The Dancer Upstairs

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  I heard animated snatches of conversation. Then he came back in. He shut the door, leaning against it. “The class is waiting. I have to go back.”

  I picked up my bag. For the first time, Santiago seemed to notice it. “Wait. Where are you staying?”

  “Your old hotel, if it’s still open.”

  “When did you arrive?”

  “This morning.”

  “You had no problems?”

  “What kind of problems?”

  “I don’t know. From the people.”

  “An old woman screamed at me. A donkey boy ran off when he saw me.”

  He blocked my way, staring at me hard. I had seen the same look in Lazo’s eyes. He looked down at my bag again. “They’ve had enough, Agustín.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “They’re suspicious of everybody. A man carrying a bag like yours, he was killed last week.”

  “A man? From the village?”

  “Nobody you’d know. A commercial traveller from Pachuca.”

  “What was he carrying?”

  “Just samples.”

  “Samples of what?”

  “Brushes, scissors, combs, the usual stuff. He was going from door to door trying to interest people. But the whisper went round. He was a pishtaco. He’d come to abduct our children, cut them up, boil their limbs for grease.”

  Do you know the pishtaco myth? My mother, who worshipped mountain spirits, tried to make us believe in this creature. She warned us not to go out at night or we would find, waiting for us, a stranger in a long white cloak. He had been sent by the authorities to rob us of our body grease. He would carry us to his lair, string us upside down and collect our dripping fat in a tub. She said the pishtaco’s favourite delicacy was the meat of young children which he sold to restaurants in the city. My sister and I assumed she used this bogeyman to stop us roaming too far from the farm.

  I said to Santiago, “They can’t believe this. Not seriously?”

  “They don’t know what to believe. They say those who have disappeared are demanding some explanation. They say policemen in disguise have been sent to extract our grease. They say that with this grease the government can buy weapons to fight Ezequiel.”

  “Who believes this?”

  “Who doesn’t? I’m telling you, don’t go out at night, Agustín. Because that’s when they seized this man. He’d been trying to sell to the barber and they descended on him. A crowd, fifty at least, old men and women, terrified for their grandchildren. The noise, I can’t describe it. They were beating pan lids, screaming and chanting. One of my pupils saw it from her bedroom. They knelt on him. They searched his pockets. Nothing. Then his bag. Inside they found scissors, nail-clippers, pen-knives, needles. That proved it. So they lynched him. It was like a ch’illa.”

  You see, this was another thing about a pishtaco. You couldn’t shoot him. My mother said the only way to kill a pishtaco was to gang up and use his own methods on him. A ch’illa was how the farmers sacrificed their llamas.

  “They tore out his eyeballs, but they didn’t stop there. They ripped off his balls and then they plucked out his heart. He was still alive. I heard the screams from this room.”

  The army buried him near the bridge. No one knew his name, nor what he had looked like. The people had dragged him through the streets until his bones showed through the scraped flesh.

  “I hear the pan lids every night.”

  “Is that what you were discussing outside?”

  “One of the kids spotted someone on the upper road. It’s exciting for them. In daylight it’s easy to dismiss as a joke. But, it’s not. If you go to the hotel, take my advice. Stay inside.” He nodded at the sofa. “I’d offer you a bed here . . .” He couldn’t hide his thoughts.

  “It’s all right, Santiago.” I had exacted enough.

  He jerked up his thumb, relieved, “So long, then, Agustín. If you catch Ezequiel, give me a call.”

  “Look, I’m serious, what I said about money. About a reward.”

  Emphatically, he shook his head. And that’s how we left each other, making vague promises which neither of us thought we would keep.

  I decided to sleep the night at our farm.

  The bridge had reopened days before, repaired by army engineers from a base in Pachuca. Below me the gully squeezed out a torrent of icy water.

  The rain had come too late to work its miracle on the valley. The drought had filched the colours from the mountains and the familiar contours were streaked with the dark brown shades of a buzzard’s wing. The sight of the pinched terraces, slipping away into ridges of cracked earth, ploughed up buried voices. I heard my mother saying: “If you don’t play your flute, the rains won’t come and the coffee won’t grow.”

  I followed a line of hoofprints. They stamped ahead of me over the clay, disappearing off the road down a steep track. Down that track, the frightened animals would have stumbled to the airstrip. I stepped on to the verge and looked from the river – glinting, a little swollen, through a bluish haze – to the flat field below. Unable to contemplate the passage of the horses and their load, I grasped at another image.

  I thought of the day I left home.

  My mother is driving our lorry along this road so I can catch the bus. I’m eighteen, going to the capital to study law. I sit between my mother and my father, who has my sister on his lap.

  Since it’s my last day, everyone is making an effort. But it isn’t a happy occasion. A week ago an army jeep delivered an envelope to my father. We haven’t been told what it contained, but after overhearing the Turk in the butcher’s shop I know.

  I am about to speak when my sister points. “Look!” Covering the field, a flock of green parrots.

  You must have seen them. You can tell you’re up north when you hear those birds. They’re hard to make out on the ground. You see a green bush, and then the whole thing lifts and the way the light falls on their feathers as they tilt makes it seem the birds have changed colour in mid air. What has been green is violent red, and you are looking at another creature.

  I expect my mother to stop the lorry and shoo the parrots from the bushes. She detests these creatures. They eat the crops and she is forever asking my father to buy some poison. Whenever she hears a wingbeat, she dashes into the field and raps a kettle shouting “hey-hey-HEY!” until they rise, shrieking, against the mountain.

  But, sitting beside me, her lips are closed.

  We reach the road. My father slides out of the lorry to open the wire gate. He waves my mother on, closes the gate and climbs back in. Normally this is my job. Today, it’s his treat to me.

  I look back at our farm. It is an honest house and the view over the split-wood fence is identical in every direction. Bleached grass on the terraces. The shadows of large birds. Rain-streaked rocks. In winter, shoals of puffy clouds neatly arranged to the horizon. In summer nothing but the sky. When it grew really hot, you’d get fireballs. On that sort of day the eucalyptus trees would explode.

  Ezequiel grew up two hundred miles to the north, his house not unlike ours. He shared our river, too. The Marañon sprang from a limestone basin above the village. It became the Amazon a thousand miles away, but was already a substantial flow by the time it passed our fields. From the lorry I can see the rapids.

  “You’ll miss the river,” murmurs my father.

  Last week when the moon was up, Santiago, Nemecio and I tied hunks of meat to a string and threw the bait in the water. When the string went taut we scooped the net under what clutched the meat and boiled up a paraffin can.

  “You won’t eat crayfish like this in law school,” said Santiago.

  My father, leaning against the window, observes his fields. The farm has been in his family since August the twelfth, fifteen-eighty, which he has read was a Wednesday. By the time he inherited from his uncle, it had dwindled to an estate of a hundred acres. But still large enough for the military to expropriate.

  “Ouch,” he says adjust
ing his position. “You’ve become too heavy.” This is an excuse. He wants to shift my sister off his lap so he can see the black roof now coming into view between the trees. His library.

  I’ve never met a man so interested in books. Any hope of establishing a conversation with him is predicated on your being interested in what he is reading. Otherwise, as my mother says, it’s a long cold night.

  She jokes he is more concerned about his books than his family. The reason he pays attention to my sister is because, from when she was a small child, she liked to show him animals she’d captured by the river. She would ostentatiously play with them at his feet, toads, beetles, lizards, snails she’d scraped from the cactus. But he is not often seduced from his text, unless he treads on something on his way to the shelves. Scraping a snail from his shoe, he would exclaim: “The boys throw stones at the frogs in sport, but the frogs do not die in sport, they die in earnest.”

  At four o’clock every afternoon my mother joins him in his library, nudging open the door with a glass of red syrup for his chest. Together they raise Pachuca, the nearest big town, on the transmitter and take orders for coffee beans, fewer and fewer orders since the creation of the government co-operative. Then, until it is time for dinner, she abandons my father to his books.

  And last week a man he has never met, made important by a soldier’s uniform, has written to say: all this, it’s over; it’s no longer yours, it’s mine.

  He jerks his head. “Martha . . .”

  “Yes, dear?”

  We wait for him to speak. But it’s my last day. “Oh . . . nothing,” and he investigates his foot.

  My mother is an Ashaninka, pure. She has been his housekeeper since he was twenty and is sharp and sweet. She has high moral standards and shoulders lopsided from picking his coffee. If I look at my face I see my father’s Spanish nose. From my mother I inherited my colouring.

  “I’ve packed your flute,” she says.

  “Oh, good. Thank you.” I had wrapped the pinkullo in a sweater and hidden it in the back of my drawer so she wouldn’t find it.

  “They’ll keep you busy at university, but try to practise.”

  “I will.”

  Her eyes, which nest in the fine lines of her round face, smile trustingly. She wipes the condensation from the windscreen and drives off the road, down the track, towards the Weeping Terrace.

  Before I catch the bus, family and friends are to assemble on this field where by tradition the villagers meet to say goodbye. It’s a rare event for any of us to leave the valley and we will hug and cry and sing special, very sad songs. I’ve witnessed these farewells, and hated them. My mother has forced me to learn the flute so I can participate in ceremonies like this one, but I don’t believe in her music any more than I believe in my father’s books. They haven’t saved the farm. These rituals embarrass me.

  Political, ignorant, mad to get away, I am a young eighteen.

  We are early. We wait on a bank of sharp sedge grass while my mother extracts the pinkullo. She plays some notes and hands me the flute.

  “Dirty girl,” says my father, picking grass from my sister’s back. But the set of his shoulders says, “What are we going to do, Martha?”

  “Papa . . .” I wish he’d speak to me. He wanted me to inherit the farm.

  “Look, there’s Father Ramón!” My mother points at the priest, who is stumbling towards us down the hill.

  “You’ll trip over your surplice,” she calls.

  “Agustín! Agustín! Thank heavens, I’ve caught you . . .” He slows to a walk as he nears us, then stops and slaps his belly, catching his breath.

  He had been at the radio station, he gasps. Delivering his sermon early so he could join us. He grips my shoulder, while addressing my mother.

  “Before I forget, thank you for the most delicious dinner last night? The tongues were excellent. Nemecio and I agreed . . .” and the rest of his sentence is consumed in a fit of coughing.

  “Shouldn’t smoke, Father,” flirts my sister. She is the one who gets around everybody.

  “Now, now,” and he coughs louder.

  I ask, “Where is Nemecio?” But I can see him with Santiago, waving from the road above. He spreads his arms into wings and zigzags down the bank. It’s the last time I will see him.

  “Agustin, I want to give you this.” Father Ramón hitches up his surplice, revealing dirty tennis shoes. He plucks a hand from the folds. “No.” I take a step back. “I can’t. Not possibly.”

  Coiled in his palm, his silver chain with its pendant. Our Lady of Fatima.

  “Trust her, and you’ll get through your law exams.” He advances, spreading the chain into a circle. “Always remember, God’s mercy is more powerful than God’s justice.” He drops it over my head

  Look. I still wear it.

  I got to our farm in the late afternoon.

  It stood at the end of a subdued avenue of eucalyptus. The view of the house held no surprise, but I was not prepared for the emotion it aroused. I hastened towards the buildings as if the river would drag them away before I reached them.

  The trees opened into the yard where we would heap the dispulped berries. I stood by the concrete water tank. Faintly on the air came something I hadn’t smelt for twenty years: the scent of the rotting honey which coated the beans.

  The buildings were deserted. All I heard was my breathing. Lack of sound in these valleys meant lack of life, another reason my mother made me learn the pinkullo. Music and dance for her were practical necessities, the melodies she urged me to collect as vital in their way as my father’s crops. Silence spoke only of blight.

  Now, close to, I saw the devastated fields around the house. The earth had separated into fissures wider than my outstretched arms. Shrubs poked into the air, unprotected against the sun, strangled by vines. My father had not been a successful farmer, yet those who replaced him had understood his crops less.

  I walked through the rooms, not taking much in. Broken glass on the kitchen floor. In my bedroom, a cardboard box spilling over with magazines. A drawer chinking with dead light bulbs. The farm had been seized in the people’s name, and the people had not known what to do with it.

  I crossed the yard to the old depot. Beside the door, on its side, crouched the rusted carcass of the English-built generator. My father boasted that it had pumped in the same peevish rhythm since 1912. It had powered the dryer for the berries and the transmitter in his library and the lamp by which he read.

  The door had been torn away. The floor was a mess of empty sacks and gasoline drums. Termites had crumbled the pillars, and the roof in listing had shed most of its panels to the floor. I approached a heap lying at the end of a beam of sunlight; the blackened remains of a gut-shot dog, the floor showing through its eye-sockets. I heard my father’s voice: “Wherever you see the military, you see stray dogs.”

  Something smelled; the dog, I thought – but it was me. I had worn the same clothes for three days.

  I washed everything in the river, including myself. On the opposite bank a thin mare was eating a mouthful of yellow grass. Like a ballerina, she rubbed her head against an outstretched leg. When I fell backwards, naked, into the water she cantered off, kicking against the flies.

  The sun was hidden by the mountains, but the air was warm and when I got out of the river my skin dried quickly.

  I was hungry. Tucked under the bank, in a pool where we often trapped trout, I noticed two dark shadows and a lazy bubble trail. I went back to the house, mended a net I found hanging in the library, and in a short time landed two small fish.

  I gathered firewood, built a fire in the yard and cooked the trout. But I could barely keep awake to eat. I had spent the previous night rolling and bumping in the back of the pick-up from Pachuca. The night before I had sat unsleeping in the lorry. I changed into a fresh shirt, rested my head against my bag and fell asleep beside the fire.

  A penetrating cry dissolved into stillness. The cry rose again. It became pa
rt of my dream, a dream in which I saw the eye-whites of terrified animals, hooves kicking against a stenchy load, teeth tearing at their own necks. I heard the whinnies of those creatures as they picked their way, or were dragged or beaten, across the stream. And, again, the cry.

  I scrambled to my feet. The road above jittered with orange lights. Tall shadows flared on the cliff. The sides of the gorge magnified the clamour. I heard animals howling, men shouting, a clashing of steel like the sound of my mother beating her kettle.

  The flames jerked down the bank. A line of upright shapes stumbled into the avenue. Dogs barked. Back and forth torchlight flashed on the eucalyptus, shooting up the trunks to a great height. Then the lights were snatched away to kindle another patch of darkness.

  The shouts were distinct now, male and female, but mostly female, older rather than younger; after so many years of frugality and silence, a hysterical release of pent-up rage, despair and grief.

  “Pishtaco! Pishtaco!”

  I leapt back from the fire, ran across the yard, took refuge inside the library. The blood seethed through my head. Who were these people? Who were they chasing? Did I know the person? Half-asleep, exhausted, this was what I thought. I believed they had pursued their quarry all this way from the village. They had frightened him into the fields and now were flushing him out with their pan lids and burning brands.

  I peered down the avenue, expecting to see a figure flitting like an exhausted bat between the trees. Nobody. Nothing moved towards me, save for those flames.

  Now I could make out the forerunners. As well as their torches, they held sticks. The dogs tossed their heads, teeth flashing in the lights.

  Then from that swarm of shadows I heard a woman’s scream. It was a sound from which all the flesh had been removed and only the raw bone showed. A voice ecstatic with hatred

  “Pishtaco! There he is!”

  I ran to the river, wading into the fast-running water, the bag with Lazo’s jug in it poised over my head. In mid-stream I slipped on a stone, but the current buoyed me up and I allowed it to bob me along. A short distance away the river broke into rapids. I floated on – not far – to the next bend and found my feet, splashing to the bank. As soon as I reached the level of the field, I doubled back through the shrubs until I knelt about fifty yards from the crowd. Slowly, I raised my head.