Jonathan Yardley

A thief seeks the heart of a dancer -- and the help of a safecracker.

THE DANCER AND THE THIEF

By Antonio Skarmeta

Translated from the Spanish by Katherine Silver

Norton. 300 pp. $24.95

The salient characteristic of the fiction of Antonio Skarmeta is charm. This is by no means the faint compliment it may at first seem to be. Charm is a quality to be valued wherever one finds it, for it simultaneously engages and pleases the person to whom it is directed. In his most famous novel, The Postman, Skarmeta tells the story of a humble Chilean postal carrier who befriends the great poet Pablo Neruda and eventually enlists him as an ally in his campaign to win the love of the most desirable woman in town. A charming little book, it was made into an even more charming movie, "Il Postino," which enjoyed considerable popular success and was nominated for several Academy Awards in 1996.

Now, Skarmeta charms once again. The Dancer and the Thief, like The Postman, is a love story, and an improbable one as well. It takes place in Santiago in the years following the fall of Augusto Pinochet, the end of state-induced terror and the tentative, hesitant dawn of democracy. Santiago is "slippery, ambiguous, promiscuous," trying to catch up with the world. Skarmeta writes about it with a mixture of affection and exasperation:

"Now the city had been modernized and the Mapocho [River] tamed by civil engineers. They diverted its course to build freeways, straight as arrows, that took the city's wealthy citizens from the exclusive suburbs to their banks downtown. The river was no longer the refuge of street urchins and young hooligans; now it was a kind of backyard to Santiago's financial center. Along its banks rose four or five tall steel buildings that aspired to being skyscrapers; Chileans, with their self-deprecating sense of humor, had unofficially baptized that pretentious, stuck-up neighborhood Sanhattan."

This is the same place where, "after the military coup, people would stand on the bridges and point down at the dead floating by, their skulls and chests crushed by soldiers' bullets." That time is gone, but memories of it haunt the city and the country, and in various ways it touches the lives of the three people at the center of this novel. The protagonist -- the thief of the title -- is Angel Santiago, 20 years old, who as the novel opens is being released from prison after two years in custody for stealing a horse. Known to his fellow prisoners as "The Cherub" because of his youth and stunning good looks, he was subjected to gang rape by inmates at the time of his incarceration and is determined, now, to retaliate against the warden who countenanced it.

A second prisoner released at the same time is Nicolas Vergara Gray, a safecracker of legendary skills who leaves prison with "a solemn vow to God, the press, and the prison authorities that he would never again break the law, and with the money his partner owed him for having kept his mouth shut throughout the trial, he would be able to lead a modest and honorable life without fleecing anyone or groveling for a few pesos." Though his "crimes have been unanimously acclaimed as true works of art," now he wants nothing so much as to reunite with his wife, Teresa Capriatti, "the most beautiful woman in the world," and their son, Pedro Pablo, a teenager who, "though he had made a few cursory visits to his father in jail, never even tried to hide his complete indifference."

The third person at the center of the novel -- the dancer of the title -- is Victoria, a "tall, thin" teenager whom Angel encounters outside a movie theater soon after his release from prison. He is immediately captivated by her. Her father was a victim of Pinochet's terror, arrested "in front of the school where he taught" and found two days later "in a ditch with his throat slit." She thinks about her father constantly because she fears that "if I don't, he'll disappear forever." She attends dance school and displays enormous talent, but is expelled and reduced to "frequenting raunchy movie houses just to keep warm." She's "a very sensitive girl" whose dream is "to dance ballet . . . at the Municipal Theater in Santiago, the Colon in Buenos Aires, the Teatro de Madrid, the Metropolitan Opera House in New York," because she holds "ballet and modern dance in a sacred space, immune to all worldly corruption, beyond the reach of her depressed mother, her father's murder, the professors who looked down on her for her indifference, for her silence."

All in all they are an appealing crew, but they live in or near the edge of the criminal world, where "the only things that work are violence and patience. . . . The first will make you rich or lead you back to jail; the second will keep you poor but free." Those are the words of a prisoner known as Lira the Dwarf. Angel, who is "already losing patience with being poor," is determined to carry out a plan that the Dwarf imparted to him in prison, a bold raid on the office of a corrupt government official who rakes in enormous bribes. The problem is that the plan requires the participation of Vergara Gray, because only he has the skill to crack the safe in which the money is kept. Thus there begins the second of the novel's two courtships. The first is Angel courting Victoria. The second is Angel courting Vergara Gray -- praising his skills, appealing to his vanity, gleefully asserting that "we are father and son, Don Nico!"

Obviously the outcomes of both courtships must be left for the reader to discover, but The Dancer and the Thief is much more than an agreeable caper. Though Skarmeta scarcely ranks at the very top of Latin America's remarkably distinguished and varied literary elite, he is a serious writer to whom the death and rebirth of democracy in his native Chile is an endlessly compelling subject. Now in his late 60s, Sk¿rmeta fled Chile more than three decades ago as Pinochet clamped down -- he had practiced journalism and taught literature at the University of Chile -- and though he has lived in Germany on and off since 1975, his burning interest and literary preoccupation remain his home country.

His attitude toward it, as toward its capital of Santiago, is a mixture of exasperation and love. When Vergara Gray tells his son about a forebear who invented the telephone but lost the U.S. patent to Alexander Graham Bell, the boy replies: "You are so Chilean. Instead of commemorating victories, you celebrate defeats. Like our national hero, Arturo Prat: everybody remembers him with great affection because he lost the naval battle of Iquique against the Peruvians." Though in fairness Skarmeta really ought to acknowledge that Peru itself honors as "heroes" many leaders who lost battles in the same War of the Pacific, it is true that the self-deprecatory streak runs strong in Chile. It is scarcely anything to be ashamed of.

Skarmeta also is proud of Chile for rising above Pinochet and establishing what now is one of the few strong democracies in Latin America. Its president, Michelle Bachelet, is capable and widely respected in the international community, its economy is strong and its vino is maravilloso. Though the ending that Skarmeta gives his characters falls well short of happy, the Chile that he portrays herein is vibrant and strong. *

Jonathan Yardley's e-mail address is yardleyj@washpost.com.