The Dancer Upstairs (36 page)

At her level you weren't permitted contact with more than two comrades. And you'd address each other as Comrade this or Comrade that, so that you'd never discover who they were. After your mission, you'd go back to being the person you had been before. It ensured you revealed nothing if you were tortured. That's why Ezequiel was effective.

But, isn't it funny? Isn't it the most appalling thing? There I was, pouring out my heart to Yolanda, all the time exhibiting the same tensions and worries she was suffering. It's possible some of the cryptic phrases I used to protect my work chimed with phrases she had been taught – and it would have been in her nature to think if she didn't recognize the code the fault lay with her, not me.

Then there was this other problem. You see, in Ezequiel's world love was forbidden. Sex was okay, but he demanded that his followers lived a loveless life, dedicated to him. But for whatever reason, whether it was to do with her father or the sad figure who'd been her fiancé, poor Yolanda, who in every other way proved so perfect a disciple, wasn't quite capable of filling that emotional hollow with Ezequiel's philosophy. There was a gap which the revolution couldn't satisfy.

All her training, the nuns, the months in the jungle camp, ought to have drummed into her the unsuitability of a man like me. But in my comforting her during the blackout, something happened which she couldn't have predicted.

A week, ten days maybe, passed before I decided to speak to the one person who might reduce my madness: her old fiancé, the poet.

He was a thin, angular-faced man with trout-coloured eyes and Yolanda's habit of staring into space. We walked through Parque Colón and sat on a bench, while, opposite us, a blue-and-yellow uniformed gardener patted geraniums into the black earth.

The poet was reluctant to talk. He was still in love with her and so was I. We were rivals and I felt shameful, but I needed to see what he and I had in common, and if he bore any stamp of her.

I gave him little choice. Either he talked to me informally, here in the open air, or I would detain him for questioning. It was imperative we speak. There were matters I needed to clear up regarding Yolanda's trial.

It was a mild day, too cold to sit out really, and he was nervous. He spoke with his hand at his neck, as if strangling himself.

“I couldn't believe it. When I saw her photograph, screaming, I said: ‘No, it can't be Yolanda.' And then it was Yolanda.” He picked up a book wrapped with a battered-looking dustcover. I supposed he had brought it along to prove his innocence. “It was as if I'd opened this book and it had exploded.”

I asked to see the book. It was When the Dead Speak by Miguel Angel Torre. “No one pays attention to poetry,” said its epigraph.

“Not a good time time for lyrics,” he said.

I noticed a poem dedicated to Yolanda.

Envy overwhelmed me. This young man with the red mole on his forehead had felt the same as I did, but his desire had lived to enjoy its full flesh.

His shadow fell on the page. “She danced that one.”

He started talking about her. Their first meeting, a friend's birthday party at the Catholic University. Her taste in music (she liked The Doors, Pink Floyd, King Crimson). Her passion for cakes. (A day later I found myself queuing at her favourite bakery in San Isidro.) A born seductress. Never said a bad word about anyone. Didn't have enemies. If she wanted to go from A to B, she went. Whatever the cost.

A force to be reckoned with.

Soon they were living in the blue house in Calle Tucumán. He installed a caoba wood barre in their bedroom so she could dance. That was a good time. They went to the beach, cooked, made love. Then, while she was convalescing from a leg injury, she was invited to Cuba, to a conference on the arts.

She was to be away for a fortnight. When she stayed a month he became worried. Maybe she had met someone else. He was always jealous if, on stage, she danced with another man. But, no – there was no man. She had found the society in which she could believe. Four months after returning from Cuba she resigned from the Metropolitan.

Classical ballet was too rigid. It was ballet for the bourgeois. From now on she would devote her energies to modern dance. Modern dance represented a liberation of the spirit from its state of repression.

“Her talk, it was all about dance. That's what I believed. But she was acting the whole time. She was seeing with other eyes.”

“Did you never suspect?”

A hand squeezed his face. He was afraid. He had believed in many of the things she did. He also believed that to admit this to me would be to condemn himself. He feared, perhaps, that I would discover his status as an underground poet. But from my university days I had been familiar with the bars he frequented. Like him, I knew how to weave tough dreams from cigarette smoke. The Kloaka, the Dalmacia, the Café Quilca – these were the haunts of people who talk revolution, talk and do nothing about it. We were more alike than he knew, he and I. Yolanda would have branded us cowards.

“I thought what she felt was religious, not political,” he said carefully. “There was a group of nuns she liked. Twice a week she would borrow my car and drive them to the shantytowns. She'd bake the children cakes, teach them to dance. At least, that's what I supposed she was doing. But she was very reserved, never talked of anything that was purely personal to her.

“Our relationship began to come unstuck when she wanted me to join in. ‘How can you represent the masses if you don't live with them?' I had said. Besides, I was a poet, not a revolutionary.

“‘Then let's live with them,' she said.

“Early on, I might have done. But our affair was not as passionate as it had been. There were frictions. A writer has to live in his own world at one moment and relate to his public at another. A dancer needs to be the centre of attention at all times. For Yolanda I had become something day-to-day, while every day she burned with a desire to impress a new audience.

“She attended a studio of modern dance in Calle Mitre, mixing with people I didn't approve of. She started coming home late, talking about Truth and Justice. She spoke of the Greeks, of Plato and Sophocles. She had read nothing – then Sophocles!

“Of course, you don't know her, so you can't imagine this. But Yolanda, reading Sophocles . . .

“One day she received a call from the youngest of the nuns. The army had stormed the prison in Lurigancho and killed two hundred of Ezequiel's men. I overheard the nun asking Yolanda to distribute leaflets about those who'd been murdered.

“I protested: ‘Yolanda, those are Ezequiel's people.' And I forbade her. That night she came home late, driving my car.

“She didn't deny what she had done. She had brought back a pot plant for me. I threw it at the kitchen window. She swept up the glass, the earth, the terracotta shards. Later, when I apologized for breaking the window, she said, ‘It isn't a window you have broken.'

“We didn't speak for a week. Then I found a pamphlet advertising a discussion at the Catholic University about the prison massacre. ‘I want to go,' I said.

“The evening was dominated by this bearded chap – Lorenzo. He kept waving his arms about, shouting for everyone to rise up, assassinate the President. Afterwards he joined us and he was very friendly with her.

“‘Yolanda,' I said, ‘I don't want that man in our house.'

“Three days later I came home and he was sitting in our kitchen. I threw him out. It was the second time I had lost my temper. You couldn't lose your temper with Yolanda. She went with Lorenzo to the door and watched him leave. She didn't scream or say anything. But that night in bed she said she had begun to question our relationship.

“She became cold and distant. I worried for her health; among other things, she hadn't menstruated for twelve months. And ate nothing, only cakes. She'd become so thin she would put stockings in her bra to make herself look bigger there. But her belief was rock-like. I think she had already made her decision.

“Two days go by. Then at breakfast she says she's going on a retreat in the jungle with some Canadian nuns.

“I sat down and said, ‘Yolanda, you're not going to a retreat. Are you?'

“She didn't lie. She didn't know how to lie.

“‘You're going to your political friends.'

“Yes.”

“‘Then we can't live together in this house any more.'

“She packed and left. A week after that, when she hadn't come home, I abandoned the house.

“I saw her again about six months later. She was sweet, and talked for two hours about the jungle, what she had seen and done there. At the end of the conversation she asked for money. She had moved back into Calle Tucumán. She needed to pay the bills. I refused, said I knew what she wanted the money for. Now, for the first time, she lost her temper. She shouted at me, and then she turned on her heel and was gone.

“I saw her again once, walking along Calle Sol. I didn't recognize her at first. She had put on weight. I thought she looked terribly attractive. As she came towards me I called her name. She walked past.”

A man plonked himself down on the bench next to us and opened a newspaper.

We got to our feet. Behind us another gardener had been lifting turf. He didn't have gardener's hands.

We walked under the African tulip trees to the gate at the edge of the park.

“Is it possible she will recant?” I asked.

He shook his head. “No, this will have made her even stronger, even more determined. She'll never relent. Ballet gave her this discipline.”

“What about her brother, was he involved too?”

“Brother?” He said. “She had no brother.”

We stopped at the gate. I shook his hand, thanked him for his time. I knew he would have been distressed by our conversation. A barman at the Café Quilca had told me that he thought the poet had attempted suicide after Yolanda left. Now he was reluctant to let me go. There was a question which plagued him.

“Tell me, what was her relationship with Ezequiel? They say in the papers he slept with all his followers. She didn't sleep with him, did she?”

The same thought tormented me. We stood there, two rivals seeking from each other assurance it was impossible to give.

“There's no way of knowing one way or the other.”

He nodded seriously to himself, zipped up his jacket, and I watched him sidle off, his head on one side, book under his arm, the other hand trailing along the railings.

Still, there are answers I can't find. What position did Yolanda hold? How did she relate to the Central Committee? To Edith? I would have bet on Edith being jealous of her. Yolanda was privileged, middle-class, not a jungle-tested killer. Or was she? Had she planted car bombs and cut throats? When I asked the poet, he remembered a Sunday lunch they'd had once and her squeamishness over a chicken. She couldn't sever its head and the creature had scampered around making the most awful mess until he had to finish the job for her.

I ask all these questions, but always I go back to her relationship with Ezequiel. What went on between them?

Yolanda's trial was a charade. The few details I have were passed on to me by the governor of the prison at which she is held.

She was flown to Villaria, and from there transported in a lorry to a military base on the lake. The trial was staged so quickly that it would have been impossible to prepare a proper defence. She never saw her judges. They sat behind reflecting glass, and she spoke to them as she might have spoken to the mirrored walls in her studio.

The voices accused her of fifty-four charges. Her lawyer's plea that she was solely the errand girl for No. 459 Calle Diderot was dismissed out of hand. She belonged to the Section of Operative Support. She found safe houses, made connections, linked one cell with another. Her calling, her privileged position allowed her to move freely in society without arousing suspicion. The most damning evidence was a mention in her notebook of the name of the café outside which the Miraflores bomb had exploded.

She was sentenced to imprisonment for the rest of her natural life at the women's penitentiary in Villaria. The senior judge acknowledged the severity of the sentence. It attested, he said, to the state's determination to prevent “the superficial attractions of the accused from serving as a beacon to others”. In passing sentence, he had acceded to the prosecutor's demand for a symbolic punishment.

She would be condemned to a cell without light.

I've never been to the compound in Villaria. And I suspect it's worse than I've been told. But I do have this certainty: If her cell is anything like Ezequiel's, it's unendurable.

Picture a tiny, windowless room thirty feet underground. If you open your arms, your fingers scrape unpainted concrete. If you raise your hands, you touch the ceiling. If you walk three paces, you smash your face.

Along one wall is a narrow bed with a mattress and a blanket. The air battles its way into the room through a vent in the ceiling. Apart from the bed, there is nothing other than a towel, a plastic water jug, and a plastic basin which can be used as a toilet. At least that is what you see with the lights on. What it's like without light, I cannot even begin to imagine.

Do you realize the horror of this? A woman used to movement, who is afraid of the dark, who is used to a lighted stage, now living in absolute darkness, no one to acknowledge her except the guard who collects the tray. There are no mirrors. She can't know what she looks like. Perhaps her eyes will milk up, like one of those deep-water, dark-dwelling fishes they net from the lake at that altitude.