The Dancer Upstairs

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  The three letters had been recorded during the fumble when Edith took the camera. At first I had assumed they belonged to a picture on the wall. It was Clorindo who said: “That’s not a picture, sir. It’s a window.” The window overlooked a tree. Outside it was night.

  “Can’t you make it clearer? Try a vector map.”

  The computer enhanced the definition. From the letters and the way they were formed, it was a street sign. The window frame cut off the left-hand end of the word, and branches hid the last letter, but clearly visible was ERO.

  I ran downstairs. Ordered a computer search, a list of all streets containing this sequence of letters. Nothing said this was a street in the capital, but I wasn’t going to widen the search. Not yet.

  How long would it take? “An hour, two hours?”

  My secretary said, “Maybe an hours.”

  I rang Sucre. He was still picking through the house in Calle Tucumán. The General, eager for such propaganda as he could make out of our raid, had been on his back.

  “He’s keen to speak with you, sir. He wants to inform the media.”

  I didn’t want to talk to the General. I told my secretary I’d be back in an hour and returned to the viewing room. I had intended to spend this evening plotting my report on the army massacre in La Posta. But suddenly nothing was so important to me as this tape. I had Clorindo play it again and again, trying different filters. For the first time since I had questioned him in Sierra de Pruna I had a tangible sense of Ezequiel’s presence. Over successive generations the image had become degraded. His features were blurred and imprecise, as seen in the light of an eclipse, but I had no doubt in my mind: those fingers clawing at the lens and the eyes they half concealed were his eyes. His fingers. Ezequiel the cameraman. Ezequiel the dancer.

  At ten-thirty I received the print-out. There were two addresses. I knew them both. Calle Perón I remembered from my days spent guarding diplomats. A smart cul-de-sac with several banks and embassies.

  I was familiar too with the second address, a quiet, tree-lined street in the suburb of Surcos consisting of a hundred or so houses. And my daughter’s ballet studio.

  13

  From the very first I deployed two teams to watch Calle Diderot and Calle Perón, five in each team, men and women, disguised as dustmen, municipal gardeners, loving couples. They were to report on everyone’s movements, what time they left home, returned; who they let through their doors. In the evenings the refuse from both streets was to be collected in a special rubbish department truck and sifted.

  “Get a list of chemists in both neighbourhoods,” I told Sucre. “Who’s buying what ointments, how regularly. Anything to do with psoriasis, I need the details. Same with tobacconists. I want to know of anyone who always buys American cigarettes, Winston, Marlboro, Camel, L&M. And a list of householders. Occupations, how long they’ve been there, where they’ve come from. Everyone is suspect. Even the Argentine Ambassador.”

  Except Yolanda, of course. I had to warn her.

  Yolanda, when she spoke of it, had tried to play down her birthday, but she couldn’t hide from me the child in her who wanted to celebrate. The occasion became my pretext.

  At nine o’ clock, half an hour after the modern dance class ended, I walked down Calle Diderot and pressed her bell. I carried a package, not well wrapped, and a flat box containing a banana cake.

  The cake wasn’t the cake I had wanted to buy. I’d seen a beautiful suspiros de Lima, positioned cleverly in the window so as to convince me that I could afford it. When the girl inspected the pedestal, she discovered it had a much higher price. What I could afford was something pitiful. Anxiety assailed me as soon as I had left the shop. The cake wasn’t enough. What else could I give her?

  The present I chose in the end was meant only as a friendly gesture. Now I wondered if the act of bringing both a cake and a present could be taken for a sign of something else – something more emotional. Was I fooling myself? What was she going to think?

  The studio lay in darkness. Upstairs, screened by the yellow curtains, someone watched television. I rapped on the door. Part of me hoped she had slipped out. I was falling for her and not wanting to. Yet my job had taken me to where she was.

  I knocked again, then gave up. I had walked two or three steps when I heard the door open.

  “Agustín?”

  She leaned in the doorway, one leg lifted so that the foot pressed against the frame, her hands on her cheek.

  “Happy birthday,” I said.

  She brought her brows together and looked at me for some time. She had hurriedly thrown on a thin black dress and her hair was sticking in wet strands to her cheeks.

  “Why didn’t you knock properly?” she said at last.

  “I thought I did.”

  “I shouldn’t let you in.” She withdrew a hand and tugged at the straps of her dress. Her shoulders were red from the shower.

  “But you can’t dance all day. To be cooped up, these four walls –”

  “What’s that you’ve got?”

  She looked at the parcel, her eyes curious. She wasn’t sure what to do.

  “And a banana cake.” I held up the box. “We could eat a slice. Then I’ll go.”

  She stood aside to let me come in, then shut the door and walked ahead, barefoot, through the sliding doors into the studio.

  “I was washing my hair.” She pushed a cassette into the player – the Pretenders singing “Stop Your Sobbing” – and turned up the volume. She was pleased to see me, but she didn’t want me there.

  I gave her the parcel and we sat down cross-legged on the floor and I felt like a teenager again, sitting in a chairless room with music playing loudly and a pretty girl and from somewhere the smell of lilies.

  “It was nice of you to remember.” She pulled the string loose. Raising Lazo’s red pot to the light she gave a little gasp of pleasure. Turning it over in her hands, she let her fingers caress the rim.

  “It’s a portrait-vase.”

  “You’re giving me this?”

  “Didn’t you need a jug for Antigone?”

  “Could I put in flowers?”

  “It’s very old. And porous, probably. The water might leak.”

  With a fluent motion she lifted her hands and waved the pot from side to side above her head. When she moved her arm, I could see soap suds in her ear. She flung the jug into the air.

  “Careful!”

  She caught it, swung it gracefully to her breast.

  “See, now it’s a baby.” She was overcome. “It’s beautiful. Thank you.” On all fours she crawled over to where I sat and kissed me on the cheek. A soapy smell mingled with the sharp scent of her skin.

  “Now I have something for you.” She scrambled to her feet and skipped from the room.

  I was taking off my jacket when she ran back holding a long wooden flute.

  “I bought it at Ausangate. It’s a pinkullo. Play something.” She turned off the music and lay down on her side, her legs tucked in, watching me.

  I pressed the mouthpiece to my lips. Pushing out my chin to raise the pitch, I played the opening notes of a rain melody. Followed by Yolanda’s eyes, my fingers opened and closed the six holes as I blew, producing a muffled, flattened sound. It wasn’t a pinkullo, it was something else, and I had no idea how to play it.

  “It’s for you,” she said, face shining.

  “No, Yolanda. This is too special. Please. You keep it.”

  She rubbed a hand up and down one leg as if she were cold. The soles of her feet were black from the patio.

  “But didn’t you want a flute? Weren’t you looking for one?”

  I didn’t want to distract her by bringing Laura into the conversation. “I suppose so.” It sounded graceless.

  She sat up, put her hands on her thighs, and rose lithely to her feet. “I’m not accepting this jug until you accept my flute.” But before I could reply, she added, “Now let’s try your cake.”

  I followed h
er into the kitchen. A hotplate beside the sink was stacked with half a dozen unwashed mugs and an ashtray piled with cigarette ends. A green oilcloth covered the table on which was a fountain of lilies in a cream-cracker tin. There were two chairs and a fridge. A door in the far wall led – presumably – into her bedroom. The ceiling beams were decorated with photographs of dancers.

  Impatiently, Yolanda pulled open the cake box. She cut two slices on to a plate.

  “Here, have some,” and she fed me one piece, putting it into my mouth, making a mess. She ate hers quickly, with a child’s appetite.

  “It’s good.”

  “Isn’t it.” But I thought of the cake in the window.

  Before I’d finished eating she jumped up, mouth full, and ran to the kitchen cupboard, bringing out a bottle of red wine. I opened it and filled two glasses.

  “To your birthday.”

  Suddenly she hesitated. “We shouldn’t be doing this, Agustin. Our birthdays are not important.” Her voice was chastened, different.

  “Nonsense. How old did you say you were?”

  Soon the bottle was empty, the last of the wine in our glasses. An impish smile spread over her face. “Shall I tell you something? Shall I tell you a big secret?”

  She crossed her legs. I looked at the scar on her ankle, like an anchovy. My heart stopped and I thought: she’s going to tell me she’s fallen in love.

  “Oh, God, another plaster!” She peeled something from her heel and rubbed it between her fingers until it was tight enough a ball to be dropped into the ashtray.

  “What’s the secret?”

  “No, no.” She had changed her mind. “I won’t. I can’t.”

  “You’re probably right.” I put down my glass. My hand had begun to shake. “How is the ballet going?”

  “I’ll show you.”

  She got ready in the bathroom. To busy myself, I removed the plates to the sink. My eyes strayed to the door at the end of the kitchen. On it were pinned a list of pupils’ names, with ticks against each one, a poster of the National Ballet of Cuba, and photographs of ballerinas: Patricia Cano, Carolina Vigil, Vivien Vallejo at the Colón in 1951. I was looking for Laura’s name on the list when a hand covered my mouth and Yolanda said, “Come.”

  We took our glasses into the studio. She wore a loose Andean dress, sand-coloured with braided edges, reaching nearly to her feet. She sat me down on the leather trunk and picked up the rosin box, tapping out a small heap of powder until its musty odour vied with the scent of lilies. From a hook on the wall, she lifted a pair of platform clogs and a white mask. She set them beside the rosin and put another cassette on the machine. As the tape hissed she took up her position, her elbow rubbing a hole in the steamed-up mirror.

  She rose on tiptoe, checking herself. One hand gripped the barre, the other performing small involuntary gliding movements as though a live creature lay beneath her skin. A foot caressed the air. Her doomeager face was beautiful, as implacably set as Lazo’s jug. She was ready.

  The notes of a pipe – similar in tone to the one she had given me – zigzagged through the room. Her body stiffened. She picked the jug up and tracked in hesitant steps to the opposite mirror. Back she flitted to the rosin heap, her feet squealing on the parquet. With a bump she put down the jug, tied the mask over her face, and bent double, gathering her dress up between her legs, like a pair of trousers. The music quickened. A charango strummed and she became her helmeted brother, riding across the plain, fleeing the battle. She was breathless, but she had clearly been a marvellous dancer.

  A brash clap of cymbals broke her advance. She halted. No longer her brother, she slipped on to the high clogs and kicked away the mask which skimmed with a crack into the wall. Now she danced her uncle, Creon, stamping about the floor, one hand lanced towards the jug, forbidding Thebes to bury a disgraced brother.

  There was a final crash of the cymbals. Upstairs, a chair shifted. Then, unaccompanied, a pinkullo began to play its pithy notes. I recognized the instrument, and the music snatched at me. Yolanda freed her dress and lay down on her stomach, her arms stretched forward in the air, begging. She was Antigone, entreating her uncle – but her fingers also reached out to me. I caught her eye. Did it mean anything, the way she looked at me? I held her gaze and felt a blast of desire.

  Slowly, elegantly, she stood up, preparing herself for the movement she had practised at the Teatro Americano. She pirouetted, once, twice, three times. And leapt. Then the lights went out. The music stopped, and a thump resonated in the darkness.

  “Yolanda!”

  She lay against the sliding doors. I tried to lift her, but she pushed herself up and away from me. “This time I was prepared.”

  She stumbled to the leather-covered chest. Inside there were candles. She lit two, sticking them upright in their own melted wax. We sat, close together, on the floor. In the candlelight her skin had a lustrous shine. Sweat polished her shoulders and rolled in bright beads down her throat, between her breasts. Her nipples pressed dark and hard through the sandy yellow dress. The last blackout had panicked her. This time she was aroused.

  I had to remember the reason why I had come to the studio – to warn her. I put an arm on her damp shoulder. I forget what I said, but I spoke vaguely, in hints. It was not possible for me to confide to her the nature of my business in Calle Diderot, nor could I reveal that I would not be far away in the days to come. But I had to alert her to the danger.

  I was telling her of the need for vigilance when she interrupted. “But I am careful,” she said. “Everybody has to be careful these days. You too.”

  I took her hand, feeling the rough-bitten edges to her fingernails. How could I say what I had to say? That they wouldn’t care if she was a dancer. That they wouldn’t care about her girls. That, to them, we were expendable. All of us.

  As if to tell me not to worry, she tapped my wrist, then lightly kissed my cheek. She wanted to get up. “We can look after ourselves.”

  “I know. But I was worried for –”

  “Stop it. You’re scaring me,” she said, and the moment had passed. She stood straight. “Anyway, I haven’t finished.”

  “You want to go on? In this light?”

  Above me, her face had been sculpted by the candlelight into something older, stronger, fiercer. “I can see perfectly well.”

  “But what about music?”

  She picked something up from the floor. “Here.”

  That night in Yolanda’s studio I mustered the notes of a forgotten tune. I didn’t really know how to play it, the flute she’d given me. It was hard to produce a good clear tone. But as my breath warmed the wood, the colour of the sound changed. The flute vibrated to the same pitch as my body, as though it were another limb, another flow of blood. And Yolanda, dancing her forbidden steps, became the music of this flute made flesh.

  She cradled the pot to her breast, then moved on scissor legs towards the rosin, scooping handfuls into the pot. Her body was something unimaginably alive. She wept with her limbs, yet at the same time they blazed. She truly was making something unseen visible, so that I never doubted her identity as the sister about to cover a mangled corpse with dust.

  She pirouetted and jumped. In that leap her body was in complicity with the air. Her legs dismissed the ground, her shoulders expressed their wings and the image of her flight was painted there.

  “Play. Play.” She spoke to my reflection. The steam had cleared from the mirrors, and in them I could see her body from every angle. With trembling arms, she raised the jug above her head – and I am certain that, with this frozen gesture, as if offering a libation, she intended the ballet to end.

  “Don’t stop, Agustín.” A whisper.

  She was then to do something I will never forget. It was the last thing I expected, and I doubt whether the idea had entered her head until that moment. She stared up at the base of Lazo’s jug, and I wondered if she had seen something there. With a tidy flick of her wrist she overturned it. A tor
rent of white dust poured down her hair, over her dress, puffing out over the candles, where it burnt, sparkling, in the flames.

  Rejas fell silent.

  “Go on,” said Dyer.

  “Half an hour later I left the studio, having promised not to see her until Sunday.”

  Dyer was not certain he had understood correctly. “You mean, you wouldn’t meet again until after her performance?”

  Rejas blushed. “That’s right.”

  “Why?”

  His fingers tugged at the chain around his neck. “She was an artist. She was consumed by discipline. She needed her privacy – her loneliness, even.”

  Dyer’s eyes hadn’t moved from his face. There was more to be said, but he saw that the other didn’t want to say it. At that moment Emilio appeared with two dishes of pork and pineapple. Dyer supposed that Rejas would have no appetite, but he ate hungrily.

  When Rejas resumed his story, Dyer hoped he would pick up the thread in the ballet school. But the meal had restored in him some sort of equilibrium. He wanted to talk about Ezequiel.

  Ezequiel signed his name when he handed the video camera to Edith. I knew as soon as I discovered the street he had filmed that I would find him. You might have thought this would be easy: I just had to look for a house near or opposite a street sign. But on either side of each street, vertical posts stood every hundred yards beneath the jacaranda.

  There are ninety-six houses in Calle Diderot. In Calle Perón fifty-four. I took charge of the Diderot operation. I’ll spare you the details. Watching a street, vital as it is, is tedious work. Compare it to the act of blowing up an air cushion: although nothing appears to be going on, no breath is wasted. It is only with the last few breaths that the cushion takes shape. Yet you have to keep blowing.

  Some people get a headache just waiting for something to unfold. Hour upon profitless hour. Contemplation immobilizes them. They end up like my father, drugged by doing nothing. They become disciples of sitting down and facing a blank wall whenever they feel a storm of rage or passion. Because it is not enough to be patient. You have to know how to be impatient, when to act quickly. The trick is to recognize the moment.