The Dancer Upstairs

by Nicholas Shakespeare

“Oh no, oh no, oh no. I don’t believe it,” said the Turk, on all fours among his silvery Thermos fragments.

  I tried the door. It was padlocked on the inside. I pressed my face to the filthy glass. No meat slapped across the stone slab. The blue chair stood in the corner, its seat missing.

  In the glass I saw my face. I looked disordered and alarming. Horrified, I found a comb and ran it through my hair. I was still combing as I turned into Calle Jirón and walked headlong into an old lady.

  She was stooped beside a mound of potatoes. I was so startled I dropped the comb. The old woman – amazingly quick – darted to pick it up, then held it away from my reach, refusing to return it until I rewarded her. She extended her other hand towards me, pleading for money. Her face was terraced with age and she had an almost peaceful look.

  Then her glance slid down to my bag and she screamed.

  “Pishtaco!” She threw down the comb, gathered up the potatoes in her black shawl, and hobbled away as fast as she could.

  At No. 119, a white house with a red door, I paused. This was where my parents had lived after the military expropriated our farm. When my father died, my mother continued to share the house with his books. In her curt old age she saw in them the enfeebled crops and the money he should have spent on fertilizer and parrot killer.

  I didn’t want to see inside and walked on. The next street, parallel to the church, was Calle Bolsas. Outside Nemecio’s house I put down my bag and knocked. Nothing. I pushed the door, but it didn’t give and, pressing my ear to a window, I could hear no sounds.

  At the bottom of the same street I tried another house, a metal plaque bolted to its door. F. Lazo, Orthodontist.

  A little girl opened the door. She had an elastoplast on her arm, and held a rag doll by the leg.

  “Who is it?” asked a worried-sounding man from inside.

  “I’m looking for Fernando Lazo,” I called.

  “But I know that voice . . .”

  He came up behind the girl, holding her shoulders as if to support himself. It was frightening how little he had changed.

  “Joaquín?”

  “It’s his son,” I said.

  Later, after the embraces and the disbelief, he led me to his surgery.

  One always expects people to react more emotionally than they do when you haven’t seen them for a long time. It wasn’t me the dentist wanted to remember. During our conversation he called me by my father’s name. What had happened to our library? It was a sad day when we left the farm. He had kept our dental records. Just in case.

  “And you? You became a lawyer, right?”

  “That’s it.”

  “Didn’t you have a sister?”

  “She’s married, lives in Brazil.”

  He contrived a smile. “So. How are your teeth?”

  “No serious problems.”

  “That’s good. Tell everyone how well I looked after you.”

  I sat on a stool beside his desk while he fidgeted with a cast of a jaw. It was odd once more to be in this room, more museum than dental surgery. Above the desk, thirty or forty burial urns were arranged on shelves reaching to the ceiling. As a younger man, Lazo had been an ardent collector of Chimu and Chachapoyan pottery. Once he was treating my mother when his daughter, dusting the pots, felt one of them stir and, peering over the rim, discovered a knot of grey snakes. My mother had come home full of the question, wanting to discuss the puzzle of how they had got there in the first place. No one had any idea. Nor did they know how to get rid of them. Hot oil – the snakes might thrash and break the pot. Water – wouldn’t they swim loose? Fire – the pot itself might crack. Lazo decided to smother them. He sealed the pot with tinfoil, lowered it into a plastic bag, and turned it upside down. It had stayed like that for days, a source of macabre and ceaseless fascination for his open-mouthed patients until, with a great song and dance, it was judged safe to remove the covering and the pot, cautiously examined, revealed a withered tangle of what looked like strips from an exploded tyre.

  That morning I had disturbed Lazo while he was making a plate for the Mayor, who’d lost a front tooth.

  “He has to have it today. Talk to me while I work.” He inclined the white jaw to the light with the care of someone inspecting the innards of an ancient clock. He had seen to the teeth of three generations of my family.

  “Says he slipped in the shower.” He pulled towards him a jar of brown teeth. To tease us, he used to tell me and my sister that the teeth were really peanuts. He poured a selection on to a shoebox lid; suddenly I wanted to eat one.

  “You’ve brought the rain, Joaquín,” he said, bending over his work. “We haven’t had rain for two years. Not rainy rain. Have you seen your coffee fields? There are cracks so wide you can’t see the bottom.” His voice quavered. He hadn’t expected me. I brought back too much.

  In the courtyard emaciated chickens, plucked-looking, poked their heads between the fence-posts.

  “What’s happened to the market?” I asked.

  “Our friends destroyed the lower road.”

  He tweezered an appropriate tooth, a molar, from the box lid, and clamped it in a small vice. “Anyway, there’s no one left to feed. Just babies. You remember my daughter? You were friends. That’s her little girl.”

  “Where is she now?”

  “Graciela? In the capital. The young ones have all fled there, those that didn’t join our friends, those that weren’t put dead into a hole. We’re a village of old men and women. With grandchildren to look after.”

  “When did you see her last?”

  “A month ago. Just before Father Ramon died. I want to follow her, but I can’t. They’ve confiscated our identity cards.”

  He unhooked his drill, directed it at the molar. When we were children he used to fasten a piece of cotton wool on the drive-cord. He hoped the white flash, zipping up and down the drill’s pulleys, would distract us from the pain.

  “We’re sick of the army, we’re sick of Ezequiel, we’re sick of anyone we don’t know. You’re lucky you weren’t lynched today.” His voice was husky. The drill jabbed at the tooth like a weapon.

  “Tell me about Father Ramón,” I said.

  He appeared not to have heard. I repeated the question.

  He switched off the drill, sat back, watching the pulleys slow, the needle lock to a sudden halt.

  “I can’t do this and tell you.” The Mayor’s tooth could wait. Not every day did Joaquín’s son sit here.

  Two months before, the villagers had voted in a left-wing councillor. This was their angry response to officials who had ordered parents to pay an education fee. In the local elections, encouraged by the councillor, the village abstained. One morning the military came driving down the hill.

  The councillor was not seen again.

  But it didn’t end there. The soldiers went from house to house, demanding to know who had supported him. It was then that Father Ramón stepped in. He insisted on an inquiry into the councillor’s disappearance and would neither give up nor moderate his demands. He contacted the Diocesan Commission for Social Action in Villaria. To the Synod he sent letters and rolls of film chronicling the army’s excesses. He accused the commanding officer to his face.

  And then Ezequiel’s men retaliated. They executed the Turk as an informer.

  “Remember the Turk? He’d taken over the hotel after Leticia Solano left town. I don’t know if he was an army informer, or if he wasn’t. I don’t know, Joaquín, really I don’t. Friendships only last as long as we don’t talk about these things. The fact is, they killed the Turk and they shot his wife as she tried to pull the hood off one of them.”

  Father Ramón had been enraged. In his broadcasts to the valleys he attacked Ezequiel, whose behaviour was no different from the military’s. He showed no respect for those he claimed to liberate. This killing was something intolerable.

  “I had not seen Father Ramón so wound up since his visit to Portugal,” said Lazo sadly.


  One Saturday afternoon a month ago the priest walked down to the river, presumably composing his next tirade, and never came back.

  “Nemecio found him. Identifiable only by his hat and his stick.”

  “Who killed him?”

  Lazo stared at the shelves of primitive pots. His voice was tight, his eyes pinched and sore as though he hadn’t allowed himself to cry.

  “Who can say?”

  Outside the chickens pecked the ground. In the next room his little granddaughter sang to a doll.

  “I thought Nemecio lived in Cajamarca.”

  “He came back to assist Father Ramón.”

  “Where is he now?”

  Lazo shifted his gaze to the brown tooth.

  “He was one of those in church.”

  “What do you mean?”

  The dentist’s eyes rippled in astonishment. “The massacre. I thought that’s why you’d come . . .”

  “What massacre? What are you talking about?”

  He searched my face. “The military’s reprisal for Father Ramón. But you heard about that, didn’t you? Didn’t you?”

  Afterwards, after he had stuttered it out, I had to tell him no one in my office knew. As soon as I heard his story, I saw that everything the General feared had overtaken us.

  Falteringly, in a voice from which all emotion had been exhausted, Lazo described the military’s revenge.

  Ten days after Nemecio discovered the priest’s body, the villagers watched two loose columns of men in black uniforms jogging towards the church. It was a Wednesday, about four-thirty in the afternoon, a time when Father Ramón would have conducted his Bible class.

  Nemecio had taken charge of the class. Suddenly, from behind the altar, he heard a banging.

  The men kicked down a door at the back of the church. They squeezed through a store room, knocking over boxes and paintings. The congregation were petrified. The soldiers fanned out along both aisles, levelling their guns at the twenty men and women, ordering them to kneel.

  “Palomino Cordero?” they shouted. “Which one of you is Cordero?”

  The man they wanted was the producer at the radio station. One of the soldiers gathered the identity cards, flicked through them, then handed the bundle to someone else, who repeated the process.

  They didn’t believe it. They had been misled. They searched the sanctuary, the pulpit; they tore off the cloth over the communion table. But Cordero wasn’t there. Their leader retreated to the altar to radio for instructions.

  There was the rasp of static. A remote voice said, “Proceed as planned.”

  The soldiers grabbed Nemecio first. Then Lazo’s son-in-law, the postman. They yanked all the men outside, leaving others to deal with the women.

  “Sing!” they yelled. “All of you, sing!”

  The women were terrified. What should they sing? One of them suggested a hymn. She led the way nervously. Her words were hesitant, her throat dry. From somewhere she found a voice.

  “Louder!”

  Guns cracked outside. One of the women screamed.

  “Louder, louder,” lashed the soldiers, from behind them now.

  The voices rose in fear. “Oh buen Jesús, yo creo firmemente que en el altar Tu sangre está presente . . .”

  They had begun the second verse when something bounced on to a wooden pew.

  Lazo felt the explosion in his surgery. It was five o’clock. From Clemencia’s shattered mouth he would hear what had happened. Nemecio’s sister was one of two survivors. The other, a farmer’s wife who lost both legs, died later.

  Since then they had threatened Clemencia. If she opened her mouth they’d dig up her dead husband and make her eat him. Neither she nor Lazo believed this to be an empty threat. She swore she would say nothing. But while she was sitting in the dentist’s chair – Lazo doing what he could with his inadequate supplies – her remaining teeth started to chatter.

  When Lazo had finished, I said: “Weren’t there bodies to prove this?”

  “They used horses to carry them away,” he said.

  Horses were the only way of transporting the bodies to the airstrip. Ezequiel’s men, after killing Father Ramón, had blown up the bridge. Near the hangar, the soldiers had dug a mass grave, but three days later they’d come back with their shovels and dug it up again and thrown the bodies – wrapped in plastic bin-liners – across the backs of the screaming animals.

  “The smell wasn’t any more pleasant to them, poor things, than it was to us,” said Lazo.

  The military must have feared an investigation because four soldiers barged into his surgery and demanded that he hand over his dental records.

  “Which I did immediately. But I have copies. I’ve foreseen something like this for years.”

  Anxious to know the fate of his son-in-law, Lazo one evening made his way to the airstrip. He’d smelled the decay lingering above the disturbed earth. Dug for a while; found nothing except the end of a candle, a strip of white cloth, and a bunch of keys.

  Saliva shone on his yellowed false teeth. He looked up at the ceiling. “When they buried them, not all the victims were dead.”

  Words formed, but I couldn’t speak.

  “Ask me. Go ahead and ask me. How do I know? One night a soldier got drunk. He began shooting in the air, yelling that he missed his mother. Knocking on doors. He demanded to see my documents. I invited him in, calmed him down. Then he put aside his gun and began crying. He was from the coast, hundreds of miles away from home, he’d been made to do these terrible things – and he described what they had done.

  “I haven’t told my daughter. She thinks her husband’s just missing. But they buried him alive. They dug that hole and threw him in it and shovelled earth over him. Alive, alive.”

  Lazo fiddled with a gas cylinder by his feet. He flicked a cigarette lighter, holding the flame to the tip of a blow-torch. The gas blew it out, but lit at the second attempt, burning with a blue-orange flame. I watched him melt the amalgam and fix the tooth in the plate.

  “There. That’ll have to do.” He turned off the gas and the flame died. It wasn’t perfect, but the cylinder was running low and months might pass before he could get another. The Mayor was a sonofabitch anyway.

  He swivelled in his chair. “I tell you, Joaquín, we’ve been afraid so long, we’re not afraid. We’re mad. Our blood has boiled over. It’s bubbled into our eyes, our brains, and we’re crazy. We’ll strike at anything. I tell you this for your own safety.”

  Next door the girl began another song, a skipping-rope rhyme I used to chant with Nemecio.

  Este niño mio, no quiere dormir . . .

  Embarrassed, I said: “Señor Lazo, can I ask a favour?”

  “Be careful, Joaquín, what you ask.”

  I told Lazo about the theft of my wallet at the high pass. “Could you lend me some money?”

  He reached stiffly above him and tugged a pot from one of the shelves. He rooted inside, plucking out a bundle of notes.

  “Take this. No, take it all. There’s nothing to spend money on here. But pay it back to Graciela, would you?” On the back of an invoice he wrote down her address in the capital.

  “Shall I take a letter from you?”

  “What would I say?”

  “You must have something you want to tell her.”

  “What? That she has no husband? No friends? Is that what you want me to write?”

  “Then I’ll tell her you’re well and so is her daughter.”

  He closed his eyes and opened them. “No. In return for this money, you please tell her the truth. What happened.”

  “Very well.”

  I stooped, folded the address and the money into an inside pocket of the sports bag. I was about to close it when he said, “This is for you.”

  Lazo, hands trembling, held the portrait-vase above my head. A beautiful one, reddish coloured, with the traces of black brushmarked crosses, and a face. He could have sold it in the capital for the equivalent of his annual i
ncome.

  I got to my feet. “But that’s –”

  “Please, Joaquín. I’m too old to be argued with. I want you to have it.” He was breathing fast, as if he had run up the road to bring it to me.

  I turned the jug under the light. Off the shelf this was not a dull ornament in need of a good dusting. It struck me then – there, in Lazo’s surgery – that within its simple shape, its rough patina, the nameless red of its pigmentation, the strong face, the sensual quality of its jaw and lips, there existed the gamut of beauty and terror.

  He had dated it to the Chimu dynasty, he said. He’d bought it off a grave-robber from the coast, near Moche. Probably it was the portrait-vase of a king or shaman and had been buried with his shrouds.

  I stammered my thanks, knowing what this gift meant to him.

  “Your father, Joachín. I loved him.”

  “Then I accept it in my father’s memory.” I wrapped the pot in a shirt and zipped up the bag.

  He opened the door for me. “I keep the records in the other pots. In case we find the teeth.”

  We shook hands. There was a furtive quality to his touch, and I knew there was something he held back. Despite everything he had told me, about Father Ramón, about the army’s reprisal, there was more to tell.

  Porque el cuco malo está por venir . . . The song’s words drifted from the dark hallway.

  “Santiago Solano – was he killed too?”

  “Santiago?” His fingers fretted at his temple. For a moment he was trying to recall whether that ditch had taken Santiago too. Then his face cleared. “No. I don’t think so. I think he was out of town that day.”

  “Where would I find him?”

  “He teaches at San Marcos.”

  I had to walk past the church to reach the school.

  At my approach the pigeons on the dome exploded into the air, leaving the brickwork bald and white. Sandbags packed the entrance to the height of my chest. A chalked sign declared that the building was undergoing essential redecoration.

  I felt the urge to pray. Between the sandbags a passage led to the wooden door. I assumed it would be locked, but the hinges were wrecked and it opened.

  From my childhood, I remembered aisles watched over by gold-haired saints, and a caoba wood floor dappled with green and blue window-light as if seen through deep water. My father, who calculated the windows to be three hundred years old, had traced their origin to a glass-maker from Salamanca. The grenade had blown them out.