Free The Dancer Upstairs by Nicholas Shakespeare Page B

did you next see Ezequiel?”
    It was the second night and Emilio had removed their plates. Dyer, arriving early, had found Rejas already sitting at the corner table.
    â€œSee him? Five days after he was pronounced dead. But I didn’t know it was Ezequiel.”
    â€œWho did you think it was?”
    â€œHow well do you know my capital?”
    â€œReasonably well.”
    â€œThen you know Surcos?”
    Dyer did. A prosperous new suburb in the northern outskirts. Rejas leant forward, raising his chin.
    Picture this. It’s about eight-thirty at night. I’ve parked my car and I’m looking up at the first floor window of the building opposite. A yellow curtain – it is obviously a child’s room – is drawn. There are cartoons of some sort decorating the fabric, but since the room is in darkness I can’t tell what they are. The sliding window is open at one corner where a breeze sucks at the curtain, distorting the characters. I am trying to decide who they are – whether it’s Mickey Mouse or maybe Dumbo the Elephant – when a light cuts on and a strange blue glow, full of underwatery movements, flickers over the ceiling. A figure moves across the light. I see someone pause behind the curtain and very slightly part it.
    Although bracing myself for an uncomfortable interview, I do remember wondering who is in that upstairs room and whether the person framed by those eerie fluorescent shadows is Laura’s teacher – or whether the apartment is even part of the dance studio.
    It’s Laura’s teacher I’m waiting to see. There’s been an embarrassing incident. Due to Quesada’s delay in paying our salaries, my cheque for Laura’s lessons has bounced. I hope the embarrassment is temporary. Deprived of Ezequiel’s terror, I have tired of my profession overnight. It’s as if Ezequiel’s death has set me free.
    But Ezequiel is not dead.
    Surcos, if you have to live in the capital, is a pleasant enough suburb. It’s about thirty minutes’ drive from Miraflores and twenty from Laura’s school in Belgrano. It smells of cooking oil, geraniums and, before it rains, fish.
    Calle Diderot is a wide street, well tended, and you can imagine children running along the pavement or playing on the tidy beds of grass between each house. Populated by lawyers, doctors and teachers who have migrated from the coast, the street has a café, its own video store and an estate agency operating from a garage.
    Jacaranda trees on each side of the street give speckled shade to eighty houses, painted brightly to remind owners of their fishing villages. The houses are modern, two-storeyed, with barbed wire between the roof terraces. Their little front gardens are enclosed by walls or by iron fences, sometimes with a dog’s muzzle poking through.
    That’s how it is now, and that’s how it was then, on the night I’m talking about.
    The ballet school was unremarkable, and was entered through a wall painted the same peppermint green as the building it concealed. One by one the mothers pulled up outside to wait for their daughters. They parked bumper to bumper and sat in their cars, varnishing their nails. Now and then one of them would turn to shout “Get down!” at an uncontrollable poodle.
    Many of these women had been Sylvina’s friends since childhood, but they didn’t marry policemen. They drove new cars, lived in properties facing the sea and could afford cooks. Sylvina saw them often. Iced coffee at the Café Haiti; tennis at San Isidro’s Country Club; aerobics in the Hotel Maria Angola; and – the latest excitement – a literary dinner which required the wife whose turn it was to host the event to deliver a short talk on a modern novel, explaining why it interested her.
    â€œAgustín!” Marina, sitting in her cherry-red BMW and tilting her face to the side mirror, had been applying her lipstick.