The Dancer Upstairs (5 page)

“He's sitting on an empty beer crate.”

Dyer looked closer. “Really? How can you be sure?”

“I took the photograph.”

4

I met Ezequiel only twice. The first time I was thirty-one. I was coming to the end of my stint in Sierra de Pruna, a small town north of Villoria. Sylvina hated it, called it the Styx. “I didn't marry you for this,” she said. But after the election we would be moving to the capital. I'd been promoted to a unit protecting foreign diplomats. Soon Sylvina would be among friends. Laura would be able to play with their daughters.

This was the first democratic election since the coup. Twelve years ago now. We'd forgotten what to do, although we anticipated trouble. My job was to set up road blocks outside the villages and check documents. Very tedious work, like sentry duty at the tomb of the Unknown Soldier: six months of vigilance in case someone blew out the flame! It did fail once, during a gas workers' strike; I had to use our Primus stove. Road-block duty was like that. After three years in Sierra de Pruna, I'd reached a point where I wasn't doing my job well. The routine was wearing me out. Just as much as Sylvina, I looked forward to a new start under a government elected by the people.

Hardly any traffic passed the police post on that morning. Then at eleven-thirty I stopped a red Ford pick-up heading towards town. In the front, staring intently at the hot bonnet where I'd rested my hand, was the man in that photograph; next to him, bolt upright, both hands gripping the wheel, sat a long-nosed mestiza of about twenty. Three Indians were standing in the back, their hair snagged with bark and grass. Probably they had slept outside.

“Documents,” I say.

They produced identity cards, all except the man in the passenger seat, who patted his pockets as if his card was there somewhere.

I was about to raise the barrier when my eyes ranged over the pick-up and I see, lying in an odd sort of heap, a large jute sack. An animal's tail, the black and white fur clotted with blood, poked from the sack's mouth.

The girl, slender, wearing a loose-fitting skirt, gets out of the car. “We ran it over.”

She leaned over the back. “It came from nowhere on to the road.”

I peeled back the sack to the tail's puckered pink base.

“A dalmatian, it looks like,” she said.

Who is the owner? Why did you pick it up? What are you going to do with a dead dog? But I didn't ask these questions. I didn't even bother to check the bumper for dents.

“We're going to a funeral.” She pushed back her hair and the sun lit up a pulse on her temple. “My uncle – he's being buried this afternoon.”

“Where?”

“Pelas.” Twenty miles east. “He was a machine operator. All his life he sits on the same chair, then he drops dead.” She clicked her long fingers, the sound cracking in the dry air.

I walked round to the passenger window. “Found it?”

The man inside shook his head. It was a scalding day, but he has tucked in at his throat a brown alpaca scarf. He is wearing a red shirt, collar up.

“Got to be somewhere.” The girl had followed me. Her face in the side mirror looked anxious. “Come on, you must have it.”

“Guess I left it at home,” he muttered. He picked a packet of cigarettes off the dashboard, tapped one out, lit it. Behind his ears on his neck he had a skin rash.

“Where do you fit in?” I asked.

“He's family,” said the girl.

I asked Sergeant Pisac to cover me and opened the door. “I'll need to take your details.”

I typed out the notes in the small office, the man sitting opposite; a basic description to pin to a photograph.

“Where were you born?”

“Galiteo.”

“On the Marañon?”

“Yes.”

“Then you know La Posta?”

He nodded.

“That's where I come from,” I said.

“Really?” He lit another cigarette, a Winston, and blew out two smooth trails of smoke.

That's it. That's all there is. You cannot imagine the number of times I raked over that scene. The whole conversation, according to my notes, lasted seventeen minutes. From what he said it would have been impossible to believe this man was a philosopher who, twelve and half hours later, would initiate a world revolution.

Hindsight is like using powerful binoculars. I should have detained him. I should have waited, sent the woman back for his documents. I should have asked a lot more questions. But next day I was leaving Sierra de Pruna. I was not going to pay over-much attention to mislaid identity papers. And I was sentimental. We came from neighbouring valleys, the man in the alpaca scarf and I, and he was going to a funeral.

At five minutes to twelve I escorted Melquiades Duran into the back yard, sat him on a crate, and took his photograph using a police-issue Nikon on a tripod.

Probably he moved because the contours of his chin are blurred. See? He's not well lit, either. At the lab, they thought the camera might have had a light leak. But that shaft of light is there because the sun is coming up over the roof. I don't have much experience with a camera. He looks like a figure from a medieval painting, don't you think?

At twelve twenty-four we came back inside the police post where the woman driver and the three Indian men waited under guard. I handed her the keys.

“Go to your funeral.”

They went out. The engine didn't start immediately. The three Indians looked at me with accusing faces. Beneath them the pick-up rocked back and forth.

“Wait. Give it a rest,” I called. She had flooded the ignition.

She waited, then brushed back a strand of hair and turned the key, eager to be on her way. This time it fired.

I leaned against the barrier, watching the truck pull away. I expected the woman to wave, but she didn't. The man I had photographed stared at me from his wing-mirror. The pick-up turned the corner, the sun flashed on the roof and they faded into a trumpet of dust.

The next time I met Ezequiel I found him alive, on a sofa, in an upstairs room in the capital. He had altered beyond recognition, only his scarf the same. But that was thirty thousand deaths, two thousand car bombs, and twelve years later.

I now know that when I stopped him at the road block Ezequiel was driving with his wife and his three bodyguards to a safe house in Sierra de Pruna. If I had dismantled the truck, I would have found explosives stolen from a tungsten mine concealed beneath the seats. I should have realized that there was something odd about a dog being in a sack, about the dog being in the truck at all.

That night Ezequiel would address a group of comrades packed into a store room behind Calle Junin. The meeting was tense. To fortify their spirits, he read aloud passages from Mao, Kant, Marx and The Tempest, including the line: “No tongue: all eyes; be silent.” At one minute after midnight, speaking in a low, precise voice, occasionally sipping from a glass of mineral water, he called for the armed struggle to begin. One by one he embraced his audience, kissing each person on both cheeks. He would not see them again until the revolution succeeded. After he walked through that door he would be going underground, with another identity.

At twenty minutes past midnight, having been told that the road was clear, he left.

For me, though, the story of Ezequiel really begins seven months later, with another dead dog.

I am standing on a bridge in the capital, staring up at a street light. It is two o'clock in the morning of the twenty-seventh of December. Suspended in the dark, the orange capsule of the lamp is surrounded by a yellow haze. But there's something wrong. A black weight dangles beneath the bright artificial light. It has torn ears and a wedge-shaped mess across its neck.

I will never find a better allegory of the horror prepared for us.

“Why have they cut his throat?” whispers Sucre.

“So the soul can't escape through the mouth.”

In my village, when you died, your dog was hanged from a tree. Dogs, my mother instructed us, were good at crossing rivers in the underworld. But we didn't slit their throats.

“Christ,” says Sucre, who is going to be a policeman only until he inherits his father's fruit orchards.

Above me the body twists in the breeze. The animal has been hanged by the tail. His front legs, bound with telegraph wire, stretch down to below his head. As he revolves, he resembles one of the brass reindeers I assembled above our Christmas candles, except he isn't tinkling. A drop splashes my face.

“He's got something in his mouth,” says Sucre.

I step back. The jaws have been forced open, something holding them apart in a frozen pant. A placard hangs down from the legs.

Twice I jump up, but the dog is too high. My attempts to pull him down disturb the flies at his eyes. I drive the car on to the kerb and stand on the roof to cut the wire. The body drops to the ground, expelling a gasp of air. In the orange light I read the words, “Deng Xiaoping”.

I untie the placard and hand it to Sucre. Puzzled, he reads aloud the message written below. “Your fascist leadership has betrayed our world revolution.”

He frowns. “Who's President Ezequiel?”

But I am concentrating on the dog. From the mouth pokes a narrow truncheon of dynamite. My first thought is for the traffic below.

The sun would rise on dogs hanging from street-lamps in Belgrano, Las Flores, and Lurigancho. Four more mutilated animals were found along the highway to the airport and another outside the Catholic University. People gathering beneath them experienced the same bafflement. No one had any idea who or what Ezequiel was. Nor his world revolution.

In the morning I spoke to the Chinese Embassy. Despite the references to Deng Xiaoping, no threats had been received. After a fortnight without more such incidents, I put the events of that evening from my mind.

Sylvina was relieved to be back in the capital. I had not seen her so happy since the early months of our marriage.

For about a year we rented the flat of her cousin Marco, who had moved with his wife to Miami. Eventually we found a modest basement apartment in Miraflores, three blocks north of Parque Colón. It wasn't as nice as Marco's flat, or the flat we had lived in six years previously, when I worked as a lawyer; and I couldn't easily afford the lease. But her mother's death had left Sylvina with a modest inheritance. How we would cope when this source exhausted itself, neither of us found the courage to contemplate. Meanwhile the inheritance paid for a cleaning lady and the subscription to the tennis club in San Isidro where Sylvina played four afternoons a week.

Our daughter Laura was growing up to look like my sister: large brown eyes, a strong body and masses of black hair which Sylvina insisted on braiding into a plait. Already Sylvina was talking about ballet lessons.

We had lived a year in the new apartment when I was promoted to assistant head of the Diplomatic Protection Unit. Despite that, Sylvina remained convinced that I was crazy to stay in the force. Who could imagine becoming a policeman? They were all either psychologically disturbed or they'd had run-ins with the law. “And all of them are poor.” But I worked regular hours, and it was a quiet time in our marriage and in the capital.

One morning in November I am summoned to an office on the third floor of a building in Via Expreso.

I reported here for duty on my return to the capital, but have had little occasion to come here since. It is a cheerless place, and when the wind blows off the sea, as it does this morning, the corridors smell of car fumes and maize hobs and urine. Because the place was always known as one of the ugliest office buildings in the city, money has been spent to brighten up the exterior with a particularly unhappy green wash which makes it even more charmless. The colour does not sit well with the barbed-wire emplacements at the entrance or the concrete blocks which prevent people from parking.

General Merino is a large-shouldered man with the trace of a moustache and small shining eyes pouched into a grey face. He wears a black turtleneck shirt, a half-sheepskin jacket with belt-flaps and looks at me from one side of his face, then the other, like a chicken. There is no tic at the corner of his eyes, as there is to be later. It is a benevolent look.

Merino is our most distinguished policeman. As a cadet in the Sixties he helped crush Fuenie's revolt and he protects his service with a similar ferocity. He has a reputation for hating the army and is known to be honest, brave and overworked. His joy in life is fishing. A rod is propped against the map on the wall behind his desk.

“You speak Quechua, right?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You know the north well?”

“Yes, sir.”

There is a glass bowl with oranges on his desk.

“Want one?”

“No thank you, sir.”

He takes an orange and peels it. “To corner a tomcat, Colonel Rejas – I call you Colonel, you understand, because I am promoting you – what do you do? You don't send two alsatians up an alley. They'll play havoc with the garbage cans and the cat just leaps up the tree. No. You send in someone who knows the area, the other's way of thinking, what he smells like. You send in another tomcat.”