The Dancer Upstairs (27 page)

“He must be big, your brother.”

“He is large.”

I peered inside again. “And underpants!”

She folded the jersey back into the bag. I noticed how her nostrils flared a little whenever she wanted to change the subject. She said, “I've spent my money and the real reason I came out was to buy a jug.”

For a second time that day, I reached for my wallet. “I've just been to the bank. I owe you six weeks tuition at least.”

“Are you certain?”

Having paid Graciela what I had borrowed from her father, I had intended the rest of the money for Sylvina. Marco's dollar guarantee had not solved the problem of our finances, but because of it the bank had agreed to extend my overdraft.

“Take it while I have it.” I waited while she tucked the money inside the jersey in her bag. “Where are you going now?”

“The theatre where I'm dancing on Sunday? I must check the stage. Do you want to see?”

I needed to ring Sucre, but it could wait. “Is it far?”

“Five blocks. Come on.” She touched my arm.

I must tell you about this in the right order. Before today, I had met Yolanda twice. I had liked her, but it would be stupid to pretend that the thought of Laura's teacher sent me into a state of excitement. When, in the lorry from Cajamarca, I had tried to recall her face it had eluded me. She had contracted into a ballet dancer with a good figure and shoulder-length black hair.

As we walked up Calle Argentina, I found myself drawn to her again. You know how some people affect the air around them? You enter a room, a party, and immediately the crowd divides into those – the majority – who suck energy from you, and one or two who with their every look and gesture restore it. Yolanda was like that. She had – well, she had life.

She took my arm. “I thought you were afraid of me.” Her cry was full of affection.

“Why?” I cut away my eyes to a stumpy man who was staring at Yolanda's chest: the low V of the fuzzy pink sweater, the scoop of leotard beneath it. He walked by, swinging his arms higher.

“You never come to the studio,” she said.

“I've been away.”

“You've been in the mountains. Laura was upset not to go with you. I want to hear everything.”

I looked back at her face. The light falling through a tree played over her collarbones, her cheeks, the dark notes in her hair. Her eyes were big and slanted, but in a beautiful way. I felt an urge to tell her everything.

“The new classes – are they a success?”

She stopped. “That girl of yours, now there's someone who can really do it. She's talented and it sings out, and then doesn't she know it. She knows. I told you I was right. If you'd watched her last week . . .”

I couldn't listen very well. All I could see was the distinctive slant to her eyebrows and the lipstick which didn't suit her, and then, suddenly I could only think about the woman I'd left in the bakery.

“I'd recorded this group of women from Chimbivilca. Their song – well, it describes how they ride like horses through the snow, celebrating the gold they have been given. A new age, if you like. Laura took to the floor and danced as if she had known the steps all her life! The other girls are starting to be jealous.”

“Thank you for encouraging her.”

“Hasn't she said anything?”

“I haven't caught up.” I tried to describe what I found on my return home, but my head buzzed as I spoke.

“That is hysterical.”

“That people should be worrying about oily skin . . .”

“Actually, your wife came to the studio a few days ago.”

“Sylvina?”

Very funnily – as I said, she had a gift for mimicry – though not unkindly, she imitated Sylvina's voice. “‘I hope you're not teaching my daughter anything too absolutely contemporary.'”

She walked on in her loping gait, her feet in their heavy boots rising unconsciously on tiptoe at each step. Without warning, her face grew solemn.

“You know, the only moment I was possessed by dance, really possessed, was at Laura's age, before I knew too much. It's what most of us lose as adults. The older you get, the more you edit out the daydream. Discipline takes away that feeling. You become so controlled.”

She withdrew her arm from mine and swapped her bag into that hand. She fell silent, thinking something over.

The Teatro Americano, a cream-painted colonial building, lay behind spiked railings in a rectangular garden planted with lavender and cassias. It was currently being used as the venue for an exhibition by a Chilean artist. A placard on the railings announced:
A History of the Human Face
.

The attendant, slim with a scanty mop of grey hair, was about to tear us tickets when she saw Yolanda. She chucked back her head and called a name through an open door. A short young man with a close-cropped beard and cautious eyes strode out. “What is it?” At the sight of Yolanda he threw up his arms. He hugged her, speaking into her ear in a jaunty, whistling voice. “I have the lights, the loudspeakers, two hundred chairs. I've rung Miguel. He promises to write a review.”

Over her shoulder, he peered at me from between heavy, red-veined lids.

“Lorenzo, this is my friend Agustín. I wanted to show him the stage.”

He pulled back. “Sure, carry on. How's everything going?”

“I'm not there – yet.”

“You need help?”

“That's sweet of you. I'll manage.”

He looked at me, then in a low voice said to her, “I'd love to see a dress rehearsal. The others would too.”

“There really isn't that much time.”

He thought about this for a moment. “Listen, I've someone on the line. We'll be in touch.” He squeezed my shoulder. “Good to meet you, Agustín.”

We passed into a lofty room hung with silk sheets. She whispered, “Lorenzo, when he isn't running this theatre, is a depressed choreographer.” She glanced back. “We used to work together. You can't believe his jealousy. Worried continually I'd run off with his steps.”

The room, arranged with uncomfortable-looking cane chairs, was lit naturally from a glass roof which revealed the grey wool sky and the top of a palm tree. Stage lights cast elaborate shadows across a stained wooden floor.

Yolanda waited for two students to leave the room, then slipped off her shoes, handing me the shopping bag.

“I need to measure this.” She walked to one wall. Abruptly, she pirouetted once, twice, three times, then leapt five paces across the floor. “Zsa, zsa, zsa, zsa, chu!”

Burned in my mind is the flash of her feet, naked and white, through the bright air.

A yard from the opposite wall she stopped. “That's fine. I was worried about the width.”

Another couple wandered into the room. She retrieved her shoes. “Isn't this a nice place?” She spread her arms and her voice rang beneath the glass. “In my first year at the Metropolitan I danced Stravinsky's ‘Symphony of Psalms' here. Hey, look at these faces.”

My attention fixed on Yolanda, I had failed to notice the faces staring at us from the silk sheets. Close to, they defined themselves. They had been lifted from newspapers in Chile dating back thirty years, blown up to life-size, and printed on the silk.

The faces of pickpockets.

The faces of murderers.

The faces of terrorists and freedom fighters.

The faces of their victims.

The faces of their pursuers

The faces of their judges.

The faces of patients from a schizophrenic ward.

The faces of extinct aborigines.

“Many of these people had one thing in common: They were not included in the society that was photographing them – either for the purpose of anthropological observation; or as objects of police control.”

“Are you a good judge of character?” she asked.

“I think so.”

“Everybody thinks they are. Let's see.”

We played a game. She darted to a sheet, covering a caption with her bag. “Now, answer me. What kind of person is this?”

“Thief?”

She raised the bag. “Murder victim.” She ran to another face. “What about . . . her?”

“Policeman?”

“Policewoman it is. Him?”

“Judge?”

“No. Murderer. Her?”

“Freedom fighter?”

“Schizophrenic. Him?”

“Extinct Indian?”

“Right. Two out of four. Which means that half the people you meet, you get wrong.”

Across the room the couple, who had been watching us, began to copy our game. They likewise had been confident of their ability to distinguish a murderer from a freedom fighter, a general who had been blown up in his bed from a Yaghan who had died of a common cold. But this was the artist's challenge. He was saying: put them side by side and the schizophrenic assumes the personality of the judge.

“In other words,” said Yolanda, “we know nothing about anybody.”

Not every face had been alive when photographed. I had been about to test Yolanda's skill when she halted before the mummified features of a body in a dress.

“Yaghan?” I asked.

“Look.”

The caption read: One of General Pinochet's disappeared. Eva Vasquez, student, for seventeen years buried in a mine shaft.

Yolanda said, “It's the same story, over and over again.” She added, fiercely, “Bastards.”

I looked at the torn drum of skin, the wretched angle of the head, and thought of Nemecio, his mouth filling, drowning in earth. Thought, too, of a widow five miles away, scrunching her dress at the knees. My years as a policeman, what had they achieved? What if I had followed Santiago's path? A sense of my emaciated duty all at once made ridiculous the distinction between Ezequiel and Calderón. You might have asked me to choose between Emilio's grilled fish and his grilled pork.

Yolanda said, “I don't know what you are like, Agustín, but I can't look at a face like this and say nothing. What happened to her is happening to us, now.”

She told me that while I'd been away the university had held a service for the Arguedas Players. She had joined the parents lighting candles for their missing children. The remains found under the cinema floor included a scrap of green blouse and two keys on a keyring, one of which fitted Vera's locker. But no body, or at least not enough of one to be identifiable.

Yolanda, looking at the desiccated face on the silk, spoke as if to herself. “You have to have a body to be able to grieve. It's something you can't understand unless you've seen a loved one die. You have to see the corpse to be certain they're dead, so they can begin living in your memory. Without a body, you can't be rid of the horror.” She broke off, covering her eyes. “Stop it, Yolanda, stop it, stop it.” She composed herself, not without effort. Giving a quick look round, she said, “Come on, let's leave.”

Outside, people pushed their prams or stretched out on the grass, reading. Through the railings I saw a yellow barrow and bought two lemon water ices on sticks. We sat on the grass, but a darkness had brushed Yolanda and she had retreated into herself.

“What would you do,” I asked, “if you were Eva Vasquez and your boyfriend asked you to fight that war?”

“I don't know.” She nibbled at her ice cream. Her eyes were red. “I don't have a boyfriend.”

“I'm thinking of Laura. If I was her age, I'd be tempted to fight.”

“She's a dancer.”

“Does it frighten you, that I talk like this?”

“No, I'm thinking. What I would do.” But she had retreated from me as well. She finished her ice cream and buried the stick in the grass. “I give up. I need a cigarette.”

Ten yards away, a young man lay on his stomach, reading a newspaper. Yolanda went over and talked to him. She came back, drawing on a cigarette.

“I didn't know you smoked,” I said.

“I don't. I feel like one.”

Forcefully, she blew out the smoke. “What about you?”

“I don't smoke.”

“I mean what would you do?”

Something about the jut of her chin, her glowing eyes, must have reached me, stung me even. I said, “There was a moment when I sacrificed everything.”

“When was that?”

“I was younger than you.”

“What happened?” She had been distracted. Now she was focused.

“I had a good job with a law firm. I was just married. I was going to be rich, maybe become a judge. One day my conscience spoke to me. When I heard it, the barriers went down. My wife, career, friends. Nothing mattered when I heard this voice. Next day I left my job.”

Her hand slapped the ground. “That's what she felt!”

“Who?”

“Sorry, I see everything through Antigone. She didn't want the dogs to eat her brother's corpse. She was saying, life and death, those obligations are more important than a state's decree – and that's how I feel. I value Eva Vasquez's life – or Laura's, or yours – much more than the laws of this country.”

“So our political situation can never change?”

“I'm not interested in politics. The only command you have to listen to is the one inside you – which you listened to.”

She flattened a hand against her chest. “I'm interested in doing the things you know in your heart are right. Burying your brother is one of them.” She spoke like a child, seeing what a child saw, then became serious again. “That's what stirred me up about the Arguedas Players. They were people's brothers and sisters.” She was crying.