A Crack in the Wall

by Claudia Piñeiro

  Claudia Piñeiro lives in Buenos Aires. For many years she was a journalist, playwright and television scriptwriter and in 1992 she won the prestigious Pléyade journalism award. She has more recently turned to fiction and is the author of the novel Thursday Night Widows, awarded the Clarin Prize for Fiction, and All Yours, both previously published by Bitter Lemon Press.

  Also available from Bitter Lemon Press

  by Claudia Piñeiro:

  All Yours

  Thursday Night Widows

  A CRACK

  IN THE WALL

  Claudia Piñeiro

  Translated from the Spanish

  by Miranda France

  BITTER LEMON PRESS

  LONDON

  BITTER LEMON PRESS

  First published in the United Kingdom in 2013 by Bitter Lemon Press, 37 Arundel Gardens, London W11 2LW

  www.bitterlemonpress.com

  First published in Spanish as Las grietas de Jara by Alfaguara, Buenos Aires, 2009

  Bitter Lemon Press gratefully acknowledges the financial assistance of Arts Council England

  © Claudia Piñeiro, 2009

  English translation © Miranda France, 2013

  Published by arrangement with Literarische Agentur Dr.Ray-Güde Mertin Inh. Nicole Witt e. K., Frankfurt am Main, Germany

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without written permission of the publisher.

  The moral rights of the author and the translator have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All the characters and events described in this novel are imaginary and any similarity with real people or events is purely coincidental.

  A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978–1–908524–096

  Typeset by Tetragon, London

  Printed and bound by Cox & Wyman Ltd., Reading, Berkshire

  “Listen. Suppose this wasn’t a crack in you – suppose it was a crack in the Grand Canyon.”

  “The crack’s in me,” I said heroically.

  The Crack-Up

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  1

  Pablo Simó is at his desk drawing the outline of a building that will never exist. He has been making the same sketch for years, like a man condemned to have the same dream every night: one about an eleven-storey tower facing north. There’s a series of identical drawings in a file; he doesn’t know exactly how many, he lost count a long time ago – more than a hundred, less than a thousand. They aren’t numbered, but each one is dated and signed: Pablo Simó, Architect. If he wanted to know which day he drew the first one, he would need to find it and look at the date, but he never does that; the most recent bears today’s date: 15 March 2007. One day he plans to count them all, these drawings of the same tower on the same plot of land, with the same number of windows and balconies identically spaced, always the same façade, the same garden to the front and sides of the building, with the same trees, one on either side of the front door. Pablo suspects that if he were to count the bricks drawn freehand on the façade, he would find exactly the same number on each drawing. And for that very reason he doesn’t count them – because it scares him to think that this obsessive drawing isn’t the product of his own application but of some external force.

  His eight-of-an-inch Caran d’Ache pencil goes up and down the page, shading, retouching, and Simó tells himself, yet again, that he will build this tower one day, when he finally decides to leave the Borla and Associates architectural practice. But this isn’t the day to make such a decision, and so Pablo tries not to dwell on the fact that he is already forty-five, that this tower gets further every day from being anything more than graphite lines on a sheet of white paper and that a mere two yards from him Marta Horvat is carelessly crossing her legs as though there were nobody sitting opposite to notice.

  He notices, of course, though Pablo Simó no longer thinks of Marta in the way he once did. Not that he doesn’t want to, but for some time now – and he would rather not remember precisely how long – he hasn’t been able to think of her without sudden and even violent interruptions to his pleasurable fantasies. It was different before. He used to dream of Marta all day and in his mind he owned her; he undressed her, he kissed her, touched her – and, since he couldn’t foresee ever separating from Laura, Pablo Simó imagined that if his wife died, as all of us shall die one day, Marta Horvat would cease to be simply that woman he undressed in his fantasies and he would try to win her for real.

  Two yards from where Pablo is drawing, with a skill that comes as naturally to him as walking, talking or breathing, Marta sits at her own desk, shouting down the telephone at a contractor. She’s complaining that this man hasn’t finished a cementing job on time; she says she doesn’t care about the rain or the two public holidays that fell within that month, much less about the transport workers’ strike. She declares, with a vehemence that is all too familiar to Pablo, that she likes people who keep their word. And she cuts him off. Pablo pictures the contractor, left hanging at the other end of the line, reeling from this tongue-lashing and with no chance of a comeback. Without looking up from his drawing, Pablo knows that Marta has risen from her desk and is pacing around the office. He hears each step, hears her light a cigarette, hears her throw the lighter back into her bag and the bag onto a chair. He hears her walking again and, finally, coming over to him. Pablo covers his sketch with other papers; he doesn’t want Marta to see what he is doing – not that she hasn’t found him drawing this north-facing, eleven-storey tower before, but he wants to be spared her comments about him and his useless obsessions. Mind you, Marta Horvat would never use those words; she wouldn’t say “useless obsessions”, she would simply say, “The plot ratio doesn’t work, Pablo.” And even though Pablo doesn’t need anyone to tell him what that means, over the years she has often explained it to him, apparently in the belief that Pablo doesn’t really grasp how important it is to exploit to the maximum the relationship between a plot’s square footage and the number of flats that can be built on it. For that reason, she says, nobody will ever construct a building like the one he has in mind on any plot in Buenos Aires that has enough square feet to build something higher than his whimsical eleven storeys. He always lets Marta say her piece, but Pablo Simó knows her argument would collapse if he pointed out one detail: he doesn’t want to build the tower in Buenos Aires. This isn’t the city where he aspires to carry out the first project he can really call his own. He knows it too well. There isn’t a street he hasn’t gone down looking for plots for Borla and Associates, and his exhaustive surveys have taught him that you can’t lay a single brick in Buenos Aires without first finding a building and condemning it to annihilation: a car park, a school, a family home, a cinema, a warehouse, a gym – it doesn’t matter what, so long as the width and surface area allow for a high-rise. Pablo Simó doesn’t want to raise his building on the rubble of something else, but in Argentina’s capital there is no longer any alternative. What Marta doesn’t realize is that when the day finally comes he’ll choose another city. He doesn’t yet know whic
h – perhaps somewhere he’s never been – but he does know that it will be somewhere where a north-facing building can get the morning sun and be built without anyone shedding tears for what was there before.

  Marta pauses behind him. On top of the pile of papers Pablo has used to cover his sketch is the advertisement he has to look at before returning it to the agency. In a few days they are going to start selling another building off-plan and the announcement needs to appear in the weekend’s newspapers. The heading they’ve chosen is “Paradise Exists”, in big, colourful typography above a page of text at the bottom of which the same burgundy letters spell out “Borla and Associates”. Marta reads it over his shoulder. She suggests he cross out “laundry room” and replace it with “utility room”. Pablo isn’t sure, but she insists, reminding him that the agency must have used as a template the announcement for the last building they sold, the one in Avenida La Plata, and that while a laundry room is fine for Boedo, it isn’t for Palermo. Pablo lets himself be persuaded, crosses out “laundry” and writes “utility” above it. Marta, evidently taking this small intervention as a territorial victory, returns to her desk and packs up for the day.

  In fact the day is not over yet, although Borla himself seems to be concluding business, coming out of his office carrying his briefcase and an umbrella that must have been left there on some previous occasion, given that the sky dawned blue over Buenos Aires this morning and stayed blue all day. Borla walks over to Marta’s desk and asks some routine questions while taking advantage of his position to peer into her cleavage. She smiles and answers; he lowers his voice and Pablo can’t make out what they’re saying, but he can see that the bad mood that induced Marta Horvat to shout at the contractor has evaporated. Marta’s hands move in the air, accompanying each of her words. Pablo, still at his desk, follows their movement, hypnotized by the red nails; he watches her hands dance in the air, swirling back and forth, making circles, pausing as though ready to swoop and finally covering the face that disappears behind them when Marta bursts out laughing. Borla draws closer and whispers something quickly into her ear, some word that takes no longer to say than it takes him to lean in to her then move away to watch her reaction. And then they both laugh.

  All indications are that in a few minutes Pablo will have the office to himself, that he’ll proceed as he does every evening, tidying his drawing board and desk, patting his top pocket to be sure that the tape measure is there where it should be and putting his smooth-paged notebook into the inside pocket of his jacket; he’ll attach the Caran d’Ache pencil between the second and third buttons of his shirt, with its point tucked in under the fabric, and finally he too will go, after all the others. However, things don’t always work out as imagined, and on that evening that Pablo Simó drew, yet again, his eleven-storey tower that will never be built, precisely at the moment that Borla says to Marta, “Want a lift anywhere?” there is a knock at the door and a young woman steps into the room, wearing black trainers, jeans and a white T-shirt, a woman carrying a much larger backpack than you might expect of someone merely popping in, a woman Pablo judges to be no more than twenty-five years old, and without any greeting or preliminaries she says:

  “Do any of you know Nelson Jara?”

  And at that moment, just as Pablo had always feared might one day come to pass, the world pauses for a fraction of a second before immediately beginning to spin at top speed in the opposite direction. All three of them, without answering the woman or saying anything, without even exchanging glances, feel themselves transported back through time to the night, three years ago, that they swore together never to revisit.

  “I’m sorry, but I’m looking for Nelson Jara…” the girl tries again.

  Borla is the first to break his trance and ask, “For whom?”

  “Nelson Jara,” she repeats.

  “It doesn’t ring a bell,” says Borla. Then he asks, “Does the name mean anything to you, Pablo? Do you know of any Nelson Jara?”

  Borla waits for the answer they agreed on, but Pablo Simó isn’t going to give it. “No, I don’t remember” – that’s what he’s supposed to say, but he says neither that nor anything else. He keeps quiet, following Borla in as far as his silence will take him, yet unable to utter a single word, for all that the other man is fixing him with that particular expression. How can Pablo deny what he knows, and what Marta knows and what Borla knows: that Nelson Jara is dead, buried a few feet beneath the heavy-wear tiles over which the three of them walk every day on their way into or out of the office, under the concrete floor of the parking lot, exactly where they left him that night, three years ago.

  2

  It takes Borla less than five minutes to get rid of the girl. He says that the name – was it Nelson Jara? – does in fact sound familiar, perhaps because he sold him a flat or contracted him for some job; that if it’s important he can look in the files, but if her concrete question is does any of them know anything about this gentleman, then the answer would have to be no. Borla sounds entirely truthful; even Pablo would believe him if he didn’t know that he was lying. But the situation isn’t quite so simple for Marta, who cracks the knuckles on both hands, making a dry sound as though the bones were literally breaking under the pressure, like the one Pablo kept hearing her make that night, and that sound, or the memory of that sound, heightens his feeling of unease. Then Borla speaks again, directing himself more casually to this girl who has waylaid the end of their working day.

  “Now, forgive my asking, but who are you?”

  And this time she is the one who seems uncomfortable and unwilling to give an answer that may provoke more questions.

  “I just need to find him and sort out some business, that’s all.”

  “It must be important business,” Borla says.

  “It is to me.”

  “What sort of business is it?”

  “Personal business,” she says, indicating by the tone of her voice that she doesn’t wish to go into details.

  Pablo hears these words, “personal business”, and looks up. The girl’s hiding something and, although she holds her head high and looks Borla in the eye, Pablo discerns a hesitancy in her movements that shows she didn’t come prepared for this barrage of questions. Whereas they have had time in the last three years to prepare. They decided in advance how they would respond to all the possible questions. They tested their answers, they practised in front of mirrors, agreeing among themselves – Marta, Borla and Simó – what they would and wouldn’t say.

  Borla has successfully turned the tables and now it’s evident that the girl is under scrutiny.

  “It’s personal business,” she repeats, picking up her backpack and slinging it over her shoulder. “But if Jara doesn’t show up he won’t be able to help with it, so thanks anyway.” And with no further explanation she opens the door and leaves.

  For a few seconds Borla, Marta Horvat and Pablo Simó remain in the same attitudes they had adopted when the girl disappeared through the door, and who knows how much longer they might have stayed in them – but just then the telephone rings and all three jump. Pablo answers. It’s Laura, who, giving him no time to say anything, begs him to come home early. He hears a kind of strangled sigh at the other end of the line, as though she were making an effort not to cry. Then she says again:

  “Can you get back early, Pablo?”

  “I’m always home early, Laura. What’s wrong? Why don’t you tell me what’s happened?”

  “I’ll tell you when you get here.”

  “Is it something to do with Francisca again?”

  “When you get here, I said.”

  Laura hangs up. Pablo stares for a moment at the receiver before hanging up himself. He’s about to explain the conversation to Borla and Marta when he realizes that they haven’t paid the slightest attention to it, that not only do they not care who rang him or what’s going on but, also, that they would be irritated to hear any observation not connected to the girl who has just le
ft and what her unexpected presence in their office might signify for the three of them.

  “What do we do, Mario?” Marta asks Borla.

  “Nothing,” he says, and Pablo can’t decide whether his assurance is real or feigned. “Don’t let’s give it a greater significance than it has. The girl came looking for Jara. Jara isn’t here and that’s all there is to it. These are normal things that happen all the time. We knew it could happen, we’ve always known. We’ve been amazingly lucky that for three years nobody came asking for him, right Pablo?”

  But Pablo Simó doesn’t answer; he doesn’t even realize that Borla is speaking to him. He stares at his hands, as he stared at Marta’s in the office, though without cracking the knuckles as she did a moment ago. Pablo simply looks at them, turning the palms up and down, opening and closing his fists while he remembers how muddy they got that night, all that earth under his nails, and, above all, the pain – a pain that took a long time to fade and that comes back in damp weather, speaking to him of the thing he cannot forget. Marta, though still shaking, jumps in and answers for him, as if they had been playing cards and Pablo had said “pass”.

  “I am worried, though…Why did this girl come precisely here to look for Jara? What gave her the idea that we might know something?”

  “She won’t only have come here, Marta,” Borla says. “She’ll have been asking for him all around the neighbourhood. I bet she’d already been to the café, the butcher, the concierge at his building.” And in a final attempt to reassure her he makes a stab at metaphor: “Marta, let’s not make a mountain out of a molehill.”

  His eyes are open wider than usual, and Borla waits to see the effect of this idiom. When neither Marta nor Pablo says anything, he continues:

  “Look, I don’t think that girl’s going to come back asking for Jara, and if she does we’ll tell her the same thing – that we don’t have a clue where he is.”