The Dancer Upstairs (10 page)

“What did they say?”

“They'd laugh, except the Principal, who was English. Señora Vallejo was sympathetic, but she wasn't allowed to sack anyone. For the other teachers, the world didn't exist outside that European stage.” She looked at me, amused. “In my last term I put on this dance. A scandal it caused with the parents. Much too dark, they found it. We don't understand your work, that dance you did with spiders. Spiders, I asked? Or was it homosexuals? Do you know what it was? The Condor Festival, one of our oldest ceremonies. And they thought this was sodomy!”

Until this moment I had thought of Yolanda as someone a little bit nervous who was talking a lot. I had said to myself, she's bound to be edgy, it's after-hours, maybe she's worried she's about to lose another pupil. I will give her the money I owe and after a polite interval I will leave. Now I wanted to stay.

“Haven't you forgotten about Laura?” she said.

Laura sat in the car, one foot over her knee, peeling off skin. When she saw me, she leaned across the seat and opened the door.

“Isn't she nice! I knew you'd like her. Was it about that letter?”

“A little bit.”

“Was it a love letter?”

“About you.”

“What have you been saying?”

“You should try modern dance, she thinks.”

“I'd like that.” She uncrossed her leg. “Today I danced a painting.”

“How did you do that?”

“It's easy. She said, ‘This is a painting. These are the dark colours. These are the light. Now express the colours for me.' I was the light. Then she divided us into two groups. ‘Over here you're angry. Over here you're not interested. Dance it.'”

“Which were you?”

“I was angry, which was fun.”

It was a world away from cloche-hatted Madame Offenbach.

“You haven't told her what I do?”

“No, daddy.”

“If she asks, say I'm a lawyer.”

“I need new shoes.”

“Mummy will get you some.”

She slipped on her ballet slippers. Their colour was disfigured by a watermark and the toes were rusty with spots of dried blood.

“And unlike Madame Offenbach she can dance,” Laura went on.

“Is she a good dancer?”

“When she left the Metropolitan, she was the best ballerina in the country. That's what Samantha told me. She danced a wonderful story for us today which she'd picked up in the mountains. She called it the Dance of the Weeping Terrace, after a terrace people go to when they say goodbye. They hug and cry because they don't know their destination. That's why it's called a Weeping Terrace.”

“Darling, I told you there was a terrace like that in our valley.”

“Did you? No, you didn't. I wish you had.”

Her teacher had made it more memorable.

“You promised to take me to La Posta,” she said cunningly. Until now Ezequiel had been the reason we couldn't make the journey. According to intelligence reports, his men had been observed in the lower valley.

“You've no excuse now.”

“I'll have a word with Mummy.”

“Do you mean that?”

“Of course I do.”

“And we can see the coffee bushes and Grandma's parrots and Grandpa's library?” She had never met my parents. Like my sister, she would have run rings around them.

“That's right.”

“You are coming home tonight, aren't you, Daddy?”

Often I didn't come back at night. I might be in the sierra, chasing some shadow connected with Ezequiel or, if in town, I might be watching a suspect house. The extra money I earned from surveillance had – so far – covered Laura's tuition fees.

“Yes.”

Beside me Laura loosened her damp hair. She gathered it up, fastening it with an agate hairclip I had given her. In contented silence we drove towards the supermarket in Miraflores.

“We must remember the cat food for your mother,” I said.

The night was sticky and at the traffic lights on Parque Colón I shrugged off my jacket and laid it on the back seat.

“Aren't you hot in those leggings?” I asked Laura.

“Daddy, do you have a girlfriend?”

I was unable to reply for a second or two. “Darling! What makes you ask such a thing?”

“You never come home.”

“I've been working, Laura.”

“Samantha says her mother likes you.”

Feeling angry, I was about to say, “Well, I don't like Samantha's mother,” when, without even a warning flicker, the lights in the street went out.

Laura looked outside. “What's happened?”

“Just a power-cut.”

The supermarket was a block away. An assistant shone his torch over the petfood shelves. He hoped it wouldn't last long. At nine there was a volleyball match.

There hadn't been a power-cut since the military coup, but I was not concerned. At the plant in Las Flores they had been rumbling on for months about low pay. I was more put out by Laura's question.

We were about ten blocks from home when my jacket started to bleep. Sucre. I pulled over outside the Café Haiti. Lanterns had been placed on the tables. In the subdued light I saw men speaking into their mobile phones, checking to see all was well at home, in the office.

I listened to the confused details. The darkness sheeting the city had nothing to do with industrial action.

“Have you told the General?”

“He's on his boat.”

“I'll meet you at the theatre.”

I gave Laura the handset. “Take this.”

“What is it? What's wrong?”

She realized something terrible had happened. She fiddled joylessly with the machine. She was trying to imagine this terrible thing.

“It's Ezequiel.” I said the words quickly, not hearing what I was saying.

“But Daddy, he's dead.”

I accelerated along Via Angola. Our street was not far now. I braked noisily outside the house, leaving a track of rubber.

“Listen, honey, I'm sorry. I'm not making sense. Explain to Mummy I can't stay.”

I pulled the door shut behind her and drove flat out along Calle Junin. Sucre's message had resurrected the dread which Quesada only five days before had put to rest. It meant one thing: Ezequiel had not lain blackened and featureless beneath a coarse army blanket; instead, he had taken a tighter grip still on our destinies. It meant he was alive after all and had decided to rise from the earth. It meant he had descended finally to the capital. And the capital, “the head of the monster”, was the perfect place in which to hide.

6

By the time I reached the theatre, the audience had bundled out into the street and were assembled on the sidewalk in a state of shock. My men had arrived and were attempting to detain them, but many had slipped away already. The crowd spread out under the plane trees and waited for taxis. Some, nervous as birds, stumbled between the tramrails. They followed the rails to the sea, not caring where they walked.

From a French playwright who had been sitting five rows from the stage I pieced together what had happened.

Lionel Grimaud, unaware of the power-cut outside, had taken the blackout to be a part of the experimental drama he was watching, in full keeping with the poster which had beguiled him here.

The poster showed a young woman, with white-chalked cheeks and eyes made up to look like a cat. She peered at her right hand in which she held a minute version of herself fashioned into a glove-puppet. From the tight, ceramic mouth poured the words:

Twenty minutes into the play the theatre lights went out. Already a negroid face, filmed behind an empty desk, had appeared on a large screen talking about alms. Then an angel had skipped on stage. Dressed in red rubber gloves, a grey suit and cardboard wings, he had hurled the contents of a bucket of water into the front row.

As an irritated section of audience mopped themselves dry, the voice of Frank Sinatra could be heard singing, “This lovely day will lengthen into evening, We'll say goodbye to all we ever knew . . .” The angel floated off, wiggling his red fingers, to be replaced on stage by four dancers, their backs to the audience.

Grimaud – who was emphatic on this point – said the dancers were girls. Each wore a black stocking over her head, with a thin black garter strap binding her face. They bent into a provocative stance, waggling their buttocks and slowly turning until they faced the audience on all fours, their tongues out. The only sound was of a fast breathing – “the sound of dogs panting” – and this, mixed with Sinatra's voice and, at the edge of the stage the silhouette of the angel lip-synching his words, provoked a horrifying impression.

Sinatra was singing, “I loved you once, in April . . .” when the moan of a recorded siren interrupted the words, followed by the rattle of gunfire.

It was then that the blackout occurred.

“We couldn't very well understand what was going on,” admitted Grimaud. On stage a disembodied light swung up and down. All eyes fixed on this erratic firefly, which plunged swiftly into the auditorium. There was the clatter of several people being tugged against their will on to the stage.

The audience shifted uneasily. Behind Grimaud an elderly woman hissed, “Claudio, you did not warn me that it was one of those audience participation plays. We should have sat further back.”

Then three shots, in quick succession.

The same woman said, for all to hear, “You promised it would be a musical.”

Things were by now so confused that people didn't know if this exchange was part of the play. The smell of cordite wasn't agreeable either, nor a warm sticky substance like scrambled egg which had landed in several laps. After five more minutes of waiting in the dark, those in the front row who had earlier been sprayed began to hiss angry asides.

But even so, they sat there. And this was the strange thing: at least ten minutes passed before anyone had the nerve to stand up, and only because they saw, flashing behind them down the aisle, another torchlight.

It swept along the rows, giving substance to the people sitting there. Soon it reached the stage, jerking upwards to reveal a drawn curtain and three figures sitting on deck chairs about six feet from the back wall.

When you light something from below, you know how exaggerated it becomes? Imagine the sight of those bodies. The beam wavered across their legs and chests, magnifying huge shadows on the back wall.

They sat at an angle. Something had happened to their faces.

Quesada, his body bent backward, had a red caste mark on his forehead. The back of his head was no longer there, but you could see the eyes, nose and cheeks. His mouth had been gagged with theatre programmes screwed up into little balls.

Beside the Interior Minister sat his wife. You could tell it was a woman from the shadow cast on the ceiling by her curly, well-cropped hair. Her neck was twisted, with one shoulder thrust back to show her lapis necklace. They had shot her in the left eyeball, through her glasses, and her hair was sparkling with broken glass and what looked like phlegm, except it was her eye.

The bodyguard slumped forward next to her. The hollow-point bullet had entered the back of his head and his face was somewhere in the audience.

The silhouettes slipped back into the darkness as the manager rested his torch on the stage and climbed up. You saw its beam pointing at the woman's feet, where there was an awful lot of blood. The manager picked the flashlight up and staggered through the puddle towards the chairs, shining the beam directly into their faces so now everyone could make out those terrible looks, the splatter on the stage set, like ink blots from a fountain pen which has been shaken violently, each splatter larger than the head, each self-contained, except for a thick vertical mark behind Quesada's chair where a chunk of his skull had struck the wall and slid down.

The light scanned the wife's sparkling hair, the pulpy red mask of the bodyguard and Quesada sitting there, a cardboard notice on his paunch, the lettering, sketched in his blood, reading: Death to all traitors. Viva El Presidente Ezequiel!

The manager gave a choking sound. People in the audience gasped.

“Believe me,” came a man's voice. “This is part of the play.”

As soon as I read the sign around Quesada's neck I knew that Ezequiel had come down from the mountains. He was among us in the city. Anywhere in the city.

But he was not just “anywhere”.

I now realize that, earlier in the evening, he would have turned on the television. Careful to cut out the sound, he wouldn't have wished to attract the attention of the ballet students below. Laura's class had ended. The girls having taken their showers, he would have walked to the window to watch them leave. He would have pushed back the curtain with the back of his hand – and that's when, through the narrowest of gaps, he would have seen me.

Admittedly, in the dark neither of us could make out more than the outline of the other. But for a second or two we looked at each other. All that separated us was a yellow nursery curtain.