The Dancer Upstairs (6 page)

The General, I will learn, is someone who reaches a decision quickly, reasonably intelligent, and once he has delegated a problem he has no intention of being bothered with it again. He gestures to a thick blue folder on his desk. “I want you to be our tomcat, Rejas.”

He gives me until next morning to acquaint myself with the contents.

At home I slip open the adjustable metal fastener. The files catalogue incidents in the countryside since 17 May 1980, the day of the last general election. On that night, seven months before their appearance in the capital, dogs were hung from lampposts in four villages of Nerpio province. The symbol was, apparently, a Maoist one. “In China a dead dog is symbolic of a tyrant condemned to death by his people.” Nor was it limited to the Andes. In the weeks ahead, dead dogs would hang under the street lights of Cajamarca, Villaria and Lepe, culminating in the incident I have described on the bridge over the Rimac. The capital had no more such incidents after that first spate.

The animals that came next were alive.

In February, in Cabezas Rubias, a black dog ran through the market, frothing at the mouth. A fruit-seller was chasing him away with a broom, when the dog exploded. Three people suffered appalling wounds and a meat stall was blown all over the market place.

In Judio, a donkey, galloping wildly, exploded into a thousand bloody pieces outside the police station. No one was hurt, but the blood seemed to have been etched into the stucco of the building.

In Salobral, during a meeting of the council, a hen was introduced into the Mayor's office and spattered the walls with feathered blood.

In none of these cases did anyone claim responsibility, but the dog and the donkey had evidently a placard round their necks proclaiming: “Ezequiel”.

“A delinquent!!!” declared the Mayor of Salobral. “An Argentine,” hinted the local bishop in a sermon recorded from the pulpit. “An American,” avowed someone in a bus queue, this quoted by the correspondent of El Comercio.

There were also reports from the deep country areas.

From the police post in Tonda: eyewitness accounts of a public assassination, the victim accused of stealing bulls.

From Anghay: two prostitutes assassinated on a crowded street.

From Tieno: the assassination of the Mayor in a barber's shop.

Again, the name Ezequiel associated with these atrocities sometimes scrawled on to the walls in the victim's blood, sometimes spelled out in rocks on a hillside. “Viva El Presidente Ezequiel. Viva La Revolución.”

This name repeated itself in valley after valley. Whoever this Ezequiel was, he was everywhere. At the same time he was nowhere. He had published no manifesto. He never sought to explain the actions taken in his name. He scorned the press. He would apparently speak only to the poor.

This was why the government had ignored him.

You've spent time in my country. You must understand why Ezequiel could describe the capital as “the head of the monster”. His “revolution” passed unnoticed there. His actions, if ever they reached the newspapers, were dismissed as an aberration, the work of “delinquents” and “thieves”.

But you know what the capital is like. It believes itself to be the whole country. Everything beyond its limits is the great unknown. It only starts caring when the air conditioner is cut off or there's no electricity for the freezer. So long as he operated in the highlands, Ezequiel was no threat to our metropolis. And all this while his movement was stealthily encroaching underground. A gigantic scarab growing pincers and teeth. Ignored. Until the moment, one week before General Merino summoned me, when a boy nearly the same age as Laura walked into the foyer of a hotel in Coripe and blew apart.

That frightened people.

The photograph from the Journal de Coripe is dated 10 June. It must have been taken in a photo-booth, because doubt is wandering on to the good-looking face. He holds his smile, uncertain, waiting for the flash.

In the article his profile is placed alongside a shot of the hotel's gutted lobby. Six bodies are arranged on stretchers. Paco, according to the manager, who survived the blast, was dressed in smart Sunday clothes with a brown leather satchel slung over his right shoulder. The manager remembered seeing his face, shielded by his arm, appear at the door. Local parliamentarians had convened in the foyer to discuss the building of a milk-powder factory. Catching sight of Paco's eyes bulging against the glass, the manager opened the door. The child had an urgent message for his father, the chairman. He must deliver it personally. “Over there,” said the manager, indicating the chairman already rising to his feet, puzzled by the boy running towards him, holding up a satchel, and calling out “Daddy, daddy!” The fact was, he had no son.

“Viva El Presidente Ezequiel!”

“This Ezequiel, sir, do we know anything about him?” I asked General Merino next day.

“Motherfuck all. Nothing beyond what you will find in that file.” The General had trouble grasping anything in the abstract.

“We were a small unit, never more than six in the early days. Our brief was ‘to investigate and combat the crimes perpetrated in the name of the delinquent Ezequiel'. But it is hard to establish an effective intelligence system from scratch. You need money – and we had little of that. One year we couldn't afford new boots. It takes also time.”

“You had twelve years,” Dyer pointed out.

“You sound like the General. And I tell you what I told him. Intelligence is no different to any other art. It's about not trying to push things. It's about waiting. Do you know how long it takes a sequoia seed to germinate? A decade. Of course, there's a time for impatience, when you must act quicker than you've ever acted before. Until then it's about collating and analysing information. Ezequiel, remember, had prepared his disappearing act since 1968. Once he disappeared, we would spend another twelve years tracking him down. But that's how long the Emergency lasted in Malaya.

“Success might have come sooner had we reacted earlier, with a clear policy and an image of the state as just, generous and firm. Unfortunately the state wasn't that. It was directionless and its mongrel policies fuelled Ezequiel's appeal to the country people and, of course, eventually also to people in the cities. By the time we decided to take note of him, it was too late. He had gathered momentum to such a degree that he could not be contained.

“I was glad to be entrusted with the case. My vocation, for which I had abandoned a prosperous position, had fallen short of my hopes for it. So I dedicated myself to the pursuit of Ezequiel.

“From the start, I was amazed by the fanaticism of his followers, by the degree of their subjection to his discipline. His cells proved impossible to penetrate. They relied on no outside group. They stole dynamite from the mines, their weapons from the police. We rarely made arrests because their intelligence was better than ours. The few we captured refused to speak. When someone talks it's to get off the hook, but not in the case of Ezequiel's people. It was evident they had been training since they were children. A good many of them were children. And when Ezequiel tapped a child on the shoulder, that child became a killer. To a ten-year-old boy or girl it was a game. They competed. Put a satchel of dynamite or an AK47 in the hands of a ten-year-old and annoy him – you don't want to be around.

“The finding of Ezequiel and his top echelon was my aim. My orders to my men didn't change. To defeat our enemy we must be aware of his attractions. If we wanted to capture Ezequiel, whoever he was, we must win over the same people. In no circumstances must we kill or torture a suspect. Frustrating though it was, we stood for the rule of law. Oppression must be seen to come from the other side. Intimidation wouldn't give us the answer. We might learn about the past, what had happened. But we forfeited a suspect's co-operation in the future.

“We were far more likely to achieve success by ‘turning' a suspect. We should concentrate on scrutinizing those in the community who betrayed any sympathy for Ezequiel. Through details, however tiny, that's how we'd find him. The colour of a wallpaper, the pattern of a dress, the contents of a dustbin.

“So we stacked up the evidence.

“We rifled dustbins. We watched houses. We noted what suspects wore. Slowly, patiently we would build up a picture until we could present our suspect with a stark alternative: Prosecution or Reward. Any human being when faced with two doors, one saying ‘Life', the other ‘Death' . . . well, you can predict which one they will choose.

“Which is what happened when I confronted the sacristan in Jaci.”

He was awkwardly thin, his crinkled skin hanging on his face like something borrowed. I found him in the church, removing the candle stubs from a row of spikes. It was vital that he should not view me as yet another official from the coast conversing in a language he didn't understand. This was why the General had asked if I spoke Quechua.

We sat on the front bench.

“This is you?”

“Yes.”

In the photograph, taken from the roof of the village school, he was receiving money from a masked figure. His benefactor's other hand clutched a captured police rifle.

“And this?”

The sacristan sat in a boat, two armed men in the prow.

“I can explain.” The hospital would do nothing without money. He had taken it to pay for an operation. His mother was dying. Cancer of the lymph glands.

“A judge would give you twenty years. Maybe more.”

“You don't understand.”

“I do.”

There were four more photographs, but he had seen from the start that I had the evidence to convict him. His face collapsed.

After he had agreed to help, I spoke to him with sympathy. I promised to have a word with the hospital. I tried to win him round. I don't know if I succeeded. But he said he would have the information ready – names, dropping-off points, dates and places of future actions – when I returned.

I came back in plain clothes. The village lay in a bowl surrounded by steep, treeless hills, by a river with little water. It took three days to reach by bus and another morning in the back of a lorry. The driver was buying cheap potatoes. Passing as his mate, I helped load them into sacks.

I had arranged to meet the sacristan at midday. As I walked towards the church, I heard hooves galloping over loose timbers. In the street, there was a stirring. People gathered up their produce, speaking in quick, hushed voices. Doors slammed. The horses must have crossed the bridge because the clatter faded. Then they rounded the high wall of the school.

I could tell who the riders were. They were masked, about ten of them. Teenagers, led by a woman, her hair tucked beneath a baseball cap. Her short legs, bulging in their faded jeans, kicked the horse in the direction of the church where I was headed. The ground vibrated as she galloped past. She rode up to the church door, urging the horse up on to the stone step until its head and bristling shoulders filled the doorway. Then she got down. One of the masked riders took her reins. She hoisted up her belt, from which hung a machete in a leather scabbard, and walked into the vestry where the sacristan awaited me with his information.

I fled uphill, up a narrow twisting street, to find a hiding place. The villagers had vanished behind their shutters, but I could feel their eyes. Eventually I took refuge behind an adobe wall – nothing but empty fields behind me – from where I looked down on the church. Minutes later, to the ringing of bells, five men were pushed into the square. The riders had known who to take, where to find them. The Mayor, two adulterers, the driver of the lorry which had brought me. And the sacristan. They were forced to their knees while the villagers watched. The bells fell silent and a young woman's voice burst from the loudspeaker tethered to the ankle of a stone figure above the church door. She spoke in fluent Quechua on behalf of Ezequiel. He had come to free them from their past. For Ezequiel the past was dead, as – shortly – these criminals would be. The five men symbolized a world in total disorder. The only way to change it drastically was not through reliance on natural political means, but through the agency of someone divine. Ezequiel was this divinity. He was the Eternal Fire, the Red Sun, the Puka Inti, beyond human control. In his presence it was impossible to remain neutral. He was not just a law of nature, but the fulfilment of our oldest prophecies.

“Weren't you promised clinics?”

Several heads nodded.

“Weren't you promised roads?”

“Yes.”

“Weren't you promised telephones?”

“That's right!”

“Ezequiel will bring you telephones, clinics, roads. He will strip the flesh of the reactionaries who denigrate your customs, and throw the scraps of their offal into the flames.” She held up a fist. Her voice rose to a strident pitch. “Under his banner the unbribable soul of the people will triumph over the genocidal forces of the law.”

From the wall, after adjusting her shawl, an old woman hurled a stone at the men kneeling in the dust. I had stopped at her stall earlier to drink coca tea.

“This Ezequiel, you support him?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I am no longer a cabbage,” she had said, not looking at me.

“Have you seen him ever?”

“Yes.”

“What does he look like?”

She had pointed to a configuration of stones on the hillside.

Below, the campesinos were being as easily won over as a child with a sweet. Terrifying. He was using our myths for his purposes. But even had the villagers understood, they wouldn't have cared. Today in this square he offered what for five centuries the government had denied them.