The Dancer Upstairs (37 page)

She can't see what she's eating, what she's drinking, where she's defecating. She can have no idea whether it's night or day. How does she know when to sleep, when to wake? Dreams must be her only light, but what can she dream of, and how does she feel when she wakes from a dream and there's darkness and she knows she'll be waking to this room for the rest of her life, that until the grave this is what will greet her?

Of course, one hopes that it won't be for the rest of her life, that there'll be a remission, an act of clemency. I think of Father Ramón's last message to me: “God's mercy is greater than God's justice.” But in a way it's worse, not knowing. If she knew she was going to live like this for the rest of her life, she could simply give up. Or else she could take heart if she knew she would only have to endure it for a certain number of years. But to face so uncertain . . .

Rejas stopped. He started again, pausing between each sentence, measuring each word as if he had few left.

During the whole first year she was permitted one visit from a Red Cross official. Now her family are allowed a visit every fortnight. But she refuses to see them. She hasn't seen anyone for fifteen months.

It would be inconceivable, even in that lightless space, if she didn't attempt some form of movement. But if you're not born at that altitude you risk soroche. You've been to Villaria – you can't jog fifty yards without feeling mountain sickness. So I expect she stretches to keep warm, gripping the bed for support. The nights are often well below freezing.

She still has touch, I suppose. But that's all she has. Her last anchor to this world is the feel of her bare feet on the concrete floor, her nose against the wall, the tips of her fingers on the ceiling.

I did manage to deliver some blankets to the prison governor, asking him to pass them on. The blankets were returned with a personal message. “Tell him I'm dead and I live only for the Revolution.”

I know what people say. They say that what she fought for has enveloped her, that where she lies now is an appropriate punishment. Didn't Ezequiel for so long make this country a place of comparable darkness? Shouldn't she be held up as an example, so no one will be tempted to follow this path?

But it is not what I feel. I think of her in prison like a candle burning down, her muscles degenerating. Soon she's going to be too old to dance. Such a waste. As if someone said you could never read again.

You will say that I feel this because I'm in love with her. But if you were to meet her, you would see the ballerina before you saw the terrorist. We're none of us, are we, just one thing? I am a policeman, but also a father, a husband for the time being, a nursemaid to a sister who I pray will survive her illness. You are a journalist, a writer, and I don't know what else beside. To look at a person from a single angle is to deform them. Even if Yolanda is guilty of protecting Ezequiel, she is also afraid of the dark. And I cannot forget that I put her there. In prison. To be in the dark forever.”

Rejas had finished.

On the jetty the night-cart people loaded rubbish on to container boats. Black and yellow birds darted into the searchlights, and out in the river something splashed.

Astrud was buried in a cemetery overlooking Botofogo bay. Hugo had picked out the black wood coffin, lined with bright blue satin. She was buried in her nightgown, the wrinkled neck of the dead baby girl in her shawl visible between her folded arms.

Dyer looked back into the room. “Why did you tell me all this?”

17

Her luggage had been left at the foot of the staircase. Dyer walked past it, chasing her laughter down a panelled corridor until he reached the conservatory.

Vivien sat holding Hugo's hand at the breakfast table, her other hand carving gestures in the morning light. She wore black velvet trousers, green ballet slippers, a white organdie shirt with an open collar and a sailor's bow loose at the neck. Ruby links – not Hugo's, he surmised – in her French cuffs.

“They should have been far, far quicker in the first act and they rushed the music in the second.” Then: “Johnny!”

She jumped to her feet and stood on tiptoe to kiss him. “I'm telling Hugo about our performance in Pará. Although you, my dear, won't be interested in the least.”

Hugo smiled his diplomat's smile at Dyer.

“There's coffee on the sideboard,” she said. “You'll have to be nice and wait patiently until I finish my story.”

Hugo, having heard about the ballet – a modern piece, specially commissioned – was fascinated to know what the Amazon looked like. “Can you see the other side?”

She touched him tenderly where his paunch pushed at his silk shirt. “It's too ridiculous. Two weeks I was stuck inside that opera house – and I only saw it for the first time last night. My dear, it's like any other river.”

Dyer said nothing. He poured himself coffee and listened while Vivien described a party thrown by the Governor – “the girls nicknamed him Porpoise Eyes” – and the varieties of fish she had eaten.

At last Vivien clapped her hands. “Enough about me.” She looked at Dyer, hard. “Johnny, darling, I want to hear what you've been up to.”

Not until lunchtime was Dyer able to tell her.

She had booked a restaurant on the Malecón. “Just the two of us. Hugo, miserably, has another engagement. He says you were awfully sweet with him.”

“I only took him to the Costa Verde.”

“He couldn't stop talking about it. How did you find him?”

“On good form, I thought.”

“He minded losing his eyebrows. Otherwise he is quite chirpy.”

They ordered lunch. Vivien talked in her enthusiastic fashion about the orphanage, the children, and a separate dormitory she had built for the girls. “Before my eyes they'd grown into adolescents. I'd find the boys the whole time under their blankets.”

The details – cupboards, washbasins, new cooking pots – seemed fresh on her mind.

“Is that where you spent last week, Vivien?”

“My dear, why do you ask?”

“I went to Pará.”

She held him with her pale blue gaze. “It's funny, I didn't somehow picture you with the Ashaninkas.”

“I couldn't find you.”

“Pará is a big place.”

“Not as big as you would think.”

She laughed, fiddling with a cufflink.

“When I found out there wasn't a ballet,” he said, “I thought you might have gone there for other reasons.”

“Darling, would I have done that if I suspected you were going to follow me?”

“Did you know I would?”

“Let's say I had an inkling. But how else was I to lose you? I had one or two things to do which I can do better on my own. I'm sorry I couldn't help with Tristan. But please understand why not. Your instinct always to find people in power morally dubious is perfectly commendable, but it doesn't go down so smoothly with those of my friends who happen to be political – not every time.”

“You can help me now,” said Dyer.

“Johnny, I can see it in your eyes. You're teeming with wicked ideas about what your aunt is up to. But it's not what you think. Without Tristan's patronage the orphanage would collapse. And I'm not going to jeopardize those children's future for the sake of getting you a newspaper interview. Punto final.”

“I've got something important to tell Calderón,” said Dyer.

“Sweetheart, you're being childish. He's not going to see you. Not only is he not going to see you, he's not even going to let you past the gate.”

“I don't want to see him.”

“Good.”

Dyer smiled. “You used a phrase once. ‘My life has been a series of meetings and failings to meet.'”

“How very poetic.”

“You were talking of your elopement with Hugo.”

“That was forty years ago, my dear.”

“I didn't manage to meet Calderón. But because of you, I bumped into someone more interesting.”

Her eyes challenged him. “More interesting than Tristan?”

“Agustín Rejas.”

Vivien put down her menu. “It's not true! You saw Rejas? Where?”

“In Pará. While waiting for you.”

“My dear, no one's met Rejas. Do you realize how incredible that is? The press here are shrieking about how he's been out of the country, talking to the Americans. Now you tell me that he's been talking to you. What sort of creature is he? I've met his wife. She tried to sell me lipgloss. I want to hear everything.”

Dyer's summary lasted through most of lunch. Vivien listened without interrupting. At the end she ordered another bottle of wine.

“Yes, yes, pour it out,” she told the waitress in atrocious Spanish. “Why do you wait for me to taste it? If it was disgusting I'd send it back. You didn't wait to see how we liked our fish, did you?”

She toyed with the glass. After a while she said in a sober voice, “So Rejas did fall for Yolanda. I'd heard as much. It's not surprising. She was lovely.”

“Why did you never mention her?”

“I expect I forgot. So much was going on. I had rehearsals. Hugo had his stroke. All of us – the whole country – were picking up our lives after Ezequiel. You forget, the vast majority of people, like me, aren't interested in politics. I'm for a well-organized life. I don't like people dashing about with guns. I was simply relieved the lights worked again. It's only you, my dear, who goes on being fascinated by the bad news.”

“That's not true.”

“I never could share your obsession with Ezequiel. It is the one thing I won't forgive, the way he used that girl. A dance studio was the most brilliant cover. Who would have imagined that above those proper young ladies there would be this choreographer of violence?”

“Then – she was lovely? Yolanda, I mean.”

“You're upset. I can tell.”

“Everything Rejas said . . .”

“My dear, you're as bad as he is. This intense attraction, hardly consummated by a touch . . . He sounds as if he didn't know her – which is always for the best. Never get too close to the dance stage, Johnny.”

“It isn't exactly my line, as you know, but she sounded so attractive, so – beguiling.”

“She was, and she wasn't. I liked her, but then I didn't, or at least not so much.”

“Tell me about her.”

“Yolanda? I met her through Dmitri. Remember Dmitri?”

“The White Russian? Tall, bald?”

“That's him. He was a bit demode, but great fun. Anyway, he was running the Ballet Miraflores then and he insisted I saw this girl. She was fourteen, which is getting on a bit, but since it was Dmitri of course I saw her. She came for an audition. Everyone performed a little dance and she did jazz, with a bit of mime and a Paganini piece thrown in. She was glorious to look at and I was in tears at the end – Dmitri knew how to get to me, all right. She wasn't wishy-washy and she moved very well. Her mother, a small, grey-haired Miraflorina, sat in the front and watched. Well, I accepted her and she was with us – let's see – nine or ten years. At one point I thought she might be prima ballerina material. But I must have decided she was too easily influenced. Then she had this problem with her leg.”

Vivien took up her glass and sipped at it, then set it down on the table.

“She told everyone it was a dance injury. I wasn't so gullible. You don't get scars like that, my dear, not from dancing. Very suspicious, it was.

“One day she was helping at the orphanage and out it came. She'd been on a protest march at the Catholic University and had been tear-gassed. In the panic, the crowd trampled on her.”

“Wasn't it a bit dangerous, to confess that to you?”

“Not at all. She knew I'd be sympathetic. She'd spent a good many Saturdays at the orphanage, cooking, washing clothes, teaching the children to do pliés. Initially, I'd been reluctant to involve her. Most do-gooders are a menace. Yolanda, I have to say, was different. A tremendous way with the children, she had. But after a few months she stopped coming.

“I have to say, too, it was the same with her dancing. She started to find classical ballet constricting. I thought she might like something more modern, more aggressive, even – Martha Graham, say – but no, she preferred folklore. The she went to Cuba and that impressed her terribly. Came back with all sorts of ideas. Instead of getting down to rehearsing we had to have these moral discussions, my dear. Fond as I was of her, I did start to find her a teeny bit wearisome. It was like talking to a glove puppet.

“But far worse than her debates, she used to skip rehearsals. That is no good, not if you're serious. She would disappear for a month at a time, and no one ever knew where.

“Then, one day, in the middle of a class, she gave it all up – poosh! – just like that. I understood, my dear. Or thought I did. I didn't know with her if it was love, or what. But politics – no, I never imagined politics. She was too naive.

“Who knows what was going on in her mind? She'd done nothing for other people, or so she felt. And then she must have met someone who talked about the creativity of the Indians, and how the only way to help them recapture their identity was to offer them salvation through revolution. A very romantic view of Indian society, my dear. It could have happened to a lot of women like that – educated, pretty, good family, religious. You start with a humanitarian idea and before you know it, you're cutting throats.

“She soon dropped out of sight. Then two years ago I heard she had started her own school. I went to see her once or twice, for encouragement's sake; also to let her know I'd leave the door open if things didn't work out. I recommended her to a few parents. As far as I could make out she seemed content. But I had other things to worry about. To me she was a very good dancer who had stopped coming to rehearsals.”