The Dancer Upstairs (2 page)

The telephone rang.

Astrud smiled at him from beneath a green beach umbrella.

“There you are. These things are hopeless for abroad. I was about to say, can we look for you at the end of April?”

“I really can't. There's a book I'm supposed to be writing. I do have to finish it before I leave.”

“How long do you need?”

“To assemble the bits – four, five weeks.”

“Fine. Then next month is holiday. In June, I want to see you here.”

“All right,” Dyer said rapturelessly.

“I give you this time-off on one condition. You write me a major piece. We can run it Saturday and Sunday. Allow yourself 12,000 words, but give Nigel plenty of warning about pics. You have the background taped. There must be a story you really want to do? Something we can syndicate?”

Always Dyer had cherished the idea that if ever the time came to leave this continent he would go out on one wonderful note. His book was to be an introduction to the cultural and social history of the Amazon Basin. But he thought of it as a task he had to complete. It was not a grace note on which to end his South American career.

On the other hand, the editor's valedictory commission did at least give Dyer the freedom to pull off an interview which every journalist down here would be envious to see in print, and which would be the logical climax of the story he had been tracking for a decade.

“There is something I'd like to write,” he said. “Do you remember the terrorist Ezequiel?”

“The chappie in the cage?”

Ezequiel was a revolutionary leader who had been caught after a twelve-year hunt. His guerrilla war against the institutions of his Andean country had resulted in 30,000 deaths and countless tortures and mutilations. Ezequiel's public humiliation – he was indeed shown to the international press from inside a cage – had captured headlines across the world a year before.

“You can get him?” It showed the editor's lack of awareness that he could ask such a question.

“It's not Ezequiel. No one's allowed to see him.” After being paraded through the streets under military escort, Ezequiel had been kept underground in a lightless cell. He had not spoken a word to the press.

“It's the person who put Ezequiel in the cage.”

“What's he called?”

“Tristan Calderón.”

“And who is he?”

“On the face of it, a humble Intelligence captain. In fact, he's the President's right-hand man. He runs the country.”

“Has he been interviewed ever?”

“Never.”

“What makes you sure you can crack it?”

“I have a good contact.”

The contact was truly a good one. Calderón was infatuated with Vivien Vallejo, an Englishwoman who had given up her career as a prima ballerina with the Royal Ballet to marry a South American diplomat. Calderón called her the whole time and sent presents, much to the annoyance of her husband. Vivien was Dyer's aunt.

“Why haven't you suggested it before?”

“I have. Twice.” The foreign desk, under pressure to reduce expenses, had judged it too obscure.

While it was nowhere in his nature to shelve a story which excited him, he was aware of his aunt's hostility to the press: gossip-column pieces, photographs of Vivien on the arm of someone not Hugo, had jeopardized her marriage more than once. For this reason, Dyer had not wished to enlist her support until he could be one hundred per cent sure of an appropriate space in the paper.

“That's it, then,” said the editor, sounding pleased. “You get me the Caldon interview and you have a month off. Nothing would make me happier than for you to come out with all guns blazing.”

Dyer looked down the beach to where he had painted Astrud. The kite was still there, but the boy had gone.

When, two days later, he saw the grey-tiled turret above the jacaranda, he felt he was coming home.

The garden walls of Vivien's house on the sea-front had grown since the summers he had lived here as a child. Topped with broken brown glass and electrified wire, they surrounded a building conceived in imitation of a Gascon manoir. The effect was wide of the mark it aimed at. The house resembled nothing so much as a sub-tropical folly, crammed, because of Hugo's profession, with objects of little beauty but plenty of nostalgia.

It was to this address on the Malecón that Dyer had sent his fax. He was coming to stay, he informed Vivien. He hoped this wouldn't be an inconvenience, but he found himself in desperate straits. He begged for her help in fixing an interview with Calderón – on or off the record. He had signed the faxed letter, perfectly honestly, with his love. Vivien, his top card, happened also to be the person he most wanted to say goodbye to before he was made to depart South America.

Until the last, when the taxi turned into her street, he had forgotten how much he missed his aunt. He had first driven up this road as a six-year-old, after his mother died. In that doorway had stood a small, vivacious woman. By the way she held herself, he had thought she waited to greet him, but she was saying goodbye to a neat, bald man who soon excused himself. Catching sight of the boy, she had run out, flung open the car door, plucked him into the sunlight. Her understanding hands caressed his face, looking for her sister. Then she hugged him to her neck and laughed.

The sound of Vivien's throaty laugh was among his earliest memories. Her bold blue eyes would bewitch anyone they looked on. Unlike most charmers, she had known suffering of her own, so that those same eyes also shone with the pale brightness of someone who has peeked over the rim. As a young girl, she had been wasted by a rheumatic fever which no doctor, and certainly no one in her family, expected her to survive. Recovering, she had taken up ballet in order to develop her weakened muscles. “No miracle, my dear, I just decided one day that every hour was a gift and I liked being alive.” It was not long before she had become famous as a classical dancer – and for renouncing everything the moment it came within her grasp.

She had been in her tenth season with London's Royal Ballet when she met Hugo Vallejo after a performance of Giselle in Lisbon. Hugo, at that time an attaché at his country's embassy, told her, did she know? it was incredible, but in shape and colour the birthmark on her right cheek matched exactly the drop of tea he had splashed that afternoon on to a tablecloth at his ambassador's residence.

“It was the corniest shit, and I told him so.” That night they dined at Tavares. A month later she exchanged Covent Garden for South America.

Her body had thickened since Dyer had lived with them. In those days she attracted to the house a corps of dedicated admirers. Gossip accused her of reserving her most accomplished steps for the dance she led her husband. “I married Hugo,” she told Dyer in one of those phrases of hers he never forgot, “because he didn't put his hand on my knee after dinner and say ‘What do you want to do now?' He put it here, on my hip, where it mattered.” And if she had disengaged those fingers once or twice to indulge a passionate life behind Hugo's back, their marriage had still endured. Now approaching seventy, she remained devoted, balanced and worldly; and, despite her accent, modulated like that of a nineteen-fifties radio announcer, very un-English.

Neither the excitement he felt in Vivien's presence, nor the fact she was his aunt, did anything to conceal from Dyer her essential toughness. She was an effective figure in her adopted country and skilled at getting things done, something she ascribed to her Covent Garden training. “All ballet dancers are made of iron, my dear. If you work nine hours a day, your life is regimented, orderly and extremely strict. You can't have an ounce of woolliness.” And it was true. When Vivien said, albeit with perfect grace, “This is what I want,” people by God jumped.

Greatly loved, she was also well aware, not least through friends like Calderón, of the political processes of the country. Too wise to take sides, although her opinion and her company were deliberately courted, she acted as a sort of “ambassador without portfolio” – and at one stage was invited to be special envoy to UNESCO. She declined, offering as an excuse her worry that she might lose her British passport. Besides, diplomacy was Hugo's bag.

For Hugo she might have given up dancing, but she did not sever links with the world of ballet. As Principal of the Metropolitan, she had kept her name prominent – if not sanctified – in that milieu. Of late, though, she was more associated in the public mind with the Vallejo Orphanage.

The story was famous, how Vivien, driving through the outskirts of the capital, spotted some children playing beneath a water-tower. She assumed the creature they were teasing as it thrashed on the ground was an animal. Then, through the circle of legs, she saw a boy. Telling Hugo to stop the car, she had pummelled her way past the children. Their victim was no older than five or six. His mouth was locked open in a spasm and his moans bubbled through saliva trails flecked with sand. One of the boy's tormentors lifted a foot and wiggled his toes between the caked lips.

Vivien had pushed him aside, gathered the boy in her arms, and made Hugo drive to the hospital in Miraflores, where she had agreed to meet the medical expenses.

The boy spoke almost no Spanish, but phrase by incomplete phrase she had pieced together his history. He came from near Sierra de Pruna. His father had been executed by Ezequiel. His mother had fled. He had contracted meningitis. Such handicaps are a stigma in the highlands. His mother set out for the capital and when she got there, she abandoned her son by the roadside.

“It changed my life. It would have changed anybody's life. What else could I have done? Left him there? Just be thankful you didn't find him, my dear.”

In the weeks ahead Vivien learnt of other cases. Two sisters from Lepe, alone in the city, their parents victims of the military. A girl, her family destroyed by a car bomb. A two-year-old, his mother seized by three men disguised as policemen.

“For every child I found, another two popped up – dazed, hungry, sick. My heart wrinkled to see them, but we simply didn't have room.”

She began to call in favours.

Vivien's international status as a dancer had always endowed her with a snobbish appeal for a certain kind of powerful person. Now she sought their patronage. She cajoled and bullied friends for donations, rented a house in San Isidro and, before quite realizing it, had set up an institution for the orphans of the violence. Within eight weeks, she found herself responsible for sixty children. Dyer would hear them during rehearsals at the Metropolitan, hiding under the seats, hitting each other, bawling. Once the music started, they shut up.

Among the influential people whom Vivien had badgered was the sometime lawyer Tristan Calderón. He was now a director of the orphanage.

On a silver tray in the hallway, under an authentic, moss-coloured ballet slipper, an envelope waited for Dyer. The letter was on stiff cream paper. Vivien had flown the coop.

Dyer reacted with panic. When you sit in an office a thousand miles away it is easy to make rash promises. Vivien's advocacy had been crucial to his getting the interview. Without her, he couldn't hope to track down Calderón.

He tried the obvious sources. There was a Deputy to whom Vivien had introduced him two years ago. He left three messages on an answering-machine. Either the man was away – or had no desire to renew acquaintance.

Nor did the local press, commonly a rich seam of unexplored leads, prove useful. His buddies on Caretas and La Republica were happy to see him, but as soon as he mentioned Calderón's name they became guarded in a way they had never been about Ezequiel. Not even in the days when his organization was killing them.

Dyer resorted to the official channels, but the people he had known at the Palace had been replaced. Captain Calderón was a functionary of average rank, nothing more; and it was not government policy to grant interviews to the media.