Borla speaks these last words with a conviction aimed at ending the discussion and, without waiting for any reaction from the others, he takes the initiative: he walks over to Marta, picks up her handbag and hands it to her, helps her to put on her linen jacket and, as she puts her arm through one of the proffered sleeves, says again, with emphasis:
“There’s no danger, Marta, don’t worry.”
Then Borla opens the door and ushers them out of it, switches off the lights – which is usually Pablo’s job – and stands waiting for them outside, signalling an end to the working day without a thought for the tumult these actions provoke in Pablo Simó, who finds himself obliged to gather up his things in a hurry and bundle them away without due respect for his usual daily ceremony. Although the tape measure, the pencil and the notebook leave with him, they are not in the places that have so long been assigned to them, and that, Pablo senses, cannot be a good omen.
They leave the office, the three of them walking briskly and talking of interchangeable banalities that could equally concern the unseasonably warm mid-March weather as the fact that the days will soon be getting shorter. They alight on whatever subject will allow them to pretend that the afternoon ended when Borla said to Marta, “Would you like a lift anywhere?”, that the door never opened, that there was never a girl in jeans, white T-shirt and black trainers asking fateful questions about Nelson Jara. All they have to do is stroll a few steps to the corner, where Pablo will say goodbye to the others and walk the remaining blocks to the underground station and Marta will get into Borla’s car, and each one of them will continue on to wherever they have to go.
3
The underground journey doesn’t give Pablo Simó much of a chance to occupy his mind with other thoughts, and as he passes through the intermittent light of stations back into the darkness of the tunnel, he can’t help but think of Jara. Since the thoughts are inescapable, he makes an effort at least to picture him alive. Jara entering the office laden with files and papers; Jara choosing the worst moments to be a pain; Jara waiting for him, crouching in the dark passage outside the old office. Jara with his double-entry tables, Jara with his documents highlighted in fluorescent yellow, Jara in his worn suit, Jara and his shoes. They were ugly shoes – he thought as much the first time he saw Jara enter the office carrying a bag full of files, notes and case studies, but he didn’t say anything until the afternoon Jara tripped over some rolls of masking tape that Marta had left beside her desk. Helping him to his feet, Pablo was transfixed by those shoes made of rough, unyielding and shapeless leather, with lots of pleats at the toe, like the crimped edge of a pasty. He couldn’t help asking:
“Why do you wear those shoes, Señor Jara?”
“Because I have flat feet, arquitecto,” the man replied.
They didn’t look like orthopaedic shoes, though perhaps they were, but leaving aside the pleating and the bad-quality leather, the laces were pulled tight and tied with a double knot, and they were badly polished. Jara had gone to the trouble of applying polish – you could see that – but then hadn’t been sufficiently motivated to rub the cloth on the leather and bring out the shine. Even though Pablo is concentrating on shoe care as a way of evoking Jara while he lived, the shoes quickly become a snare, bringing him back again to that night they were worn for the last time. It was Pablo’s job to lift Jara by the feet while Borla had him under the arms. And those shoes were the last thing Pablo saw before they let Nelson Jara fall, finally, into what would become his grave.
The sequence of images is interrupted only twice, on the two occasions Pablo has to change from one line to another. It’s a short respite, because on the next train the sequence rewinds to the beginning. As he’s remembering how his arms felt once they were relieved of that weight, and the muffled sound of Jara’s body falling onto damp earth, the train doors open at Castro Barros and Pablo hurries to get out. He takes the stairs two at a time, anxious to breathe the night air; it’s later than usual and he knows that Laura is waiting for him with some worry related to their daughter. Even though his arrival will not resolve the problem, at least it will allow Laura to unburden herself on him. But half an hour earlier he broke a Kabbalah: before leaving the office he didn’t put his things away according to the usual ritual; he pats his pockets and confirms the absence of his pencil, notebook and tape measure. It’s now all the more important not to neglect the other evening ritual – the last coffee of the day at the corner bar, an ordinary bar, a small and unlikely survivor given its proximity to the Las Violetas patisserie at the intersection of Rivadavia and Medrano, but which, in contrast to Las Violetas, Pablo Simó feels to be his own because he doesn’t have to share it with tourists and the customers who sometimes make their way here from other parts of Buenos Aires.
He picks a table by the window and stirs sugar into his coffee while attempting another strategy for arriving home without Jara, dead, on his brain – think of Marta instead. Best to focus on what works: that reddish-brown mole that Marta Horvat has on one leg, almost at the point where the curve elides into the knee joint. By the time the spoon has completed several circuits of the coffee cup, his strategy is beginning to work and everything in the world is falling away, apart from that mole and the leg to which it belongs and the woman to whom the leg belongs. He pays for his coffee and walks on home, fighting not to let the mole disappear; in this way Pablo manages to relegate what just happened in the office, the rucksack girl, Borla’s lies and Jara’s shoes to the status of minor irritations held in some unidentified place from which Marta’s mole will not let them escape. He puts his key in the lock, opens the door, and on the other side of it finds Laura, sitting in the livingroom armchair, crying.
“I can’t take her any more,” she says.
And Pablo knows that when his wife says “her” in that tone of voice, she means Francisca.
Her quivering voice is a sure sign that she has been shouting, a lot. Laura tells him that she dropped by the school today, unannounced, to pick their daughter up, but that Francisca wasn’t there, nor had she been to any lessons that day, according to the secretary. Then she had gone looking for her and found her in a bar drinking beer with her friend Anita – of all her friends the one Laura likes least – and three guys.
“Three boys,” Pablo corrects her.
“Guys,” she says again. “One of them even had a beard.”
And she says nothing more, just cries and cries from then until dinner time. This isn’t the first time Francisca has bunked off school, nor the first time she’s drunk beer, nor even, Laura suspects, the first time she’s gone out with boys significantly older than herself, but it is the first time her mother has been a witness to these events, and that image – of Francisca hugging her bare legs on the chair, laughing, drinking beer straight from the bottle, passing it to some man, letting another one stroke her knee – is something she cannot transmit to Pablo in any other words than these: I can’t take her any more.
Half an hour later the three of them are sitting around the table. They’ve hardly sat down when the telephone rings. Laura, still red-eyed, looks at them both: first at Pablo, then at Francisca, then at Pablo again. He knows that look, knows it to be his wife’s way of declaring, without recourse to speech, that she is not going to be the one to get up and answer the phone. Francisca holds her mother’s gaze, to Pablo’s dismay, because he knows that it irritates Laura even more. He can detect his wife’s annoyance in the tension of her neck muscles, in the way she moves her food around the plate without eating any of it, but above all the anger shows in the blueish vein that stands out on her forehead, just above the left eye. Pablo gets to his feet and goes to answer the phone; he knows that this gesture won’t improve the atmosphere, but he doesn’t want it worsened by a ringing telephone, left unanswered. Just before he gets to the receiver, it stops ringing anyway.
Pablo returns to his seat and makes an effort at starting a conversation. Hurriedly he tries to think up a subject, but nothin
g comes as strongly to mind as Marta’s mole and Jara’s shoes. Further brain-wracking turns up a girl in jeans, white T-shirt and black trainers. He can’t talk about any of these things to his wife or daughter so, opting for a blend of truth and fiction, he invents a lie about his underground journey that evening, how the trains stopped between two stations and how the confinement brought on a panic attack in one passenger. He describes the tension on that man’s face exactly as he sees it etched now on Laura’s face opposite him, but leaving out the blue vein above her left eye because that would give him away. Other details he invents, such as the badly polished shoes, tied with a double knot. He tells how the man even tried to open a window to throw himself out and how several passengers had to hold him back. He resists the temptation to claim to have been one of those passengers – he knows the limits of his own lie – saying instead that they were a man and a girl who had a strange mole on her leg, close to the knee. Pablo Simó tells his story with such gusto that you might think he, and not the man with claustrophobia, was the drama’s real protagonist. But neither Laura nor Francisca are interested enough in his anecdote to do more than look up at him occasionally from their plates.
“Pass the salt,” says his daughter, and as he does so Laura’s eyes fill with tears.
How must his wife have interpreted “pass the salt” for her eyes to well up like that? Or what interpretation has she given to the fact of his passing the salt to his daughter? Pablo Simó doesn’t know. The phone rings again and he quickly says to Francisca, “Can you get it?”
As soon as the girl stands up, Laura warns her:
“If it’s for you, hang up straight away – you’re banned from using the phone for a week.”
“Then someone else can answer,” says Francisca, sitting down.
Laura shoots Pablo a pleading look. He’d like to oblige her by doing whatever it is her eyes are demanding of him, but he isn’t sure exactly what that is. Even though he knows that it isn’t to do with him answering the telephone, he moves back his chair and prepares to do just that. The telephone rings twice more then stops. Pablo returns to his seat; the three continue to eat, in silence; for a long time the only sound is the scraping of cutlery against china or water being poured into a glass. Pablo no longer feels able to take up the story of the underground drama and embarking on a new one would seem to be forcing matters too far; he decides that silence is perhaps far better for them all, that for the moment there isn’t much more they can do than let time pass; Francisca, however angry it makes her, must stick for several weeks, a month even, to the routine of a normal fifteen-year-old who goes to school every day, succeeds in class, comes home early, and in so doing brings peace to her mother. The normal routine of a normal girl, that is what Laura needs from her daughter; Pablo knows as much because that is how, using exactly that word, Laura referred to her daughter half an hour earlier when she said:
“Is it so hard for her to be normal?”
And he didn’t know how to answer because he isn’t even exactly sure what it means to be normal. Is he normal himself? As time goes by, will Francisca come to seem more like him or like Laura? He suspects that his daughter won’t live up to her mother’s expectations, but that by the time the failure becomes evident it will also be irretrievable and Laura will have no option but to accept it. Pablo’s immediate task is to get through this time however he can, waiting for Francisca to mature, to pass this age at which children can still be influenced by their parents until finally she leaves behind girlhood and with it the obligation to render accounts of what she drinks, with whom, where and when. After all, has he ever rendered accounts of what he did three years ago? Pablo looks over at his daughter, who’s furious but holding her tongue, and wonders if the girl eating opposite him is closer to the one who used to sit on his lap, cuddling him and provoking her mother by whispering “Do you want to marry me?” or to the one who drinks beer in bars and is on the verge of having sex, if she hasn’t already, with someone whose name she doesn’t even know. He wonders, does he have a right to know the name of the man his daughter will sleep with for the first time? At Francisca’s age Pablo and Laura were already going out together, although they didn’t have relations until a few years later. At Francisca’s age he was happy enough just to feel Laura’s tits – that was as far as she’d let him go and it was prize enough. First he would grope them through her clothes with his hands spread like claws, stroking them, squeezing them, weighing them up, and only after a while would he try to put his hand under her top. Laura always stopped him, although she let him rub his face against her chest and kiss it through her clothes as much as he wanted. When Pablo got hard he grabbed Laura’s hand and placed it there for her to feel and she, as soon as she had felt it, would send him away, saying:
“Go on, get lost.”
And obediently he would go, walking the three blocks that separated his house from Laura’s, in a painful stoop, wondering whether to sit on the edge of the pavement until his erection subsided or hurry back to his room to masturbate, and knowing that neither option would be a relief. They must have been fifteen when they touched each other this way, or sixteen at the most, and Pablo wonders how different their behaviour was to his daughter’s now. It’s one of many questions to which he has no answer.
Pablo glances at Francisca and then at Laura, so distant from each other. He also feels far away. He concludes that the misunderstanding is an inevitable consequence of time’s passing, the years on either side of a line that is always moving, a line marking the arrival of one’s children at an age in which they cease to be – if ever they were – the consequence of our actions. What would relieve Laura of the weight Francisca signifies for her? If Francisca were either a little girl again or a woman once and for all, if she were firmly on one side or the other of that line. It would be a relief to see his daughter safely on one or other side of the river, and not floundering in the current, which is where she seems to be at the moment, and from where they still entertain notions of being able to save her. Even if that’s not altogether possible. Even if nobody is really safe.
Breaking the silence, which he had begun to find almost comfortable, Laura rises from the table, takes her plate to the sink and returns with a bowl of fruit. Pablo selects an apple and bites into it, watching his daughter again; she’s not wearing a bra and he can see that her breasts are much smaller than Laura’s were at her age. He wonders if they may still grow a bit or if, like Marta, one day she’ll buy a pair in the size she wants. Pablo suspects that comparing Francisca’s tits with her mother’s, or with Marta’s, probably isn’t politically correct. He tries to change the focus of his attention without letting it return to the events of that terrible night that began when Marta Horvat rang his house in tears. He asks Francisca:
“Not having any fruit?” gesturing with the half-eaten apple.
“May I leave the table?” Francisca replies.
Pablo says nothing. If he says yes Laura will be annoyed, and if he says no his daughter will be annoyed. He opts for silence, pretending to be hindered by a mouthful of apple, then when he’s finished that he takes another bite and another, filling his mouth and leaving the question unanswered. She may well deny it, but Marta Horvat’s had her tits done – he knows she has. One time she came back from annual leave in a white strappy top and Pablo only had to watch her come in the door to know that she was bringing something extra to the table. That white strappy top showed the edging on her bra and had been made to accommodate an enlargement of about three cup sizes, deforming the word emblazoned across her bust: Beloved. He could have printed the word on himself, and not on the fabric of her T-shirt but on Marta’s skin itself. It’s in the middle of Pablo’s reverie about that T-shirt – which he recalls as clearly as if it were in front of him – that the telephone rings for the third time and he, wary of exacerbating the bad atmosphere, automatically gets up. But Francisca, demonstrating that she can do what she likes when she likes – or better, that she
will never do what is expected of her – gets there before him.
“It’s Booorrrrrrrrrla,” says Francisca, rolling the “r” more than seems appropriate to Pablo, given that this particular “r” belongs in the surname of the man who’s been paying his salary for nearly twenty years.
He makes his way to the phone with trepidation; it’s unusual for Borla to call him at home at this hour, especially with no warning.
“Hello,” he says.
Borla kicks off, without preamble:
“I didn’t like that girl, what about you?”
“I don’t know, I thought you were relaxed about it,” Pablo answers, perplexed not only because Borla has called him but because he is asking his opinion.
“I wasn’t relaxed at all – I pretended to be for Marta’s sake. I don’t want her to start panicking, you know what she’s like when she’s scared,” says Borla, calling on a complicity that is also unusual between them.
“May I leave the table?” asks Francisca.
“What worries me is why she came to see us,” says Borla, speaking almost at the same time as Pablo’s daughter.
“Because she must have been asking all around the neighbourhood – the concierge, the butcher…” says Pablo, repeating the very words Borla had spoken that afternoon.
“Yes, but we’re not doormen,” Borla interrupts, “and we don’t run a butcher’s shop. Nobody is the regular customer of an architect’s practice. You see what I mean? There’s something fishy there, something I don’t like, Pablo. I want you to be on your guard. If that girl comes back, find out who she is and what she’s after – why she came to the office, and why now, after three years.”
“And if she doesn’t come back?” asks Pablo.
“So can I leave the table or not?” Francisca asks again.
Pablo sees Laura looking at her without saying anything, then looking at him, and begins to lose the train of what Borla’s saying. He sees the blue vein standing out above his wife’s left eye and, hoping to defuse the tension, tells his daughter:
A Crack in the Wall Page 2
