The Dancer Upstairs

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  In that first shock of darkness I heard her cry out. Something crashed to the floor.

  “Are you all right? Have you hurt yourself?” There was no sound.

  “My arm,” came a thin voice. “I’ve scalded it . . .”

  I fumbled my way across the dance floor into the kitchen. My hand sent a tin object clattering into the sink, an ashtray by the smell of it. Dampening a cloth, I felt my way to the fridge, probed inside until I found the metal tray, then pummelled out the ice cubes, packing them into the cloth.

  “Where are you?”

  “Here. Over here.” Her voice rattled with panic.

  I knotted the cloth around her arm, but it was impossible to tell how bad the burn was. She clung to me and I heard her taking in gulps of air.

  “A torch, have you got one?”

  I had to repeat the question.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Or candles?”

  “No, no. I don’t know where they are. Can we get out of here?”

  In the studio the mirrors, reflecting the night sky, smouldered with a reddish glow.

  I slid open the door and guided her outside, across the patio, then out through the door in the wall. There was chaos in the street. Cars hooting. Names shouted. “Inez? Margarita? Juan?” Crazed parabolas of torchlight and voices calling, “Watch out! Where are you? Over here!”

  The blackout had blindfolded the city, save for the starry firmament above, like recollected dazzle, and one ember-red patch above the roofs.

  “Miraflores,” I said. “They must have electricity.”

  I helped her into the car and drove at a crawl towards the red tint in the sky. Tall buildings blocked our view of the hills. So we couldn’t see what they were staring at in Las Flores and Monterrico and La Molina, a pattern of blazing oil-drums that spelled out in acrid, flaming letters, brighter than any star, the single word, EZEQUIEL.

  “I’m sorry.” Her voice was calmer. “These things always take me by surprise.”

  “We should look for a chemist.”

  She seemed distracted. But she wasn’t concerned about her burn. “I never know when to expect them. And I wanted to play you some flute music.”

  By the time we drove into the light, she had recovered.

  “You don’t want anything for your arm?”

  “No. Thank you.”

  “Let me buy you a drink then,” I said.

  “I’d like that very much.”

  The Café Haiti was packed. I checked the tables for Sylvina, who had been playing doubles with Consuelo. Would she be here? I wondered how I would explain myself. You must surely know that if you go somewhere with an attractive young woman, even if the occasion is an innocent one, and you don’t tell your wife, you can’t help feeling guilty. But there was no one I knew in the café.

  The waitress, shy, with expressive eyes in a highland face, waited for our order.

  “Whatever you’re having,” said Yolanda.

  “Two beers.”

  “Here, let me pay.”

  “No.”

  “An hour ago, you were telling me you had no money,” she teased. She was flirtatious, though there was nothing more behind it. I felt a rush of affection towards her.

  From our corner table, I took in the room. There was a lot of shoulder tapping and chairs leaning back as news of the blackout was broadcast and digested. It was strange to consider Miraflores as a beacon in a blinded city. For the first time, the café struck me as beautiful.

  I felt a sudden sharp pain in my hand. Yolanda was examining the fingers.

  “You’ve hurt yourself.” When thumping out the ice, I must have stripped the skin.

  “How’s your arm?” I asked.

  She drew up her left sleeve. “I look idiotic wearing this dishcloth, but – truly – I hardly feel a thing.”

  Relief to be in the light again showed in her face. All her movements were revealed in the unreflected suddenness of her smile.

  “I’m sorry about my panic attack. I don’t like the dark.”

  “Is there a reason?”

  “Do I need one?”

  “I suppose not.”

  “I’ve never been able to sleep without a light on in the house. That’s why I’m so relieved you were there tonight.”

  “I’m glad I could help,” I said.

  “Last time there was a blackout, I was rehearsing and I lost my balance. I couldn’t see myself in the mirror and everything went to pieces and I fell flat on my bum.”

  “Is there no one you can call?”

  “What can they hope to achieve, really?” clucked a voice from the table behind. A woman in sunglasses with flattened down, very golden hair, spoke to a woman with prominent, heavily mascara’d eyes.

  “But haven’t they got a point, these poor people?” said her companion.

  Yolanda looked round as the blonde lady removed her sunglasses. A reflection was admired in the lenses, some grease was polished off, and the glasses restored to their perch on a large nose.

  Through them, the blonde appraised Yolanda. There’s nothing like the sight of an ugly woman taking in an attractive one. Wistfully, the blonde said, “Perhaps they’ll kidnap Maimée.”

  Yolanda leaned forward towards me in a confiding way. She was about to speak when a woman’s voice, obviously trying to be heard, announced, “You know, I’ve always been on the left, deep down.”

  Neither of us could help it. We burst into laughter.

  Rejas glanced at Dyer. He seemed to have forgotten where he was. An all but empty restaurant. Not a ballerina sharing his table, but a man pretending to be a historian.

  A foghorn prompted him to check his watch. Dyer saw the relief with which he said he must go. Somewhere in that night, in a house Dyer would never visit, Rejas had another woman to attend to.

  “Emilio!”

  Rejas, having called for his bill, began to stroke some bread crumbs into a line with the back of his hand. Unexpectedly, he reached across and removed the knife from Dyer’s plate. He held it by the handle, over the table, between thumb and forefinger, blade pointing downward.

  “How long do you think it takes a rat to drown?”

  The question surprised Dyer. “Half an hour?” he guessed.

  “It’s a story I was told by Ezequiel,” said Rejas. “He used it to explain to me the sheer will he managed to unleash in our people. But which could apply to any of us.”

  “How long?”

  “He told me that if you drop a rat in a tank of water, the rat will swim about for fifteen minutes and after fifteen minutes he will drown.” Rejas released the knife. It clattered on the table. His eyes blurred with despair.

  “But if, after fifteen minutes you pick the rat up by his tail and give him a good shake to start him breathing again and drop him back in the water . . .” He gazed at the dull blade. Once more he took the knife by the handle and dropped it. The noise bounced through the room. Dyer was aware of Emilio swivelling from the till.

  “How long do you suppose he swims after that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Rejas sat back, though his eyes never quitted the blade.

  Dyer, too, stared at the knife. “Half an hour,” he guessed.

  “Two days.”

  “Two days?”

  Rejas accepted his bill from Emilio and counted out the money. “I must go back to my sister.”

  The colonel stood, but Dyer sat there, still imagining that creature swishing through the water.

  “Her condition, is it serious?”

  “She’s in a coma. Well, in and out of it.”

  Dyer had failed to understand the seriousness of her illness. A case of food-poisoning, he’d thought. Was that why Rejas had talked all this while, all these evenings – to take his mind off his sister?

  “There’s a good hope she’ll recover, surely?”

  “Hope? That’s what it boils down to.”

  Rejas was not talking about his sister.


  9

  When Dyer entered the restaurant next evening, Rejas wasn’t there.

  Half an hour passed. Still no sign of his coming. At eight, Dyer ordered Emilio’s grilled fish, though reluctantly.

  It had been very hot during the day. After writing down the policeman’s story in a yellow, spiral-bound notebook, he had slept late and again in the afternoon taken a long siesta. Now a little breeze came through the window.

  He turned a page, listening for steps. Outside, he heard the imperturbable throb from the fortress, and the peacocks in the bird market screaming from their cages. He tried to read, but could not concentrate. He looked at his watch. Eight-thirty. The policeman had never been this late. Had Rejas found out who he was, or had he, for whatever reason, suddenly thought better of telling his story to a stranger?

  Dyer had not asked Rejas why he might want to talk in this way. It helped that he was Vivien’s nephew, of course. Besides, people do tell their secrets to strangers, and it stood to reason they would feel for each other a certain sympathy. They were men of an age, both miles from home. And like Rejas, wasn’t he about to be discarded, or used in the wrong way? But that he should have hit his target inadvertently . . .

  And yet, Dyer thought, isn’t it the desire of wanting to hit the target that makes you miss it? If you want things too badly, you end up with nothing at all. It’s the act of not hankering after something that somehow, weirdly, brings it about. And wasn’t he himself a kind of target? He was one of the few people in the world whose fascination Rejas could rely on. Many of his countrymen, perhaps even his own sister, might not have given a damn. But Dyer understood. Hadn’t he been looking for Rejas in the first place and hadn’t they both chosen this restaurant in which to read – both of them – the same book? Which was why, as Rejas had begun talking, Dyer had been able to quell any doubt about the policeman’s motive. He had simply thought: This is the story I’ve been waiting for all my career.

  It was gone nine when he heard the click, click, click, on the stone staircase and the strands parted on the bead curtain. Rejas sat down, apologizing. The specialist had been on the telephone to discuss his sister’s tests. Over the plate which Emilio served him, he continued to brood on her illness, slowly enfolding Dyer in his misery.

  Two months earlier a storm had kept her overnight on an island opposite Pará. At one of the stalls by the jetty she had eaten undercooked pork. Soon after she became lethargic, complained of headaches, a pain behind the right eye. One day her husband found her speaking incoherently about snails. The symptoms – vomiting, nausea, disorientation – were consistent with cysticercosis. As the seizures became more frequent, he summoned Rejas. She was thirty-seven, and quite likely to die.

  For the past three weeks the two men had taken turns by her bed. Rejas kept vigil during the day, his brother-in-law at night. Her level of consciousness fluctuated from hour to hour. One moment she was quiet, the next agitated and disoriented. After swallowing her drugs her limbs shook. Frequently she hallucinated.

  Who was that making coffee?

  Why did Agustín wear so much eau de cologne?

  Didn’t he like this beetle she’d found by the river?

  “She thought I was our father. As a girl, she was always coming into his library with frogs and snails.”

  In the mornings Rejas sat in a wicker chair and read aloud from their father’s books. Propped on pillows, she listened, stuporous, sucking her thumb. In the afternoons as she slept he brushed the flies from her mouth and the liquid trails at the corners of her eyes. At six, when her husband returned from work, Rejas could leave the room. He would be careful in his movements in case she heard the wicker creaking. In that confined space it had the effect of a shriek. Once, waking up, she insisted on coming with him. She knelt, rummaging through a drawer for a favourite dress of black velvet. “Wait, Agustín, wait till I find it. We’ll have such a good time.”

  The doctor, observing the deterioration in his patient, advised a lumbar puncture. The hallucinations could indicate that the drugs were destroying the parasites. Or her condition was untreatable. The answer would show up in her spinal fluid. With the two men’s approval, she was laid on her left side, curled up like a baby, while a long needle was inserted into her back. The sample had been sent for analysis to a lab in Rio. That was a week ago. They were still waiting for the results.

  “You think you’re grown up,” said Rejas. “Then you see your sister ill – and she’s a ten-year-old again. But there are some people – their youth never leaves them. It’s the only time of life which interests them and they respond to everyone they meet as if they are still ten-year-olds. Yolanda was like that. In some ways she could be grown up beyond her years, in other ways oddly childish – as ballerinas can be who’ve not been around people much.

  “Then there are those like me, who don’t think about their childhood. Which is a common experience in the sierra. When their parents die, people who’ve moved away don’t come home any more, not to small towns. I went back to La Posta only once after I left – with Sylvina for a fortnight’s holiday the summer I graduated. After the military had seized our farm, there was nothing to go back for. I didn’t investigate Ezequiel’s influence in the valley because you never think things are going to be so bad in your own village. Then Yolanda mentioned Ausangate.

  “That night I lay awake, remembering in detail the village, my friends, the skipping-rope rhymes, our coffee plantation. It was at this period I learned the fate of our priest.”

  He searched for something in his trouser pocket. “Tell me, did your aunt mention a Father Ramón, who might have worked with her on the children’s project?”

  “Ramón? I don’t think so.”

  “I was one of his altar boys. There were three of us – me, Nemecio, and Santiago, his favourite.”

  Dyer had been so relieved to see Rejas this evening that for a while he didn’t mind what the policeman talked about. Now he was anxious for him to continue his story. “Last night you were talking about Yolanda.”

  Rejas, his hand now rummaging in another pocket, ignored him. “This old man. He wasn’t just any priest, you understand. He was a priest I loved. It’s a terrible story. But it was he who led me to Ezequiel.”

  He had found what he was looking for. “I want to show you this. It’s important.”

  It was an airmail letter, the paper so thin that the blue writing pressed through like veins.

  “My last contact was this letter from Portugal.”

  Rejas waited for Dyer to read it. The hand was large and neat.

  You remember my hope of one day visiting Our Lady’s shrine at Fatima? My prayers have been answered. I have been lucky enough to be appointed religious guide for a tour comprising eighteen pilgrims from our diocese.

  The priest, whom Dyer gathered had never before left La Posta, was excited by the airport, by the food on the plane, by the way the time changed as he flew.

  Five hours of Palm Sunday lost! Where did that day go? Was it a sin not to be in church, do you think?

  In Portugal he had eaten well, if curiously

  – a dish with pork and clams . . . On the way to the shrine we took a bus to Coimbra, where I saw the library. Gold everywhere. Your father would have loved it! At Fatima the shrine to the Virgin surpassed his expectations. I walked on my knees all the way with the same speed as if I had been on my feet. You have no idea how holy this place is. The Virgin’s presence is palpable. I said a prayer for you and your sister. Also for the village. Things are not so good in the valleys at the moment, Agustín. I have had to send five children to an orphanage in the capital. You will understand why Our Lady’s message of peace has never seemed more needed. I prayed through the night – and I did feel I was listened to.

  I had not heard from Father Ramón since receiving that letter. Then, about a week after my meeting with Yolanda, Sucre handed me a newspaper cutting.

  “La Posta? Isn’t that your village, sir?”
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  “Why? What’s wrong?”

  “They’ve killed the priest.”

  The cutting, three weeks old, reported that Maoist forces had executed Ramón because he had been “participating in the counterinsurgency struggle designed by the government and armed forces”.

  I heard the details later. It was hideous.

  They waited for him by the Weeping Terrace, which is now an airstrip. He walked there every Saturday, composing the sermon he would broadcast over our local radio station. They seized his hat, his stick and the small Bible he carried everywhere – a gift of my father’s, with gilt-edged pages. He was forced to his knees on the grass, his hands tied behind his back. A woman knelt in front of him. She searched the Bible for the appropriate page.

  “Read it out,” she ordered.

  The passage was from Job. He started reading. His voice was famous. He would have said the words as if he was touched with their emotional truth.

  “‘His breath kindleth coals and flame goeth out of his mouth. In his neck remaineth strength and sorrow is turned to joy before us.’”

  She tore the page out, screwed it into a ball, forced it between his lips. “Eat.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Eat!”

  I picture his lips parting.

  “Swallow.”

  I see him making the effort to swallow and the woman, a dreadful expression on her face, tearing first page of Genesis, telling him “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,” making another ball, holding that to his mouth. I see him willing himself to transform this page into the Host. I remember there are six hundred and twenty-seven pages.

  After he passed out, he was stabbed repeatedly. They scooped out the guts and filled his stomach with the rest of the Bible – which, according to a message left inside his hat, had been written as a propaganda tool.

  Lastly, they attacked his face. Those who found his corpse couldn’t tell if it belonged to a man. But when the face is mutilated like that, it means one thing: the killer is known to his victim.