Free The Dancer Upstairs by Nicholas Shakespeare

twenty years, but no downpour will disguise the contours of a familiar cheek spotted through a car window.
    In short, you change your habits, your instincts, your face.
    But one thing you can’t change is your illness.
    You remember how I typed “eczema” on the basic description of Melquiades Artemio Duran? Well, Ezequiel suffered from psoriasis.
    It’s not a pretty disease. The new cells push up before the old cells are ready to leave and you erupt in nasty weeping yellow scabs. But what’s odd about psoriasis when you consider Ezequiel is that you don’t find it among the Indians. It’s a Caucasian disease. A white man’s disease.
    It’s also incurable. It might fluctuate and there may be periods when it’s not present, but always it comes back. What you’ve got to watch out for is the stage when it becomes rampant, because that’s when the sores become infected and the smallest movement is agony.
    For a long time Ezequiel’s bad skin was my most concrete lead. After any attack by his people on a village, I would interrogate the chemist. Sometimes they’d lie, sometimes there would be no records, but where records existed these often revealed a sale of Kenacort E.
    It suggested Ezequiel’s illness might be worsening. If this was the case, I was confident he would be forced soon to abandon the high altitudes. You see, at a certain altitude his blood would coagulate. He wouldn’t be able to go on breathing, and that’s why he would want to make his way down to the coast.
    I have no proof to back this, but I suspect Ezequiel’s ailment was connected with his decision to go underground. His behaviour did suggest a certain vanity. All those spots – would you want to be seen in that condition? How else does one explain the quantum leap from Professor Edgardo Vilas, the mild-mannered philosopher, into President Ezequiel, the revolutionary?
    I am not a Kantian philosopher. I find his work hardly intelligible. But I understand it enough to know that Ezequiel took an á la carte attitude to Kant’s works, and made such a meal of his philosophy that its originator would not have recognized it.
    Kant does have one image which holds some meaning for me: the bird which thought it could fly faster in a vacuum, without air to beat against. For me, that is where Ezequiel’s reading and his texts and his philosophy had led him, to airless haunts where all gusts of life were extinguished. He’d started out with his ideology, but he was dealing with people for whom ideology meant nothing. Blood and bone and death were all that mattered to the people in my valley. It was idiotic to think they would care about Kant or Mao or Marx, and so he taught them in blood and bone and death, and he had become intoxicated.
    My pursuit went on.
    I got used to the overlarded soup of the canteen, the wary nods in corridors, the unanswering shelves of documents and photographs, the despair of an unfinished case.
    I drove home.
    I crouched before Laura as she sat in her playpen and shielded with both hands the flicker of my love for Sylvina. But my vocation had generated a deepening hostility. The unsolicited touch of our first meeting, that look across the table in the faculty library, such intimacies had fled into a darkness from which I could not retrieve them.
    Day after day passed like this. Year by year. Twelve of them.
    It came as a shock, therefore, when Ezequiel’s death was announced. On 3 March 1992, Alberto Quesada, Minister of the Interior, gave a television interview in the course of which, questioned about the insurrection in the highlands, he adopted this line: Ezequiel, a criminal, a one-off, was certainly dead. If he wasn’t dead, why didn’t he show his face? He was the Eternal Flame. How could you conceal his splendid blaze?
    Because, Quesada jeered, he had perished. He was like one of those tyrannical sultans whose death is not admitted,