A Crack in the Wall
Page 4
“Oh, that’s great,” says Pablo, held by her smiling eyes.
There’s another awkward silence. The girl pulls the rucksack more squarely onto her shoulder, not because she needs to but as a way of shaping the silence. Pablo is sure that it is the same rucksack as the one she was wearing the other day, though evidently put to a different use today. The afternoon they first met her rucksack was stuffed with things, heavy contents by the look of it: the clasps were straining and there was no give in the canvas, which today looks empty and slack. The girl’s face has changed too, but in the opposite way: she looks fresher, her caramel-coloured eyes shining in the young face, her dark hair reflecting the sunlight coming through the window. As if anxious about her appearance, the girl smooths her hair down, pulling the white elastic band on her ponytail tighter. Pablo sees that her hands are red and raw, as if they have been put to some uncustomary work; it’s a subtle reminder of how his hands were the night Jara died. The girl notices Pablo looking at them and says:
“That’ll teach me to spring clean my new house without rubber gloves.” And then, “Anyway, I’d better be off.”
“It’s nice fixing up a new house…” Pablo says and tries to remember her name before realizing that he has never known it.
“Leonor,” she tells him. “And you?”
“Pablo Simó,” he says. And he repeats his name simply to have a reason to say the girl’s again: “Pablo Simó, Leonor. If there’s anything I can help you with, give me a call.”
“Well thanks,” she says and probes the empty depths of her rucksack for a mobile phone. “Give me your mobile number and I’ll put it in my phone.”
“I haven’t got one,” says Pablo.
She stares at him for a moment and then says:
“I don’t believe you.”
“I don’t have a mobile phone, seriously – I don’t use them.”
Leonor smiles as though she still isn’t sure whether to believe him or not, but he takes a paper napkin anyway and writes down his name and number on it. When he gives it to her she says:
“In that case you must be a romantic.”
The word “romantic” unsettles Pablo in some way, putting him on his guard; worrying that the consternation may show on his face, he looks for his reflection in the window, which returns only blinding sunlight. He’s still lost when she speaks to him, bringing him back to the conversation.
“In fifth form at school we did a modern version of Romeo and Juliet as if it were taking place in the twenty-first century. It was all going great until one of the last scenes, when, in the original version, the messenger can’t get to Romeo in time to tell him that Juliet has taken a sleeping draught, not poison, and that’s what sets up the final tragedy. Do you know what the messenger said in our version?”
Pablo shakes his head. She can’t resist the temptation to laugh, her face lighting up for a moment, but she controls herself enough to finish the anecdote.
“He said, ‘It looks like Romeo’s mobile is out of range.’ There were a hundred and fifty people in the auditorium and they all cracked up and kept laughing until the curtain came down. There was no possibility of a tragic finale then. It was a disaster.”
Pablo smiles. She smiles too.
“So, shall I send a messenger then?” the girl asks.
“Call me at the office,” he says, and he’s about to take another napkin to jot down his work number, but she stops him.
“It’s fine. I think I’ve got that one.”
Leonor scrolls through the numbers on her screen with a speed Pablo has seen matched only by his daughter, and reads one out aloud, checking it with him.
“Yes, that’s the one,” he says.
Then she says goodbye, kisses him on the cheek and leaves.
As he fiddles with the paper napkin the girl gave him, Pablo wonders which aspects of their conversation he will relay to Borla, and which not. He can imagine the questions his boss is going to ask, starting with, “Why has the girl has moved into this neighbourhood?” and finishing with, “Why has she got our number on her mobile?” Pablo fears that he won’t have the answers for all Borla’s questions. For that reason he decides not to name Romeo and Juliet’s messenger, and to leave out the last part of their conversation, everything after “Call me if there’s anything you need.”
5
Pablo Simó and Nelson Jara had first met each other a few weeks before Jara’s death, perhaps a month before, and only ever met two or three times subsequently – if you included that last night, when Jara was already dead. Right from the start, though, Pablo had had the strange sensation of knowing the man in greater detail than would usually be gleaned from a handful of short encounters.
It was by no means a conventional introduction. Pablo had been alerted that Jara would be coming to see him at some point, but even so, the man’s appearance that morning in the dark corridor of their old office caught him off-guard. Borla and Marta had been talking about him the day before – calling him an “old arsehole” even though Jara couldn’t have been much older than Borla himself – after a slanging match in the meeting room. Pablo thought he recognized the tone of the shouting: it was one of Marta’s convenient outbursts, during which she started threatening to hand in her notice, saying that this job was sucking the life out of her, that she was leaving, quitting, chucking it in. These outbursts were apt to end as abruptly as they began, once she had extracted from Borla the promise of a week’s paid leave in some part of the world with a beach and guaranteed sun all year round, from which Marta would return looking bronzed, with the kind of tan no beach on the Argentine coast bestows on any of the skin types Pablo knows. Locating the white line of a thin strap Marta had not bothered to pull down before letting herself flop onto the sand counts among the most exciting memories Pablo has from all their years working together. The last time was the summer before Jara’s death. He almost touched her – so nearly laid his hand on that shoulder left bare by a suggestive halter-neck top. He doesn’t know what came over him, can’t recall how he came to be so close to her. The last thing he remembers is standing behind her, waiting for Marta to finish with the photocopier so that he could use it, and then a blank, a memory lapse, and by the time he realized what he was doing his index finger was tracing that fine tan line, from the top down, half an inch above her skin, not touching it but following it in the air. Pablo didn’t know at that moment whether he was more excited by the image of his finger about to touch her, about to pull at that non-existent strap exposing Marta’s naked breast, or by the possibility of her turning round and catching him in the act.
But the tanned skin, the strap’s outline on her shoulder, him on the point of touching her, her breasts, the beach where Pablo imagined her – all that was before. Later, only a few months later, there were no more opportunities to let the mind be carried off to such places. That afternoon, after they had finished shouting, Borla and Marta came out of the meeting room and explained to him who Jara was.
“The guy wants us to stop the job on Calle Giribone because of a crack in the wall of his flat,” said Borla. “You know how to deal with that sort of stuff, Pablo.”
“Just get him off my back,” threw in Marta.
Pablo, momentarily distracted by the phrase “get him off my back”, missed some of what followed, though he picked up enough to know what the grievance was about. It wasn’t the first time somebody had complained because one of their jobs – or work by another architectural practice or construction company – had caused problems in an adjoining building. It was part of the job, another chore, to go and examine the damage and establish whether it was damage as such – a process that was deliberately drawn out so as to win more time to get on with construction and postpone the repairs until project finances were looking healthier – then to minimize the damage and promise to fix it as economically as possible, and not much more.
“The old man’s an idiot, a serious pain in the arse,” Marta warned him.
“He could end up being a piece of work – I can just see it,” she insists.
“A piece of work – how?” Pablo asks.
“A piece of shit,” Marta replies.
Only a few hours later Pablo Simó met Jara and was able to draw his own conclusions. His first impression wasn’t one of the best. As he emerged from the lift and was closing the door, Jara slunk up like a shadow, tapped Pablo on the shoulder and gave him a shock that could have caused a heart attack in someone of a more delicate disposition. In those days Borla and Associates was still on the third floor of a 1950s building and had been since its inception, until the nature of the business, the scale of the models and the need for the office itself to function as a showroom persuaded Borla to reserve a bigger space in the building they were working on at that time, on Calle Giribone – the building where they still are and where the presence of a body buried underneath the basement slabs condemns them to remain. The old practice, where Simó and Jara first met, was a few yards from the intersection of Dorrego and Corrientes, when the neighbourhood was still known to everyone as Chacarita and hadn’t yet been upgraded to Palermo. Pablo had come out of the lift into the dark corridor, empty as it was every morning, its smell a mixture of disinfectant and bleach. It was unusual to meet anyone here at this time of day, but there was Jara, smiling, his hand outstretched as he said:
“Did I give you a shock? My name’s Nelson Jara, how do you do?”
And although Pablo had indeed been shocked, he shook his head.
“Not at all, don’t worry,” he said, and showed Jara into the office.
Jara was carrying a plastic bag from some shoe shop, stuffed with files. One of its handles had come off and, as he held it in one hand, the other supported it underneath, so that the weight of papers didn’t cause it to collapse altogether. The files, grubby and pointing downwards, bulged out of the top of the bag. Pablo invited Jara to sit down while he prepared for the day’s work. He took out his notebook, put it to one side and laid his Caran d’Ache pencil diagonally across it, making sure it fit exactly the contours of the notebook, from bottom to top, left to right. Jara, sitting opposite him, waited, following his movements, nodding sometimes as though approving Pablo Simó’s actions, rocking his body very slightly back and forth, though without moving the chair, his legs crossed and his fingers interlaced in his lap.
“How can I help you?” Pablo asked finally.
Jara immediately ceased rocking and started rummaging in his bag, pulling out papers and scattering them across the desk, crashing into Pablo Simó’s space like a conquistador taking possession of a town after proving himself the victor in battle. An orange file ended up on top of the notebook, sending the Caran d’Ache pencil rolling from its diagonal while he, powerless in the face of Jara’s rampancy, could do no more than follow its course almost to the edge of the desk, less than an inch away from falling to the floor. And although witnessing the displacement of his Caran d’Ache pencil made him feel uncomfortable, Pablo didn’t dare move Jara’s file and put his pencil back in position, and anyway such an action would be futile: the man still hadn’t finished, space had to be found for a photo album, another file stuffed with badly folded newspaper and magazine cuttings, photocopies of municipal edicts and a couple of envelopes ominously entitled “various documents”. In spite of the anxiety it caused him, Pablo left everything as Jara set it out: the only thing he removed from under the papers was the gas bill from home, which was due that day and which he mustn’t forget to pay.
“Where shall we start, arquitecto?” Jara asked.
While waiting for an answer, Jara fixed Pablo with a smile that made him uncomfortable because it seemed so out of place. It reminded him of a door-to-door tie salesman who came to the office once in a while with a suitcase full of different styles, colours and materials. Borla usually bought several and Pablo only one, which he paid for in three instalments. The man sitting opposite wasn’t a salesman though, but someone bent on halting the construction of a building on Calle Giribone in the belief that his livingroom wall was about to fall down.
“Where would you like to start?” Jara asked again, gesturing at the papers.
And if it had been up to Pablo he wouldn’t have started anywhere; if it had been up to him he would have been putting the final touches to a project, planning a new building, drawing one of the many versions of his north-facing, eleven-storey tower, or dreaming about Marta. But he was there, trapped, at least until he could dispatch the chore of dealing with this man; he might as well get it done as quickly as possible, so without making any effort of thought he picked the most obvious answer to the question “Where shall we start?” and replied:
“Let’s start at the beginning.”
Jara moved his index finger quickly up and down in the air, as if to say, “I get the joke,” and began riffling through his own disordered papers, then pulled out a photo album which he laid out on top of everything, open on the first page, and said:
“Here you have all the evidence you need, arquitecto. I doubt you’ll need much more if you are a specialist in excavations and demolition, as your colleague Borla claims. Colleague or boss?” he asked, as he swivelled the album round and nudged it forwards so that the photograph was facing Pablo.
Pablo didn’t answer the question, nor did he immediately take up the album. He was distracted by the reference to Borla and wondered if his boss had in fact described him in those words, as a “specialist in excavations and demolition”. If so, he wondered whether the phrase had been without any particular significance, used simply to satisfy a man who demanded attention, or whether it concealed an ironic reference that lay beyond Pablo’s understanding. Can someone be an expert in excavations and demolitions? Jara nudged the open album further forwards, landing it in Pablo’s line of sight, so that he could now see a series of three photographs showing the same wall traversed by a crack. The wall didn’t change in any of the photographs, but the crack did; it was advancing at a rate Pablo estimated at about two inches between one photo and the next. Now he gave the album his full attention, studied the photos and made as if to turn the page:
“May I?”
“Please, feel free, arquitecto,” Jara answered.
Pablo turned the page to find more pictures of the same wall, the same crack, except in each successive photo the fissure was longer. He could see that this was something significant but, as in a game of brinkmanship, Pablo closed the album, put it to one side and said.
“Anything else?”
Jara, perhaps trying to conceal his disappointment, fixed him for a moment with his salesman’s smile and, as though preparing to show him a model even better than the last, made with Indian natural silk and hand-finished, he put the album back into the bag. Then, in what struck Pablo as a deliberate attempt to generate suspense, he slowly opened another of the files where, on an x-and-y-axis graph, a curve had been plotted to represent the growing crack Pablo had just seen photographed. The x stood for the inches covered by the crack’s progress across the wall and the y for the time that had elapsed from the moment it first appeared until that day, the very day on which they were meeting for the first time.
“You went to the trouble of measuring it this morning, Señor Jara?” Pablo asked him.
“I measure it every day, arquitecto, twice: first at breakfast time and then at night, before I go to bed.”
Pablo lifted a hand to touch the measuring tapes in the breast pocket of his jacket and imagined this man – perhaps with a tape similar to his own, perhaps with a yellow oilcloth one like dressmakers use, the kind that get hopelessly stretched from measuring so many hips and sleeve lengths, or perhaps with the same plastic ruler Pablo guessed Jara used to plot his x and y lines – up on a chair, measuring the extent of the crack as it made its way along the wall of his home.
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br /> “Do you need me to show you anything else, or is that enough?” Jara asked.
And even though the image of that old fellow wobbling on a chair made him feel a little for Jara, Pablo didn’t forget the objective of this meeting that had obliged him to sit opposite this man, and asked:
“What’s the width?”
“The width?” Jara repeated.
“Yes, the width,” Pablo said again, with the confidence that comes from knowing you have made a good play: “Señor Jara, you know that this practice will pay to have your wall replastered, but from what my colleague Señor Borla tells me, you aren’t satisfied with that, correct?”
“Absolutely correct, it doesn’t satisfy me at all. That crack threatens the structure of my house and it appeared the day after you began digging under the adjacent plot of land. Do you know something? It is through that space that the sun enters my house every morning.”
“I cannot give you back the sun, Señor Jara; you are lucky to have had it for so many years without anyone building next to you.”
“I’m here about the crack, not the sun,” the man clarified.
For the first time in their meeting, Jara lost his smile; he seemed to be focussing hard, thinking carefully about his next move. Pablo saw this and made a pre-emptive strike.
“The length of the crack is less important than the width. Perhaps you didn’t know that? The crack you’ve shown me in these photographs is certainly long, but it implies no threat whatsoever to the structure of your house – do you understand?” Pablo waited for a reply, but rather than give one, Jara began once again to rock back and forth. So he continued: “Listen, Señor Borla will be happy to plaster over the crack, whether or not he is responsible, as long as our contractors’ work schedules allow it. Please be assured on that count.”
But Nelson Jara, far from seeming assured, had begun to sweat. A fat drop was rolling down his forehead.
“No, no, you don’t understand me, arquitecto. A nice bit of replastering isn’t going to do the trick. I know this city’s building regulations and under article…” he paused to put on his glasses before reading from a paper highlighted in yellow that he had taken out of another file and now held in front of his eyes, closer than seemed necessary, as if the lenses’ magnification factor were not enough. “In Article 5.2.2.6 it states that ‘the excavations shall be done in such a way as to ensure the stability of retaining walls and vertical cuts etc. etc., unless a soil survey indicates that underpinning is not necessary.’” When he had finished reading, he pushed his glasses up onto his forehead and looked Pablo straight in the eye, in a way that seemed calculated to intimidate. “However, in the land survey your company presented to the municipality, engineer…” He paused, trying for a moment to bring to mind the elusive name, then, not finding it, was obliged to put on his glasses again to read a fuzzy photocopy that he took out of an envelope bearing the words “Various Documents”. “Zanotti, engineer Luis Zanotti… did not say at any point that underpinning was not necessary and you – I’ve got all this photocopied – you went ahead with the work, without underpinning and with longer transverse cuts than are permitted.”