The Dancer Upstairs (9 page)

Marina, squeezing my arm, said, “What will you do now?”

“I don't know. Maybe it's time to go back to the law.”

“Sylvina will be thrilled!”

“I suppose so.” That's what I'd promised my wife. Once Ezequiel was caught, I would look for a better-paid job.

“Is Sylvina all right?”

“She's at the vet.”

“We're looking forward to her talk on Wednesday. You know we're meeting at your place?”

“She's very excited about it.”

“I can't fault Marco. He's been extremely generous, sending us copies of the novel. Which I still have to read.” The divorce, Marina wanted us to gather, had not been acrimonious.

“And Laura,” she said. “Is she happy with her new teacher?”

“Oh, yes. A great success.”

“When I heard how miserable she was with Madame Offenbach . . .”

There was a commotion behind Marina. The ballet class filed out of the door in the green wall. Beautifully turned out, erect, with splayfooted steps they scattered towards the cars.

Marina, recognizing a pampered girl in pink tights and a smart blue leotard, said: “There's Samantha! Bye for now.”

It was easy to tell my daughter apart. The other girls left talking to each other. She was by herself. Slightly heavier than the rest of them, and smaller, she was made taller by a head of hair which she pulled back in a way that gave a crushed look to her features. It was hair she could sit on, long and thick, the colour of freshly made coffee. The other girls in her class had the blonder hair of their mothers; and the lighter skin.

Laura, seeing the grey Peugeot, walked towards me at a tilt. Conscious of her short neck, she held down her shoulders. Despite the warm night, she hid her body with leggings over her leotard. Sylvina was always after her to lose weight. “If you're not careful, you'll see your dinner in your behind,” and she would prepare a special fat-free chop which Laura devoured in a second.

Continually struck by the girl's resemblance to my sister, I asked on one occasion, “What's wrong with her? She looks all right to me.”

Sylvina flicked the white hands which once fascinated me. “Certainly she looks all right. Now.”

My wife was the force behind the decision that Laura should take up ballet. This was what her friends did with their children. Through Laura, Sylvina could live out the dreams she had harboured for her younger self. She wanted Laura to be pretty, to walk nicely with ribbons in her hair, to be up there on stage as a Cinderella fairy. In other words, she wanted Laura to put on a tutu and forget where she came from.

The matter was never brought up; it lay unexploded between us. I had once overheard Sylvina speaking to Marina on the telephone. I wouldn't have listened had she not been talking in such an apologetic tone. “Samantha's so lucky with her looks. Laura's very dark, you see.”

Quite why this should have cropped up then, I don't know. It had never been an issue before. When I met my wife – at university in the late Sixties – it was a time of “indigenism”, the country enjoying one of its spasmodic celebrations of self-discovery. For Sylvina it was an assertion of identity to be seen in fashionable company, white hand in brown, and I was not immune, either. Now, twelve years on, she believed learning classical ballet might go some way to removing the jungle from Laura's face.

But you only had to look at Laura to understand she wasn't built for classical ballet. It agonized me to watch her struggling, bewildered, before the mirror we had installed in the hall. I could see the pain she inflicted on herself, trying to make her joints go in a way they were not meant to; doing things which did not come naturally to her body.

When I mentioned this to Sylvina, she said, “To be a good ballerina, you have to deform yourself.”

I said nothing, but it made me angry. Laura had her own poise, her own beauty. She required nothing more.

However this was not the matter I needed to discuss with her teacher.

I asked Laura to sit in the car.

My knock resounded in the street. Over the wall, I heard a sliding door being opened, footsteps, the drawing of a bolt.

She was dressed in black: black, round-necked leotard with long sleeves, a gauzy black ankle-length skirt over it, black ballet slippers.

“Yolanda? I'm Laura's father.”

She pointed to her smiling mouth which was full. She put a hand to her throat as if this would make her swallow quicker.

“There. Sorry.” She held up a slice of banna cake on a paper plate. “I've just made it. Want some?”

“No thanks.”

“But Laura's left. Haven't you seen her?”

“She's in the car.”

“Do you want to bring her in?”

“I'd rather not. It's about your letter.”

“Oh. Yes,” she said, as if she had forgotten. It's an embarrassing thing, to tell someone their cheque has bounced.

She unfastened the door chain. Beneath the streetlight her face gleamed pale, still wet from where she had towelled off her make-up. Wide brown eyes set on high cheekbones, a clear skin, fine dark hair. She looked frank, honest, conscientious – the kind of person you might tell everything to on first meeting.

“Please. Come through.”

I followed her across the patio. We entered the studio through a glass door and she slid it shut after me.

The room smelled of cigarettes, sweat, and the musky scent of rosin. A wooden barre, slung with pink tights and tracksuit tops, ran around two mirrored walls. Laid out on the shiny parquet floor were inflatable grey mats for breathing exercises and, against the near wall, a cassette-player, a tin box scattered about with white powder, and a leather trunk. One door, half open, covered in photographs of dancers, led into a kitchen. Another, also ajar, into a shower room. The mirrors were steamed over.

She put on a tape, Tchaikovsky, quite loud, as if that was what I would expect – and raised her arms in an apologetic spread at the tatty state of her studio. “So. This is it.”

Beneath the strip-lighting, there was something original and unfeigned about her. Also a graveness, as if she had been marked by a bad love affair.

“Laura warned you? Once inside you have to do everything I say.”

Before I could answer, she raised one hand above her head and slid her fingers down an invisible rope to her neck. Speaking in a strict Germanic accent, she said, “The best position for a dancer is the one when you're hanged, because it's very well placed. The hips are over the feet. The shoulders are over the hips. The head is midway. Ja, it's a wonderful position.” The imitation was good. She made me want to laugh.

“Madame Offenbach?”

“Not a success, I gather?”

“No.”

I could see Yolanda wanted to say, “I hope Laura's happier here,” but she held the words back, her lips skewed sideways, her front teeth showing at the corner of her mouth.

She scooped something from the floor. “They never pick up their plasters!”

She threw it into the rosin box “Coffee? Or would you like lemonade, if they've left any?” She watched me, biting a nail.

“Laura's waiting. I'd better not.”

To Laura, not Sylvina, she had entrusted her simple note.

I was nervous, which made her nervous. “Here's the money I owe. I'm sorry about the cheque.”

With a smile all neat and laced she said, “We hadn't met, but I thought it was better to tell you than Señora Rejas.”

“My employers are two months in arrears with their salaries.”

She accepted the money and, without counting it, folded it on to the plate beside the remains of her cake. “That's terrible. Already I've had to let three girls go because they couldn't afford it. I've regretted it ever since. They came every day from Las Flores. They were so excited, the parents. They watched their daughters in their beautiful dresses and they dreamed. I should never have let them go. They were three lovely dancers, I could tell as soon as I saw them.”

“Can you tell, that quickly?”

She nodded. “Some girls, you only have to see them standing still to know they're dancers. Others might be good at barre work, but when you bring them into the centre they're terrible.”

“And Laura?” I risked.

“Your girl, she's a spot of sunshine. That's a real child you have. Not a little adult in lipstick.” And she imitated with exaggerated eyes someone I knew at once to be Marina.

At my laughter, she raised her hand. “No, I mustn't be so disparaging. They're probably your friends. It's just that in six months I have attracted the worst sort of ballet mother.”

I was still smiling. Her mocking of Marina's values struck a chord. She was not the dupe of anyone's wealth. But she hadn't answered me.

“It's hard for a parent to ask this. Should we encourage Laura?”

Her face remained serious. “How much do you know about ballet?”

“Not much.” Through Sylvina I had met a few dancers. They seemed to me dim, uneducated and self-absorbed.

“Laura has nice ideas,” she said, “but she should take risks. I love people to take risks. Very often it works.”

“She wants to join the Metropolitan.”

“You've put her down for classical classes, which is fine,” she said carefully. “You can't be an engineer without studying mathematics. If you've been classically trained you can do things in modern dance no modern dancer can do. But she might find her natural aptitude is for the kind of contemporary dance I'm involved with. It can't hurt to try.”

Politely, conscious of the time and of Laura waiting in the car, I said, “Do you still dance?” I knew nothing about her. We had found the school through Marina. Keen for Samantha to maintain the standards of Miami, she had recommended the teacher in Calle Diderot as a first-rate communicator. But I had no idea whether the teacher performed.

“I did and then I didn't and now I do again. As of this moment I'm meant to be preparing a ballet with a small group at the Teatro Americano, but it's getting desperate. I can't find a subject.” She tucked her hands behind her back. “But you're not here to discuss my problems. Is there anything else about Laura?”

In fact, there was. I was worried my daughter was the one the pretty girls laughed at. I knew they called her Cucumber Body after a livid green all-over which Sylvina had bought in a sale. Once through the kitchen door I had heard Laura, in tears, telling Sylvina, “Samantha says my feet are claws around a branch and I look like a parrot in a storm.”

But if Laura had been teased, she wouldn't want me to know. And no parent cares to enquire too closely into the particulars of their children's suffering. So I said, “I'm worried about her feet.”

“Her feet?”

“Is it right for Laura's feet to bleed?”

“Can I ask you something? Laura wants to join the Metropolitan, but how serious is she – I mean, about wanting to be a dancer?”

I pictured my daughter night after night before the hallway mirror, beating her new shoes with Sylvina's toffee hammer to make them quieter, soaking her feet in salt water, spreading mustard on her blisters, inserting foam between the toes, raising one leg then the other, her legs taut as triggers, her breasts shuddering as if she was going to be sick, her body crying out with fatigue.

“She is serious.”

“Then she'll have to go through this hell. If you want to be a dancer you can't have a normal life. You don't have boyfriends. You're not really a woman in most people's eyes. There's a sense in which you have to dance yourself to death. You're aiming for a perfection which your body isn't meant to give you. The pain is intense. Intense. You dance with pain. But the feet, you don't have to worry about them.”

She hiked up her skirt, easing off her ballet shoes. In a graceful movement she lifted her leg until her bare foot rested in the air, perfectly still, not far from my face.

“See those corns? When they're well set in she'll be able to dance on them. They'll be deformed, but her feet won't bleed anymore.”

Yolanda's foot, it was more a sea-creature's flipper. Ugly, discoloured, with red calluses, the nails ridged into shapeless chips, the skin on the toes sharpened into a permanent crease. It reminded me of the turtle with a bitten shell I'd seen on the beach at Paracas.

I averted my eyes. “Does she have to starve, too?”

“I don't understand.” She lowered her leg.

I told her about the diet Sylvina insisted upon.

“Laura's not on a diet? You must take her off it. You'll never get a classical figure by dieting. She's growing. She needs energy. Oh, these Western ideas of beauty make me sick. Little girls' looks are just different. She's beautiful as she is.”

I thought so.

“Of course she is! She should treasure what she has, make the most of it. That's what'll make her a dancer. Your daughter's much richer, much lovelier than all those Miami babes with chocolate-chip noses and frosted hair. Look at her. She has all of our country in her face.”

I had never heard anyone talk like this. Those elements which Sylvina found distasteful in our daughter were mine as well. By supporting Laura, her teacher had given me, my origins, validity.

“At the Metropolitan I got into the most awful fights with the teachers. Be honest, look at us, I'd say. Most of us, we're brown-skinned and stocky. Classical ballet was invented by the Europeans, and is danced with different bodies in mind, different sensibilities. We have Andean bodies, Andean minds. How can we respond to what is going on around us if we're dressed like this and all the steps are spoken in French. We can't!”