The Dancer Upstairs

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  “Ask Gomez what he sees.”

  Sucre spoke into the radio. In the van someone, not Gomez, was saying, “. . . she promised she’d clean my straw if I let her go.”

  “Gomez, what do you reckon?”

  Gomez came on. “Light in the yard at the back, sir. Otherwise no movement.”

  To me, Sucre said, “Go in now?”

  “Tell Gomez to drive round the other side and keep watch. There might be a garden they can escape from.”

  I heard a snarl in the air. A helicopter tilted northwards into a sky scratched with red fireworks.

  “Red, what’s that mean?”

  “No one’s worked out the colours, sir. Yesterday they were shooting blue. The day before, green.”

  All kinds of confusion had been going on when he left the headquarters. Roads piled high with burning tyres. Windows smashed. Stores looted.

  “The General reckons some enormous piece of shit is floating down the pipeline.” He took the binoculars and raised them to his eyes.

  We watched the street, waiting for Gomez to radio back. The boy knelt in the road twenty yards away and re-tied the laces on his gym shoes.

  “The General, you won’t recognize him, sir. Calderón and Lache, they treat him like he’s garbage. Cut him out of everything.”

  He unwrapped something from a sheet of newspaper. “Pear, sir?” They’d come from his farm.

  A shutter opened in the house next to us. Through the window I saw a girl in a rugger shirt. One arm raised, she leapt to touch a slowly revolving fan. She reminded me of Yolanda. Everything did. A laugh floated out and a fat man in a vest appeared at the window. He leaned on the sill, glass in hand. Give his red nose a twist, I thought, and it would come off. After a while he stopped laughing and turned back to the room.

  I ate my pear, concentrating on the girl, wondering why she wanted to touch the fan like that, when my vision was blocked by a hideous face. Sucked to the car window, the lips of its distorted mouth moved down the glass.

  “Beat it!” Sucre, throwing the newspaper over his pistol, reached across me and slapped the glass

  “Can’t I stand here?” The boy’s voice, faint through the glass, sarcastic.

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Just beat it.”

  His gaze roamed over our laps. Then he pushed himself upright. He sauntered back to the others, on the way stopping to pick up a stone. I heard the tinkle of shattered glass, followed by a shout. Then a quietness settled over the street. A quietness which terrified.

  Gomez radioed that he was in position. A firework exploded, hidden by the roofs. Sucre, fidgeting with his pistol under the newspaper, said, “Ezequiel, if he’s inside, I’m going to stop his clock for him.”

  If, behind those shutters, we did find Ezequiel, how tempting to believe it would cease overnight – the shooting, the murders, the knives at our throats – and the days would be unsoured and Sylvina could take Laura to the beach and buy her a balloon or polish her toenails in the sun. But Edith would not have handed out Ezequiel’s number to a bit-player like Santiago.

  “What’s that?” I said.

  “Sounds like a dog at a dustbin.”

  “Let’s go.”

  Filling the house was the smell of a burned filter from a cigarette crushed into a mug. The television set was warm and the door to the yard was open. A lamp on the porch swayed in the breeze from the beach.

  Sucre barged back in from the yard, followed by Gomez.

  “They were tipped off, sir. We should have gone in immediately.” He smashed his foot into the door.

  I ordered Gomez to round up the boys in the street, then went through the house. Alerted by Ezequiel’s thousand eyes, whoever had been here had left in a panic. Clothes jettisoned over a narrow iron bed; on the kitchen table a tin of peaches, half-empty beside an architecture magazine; in the front room, stacked on top of the television set – three video tapes.

  A stepladder led through a hatch on to the flat roof, from where I watched Gomez running down the empty street. I waited, looking at the fences and rooftops. In the cool, dry night no shadows moved.

  My presence had disturbed the birds in the cage. Agitated by the fireworks, they clawed against the wire, opening and closing their cramped feathers. I had assumed they were doves or pigeons, but now I saw that they were parrots. Raging, impervious to the screeching and scratching and clatter of wings, I heaved the cage to the edge of the roof and I pushed.

  When I went downstairs, the ruined green wings flapped blood over the porch, and dying birds sang their pain through smashed beaks.

  The Café Haiti, where I waited at twelve the following morning, was emptier than usual. I sat at a table in the corner and ordered coffee.

  The waitress retrieved the menu. “I remember you.”

  The prospect of leaving Yolanda without having made a firm date for another meeting had been intolerable. I hadn’t known how best to broach the subject. Then, talking about Antigone, she had said she was coming into town to collect her costume.

  “Could we meet afterwards – at the Haiti?”

  I had had to extract myself from Calle Tucumán. We were going meticulously over the house. So far all we’d found was a black horsehair wig, a combat jacket on a door hook, and a cardboard box containing more of the pamphlets Hilda Cortado had distributed. There remained the three video tapes in my briefcase. I’d watch them at the station, I told Sucre. Then, for the first time in my career, I played truant.

  At twelve-fifteen Yolanda pushed open the glass door. She wore a sea-blue dress – sleeveless, loose, above the knee – and, over her shoulder, a bag of raw silk patterned with white llamas. She stood on tiptoe and looked about the cafe twice before she saw my upraised hand.

  She walked over, head down, and we embraced clumsily. She had washed her hair and I could smell the new cloth of her dress and I knew she wore it for me.

  “You look lovely.”

  “Don’t let me forget this.” She tucked her bag under the table.

  “May I see?”

  “It’s unlucky. Not until I come on stage.” She didn’t want to begin on a wrong note and wasn’t ready to catch my eye.

  She said to the waitress, “You know what I feel like more than anything in the world? A suspiros de Lima.”

  “We don’t have them.”

  “Oh, dear. A lamesita, then?”

  “Only pan de arabe or pan de Viena.”

  “Pan de arabe then.” She looked around. “Isn’t this where we sat before?” Her eyes rested on me. “See? Already we have a history.”

  I don’t wish to say too much about that afternoon. What I mean is . . . is that I can’t be precise. What happened between us is not a complete picture in my mind, any more than is she. How long had we known each other? If I count up the hours, I don’t suppose much longer than the time I’ve spent talking to you.

  Put it this way. For many years I had looked neither right nor left, but stared ahead, my thoughts settled on one object: the capture of Ezequiel. Now, out of the blue, this young woman had taken me by the arm and offered something which I ought to have resisted.

  There was still light in the sky when we left the Haiti. We spent the end of the afternoon walking. Towards the sea and along the Malecón. I had no sense of being curbed, only of endless space. When I looked at her the ghosts of my happiest childhood moments nudged me.

  “That sea,” I remember telling her. “It takes you nowhere, but I love it.”

  And, later: “I’ve been walking down this street for twenty years and never noticed that funny grey turret.”

  In some square – I was never to find it again – we sat on a bench.

  “What are you looking at?” I asked.

  “Your wrist. I was looking at it yesterday, on the grass.”

  “My wrist?”

  “I always look at a man’s wrist. Or the side of his neck, or his ankle. The vulnerable parts.”

  I inspe
cted my wrist. It had never struck me as vulnerable.

  “What does it tell you?”

  “All intelligent people can fake modesty, Agustín, but you are modest.”

  Her hand suddenly flew at my face and I ducked away.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m not going to hit you.” From the corner of my mouth, she neatly flicked away a large crumb of pan de Arabe.

  Was it on this bench that she released the few details of her life, or do I introduce these from another conversation? It wasn’t much. Conservative upbringing. Only daughter of a construction engineer, to whom she had been close. Her mother, a pious teacher, made her attend the Fatima church in Belgrano four times a week. From an early age she longed to escape. The opportunity presented itself when she was fifteen. The nuns from the Sophianum school took her on a trip to the shantytowns. The Mother Superior led her to understand that she would regard it as something dreadful, worse than a lie, if Yolanda ignored the conditions in which these people lived. She decided to become a missionary in the jungle. Her father put down his foot. He wouldn’t allow it.

  “So I became a dancer.”

  Whenever she talked about her calling, a splinter of ruthlessness would enter her voice. “You may think I’m a nice person. But ask Laura. In my studio I’m different. Once you come inside, you’re there to be disciplined, to get rid of your ego.”

  Another time she said, “You don’t know how dance is. You can’t talk about it – but it is a calling. You feel different. You feel special. You have to be very much yourself, but that’s so you can be someone else.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Look, I have chubby cheeks. Too much flab here – and here. Nevertheless, people always say. ‘You’re so beautiful, Yolanda. What a marvellous body.’ But to me a marvellous body is not interesting unless it can represent something. Because what are you? You are many people. I can’t become real to myself unless I can also become, say, Antigone.”

  I had not met anyone like Yolanda. Yet if I describe her qualities they sound slight. As I say, she was astonishingly alive – she really did excite the air around her. She was attractive, but didn’t assume she could do everything. She was an idealist; at the same time, she could behave like someone who has lost her beliefs. She was tender. She was interested. Above all, she had this alertness. In repose, she always seemed ready to whirl about. Sometimes you had the impression she waited for a signal which none but she might register – and that it had sounded as you spoke to her. Then she would break off and her face would set in an attitude of the most intense expectation. She would look into space and with a jerk of attention focus back on you. She might listen deferentially to what you were saying – but a few minutes later something would distract her and she’d cry, “Isn’t that man ridiculous? No, come to think of it, I’d like hair like that.”

  Prompted by the bag at her feet, which contained the dress she wouldn’t show me, I asked about her performance. Who had choreographed the ballet, who was to be Creon, what props would she use?

  She rolled her eyes. “Oh, it’s a mess. There were going to be four of us, including Lorenzo. Remember, you met him at the theatre? We’d been looking to dance a drama. Then I saw this piece on television about the Arguedas Players, and that’s when I had the idea. What about Antigone? So we read Sophocles. Then Anouilh. Then Brecht. Then fought a lot. When the group broke up, two of them wanting to direct, all of them wanting to dance Antigone, I said: Forget it. I’ll dance on my own.”

  We walked around the square. Prim houses. A woman behind a grille who looked up from her book. “Did you see that lady smiling to herself?” A couple not talking in a car. “What is she doing with him?” “What is anyone doing with anyone?” Laughter.

  On the edge of the square, a large dog, black with a spine of orange fur, hurled himself from the leaves and nudged his head between us, panting.

  I pushed him away, afraid he might attack Yolanda. He bounded to her side and licked her hand.

  “Down, boy, down.” She stroked his shining face, then took my arm.

  “Tomorrow I will be twenty-nine.”

  “How will you celebrate?”

  “Rehearse. Then classes. Then more rehearsing.”

  “On your birthday? What about your family?”

  She looked abstracted. She might have been working out a complicated dance step.

  I thought of the yellow cardigan she had spread against me. “Isn’t your brother going to take you out?”

  “But, Agustín!” she cried. “My dance is one week away. I haven’t finished the choreography. I’m having nightmares.”

  “Nightmares? About what?”

  She pressed the fingers of one hand to her chin, contemplating the dog, which had run on ahead. “Very well. I dream I am late for the performance. I hear a flute in the background – maybe it’s your rain pipe! – and I can’t get to the stage, I can’t run. Something, someone holds me back. At the last moment I break loose and it’s dark on stage, and there isn’t enough light to see.”

  “But you shouldn’t spend your birthday alone . . .”

  “It’s not a problem.”

  “My wife is worried you have no friends.”

  She burst into laughter. “Your wife is right. Yesterday, before I bumped into you, I felt so useless. I wanted to pack it in. Then I said no, better not, too much work to do.”

  “That’s why you have no boyfriends?”

  “Oh, I’ve catted around,” she said unexpectedly. “And I was engaged, to a poet, a frivolous poet who only liked cars and clothes.”

  “You didn’t love him?” I said, without reflecting.

  “I loved him. But work got in the way.”

  Childishly, she withdrew her arm and dashed up the path to kick a can. She kicked it again and the dog chased after, pushing the can away from her with his nose. Then he trotted off, the can in his mouth. Yolanda looked back at me, raising her arms in a shrug. I felt another stab of intimacy, and I knew a strength in me had lapsed.

  I drove Yolanda home and around seven o’clock returned to police headquarters. In the viewing room on the fourth floor, I gave the video cassettes from the house in Calle Tucumán to Sergeant Clorindo and went to fetch a cup of water.

  “OK, Clorindo. I’m ready.”

  I settled down without much expectation. I held the cup to my lips, about to drink, when on screen there appeared the face of Quesada, our late Minister of the Interior, making a televised speech to the Assembly. I finished the cup and sat back. Already this promised to be a waste of time. Probably the other cassettes were movies. I was so used to disappointment.

  It would last less than a second. It was no more, really, than a trivial act of clumsiness. But our smallest gesture is never so small as we think. You hand over a camcorder, you rub a crumb from someone’s mouth. The consequences are incalculable.

  The first tape was a compilation of news reports. Quesada’s triumphant speech. Quesada, wife and bodyguard on stage at the Teatro de Paz. Prado’s body on the roadside. All items recorded from Canal 7, fifteen of them.

  The second tape featured exteriors filmed through the back of a fast-moving car. The Presidential Palace; a barracks in the south of the capital; two houses I didn’t recognize. The sites, I presumed, of intended targets.

  I did not immediately gauge the significance of the last tape. It consisted of a single grainy recording, rather blue in colour, as though it had been copied from another copy. Filmed in a nondescript room, a group of darkly dressed men and women danced in a ritual celebration.

  “Turn up the sound.”

  Clorindo adjusted the volume to a high frequency, insect hum. “There isn’t any,” he said.

  The floor was strewn with flowers. The celebrants surged back and forth, arm in arm, stamping on the blossoms. At the same time their faces concentrated on the dancer who held the camcorder, about whose expertise, despite the uncomplicated eagerness of their smiles, several eyes impl
ied reservation. From the angle of the pictures, it was obvious that the dancer/operator, who moved in a sort of inebriated sway, didn’t know how to work the machine. A short-haired woman, rather flat-faced and with a mannish mouth, could be seen shouting directions. Then a hand must have found the volume control.

  There came the sudden loud sound of stamping feet and reflected voices and Frank Sinatra singing “Summer Wind”. I could hear the cameraman’s heavy breathing, like the wow-wow resonance of a seashell removed from the ear.

  The flat-faced woman pleaded, “Give it here, give it here.”

  As she took the camera, I glimpsed the person behind it – a large man in a pale jersey, filmed from the side. When he realized the tape was running, he flinched, held up a hand, spread the fingers over the lens. The tape ended there.

  “Go back to the beginning,” I told Clorindo.

  Could that blank-looking face be Edith’s? I remembered a woman with thick make-up and longer hair.

  “Let’s see the colour of her eyes.”

  Clorindo froze the tape. He connected the image-enhancer and blew up the pixels. An icon appeared in the corner, which, with the computer’s mouse, he dragged down to her eyes. He clicked twice. The image needed sharper definition.

  “Try a different algorithim.”

  He typed in the co-ordinates. Once again he grabbed a frame and digitized it. Her eyes became the screen. They were the same coloured blue as the print. But I knew them to be green. I was looking at Father Ramón’s killer.

  “Go forward.” I wanted to see the dancer at the end, the operator.

  Edith, animate again, took hold of the camera. It jerked to the floor, recording several pairs of trouser legs. Then it arced up, over the walls, filming the man’s shoulders.

  “Wait. Focus on that area.”

  The icon was clicked. The hand juddered frame by frame towards the lens. I could see between the fingers a fuzz of beard, the black frame of a pair of spectacles, two narrow eyes.

  Ezequiel.

  We reran the tape. It’s amazing what you miss when you’re looking for something else. I was concentrating so much on Edith and the bearded dancer that I did not notice the road sign until I’d played the tape a dozen times.