The Dancer Upstairs

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  They hadn’t followed me. They trained their attention on my fire. To a frightened people looking for what they needed to find, these flames in a deserted farm signalled one thing. Pishtaco.

  An old woman – perhaps the one who had screamed – danced towards the fire. She stamped her feet, sending up scuffs of earth, twisting her body in an untidy sway. Once, livid with my father over something, my mother had shuffled the same steps.

  Spread out around the flames were other shrivelled figures. Chanting together, they urged her on. Light played over their quivering throats, their downturned mouths, their brainwashed faces. They looked like creatures made of earth. “Pishtaco, pishtaco, pishtaco,” they sang tonelessly

  The woman was dancing away the alien, the flesh-eater.

  She finished. A man’s voice said, “He’s not here. Where is he?”

  The faces disappeared. Dogs were called and the lights doddered through the house. Sparks drifted up through the library roof. A fierce beam of torchlight investigated the rafters.

  “Over there! Something moved!” But it was another’s shadow.

  From the river, in a voice I thought I knew, an old man shouted “He’s in the water!” My shirt and trousers – which I had spread on the rocks to dry – were brought for inspection, then cast into the fire. The thrower knelt down, puffing at the embers. The flames illuminated a face that could have been Lazo’s – but from that distance, in that glow, I was not certain of anything.

  If it was Lazo and he caught me, would I be able to reassure him, make him call them off. Or would he tear out my eyes?

  An old woman, her back framed by the fire, suddenly turned and scrutinized the darkness that engulfed me. She held up a lantern and its light slanted across a ravined cheek. I heard her say to two other women, “Come on, let’s check this field.” One of them whistled. A dog lifted its nose from the fish bones. Swiftly – very swiftly, given their age – the three of them struck out in my direction.

  I scrambled through the undergrowth. Brambles tore at my face. I wasn’t sobbing yet, but I felt a stab of terror. I crawled on hands and knees, feeling a way between the roots and over ditches. After twenty yards or so the ground suddenly gave way and I fell through black air. My arm flailed, striking a bush – which I grabbed. Rigid with dread, I hauled myself back to the surface and lay on the lip of the crevice, hugging the bag to my chest, panting and trembling. Branches snapped. A dog barked. Daggers of light converged towards me. I had no time left.

  How wide the crevice was, I couldn’t tell. I kicked out and touched earth a yard away. But how deep? There are cracks so wide you can’t see the bottom. To measure the depth, I gripped the bush and lowered myself, feeling for the bottom with one foot. The sides started to narrow almost immediately. I let myself down a little further. The crevice seemed to shrink to the width of a man’s waist. But I could not feel the bottom. The ground reverberated with trampling feet. What if Lazo was right? What if this plunged into the heart of the earth? I twisted my head. The tips of branches glinted twenty yards away. I could hear a hungry snuffling. A bush shuddered.

  I released my grip and slithered down until I was wedged. Above me was the vast indifference of the night. Then sparks drifted among the stars. They had set fire to the house.

  At that moment I wanted to kill Ezequiel. Had he been sandwiched in the earth and I had appeared on the lip, I would have stamped him into that bitter-smelling oblivion.

  11

  Next evening, waiting for Rejas, Dyer had opened a second packet of breadsticks. Without a word, Emilio lifted the book and flicked the crumbs into his cupped hand. Then, in his grubby, over-large jacket, his bow-tie at an angle, he walked ponderously on to the balcony and flung out his hand, scattering the crumbs.

  Nine o’clock. A samba racketed from the fortress. Through the window drifted dog-barks, engines panting and the leathery smell of night.

  “Where is he?”

  Coming back inside, the waiter shrugged.

  “Do you know where his sister lives?”

  Emilio flicked a napkin over the seat of the empty chair, avoiding Dyer’s eye.

  “Do you know her name?”

  No reaction. Across the river, darkly spread against the last traces of a dramatic sunset, the jungle lifted ragged wings. Dyer could see, between the acanthus scrolls of the balustrade, the water rolling by and foam curling from a prow. A rubbish boat. Sluggish, unimpressable, varnished by a low moon, the river had Emilio’s face.

  Dyer ordered a beer. At nine-thirty he heard someone on the stairs. The curtain rustled and two faces poked, one above the other, through the beads. The taller, European-looking, wore a ponytail and chewed a mango noisily. At first Dyer thought they were musicians, wondering whether to play. Then he saw a pair of flippers dangling from the man’s neck, and, attached to his belt, some goggles. Two divers, more like, looking for a buddy or a good time. “Come on, Mr Silkleigh, there’s nothing for us here,” decided the lower head, impatient. “Right-oh, old thing.” The discussion over, they withdrew. Dyer heard their footsteps descending and a catcall from the square.

  Ten o’clock.

  Last night, Rejas had left Dyer down a dark hole, expecting to have his eyes torn out. Surely he couldn’t have intended to leave him hanging at such a point? Dyer had listened to people’s stories all his life. Why was he so engrossed by this one? However dimly, he must have suspected where Rejas was leading. The policeman’s narrative beckoned, and not just because he had fought against a darkness unlike any Dyer had known.

  “Another beer.”

  That darkness, that darkness – suddenly it flickered through him like a nausea. Jaime, wasn’t that his name, the journalist from Villaria who’d had his tongue cut out? No, Juan, that’s who it was. Or maybe it was Julio. Dyer had met him only once, for a beer, at the Versailles Bar in Plaza San Martín. Grey jersey, shiny black bomber jacket, fattish. Dyer must have seen the tongue when Julio licked his fingers to turn the pages of the thesis he had brought with him. He’d written this about Ezequiel, his years at Santa Eufemia University. It was one of three copies; the military had one, Ezequiel the other. The two professors assigned to supervise had both resigned out of fear. Ezequiel’s comrades had rung him. Strange voice said: Burn your copy. Show it to no one. “If you’re afraid of dying, you’ll die many times.” But if you’ve spent four years writing six hundred pages, what you want most in the world is readers. That’s when Julio licked his fingers. The world needed to know this, how it started. He had been vehement on this point, fervent, but Dyer couldn’t tell him that the world didn’t care a fig, could not say that to a colleague, so he asked him, he said: Jaime, listen, who’ve you shown this to? and Jaime had listed them, this American journalist – who Dyer knew was CIA – also a French journalist and one from Reuters, and now he was showing it to Dyer.

  Aren’t you in danger? Oh, no. No, no. No. Besides, who would find out? Jaime didn’t believe in Ezequiel’s thousand eyes, Ezequiel’s thousand ears. Propaganda.

  Journalists can get like that with a story, when it becomes more important than their lives.

  But someone found out. Must have done. Jaime had been so pleased, too. Kept saying “scoop”. Wanted to know if that’s what they called it in English. “Scoop?” In fact, that was the last word Dyer heard him say as they were leaving the bar, Jaime hopping from one leg to another, terrifically pleased with himself. A group of Ezequiel’s followers imprisoned in Lurigancho had agreed to speak to him. In gaol. “A scoop.”

  It was, too. None of the press corps had been able to interview Ezequiel’s people. This was Ezequiel’s policy. He didn’t like journalists. Journalists took sides, he said. So far he had killed forty-two.

  Well, the prisoners granted Jaime his interview. The guards unlocked the door into the compound, let him through, turned the lock after him. An hour later a hand scratched at the grille. They had cut out his tongue.

  Perhaps it was Jorge. The name didn’t matter. The p
oint was the tongue, and once Dyer thought of that gargling hole he couldn’t stop himself. The awful daring of a moment’s surrender, wasn’t that what Eliot had said? Or Pound?

  Unasked, Emilio brought him another beer.

  He was drinking to forget what he couldn’t remember. Now that he thought about it, had Jorge’s tongue in fact been cut out? Dyer hadn’t seen it. Had anyone seen the tongue or the absence of tongue? What was to say that it didn’t happen? That the whole story had been made up, its horror improved with the telling? Hadn’t Dyer been culpable of treating Ezequiel like this? Hadn’t he boasted he knew all about Ezequiel – yet if he was honest, if the man was sitting right opposite him now, in the seat he’d reserved for Rejas, who wasn’t coming by the look of things, did Dyer know anything about the man? Really know? Some people devoted whole lives to this subject. Forty-two of his peers had given their lives to it. Dyer had been lucky so far, but there was no reason why his luck should continue. If he hadn’t had connections, and Vivien Vallejo for an aunt, nobody would have had anything to do with him.

  And Brazil? What did he know about Brazil? Come to that, what did he know about South America? He knew Spanish and Portuguese and a smattering of Guarani, but not so well that anyone would take him for a native speaker. In his articles he was able to present the continent as a novelty in England, but what right did he have to act as an intermediary?

  His heyday had been the war in the Falklands and its aftermath. His despatches towered above the others, not just because he spoke Spanish but because, by virtue of his upbringing in Latin America and his marriage to a Brazilian girl, he already had unrivalled contacts in the region. He won two consecutive press awards – one, for his interview with Lieutenant-Colonel Rose, minutes after brokering the peace in Port Stanley; the second, for his investigation into the treatment of Amazon Indians. Excited by Latin America for the first time since Perón nationalized the railways, his newspaper had opened a bureau in Rio.

  But interest had quickly flagged. Either he could keep up a steady flow of revelations about the destruction of the rain forest or Nazi-hunting in Paraguay, or the public did not want to know. Our C2 readers aren’t switched on to your neck of the woods.

  And now his aunt had disappeared and it was eleven o’clock in Pará and Rejas hadn’t turned up and he felt like a shit because he hadn’t told him who he was. Rejas had thought he was talking to a receptive stranger, but had grown suspicious. He must have used his contacts in the police force and found out about him and that’s why he wasn’t coming tonight and that’s why Dyer would never see him again and he would spend the rest of his life thrashing through the water without having heard the end of the story.

  When he got to his room in the Hotel Seteais, he threw up. It had been a mistake not to order dinner.

  In the morning Pará celebrated Corpus Christi. The young priest stood beneath an awning in the bed of a lorry, which took him at walking pace across the square, stopping at the steps of a church with three clock faces. Attached to the fringed awning, two coffin-sized loudspeakers distorted the Eucharist. The congregation, dressed up, fanned their throats with hymn sheets until invited to sing. Their words emphasized the connection between Pará and the Old World: “O, Jesus, you were born in Bethlehem, our brother city.” Firecrackers burst noisily between the hymns.

  Shaken from his bed by the din, Dyer got up – still in his clothes from the night before – and walked to the square.

  His mood was penitential, but he lacked the energy to insinuate himself into the crush. His mouth was dry, and he had an undergraduate’s hangover. What he wanted most was coffee and a large glass of orange juice. He looked towards the restaurant, peering over the hymn sheet someone had given him, to see if Emilio had opened his shutters, when he saw Rejas standing in the recess behind the balcony.

  Dyer, climbing the steep stairs, was worried in case Rejas might want to avoid him, but the policeman regretted his absence the night before: he had not been able to leave his sister. She had been unwell all afternoon. When she opened her eyes, her left pupil was turned outward and didn’t respond to light.

  “No news yet from the lab?”

  “No.”

  They watched Emilio put down the coffee and orange juice. Rejas waited until the waiter was gone, then said: “You’ve been suborning my friend.”

  “I did ask him where your sister lived,” admitted Dyer, embarrassed. “But he wouldn’t tell me.”

  “No, he wouldn’t. He comes from my valley. His family used to work in the hotel, when it was owned by Santiago’s mother. His wife looks after my sister. They were driven out by Ezequiel’s people. My sister was happy to take them in.”

  “He’s very protective . . .”

  Rejas, changing the subject again, said: “What did you do yesterday? Did you find some Indians?”

  “There’s something I need to tell you,” said Dyer.

  “What is that?”

  “I told you I was a writer. That’s not the whole story. I’m a journalist.”

  Rejas gave him a quick, hard look. “I know who you are. I know your name, and your date of birth, and the name of the paper you write for.”

  “How did you know all this?”

  “I knew it as soon as you told me that Señora Vallejo was your aunt. I’ve read your work.” Rejas mentioned an article which had been translated in La República, one of the first studies of Ezequiel’s movement to have been published in the west.

  “Well, yes – yes, actually, I did write that.”

  Rejas said, though not disagreeably, “It was rather shallow, I thought. There were some inaccuracies, too. And another article which upset a great many people in my country.”

  “I hadn’t known until quite recently that it caused this offence.”

  “It doesn’t matter.” His smile was more a shrug than a reprimand.

  “They were rather shallow,” agreed Dyer. “What I write is bound to appear shallow to a participant. Journalists can’t tell the whole story.” He stopped. “But if you knew I was a journalist all along, why tell me your story? You must be aware of the risks.”

  Rejas, face between his hands, evaluated Dyer. “Do you write everything you are told?”

  “If I judge it has political interest for my readers, yes.”

  Rejas considered this. “When you came here, what actually were you researching?”

  To be able to tell the truth was suddenly more welcome to Dyer than fresh air. He explained the background to his journey to find Vivien, his failure to get an interview with Calderón.

  “It seems I may have blotted my copybook.”

  Rejas shook his head. “Frankly, you ought to have known he wouldn’t speak to you. He’s practically ungetatable. That is the source of his power, as it was for Ezequiel. Why should he see you? He won’t even see me.”

  “Calderón has reason to be frightened of you. It’s hardly any wonder.”

  “No, it’s not that. He just doesn’t see people. That’s not the way he works.”

  “But why would you want to reach him, Colonel? Except to tell him of your intentions.”

  For three nights, Dyer had kept his ferreting brain in check, hoarded the questions he wanted to ask. Now they tumbled out. “Ledesma of the PLP is vying with Temuco of the CPV for your hand in political marriage. Yet here you are, miles from home. All right, your sister’s ill. But surely you have a plan? You must know that if the elections were held tomorrow, you’d have a chance of winning. You’re an ideal figurehead of the People’s Party. You would have an immense following. A great many people outside your own country, too, are aware of you, what you’ve done. The Brazilian press, if they had any idea you were here, would be marching up those steps in battalion strength.”

  He watched Rejas, waiting for a reaction. But he was trapped by the other man’s unblinking gaze into rushing on. “So what would stop you running? What is stopping you running? Is Calderón frightened of your popularity?”

 
; Rejas, a little impatient, said, “Who can say what Calderón thinks? I’ve left the stage, haven’t I? I’ve gone away – which is what he wanted. I can’t help it if the stage keeps coming back to me.”

  “I don’t want to appear impertinent, but I have to ask. Will you run?”

  “Maybe not. Maybe I will. Today is too soon to say. Neither yes nor no is yet the right answer.”

  “What do you need, then, what are you waiting for, to make up your mind?”

  Rejas threw back his head, exasperated. “Let’s just say that I need, in some way I haven’t been able to arrive at, to reach an understanding.”

  “Are you talking about a deal? I can perfectly see, Colonel, what you could offer Calderón. But what could he propose to you?”

  Rejas looked at Dyer a very long time, as if weighing up whether to continue with the discussion.

  Finally he said, “Let’s get to the end of the story.”

  12

  I returned to the capital by bus. The journey took three days. What sustained me was the piece of paper with Edith’s emergency number on it. I had no idea of her position in Ezequiel’s hierarchy, but she was obviously high up. If I could locate the address, I believed it would connect me to Ezequiel. I knew that number by heart.

  We reached the outskirts at dusk. There was a blackout. Blue fireworks spattered the sky, a signal of some kind. I was certain a message lay encoded in those bursts of colour, but could not guess what it might be.

  The bus inched through the crowd. Fanned out beside the window, panicked men and women, heads down, walked rapidly from something. Families fleeing with their children, heading they didn’t know where. A face twisted up at me, mouth open.

  I had been gone nine days. Terror had sunk its fangs into the city.