The Dancer Upstairs Read Online Free Page B

rose and set at the same time each day. He liked the unforgeable smells of the port, and the torpor of the riverside, which met a commensurate emotion in him. Something having snapped in his bond to the newspaper, he suddenly looked forward to this time on his hands, time to reflect on the future, time to lay to rest one or two hungry ghosts, time to plot his book. There was nothing and no one to distract him, he remembered thinking, as he walked towards a restaurant he had marked out earlier in the day.
    Only Euclides da Cunha, whose Rebellion in the Backlands he was thankful he had brought with him.

2
    Dyer sat down at a table and at once began reading. He had read a chapter by the time the man at the window called for the bill. Dyer smiled, trying to remember where they could have met. The man responded with the unfavouring half-smile people reserve for helpful shopkeepers. Dyer looked away.
    The pattern repeated itself the following night. The two diners sat together in that room for no longer than twenty minutes before, punctual as the last ferry, the man called for his bill. They read and ate their meals in silence. It must have confounded the waiter to watch his only clients sitting like that, not exchanging a word.
    Dyer would have taken the man for a fellow stranger to Pará had not the waiter treated him so respectfully. Emilio hurried for no one, yet when signalled by the man at table seventeen he stopped whatever he was doing and directed himself between the straw-seated chairs, clasping his black folder as though it contained, not a bill for a grilled fish, but the freedom of the city. A moment later, walking like someone out of uniform, his other customer brushed past Dyer’s table.
    But Emilio could not satisfy Dyer’s curiosity. The courtesy with which he brought and removed plates concealed a splendid disdain. Emilio, if Dyer was reading, was not above lifting both book and plate and dusting away the crumbs, all the while smiling apologetically as though he were somehow to blame for their presence on the table. His manner seemed determined by the assumption that Dyer would leave no tip. Emilio would call at his back as he left, “Good evening, Senhor,” as if he didn’t mean it. These words, spoken in correct Portuguese but with the trace of a Spanish accent, were the only three he addressed to Dyer. When asked about the person at the window, he shrugged.
    Not until the third night did the man pause at Dyer’s table.
    Dyer was so engrossed in Rebellion in the Backlands that several seconds passed before he became aware of someone looking over his shoulder.
    The man held out his own cloth-bound volume. They were reading the same book.
    â€œI don’t believe it. Extraordinary!” Dyer got to his feet. The coincidence was not so extraordinary, at least not in Brazil. But in that scarcely patronized restaurant it was strange indeed.
    Dyer gestured at the chair opposite. The man checked his watch.
    â€œI cannot stay long,” he said, in Spanish. He drew the chair to him and sat on the edge of the seat, facing away. “I am expected at home.”
    Dyer sought Emilio, but, observant as ever, he was already advancing.
    â€œBeer?”
    â€œA coffee, I’d prefer.”
    The man placed his book, the Spanish edition, on the table. “If only the author could see!”
    Dyer said, “You know how people go on about a book, then you are disappointed. But it’s as good as I hoped.”
    â€œI’ve come to reading late.” His face had a preoccupied look. “My father had a library, but I never made use of it. At last I have time.”
    â€œThen we’re in the same boat.”
    The eyes which inspected Dyer were brown and steady. He was neither good-looking nor ugly, and while he would not have turned a young girl’s head, someone older might have been struck by his face and the evidence of a passion which had left its