There hadn’t been a power-cut since the military coup, but I was not concerned. At the plant in Las Flores they had been rumbling on for months about low pay. I was more put out by Laura’s question.
We were about ten blocks from home when my jacket started to bleep. Sucre. I pulled over outside the Café Haiti. Lanterns had been placed on the tables. In the subdued light I saw men speaking into their mobile phones, checking to see all was well at home, in the office.
I listened to the confused details. The darkness sheeting the city had nothing to do with industrial action.
“Have you told the General?”
“He’s on his boat.”
“I’ll meet you at the theatre.”
I gave Laura the handset. “Take this.”
“What is it? What’s wrong?”
She realized something terrible had happened. She fiddled joylessly with the machine. She was trying to imagine this terrible thing.
“It’s Ezequiel.” I said the words quickly, not hearing what I was saying.
“But Daddy, he’s dead.”
I accelerated along Via Angola. Our street was not far now. I braked noisily outside the house, leaving a track of rubber.
“Listen, honey, I’m sorry. I’m not making sense. Explain to Mummy I can’t stay.”
I pulled the door shut behind her and drove flat out along Calle Junin. Sucre’s message had resurrected the dread which Quesada only five days before had put to rest. It meant one thing: Ezequiel had not lain blackened and featureless beneath a coarse army blanket; instead, he had taken a tighter grip still on our destinies. It meant he was alive after all and had decided to rise from the earth. It meant he had descended finally to the capital. And the capital, “the head of the monster”, was the perfect place in which to hide.
6
By the time I reached the theatre, the audience had bundled out into the street and were assembled on the sidewalk in a state of shock. My men had arrived and were attempting to detain them, but many had slipped away already. The crowd spread out under the plane trees and waited for taxis. Some, nervous as birds, stumbled between the tramrails. They followed the rails to the sea, not caring where they walked.
From a French playwright who had been sitting five rows from the stage I pieced together what had happened.
Lionel Grimaud, unaware of the power-cut outside, had taken the blackout to be a part of the experimental drama he was watching, in full keeping with the poster which had beguiled him here.
The poster showed a young woman, with white-chalked cheeks and eyes made up to look like a cat. She peered at her right hand in which she held a minute version of herself fashioned into a glove-puppet. From the tight, ceramic mouth poured the words:
Literature! Dance! Theatre! Film! All this in a drama that is absolutely contemporary. Are you sick of injustice? Are you sick of feeling helpless? Are you sick of believing there’s nothing you can do? Our actors will startle you out of your indifference. In Blackout you will see human existence taken to its extremes. You will see fanaticism. You will see darkness. You will see intolerance. You will see hope. AND YOU WILL SEE Blackout TONIGHT!
Twenty minutes into the play the theatre lights went out. Already a negroid face, filmed behind an empty desk, had appeared on a large screen talking about alms. Then an angel had skipped on stage. Dressed in red rubber gloves, a grey suit and cardboard wings, he had hurled the contents of a bucket of water into the front row.
As an irritated section of audience mopped themselves dry, the voice of Frank Sinatra could be heard singing, “This lovely day will lengthen into evening, We’ll say goodbye to all we ever knew . . .” The angel floated off, wiggling his red fingers, to be replaced on stage by four dancers, their backs to the audience.
Grimaud – who was emphatic on this point – said the dancers were girls. Each wore a black stocking over her head, with a thin black garter strap binding her face. They bent into a provocative stance, waggling their buttocks and slowly turning until they faced the audience on all fours, their tongues out. The only sound was of a fast breathing – “the sound of dogs panting” – and this, mixed with Sinatra’s voice and, at the edge of the stage the silhouette of the angel lip-synching his words, provoked a horrifying impression.
Sinatra was singing, “I loved you once, in April . . .” when the moan of a recorded siren interrupted the words, followed by the rattle of gunfire.
It was then that the blackout occurred.
“We couldn’t very well understand what was going on,” admitted Grimaud. On stage a disembodied light swung up and down. All eyes fixed on this erratic firefly, which plunged swiftly into the auditorium. There was the clatter of several people being tugged against their will on to the stage.
The audience shifted uneasily. Behind Grimaud an elderly woman hissed, “Claudio, you did not warn me that it was one of those audience participation plays. We should have sat further back.”
Then three shots, in quick succession.
The same woman said, for all to hear, “You promised it would be a musical.”
Things were by now so confused that people didn’t know if this exchange was part of the play. The smell of cordite wasn’t agreeable either, nor a warm sticky substance like scrambled egg which had landed in several laps. After five more minutes of waiting in the dark, those in the front row who had earlier been sprayed began to hiss angry asides.
But even so, they sat there. And this was the strange thing: at least ten minutes passed before anyone had the nerve to stand up, and only because they saw, flashing behind them down the aisle, another torchlight.
It swept along the rows, giving substance to the people sitting there. Soon it reached the stage, jerking upwards to reveal a drawn curtain and three figures sitting on deck chairs about six feet from the back wall.
When you light something from below, you know how exaggerated it becomes? Imagine the sight of those bodies. The beam wavered across their legs and chests, magnifying huge shadows on the back wall.
They sat at an angle. Something had happened to their faces.
Quesada, his body bent backward, had a red caste mark on his forehead. The back of his head was no longer there, but you could see the eyes, nose and cheeks. His mouth had been gagged with theatre programmes screwed up into little balls.
Beside the Interior Minister sat his wife. You could tell it was a woman from the shadow cast on the ceiling by her curly, well-cropped hair. Her neck was twisted, with one shoulder thrust back to show her lapis necklace. They had shot her in the left eyeball, through her glasses, and her hair was sparkling with broken glass and what looked like phlegm, except it was her eye.
The bodyguard slumped forward next to her. The hollow-point bullet had entered the back of his head and his face was somewhere in the audience.
The silhouettes slipped back into the darkness as the manager rested his torch on the stage and climbed up. You saw its beam pointing at the woman’s feet, where there was an awful lot of blood. The manager picked the flashlight up and staggered through the puddle towards the chairs, shining the beam directly into their faces so now everyone could make out those terrible looks, the splatter on the stage set, like ink blots from a fountain pen which has been shaken violently, each splatter larger than the head, each self-contained, except for a thick vertical mark behind Quesada’s chair where a chunk of his skull had struck the wall and slid down.
The light scanned the wife’s sparkling hair, the pulpy red mask of the bodyguard and Quesada sitting there, a cardboard notice on his paunch, the lettering, sketched in his blood, reading: Death to all traitors. Viva El Presidente Ezequiel!
The manager gave a choking sound. People in the audience gasped.
“Believe me,” came a man’s voice. “This is part of the play.”
As soon as I read the sign around Quesada’s neck I knew that Ezequiel had come down from the mountains. He was among us in the city. Anywhere in the city.
But he was not
just “anywhere”.
I now realize that, earlier in the evening, he would have turned on the television. Careful to cut out the sound, he wouldn’t have wished to attract the attention of the ballet students below. Laura’s class had ended. The girls having taken their showers, he would have walked to the window to watch them leave. He would have pushed back the curtain with the back of his hand – and that’s when, through the narrowest of gaps, he would have seen me.
Admittedly, in the dark neither of us could make out more than the outline of the other. But for a second or two we looked at each other. All that separated us was a yellow nursery curtain.
That curtain was permanently drawn. Ezequiel would stand behind it for minutes on end, absorbing the street. He liked to stand in the same position, his face against the glass of the window, which he would slide open a few inches. At the end, when I was observing him through my binoculars, I could see him inhaling the air, feeling it on his raised face like a dog pressing its nose to a car window. That’s probably what gave him his cough, because a few days after Quesada’s death, Laura came home with a fever, and by the end of the week Sylvina had caught it too.
I can describe what he would have seen through that chink. By the time I ordered in my men, I knew everyone in that street, what they did, when they left home, what time they returned, their love affairs and peccadilloes. Afterwards I wandered a lot around that room, standing where he used to stand, imagining him. Once, a movement drew my eyes to the house opposite. A young girl pushed a man, laughing, on to a bed. A leg was raised at right angles into the space where they had stood, then it disappeared. When the girl next passed the window she was naked. Seconds later I heard the sound of a cistern flushing.
The cistern was fed from a water tank on the roof. It’s a funny thing, but for six months almost the only word Ezequiel would have seen in the world outside the room was the manufacturer’s name: “Eternity”.
If I close my eyes, I can follow the street to the hill at the end. Sometimes the outlines of the slope are clear and I can make out paths and the colours of a rubbish tip. On other days, it remains a blurred shape, the same colour as the fluffy grey sky which our poets liken to a donkey’s belly.
I hear the sounds of a middle-class street. A gate closing, a car door opening, a bird singing. The tree where the bird sits is a jacaranda. It’s been growing purpler by the day, as if someone has dipped the branches in the afternoon sky. I don’t know about you, but I hate the sound of birdsong in the evenings.
Opposite, below the lovers’ room, Milagra the maid starts to beat an imitation Persian carpet against the fence. The noise causes an Alsatian to leap up paws spread against the railings, barking. A while ago, while reversing into the street, Milagra’s employer ran over one of this dog’s puppies. That’s why he paces up and down, thrusting his snout between the bars, his black eyes roving over anyone who passes.
Milagra shouts for the Alsatian to be quiet, but is ignored. She is habitually ignored. Every day she bustles after the boy who collects bottles. Too late she hears his shout. She scuffles in the wake of his bicycle cart, but never attracts his attention.
“Bottles!” shouts the boy. Casually he lifts both hands above his head, so that for a few dangerous yards no one is steering the cart. Then he grips the bars, leans into the corner and disappears.
Milagra lurches one or two paces and stands in the middle of the street, panting helplessly, holding to her breast a bag which clinks with empty Cristal beer bottles. “Señor . . . Señor . . .”
The barking frightens a face to a window of the house on the corner. Did Ezequiel know what went on in that room every afternoon? The face at the window belongs to Señora Zampini. At three o’clock, when Doctor Zampini is lecturing on geriatric oncology at the Catholic University, an orange Volkswagen Beetle draws up and out steps a tall man in a brownish suit with shiny dark patches on the elbows of the jacket. He stands up stiffly, pulling his shirt cuffs back down his sleeves. He’s not as excited as he used to be. He comes without the verve or the flowers that attended his earlier visits. Has Señora Zampini noticed his listlessness? When the door opens hers is the face in the shadow, grim with anticipation. He enters, kisses her hand. The door is bolted behind him.
What else do I hear? The conversation from the corner café over cups of scalding, cardboard-tasting coffee. Cars leaving for the beach, their drivers hooting as they pass the video store, the air sweet with the lotions they’ve rubbed on their arms and faces. The panting of two middle-aged joggers, women in turquoise tracksuits, their hairdos ravaged by sweat.
It is easy for me to picture myself as Ezequiel. How hungrily I watch the street. I yearn to be outside, moving. There are occasions when I want to yield to the violence I have unleashed, taste it for myself, experience the fear I have become immune to. I touch the window and cough. I feel the air against my hand. Despite my cough I press my cheek to the draught. I belong downstairs, not in this locked room. I touch the door handle and dream of the world downstairs. At half past three every afternoon, Kant walked under his lime trees. For six months I haven’t abandoned this space.
So there Ezequiel stands, waiting for Laura’s class to leave, waiting to count the girls out so he may watch television or listen to his music.
There is a box crammed with loose cassettes – Beethoven, Schumann, Wagner, and a Donizetti opera – Lucia di Lammermoor. There are also recordings of Frank Sinatra, but they haven’t been played in a while. Ezequiel’s taste in music has changed since he left the mountains. As the psoriasis devours him, eating its way between his buttocks, he no longer wants to hear a human voice.
Not that he spelled any of this out during our interrogation. I had to retrieve these bits and pieces from a tide of belligerent nonsense about fascist continuism and the Inevitable New Dawn. The utopian garbage he spouted contained few clues about what actually went on in that room. Only the room told me anything.
It was not much bigger than my office. There was a double bed and at the centre, with its back to the window, a high-backed armchair covered in red velvet, in which he spent much of his time reading.
His books were arranged in alphabetical order on a shelf above the cassette-recorder. This was Ezequiel’s third safe house in eighteen months and he had with him only essential texts, each one annotated in his close, backward-sloping handwriting. Had they let me study them I might be able to tell you more about the way his mind worked. But they didn’t.
On the arm of the chair, a tin Cinzano ashtray overflowed with Winston stubs. He loved American cigarettes. That, and his psoriasis, and his passion for Kant, and the fact that he liked drinking mineral water constituted pretty much the whole of the picture I had of the man until I met him face to face in that room. By that time there would be no yellow curtain between us, no merry cartoon elephants floating down on striped parachutes. Down to what, I don’t know.
What else was up there? In such a space everything becomes an icon. Two pairs of shoes on the floor, making steps without him. On the white walls a small picture of Mao and a framed photograph of the Arc de Triomphe at night. He’d never been to Paris, but he admired Napoleon. These types do. A hotel trolley which he used as a desk, and also to eat from. The food, prepared in a back kitchen, was brought to him by Comrade Edith. She was the only person allowed to enter his sanctuary, kept locked at all times. Edith was the reason, I am sure, he had abandoned the mountains. His wife Augusta was the girl who had driven the red pick-up (and was formerly the girlfriend of Pascual). She would have wanted him to remain in the countryside. Like him, she had envisaged the revolution achieving its triumph after his death, in much the way that cathedral architects were content not to see their work completed in their lifetimes.
But that was a young man’s dream, the fantasy of a provincial idealist. Augusta’s death and his disease had pinched him back into this life. He no longer had the patience of a snake. He had grown restive, and Edith found it easy to exploit this impatience. Sh
e urged him to enjoy the fruits of his revolution now, in his lifetime. All they required was one final, decisive action. But for this he must come down to the capital. His physical presence was needed to plan the operation. To monitor and inspire it. To be there when his people removed, once and for all time, the rotten, crumbling keystone of the state.
I don’t know whether he and Edith slept together in that unmade bed. Rumours said he slept with all his female followers, who regarded him as holy. But I don’t believe that.
A small bathroom led off the bedroom. Here he swallowed his capsules and applied his creams. Have you smelled petroleum jelly? Well, that’s how the bathroom smelled. There were medicines everywhere, on the floor beside the perished rubber mat, on the shelf below the shower, ranged along the top of the cabinet above the basin.
What struck me was the lack of a mirror. I can only suppose that Ezequiel had become revolted by his image and no longer wished to be reminded of his obese, diseased, almost immobile self.
So here he stood, this sick body – the psoriasis worsening by the day – restless, in pain, and of course he was going to be aware of the beautiful girls below. Since he couldn’t see them they must have been the more beautiful in his imagination. You see, the dancers’ bathroom was directly below his. He would have heard snatches of conversation as they soaped their exhausted bodies under the shower. Think of it. Here was a man in a locked room preaching liberty while downstairs, only a matter of feet away, they were free.
They were being trained to fly and he was caged. Doesn’t that make you laugh?
He must have seen me get out of my car. I’m not sure what can have passed through his mind when he saw me crossing the street. I guess while I talked with Yolanda downstairs he would have sat in his armchair and watched a silent television screen. Then, when the power-cut came, he would have waited for news from the theatre.
The Dancer Upstairs Page 8