The Dancer Upstairs (7 page)

A murmur fluttered through the crowd. In the sun, something metal flashed. There was a shout and one of the masked riders jabbed a rifle into the sacristan's back.

“Forward!”

The man's head rested, bowed and shaking, on his clasped hands. The force of the blow had knocked his cap to the ground.

“Go forward!”

Another blow on his shoulders. I heard him whimpering. He babbled about his sick mother, how she needed medicine. My fingers scratched the earth. He was about to be punished because of me. If I had been there, I would have been seized too. Who had betrayed him? Where was the information he had prepared for me?

He threw back his head. In a hoarse summons to the surrounding bowl he shouted: “Rejas!”

My name ricochetted from hill to hill.

“Forward, traitor!”

One knee tested the ground an inch ahead. Then the other. In minuscule shuffles he advanced towards the masked figure with the machete.

She tested the blade with her thumb.

“Rejas!” And madly his eyes followed the echoes, as if they would delve me into the open.

“Viva El Presidente Ezequiel!”

I tell you, I still wake up and it's his call I'm hearing. Rejas, Rejas, REJAS.

In this fashion Ezequiel persuaded the people to consider him divine. As a man of flesh and blood, he had ceased to exist. He had dismembered and scattered his body, and now thrived like a monstrous Host in the heart of anyone invoking his name. One day he was in Jaci, his name daubed in dripping letters on the church wall. On the same day he was six hundred miles east, robbing the Banco Weise. If ever we approached him, the old coca lady had warned, he would transform himself into a canopy of feathers and lift into the sky. “He can never be caught.”

But Ezequiel was no condor or circle of stones. He existed, all right. Who he was and what he looked like – small, large, one-legged, wall-eyed – we had not the least idea. But someone who condoned public beheading; well, we didn't think to look for a man of culture. We had marked him as a jungle-tested leader in the mould of Guevara or Castro, or those revolutionaries whom the General had fought in the Sixties. Which is why it was such an extraordinary shock when we discovered Ezequiel's true background.

Six months after the execution at Jaci, Sucre led into the office a senior lecturer in philosophy from the Catholic University.

“He says he knows who Ezequiel is.”

The philosopher – stooped, bloodshot eyes, white moustache – was frightened. A colleague had overheard his boast and mentioned it to another colleague, who at some point had told Sucre's cousin, a second-year student in the same faculty.

Contemptuously, Sucre piloted him to a chair. “He now denies it.”

“Who were you talking about?”

“It doesn't matter. It was a quarrel, a long time ago.”

He wore a maroon corduroy jacket buttoned up, which he undid to reveal a brown cardigan, also unbuttoned, covered in biscuit crumbs. His skin was drink-ruined, and he had the deflated cheeks of a boaster.

“Tell me about this quarrel.”

It was nothing serious. Just an academic squabble.

“About Ezequiel?”

“No, with Ezequiel.”

“You're telling me Ezequiel was an academic at your university?”

In the corner Sucre chewed air.

“He was a philosopher of no small distinction.” Tetchily he drew the wings of his cardigan over his shirt. “Only he didn't answer to Ezequiel. His name was Edgardo Rodriguez Vilas.”

And slowly it came out.

It had happened in Villoria, in the mid-Sixties. Our informant – let us call him Pascual – had been recruited to the newly opened University of Santa Eufemia. He had been happy in his position, until the appointment of this man Vilas to the same faculty.

Vilas was a Maoist, Pascual a Marxist. It was the time of the Sino-Soviet split. They'd argued.

“I was pro-Castro. Vilas thought Castro was a chorus girl.”

One day Pascual complained to the Dean. Said he didn't approve of what Vilas was doing. A sinister, anti-humanist influence. So fixed in his political ideal all things became instrumental to it.

Somehow his complaint reached the ears of Vilas. In charge of personnel, he removed Pascual from the faculty board.

There was an added complication. One student over whom Vilas had exerted his influence was Pascual's girl. Vilas had gone off with her.

“You mean an affair?”

“To my knowledge he did not actually have a physical relationship with her,” he said coldly.

“Then why did she leave you?”

“I understand she found his absolutism attractive. Such people are always hungry for imperatives when those imperatives coincide with their own.”

“Which were?”

“Like a lot of types unable to relate to others, he could excite in them a romantic possibility of violent revolution.”

“Which you couldn't?”

He buttoned up his cardigan. “I tend to see the other side of the coin.”

“And your colleague Vilas, he was capable of violence?”

“Possibly. He was always talking world revolution. But it was the Sixties. Weren't you?”

“Where is he now?”

“Look, he's probably still in Villaria.”

“Describe him.”

“This was twenty years ago.”

“Concentrate.”

“Average height, glasses, black hair, thin.”

“Do you have photos?” My attention had waned. At that time a lot of radical professors, because of the expansion of the universities, woke up in positions they didn't have the intelligence to maintain. Suddenly they had power. They possessed the truth. So they used revolutionary ideology to shatter the system. Until it threatened their pension plans.

“He would never be photographed,” Pascual was saying.

“Really? Why not?”

“Hated it. Which we found odd because he wasn't shy. If you ask me it was vanity. He had this skin complaint.”

My interest quickened. “Get the albums, Sucre.”

There were six of them. “Take a look.”

The philosopher turned the laminated pages. On one side we had stuck pictures of Ezequiel's victims; opposite, the faces of those so far interrogated.

“I didn't realize . . .”

“No one here does.”

He leafed through the album. Page after page of mutilation.

“He was responsible for this?” He stared at the sacristan's corpse. He was frightened. He remembered something. Something was coming back to him.

He reached the end. “No, not there.”

“Try an earlier one.”

With relief he closed the second book. “Nothing.”

“Another.”

We were nearly done. His cardigan buttoned up, he wanted to go.

“Tell me. You're a man who understands history,” I said. “If you want to start a revolution, why not issue a manifesto? Why not show the people who you are, what you're doing?”

He leaned back, grateful to explain. “That's perfectly understandable. Socrates wrote nothing down. Neither did Jesus. The problem with text is that it assumes its own reality. It cannot answer, and it cannot explain.”

“So if you wanted to be effective, you'd leave no trace?”

“That's right.”

I opened another album, the earliest. “Last one.”

Impatiently he turned the pages. Half way into the album he dislodged a photograph. I retrieved the print from the floor and inserted it back under the plastic sheet. Pascual lifted the next page, and even though he had not been concentrating, I saw the hairline hesitation. His hand came up, scratched the side of his nose. Something forced him to hurry on, cover up the image which had made his eyes contract.

“Stop!” I pressed my hand down on the album, turned the page back.

“Is that him?”

The philosopher's cheeks sagged. His eyes flicked wildly over the face. I could only see it upside-down. I wrenched the album from him. He had been trapped by a photograph of a man wearing a brown alpaca scarf, taken on a scalding morning near Sierra de Pruna. Taken by me.

A curious and not very comfortable feeling comes over me when I look at prints of my wedding or of Laura's christening: as soon as I see them, my memory of the occasion is subverted. In a vital way what they celebrate has ceased to exist for me.

So it was with that photograph of Ezequiel. Each time I looked at it I remembered less. The image, already distant, became encrusted with a further memory of my failure to remember anything more. The live face was, if you like, lost, bullied out by subsequent events.

At the office there was jubilation. At last we knew who he was and what he looked like. Professor Edgardo Vilas was the labourer Melquiades Artemio Duran who was the Maoist revolutionary leader Ezequiel. The General hoped the sight of him might prompt additional memories, as if, by remembering one tiny detail extra, all would be solved.

“Think hard, Tomcat. Think back. There must be something other than his Yankee cigarettes and the rash on his neck.”

But there wasn't. Lifeless, unreal, boiled in time, he had become a non-face. He wasn't a man any more. Not someone you could see in a café drinking tea and say “Yes!” He had become an icon. When I looked into those narrow black eyes all I saw was a stiff tail sticking out of a sack.

Pascual couldn't help. Two days later, when he was required to come back in and verify the photograph before General Merino, the faculty informed me that he had taken unexpected leave. He never did come back.

It does seem incredible in the age of the camera that someone can avoid having their picture taken for thirty-four years. From outer space it is possible to frame the scowl of a man perching on a beer crate in a country yard, yet for all this time what printed image did we have of Ezequiel? Apart from that black-and-white print, not one. Think of it: no high school portrait, no family picnic, no face gazing from among a group of friends. That this distinction should have been achieved by the holder of a prominent chair at Santa Eufemia University is remarkable.

With the same reverence for detail that characterized his dissertation on the Kantian theory of space, he had excised from the record all trace of his physical presence. When I inspected his dissertation, his appointment to the professorship, his library card, I found in each case the same rough, near transparent patch, lighter in colour than the surrounding page, where a photograph had been torn out or removed with a knife.

It is not the first time an intense search has yielded nothing. At the Police Academy we were lectured on the American D. B. Cooper, who was the first person to hijack an aircraft. Our tutor credited Cooper with being the fore-runner of modern terrorism. Decades later, he may be still at large, walking cheerfully down some main street in Mississippi, popping his pink gum at the sky. For three hours, the length of the flight, he existed as D. B. Cooper, after which no one saw him again. He parachuted out of history, and the last image anyone had of him was the light on his silk chute drifting towards the pines.

Once he had climbed back into his pick-up, that's how it was with Ezequiel.

I won't go into detail about the months and years which followed. The people who had met him, the rooms he had lived in, the shop where he had bought his mineral water – all these I traced until the moment of his disappearance. But I was trying to carve a statue out of shadows. I might have been excavating one of those burial mounds at Paracas. To the General my exhibits appeared indistinguishable from the sand.

It proved impossible to conjure Ezequiel from such remnants. He was not a man to whom stories attached themselves. His character, assembled from hundreds of interviews, was a hollow, papier maché construction. The sentences cancelled each other out. You heard only the echoes.

“He wouldn't hurt a fly.” Classmate, San Agustin College, Galiteo.

“He said that violent revolution was the only way to seize power and transform the world.” Classmate.

“He had no girlfriends.” Classmate.

“Women pushed and shoved to be near him.” Pupil, Santa Eufemia.

“His lectures were repetitive. He was not a particularly interesting phenomenon.” Fellow teacher.

“He was handing down the Commandments.” Pupil.

“He only bought mineral water.” Shopkeeper, Lepe.

“I saw him smile once. It was in the street and he was drunk.” Fellow university student, Lepe.

“He said that flowers made him sneeze.” Secretary at Faculty of Philosophy, Santa Eufemia.

“Every day for lunch he ordered the same dish: a flavoured yogurt.” Cashier at university canteen, Lepe.

“He asked me to turn down my music.” Neighbour, Santa Eufemia.

“In the middle of a conversation he would tell you Albanian olive oil was the best in the world.” Visiting Peace Corps lecturer.

“He never took off his jacket. He always wore a scarf.” Pupils, various.

Read cold on the page, these statements were inert or comical. One element united them. In each case I heard the hush in the speaker's voice, the kind of hush people use when they should not be speaking.

Where was he?

Possibly he was not in the country at all. He could easily, without risk to himself, have directed his operations from some hotel in, say, Paris. But I didn't think so. My instinct told me he remained locked into this soil, driven into it with the force of an axe, identified with his revolution so as to be indivisible from it.

He really was a charismatic leader, you see. This was a man in command, who was not commanded. An unquivering spirit seemed to lie at the centre of him, stilled into place by a terrible ambition. He didn't have to participate himself. I doubt he ever fired a gun. But by the act of being there, of showing his face, he could infuse a terrible energy into his followers.