The Dancer Upstairs

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  “And downstairs?”

  “Only the dance teacher.”

  I turned to Ezequiel. Haunted by a ballerina with unseeing eyes, I couldn’t distinguish the details of his face. “Is Yolanda with you?”

  The beard opened and the answer slid out through a smile, stabbing me with the cold blade of understanding.

  “Everyone’s with us, Colonel. It doesn’t matter if you shoot us. We’re in history.”

  I told him that he must accompany me below. He wanted to take with him a Mao Tse-tung badge from a drawer by his bed. The Chinese leader had presented it to him personally.

  I glanced at Sucre, but he was broken with emotion. I found the badge. After Ezequiel had closed his fist around it, I nodded to Clorindo to put on handcuffs. He seized Ezequiel’s wrists and I thought: this is my victory. A sick man with nothing to say who wants to keep his memento from Mao.

  Out of the room, he changed. He had been waiting for the coup de grâce. Once it dawned on him that he was caught, his personality abruptly weakened. He had no plan beyond this – not a Sixth or Seventh or a Twenty-Fifth Grand Plan. Upstairs he could be Kant’s dove, soaring in his own vacuum. Downstairs, when I took him into the street and the rain fell on his skin, he felt the beak of fear.

  We used the back lift to reach my office. I locked the door. Four men stood guard in the corridor outside. No one else was to be allowed entry. In accordance with the orders issued to me, and with enormous reluctance, I telephoned the office of Captain Calderón.

  A clipped female voice told me he was attending a cocktail party at the house of the American Chargé d’Affaires. If my business was urgent she was empowered to provide a contact number.

  “It’s urgent.”

  I started to dial. I was aware of Ezequiel in the chair and Sucre behind him and Gomez holding a gun. But my thoughts were not coherent.

  I heard the ringing tone. I looked at Ezequiel, bright diamonds of rain on his yellow cardigan and in his hair. He must have felt an itch because he raised his hands and with the back of his fingers tried to scratch his temple. The handcuffs restricted his movements, and he knocked off his spectacles. The sight of his naked face, suddenly revealed, brought a flash of recognition. I remembered the packed earth yard in Sierra de Pruna, the upturned beer crate, the cramped front room in the police post.

  “Sucre, see to his glasses.”

  Ezequiel fumbled blindly on his lap, but his ruined fingernails caught in a fold of his trousers.

  In the receiver at my ear a voice boomed in English, “Denver Tennyson, can I help?”

  “Captain Calderón, is he there, please?”

  “Who wants him?”

  On the other side of the desk, Ezequiel grimaced. Suddenly I saw what the matter was. Gomez, in applying the handcuffs, had prised loose one of the fingernails. Ezequiel, when he dislodged his spectacles, had not been trying to scratch, but to press the nail back over the exposed flesh.

  “I’ve made a mistake. I’m sorry to have troubled you.” I replaced the receiver.

  By that grimace, Ezequiel placed himself with the living. If, as were my orders, I handed him over to Calderón, he would be tortured and killed. I would be delivering him to the fate he expected, and against which he had prepared himself. He knew that in death he would become something else, a memory to spur his people on. To save his life was my greatest revenge.

  I dialled Canal 7. “Cecilia, I have something for you. Yes. It’s important.”

  At nine in the morning, having interrogated Ezequiel through the night, I presented him to the press. I learned more from our conversation than I am able to tell you, but nothing to make me alter my plan. Once word was out that we had him – alive and unharmed – the government could not shoot him. Your profession saved Ezequiel.

  There was another consideration. I wanted to demonstrate that the institution I had served for twenty years was strong enough to ensure a fair trial. It was naive of me, and it didn’t happen. Yet he wasn’t executed. Calderón drew up a Decree Law – even selected members of a naval firing squad – but the President feared the outrage abroad.

  Calderón, if he couldn’t execute Ezequiel, decided to humiliate him. He hit on the idea of exhibiting the captive in a cage. He dressed him up in a black-and-white uniform, like a cartoon figure, and locked him inside a large metal coop, a kind of box with bars, covered with tarpaulins. At what was judged to be the most propitious moment, Calderón had the covers removed. But it belittled us rather than Ezequiel. Like staring at a monkey in a zoo. As if we were superior. But you were there, with all the rest of those journalists. You saw how they treated him. That was in the piece you wrote.

  “And Yolanda?” Dyer asked after a long interval.

  Nothing in all his years as a journalist had hardened him to the despair in Rejas’s answer.

  “I was still interrogating Ezequiel when the message came through. Yolanda, Edith, Lorenzo and the two women from the Central Committee, had been transferred from Calle Diderot to cells downstairs. Yolanda, I ordered, was to be put in a cell by herself. She had been hysterical, but the nurse had given her a shot. She was now asleep.

  “I rang downstairs. ‘I’ll look in on her later,’ I told the nurse. ‘Please give her an extra blanket.’ There was an astonished silence, so I said, ‘She’s my daughter’s ballet teacher. She doesn’t understand what’s going on.’

  “‘She doesn’t, does she?’ I asked Ezequiel.

  “His hand opened and closed over Mao’s badge, as it had throughout our conversation. Behind his glasses his eyes were tired. ‘Comrade Miriam is not only a fine dancer, Colonel.’

  “Even at this stage I hoped there had been some mistake. It didn’t seem possible. Yolanda was naive politically, but if I could talk to her for an hour we would find some way out of this. I didn’t want to believe there wasn’t a way.

  “Minutes before the press conference, I tried to see her. I needed a special pass to enter the basement. My own orders. Sucre fetched the permit.

  “The nurse looked at me angrily. ‘Over there.’

  “On a bench in a small cell, her face to the wall, Yolanda lay sleeping.

  “‘When will she come round?’ A blanket covered all but the top of her head.

  “‘An hour or so. I gave her another shot at six.’

  “‘She didn’t understand what was going on,’ I repeated.

  “Behind me a drained voice said, ‘You’re wrong, boss.’

  “Sucre nodded through the bars. His face had the look of someone who has steeled himself to say the unsayable.

  “Calderón gave me no chance to interrogate Yolanda. Twenty minutes after the press conference, a convoy of trucks blocked off the entrance to the headquarters. Soldiers leapt out, followed by my furious military counterpart.

  “In my office he threw an official order down on my desk. It removed from my charge Ezequiel, the four members of the Central Committee – and Comrade Miriam, as Yolanda would from now on refer to herself.

  “I last saw her stumbling between soldiers, her head covered in a black hood.”

  16

  Next evening Dyer crossed the square for the last time and climbed the stairway to the Cantina da Lua. The following morning he would take a plane out.

  Rejas had ordered the wine. He began to fill two glasses as Dyer sat down.

  Good news. The specialist had telephoned about his sister’s tests. The antibiotic was working. Her cysticercosis, which they feared might have been a fatal strain, was curable.

  Alert, no longer disoriented, his sister had no memory of her recent confusion. For the first time in a fortnight, she had asked Rejas to read to her. She wanted her mind to be taken out of that stuffy bedroom.

  Rejas smiled. “I read a few pages of Rebellion in the Backlands.”

  He poured another glass of wine, but he drank without tasting it. He had ordered the bottle to celebrate his sister’s recovery. He was not drinking to celebrate.

  He was comin
g to the end, and he wanted Dyer to listen.

  I have blanked out a lot since the night of Ezequiel’s capture. Calderón forbade me to say a word, with very clear threats of unpleasant consequences if I chose to disobey him a second time. In the months ahead, he would have me watched. But my wound was private. I hardly remembered how to breathe, or walk, or perform the simplest gestures. The press would declare repeatedly how, by my action, I had cured the country of “Ezequiel’s pestilence”. I had achieved all I had set out to achieve, but in achieving it I had lost what I most wanted. The truth was that I had sundered myself from all that was precious to me.

  There followed the darkest days of my life. Why had fate determined that Ezequiel and I should be linked in this way? Nor could I get used to the coincidence that Ezequiel’s safe house was the school where Laura learned her ballet. Every time I dropped my daughter off, I had been, without knowing it, delivering her to his lair.

  I wanted to hate the person who had taken her hand, led her inside, but I didn’t. I kept seeing Yolanda on the parquet, two men pinning her to the ground, her eyes loaded with hatred and madness combing her hair. I was stormed by her image and my heart could not bear it.

  We know so little about people. But about the people we love, we know even less. I was so blind with love for her I hadn’t been able to see. I had been like that American watching the video who could not believe it was his wife. There must be thousands of poor bastards who don’t know what’s going on in their women’s minds. I had just kept making excuses and making excuses.

  Shall I tell you something? Shall I let you into a secret about Yolanda? – and this is such a sad thing. I believe that until the last moment, when it could not have been clearer who I was, Yolanda had found a way of convincing herself. If true, it’s pitiable – but how else do I explain our intimacy? On that day when we sat on the grass and I told her about the army massacre she must have told herself I was on her side. I was one of them. Of course, she had no means of proving it. She couldn’t run upstairs to Ezequiel and say, “I’ve just met this man . . .” That would have been a breach of his discipline. So she demonstrated her loyalty by not informing him. When she said to me, “Silence is part of the dance”, she was speaking the truth.

  At her level you weren’t permitted contact with more than two comrades. And you’d address each other as Comrade this or Comrade that, so that you’d never discover who they were. After your mission, you’d go back to being the person you had been before. It ensured you revealed nothing if you were tortured. That’s why Ezequiel was effective.

  But, isn’t it funny? Isn’t it the most appalling thing? There I was, pouring out my heart to Yolanda, all the time exhibiting the same tensions and worries she was suffering. It’s possible some of the cryptic phrases I used to protect my work chimed with phrases she had been taught – and it would have been in her nature to think if she didn’t recognize the code the fault lay with her, not me.

  Then there was this other problem. You see, in Ezequiel’s world love was forbidden. Sex was okay, but he demanded that his followers lived a loveless life, dedicated to him. But for whatever reason, whether it was to do with her father or the sad figure who’d been her fiancé, poor Yolanda, who in every other way proved so perfect a disciple, wasn’t quite capable of filling that emotional hollow with Ezequiel’s philosophy. There was a gap which the revolution couldn’t satisfy.

  All her training, the nuns, the months in the jungle camp, ought to have drummed into her the unsuitability of a man like me. But in my comforting her during the blackout, something happened which she couldn’t have predicted.

  A week, ten days maybe, passed before I decided to speak to the one person who might reduce my madness: her old fiancé, the poet.

  He was a thin, angular-faced man with trout-coloured eyes and Yolanda’s habit of staring into space. We walked through Parque Colón and sat on a bench, while, opposite us, a blue-and-yellow uniformed gardener patted geraniums into the black earth.

  The poet was reluctant to talk. He was still in love with her and so was I. We were rivals and I felt shameful, but I needed to see what he and I had in common, and if he bore any stamp of her.

  I gave him little choice. Either he talked to me informally, here in the open air, or I would detain him for questioning. It was imperative we speak. There were matters I needed to clear up regarding Yolanda’s trial.

  It was a mild day, too cold to sit out really, and he was nervous. He spoke with his hand at his neck, as if strangling himself.

  “I couldn’t believe it. When I saw her photograph, screaming, I said: ‘No, it can’t be Yolanda.’ And then it was Yolanda.” He picked up a book wrapped with a battered-looking dustcover. I supposed he had brought it along to prove his innocence. “It was as if I’d opened this book and it had exploded.”

  I asked to see the book. It was When the Dead Speak by Miguel Angel Torre. “No one pays attention to poetry,” said its epigraph.

  “Not a good time time for lyrics,” he said.

  I noticed a poem dedicated to Yolanda.

  . . . world invisible,

  the skilful poison of

  your changeless pose . . .

  Envy overwhelmed me. This young man with the red mole on his forehead had felt the same as I did, but his desire had lived to enjoy its full flesh.

  His shadow fell on the page. “She danced that one.”

  He started talking about her. Their first meeting, a friend’s birthday party at the Catholic University. Her taste in music (she liked The Doors, Pink Floyd, King Crimson). Her passion for cakes. (A day later I found myself queuing at her favourite bakery in San Isidro.) A born seductress. Never said a bad word about anyone. Didn’t have enemies. If she wanted to go from A to B, she went. Whatever the cost.

  A force to be reckoned with.

  Soon they were living in the blue house in Calle Tucumán. He installed a caoba wood barre in their bedroom so she could dance. That was a good time. They went to the beach, cooked, made love. Then, while she was convalescing from a leg injury, she was invited to Cuba, to a conference on the arts.

  She was to be away for a fortnight. When she stayed a month he became worried. Maybe she had met someone else. He was always jealous if, on stage, she danced with another man. But, no – there was no man. She had found the society in which she could believe. Four months after returning from Cuba she resigned from the Metropolitan.

  Classical ballet was too rigid. It was ballet for the bourgeois. From now on she would devote her energies to modern dance. Modern dance represented a liberation of the spirit from its state of repression.

  “Her talk, it was all about dance. That’s what I believed. But she was acting the whole time. She was seeing with other eyes.”

  “Did you never suspect?”

  A hand squeezed his face. He was afraid. He had believed in many of the things she did. He also believed that to admit this to me would be to condemn himself. He feared, perhaps, that I would discover his status as an underground poet. But from my university days I had been familiar with the bars he frequented. Like him, I knew how to weave tough dreams from cigarette smoke. The Kloaka, the Dalmacia, the Café Quilca – these were the haunts of people who talk revolution, talk and do nothing about it. We were more alike than he knew, he and I. Yolanda would have branded us cowards.

  “I thought what she felt was religious, not political,” he said carefully. “There was a group of nuns she liked. Twice a week she would borrow my car and drive them to the shantytowns. She’d bake the children cakes, teach them to dance. At least, that’s what I supposed she was doing. But she was very reserved, never talked of anything that was purely personal to her.

  “Our relationship began to come unstuck when she wanted me to join in. ‘How can you represent the masses if you don’t live with them?’ I had said. Besides, I was a poet, not a revolutionary.

  “‘Then let’s live with them,’ she said.

  “Early on, I might have d
one. But our affair was not as passionate as it had been. There were frictions. A writer has to live in his own world at one moment and relate to his public at another. A dancer needs to be the centre of attention at all times. For Yolanda I had become something day-to-day, while every day she burned with a desire to impress a new audience.

  “She attended a studio of modern dance in Calle Mitre, mixing with people I didn’t approve of. She started coming home late, talking about Truth and Justice. She spoke of the Greeks, of Plato and Sophocles. She had read nothing – then Sophocles!

  “Of course, you don’t know her, so you can’t imagine this. But Yolanda, reading Sophocles . . .

  “One day she received a call from the youngest of the nuns. The army had stormed the prison in Lurigancho and killed two hundred of Ezequiel’s men. I overheard the nun asking Yolanda to distribute leaflets about those who’d been murdered.

  “I protested: ‘Yolanda, those are Ezequiel’s people.’ And I forbade her. That night she came home late, driving my car.

  “She didn’t deny what she had done. She had brought back a pot plant for me. I threw it at the kitchen window. She swept up the glass, the earth, the terracotta shards. Later, when I apologized for breaking the window, she said, ‘It isn’t a window you have broken.’

  “We didn’t speak for a week. Then I found a pamphlet advertising a discussion at the Catholic University about the prison massacre. ‘I want to go,’ I said.

  “The evening was dominated by this bearded chap – Lorenzo. He kept waving his arms about, shouting for everyone to rise up, assassinate the President. Afterwards he joined us and he was very friendly with her.

  “‘Yolanda,’ I said, ‘I don’t want that man in our house.’

  “Three days later I came home and he was sitting in our kitchen. I threw him out. It was the second time I had lost my temper. You couldn’t lose your temper with Yolanda. She went with Lorenzo to the door and watched him leave. She didn’t scream or say anything. But that night in bed she said she had begun to question our relationship.