The Dancer Upstairs (20 page)

I held my ground. “And it's vital I go to La Posta, sir.”

“Why?” He stood up and looked uncertainly at his map.

“Ezequiel has been trying to contact a friend of mine.”

“So?”

“This friend may be involved.”

It had burst upon me in Leticia's kitchen. All the time I had been searching for Ezequiel I had been looking in the wrong place.

10

On the morning I left for La Posta, Laura sidled into the bedroom. She was miserable. Children hold adults to their promises.

“Look.” I watched her through the camera. “I'll take masses of photos for you.”

Her face hardened.

“I'll bring you a flute – like the one I used to play. I promise.”

She said nothing.

“The military have declared it an emergency zone, Laura.”

To prove that she was the child I took her for, she locked herself in her room and sang aloud to the cat.

Sylvina drove me to the airport. An unusual peace had settled on her, and on the city we passed through. If you live with violence you become acclimatized to it. After a car bomb, people will jog round the dead bodies. They will go to their tennis courts. One of Sylvina's cousins, to circumvent the curfew, had bought a second-hand ambulance to transport his friends to parties. There is a routine even to menace.

As we drove past the Inca Market, Sylvina said, “Agustín, I have a way we can make money.”

She had been discussing our problems with Marco. She knew I'd be cross, which is why she waited until this moment to talk about it. The fact was, Marco had come up with a fail-safe plan for us to become millionaires. In the vague terms in which I grasped it, Marco's solution – upon which, shortly, all her hopes would fix – required Sylvina to sell certain beauty products to her friends and induce them to do likewise while taking a percentage.

“If you persuade people to work for you, you get ten per cent of everything they sell, so if they sell fifty dollars I receive five dollars, and if they in turn find two people to work for them, eventually I'll be at the top of the pyramid and it can't fail.” A lavender Cadillac seemed to be involved at some point, because she brought up that again after the engine stalled at the security checkpoint.

“Marco's obsessed with it. Just in his own street two women have made millions.”

We kissed through the car window. “You know what communications are like in the sierra,” I said. “But I'll try to ring.”

“Anyway, Marco's sending me a sample kit.”

I flew in a military transport to Cajamarca, from where I caught a lift with a lorry heading north. The driver was a round, thick-set man with an overhanging forehead and huge, offended eyes. We left for the mountains that night, splashing out through the mud, our headlamps shedding a watery dazzle in the pelting rain.

The truck had been climbing for three hours when Ezequiel struck. We were approaching a high pass, and the driver was telling me about his family, killed by the police. I sat, appalled, watching a bank of mist nudge into the sweep of our lights.

He said he knew the policeman who had killed them, knew his name and nickname, knew where he lived. Every night since his wife and daughters had been found in a sheep field, strangled with khaki webbing, he had driven backwards and forwards past the policeman's house, fifty yards one way, then reverse and fifty yards the other way. Up, down. Up, down, Up, down. Until daylight. He lifted a plump hand from the wheel and pointed a finger at my temple.

“Pow!” he whispered.

“Watch out!” The headlight picked out a barricade of rocks in the mud.

He braked hard and the truck slithered towards the hillside, shuddering to a stop against a bank of earth. Soon another vehicle pulled up behind us, and another, until the lights of six cars illuminated the bend.

He slapped the flat of his hands against the steering wheel. “What the fucking hell is this about?”

It was ten o'clock. The mist was rolling in.

And then four figures solidified in the haze, stepping between the rocks, waving powerful flashlights, advancing through the rain.

The driver leaned from his window and yelled: “Let us pass.”

“Shut your face.” It was a young boy, speaking through a woollen mask. His gloved hands gripped what, in that light appeared to be a gun, but might have been a stick. He wasn't nervous.

“Turn out your lights and wait in the cab.” There was the flop of feet and he continued down the line of cars, flanked by his three companions.

The driver turned the lorry's lights off and slumped back in his seat.

I said quietly, “If they order us out, we'll be shot.” I carried no weapon, but concealed in my right shoe was a military pass and my police identity card. Should they discover these, there would be no mercy. Not for me, not for the driver, either.

A shadow, then a tap on the window. A light beamed in my face. The door opened and a moment later my first gasp of the chill mountain air froze my lungs.

“Your money. Quickly.” The light remained in our eyes while we groped for our wallets. A hand seized them, then the torch was flashed at my feet.

“That bag. Pass it here.”

The bag was unzipped, a hand in a long, damp orange love thrust inside. It emerged with my old Leica: one of the few nice things my father left me. On the film were pictures of Laura and Sylvina at Paracas: standing in the waves, offering crisps to a sea-lion, pointing at a turtle on the sand. I would later regret the theft of those happy images even more than I did now.

I could easily afford to contribute to the revolution, snarled the voice. This instrument was worth more than he earned in a year.

He jumped to the ground and ran off, leaving me to shut the door. Beside me the driver expelled his breath. There's something frightening about a twelve-year-old with a gun. Then, suddenly agitated, he twisted in his seat. “Hey,” he whispered, “what's that?” The truck squealed on its chassis and we could hear the heavy boxes sliding in the back.

They were unloading his vegetables. With the hand that had been a pistol he covered his eyes and sobbed.

Five minutes later the boys came by again, not looking at us. They reached the rocks and switched off their torches; shadow-thin, sheathed in denim, they slipped down the bank and vanished.

It was something tremendous, this silence. We waited, waited, as the quietness dripped around us. Eventually the car behind switched on its sidelights, and after an interval a strained voice was heard calling, “Shall we risk it?”

Two men stooped over the rocks and began lifting them. The driver and I got out to help. We didn't exchange words. Then we climbed back in and everyone started their engines and we drove from that place.

Two days later I reached the valley where I was born. The road signs had been stolen, but I knew where I was.

I banged on the cab roof. As the pick-up slowed I jumped from the back.

The air smelled sharply of wet earth and the barky scent of catuaba shrubs. Midges, bloated by rain, danced over puddles reflecting terraces of corn and cactus.

I paused at the top of the track. La Posta lay below, a village on the edge of a drop into a valley at the headwaters of the Amazon. I could see the white domed church, the ironwork bridge, and the thread of road winding through the valleys beyond the town. It led to our farm, though the house was hidden by an escarpment.

You know how you feel when you see your name in print? I experienced the same shock of recognition. Nostalgia engulfed me and the landscape trembled a little and I walked down that track as if the rest of my life hadn't happened. The landscape hadn't changed – therefore nothing else had either.

Just outside the village I heard a cry. A boy came round the corner, whipping a donkey with a strip of rubber. When he caught sight of my bag he leapt off down the slope, not looking back. The donkey, ignoring me, lowered its peeled-back lips to the verge.

I was too excited to be offended. I walked on down into the main street. It was eleven in the morning, but I was shocked by what I didn't see.

I expected the sidewalks to swarm with women from the lower farms. Every morning they would sit cross-legged behind pyramids of coca leaf and manioc flour. At the same age as the boy with the donkey, I had loved to watch their hands sneak from under impossibly coloured shawls, either to ladle a cup of reddish chicha; turn over a chunk of sweet-smelling alpaca; or offer a roasted guinea pig with a mouth of charred teeth.

Today the muddied sidewalk was deserted save for three small figures hurrying away. I breathed in deeply. Even the air seemed tainted.

In the Plaza de Armas, steam gargled from an open drain and drifted over a scraggy hedgerow, smudging the knees of a statue. I remembered how, on Sundays, dissatisfied young women would loiter before our band, making eyes at the musicians. Parents would push their prams across the cobbles to meet other parents, and the benches would creak with watchful old men, tapping their feet to badly played tunes. This morning two girls knelt by the fountain in the square. They crouched at the spout, spraying water at each other from the dribble. José's daughters? They had the butcher's curly black hair. When they saw me, they ran off through the threadbare topiary into a house beyond.

On his plinth, Brigadier Pumacacchua averted his concrete gaze.

I paused on the corner at the butcher's shop. Twice a week my mother would send me to buy the lamb's tongues for which my father had a weakness. The idea had entered her head that this was every man's favourite dish – Father Ramón included. She adored the priest and was always fussing over him, inviting him to dinner, serving him these tongues which, uncomplainingly, he ate, telling her they were wonderful.

Twenty-five years ago I'd been waiting my turn in the queue, a lamb's head resting on a blue chair beside me, when the door burst open and the printer we knew as “the Turk” bustled in holding a Thermos flask of calligraphy fluid, warmed-up, and a stack of blank invitation cards under his arm. “They've expropriated the coffee farm!” He didn't know I was in the shop, and at José's dismayed expression he turned, dropping the flask when he saw me. I watched the steaming ink spread under the chair, mingling with the lamb's blood until the floor was a vivid pattern of reds and blacks streaking one into the other.

“Oh no, oh no, oh no. I don't believe it,” said the Turk, on all fours among his silvery Thermos fragments.

I tried the door. It was padlocked on the inside. I pressed my face to the filthy glass. No meat slapped across the stone slab. The blue chair stood in the corner, its seat missing.

In the glass I saw my face. I looked disordered and alarming. Horrified, I found a comb and ran it through my hair. I was still combing as I turned into Calle Jirón and walked headlong into an old lady.

She was stooped beside a mound of potatoes. I was so startled I dropped the comb. The old woman – amazingly quick – darted to pick it up, then held it away from my reach, refusing to return it until I rewarded her. She extended her other hand towards me, pleading for money. Her face was terraced with age and she had an almost peaceful look.

Then her glance slid down to my bag and she screamed.

“Pishtaco!” She threw down the comb, gathered up the potatoes in her black shawl, and hobbled away as fast as she could.

At No. 119, a white house with a red door, I paused. This was where my parents had lived after the military expropriated our farm. When my father died, my mother continued to share the house with his books. In her curt old age she saw in them the enfeebled crops and the money he should have spent on fertilizer and parrot killer.

I didn't want to see inside and walked on. The next street, parallel to the church, was Calle Bolsas. Outside Nemecio's house I put down my bag and knocked. Nothing. I pushed the door, but it didn't give and, pressing my ear to a window, I could hear no sounds.

At the bottom of the same street I tried another house, a metal plaque bolted to its door. F. Lazo, Orthodontist.

A little girl opened the door. She had an elastoplast on her arm, and held a rag doll by the leg.

“Who is it?” asked a worried-sounding man from inside.

“I'm looking for Fernando Lazo,” I called.

“But I know that voice . . .”

He came up behind the girl, holding her shoulders as if to support himself. It was frightening how little he had changed.

“Joaquín?”

“It's his son,” I said.

Later, after the embraces and the disbelief, he led me to his surgery.

One always expects people to react more emotionally than they do when you haven't seen them for a long time. It wasn't me the dentist wanted to remember. During our conversation he called me by my father's name. What had happened to our library? It was a sad day when we left the farm. He had kept our dental records. Just in case.

“And you? You became a lawyer, right?”

“That's it.”

“Didn't you have a sister?”

“She's married, lives in Brazil.”

He contrived a smile. “So. How are your teeth?”

“No serious problems.”

“That's good. Tell everyone how well I looked after you.”

I sat on a stool beside his desk while he fidgeted with a cast of a jaw. It was odd once more to be in this room, more museum than dental surgery. Above the desk, thirty or forty burial urns were arranged on shelves reaching to the ceiling. As a younger man, Lazo had been an ardent collector of Chimu and Chachapoyan pottery. Once he was treating my mother when his daughter, dusting the pots, felt one of them stir and, peering over the rim, discovered a knot of grey snakes. My mother had come home full of the question, wanting to discuss the puzzle of how they had got there in the first place. No one had any idea. Nor did they know how to get rid of them. Hot oil – the snakes might thrash and break the pot. Water – wouldn't they swim loose? Fire – the pot itself might crack. Lazo decided to smother them. He sealed the pot with tinfoil, lowered it into a plastic bag, and turned it upside down. It had stayed like that for days, a source of macabre and ceaseless fascination for his open-mouthed patients until, with a great song and dance, it was judged safe to remove the covering and the pot, cautiously examined, revealed a withered tangle of what looked like strips from an exploded tyre.