The Dancer Upstairs

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  The Calle Diderot team worked eight-hour shifts. It was a crude operation by Western standards. But anything more sophisticated at this stage might have aroused curiosity. Sucre was the dustbin man. Gomez, alternating with Clorindo, did wonders in the blue and yellow outfit of the municipal gardener. A couple seconded from Narcotics spent hours in the café and nestling in the front seat of their clapped out Volkswagen. The operation was kept secret even from the General, whom I had not told what we had found on the video cassette.

  I used a different car for each shift. Sometimes I parked in a narrow cul-de-sac, sometimes on the corner of Calle Leme. People aren’t that observant. They don’t stare at particular cars in the street – and I wasn’t driving a lavender Cadillac. I listened to the radio. I read the newspaper. I broke up the day by using the lavatory in a bar on Calle Pizarro where they sold sandwiches. I sat for eight-hour stretches, watching passers-by.

  At night, since it was too risky to rent a room from anyone in the street, I exchanged the car for a van. I used a blue engineer’s van, no windows at the back and with a black stripe along both sides. From the outside it looked like a band of paint. In fact, it was darkened perspex, and I could see through it.

  I sat on a folding chair in the back. I had night glasses and a bottle to pee in. One of my men, usually Sucre, would park the van, get out, lock it and walk away. At the end of the shift he would come back, repeating the process in reverse.

  I soon became familiar with the faces of the street, what preoccupied them, who they liked or didn’t like. No one seemed ill at ease or fearful. This was a prosperous neighbourhood, far removed from the tension of the outskirts. A bird sang in the jacaranda. A dog lay asleep on a porch. The very tranquillity of the scene was reason enough to be on guard.

  I compiled notes. On that first afternoon, for instance, at about two-fifteen an elderly man, tall with patched sleeves, entered No. 339. After forty-five minutes he drove quickly away in an orange Volkswagen Beetle.

  An hour later the maid from No. 345 visited the “Vargas Video Store”. She came out holding two cassettes, talking to herself. The store-keeper charged extra if you didn’t rewind the videos.

  At four o’clock a female jogger, late forties, in a turquoise track suit, left No. 357. She returned after thirty-five minutes, walking.

  Ten minutes later, a young woman, tidily dressed, arrived at No. 365, the estate agency run from a garage. I could see the car behind her desk. She left at five-thirty carrying a handful of envelopes.

  Which of these people was hiding Ezequiel? You see, I was certain he had settled here, or in Calle Perón. He had remained as silent and derisive as a god right up until the moment I saw him on the video cassette. A few frames of film had made him fallible, human at last. The sound of him may have been no louder than the distant thrumming of an insect, but in those warm nights I felt his presence.

  I am able to picture him in that room. He’s lighting another cigarette. He is listening to the music we would find in the cassette player: Beethoven’s Ninth. Perhaps it is the last movement playing as he leans in his customary position by the window, having watched the sixteen girls go into their class.

  It strikes him as a warm evening, but he often misjudges the temperature so that Edith, wearing a thick sweater, will come into the room and find him with nothing on but a vest.

  I see Edith nudging open the door with a tray. She rests it on the trolley while he lingers at the window, watching two lovers go by. He hears a bird. He scratches his neck. For twelve years he has been cooped up in airless rooms like this one.

  Edith confirms the meeting on Monday. At eight that morning the Central Committee will present details for his approval. Nothing can go wrong. In less than a week the final act of the Fifth Grand Plan will be played out.

  He listens, eating. He planned it himself, twenty years ago. The strategy has remained unblemished in his head. He nods and forks towards his tongue another mouthful of ceviche.

  The night crackles. Edith parts the curtain a fraction. Yellow fireworks confirm the operation tomorrow, against Cleopatra’s Hotel. She comes back into the room and sits on the edge of the bed, plucking hairs from her black trousers.

  At seven o’clock she turns on the television, keeping the volume low. The police announce an important breakthrough in the hunt for Ezequiel. A police general, interviewed outside a blue house, holds up a wig and says: “Have no doubt. We are closing in.”

  Ezequiel watches for a minute, then picks up his book. There are marks on the page where wax from a candle splashed during the last blackout. It upsets him because it was a good edition.

  Edith says, “Is there anything else you want? Cigarettes? Water?”

  “I need more Kenacort.” He doesn’t need to speak loudly to be heard. His voice is a solid thing, the words creating in the room another presence. This second figure stands at his shoulder, like a maquette of damp grey clay, arms crossed, featureless – but watchful.

  “Is it bad?”

  He nods. The rash has started to creep inside the membrane of his penis. When he pissed this morning he wanted to scream.

  He brushes her hand from his knee. Reluctant to pull herself away, she watches him drink his water. She decides to make the bed. The Dithranol has marked the sheets with purple brown stains. She strips them off and is about to leave the room, pregnant with dirty bedclothes, when she hesitates, returns to his side.

  His mouth is full of water, his tongue and lips dry from the Acitretin tablets. He swallows. “What is it?”

  “It might be nothing.”

  He listens as she explains what is troubling her.

  “Should I have him followed?”

  “No. I’ve seen him. It’s nothing. He’s infatuated, that’s all. Another Gabriel.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Although the words are quietly spoken, his black eyes are charged. “You can’t check everybody.” He drains his glass and pushes away the tray.

  “You’re finished?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you want to watch some more?”

  “No.”

  She switches off the television and leaves the room. She will not come back tonight.

  From below he hears the squeak of shoes, a sound as of something sharply wrenched. He looks down to the rug. The squeaks mark the end of his reading. Downstairs they are beginning their exercises. For the next hour and a half the floor will become a sounding board for the thud, thud, thud of feet and the “one two three, one two three, one two three” of the teacher calling out the rhythm, and for the music, interrupted again and again, of his favourite composers.

  These interruptions are a torture to him. At the same time, he demands in his followers the same obedience as the ballet teacher seeks from her pupils. He makes tolerable these evenings by recasting the girls beneath him into the image of his invisible army.

  Tonight, it is a classical class. The girls begin at the edge of the room and, in a quickening tempo, proceed to the middle. At the end of the lesson they will have exercised every part of their bodies – except the vocal cords. On the dance floor, only the teacher speaks. They listen to her, not talking, because she can make them perfect.

  “Okay, we’ll start with the same plié as yesterday. Let’s remember what we discussed, about keeping the strength in the middle and freeing the arms.”

  He slips a finger under the page as he reaches the bottom. He is rereading Kant. He turns the page.

  “Listen to what I’m going to play, and push from the front foot. Good, Christina. Practise that.”

  They’re dancing “The Song of the Moon” from Rusalka. Hands wave in the mirror. Bodies sway like branches in a wind. The hands and bodies flow to the Dvorák composition he most loves. He stretches a leg.

  “Down and up, down and up. Hips back. Listen to the music. You’re not listening to the music, Gabriela.” It stops in mid beat. “I’m sorry, girls.”

  Shoes brush across the parquet. The t
eacher, he imagines, will be adjusting a head, plucking up one shoulder, placing a finger in the small of the girl’s back.

  “Now, your arms are condor feathers.”

  The music strikes up, accompanied by a handclap in time to the beat.

  From the trolley he picks up a fountain pen. He unscrews the cap and with an effort writes in the margin: Can we then infer from the natural world that man ought to be free? Is that bird I hear free?

  He reads another paragraph, but the words are evasive. They, like the music, fail to move him. He coughs, catching a movement on the blank screen before him. From the television his reflection is beamed back at him. Sitting behind the trolley, he is made shockingly aware of the contrast between this body and the hands which tremble at full stretch below him, taking aim at the ceiling.

  “The eyes must go up,” says the voice downstairs. “Open them, open them, look at the ceiling.”

  Ezequiel turns a few pages and lays the book, pages down, on the arm of his chair. He pushes himself up and walks to the door. He unclenches his hand, lets it hover over the stainless-steel handle. But he does not make contact. In the end the hand drops back to his side.

  “You must be careful of that foot, especially Adriana.”

  Grimacing, he unwraps his scarf, throws it on to the bed. The meal has made him sweat. He feels the jowls dragging on his face and the weight of his belly. What can he expect if he eats and doesn’t exercise? Sliding a hand under his vest, he begins to scratch.

  The move to the city has not arrested the spread of the disease. His hairless chest is patched with white fleckmarks where the skin is peeling. These sores, the shape and size of tears, also speckle his arms and the insides of his legs, while a thick red rash torments the back of his neck. An unkempt, greying beard conceals the eruption on his plump face. His scalp shows pinkly through a thin scrub of curls. If he scratches it, the fingers come away stuck with the hairs.

  To handle a book, even, is an agony. There are brown pustules on the palms of his hands, on the soles of his feet, in the skin of his armpits, and inside his ears and belly-button. Since he left the jungle six months ago his nails have grown crumbly. On his right hand three have lifted from the nailbed. He bathes them every morning in a bowl of warm oil, but the delicate flesh around and under them is weepy. Against the pain, a doctor has advised: “Find an image you like. Imagine yourself on a beach, or your skin being soothed by the sun.”

  The only thing that can help is to be in the sun.

  He tries light therapy. In the evenings he sits under the sunlamp and reads, but it is never wise to read for long. He has articles brought to him on the current state of research into his condition. He experiments with the latest medicines. He prays for a miraculous breakthrough, but his head tells him there is no cure. A doctor has told him: “It’s your Spanish blood coming though.” But he still hopes.

  Downstairs, the tempo quickens. The girls have changed into pointe-shoes and are leaping through the air. He hears the yelp of the shoes, the thump of feet as the dancers land, the occasional, less exact, sound of someone falling over, the teacher’s handclaps passing like gunshots through the floor.

  “Laura, do you want to have a go?”

  Ezequiel closes his eyes.

  He is awoken by the young dancers applauding their teacher.

  A mosquito feeds on the back of his hand. He watches the blood fill its belly. He lifts his hand and the insect is gone.

  A minute later he limps into the bathroom and claws a flattened tube from the basin. He squeezes a length of greenish jelly on to his fingers and rubs it into his neck and behind his ears and on his chin until the beard glistens. Lifting his vest, he smears the foul-smelling stuff over his stomach. Then he unbuckles his trousers and does the same on the inside of each leg. Having shielded the exposed skin, he spreads the Dithranol – very carefully, since it burns. Finally he swallows the last two pills from a brown box. He has been taking these pills since June. They make him liverish, but on parts of his body he has noticed the rash has stopped spreading. He drops the empty carton into a bucket under the sink.

  Beneath his feet, below him, he hears the girls turning on the showers. The sounds are distinct. He hears their giggles, the water hosing their bodies, their complaints about the lesson.

  “I told her from the start my neck’s out from last night.”

  “Doesn’t she understand we’re exhausted?”

  “My physio told me I shouldn’t be pushing it, and there she was – pushing it.”

  “Shit, my feet are bleeding again.”

  Sometimes the girls talk about sex while they soap themselves, or as they whip their long hair from side to side under the hot air vent. But tonight in the shower they talk about Laura.

  This dance they’re talking about, she had performed it while he slept.

  “You used to dance like a lollipop,” says a grudging voice. “What happened to you?”

  They ask questions, trying to sound nonchalant.

  “Was it as amazing as it looked?”

  “Go on, Laura. What was it like?”

  The girl called Laura speaks. She sounds embarrassed. She dreamed she was standing in the air.

  Twelve hours after I last saw Yolanda, in the early hours of Friday morning, a car bomb exploded on a roundabout in the main street of Miraflores, killing twenty-seven people and gouging a lorry-sized hole in the road outside the Café Haiti. The debris maimed scores of others, among them the cheerful waitress from Judio, whose nose was sliced off. There was no doubting the intended target: Cleopatra’s Hotel, where the Foreign Minister was to have entertained ambassadors from countries of the European Community to breakfast. But an accident spared the hotel. At the roundabout the getaway car crashed into one loaded with a mixture of fertilizer, diesel oil and dynamite. Their bumpers became entangled. When the café’s security guard walked over to help, the drivers ran off across the park. The collision must have damaged the detonating mechanism, because ten seconds later the front car blew up, the force of the seventeen-hundred-pound bomb catapulting it into the Café Haiti, which caught fire.

  I heard the thunderclap from ten miles away, having just arrived in Calle Diderot. It was seven in the morning and the street was rubbing its eyes. Opposite, a schoolgirl leaned against a wall talking to a friend, their legs the colour of cooking oil in the sun. The bottle boy cried out and they glanced up, which encouraged him to bicycle past waving both hands in the air. Red-faced, talking both at once, they turned back to each other, ignoring him.

  “Bottles! Bottles!”

  The earth jolted between his cries, but the girls did not look up.

  There were few details to be had over the radio link with headquarters. I tried to contact Sylvina on the mobile phone. As I left she had murmured about some shopping she needed to do. I rang home, but the line was engaged. I waited five minutes and tried again. Still busy. An hour later she answered.

  “Yes?”

  “It’s Agustín.” I was so relieved to hear her voice.

  “What’s wrong? Are you all right?”

  “What about you? What about the bomb?”

  “Bomb? I thought it was the gas-mains.”

  “You’re not hurt then?”

  “No. I was washing my hair. I was going to complain. The oven’s not working.”

  “You know I love you.”

  There was a pause. “Agustín, you can’t just ring up and say you love me as if that will make up for not saying it when we’re together. It won’t.”

  “Darling, I was worried.”

  “I was expecting another call.”

  My news had disturbed Sylvina. She wanted to know from me how I thought the bomb would affect her presentation on Sunday night. She had acceptances from ten prospective clients, including Leonora – which was a coup (although Leonora’s dachshund had become pregnant by Patricia’s Irish setter and Leonora was worried the puppies, expected to be premature, might have to be born by caesarean). Sy
lvina didn’t know how she was going to seat everyone. She needed extra chairs, but she refused point-blank to ask the people upstairs before I had even suggested it.

  “Do you think the bomb will affect international flights?”

  “Why should it?”

  “That’s another thing. I have to go to the airport.”

  “What on earth for?”

  “I’m expecting more samples this afternoon.”

  “Can’t they wait?”

  “No. Patricia placed her order on the strictest condition she had the lipstick in time for the American Chargé’s party tomorrow. I’ve been invited too, which is very sweet since I’ve met Señora Tennyson only once. It’s her fortieth birthday, which means a present I suppose . . . Perhaps a nourishing night-cream . . .”

  Dr Zampini drove by, raking a hand through his long grey hair. The bus drew up and the two girls climbed aboard.

  Sylvina said, after another pause, “Agustín, would you do me a favour? I’ve spoken to Marina. She’s free to collect the girls later tonight, but she doesn’t think she can take them to their lesson. Would you do that? I don’t often ask and it would help matters.”

  “Shouldn’t we pull Laura out of the ballet – for the moment?”

  “When everything’s going so well for her? Agustín, I simply don’t read you sometimes.”

  Gomez relieved me at three o’clock. I drove back to headquarters.

  In the corridor a long-faced Sergeant Ciras gave me an update. When the car crashed through the Haiti’s window, twenty people were in the café. The dead included a director of the Banco Wiese and a junior Foreign Office minister, blown up with his undelivered speech in his briefcase. And there were yet more injuries when tenants of the high-rise blocks recklessly tapped out the shards from their smashed windows on to the pavements below.

  I walked upstairs, thinking of an obliterated corner table.

  When the General heard I was in the building he sent for me. “What’s going on?” he said woozily, as if he had fainted. He grabbed my arm and shut the door. “Calderón has been shitting on my shadow all morning.” He sat down heavily. The fruit bowl was all but empty. The crisis had stripped away his eccentricities, of which the final remnant was one shrivelled orange. The General started to peel it.