitive. He was not a particularly interesting phenomenon.” Fellow teacher.
“He was handing down the Commandments.” Pupil.
“He only bought mineral water.” Shopkeeper, Lepe.
“I saw him smile once. It was in the street and he was drunk.” Fellow university student, Lepe.
“He said that flowers made him sneeze.” Secretary at Faculty of Philosophy, Santa Eufemia.
“Every day for lunch he ordered the same dish: a flavoured yogurt.” Cashier at university canteen, Lepe.
“He asked me to turn down my music.” Neighbour, Santa Eufemia.
“In the middle of a conversation he would tell you Albanian olive oil was the best in the world.” Visiting Peace Corps lecturer.
“He never took off his jacket. He always wore a scarf.” Pupils, various.
Read cold on the page, these statements were inert or comical. One element united them. In each case I heard the hush in the speaker’s voice, the kind of hush people use when they should not be speaking.
Where was he?
Possibly he was not in the country at all. He could easily, without risk to himself, have directed his operations from some hotel in, say, Paris. But I didn’t think so. My instinct told me he remained locked into this soil, driven into it with the force of an axe, identified with his revolution so as to be indivisible from it.
He really was a charismatic leader, you see. This was a man in command, who was not commanded. An unquivering spirit seemed to lie at the centre of him, stilled into place by a terrible ambition. He didn’t have to participate himself. I doubt he ever fired a gun. But by the act of being there, of showing his face, he could infuse a terrible energy into his followers.
And the throat-slittings and the killings and the bombings and the robberies and the kangaroo trials and the dogs hung from lampposts – these ceased when he left an area. They followed him wherever he went and when he was no longer there, they stopped. He was, if you like, one of those washerwomen in times of plague who contaminate everything they touch even as they wash it. Our own Typhoid Mary, except he believed he was making clean the lives of our people. He was scrubbing out the dirt and the corruption and the abuses which had oppressed us since the Spanish Conquest. He was leading us towards his fresh new dawn.
That’s how he earned his nickname at university. Behind his back they called him Shampoo. Because he brainwashed people.
He wasn’t abroad, but where was he? Believe me, it is difficult to disappear. Your ability to hide is restricted if you stand out in any sort of way. If you are bigger or more intelligent or if you come from somewhere else. Ezequiel would have stood out.
When people are after you and want to kill you, you have three choices:
You go to a place where there are no people.
You never leave your room. But it’s not easy to hide an extra person; you knock over a chair and always there’s someone downstairs who had thought, until then, that there was no one else up there.
You remain in the open, but you change yourself in every way possible. If you are an obsessive coffee drinker, you drink tea. If you wear glasses you change to contact lenses. If you like to wear your hair one length, you wear it another. You put tacks in your shoes so your mother would not recognize your walk. You change your instincts. The Gestapo caught one of your agents in Paris because she looked to the right as she crossed the road. If you have to go into the street, you guard against anyone catching sight of your profile. Even on a rainy evening it’s easy to recognize a person you know. You might not have seen them for twenty years, but no downpour will disguise the contours of a familiar cheek spotted through a car window.
In short, you change your habits, your instincts, your face.
But one thing you can’t change is your illness.
You remember how I typed “eczema” on the basic description of Melquiades Artemio Duran? Well, Ezequiel suffered from psoriasis.
It’s not a pretty disease. The new cells push up before the old cells are ready to leave and you erupt in nasty weeping yellow scabs. But what’s odd about psoriasis when you consider Ezequiel is that you don’t find it among the Indians. It’s a Caucasian disease. A white man’s disease.
It’s also incurable. It might fluctuate and there may be periods when it’s not present, but always it comes back. What you’ve got to watch out for is the stage when it becomes rampant, because that’s when the sores become infected and the smallest movement is agony.
For a long time Ezequiel’s bad skin was my most concrete lead. After any attack by his people on a village, I would interrogate the chemist. Sometimes they’d lie, sometimes there would be no records, but where records existed these often revealed a sale of Kenacort E.
It suggested Ezequiel’s illness might be worsening. If this was the case, I was confident he would be forced soon to abandon the high altitudes. You see, at a certain altitude his blood would coagulate. He wouldn’t be able to go on breathing, and that’s why he would want to make his way down to the coast.
I have no proof to back this, but I suspect Ezequiel’s ailment was connected with his decision to go underground. His behaviour did suggest a certain vanity. All those spots – would you want to be seen in that condition? How else does one explain the quantum leap from Professor Edgardo Vilas, the mild-mannered philosopher, into President Ezequiel, the revolutionary?
I am not a Kantian philosopher. I find his work hardly intelligible. But I understand it enough to know that Ezequiel took an á la carte attitude to Kant’s works, and made such a meal of his philosophy that its originator would not have recognized it.
Kant does have one image which holds some meaning for me: the bird which thought it could fly faster in a vacuum, without air to beat against. For me, that is where Ezequiel’s reading and his texts and his philosophy had led him, to airless haunts where all gusts of life were extinguished. He’d started out with his ideology, but he was dealing with people for whom ideology meant nothing. Blood and bone and death were all that mattered to the people in my valley. It was idiotic to think they would care about Kant or Mao or Marx, and so he taught them in blood and bone and death, and he had become intoxicated.
My pursuit went on.
I got used to the overlarded soup of the canteen, the wary nods in corridors, the unanswering shelves of docum
ents and photographs, the despair of an unfinished case.
I drove home.
I crouched before Laura as she sat in her playpen and shielded with both hands the flicker of my love for Sylvina. But my vocation had generated a deepening hostility. The unsolicited touch of our first meeting, that look across the table in the faculty library, such intimacies had fled into a darkness from which I could not retrieve them.
Day after day passed like this. Year by year. Twelve of them.
It came as a shock, therefore, when Ezequiel’s death was announced. On 3 March 1992, Alberto Quesada, Minister of the Interior, gave a television interview in the course of which, questioned about the insurrection in the highlands, he adopted this line: Ezequiel, a criminal, a one-off, was certainly dead. If he wasn’t dead, why didn’t he show his face? He was the Eternal Flame. How could you conceal his splendid blaze?
Because, Quesada jeered, he had perished. He was like one of those tyrannical sultans whose death is not admitted, and whose pavilion is raised each night. He was like El Cid, and they had strapped his carcass to his horse. He had, in short, been blown out.
It was tempting to believe Quesada. But his bellicose message was as crude as the posters distributed by his Ministry, showing my photograph of Ezequiel prancing on cartoon cloven feet and embellished with the tail of a devil. If such a pivotal figure was dead, there would be some sign that he was no longer on the scene. If the army had killed him in a shoot-out, they would have flaunted the body. They would have treated him like Che Guevara.
My own belief, which I had submitted in my latest report to General Merino, was that, on the contrary, Ezequiel had never posed a greater threat.
I expected to hear back from the General, but three weeks after Quesada’s broadcast the police went on strike. None of us had been paid for two months. Outside the Ministry of the Interior a thousand policemen held up our symbol, a worn-out boot. The strike ended with Quesada giving his personal assurance that all salaries would be paid by the end of the week. Two days later the General summoned me. It was, the summons said, important.
I never could predict what the General regarded as important. I hoped he wanted to discuss my report. But he might want to talk about Quesada’s pay settlement; or possibly he wished to know more about Hilda Cortado, a woman we had arrested the previous afternoon for distributing subversive leaflets. It was rare to catch someone red-handed like this.
In fact, it was about none of these things.
Preparing his tackle, he fiddled with a lure dangling with hooks. “Forget it, Tomcat. It’s over.” He rolled down his turtleneck and, with the lure, slit the air an inch from his neck. “Your pal Ezequiel, he’s dead.”
He sketched the details for me brusquely. Skirmish on a dirt road above Sierra de Pruna. Lorry refuses to stop. Army opens fire. Lorry, packed with dynamite from copper mine, explodes. Body found. Ezequiel.
Merino was annoyed. “We work on this for twelve years, then the army waltzes in. General Lache is going to be unspeakable.”
“When did this happen, sir?”
“A month ago.”
“A month ago! Why weren’t we told before?”
“Lache wanted to be certain. He tells me Quesada’s very happy.”
It was true I had observed a lull in Ezequiel’s activities. Normally during this period we might have expected forty, fifty incidents in the provinces. Since Quesada’s broadcast my unit had reported seven.
Could Ezequiel be dead?
I expected the story to lead the news on Canal 7, but it was transmitted near the end, after an item on the national women’s volleyball team. In the capital, Ezequiel remained virtually unknown. The announcement of his bandit’s end on a dust road a thousand miles away merited twenty seconds. There was film of a truck on its side and a plump corpse covered with an army blanket. An anonymous hand drew back the blanket, and the camera closed in on a man’s head, lingering over charred features and a body which resembled a burned sofa.
Sucre looked to me for confirmation. “That’s him. Isn’t it, sir?”
“It could be.”
You know how you look forward to something which you never believe will happen, and when it does you are overcome with exhaustion? That was my feeling on seeing the blackened mess which was Ezequiel’s face. With this fulfilment of my task, desire had faded. There was none of the anticipated elation. I felt stripped of my shadow.
Quesada, a small dapper figure in a white suit, was filmed clapping the shoulder of General Lache, who looked massively pleased with himself. Delighted, the Minister knocked on the camera lens. “As of this moment, Ezequiel no longer exists.”
General Merino would have attributed it to professional resentment, but I had no wish to see the body.
5
“When did you next see Ezequiel?”
It was the second night and Emilio had removed their plates. Dyer, arriving early, had found Rejas already sitting at the corner table.
“See him? Five days after he was pronounced dead. But I didn’t know it was Ezequiel.”
“Who did you think it was?”
“How well do you know my capital?”
“Reasonably well.”
“Then you know Surcos?”
Dyer did. A prosperous new suburb in the northern outskirts. Rejas leant forward, raising his chin.
Picture this. It’s about eight-thirty at night. I’ve parked my car and I’m looking up at the first floor window of the building opposite. A yellow curtain – it is obviously a child’s room – is drawn. There are cartoons of some sort decorating the fabric, but since the room is in darkness I can’t tell what they are. The sliding window is open at one corner where a breeze sucks at the curtain, distorting the characters. I am trying to decide who they are – whether it’s Mickey Mouse or maybe Dumbo the Elephant – when a light cuts on and a strange blue glow, full of underwatery movements, flickers over the ceiling. A figure moves across the light. I see someone pause behind the curtain and very slightly part it.
Although bracing myself for an uncomfortable interview, I do remember wondering who is in that upstairs room and whether the person framed by those eerie fluorescent shadows is Laura’s teacher – or whether the apartment is even part of the dance studio.
It’s Laura’s teacher I’m waiting to see. There’s been an embarrassing incident. Due to Quesada’s delay in paying our salaries, my cheque for Laura’s lessons has bounced. I hope the embarrassment is temporary. Deprived of Ezequiel’s terror, I have tired of my profession overnight. It’s as if Ezequiel’s death has set me free.
But Ezequiel is not dead.
Surcos, if you have to live in the capital, is a pleasant enough suburb. It’s about thirty minutes’ drive from Miraflores and twenty from Laura’s school in Belgrano. It smells of cooking oil, geraniums and, before it rains, fish.
Calle Diderot is a wide street, well tended, and you can imagine children running along the pavement or playing on the tidy beds of grass between each house. Populated by lawyers, doctors and teachers who have migrated from the coast, the street has a café, its own video store and an estate agency operating from a garage.
Jacaranda trees on each side of the street give speckled shade to eighty houses, painted brightly to remind owners of their fishing villages. The houses are modern, two-storeyed, with barbed wire between the roof terraces. Their little front gardens are enclosed by walls or by iron fences, sometimes with a dog’s muzzle poking through.
That’s how it is now, and that’s how it was then, on the night I’m talking about.
The ballet school was unremarkable, and was entered through a wall painted the same peppermint green as the building it concealed. One by one the mothers pulled up outside to wait for their daughters. They parked bumper to bumper and sat in their cars, varnishing their nails. Now and then one of them would turn to shout “Get down!” at an uncontrollable poodle.
Many of these women had been Sylvina’s friends since childhood, but th
ey didn’t marry policemen. They drove new cars, lived in properties facing the sea and could afford cooks. Sylvina saw them often. Iced coffee at the Café Haiti; tennis at San Isidro’s Country Club; aerobics in the Hotel Maria Angola; and – the latest excitement – a literary dinner which required the wife whose turn it was to host the event to deliver a short talk on a modern novel, explaining why it interested her.
“Agustín!” Marina, sitting in her cherry-red BMW and tilting her face to the side mirror, had been applying her lipstick. She had returned from Miami with a slightly different profile, a little less nose, a little more chin. She left the car and crossed the road.
“I haven’t seen enough of you!” Divorced from Marco, she had been two months back in the city.
We kissed. Miami had given her a taste for tight pants, long fingernails and streaked hair.
“I’ve been busy.”
“How pleased you must be. I saw the news on television. I didn’t realize until Sylvina told me he was the one.” She touched my arm, partly secretive; partly not. We asked Marina to keep quiet about my profession. When the girls at Laura’s previous dance school found out I was a policeman, they had teased her. So had the ballet mistress.
Marina, squeezing my arm, said, “What will you do now?”
“I don’t know. Maybe it’s time to go back to the law.”
“Sylvina will be thrilled!”
“I suppose so.” That’s what I’d promised my wife. Once Ezequiel was caught, I would look for a better-paid job.
“Is Sylvina all right?”
“She’s at the vet.”
“We’re looking forward to her talk on Wednesday. You know we’re meeting at your place?”
“She’s very excited about it.”
“I can’t fault Marco. He’s been extremely generous, sending us copies of the novel. Which I still have to read.” The divorce, Marina wanted us to gather, had not been acrimonious.
The Dancer Upstairs Page 6