The Dancer Upstairs

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  By now we’ve slipped back so she doesn’t see us. We’ve got her in the zoom. She bounces off the road, trailing a dust-devil through a bank of rush-mat shacks, stopping outside a low white shed, one of the few concrete buildings in sight.

  “Sometimes she does charity work.” The words could hardly be heard. His face was shrinking. I could see the wide pores in his nose.

  She looks round, hauls the bag off the seat, and without knocking enters the building.

  I fast-forwarded again. We’d waited a minute before going inside.

  The tape wasn’t well filmed and once or twice crossing a slippery tiled floor Sucre lost focus. But no one could mistake the look of the woman kneeling there as she jerked round to see us, nor the bag from which she had begun to unpack three sub-machine guns.

  “Paulita,” he said, a hand over his mouth, not believing it.

  I had been on my way to the basement to interrogate her further. It was time I returned there. There was no point in telling the American, but this evening we would have to turn Paulita over to the military.

  Already I’d spent six hours with his wife. So far she’d said only four words, repeated over and over again.

  “Viva El Presidente Ezequiel!”

  8

  On the next day my bank refused me credit.

  Have you been in that situation? I notice you use a Mastercard to pay Emilio. But supposing tonight he came over and said, “Sorry, señor, can’t take this” – think how you’d feel.

  The cash dispenser was near my office. When it refused to return my card I stood absorbing the flashing message, the cramps of impotence. Behind me concerned voices asked, “What’s wrong? Is it out of cash?” Shamed, I walked down Calle Irigoyen. A couple, smartly dressed, entered a restaurant. What would the meal cost them? A hundred pesos? Across the road a man inserted his tip through a taxi’s window. Inside a shop, a woman decided on a dishwasher. Everywhere my eyes settled on people spending money. How could they afford it?

  I counted my change. Three pesos. Enough for a pair of underpants.

  Perhaps I could cash a cheque. Or request an advance on my salary. I saw myself reduced to telling Sucre I’d left my wallet behind, and might I borrow twenty pesos to tide me over?

  At home, I found Sylvina sitting on the end of our bed.

  “What’s wrong?” She had been weeping.

  She looked away. “The shoemaker cut up my credit card.”

  On the bank’s instructions, El Chino had before her eyes scissored in half the credit card with which she had tried to pay for Laura’s birthday present, a pair of goatskin pointe shoes. “Thank God, I was able to put it on my Visa.” But she had never been so humiliated. El Chino, an unpleasant man who kept a raucous crow in his shop, was a gossip. When he went round the dance academies with his box of sample shoes, he would relish peddling the story of Senora Rejas’s Mastercard.

  His shop became a place of horror. And not just his shop, but the department store where she had hoped to buy Laura a leotard. She had come home disgusted with herself.

  “Why, why, why?” She wasn’t extravagant. “Why, Agustín?”

  I couldn’t answer. Her friends bought dance shoes, but they could afford them.

  She held up a red-wrapped package. A present for Laura had got her into this mess. Now everything was called into question.

  “Maybe I shouldn’t have bought these.” She turned the package over, squeezing its contents. “Maybe they were too expensive.” She started to unwrap the paper, then passionately hurled the parcel away from her and collapsed back on the bed, her face white and glittering with unhappiness.

  “Sylvina, why–” I began.

  “Why do you say why?” She spoke to the ceiling. She propped herself up on her elbows, her skirt drawn tight about her thighs. Her legs were askew on the bed, heels caught in the bedcover.

  “We are –”

  “Were. Were. Were,” and she lay back again, a hand over her face, sobbing.

  I sat down beside her, picking up the package from the floor where she had thrown it. I removed the red paper, laid the shoes on the bed, then, tenderly, pulled my wife’s hand away from her eyes. One by one, I separated the fingers, but they were not there for me as they once had been.

  She talked mechanically, as if making a list. There was the telephone bill, her tennis club subscription, the groceries. How did I expect her to buy food? – talking of which, there were no pears today at the market.

  “This is the time of year for pears. Why aren’t there any, Agustín?” She snatched back her hand. “How can I make you a pudding without pears?”

  “I don’t know, darling.” Whenever she wanted to forget something, she shopped.

  “I still can’t find a pepper grinder.”

  So it was on that bed that I confronted Sylvina with the true state of our finances. “I’m not accusing you of anything, but that’s the way it is.”

  She sat up. Instead of reacting defensively, she said with great calmness, “What about Marco?”

  “Marco?”

  “I have discussed it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He made the offer himself. He’d heard things were bad down here. We could rely on him, he said.”

  We had a terrible argument, after which she shut herself in the bedroom and telephoned Miami.

  The following evening, without telling Sylvina, I drove to the ballet studio in Surcos. I made certain the mothers had driven away before ringing the doorbell. Yolanda had no telephone. If I wanted to catch her, it would have to be at the studio.

  The street had fallen quiet. A bolt rattled and the door in the wall opened a few inches. I recognized her silhouette. Seeing who it was, she drew the chain.

  “Señor Rejas?” Under dark eyebrows her look was intense. “But Laura’s just left, with Samantha.”

  I knew this. I had watched them leave. Since I could no longer be certain of my movements, we had decided that Sylvina would alternate with Marina in collecting the two girls.

  “It’s about Laura I need to talk with you.”

  The door opened further and a finger of light slanted down one side of her face. Her mouth was traced unevenly in dark lipstick, as though she expected someone. She wore a clean, faded pink shirt, which she must have changed into quickly because it was misbuttoned.

  “Do I disturb . . . ?”

  “No, come in.”

  I don’t know what questions passed through her head as she led the way through the sliding glass doors. Private teachers must expect the worst.

  In the studio, as before, she put on a cassette.

  “Dvorák, isn’t it?” I asked.

  “We were dancing to it just now.”

  She listened to the music, then turned down the volume. On her neck a tendon vibrated. “I can’t offer you much. A coffee?”

  Walking back from the kitchen into the studio she dragged over two inflatable exercise mats. She blew them up until her face coloured. When she inserted the stoppers, I saw that her fingernails were bitten to the quick.

  “Sorry. These are all I’ve got to sit on. I don’t encourage visitors. To begin with I let the mothers watch, but I banned them after a week. They all sat in a row, which was rotten for the child who fell over. Mind you, some of their children I could push myself.”

  She laid out the mats. I sat cross-legged. She sat upright, her legs folded to one side, and drew a white handkerchief from her sleeve.

  “I’ve got a bit of a cold.”

  I was about to tell her Laura had caught it, too, when she exclaimed, “I like your daughter so much! She’s unsure of herself and anticipates the music and doesn’t loosen her neck, but we were so right to try her on modern dance!”

  Laura, with Sylvina’s agreement, had exchanged a classical class for a modern one. Which was now immaterial, of course.

  “I’m afraid I have to take her away.”

  A plaster had stuck to her mat. She peeled it off and looked at
it intently. “What do you mean? Am I too strict?”

  “No, she’s very fond of you.”

  I explained my situation. I didn’t want to withdraw Laura, but I could no longer afford the fees.

  She kept staring down, and I thought she didn’t believe me.

  It wasn’t merely a question of my salary being late. I’d been paying for Laura with my overtime earnings. Now all overtime had been cancelled.

  I was humiliated and she could hear it. She continued gazing at the plaster, then tossed it over her shoulder.

  “That’s all right. I’m happy to carry her until you can meet the fees.”

  Is this why I decided to talk to her before Sylvina? It must have been at the back of my mind, Yolanda’s reluctance to disrupt her class.

  Before I’d even thought about it, I said, “Next month. I might be able to pay then.”

  “Pay when you can. But don’t tell anyone. Please. You can’t imagine the misery my life would be if some parents found out.”

  I started to thank her, but she interrupted. “I’ve been teaching children in the mountains for free. Anyway, it’s not kindness. I’m thinking of the others.”

  “Laura tells me you get your ideas from the sierra.”

  I knew that, before opening her school, she had studied traditional dance in the highlands. But I had mentioned the sierra only out of politeness.

  “I’ve been studying the dance groups at Ausangate.”

  It is possible for a word to leap out and slap you after twenty years. “Ausangate,” I repeated, and she must have thought I didn’t understand because she started to explain.

  I wasn’t listening. The word, last spoken by my mother, had exploded in my head. Now, on this dance floor, its mention extinguished the smells of rosin and sweat and cigarette ash and I was standing on a narrow path called the Knife Edge.

  It was four in the morning. The moonlight blazed on the ice. We had been walking for three days and I was playing my flute to a sheer white cliff across a gully. We listened in awe as the glacier sent back my music, giving us the strength to climb to the summit.

  I said, “I was once a pilgrim to the ice festival.”

  “You weren’t!”

  “Thirty years ago. I was Laura’s age.”

  “You’re the first person I’ve met in this city who’s heard of it.”

  “I played the pipes in the wayli dance.”

  “No! Which pipes?”

  A word formed on my lips. “Pinkullo”, and in uttering it I felt the sores in my mouth. The cold air cramped my chest. My neck ached and I heard the reedy notes of my flute and, from the pilgrims around me, voices imitating the animal whose costume we wore, whose bells tinkled round our necks, whose spirit we had been transformed into while the festival lasted.

  “Then you know what I’m talking about!” Yolanda jumped up. She kicked off her slippers and raised one arm until I recognized the wrung neck of a dead bird. With her other hand she masked her face, kicking back a leg to mimic a creature scuffling out its urine. She danced a few steps, her body slim and decisive, then sat down again, eager to hear more.

  “So you provided kun – what is it, the word for comfort and joy?”

  I laughed. “Kunswiku”, and there was no way to halt the sequence of images, the short spears of frost on the stubble, the blast of orange heat from the candles in the sanctuary, Father Ramón, breathless, not used to this altitude, awaiting our return with Santiago beside him, while up ahead, leading us, scrambling on to the glacier with his axe, the distant figure of my friend Nemecio.

  She touched my knee, forthright as a child. “Is it true every year someone dies? As a sacrifice?”

  I was evasive. “There are accidents.”

  On the last night we climbed to the summit and fought. There must have been a thousand people milling on the glacier, all from village groups like mine. At that height, in that strange light, something happened. Without anyone to guide us, we divided into two bee-swarms. For an hour we ran at each other, throwing snowballs and yelling. The noise – rattled bells, shouts, drums – echoed off the ice as we rushed forward and retreated until someone slipped too near a crevasse. That year it was a pilgrim from Pachuca. We knew it as soon as he fell. We stood in the snow, not moving, and I’ll never forget the relief – that it wasn’t someone from our village whom the mountain had chosen.

  She shook her head. “To think you played that flute. I can’t believe this. So that explains what I’ve noticed in Laura. I wondered what it could be. She has her own way of moving, which you can’t teach, just like the girls I’ve been living with in the sierra. She’s also got that plumbline of balance these rootless westerners don’t have. She should be studying the wayli, like her father, not The Nutcracker Suite!”

  Yolanda stared into space. I looked at her face. For whom had she inexpertly applied her lipstick? She lowered her gaze, unsettled again.

  “You’re sure I haven’t disturbed you?” I said.

  “No, it’s nice talking. You don’t meet many people outside the studio, and never anyone who’s been to Ausangate. What were we talking about, I’ve forgotten?”

  “The Nutcracker Suite.”

  “Why does Madame Offenbach do it? Every year she still sends letters to Panama on Margot Fonteyn’s birthday and every year she puts on The Nutcracker. Is that our response to the kidnapping of those drama students, to dress up in white tutus and behave like fairies or flowers?”

  “And that is why you left the Metropolitan?”

  She ran a hand down her leg at the memory, rubbing her ankle. She wore no stockings. On her ankle was a narrow scar, the same pale colour as her skin, but shiny.

  “No. I had a leg injury. Every time I tried to get my heel down to jump, it was agony. One day Señora Vallejo was watching to see if I’d recovered from my accident. There was an idea I might be the prima ballerina. Well, I put my leg in a developpé and I did this unheard of thing.”

  She stood up quickly, faced the mirror and unfolded one leg, the foot higher than her hip, then slowly lowered it.

  “I thought: I’m giving up, I’m stopping. This is ridiculous. I put my leg down and I left the studio. Everybody knew what that meant. They knew it was final, as if I was in the army and had disobeyed an order. I ran into the dressing room, everyone’s clothes hanging on pegs like ghosts. I heard the music outside, still carrying on. It was a Brahms adagio. At last, no more struggle, I thought. I want to go out into the world. So I went to the jungle for two years – I’d always longed to be a missionary. I dropped everyone in the ballet world and went to Iquitos, with the Teresiana nuns. For two years I couldn’t bear to hear ballet music. I pretended I’d never been a dancer.”

  She had noticed in the mirror that her buttons were done up wrongly. She undid her shirt and rebuttoned it correctly.

  “You gave up dancing, yet you started your own school.”

  “Because I can’t help it,” she said with feeling. She stood, arms crossed, chin up, on the tips of her toes.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that everything that goes on inside me – joy, passion, rage, love – I want to show it with my body.” She whirled round. “Don’t tell me you didn’t feel the same way at Ausangate.”

  “And this feeling, it came back gradually, or in a flash?”

  “A flash.” She pointed at a poster pinned to the kitchen door. “I was taken to see these Cuban dancers at the Teatro Americano – where soon I have to do my ballet. They reminded me of what I had forgotten.”

  “Which was?”

  “Something Señora Vallejo always quoted. ‘Movement never lies.” She never tired of reminding us that dance is a contemporary art form. It can incorporate our reactions to what’s going on now, this minute. It can allow us to be ourselves, not parodies of some European ideal.”

  “Have you found an idea for your ballet?”

  “It’s unlucky to talk about work in progres.”

  That I could u
nderstand and respect. “Forgive me.”

  “Silence is part of the dance,” she joked. Her face became serious again. “I’m going to dance a ballet in memory of the Arguedas Players.”

  “The drama group?”

  She bit her lip and her nostrils flared a little. “Wasn’t that terrible? Poor kids. I feel such hatred for anyone who could do that. What would you feel if one evening Laura was seized by a group of gangsters and that was the last you heard of her? No, that’s a terrible thing to say.” But she looked at me. “Do you think they’re alive?”

  “Who knows?” I’d wondered the same things myself.

  “It’s been three weeks. The parents have heard nothing. I’ve a pupil here – her cousin Vera was one of the students. Everyone knows it was the army behind it. They’re dead, they must be.”

  “Probably.”

  “The other day I watched a programme about their abduction. Then I had this idea.”

  “To dance the kidnap?”

  “No, to dance Antigone.”

  “Antigone?” I was out of my depth. “Isn’t that a play.”

  “But, you see, that’s it! That’s the reaction I want. If I had told you I was going to dance something called, I don’t know, Hexagramma, then all I’d hear from the ballet mothers is: ‘Why do you have to do pieces like this? Why do you have to show us all these dead bodies?’ That’s why I’m going to go back to Sophocles! Something everyone will think is taking place a long, long time ago, but which we’re living now.”

  “Can I see this ballet?”

  “You wouldn’t like it.”

  “You said it was at the Teatro Americano.”

  Upstairs someone moved. She raised her head. “What’s happened to our coffee?”

  Yolanda went into the kitchen, flicked the switch on the kettle, and waited for it to boil again.

  She was pouring the water when the lights blacked out.

  People think they know how they’ll react in extreme circumstances. I think I know how I would react if this ceiling fell down. But I can’t be sure. Nothing so far had indicated to me that Yolanda would behave as she now did.