Victories and crimes of romance.

• Author: Mujica, Barbara
• Position: Book Review

El baile de la Victoria, by Antotuo Skarmela. Barcelona: Planeta, 2003.

A combination thriller and romance, El baile de la Victoria, by Chilean writer Antonio Skarmeta, makes you laugh al the same time it pulls at your heartstrings. Angel Santiago and Nicolas Vergara Grey, beneficiaries of a general amnesty, have just been released from prison. Santiago, nicknamed the Cherub, is an adolescent horse thief with a face like an angel, who did five years for making off with his boss' son's favorite mount. Having been brutally sodomized by other inmates in a prison initiation ritual, Santiago holds the warden Santoro responsible and vows to kill him. Vergara Grey is an experienced crook known for the artistry with which he cracks safes. He agreed to take the fall for his partner Monasterio on a big job, only to find, upon getting out of jail, that Monasterio has cheated iron out of his half of the loot.

Unlikely associates, Santiago and Vergara Grey join forces to help a young girl, Victoria Ponce, with dreams of becoming a ballerina. Angel meets Victoria in a cheap movie theater, and they soon become lovers. In despair over her mother's depression, her lather's death years before at the hands of Pinochet's thugs, and her own recent expulsion from high school, Victoria's Girly refuge is the dance studio. However, she cannot advance in her ballet studies without a high school degree. In love for the first time, Angel helps her prepare lot the high school readmission test, and the girl soon memorizes huge amounts of material. When Victoria fails, it is not because she hasn't learned the disparate Nets dictated by the educational bureaucracy, but because the committee is too obtuse to appreciate her aesthetic sensibilities. And now she cannot go back to dance school because she is in arrears with the tuition.

Anxious to assist his girlfriend, Angel tries to convince Vergara Grey to help him to pull off el gran golpe, the great heist, which will pull them all out of poverty. However, Vergara Grey has decided to go straight in hopes of winning back his wife and son, who have repudiated him. When Victoria becomes suicidal and winds up in the hospital, Vergara Grey knows he has to help. He and Angel contrive not Girly to get the girl back into ballet school, but, with the cooperation of a well-meaning cop, to give her the opportunity to dance in the Municipal Theater. Convinced that his Wife win never come back to him, especially now that he has nothing...