The Dancer Upstairs (38 page)

“Rejas is convinced she must have been exceptional.”

“Some of my teachers have gone round making extravagant boasts on her behalf. But when someone becomes notorious, people do tend to say, ‘Oh, my brilliant pupil.' Do you still paint your watercolours? If you had gone berserk with a machine-gun no doubt one or two people would have said: ‘What a tragedy – he was such a good artist.'”

Dyer couldn't help smiling. “So atrocity is the province of the bad watercolourist?”

“My dear, I adore your paintings. We still have one in the spare room. No. What I'm wondering is, if she had been that good a dancer, would she have given it up?”

“You did.”

“I had no illusions. The world was going to go on without me. I didn't think I would be able to go on without Hugo. That's all.”

Vivien looked at him, a suspicion of sharpness in her eyes. “This doesn't make her fate any less unspeakable, but hasn't she become what she struggled to be on the dance floor? Isn't she entombed in her cave, like Antigone? All I'm begging you is, don't fold her into your life, please. I'm serious, Johnny. She is lovely, Yolanda, and it's easy to see what Rejas, poor man, must have felt. Imagine this attractive young woman walking towards him through the rubble of his life. Who could resist? That body! Those looks! That sweetness! My dear, it must have been as though she had sat on his lap stark naked.

“But if I was stern, I could paint a different picture. I could say Yolanda had only her looks. I could pretend she wasn't blessed with the meat and gristle of character, and when she grows old this will reveal itself in her face. We old people aren't unfaithful to our characters. Your aunt here – what you see is the real thing. You can keep something suppressed a long while; then, at a certain age, your true self bounces out. Maybe in twenty years those big brown eyes will narrow, showing how thin the broth has been. Maybe her skin will grow dullish, her black hair lose its lustre, her slender fingers flatten into hands like those of our dear waitress. Maybe the dungeon will snuff out her essential sweetness and she won't be lovely anymore.”

“And I wouldn't believe you.”

“The thing is, you'd be right,” she said crossly. “But it's my duty to stop you forming sentimental attachments to people you haven't met – if only for your poor mother's sake.”

She called the waitress for a plate to cover the fish against the flies. “No, don't take it away. I know we've had our pudding – but we might want to go back.”

“What about her relationship with Ezequiel?”

“What does Rejas think?”

“He doesn't believe there was anything between them. Doesn't want to, perhaps.”

“Men are so silly. Listen, have you any idea what Yolanda was like at the Metropolitan? She was wild, my dear. Wild. Blasts of vitality. No one was immune to her attraction – why should Ezequiel have been different? All those months in that compression chamber . . . Maybe they did, maybe they didn't. Does it matter, anyway? No, don't give me that flinty look – Ezequiel I regard in the same light as the Devil, but he might have been amusing company with it. Perhaps he was considerate and careful with her. Women, who will tell themselves any number of consoling lies, forgive almost anything of a man who goes out of his way to be tender and make them laugh. A little bit of trouble goes a long way, my dear. I'm not saying that's what happened. But who knows what goes on between two human beings? And what did Rejas himself say? That we know next to nothing about the people we love.”

She sighed. “That goes for you, too, Johnny. Sometimes I think of you as just another one of my orphans. I'm always saying to them when they leave, ‘Get on with it, for Christ's sake. Up, up, up, on your own two feet.' And I wish you would do the same. When Hugo told me he'd been trying to fix you up with Mona, I said: ‘That willowy girl is no good for Johnny. He needs someone much rounder.'”

Vivien drank her wine and looked serious again. “A ballet dancer would never do for you, my dear. Now. This message you have for Calderón – is it about the election?”

“It is and it isn't.”

“Is Rejas going to stand?”

“What does Tristan think?”

“Don't play with me, Johnny.”

“I think it's more a question of ‘I won't stand If.'”

“What's the If?” Her eyes narrowed. Dyer had her complete attention. But he knew she was addressing someone else.

He saw this person clearly now, from their first meeting in the Cantina da Lua. Rejas, recognizing him from the start, had taken a gamble on the kind of person Dyer was – had gambled his all. By speaking freely the policeman had broken the habit of a career. His anguish was unreachable, but Dyer, without being aware of it, had offered, through his kinship with Vivien, one feeble ray of hope. In order to win the journalist's trust, Rejas had told him everything, in the most careful detail, omitting nothing. At the same time, he must have hoped that when Dyer understood the reason, he would decide not to publish it.

Once he had relayed the message to Vivien, Dyer knew that he would put this story away. He would not forget it, but it was too personal, too unhistorical, too unpolitical to use as journalism. The only thing he could make of it would mean his having to leave the real elements out.

But it would not be wasted. Rejas had confessed to him for a reason – because Dyer was still capable of doing things that he could no longer do himself.

With Rejas's story, Dyer had the power to give Yolanda back the light.

“I'm bringing you a message for you to give to Calderón. Rejas wants to be certain that Yolanda – as quite distinct from Ezequiel – will be decently treated in prison, and that Calderón will use his influence with the President to release her in two or three years' time. If Rejas has this assurance, he will not contest the elections.”

“You believe him?”

“Yes, I do. One, he is a just man. Two, Yolanda has no blood on her hands. That's why Ezequiel chose her. Three – he loves her, damn it.”

“Didn't you see her on television? She was screaming blue murder for the revolution.”

“Yes, but she's young. Rejas is convinced that she has never handled a weapon in her life. You knew her, Vivien. Was she a revolutionary? He's appealing to you.”

“Did he mention that he'd given the orphanage the money from his reward?”

“No, he didn't. But I knew, anyway.”

“So his gift really was an acte gratuit,” she said reflectively.

“You can't think he gave you that money to get at Calderón. He announced his decision on the steps of the police building – the day after he caught Ezequiel.”

Vivien nodded. “You should tell your friend he's done a wonderful job, but he's not presidential material.”

Dyer looked down at the table, pushing a fork so that its tines left faint parallel tracks in the cloth. He looked up at his aunt again. It was vital he persuade her.

“He's a good man, Vivien. I trust him.”

She sat back, returning his gaze. “If, as you seem so certain, Rejas doesn't go into politics – well, anything might happen. Then there is hope. That hair-raising story Rejas told you about the rat . . . He's right, you know. But if he decides to stand against the government, or even to speak out in any way, the risk is obvious: she'll continue to rot in gaol.”

“So that's the message back?”

Her eyes twinkled at Dyer's concern. “He knew what he was doing, didn't he? Quite apart from the fact that you are my nephew. It's a terrible burden, a story you're not allowed to tell which the world has got wrong. And what better way of keeping it quiet than to give it to a journalist who understands more or less what you're talking about, but whose readers at home will never be interested in South America? You know what they would have said, don't you? At the paper, I mean – ‘Nice story, my dear, but can't you set it in Provence?' Telling it to you, he was telling it to the ground. So don't worry about Rejas, Johnny. He chose you.”

They walked home along the Malecón. The trees were in their last days of flower, and in a small open park on the clifftop the blossom was strewn across the dry grass.

“I have another favour to ask,” said Dyer. “I promised Rejas I would speak to you about his daughter. Laura. Who was Yolanda's pupil.”

“How old is she now?”

“Fourteen.”

“Too old.”

“Her dream is to join the Metropolitan.”

“I'm sure. Or is it her father's dream? It doesn't matter, in any case. This is not a sentimental profession.”

“You accepted Yolanda at that age.”

“Yolanda had talent.”

“I believe Laura's good. Really.”

“Or Rejas does?” Vivien, who had been about to shake her head, looked amused. “And if Laura does succeed in becoming a dancer – a good one – then a part of Yolanda will live on? Is that what you're both thinking? All these people you haven't met, Johnny . . . All right, I'll give her an audition. Now, watch out for that step. You're walking too fast. I want to catch my breath.”

They looked down at a grey sea dissolving into a greyer horizon. A freighter moved out of the docks. Through the cranes, as though hanging from them, Dyer could make out the shape of an island. Under its cliffs, white-stuccoed with guano, spread the squat roof of Ezequiel's prison.

He thought of Ezequiel's captor, still in another country. He could not forget the policeman's grief-coloured face as they had shaken hands twenty-four hours before. Here was a man who had fought against not one system, but two. What he represented was better than either. Yet his cure had been his destruction; and what he had called his “madness”, his salvation.

Halfway across the square, Dyer had heard the clatter of the shutter against the wall and stopped to look back at the Cantina da Lua. Rejas was on the balcony, gripping the iron balustrade, and for a moment the other had thought he might have left his chair to wave. He raised his hand in salute, but Rejas was staring into the river. At first Dyer couldn't work it out. Then he realized. A strong breeze played over the current, blowing upstream, so that the river seemed to be to flowing the other way, inland to its source. His eyes adrift on that water, Rejas had looked so lonely and little, a man with part of his soul broken.

“Thinking of Rejas?” said Vivien.

“Yes.”

“It's like the end of a book. He'll live on. We're very resilient, human beings. Maybe he'll find someone else. I've survived ten revolutions and as many heartbreaks. What they say here is true. Love is eternal for as long as it lasts.”

“Vivien–”

“I'm sure Tristan will find out what you've told me,” she said abruptly. “But I do need you to get that slipper copied – I am serious.”

They turned into Vivien's street, purple with jacaranda and lined, between the trees, with old-fashioned lamps from the time of the rubber boom. It was early afternoon, but jets of gas flickered behind the glass shades.

In Pará, Rejas would be sitting down to dinner.

Dyer sent his fax from Vivien's office.

Meanwhile he had a book to finish. He threw himself into the project as soon as he had finished closing down the office in Joaquim Nabuco. He would rise at six and write until lunchtime. In the afternoons he took to walking the length of Ipanema beach, to the point where the Dos Irmãos slipped into the sea. As he walked towards those mountains, he would often think of better ways to express what he had written; on the way back he planned the chapters ahead.

He began to enjoy the work. The book would have a limited market, but it was a subject he felt uniquely qualified to write about. As the weeks passed, he forgot about Vivien's promise to audition Laura. It was the sort of thing his aunt would not think to mention, and, besides, she was hopeless at keeping in touch. He had rather expected it to turn out badly; such vague attempts to help usually do.

He had reached chapter seventeen when the letter came through the box. The envelope had been sent to Dyer, care of Senora Vallejo. Vivien had forwarded it and on the back she had written: Shoes perfect. Colour, too. Thanks. V

Inside, there was a postcard.

The legend was, “Pilgrims ascend Mount Ausangate on the final night of the Corpus Christi ice festival”. The colour photograph showed a zigzag of lights against a dark blue slope and, dotted on the snowy summit, a line of curiously robed figures.

It was from Rejas.

His sister had died. Emilio would be staying on and doubtless would be pleased to see Dyer if he chanced to visit Pará.

His wife had gone to live in Miami.

Ezequiel had signed a declaration stating that he agreed with the policies of the government.

Dyer would shortly read that Rejas had been made Minister of Native Affairs.

Whenever Dyer came to the capital, Rejas hoped he would make the time to dine with him again.

And, “Laura has been accepted by the Metropolitan. Thank you.” And his initials.

That was all.