The Dancer Upstairs

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  “She became cold and distant. I worried for her health; among other things, she hadn’t menstruated for twelve months. And ate nothing, only cakes. She’d become so thin she would put stockings in her bra to make herself look bigger there. But her belief was rock-like. I think she had already made her decision.

  “Two days go by. Then at breakfast she says she’s going on a retreat in the jungle with some Canadian nuns.

  “I sat down and said, ‘Yolanda, you’re not going to a retreat. Are you?’

  “She didn’t lie. She didn’t know how to lie.

  “‘You’re going to your political friends.’

  “Yes.”

  “‘Then we can’t live together in this house any more.’

  “She packed and left. A week after that, when she hadn’t come home, I abandoned the house.

  “I saw her again about six months later. She was sweet, and talked for two hours about the jungle, what she had seen and done there. At the end of the conversation she asked for money. She had moved back into Calle Tucumán. She needed to pay the bills. I refused, said I knew what she wanted the money for. Now, for the first time, she lost her temper. She shouted at me, and then she turned on her heel and was gone.

  “I saw her again once, walking along Calle Sol. I didn’t recognize her at first. She had put on weight. I thought she looked terribly attractive. As she came towards me I called her name. She walked past.”

  A man plonked himself down on the bench next to us and opened a newspaper.

  We got to our feet. Behind us another gardener had been lifting turf. He didn’t have gardener’s hands.

  We walked under the African tulip trees to the gate at the edge of the park.

  “Is it possible she will recant?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “No, this will have made her even stronger, even more determined. She’ll never relent. Ballet gave her this discipline.”

  “What about her brother, was he involved too?”

  “Brother?” He said. “She had no brother.”

  We stopped at the gate. I shook his hand, thanked him for his time. I knew he would have been distressed by our conversation. A barman at the Café Quilca had told me that he thought the poet had attempted suicide after Yolanda left. Now he was reluctant to let me go. There was a question which plagued him.

  “Tell me, what was her relationship with Ezequiel? They say in the papers he slept with all his followers. She didn’t sleep with him, did she?”

  The same thought tormented me. We stood there, two rivals seeking from each other assurance it was impossible to give.

  “There’s no way of knowing one way or the other.”

  He nodded seriously to himself, zipped up his jacket, and I watched him sidle off, his head on one side, book under his arm, the other hand trailing along the railings.

  Still, there are answers I can’t find. What position did Yolanda hold? How did she relate to the Central Committee? To Edith? I would have bet on Edith being jealous of her. Yolanda was privileged, middle-class, not a jungle-tested killer. Or was she? Had she planted car bombs and cut throats? When I asked the poet, he remembered a Sunday lunch they’d had once and her squeamishness over a chicken. She couldn’t sever its head and the creature had scampered around making the most awful mess until he had to finish the job for her.

  I ask all these questions, but always I go back to her relationship with Ezequiel. What went on between them?

  Yolanda’s trial was a charade. The few details I have were passed on to me by the governor of the prison at which she is held.

  She was flown to Villaria, and from there transported in a lorry to a military base on the lake. The trial was staged so quickly that it would have been impossible to prepare a proper defence. She never saw her judges. They sat behind reflecting glass, and she spoke to them as she might have spoken to the mirrored walls in her studio.

  The voices accused her of fifty-four charges. Her lawyer’s plea that she was solely the errand girl for No. 459 Calle Diderot was dismissed out of hand. She belonged to the Section of Operative Support. She found safe houses, made connections, linked one cell with another. Her calling, her privileged position allowed her to move freely in society without arousing suspicion. The most damning evidence was a mention in her notebook of the name of the café outside which the Miraflores bomb had exploded.

  She was sentenced to imprisonment for the rest of her natural life at the women’s penitentiary in Villaria. The senior judge acknowledged the severity of the sentence. It attested, he said, to the state’s determination to prevent “the superficial attractions of the accused from serving as a beacon to others”. In passing sentence, he had acceded to the prosecutor’s demand for a symbolic punishment.

  She would be condemned to a cell without light.

  I’ve never been to the compound in Villaria. And I suspect it’s worse than I’ve been told. But I do have this certainty: If her cell is anything like Ezequiel’s, it’s unendurable.

  Picture a tiny, windowless room thirty feet underground. If you open your arms, your fingers scrape unpainted concrete. If you raise your hands, you touch the ceiling. If you walk three paces, you smash your face.

  Along one wall is a narrow bed with a mattress and a blanket. The air battles its way into the room through a vent in the ceiling. Apart from the bed, there is nothing other than a towel, a plastic water jug, and a plastic basin which can be used as a toilet. At least that is what you see with the lights on. What it’s like without light, I cannot even begin to imagine.

  Do you realize the horror of this? A woman used to movement, who is afraid of the dark, who is used to a lighted stage, now living in absolute darkness, no one to acknowledge her except the guard who collects the tray. There are no mirrors. She can’t know what she looks like. Perhaps her eyes will milk up, like one of those deep-water, dark-dwelling fishes they net from the lake at that altitude.

  She can’t see what she’s eating, what she’s drinking, where she’s defecating. She can have no idea whether it’s night or day. How does she know when to sleep, when to wake? Dreams must be her only light, but what can she dream of, and how does she feel when she wakes from a dream and there’s darkness and she knows she’ll be waking to this room for the rest of her life, that until the grave this is what will greet her?

  Of course, one hopes that it won’t be for the rest of her life, that there’ll be a remission, an act of clemency. I think of Father Ramón’s last message to me: “God’s mercy is greater than God’s justice.” But in a way it’s worse, not knowing. If she knew she was going to live like this for the rest of her life, she could simply give up. Or else she could take heart if she knew she would only have to endure it for a certain number of years. But to face so uncertain . . .

  Rejas stopped. He started again, pausing between each sentence, measuring each word as if he had few left.

  During the whole first year she was permitted one visit from a Red Cross official. Now her family are allowed a visit every fortnight. But she refuses to see them. She hasn’t seen anyone for fifteen months.

  It would be inconceivable, even in that lightless space, if she didn’t attempt some form of movement. But if you’re not born at that altitude you risk soroche. You’ve been to Villaria – you can’t jog fifty yards without feeling mountain sickness. So I expect she stretches to keep warm, gripping the bed for support. The nights are often well below freezing.

  She still has touch, I suppose. But that’s all she has. Her last anchor to this world is the feel of her bare feet on the concrete floor, her nose against the wall, the tips of her fingers on the ceiling.

  I did manage to deliver some blankets to the prison governor, asking him to pass them on. The blankets were returned with a personal message. “Tell him I’m dead and I live only for the Revolution.”

  I know what people say. They say that what she fought for has enveloped her, that where she lies now is an appropriate punishment. Didn’t Ezequiel for so long ma
ke this country a place of comparable darkness? Shouldn’t she be held up as an example, so no one will be tempted to follow this path?

  But it is not what I feel. I think of her in prison like a candle burning down, her muscles degenerating. Soon she’s going to be too old to dance. Such a waste. As if someone said you could never read again.

  You will say that I feel this because I’m in love with her. But if you were to meet her, you would see the ballerina before you saw the terrorist. We’re none of us, are we, just one thing? I am a policeman, but also a father, a husband for the time being, a nursemaid to a sister who I pray will survive her illness. You are a journalist, a writer, and I don’t know what else beside. To look at a person from a single angle is to deform them. Even if Yolanda is guilty of protecting Ezequiel, she is also afraid of the dark. And I cannot forget that I put her there. In prison. To be in the dark forever.”

  Rejas had finished.

  On the jetty the night-cart people loaded rubbish on to container boats. Black and yellow birds darted into the searchlights, and out in the river something splashed.

  Astrud was buried in a cemetery overlooking Botofogo bay. Hugo had picked out the black wood coffin, lined with bright blue satin. She was buried in her nightgown, the wrinkled neck of the dead baby girl in her shawl visible between her folded arms.

  Dyer looked back into the room. “Why did you tell me all this?”

  17

  Her luggage had been left at the foot of the staircase. Dyer walked past it, chasing her laughter down a panelled corridor until he reached the conservatory.

  Vivien sat holding Hugo’s hand at the breakfast table, her other hand carving gestures in the morning light. She wore black velvet trousers, green ballet slippers, a white organdie shirt with an open collar and a sailor’s bow loose at the neck. Ruby links – not Hugo’s, he surmised – in her French cuffs.

  “They should have been far, far quicker in the first act and they rushed the music in the second.” Then: “Johnny!”

  She jumped to her feet and stood on tiptoe to kiss him. “I’m telling Hugo about our performance in Pará. Although you, my dear, won’t be interested in the least.”

  Hugo smiled his diplomat’s smile at Dyer.

  “There’s coffee on the sideboard,” she said. “You’ll have to be nice and wait patiently until I finish my story.”

  Hugo, having heard about the ballet – a modern piece, specially commissioned – was fascinated to know what the Amazon looked like. “Can you see the other side?”

  She touched him tenderly where his paunch pushed at his silk shirt. “It’s too ridiculous. Two weeks I was stuck inside that opera house – and I only saw it for the first time last night. My dear, it’s like any other river.”

  Dyer said nothing. He poured himself coffee and listened while Vivien described a party thrown by the Governor – “the girls nicknamed him Porpoise Eyes” – and the varieties of fish she had eaten.

  At last Vivien clapped her hands. “Enough about me.” She looked at Dyer, hard. “Johnny, darling, I want to hear what you’ve been up to.”

  Not until lunchtime was Dyer able to tell her.

  She had booked a restaurant on the Malecón. “Just the two of us. Hugo, miserably, has another engagement. He says you were awfully sweet with him.”

  “I only took him to the Costa Verde.”

  “He couldn’t stop talking about it. How did you find him?”

  “On good form, I thought.”

  “He minded losing his eyebrows. Otherwise he is quite chirpy.”

  They ordered lunch. Vivien talked in her enthusiastic fashion about the orphanage, the children, and a separate dormitory she had built for the girls. “Before my eyes they’d grown into adolescents. I’d find the boys the whole time under their blankets.”

  The details – cupboards, washbasins, new cooking pots – seemed fresh on her mind.

  “Is that where you spent last week, Vivien?”

  “My dear, why do you ask?”

  “I went to Pará.”

  She held him with her pale blue gaze. “It’s funny, I didn’t somehow picture you with the Ashaninkas.”

  “I couldn’t find you.”

  “Pará is a big place.”

  “Not as big as you would think.”

  She laughed, fiddling with a cufflink.

  “When I found out there wasn’t a ballet,” he said, “I thought you might have gone there for other reasons.”

  “Darling, would I have done that if I suspected you were going to follow me?”

  “Did you know I would?”

  “Let’s say I had an inkling. But how else was I to lose you? I had one or two things to do which I can do better on my own. I’m sorry I couldn’t help with Tristan. But please understand why not. Your instinct always to find people in power morally dubious is perfectly commendable, but it doesn’t go down so smoothly with those of my friends who happen to be political – not every time.”

  “You can help me now,” said Dyer.

  “Johnny, I can see it in your eyes. You’re teeming with wicked ideas about what your aunt is up to. But it’s not what you think. Without Tristan’s patronage the orphanage would collapse. And I’m not going to jeopardize those children’s future for the sake of getting you a newspaper interview. Punto final.”

  “I’ve got something important to tell Calderón,” said Dyer.

  “Sweetheart, you’re being childish. He’s not going to see you. Not only is he not going to see you, he’s not even going to let you past the gate.”

  “I don’t want to see him.”

  “Good.”

  Dyer smiled. “You used a phrase once. ‘My life has been a series of meetings and failings to meet.’”

  “How very poetic.”

  “You were talking of your elopement with Hugo.”

  “That was forty years ago, my dear.”

  “I didn’t manage to meet Calderón. But because of you, I bumped into someone more interesting.”

  Her eyes challenged him. “More interesting than Tristan?”

  “Agustín Rejas.”

  Vivien put down her menu. “It’s not true! You saw Rejas? Where?”

  “In Pará. While waiting for you.”

  “My dear, no one’s met Rejas. Do you realize how incredible that is? The press here are shrieking about how he’s been out of the country, talking to the Americans. Now you tell me that he’s been talking to you. What sort of creature is he? I’ve met his wife. She tried to sell me lipgloss. I want to hear everything.”

  Dyer’s summary lasted through most of lunch. Vivien listened without interrupting. At the end she ordered another bottle of wine.

  “Yes, yes, pour it out,” she told the waitress in atrocious Spanish. “Why do you wait for me to taste it? If it was disgusting I’d send it back. You didn’t wait to see how we liked our fish, did you?”

  She toyed with the glass. After a while she said in a sober voice, “So Rejas did fall for Yolanda. I’d heard as much. It’s not surprising. She was lovely.”

  “Why did you never mention her?”

  “I expect I forgot. So much was going on. I had rehearsals. Hugo had his stroke. All of us – the whole country – were picking up our lives after Ezequiel. You forget, the vast majority of people, like me, aren’t interested in politics. I’m for a well-organized life. I don’t like people dashing about with guns. I was simply relieved the lights worked again. It’s only you, my dear, who goes on being fascinated by the bad news.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “I never could share your obsession with Ezequiel. It is the one thing I won’t forgive, the way he used that girl. A dance studio was the most brilliant cover. Who would have imagined that above those proper young ladies there would be this choreographer of violence?”

  “Then – she was lovely? Yolanda, I mean.”

  “You’re upset. I can tell.”

  “Everything Rejas said . . .”

  “My
dear, you’re as bad as he is. This intense attraction, hardly consummated by a touch . . . He sounds as if he didn’t know her – which is always for the best. Never get too close to the dance stage, Johnny.”

  “It isn’t exactly my line, as you know, but she sounded so attractive, so – beguiling.”

  “She was, and she wasn’t. I liked her, but then I didn’t, or at least not so much.”

  “Tell me about her.”

  “Yolanda? I met her through Dmitri. Remember Dmitri?”

  “The White Russian? Tall, bald?”

  “That’s him. He was a bit demode, but great fun. Anyway, he was running the Ballet Miraflores then and he insisted I saw this girl. She was fourteen, which is getting on a bit, but since it was Dmitri of course I saw her. She came for an audition. Everyone performed a little dance and she did jazz, with a bit of mime and a Paganini piece thrown in. She was glorious to look at and I was in tears at the end – Dmitri knew how to get to me, all right. She wasn’t wishy-washy and she moved very well. Her mother, a small, grey-haired Miraflorina, sat in the front and watched. Well, I accepted her and she was with us – let’s see – nine or ten years. At one point I thought she might be prima ballerina material. But I must have decided she was too easily influenced. Then she had this problem with her leg.”

  Vivien took up her glass and sipped at it, then set it down on the table.

  “She told everyone it was a dance injury. I wasn’t so gullible. You don’t get scars like that, my dear, not from dancing. Very suspicious, it was.

  “One day she was helping at the orphanage and out it came. She’d been on a protest march at the Catholic University and had been tear-gassed. In the panic, the crowd trampled on her.”

  “Wasn’t it a bit dangerous, to confess that to you?”

  “Not at all. She knew I’d be sympathetic. She’d spent a good many Saturdays at the orphanage, cooking, washing clothes, teaching the children to do pliés. Initially, I’d been reluctant to involve her. Most do-gooders are a menace. Yolanda, I have to say, was different. A tremendous way with the children, she had. But after a few months she stopped coming.