The Dancer Upstairs (11 page)

That curtain was permanently drawn. Ezequiel would stand behind it for minutes on end, absorbing the street. He liked to stand in the same position, his face against the glass of the window, which he would slide open a few inches. At the end, when I was observing him through my binoculars, I could see him inhaling the air, feeling it on his raised face like a dog pressing its nose to a car window. That's probably what gave him his cough, because a few days after Quesada's death, Laura came home with a fever, and by the end of the week Sylvina had caught it too.

I can describe what he would have seen through that chink. By the time I ordered in my men, I knew everyone in that street, what they did, when they left home, what time they returned, their love affairs and peccadilloes. Afterwards I wandered a lot around that room, standing where he used to stand, imagining him. Once, a movement drew my eyes to the house opposite. A young girl pushed a man, laughing, on to a bed. A leg was raised at right angles into the space where they had stood, then it disappeared. When the girl next passed the window she was naked. Seconds later I heard the sound of a cistern flushing.

The cistern was fed from a water tank on the roof. It's a funny thing, but for six months almost the only word Ezequiel would have seen in the world outside the room was the manufacturer's name: “Eternity”.

If I close my eyes, I can follow the street to the hill at the end. Sometimes the outlines of the slope are clear and I can make out paths and the colours of a rubbish tip. On other days, it remains a blurred shape, the same colour as the fluffy grey sky which our poets liken to a donkey's belly.

I hear the sounds of a middle-class street. A gate closing, a car door opening, a bird singing. The tree where the bird sits is a jacaranda. It's been growing purpler by the day, as if someone has dipped the branches in the afternoon sky. I don't know about you, but I hate the sound of birdsong in the evenings.

Opposite, below the lovers' room, Milagra the maid starts to beat an imitation Persian carpet against the fence. The noise causes an Alsatian to leap up paws spread against the railings, barking. A while ago, while reversing into the street, Milagra's employer ran over one of this dog's puppies. That's why he paces up and down, thrusting his snout between the bars, his black eyes roving over anyone who passes.

Milagra shouts for the Alsatian to be quiet, but is ignored. She is habitually ignored. Every day she bustles after the boy who collects bottles. Too late she hears his shout. She scuffles in the wake of his bicycle cart, but never attracts his attention.

“Bottles!” shouts the boy. Casually he lifts both hands above his head, so that for a few dangerous yards no one is steering the cart. Then he grips the bars, leans into the corner and disappears.

Milagra lurches one or two paces and stands in the middle of the street, panting helplessly, holding to her breast a bag which clinks with empty Cristal beer bottles. “Señor . . . Señor . . .”

The barking frightens a face to a window of the house on the corner. Did Ezequiel know what went on in that room every afternoon? The face at the window belongs to Señora Zampini. At three o'clock, when Doctor Zampini is lecturing on geriatric oncology at the Catholic University, an orange Volkswagen Beetle draws up and out steps a tall man in a brownish suit with shiny dark patches on the elbows of the jacket. He stands up stiffly, pulling his shirt cuffs back down his sleeves. He's not as excited as he used to be. He comes without the verve or the flowers that attended his earlier visits. Has Señora Zampini noticed his listlessness? When the door opens hers is the face in the shadow, grim with anticipation. He enters, kisses her hand. The door is bolted behind him.

What else do I hear? The conversation from the corner café over cups of scalding, cardboard-tasting coffee. Cars leaving for the beach, their drivers hooting as they pass the video store, the air sweet with the lotions they've rubbed on their arms and faces. The panting of two middle-aged joggers, women in turquoise tracksuits, their hairdos ravaged by sweat.

It is easy for me to picture myself as Ezequiel. How hungrily I watch the street. I yearn to be outside, moving. There are occasions when I want to yield to the violence I have unleashed, taste it for myself, experience the fear I have become immune to. I touch the window and cough. I feel the air against my hand. Despite my cough I press my cheek to the draught. I belong downstairs, not in this locked room. I touch the door handle and dream of the world downstairs. At half past three every afternoon, Kant walked under his lime trees. For six months I haven't abandoned this space.

So there Ezequiel stands, waiting for Laura's class to leave, waiting to count the girls out so he may watch television or listen to his music.

There is a box crammed with loose cassettes – Beethoven, Schumann, Wagner, and a Donizetti opera – Lucia di Lammermoor. There are also recordings of Frank Sinatra, but they haven't been played in a while. Ezequiel's taste in music has changed since he left the mountains. As the psoriasis devours him, eating its way between his buttocks, he no longer wants to hear a human voice.

Not that he spelled any of this out during our interrogation. I had to retrieve these bits and pieces from a tide of belligerent nonsense about fascist continuism and the Inevitable New Dawn. The utopian garbage he spouted contained few clues about what actually went on in that room. Only the room told me anything.

It was not much bigger than my office. There was a double bed and at the centre, with its back to the window, a high-backed armchair covered in red velvet, in which he spent much of his time reading.

His books were arranged in alphabetical order on a shelf above the cassette-recorder. This was Ezequiel's third safe house in eighteen months and he had with him only essential texts, each one annotated in his close, backward-sloping handwriting. Had they let me study them I might be able to tell you more about the way his mind worked. But they didn't.

On the arm of the chair, a tin Cinzano ashtray overflowed with Winston stubs. He loved American cigarettes. That, and his psoriasis, and his passion for Kant, and the fact that he liked drinking mineral water constituted pretty much the whole of the picture I had of the man until I met him face to face in that room. By that time there would be no yellow curtain between us, no merry cartoon elephants floating down on striped parachutes. Down to what, I don't know.

What else was up there? In such a space everything becomes an icon. Two pairs of shoes on the floor, making steps without him. On the white walls a small picture of Mao and a framed photograph of the Arc de Triomphe at night. He'd never been to Paris, but he admired Napoleon. These types do. A hotel trolley which he used as a desk, and also to eat from. The food, prepared in a back kitchen, was brought to him by Comrade Edith. She was the only person allowed to enter his sanctuary, kept locked at all times. Edith was the reason, I am sure, he had abandoned the mountains. His wife Augusta was the girl who had driven the red pick-up (and was formerly the girlfriend of Pascual). She would have wanted him to remain in the countryside. Like him, she had envisaged the revolution achieving its triumph after his death, in much the way that cathedral architects were content not to see their work completed in their lifetimes.

But that was a young man's dream, the fantasy of a provincial idealist. Augusta's death and his disease had pinched him back into this life. He no longer had the patience of a snake. He had grown restive, and Edith found it easy to exploit this impatience. She urged him to enjoy the fruits of his revolution now, in his lifetime. All they required was one final, decisive action. But for this he must come down to the capital. His physical presence was needed to plan the operation. To monitor and inspire it. To be there when his people removed, once and for all time, the rotten, crumbling keystone of the state.

I don't know whether he and Edith slept together in that unmade bed. Rumours said he slept with all his female followers, who regarded him as holy. But I don't believe that.

A small bathroom led off the bedroom. Here he swallowed his capsules and applied his creams. Have you smelled petroleum jelly? Well, that's how the bathroom smelled. There were medicines everywhere, on the floor beside the perished rubber mat, on the shelf below the shower, ranged along the top of the cabinet above the basin.

What struck me was the lack of a mirror. I can only suppose that Ezequiel had become revolted by his image and no longer wished to be reminded of his obese, diseased, almost immobile self.

So here he stood, this sick body – the psoriasis worsening by the day – restless, in pain, and of course he was going to be aware of the beautiful girls below. Since he couldn't see them they must have been the more beautiful in his imagination. You see, the dancers' bathroom was directly below his. He would have heard snatches of conversation as they soaped their exhausted bodies under the shower. Think of it. Here was a man in a locked room preaching liberty while downstairs, only a matter of feet away, they were free.

They were being trained to fly and he was caged. Doesn't that make you laugh?

He must have seen me get out of my car. I'm not sure what can have passed through his mind when he saw me crossing the street. I guess while I talked with Yolanda downstairs he would have sat in his armchair and watched a silent television screen. Then, when the power-cut came, he would have waited for news from the theatre.

I left the Teatro de Paz at three in the morning and drove cautiously home. The only lights came from cars and a few candles twitching behind windows. The city was quiet, too. All I could hear were the waves stampeding on a dirty grey beach. Not until I reached Via Barranco did I learn why the silence was sinister.

My headlights picked out packs of children tearing along the sidewalks. They were sticking paper sheets on to doors and windows. I swerved at them and they ran off. Getting out of the car, I walked towards the face which stared at me from this door and the next, and from the doors of every house in Via Barranco.

My photograph of Ezequiel, blown up by Quesada's ministry and used in the countryside, had been translated into thousands of head-sized posters. They were signed Presidente Ezequiel, while across the top of each, in the same handwriting, were the words: Blood doesn't drown the revolution but irrigates it! Ezequiel's thousand eyes and thousand ears are on you!

I had the sensation that the eyes in the poster mocked me personally. As a clue to what I look like now, this morning, they said, this face is worthless.

The dawn confirmed his prevalence. In San Isidro, a general's widow woke in the half-dark and thought she had died because Ezequiel's face, which she mistook for that of her husband coming to greet her, had been pasted over both bedroom windows. His uninhabited eyes stared from the dustbins, from movie posters, from beneath the glass tops of the tables left overnight outside the Café Haiti. He floated in the fountains of the Plaza San Martin. He was caught in the treetops of the Jardines Botanicos, as though dropped from the sky. He looked up from doormats in Belgrano, having been slipped, like a locksmith's circular or a Chinese restaurant menu, beneath the front doors.

Like the Passover Angel, he had spread his wings over the capital.

So long as it stirred the dust of unseen terraces far from the capital, no one believed much in Ezequiel's revolution. Now everybody was fervently interested. When there is a victim at once familiar and powerful, the anxiety of a nation is easily engaged. The identity of the murdered Minister underlined our gross incompetence. The man on stage, his mouth grotesquely stuffed with theatre programmes, had, among his other responsibilities, been head of the national police force. He was, politically speaking, our boss.

At eight-fifteen in the morning, on the day after the Teatro de Paz killing, General Merino called me to his office. When he had learned the news of Ezequiel's death he had taken a holiday. He should have been on his boat. Instead he stood by his desk and looked at me with misgiving, his lower lip pushed forward a little. He was slightly tipsy and smelt of the cigarette he had cadged off his secretary. Because of the power-cut, the air-conditioning wasn't working and he had removed his jacket.

“I've been asked to stand by. Calderón wants to speak to me.”

“Fuck,” I said.

“Fuck is right.”

He grabbed an orange from the glass fruit bowl and started to dismantle it. A sticky hand indicated a poster on his desk, black letters screaming: sick of injustice? sick of feeling helpless? sick of believing there's nothing you can do?

“Once,” he said through a mouthful of pulp and juice, “I made the mistake of buying a ticket for one of these so-called plays. Believe me, there was nothing I longed to do more than climb on stage and grab the actor by the throat and say to him: This is no damn good.”

He shook his head and sucked at a segment of orange.

“You know what Calderón is going to say, Tomcat. How did we so completely underestimate Ezequiel?”

“We didn't, sir.”

“What's that? Speak up, can't you?”

“A copy of my report was sent to the President's Office.”

The warning had been there on the first page. In the third paragraph I referred to the mimeographed pamphlet discovered on the woman we had arrested in Las Flores. This pamphlet, entitled “Washing the Soul”, constituted Ezequiel's sole declaration to date. “Our process of the people's war has led us to the apogee; consequently, we must prepare for the insurrection which becomes, in synthesis, the seizure of the cities.”

My message, underlined in yellow marker, was clear. On the presumption that the pamphlet was not a forgery, and regardless of the welcome lull in Ezequiel's activities, we ought to brace ourselves for an escalation of violence. “We cannot rule out that he will try a political assassination.”