The Dancer Upstairs (32 page)

The move to the city has not arrested the spread of the disease. His hairless chest is patched with white fleckmarks where the skin is peeling. These sores, the shape and size of tears, also speckle his arms and the insides of his legs, while a thick red rash torments the back of his neck. An unkempt, greying beard conceals the eruption on his plump face. His scalp shows pinkly through a thin scrub of curls. If he scratches it, the fingers come away stuck with the hairs.

To handle a book, even, is an agony. There are brown pustules on the palms of his hands, on the soles of his feet, in the skin of his armpits, and inside his ears and belly-button. Since he left the jungle six months ago his nails have grown crumbly. On his right hand three have lifted from the nailbed. He bathes them every morning in a bowl of warm oil, but the delicate flesh around and under them is weepy. Against the pain, a doctor has advised: “Find an image you like. Imagine yourself on a beach, or your skin being soothed by the sun.”

The only thing that can help is to be in the sun.

He tries light therapy. In the evenings he sits under the sunlamp and reads, but it is never wise to read for long. He has articles brought to him on the current state of research into his condition. He experiments with the latest medicines. He prays for a miraculous breakthrough, but his head tells him there is no cure. A doctor has told him: “It's your Spanish blood coming though.” But he still hopes.

Downstairs, the tempo quickens. The girls have changed into pointe-shoes and are leaping through the air. He hears the yelp of the shoes, the thump of feet as the dancers land, the occasional, less exact, sound of someone falling over, the teacher's handclaps passing like gunshots through the floor.

“Laura, do you want to have a go?”

Ezequiel closes his eyes.

He is awoken by the young dancers applauding their teacher.

A mosquito feeds on the back of his hand. He watches the blood fill its belly. He lifts his hand and the insect is gone.

A minute later he limps into the bathroom and claws a flattened tube from the basin. He squeezes a length of greenish jelly on to his fingers and rubs it into his neck and behind his ears and on his chin until the beard glistens. Lifting his vest, he smears the foul-smelling stuff over his stomach. Then he unbuckles his trousers and does the same on the inside of each leg. Having shielded the exposed skin, he spreads the Dithranol – very carefully, since it burns. Finally he swallows the last two pills from a brown box. He has been taking these pills since June. They make him liverish, but on parts of his body he has noticed the rash has stopped spreading. He drops the empty carton into a bucket under the sink.

Beneath his feet, below him, he hears the girls turning on the showers. The sounds are distinct. He hears their giggles, the water hosing their bodies, their complaints about the lesson.

“I told her from the start my neck's out from last night.”

“Doesn't she understand we're exhausted?”

“My physio told me I shouldn't be pushing it, and there she was – pushing it.”

“Shit, my feet are bleeding again.”

Sometimes the girls talk about sex while they soap themselves, or as they whip their long hair from side to side under the hot air vent. But tonight in the shower they talk about Laura.

This dance they're talking about, she had performed it while he slept.

“You used to dance like a lollipop,” says a grudging voice. “What happened to you?”

They ask questions, trying to sound nonchalant.

“Was it as amazing as it looked?”

“Go on, Laura. What was it like?”

The girl called Laura speaks. She sounds embarrassed. She dreamed she was standing in the air.

Twelve hours after I last saw Yolanda, in the early hours of Friday morning, a car bomb exploded on a roundabout in the main street of Miraflores, killing twenty-seven people and gouging a lorry-sized hole in the road outside the Café Haiti. The debris maimed scores of others, among them the cheerful waitress from Judio, whose nose was sliced off. There was no doubting the intended target: Cleopatra's Hotel, where the Foreign Minister was to have entertained ambassadors from countries of the European Community to breakfast. But an accident spared the hotel. At the roundabout the getaway car crashed into one loaded with a mixture of fertilizer, diesel oil and dynamite. Their bumpers became entangled. When the café's security guard walked over to help, the drivers ran off across the park. The collision must have damaged the detonating mechanism, because ten seconds later the front car blew up, the force of the seventeen-hundred-pound bomb catapulting it into the Café Haiti, which caught fire.

I heard the thunderclap from ten miles away, having just arrived in Calle Diderot. It was seven in the morning and the street was rubbing its eyes. Opposite, a schoolgirl leaned against a wall talking to a friend, their legs the colour of cooking oil in the sun. The bottle boy cried out and they glanced up, which encouraged him to bicycle past waving both hands in the air. Red-faced, talking both at once, they turned back to each other, ignoring him.

“Bottles! Bottles!”

The earth jolted between his cries, but the girls did not look up.

There were few details to be had over the radio link with headquarters. I tried to contact Sylvina on the mobile phone. As I left she had murmured about some shopping she needed to do. I rang home, but the line was engaged. I waited five minutes and tried again. Still busy. An hour later she answered.

“Yes?”

“It's Agustín.” I was so relieved to hear her voice.

“What's wrong? Are you all right?”

“What about you? What about the bomb?”

“Bomb? I thought it was the gas-mains.”

“You're not hurt then?”

“No. I was washing my hair. I was going to complain. The oven's not working.”

“You know I love you.”

There was a pause. “Agustín, you can't just ring up and say you love me as if that will make up for not saying it when we're together. It won't.”

“Darling, I was worried.”

“I was expecting another call.”

My news had disturbed Sylvina. She wanted to know from me how I thought the bomb would affect her presentation on Sunday night. She had acceptances from ten prospective clients, including Leonora – which was a coup (although Leonora's dachshund had become pregnant by Patricia's Irish setter and Leonora was worried the puppies, expected to be premature, might have to be born by caesarean). Sylvina didn't know how she was going to seat everyone. She needed extra chairs, but she refused point-blank to ask the people upstairs before I had even suggested it.

“Do you think the bomb will affect international flights?”

“Why should it?”

“That's another thing. I have to go to the airport.”

“What on earth for?”

“I'm expecting more samples this afternoon.”

“Can't they wait?”

“No. Patricia placed her order on the strictest condition she had the lipstick in time for the American Chargé's party tomorrow. I've been invited too, which is very sweet since I've met Señora Tennyson only once. It's her fortieth birthday, which means a present I suppose . . . Perhaps a nourishing night-cream . . .”

Dr Zampini drove by, raking a hand through his long grey hair. The bus drew up and the two girls climbed aboard.

Sylvina said, after another pause, “Agustín, would you do me a favour? I've spoken to Marina. She's free to collect the girls later tonight, but she doesn't think she can take them to their lesson. Would you do that? I don't often ask and it would help matters.”

“Shouldn't we pull Laura out of the ballet – for the moment?”

“When everything's going so well for her? Agustín, I simply don't read you sometimes.”

Gomez relieved me at three o'clock. I drove back to headquarters.

In the corridor a long-faced Sergeant Ciras gave me an update. When the car crashed through the Haiti's window, twenty people were in the café. The dead included a director of the Banco Wiese and a junior Foreign Office minister, blown up with his undelivered speech in his briefcase. And there were yet more injuries when tenants of the high-rise blocks recklessly tapped out the shards from their smashed windows on to the pavements below.

I walked upstairs, thinking of an obliterated corner table.

When the General heard I was in the building he sent for me. “What's going on?” he said woozily, as if he had fainted. He grabbed my arm and shut the door. “Calderón has been shitting on my shadow all morning.” He sat down heavily. The fruit bowl was all but empty. The crisis had stripped away his eccentricities, of which the final remnant was one shrivelled orange. The General started to peel it.

“Latest orders: whoever captures Ezequiel, we turn him over to Calderón and keep it secret.” He put the first segment of orange into his mouth.

“What does that mean for Ezequiel, sir?”

“It means they'll shoot him.”

He pulled a face and spat out a pip. “The army's become the government – the government's so desperate they're trying to buy their way out. The reward for Ezequiel's capture is now ten million dollars. I've heard they are debating bringing in the Americans.”

He leaned forward, rubbing his cheeks. “I tell you, Tomcat, this is a cluster-fuck.”

His face had a bedraggled, unimportant look. “Tell me, anything in Perón and Diderot?”

“So far nothing.”

“Gut feeling?”

“Gut feeling is we're close, but we mustn't hurry –”

“Yes, yes, I know about your inflatable bed theory.” He played with the orange peel, plucking out strands of pith which he dropped into the bowl. In a voice so quiet that he might have been speaking to himself, but didn't mind if I overheard, he said: “Fact is, Tomcat, in one sense Brother Ezequiel's won already. The Americans, who believe everything they read in Der Spiegel, reckon he's taken control of the country.”

He lifted his head. “It was a pity he had to bring in all this Mao and Kant, you know. It was perfectly understandable without that claptrap.”

I sought out Sucre in the basement. He stood behind a table, facemask pushed up over his hair, tagging a card to a bin-liner. He had opened the door to allow in air from the courtyard, but the place stank. Bunches of flies rose from the concrete floor as I approached.

“What's exciting today?”

Behind Sucre, dressed in boiler suits and wearing blue rubber gloves, other men raked through a little hill of filth.

“Nothing to give you goose-flesh.”

He studied a chart, wrinkling his nose. “Best of the day? Calle Perón. Item One. Three copies of Marxism Today from No. 29. Item Two. Traces of cocaine in envelope addressed to cultural attaché in No. 34. Item Three. Serrated bone-handled knife from No. 63, probably thrown away by accident since the bag also contained duck à l'orange.”

“Any medicines?”

“Aspirin, Nivea, French talcum powder, mouthwash, yards of dental floss, used Trojans. What you'd expect from diplomats.”

“Calle Diderot?”

“We're collecting tonight. You told us not to be too clockwork. Make the customers uneasy.”

“Clorindo report anything?”

“He frightened off a man climbing into 456. Probably just a thief. Otherwise, he's whitewashed most of the trees.”

“Gomez?”

“Problem with the maid at No. 345, who said her employer liked to plant the geraniums himself. Yesterday he put in all the annuals I gave him.” He set down the paper and tried to wipe off a grease stain he'd made with his thumb. “Soon everyone will want to move in.”

At six o'clock, I drove one of our surveillance vehicles to Laura's ballet school. About the dangers posed to my daughter, I suffered a father's anguish. Should I tell Sylvina, who, in a sort of ecstasy, spent each day ordering lipsticks? Should Laura from now on ride to and from her class with Marina? I didn't want her associated with me. Ought I to remove her from the school? Would you have wanted
your
child to go to dance lessons in that street?

“Laura!”

She didn't recognize the car. I repeated her name, but she turned away.

I opened my door and shouted. “Laura! Samantha!” They turned, walked over.

“Where's mummy?” said Laura, climbing into the back seat.

“She's gone to the airport.”

“Is she leaving?”

“She's collecting something. It's for her presentation on Sunday. Marina will take you both home later.”

In the mirror, her face was serious. “Daddy, do you think we'll ever be rich?”

“No.”

“Yes, we will be. Mummy says we're going to be rich and she's going to buy a house in Paracas and drive us there every weekend in a big purple car.”

“Let's not argue in front of Samantha.”

At this Marina's daughter, small-eyed, ruddy faced, looked superior. The month before she had stabbed Laura with a pencil.

Laura looked out of the window. “This isn't the way.”

I was driving along the coast road. The streets around the Haiti would be blocked off. “There's been a bomb.”

“Samantha knows one of the people who was hurt.”

I looked up. “Is that so?” In the back, Samantha tried to feign sadness but looked proud.

“It's not my friend, Laura, it's Mummy's.”

“You said it was your friend.”

“I did not.”

“How's your flute?” I asked Laura.