The Dancer Upstairs (23 page)

“I want to know who killed him.”

“Forget it.”

“Under the emergency code, I could arrest you for everything you've said. These books alone–”

“Look, don't make threats about arresting me – I just need to yell ‘police' and everyone in town will come running.”

“Fine. I'll go away. I'll build the evidence against you. I'll watch you night and day. And then I'll come back. Do I have to spell it out?”

He looked down at my feet. “Why do all policemen wear white socks?”

“Who supplies the food? Who are Ezequiel's contacts in the village?”

He threw himself back. “I don't know. I don't know.”

“But you know about Father Ramón. I'm certain you do.”

His lower lip trembled and he clutched his knees. When he raised his head, his eyes were not looking at me but at the side of my face. “You don't understand. I've signed a blood pact with these people.”

“You're a lot better off dealing with me, buddy. You know Ezequiel's ways. If he discovers we're friends, he is likely to make the same moral sacrifice of you that he made of Father Ramón. And you've seen how the military behave. It's a miracle they didn't get you last time. You're fucked, Santiago.”

I gave it time to sink home. Then I said reasonably, “It could be lucrative, you know. How much do you earn teaching algebra? I can offer you more. A reward. Start-up capital. Settle you in a new country, new identity, leave all this despair behind. Miami. White beaches. The good life.”

“Go on, Agustín, squeeze my balls some more.”

“Don't you see? Ezequiel's made an idiot of you. Is that what you wanted when you were an altar boy? To see your priest, the person in the world you most wanted to emulate, choke on his Bible, see him gutted like a fish, see his face sliced off?”

No reply. He was not listening. In a faraway tone he addressed the sofa beside me, breathing uneasily. “They came here after they'd done it. They wanted bed and food.”

“How many?”

“Three.”

“Male, female?”

“Two men, and a woman who was in charge.”

“How old? Where was she from? Was she educated?”

“It was Edith.”

“Edith? From Pachuca?” A girl with cold, mint eyes and make-up who wouldn't dance with us.

“Ramón had to be punished by someone he knew,” he said doggedly.

“Where is Edith now?”

“No idea. They operate away from home. Like your army friends.”

“But she used to live in the next valley.”

“Not for twenty years.”

“How did she behave? What did she say?”

“She said be patient, the revolution was in our grasp.”

“And the men with her?”

“Kept pretty quiet. Said almost nothing.”

“You knew them?”

“No. They were from the capital.”

Had Edith slept on this sofa afterwards?

“Did they want you to lead them to Father Ramón? Is that what they wanted?”

“They were angry about his sermons. His attacks on Ezequiel.”

“He had also spoken out against the army.”

“Anyway, I wasn't here.”

“But you were here when they came back.”

“That's right.”

“Where were you, Santiago?”

Dismally, he said, “A woman. She's married. I see her in the afternoons. You can have her name, if you like.”

I didn't want to hear more. “How do you feel? You waited all these years for the call, and this is what the revolution demanded – and you weren't even here. Nor when they killed Nemecio and the others.”

“No, I wasn't. And by God, Agustín . . .”

“How did you know who these people were? How did you know they weren't spies?”

Santiago got up and went into his bedroom. A cupboard creaked. He came out again, unfolding a piece of paper.

“Here. This is all I can offer you. This is all I know. This is all I have.”

A photocopy of a computer print-out. Four names, each listed for a village in the area. At the bottom, on its own, a telephone number prefixed by the code for the capital.

“You're ‘Comrade Arturio'?”

“That's what they called me at university. I had no choice. Don't ask who the others are. I've no idea.”

“What about this number with no name?”

“She said to use it in an emergency.”

I copied down the information.

“Do you still play the flute?” he said in a not very interested way.

“No.”

“I'll never forget the sound you made as we came down the glacier.”

“And you, Santiago, do you still sing?”

Before he could answer, voices sounded in the street. He jumped up, parting the curtain. “I told them to play in the yard!”

Someone pounded on the door. Santiago said, “Excuse me”. He puckered his lips in a schoolmasterly way and charged out into the street.

I heard animated snatches of conversation. Then he came back in. He shut the door, leaning against it. “The class is waiting. I have to go back.”

I picked up my bag. For the first time, Santiago seemed to notice it. “Wait. Where are you staying?”

“Your old hotel, if it's still open.”

“When did you arrive?”

“This morning.”

“You had no problems?”

“What kind of problems?”

“I don't know. From the people.”

“An old woman screamed at me. A donkey boy ran off when he saw me.”

He blocked my way, staring at me hard. I had seen the same look in Lazo's eyes. He looked down at my bag again. “They've had enough, Agustín.”

“What do you mean?”

“They're suspicious of everybody. A man carrying a bag like yours, he was killed last week.”

“A man? From the village?”

“Nobody you'd know. A commercial traveller from Pachuca.”

“What was he carrying?”

“Just samples.”

“Samples of what?”

“Brushes, scissors, combs, the usual stuff. He was going from door to door trying to interest people. But the whisper went round. He was a pishtaco. He'd come to abduct our children, cut them up, boil their limbs for grease.”

Do you know the pishtaco myth? My mother, who worshipped mountain spirits, tried to make us believe in this creature. She warned us not to go out at night or we would find, waiting for us, a stranger in a long white cloak. He had been sent by the authorities to rob us of our body grease. He would carry us to his lair, string us upside down and collect our dripping fat in a tub. She said the pishtaco's favourite delicacy was the meat of young children which he sold to restaurants in the city. My sister and I assumed she used this bogeyman to stop us roaming too far from the farm.

I said to Santiago, “They can't believe this. Not seriously?”

“They don't know what to believe. They say those who have disappeared are demanding some explanation. They say policemen in disguise have been sent to extract our grease. They say that with this grease the government can buy weapons to fight Ezequiel.”

“Who believes this?”

“Who doesn't? I'm telling you, don't go out at night, Agustín. Because that's when they seized this man. He'd been trying to sell to the barber and they descended on him. A crowd, fifty at least, old men and women, terrified for their grandchildren. The noise, I can't describe it. They were beating pan lids, screaming and chanting. One of my pupils saw it from her bedroom. They knelt on him. They searched his pockets. Nothing. Then his bag. Inside they found scissors, nail-clippers, pen-knives, needles. That proved it. So they lynched him. It was like a ch'illa.”

You see, this was another thing about a pishtaco. You couldn't shoot him. My mother said the only way to kill a pishtaco was to gang up and use his own methods on him. A ch'illa was how the farmers sacrificed their llamas.

“They tore out his eyeballs, but they didn't stop there. They ripped off his balls and then they plucked out his heart. He was still alive. I heard the screams from this room.”

The army buried him near the bridge. No one knew his name, nor what he had looked like. The people had dragged him through the streets until his bones showed through the scraped flesh.

“I hear the pan lids every night.”

“Is that what you were discussing outside?”

“One of the kids spotted someone on the upper road. It's exciting for them. In daylight it's easy to dismiss as a joke. But, it's not. If you go to the hotel, take my advice. Stay inside.” He nodded at the sofa. “I'd offer you a bed here . . .” He couldn't hide his thoughts.

“It's all right, Santiago.” I had exacted enough.

He jerked up his thumb, relieved, “So long, then, Agustín. If you catch Ezequiel, give me a call.”

“Look, I'm serious, what I said about money. About a reward.”

Emphatically, he shook his head. And that's how we left each other, making vague promises which neither of us thought we would keep.

I decided to sleep the night at our farm.

The bridge had reopened days before, repaired by army engineers from a base in Pachuca. Below me the gully squeezed out a torrent of icy water.

The rain had come too late to work its miracle on the valley. The drought had filched the colours from the mountains and the familiar contours were streaked with the dark brown shades of a buzzard's wing. The sight of the pinched terraces, slipping away into ridges of cracked earth, ploughed up buried voices. I heard my mother saying: “If you don't play your flute, the rains won't come and the coffee won't grow.”

I followed a line of hoofprints. They stamped ahead of me over the clay, disappearing off the road down a steep track. Down that track, the frightened animals would have stumbled to the airstrip. I stepped on to the verge and looked from the river – glinting, a little swollen, through a bluish haze – to the flat field below. Unable to contemplate the passage of the horses and their load, I grasped at another image.

I thought of the day I left home.

My mother is driving our lorry along this road so I can catch the bus. I'm eighteen, going to the capital to study law. I sit between my mother and my father, who has my sister on his lap.

Since it's my last day, everyone is making an effort. But it isn't a happy occasion. A week ago an army jeep delivered an envelope to my father. We haven't been told what it contained, but after overhearing the Turk in the butcher's shop I know.

I am about to speak when my sister points. “Look!” Covering the field, a flock of green parrots.

You must have seen them. You can tell you're up north when you hear those birds. They're hard to make out on the ground. You see a green bush, and then the whole thing lifts and the way the light falls on their feathers as they tilt makes it seem the birds have changed colour in mid air. What has been green is violent red, and you are looking at another creature.

I expect my mother to stop the lorry and shoo the parrots from the bushes. She detests these creatures. They eat the crops and she is forever asking my father to buy some poison. Whenever she hears a wingbeat, she dashes into the field and raps a kettle shouting “hey-hey-HEY!” until they rise, shrieking, against the mountain.

But, sitting beside me, her lips are closed.

We reach the road. My father slides out of the lorry to open the wire gate. He waves my mother on, closes the gate and climbs back in. Normally this is my job. Today, it's his treat to me.

I look back at our farm. It is an honest house and the view over the split-wood fence is identical in every direction. Bleached grass on the terraces. The shadows of large birds. Rain-streaked rocks. In winter, shoals of puffy clouds neatly arranged to the horizon. In summer nothing but the sky. When it grew really hot, you'd get fireballs. On that sort of day the eucalyptus trees would explode.

Ezequiel grew up two hundred miles to the north, his house not unlike ours. He shared our river, too. The Marañon sprang from a limestone basin above the village. It became the Amazon a thousand miles away, but was already a substantial flow by the time it passed our fields. From the lorry I can see the rapids.

“You'll miss the river,” murmurs my father.

Last week when the moon was up, Santiago, Nemecio and I tied hunks of meat to a string and threw the bait in the water. When the string went taut we scooped the net under what clutched the meat and boiled up a paraffin can.

“You won't eat crayfish like this in law school,” said Santiago.

My father, leaning against the window, observes his fields. The farm has been in his family since August the twelfth, fifteen-eighty, which he has read was a Wednesday. By the time he inherited from his uncle, it had dwindled to an estate of a hundred acres. But still large enough for the military to expropriate.

“Ouch,” he says adjusting his position. “You've become too heavy.” This is an excuse. He wants to shift my sister off his lap so he can see the black roof now coming into view between the trees. His library.

I've never met a man so interested in books. Any hope of establishing a conversation with him is predicated on your being interested in what he is reading. Otherwise, as my mother says, it's a long cold night.

She jokes he is more concerned about his books than his family. The reason he pays attention to my sister is because, from when she was a small child, she liked to show him animals she'd captured by the river. She would ostentatiously play with them at his feet, toads, beetles, lizards, snails she'd scraped from the cactus. But he is not often seduced from his text, unless he treads on something on his way to the shelves. Scraping a snail from his shoe, he would exclaim: “The boys throw stones at the frogs in sport, but the frogs do not die in sport, they die in earnest.”