The Dancer Upstairs (35 page)

Sucre radioed me. “It's him.”

The rain had started. I come in from the car and run across the patio. Yolanda is struggling on the parquet with two of my men. There is glass everywhere. Oblivious to her screams, a third man is pointing a pumpgun at the ceiling.

Yolanda, aware of another presence, looks up. Shock has blackened her eyes and left her cheeks purple and grey, the shade of an artichoke leaf.

Her eyes grab me. “Agustín! Help me. These bastards–”

“Let her go.”

Gomez tried to say something.

“Shut up,” I said.

He releases Yolanda and she runs to me, throwing her arms around my neck, sobbing with relief.

I stroke her head. “Thank God you're safe. You don't know who we've got upstairs.”

Behind my head, her arms stiffened. Extremely slowly, she disengaged herself.

“What's going on?” she says in a confused voice, her jaw at an angle.

I hold both her hands. The veins in them stand out as she strains to pull away. “Don't be frightened. These are my men.”

She glares at me. Some savagery has transformed her eyes and there shoots into them an expression I had seen on Laura's face. She stares into a middle distance that doesn't exist, in which I do not exist.

She tears free one hand, punches the air and screams, “Don't you dare harm him! You'll pay with your life if you harm him!”

“Yolanda–” As she whirls away from me I feel the bite of truth.

“Viva El Presidente Ezequiel!”

Gomez seizes one of her arms, Ciras the other as she tumbles towards the floor.

Somehow I stepped past her, through the kitchen, up the steep, uncarpeted staircase, towards the dull nickel of my triumph.

He sat in his velvet-covered chair, a sick man wearing the yellow alpaca jersey which she had bought him. Sucre and Clorindo kept their guns on him.

He looked from Sucre to me and back to Sucre, who said, “Stand up before the Colonel.”

Obviously in agony, Ezequiel slowly rose to his feet, watching me intently. Neither of us knew what to do. He offered his hand and when I shook it, conscious of a rough-textured, vegetable skin, he flinched.

Sucre, encouraged by this contact, searched for a weapon. With care, as if he might not be dealing with someone of flesh and blood, he patted his hands down our prisoner's legs.

Ezequiel, still holding my hand, was calm. With his free hand he tapped his forehead. “You'll never kill this.” He spoke with an insane clarity. His eyes were dark and unblinking, the black dots in their centres like shirt-buttons. He was, I think, fully expecting to be shot. I had not even drawn my gun.

From a room at the back, I heard women screaming. Edith and someone else, shrieking for me not to touch him. Downstairs, Yolanda's screams renewed themselves. Gomez must then have gagged her.

Since I wasn't in uniform I introduced myself, addressing Ezequiel as “Professor”. For the second time in our lives I asked for his documents. Gingerly, he emptied his pockets. He produced a spotted handkerchief, crinkly with dried phlegm. “I have none.”

He did not appear distressed. I reasoned that someone who has caused so much havoc, so many killings, is not going to be worried by final capture.

“How many others?” I asked Sucre.

“Three next door – two females, one male – plus Edith Pusanga. Sanchez and Cecilia are covering them.”

“And downstairs?”

“Only the dance teacher.”

I turned to Ezequiel. Haunted by a ballerina with unseeing eyes, I couldn't distinguish the details of his face. “Is Yolanda with you?”

The beard opened and the answer slid out through a smile, stabbing me with the cold blade of understanding.

“Everyone's with us, Colonel. It doesn't matter if you shoot us. We're in history.”

I told him that he must accompany me below. He wanted to take with him a Mao Tse-tung badge from a drawer by his bed. The Chinese leader had presented it to him personally.

I glanced at Sucre, but he was broken with emotion. I found the badge. After Ezequiel had closed his fist around it, I nodded to Clorindo to put on handcuffs. He seized Ezequiel's wrists and I thought: this is my victory. A sick man with nothing to say who wants to keep his memento from Mao.

Out of the room, he changed. He had been waiting for the coup de grâce. Once it dawned on him that he was caught, his personality abruptly weakened. He had no plan beyond this – not a Sixth or Seventh or a Twenty-Fifth Grand Plan. Upstairs he could be Kant's dove, soaring in his own vacuum. Downstairs, when I took him into the street and the rain fell on his skin, he felt the beak of fear.

We used the back lift to reach my office. I locked the door. Four men stood guard in the corridor outside. No one else was to be allowed entry. In accordance with the orders issued to me, and with enormous reluctance, I telephoned the office of Captain Calderón.

A clipped female voice told me he was attending a cocktail party at the house of the American Chargé d'Affaires. If my business was urgent she was empowered to provide a contact number.

“It's urgent.”

I started to dial. I was aware of Ezequiel in the chair and Sucre behind him and Gomez holding a gun. But my thoughts were not coherent.

I heard the ringing tone. I looked at Ezequiel, bright diamonds of rain on his yellow cardigan and in his hair. He must have felt an itch because he raised his hands and with the back of his fingers tried to scratch his temple. The handcuffs restricted his movements, and he knocked off his spectacles. The sight of his naked face, suddenly revealed, brought a flash of recognition. I remembered the packed earth yard in Sierra de Pruna, the upturned beer crate, the cramped front room in the police post.

“Sucre, see to his glasses.”

Ezequiel fumbled blindly on his lap, but his ruined fingernails caught in a fold of his trousers.

In the receiver at my ear a voice boomed in English, “Denver Tennyson, can I help?”

“Captain Calderón, is he there, please?”

“Who wants him?”

On the other side of the desk, Ezequiel grimaced. Suddenly I saw what the matter was. Gomez, in applying the handcuffs, had prised loose one of the fingernails. Ezequiel, when he dislodged his spectacles, had not been trying to scratch, but to press the nail back over the exposed flesh.

“I've made a mistake. I'm sorry to have troubled you.” I replaced the receiver.

By that grimace, Ezequiel placed himself with the living. If, as were my orders, I handed him over to Calderón, he would be tortured and killed. I would be delivering him to the fate he expected, and against which he had prepared himself. He knew that in death he would become something else, a memory to spur his people on. To save his life was my greatest revenge.

I dialled Canal 7. “Cecilia, I have something for you. Yes. It's important.”

At nine in the morning, having interrogated Ezequiel through the night, I presented him to the press. I learned more from our conversation than I am able to tell you, but nothing to make me alter my plan. Once word was out that we had him – alive and unharmed – the government could not shoot him. Your profession saved Ezequiel.

There was another consideration. I wanted to demonstrate that the institution I had served for twenty years was strong enough to ensure a fair trial. It was naive of me, and it didn't happen. Yet he wasn't executed. Calderón drew up a Decree Law – even selected members of a naval firing squad – but the President feared the outrage abroad.

Calderón, if he couldn't execute Ezequiel, decided to humiliate him. He hit on the idea of exhibiting the captive in a cage. He dressed him up in a black-and-white uniform, like a cartoon figure, and locked him inside a large metal coop, a kind of box with bars, covered with tarpaulins. At what was judged to be the most propitious moment, Calderón had the covers removed. But it belittled us rather than Ezequiel. Like staring at a monkey in a zoo. As if we were superior. But you were there, with all the rest of those journalists. You saw how they treated him. That was in the piece you wrote.

“And Yolanda?” Dyer asked after a long interval.

Nothing in all his years as a journalist had hardened him to the despair in Rejas's answer.

“I was still interrogating Ezequiel when the message came through. Yolanda, Edith, Lorenzo and the two women from the Central Committee, had been transferred from Calle Diderot to cells downstairs. Yolanda, I ordered, was to be put in a cell by herself. She had been hysterical, but the nurse had given her a shot. She was now asleep.

“I rang downstairs. ‘I'll look in on her later,' I told the nurse. ‘Please give her an extra blanket.' There was an astonished silence, so I said, ‘She's my daughter's ballet teacher. She doesn't understand what's going on.'

“‘She doesn't, does she?' I asked Ezequiel.

“His hand opened and closed over Mao's badge, as it had throughout our conversation. Behind his glasses his eyes were tired. ‘Comrade Miriam is not only a fine dancer, Colonel.'

“Even at this stage I hoped there had been some mistake. It didn't seem possible. Yolanda was naive politically, but if I could talk to her for an hour we would find some way out of this. I didn't want to believe there wasn't a way.

“Minutes before the press conference, I tried to see her. I needed a special pass to enter the basement. My own orders. Sucre fetched the permit.

“The nurse looked at me angrily. ‘Over there.'

“On a bench in a small cell, her face to the wall, Yolanda lay sleeping.

“‘When will she come round?' A blanket covered all but the top of her head.

“‘An hour or so. I gave her another shot at six.'

“‘She didn't understand what was going on,' I repeated.

“Behind me a drained voice said, ‘You're wrong, boss.'

“Sucre nodded through the bars. His face had the look of someone who has steeled himself to say the unsayable.

“Calderón gave me no chance to interrogate Yolanda. Twenty minutes after the press conference, a convoy of trucks blocked off the entrance to the headquarters. Soldiers leapt out, followed by my furious military counterpart.

“In my office he threw an official order down on my desk. It removed from my charge Ezequiel, the four members of the Central Committee – and Comrade Miriam, as Yolanda would from now on refer to herself.

“I last saw her stumbling between soldiers, her head covered in a black hood.”

16

Next evening Dyer crossed the square for the last time and climbed the stairway to the Cantina da Lua. The following morning he would take a plane out.

Rejas had ordered the wine. He began to fill two glasses as Dyer sat down.

Good news. The specialist had telephoned about his sister's tests. The antibiotic was working. Her cysticercosis, which they feared might have been a fatal strain, was curable.

Alert, no longer disoriented, his sister had no memory of her recent confusion. For the first time in a fortnight, she had asked Rejas to read to her. She wanted her mind to be taken out of that stuffy bedroom.

Rejas smiled. “I read a few pages of Rebellion in the Backlands.”

He poured another glass of wine, but he drank without tasting it. He had ordered the bottle to celebrate his sister's recovery. He was not drinking to celebrate.

He was coming to the end, and he wanted Dyer to listen.

I have blanked out a lot since the night of Ezequiel's capture. Calderón forbade me to say a word, with very clear threats of unpleasant consequences if I chose to disobey him a second time. In the months ahead, he would have me watched. But my wound was private. I hardly remembered how to breathe, or walk, or perform the simplest gestures. The press would declare repeatedly how, by my action, I had cured the country of “Ezequiel's pestilence”. I had achieved all I had set out to achieve, but in achieving it I had lost what I most wanted. The truth was that I had sundered myself from all that was precious to me.

There followed the darkest days of my life. Why had fate determined that Ezequiel and I should be linked in this way? Nor could I get used to the coincidence that Ezequiel's safe house was the school where Laura learned her ballet. Every time I dropped my daughter off, I had been, without knowing it, delivering her to his lair.

I wanted to hate the person who had taken her hand, led her inside, but I didn't. I kept seeing Yolanda on the parquet, two men pinning her to the ground, her eyes loaded with hatred and madness combing her hair. I was stormed by her image and my heart could not bear it.

We know so little about people. But about the people we love, we know even less. I was so blind with love for her I hadn't been able to see. I had been like that American watching the video who could not believe it was his wife.
There must be thousands of poor bastards who don't know what's going on in their women's minds
. I had just kept making excuses and making excuses.

Shall I tell you something? Shall I let you into a secret about Yolanda? – and this is such a sad thing. I believe that until the last moment, when it could not have been clearer who I was, Yolanda had found a way of convincing herself. If true, it's pitiable – but how else do I explain our intimacy? On that day when we sat on the grass and I told her about the army massacre she must have told herself I was on her side. I was one of them. Of course, she had no means of proving it. She couldn't run upstairs to Ezequiel and say, “I've just met this man . . .” That would have been a breach of his discipline. So she demonstrated her loyalty by not informing him. When she said to me, “Silence is part of the dance”, she was speaking the truth.