The Dancer Upstairs (3 page)

On the second evening he took Hugo out to dinner at the Costa Verde.

“How's that pretty girlfriend of yours?” This was the first time he had seen his nephew on his own.

“She's been gone for ages,” said Dyer.

Hugo, humbled, shook his head. “I shouldn't ask so many questions.”

His uncle had been with him in the Rio clinic when Astrud died. Vivien was touring Argentina with her dance company. Hugo flew over after things took a turn for the worse. Astrud had gone into labour prematurely. Dyer and Hugo sat outside the operating theatre. Winter sunlight spreading lozenge shapes on the lino; down the corridor a man selling magazines; the doctor taking off his glasses to wipe the bridge of his nose.

The amniotic fluid had entered her bloodstream. She died giving birth to a stillborn girl.

Hugo took control. He dealt with the hospital, the burial, the foreign desk in London. He spoke with Astrud's parents in São Paulo and her grandmother in Petropolis. Then he brought Dyer home to Miraflores.

That was eleven years ago. Since when Hugo and Vivien always welcomed him with an unwavering warmth. “This is your home, Johnny.” He must invite anyone he wanted to. So the house on the Malecón became the place where Dyer brought his new girlfriends.

“I'll get Mona over tomorrow night.” Hugo mentioned the name of a dull cousin, recently divorced.

“I'm here to work,” said Dyer.

Hugo nodded. He didn't ask about the nature of this work, nor did Dyer tell him. He had no wish to involve his uncle in his quest for Calderón. Hugo had not been well of late, and in any case had always preferred to turn a blind eye to Vivien's adventures.

While they ate, Hugo discoursed about Vivien's orphanage, to which Dyer supposed she would be donating the proceeds of the Pará gala. He ran through the membership of the Jockey Club where he was now Secretary; and when conversation petered out over coffee, he turned to the subject of genetically modified vegetables in which, since his stroke, he had developed an interest. About the civil war which had disembowelled his country, he said not a word.

“What are things like here now?” Dyer enquired at last.

“There's an uneasy peace,” said Hugo cagily. “It's real because it's happening, but maybe something more is going to happen.”

“You were brave to go on living here. Why in heaven's name didn't you leave?”

“It's not me. It's Vivien,” said Hugo, and not for the first time Dyer was conscious that few conversations he conducted with Vivien's husband ever hit the nub of the matter.

“When is she coming back?”

Hugo had been adroit so far in steering away from this subject and he remained vague. “I was expecting her home by the weekend. Or maybe she'll stay in Pará some more.”

“I forgot Pará had an opera house.”

Hugo raised what had once been an eyebrow. The stroke had removed both brows and given to his features, already bald, an unprotected air. “Pavlova danced there.”

By Sunday there was still no sign of Vivien. “She's bound to be back tonight,” said Hugo, who had spent all day at the race-track. But she did not reappear.

Nor did she turn up on Monday.

On Wednesday morning, Dyer joined Hugo for breakfast in the conservatory. Before going to bed, he had been rereading Vivien's letter.

“Hugo, what is it with this slipper?”

“Is that the shoemaker in Rio? She swears by his shoes. I discovered him by chance, when I was staying with you that time.”

Hugo accepted the letter from Dyer and studied it. His face was normally difficult to read, but not on this occasion. “If you ask me – and this is just a hunch – it's Vivien's way of saying she's not going to come back until she is sure you're gone.”

“Why would she behave like that?”

Dyer sensed his uncle's reluctance to hurt him. “I didn't want to tell you,” said Hugo. “But perhaps it's not such a bad thing you know.” The truth was, his last article had made Dyer persona non grata in one or two circles. “It frightened Vivien quite a lot. I've also had my share of barbed remarks at the club.”

“About what?”

“Something you wrote upset Calderón. From what I understand, he intimated to Vivien that there might come a time when she is going to have to stop talking to you. He finds it disconcerting to have people around who are so well informed.”

“I was hoping to get an interview with him.”

“Well, exactly, but you can put that out of your mind. You're a good journalist, Johnny, and that's what makes you dangerous. For some people in our society, the whole practice of journalism menaces their peace of mind. Half the dinner parties Vivien goes to, she's terribly proud to be your aunt. The other half, she keeps very, very quiet about it.”

There followed two fraught days. Dyer, his options running out, spent his time in the library of the Catholic University, using the opportunity to read early explorers' accounts of the Amazon. By Thursday, it was obvious that Vivien was going to stay on in Brazil. Hugo spent conspicuously more time at the Jockey Club, but continued to behave with unflagging hospitality on the few occasions they met.

Unwilling to be more of a headache to him, Dyer announced his intention to go upriver. There was research on the Ashaninkas he needed for his book. Not to alert Vivien, he told Hugo he would be spending a few days among an Indian tribe near Satipo. But he had decided to smoke out his aunt in Pará.

The Pará opera house is a coral-pink building across the Praça da Republica from the Hotel Madrid. On the morning of his arrival, Dyer walked down an avenue bright with mango trees to an entrance swathed in scaffolding.

The young woman in the administration office confessed herself perplexed. She had, of course, heard of Senhora Vallejo, but did not believe the Metropolitan were dancing in Pará. Besides, no performance would be possible until the municipality had completed the work of restoration. She suggested Dyer try the Teatro Amazonas in Manaus.

He telephoned Manaus and drew another blank. Six hundred miles upriver and no Vivien, no ballet. He contacted theatres in Santarém and Macapá. By mid-afternoon he knew he was wasting his time. The ballet story was a ruse. His aunt had left home because she knew he was coming.

He walked down to the river, then back through the bird market to his hotel. The air was humid, sweetened overripely with mangoes; beads of sweat tickled his neck and he wanted a shower. Afterwards he lay down on a hard bed under the window, unable to sleep. He squeezed a hand over his eyes, but with each mango-laden breath the sensation increased. It was four in the afternoon in a place where he didn't want to be, and he was furious.

He was stuck. He saw that now. He had bought a fixed date ticket; the return flight another week away. He was loath to give up the chase on Calderón. He thought it yet possible to snare his aunt with a last-ditch appeal. But what could he do in the meantime? It was pointless to fly back to keep Hugo company. The most sensible course would be to take a leaf from Vivien's book. Lie low for a few days, then surprise her.

Next morning he moved into a hotel close to the British-built port; a plaster-fronted building with white shutters and a verandah perched over the immense river. This was the old quarter, built during the rubber boom. Once prosperous, it had grown decrepit. Many of the houses were boarded up, with trees bursting out of the roofs. Others, like the building opposite, stood no deeper than their façade. To Dyer, the emptiness behind the preserved frontage mimicked one of Vivien's stage sets. Standing on his verandah, he could see the cloudless sky beyond the windows, the slanting drift of vultures between the architraves, and every now and then the agitated flight of a black and yellow bird, the bem-te-vi.

Bem-te-vi, bem-te-vi. I've seen you, I've seen you.

Frustrated, lethargic, crushed by the heat, Dyer could not hear that call without thinking of the slave hunters who trained the bird to hunt down fugitives. Catching sight of those yellow wings hovering in the sickly-sweet air, he wanted to shout out: “Go and find her, you stupid bird.”

Bem-te-vi, bem-te-vi.

He tried to be calm about his fate. He had been given free run of the world he cared about, the fount of his stories, and he had failed to deliver. If he telephoned Hugo, that would blow the whistle on Vivien. If he telephoned his editor, he ran the risk of having to return to London immediately. What could he find to do in Pará – except what he ought to be doing anyway?

The proposal of a book on the Amazon basin had interested him when originally he was approached by a London publishing house. He had long been fascinated by the area and had no doubt that he was qualified to write an introduction – although, in the absence of any reminders, it did cross his mind that his publishers might have gone the way of his newspaper. Vivien's vanishing act gave him an excuse. He had the notes he had made in the Catholic University library, and had had the foresight to bring with him several learned works. And hadn't this wild-goose chase landed him by sheer chance in a sea-port which he needed to write about? Rather than kicking his heels for a week, he would spend the time sketching out captions for as yet imaginary photos, studying texts, gathering information.

No sooner had he switched hotels than he began to enjoy Pará more. Due to its position on the Equator, it was a place which lived obstinately in its own time. Pará time never altered. And then there were the hours kept by the rest of the world.

He liked the fact that the sun rose and set at the same time each day. He liked the unforgeable smells of the port, and the torpor of the riverside, which met a commensurate emotion in him. Something having snapped in his bond to the newspaper, he suddenly looked forward to this time on his hands, time to reflect on the future, time to lay to rest one or two hungry ghosts, time to plot his book. There was nothing and no one to distract him, he remembered thinking, as he walked towards a restaurant he had marked out earlier in the day.

Only Euclides da Cunha, whose Rebellion in the Backlands he was thankful he had brought with him.

2

Dyer sat down at a table and at once began reading. He had read a chapter by the time the man at the window called for the bill. Dyer smiled, trying to remember where they could have met. The man responded with the unfavouring half-smile people reserve for helpful shopkeepers. Dyer looked away.

The pattern repeated itself the following night. The two diners sat together in that room for no longer than twenty minutes before, punctual as the last ferry, the man called for his bill. They read and ate their meals in silence. It must have confounded the waiter to watch his only clients sitting like that, not exchanging a word.

Dyer would have taken the man for a fellow stranger to Pará had not the waiter treated him so respectfully. Emilio hurried for no one, yet when signalled by the man at table seventeen he stopped whatever he was doing and directed himself between the straw-seated chairs, clasping his black folder as though it contained, not a bill for a grilled fish, but the freedom of the city. A moment later, walking like someone out of uniform, his other customer brushed past Dyer's table.

But Emilio could not satisfy Dyer's curiosity. The courtesy with which he brought and removed plates concealed a splendid disdain. Emilio, if Dyer was reading, was not above lifting both book and plate and dusting away the crumbs, all the while smiling apologetically as though he were somehow to blame for their presence on the table. His manner seemed determined by the assumption that Dyer would leave no tip. Emilio would call at his back as he left, “Good evening, Senhor,” as if he didn't mean it. These words, spoken in correct Portuguese but with the trace of a Spanish accent, were the only three he addressed to Dyer. When asked about the person at the window, he shrugged.

Not until the third night did the man pause at Dyer's table.

Dyer was so engrossed in
Rebellion in the Backlands
that several seconds passed before he became aware of someone looking over his shoulder.

The man held out his own cloth-bound volume. They were reading the same book.

“I don't believe it. Extraordinary!” Dyer got to his feet. The coincidence was not so extraordinary, at least not in Brazil. But in that scarcely patronized restaurant it was strange indeed.

Dyer gestured at the chair opposite. The man checked his watch.

“I cannot stay long,” he said, in Spanish. He drew the chair to him and sat on the edge of the seat, facing away. “I am expected at home.”

Dyer sought Emilio, but, observant as ever, he was already advancing.

“Beer?”

“A coffee, I'd prefer.”

The man placed his book, the Spanish edition, on the table. “If only the author could see!”

Dyer said, “You know how people go on about a book, then you are disappointed. But it's as good as I hoped.”

“I've come to reading late.” His face had a preoccupied look. “My father had a library, but I never made use of it. At last I have time.”

“Then we're in the same boat.”

The eyes which inspected Dyer were brown and steady. He was neither good-looking nor ugly, and while he would not have turned a young girl's head, someone older might have been struck by his face and the evidence of a passion which had left its traces.

“Don't you think that each time a good book is written it's a triumph for everyone?” said the man. “The same each time someone is cured of a disease or a criminal is caught. It's one more tiny victory against the darkness.” It was touching, this faith in books. He'd only just discovered them and now he had discovered them terribly.