The Dancer Upstairs (31 page)

“I know. But I was worried for –”

“Stop it. You're scaring me,” she said, and the moment had passed. She stood straight. “Anyway, I haven't finished.”

“You want to go on? In this light?”

Above me, her face had been sculpted by the candlelight into something older, stronger, fiercer. “I can see perfectly well.”

“But what about music?”

She picked something up from the floor. “Here.”

That night in Yolanda's studio I mustered the notes of a forgotten tune. I didn't really know how to play it, the flute she'd given me. It was hard to produce a good clear tone. But as my breath warmed the wood, the colour of the sound changed. The flute vibrated to the same pitch as my body, as though it were another limb, another flow of blood. And Yolanda, dancing her forbidden steps, became the music of this flute made flesh.

She cradled the pot to her breast, then moved on scissor legs towards the rosin, scooping handfuls into the pot. Her body was something unimaginably alive. She wept with her limbs, yet at the same time they blazed. She truly was making something unseen visible, so that I never doubted her identity as the sister about to cover a mangled corpse with dust.

She pirouetted and jumped. In that leap her body was in complicity with the air. Her legs dismissed the ground, her shoulders expressed their wings and the image of her flight was painted there.

“Play. Play.” She spoke to my reflection. The steam had cleared from the mirrors, and in them I could see her body from every angle. With trembling arms, she raised the jug above her head – and I am certain that, with this frozen gesture, as if offering a libation, she intended the ballet to end.

“Don't stop, Agustín.” A whisper.

She was then to do something I will never forget. It was the last thing I expected, and I doubt whether the idea had entered her head until that moment. She stared up at the base of Lazo's jug, and I wondered if she had seen something there. With a tidy flick of her wrist she overturned it. A torrent of white dust poured down her hair, over her dress, puffing out over the candles, where it burnt, sparkling, in the flames.

Rejas fell silent.

“Go on,” said Dyer.

“Half an hour later I left the studio, having promised not to see her until Sunday.”

Dyer was not certain he had understood correctly. “You mean, you wouldn't meet again until after her performance?”

Rejas blushed. “That's right.”

“Why?”

His fingers tugged at the chain around his neck. “She was an artist. She was consumed by discipline. She needed her privacy – her loneliness, even.”

Dyer's eyes hadn't moved from his face. There was more to be said, but he saw that the other didn't want to say it. At that moment Emilio appeared with two dishes of pork and pineapple. Dyer supposed that Rejas would have no appetite, but he ate hungrily.

When Rejas resumed his story, Dyer hoped he would pick up the thread in the ballet school. But the meal had restored in him some sort of equilibrium. He wanted to talk about Ezequiel.

Ezequiel signed his name when he handed the video camera to Edith. I knew as soon as I discovered the street he had filmed that I would find him. You might have thought this would be easy: I just had to look for a house near or opposite a street sign. But on either side of each street, vertical posts stood every hundred yards beneath the jacaranda.

There are ninety-six houses in Calle Diderot. In Calle Perón fifty-four. I took charge of the Diderot operation. I'll spare you the details. Watching a street, vital as it is, is tedious work. Compare it to the act of blowing up an air cushion: although nothing appears to be going on, no breath is wasted. It is only with the last few breaths that the cushion takes shape. Yet you have to keep blowing.

Some people get a headache just waiting for something to unfold. Hour upon profitless hour. Contemplation immobilizes them. They end up like my father, drugged by doing nothing. They become disciples of sitting down and facing a blank wall whenever they feel a storm of rage or passion. Because it is not enough to be patient. You have to know how to be impatient, when to act quickly. The trick is to recognize the moment.

The Calle Diderot team worked eight-hour shifts. It was a crude operation by Western standards. But anything more sophisticated at this stage might have aroused curiosity. Sucre was the dustbin man. Gomez, alternating with Clorindo, did wonders in the blue and yellow outfit of the municipal gardener. A couple seconded from Narcotics spent hours in the café and nestling in the front seat of their clapped out Volkswagen. The operation was kept secret even from the General, whom I had not told what we had found on the video cassette.

I used a different car for each shift. Sometimes I parked in a narrow cul-de-sac, sometimes on the corner of Calle Leme. People aren't that observant. They don't stare at particular cars in the street – and I wasn't driving a lavender Cadillac. I listened to the radio. I read the newspaper. I broke up the day by using the lavatory in a bar on Calle Pizarro where they sold sandwiches. I sat for eight-hour stretches, watching passers-by.

At night, since it was too risky to rent a room from anyone in the street, I exchanged the car for a van. I used a blue engineer's van, no windows at the back and with a black stripe along both sides. From the outside it looked like a band of paint. In fact, it was darkened perspex, and I could see through it.

I sat on a folding chair in the back. I had night glasses and a bottle to pee in. One of my men, usually Sucre, would park the van, get out, lock it and walk away. At the end of the shift he would come back, repeating the process in reverse.

I soon became familiar with the faces of the street, what preoccupied them, who they liked or didn't like. No one seemed ill at ease or fearful. This was a prosperous neighbourhood, far removed from the tension of the outskirts. A bird sang in the jacaranda. A dog lay asleep on a porch. The very tranquillity of the scene was reason enough to be on guard.

I compiled notes. On that first afternoon, for instance, at about two-fifteen an elderly man, tall with patched sleeves, entered No. 339. After forty-five minutes he drove quickly away in an orange Volkswagen Beetle.

An hour later the maid from No. 345 visited the “Vargas Video Store”. She came out holding two cassettes, talking to herself. The store-keeper charged extra if you didn't rewind the videos.

At four o'clock a female jogger, late forties, in a turquoise track suit, left No. 357. She returned after thirty-five minutes, walking.

Ten minutes later, a young woman, tidily dressed, arrived at No. 365, the estate agency run from a garage. I could see the car behind her desk. She left at five-thirty carrying a handful of envelopes.

Which of these people was hiding Ezequiel? You see, I was certain he had settled here, or in Calle Perón. He had remained as silent and derisive as a god right up until the moment I saw him on the video cassette. A few frames of film had made him fallible, human at last. The sound of him may have been no louder than the distant thrumming of an insect, but in those warm nights I felt his presence.

I am able to picture him in that room. He's lighting another cigarette. He is listening to the music we would find in the cassette player: Beethoven's Ninth. Perhaps it is the last movement playing as he leans in his customary position by the window, having watched the sixteen girls go into their class.

It strikes him as a warm evening, but he often misjudges the temperature so that Edith, wearing a thick sweater, will come into the room and find him with nothing on but a vest.

I see Edith nudging open the door with a tray. She rests it on the trolley while he lingers at the window, watching two lovers go by. He hears a bird. He scratches his neck. For twelve years he has been cooped up in airless rooms like this one.

Edith confirms the meeting on Monday. At eight that morning the Central Committee will present details for his approval. Nothing can go wrong. In less than a week the final act of the Fifth Grand Plan will be played out.

He listens, eating. He planned it himself, twenty years ago. The strategy has remained unblemished in his head. He nods and forks towards his tongue another mouthful of ceviche.

The night crackles. Edith parts the curtain a fraction. Yellow fireworks confirm the operation tomorrow, against Cleopatra's Hotel. She comes back into the room and sits on the edge of the bed, plucking hairs from her black trousers.

At seven o'clock she turns on the television, keeping the volume low. The police announce an important breakthrough in the hunt for Ezequiel. A police general, interviewed outside a blue house, holds up a wig and says: “Have no doubt. We are closing in.”

Ezequiel watches for a minute, then picks up his book. There are marks on the page where wax from a candle splashed during the last blackout. It upsets him because it was a good edition.

Edith says, “Is there anything else you want? Cigarettes? Water?”

“I need more Kenacort.” He doesn't need to speak loudly to be heard. His voice is a solid thing, the words creating in the room another presence. This second figure stands at his shoulder, like a maquette of damp grey clay, arms crossed, featureless – but watchful.

“Is it bad?”

He nods. The rash has started to creep inside the membrane of his penis. When he pissed this morning he wanted to scream.

He brushes her hand from his knee. Reluctant to pull herself away, she watches him drink his water. She decides to make the bed. The Dithranol has marked the sheets with purple brown stains. She strips them off and is about to leave the room, pregnant with dirty bedclothes, when she hesitates, returns to his side.

His mouth is full of water, his tongue and lips dry from the Acitretin tablets. He swallows. “What is it?”

“It might be nothing.”

He listens as she explains what is troubling her.

“Should I have him followed?”

“No. I've seen him. It's nothing. He's infatuated, that's all. Another Gabriel.”

“Are you sure?”

Although the words are quietly spoken, his black eyes are charged. “You can't check everybody.” He drains his glass and pushes away the tray.

“You're finished?”

“Yes.”

“Do you want to watch some more?”

“No.”

She switches off the television and leaves the room. She will not come back tonight.

From below he hears the squeak of shoes, a sound as of something sharply wrenched. He looks down to the rug. The squeaks mark the end of his reading. Downstairs they are beginning their exercises. For the next hour and a half the floor will become a sounding board for the thud, thud, thud of feet and the “one two three, one two three, one two three” of the teacher calling out the rhythm, and for the music, interrupted again and again, of his favourite composers.

These interruptions are a torture to him. At the same time, he demands in his followers the same obedience as the ballet teacher seeks from her pupils. He makes tolerable these evenings by recasting the girls beneath him into the image of his invisible army.

Tonight, it is a classical class. The girls begin at the edge of the room and, in a quickening tempo, proceed to the middle. At the end of the lesson they will have exercised every part of their bodies – except the vocal cords. On the dance floor, only the teacher speaks. They listen to her, not talking, because she can make them perfect.

“Okay, we'll start with the same plié as yesterday. Let's remember what we discussed, about keeping the strength in the middle and freeing the arms.”

He slips a finger under the page as he reaches the bottom. He is rereading Kant. He turns the page.

“Listen to what I'm going to play, and push from the front foot. Good, Christina. Practise that.”

They're dancing “The Song of the Moon” from Rusalka. Hands wave in the mirror. Bodies sway like branches in a wind. The hands and bodies flow to the Dvorák composition he most loves. He stretches a leg.

“Down and up, down and up. Hips back. Listen to the music. You're not listening to the music, Gabriela.” It stops in mid beat. “I'm sorry, girls.”

Shoes brush across the parquet. The teacher, he imagines, will be adjusting a head, plucking up one shoulder, placing a finger in the small of the girl's back.

“Now, your arms are condor feathers.”

The music strikes up, accompanied by a handclap in time to the beat.

From the trolley he picks up a fountain pen. He unscrews the cap and with an effort writes in the margin: Can we then infer from the natural world that man ought to be free? Is that bird I hear free?

He reads another paragraph, but the words are evasive. They, like the music, fail to move him. He coughs, catching a movement on the blank screen before him. From the television his reflection is beamed back at him. Sitting behind the trolley, he is made shockingly aware of the contrast between this body and the hands which tremble at full stretch below him, taking aim at the ceiling.

“The eyes must go up,” says the voice downstairs. “Open them, open them, look at the ceiling.”

Ezequiel turns a few pages and lays the book, pages down, on the arm of his chair. He pushes himself up and walks to the door. He unclenches his hand, lets it hover over the stainless-steel handle. But he does not make contact. In the end the hand drops back to his side.

“You must be careful of that foot, especially Adriana.”

Grimacing, he unwraps his scarf, throws it on to the bed. The meal has made him sweat. He feels the jowls dragging on his face and the weight of his belly. What can he expect if he eats and doesn't exercise? Sliding a hand under his vest, he begins to scratch.