A Crack in the Wall

by Claudia Piñeiro

  “Forgive me, Señor Jara,” Pablo interrupted, “but what has all this got to do with your crack?”

  “Because my crack – as you call it, and quite rightly, because it is mine, in my apartment where I sit down to eat opposite it at lunch and dinner every day, where I measure it, take photographs of it, even talk to it – can you believe I sometimes even speak to that wall, arquitecto?” He waited for a reply but, since Pablo gave none, continued. “My crack, as I was saying, appeared while your people were digging without underpinning. You caused it; the work you were doing caused it. That’s all there is to it.”

  “I wouldn’t be so categorical. There are all manner of technical details to take into account,” Pablo began, but this time Jara was the one to interrupt.

  “The lack of underpinning caused structural collapse, which then set off a series of movements, causing the ground to shift underneath my building,” he said. His choice of words and intonation made Jara sound as though he were reciting a report he had made an effort to learn and commit to memory.

  “You sound more expert on the subject than I am,” Pablo said dryly.

  “The circumstances have obliged me to become an expert, and those same circumstances oblige you to offer me something more than the miserable offer of a plastering job. You’re going to have to think of something else, arquitecto.”

  With this Jara took off his glasses again, reassumed the smile of a tie salesman and waited. Neither of them moved, each holding the other’s gaze while saying nothing – Jara because he was waiting for Simó’s proposal, Pablo because he still couldn’t think what to say. Then, for want of a better alternative, Pablo Simó said:

  “Give me a moment, Señor Jara. I’m just going to the bathroom.”

  Standing in front of the urinal, watching his piss fall onto the little balls of naphthalene dancing against the white porcelain, Pablo Simó considered his options. It was obvious that this man, owner of the ugliest pair of shoes Pablo had ever seen, had a stronger case than any other aggrieved neighbours he had had to deal with on past jobs. It was also obvious that Jara wouldn’t easily be placated, that he was brandishing all this legal terminology with the clear intention of applying pressure – there were other words that Pablo didn’t yet dare to think of, “extortion”, for example – and obtaining a favourable response to his claim. What he could not yet understand was what exactly Nelson Jara wanted. Pablo had already offered to have the wall mended, he could even offer to get it done as soon as possible, but Jara had said nothing about a time frame. “You’re going to have to think of something else,” was what he had said, and Pablo Simó was particularly struck by those words “something else”. He pulled up his zip and went over to the basins. As he washed his hands, he felt displeased by his reflection in the mirror: not by the bags under his eyes – they had been with him for years – nor by the hair, which at this point in the month was too long to be neatly combed and not yet long enough to merit a haircut; it was probably the teeth, which, although Pablo brushed them meticulously, were beginning to look yellowish along their upper edges. He thought grimly that he would have to live with discoloured teeth until the time came to swap them for false ones. He wasn’t really sure which feature was most to blame; he just knew that he didn’t like what he saw. His hands still wet, he dug his fingers like claws into the quiff that flopped over his face and combed it back off his forehead. The reflection barely changed. With the tip of his index finger he tried to rub his front teeth and incisors, also without improvement. He closed his mouth and thought of speaking to the image looking out of the mirror, except that no words came to mind. The light flickered; suspecting that the bulb was loose, Pablo stretched up onto the balls of his feet to adjust it. An image came to mind of Jara in his flat, balancing on tiptoe like him, up on a chair measuring the crack in his wall. The bulb was hot: it burned his fingertips and he swore aloud. He turned on the tap again, putting his fingers in the stream of cold water. There was knocking at the door and Jara, who must have heard him shout, called from outside.

  “Everything all right, arquitecto?”

  “Yes, yes, I’ll be out in a minute,” he answered.

  “Can I help you with anything?”

  “No, thank you,” Pablo said.

  “You definitely don’t need anything?” the man insisted.

  “No,” Pablo said emphatically, hoping to deter any more questions.

  Before closing the tap, he washed his face, rubbing it hard, as he did first thing in the mornings when he was trying to wake up and get Marta out of his head before Laura read her presence in his face. “How does this guy plan to help someone swearing in a lavatory?” he thought.

  “Shall we carry on, arquitecto?”

  Pablo looked up and saw the reflection of Nelson Jara, who was peeping through a gap in the door now, chin resting on the latch, smiling at him.

  “I’ll just dry my face, then I’m with you,” Pablo said, and though he would have liked to add “You could at least let me have a piss on my own,” he settled for glaring at the image of the man reflected in the mirror until Jara, whether or not in reaction to Pablo’s irritation, closed the door again.

  His face was wet and he couldn’t bring himself to dry it with the hand-towels Borla always bought, which were as hard as sandpaper – “At least you get a free facelift,” he had quipped to Marta once when she complained about it, and she didn’t find the joke at all funny. He wondered if the man waiting for him with piles of documents about his cracked wall woke up alone every morning, or if he lived with someone; was there a Señora Jara, or was he a widower? Did he have children, grandchildren even? And although he didn’t know the answer he felt sure that, even if he did share his life with someone, for Nelson Jara there was nothing more important in the world than the crack that was gradually opening up his wall and which Pablo had been ordered by Borla to ignore.

  Some minutes later, Pablo Simó came out of the lavatory and sat down again at his desk. Jara hardly let him settle into his chair before asking:

  “Is an inch enough, arquitecto?”

  Pablo didn’t understand.

  “An inch and one-eighth, to be precise,” Jara went on. “You asked a moment ago how wide the crack was and I couldn’t say. I confess you got me there, arquitecto, but now I do know; while you were in the lavatory I took the liberty of calling my building’s caretaker, and he went and measured it. Will an inch and one-eighth do?” he repeated, and sat waiting for Pablo’s reply with his rictus smile.

  “It will do, it will do,” Pablo answered, increasingly persuaded that this man would have made an excellent tie salesman.

  “Shall we proceed, then, or would you prefer to take some time to evaluate the situation more fully?”

  Pablo, who had hoped to dispatch this problem in one day and was quite sure that he couldn’t stand to have a second meeting with this specimen, said:

  “Look, Señor Jara, as I said earlier, Borla and Associates do not believe that the crack that has appeared in your apartment necessarily has any connection to our work.”

  “And I say that it has, that your practice is responsible,” Jara quickly interjected, but Pablo didn’t let himself be cowed by this fighting talk or, if he did, he didn’t let it show. Instead he said:

  “We have been putting up buildings for years and we’ve never had a wall fall down. The probability of serious structural damage in your apartment is either extremely low or zero.”

  Jara laughed, but this time it wasn’t a salesman’s laugh – it wasn’t contained or studied but genuine, nervous and even angry; for the first time this man addressed Pablo by his surname, not by his first name or position.

  “Señor Simó, the life of a person like you or me can’t be reduced to a question of statistics. A wall only has to fall down once to finish someone off. Or do you have seven lives, like a cat? No, don’t kid yourself that you do. You’re not understanding me because you don’t see what it is that really frightens me. Shall I
tell you? It’s not being flattened by falling masonry, because that – death, I mean – would be the end of the story and I wouldn’t know anything about it. What does scare me is the thought of the wall coming down when I’m not there – do you see? – that today, this afternoon, or some time soon, when I’m on my way home, just about to arrive, as I pass your site, I’ll look up to my window, as I always have done for years and, there in the distance, I’ll see the chairs around my table, the table itself still with the cloth that covered it this morning at breakfast, and behind that the door through which I enter my home from the fifth-floor landing, my fridge, my boiler, my whole life, arquitecto. And you know why I would see those things? Because the wall that covered the little I own wouldn’t be there any more, protecting what’s mine.”

  Jara repeated the words “what’s mine”, then paused for a moment, gazing blankly at the papers he had strewn over the desk until some impulse prompted him to move, imperceptibly at first then gradually faster, and soon he was rocking back and forth in his chair again. Jara seemed to have been set in indefinite motion, but then, as though suddenly remembering something important, he came to an abrupt halt and started looking among the files with renewed enthusiasm, until he alighted on a newspaper cutting that showed a large photograph of a building in which somebody seemed quickly or carelessly to have erased the side wall. It looked like a doll’s house, with even the smallest details of the exposed rooms visible. The photograph had the caption “Fatal Collapse”.

  “You understand me, arquitecto, don’t you, right? Of course you understand me.”

  Jara took a handkerchief out of his trouser pocket and dabbed at his forehead with deliberation, repeating the action on both sides. Then he crossed his legs, folded his hands in his lap and once more rocked back and forth in his chair, waiting.

  The truth was that Pablo did not entirely understand what Jara wanted, but he decided that the only way to find out was to be as direct as possible. Before saying anything, he retrieved his Caran d’Ache pencil from the edge of the desk, placed it diagonally across his notebook again and tidied up some of the disorder caused by Jara’s files – not much, but enough to establish that he was once more in charge of his own domain. Once he felt ready he leant back in his chair, stretched his arms upwards and brought them down behind his neck, interlacing his fingers for support; he looked Jara straight in the eyes and only then did he say:

  “So Señor Jara, tell me, what is it you want?”

  Just as he had expected, Jara acknowledged the question, but discreetly, without surprise, as though he had been waiting for it. And he was equally direct.

  “Money, arquitecto,” he said. “Money to pay for all the trouble that this is causing me. And all the eventualities. Because if it were just a question of rendering a small crack, I could do that myself without bothering you or your people. But there may be a structural problem here that ends up affecting other apartments too, and my silence has got to be worth something, don’t you think?” He didn’t wait for an answer to the question. “Money, arquitecto, that’s what I want: money.”

  Once again they sized each other up, watching each other in silence. Pablo smiled briefly and nodded, several times, communicating to Jara with this gesture that yes, he finally was beginning to understand.

  “And how much would we be talking about?” Simó asked.

  “Don’t make out like you don’t know, arquitecto. You’re the one who deals with this sort of negotiation, not me. Name a figure, I leave it to your discretion.”

  But Pablo didn’t name a figure or say anything else for the moment. Then Nelson Jara began to put his things away in the bag. He took time over the operation, not in order to stow the papers neatly away, but to maintain the level of tension he had succeeded in creating. Only now that he seemed confident of getting what he was looking for did he offer his hand to Pablo, and as they shook hands he said:

  “I’ll be waiting for your call, arquitecto.”

  And then he slid his card onto the table, a white card printed with thick black letters that set out his name and telephone number with a shiny calligraphy in which some letters – the “t” and the “f”, for example – extended exaggeratedly high or low in relation to an imaginary base line.

  Pablo took the card, read it and was surprised to see that Jara’s telephone number shared the same last three digits as his own: two, eight, two. It was a sign that he and Jara, who seemed so different, had something in common. Even if all they shared was those three numbers. He wondered whether it was Kabbalah, fate, chance or coincidence as he put the card into his wallet.

  On his feet and loaded down once more with the papers that confirmed the existence of the crack and the validity of his claim, Jara said goodbye, adding:

  “I trust you arquitecto, I trust that you will know how to put yourself on the right side.”

  And he left.

  6

  Only a week after their chance encounter in that café Pablo Simó never usually goes to, Leonor calls him at the Borla studio. He’s surprised by this unexpected contact. He had persuaded himself, as a way to forestall disappointment, that their exchange of telephone numbers had been nothing more than a formality, a kind of courtesy. Pablo had told Borla as little as possible about his meeting with Leonor: only that he had run into the girl, that she was living in the area but – and this was what should really matter to the Borla studio – that she was no longer looking for Jara. However, Borla didn’t seem completely convinced.

  “You didn’t ask her why she was looking for him in the first place?”

  “There was no need – she’s not looking for him any more.”

  “Ask her anyway, if you see her again,” Borla said before closing the subject with one of his favourite maxims, “A warned man counts for two.” Then he went, leaving Pablo to ponder what it was like to be a warned man, how much two men would count for and if any two men would count the same as any two others, if he and Jara would count the same as himself and Borla, how much Borla and Jara would count for – and a few other combinations besides.

  When he answers the telephone and hears “Hello, Pablo?” he doesn’t immediately know who is speaking, just that he has an agreeable sensation, as if this woman’s voice evoked some happy memory that has been long buried under the weight of the endlessly repeating days that make up any man’s life. It’s a voice that seems to leap – like a person leaping from one rock to the next to avoid getting wet while crossing a stream at some shallow point – with a tone that glides from one vowel to the next as though she were reading them off a song-sheet. Pablo knows immediately that this enthusiastic “hello” is entirely different to the “hellos” of any of the other women who might have reason to call him. If he had to hazard where the true difference lay, he would say: this “hello” is alive. Very different to Laura’s muted “hello”, presaging a list of complaints and reminders. Very different to Marta’s – a harsh, biting “hello” that has the strange ability to dry the throat not of the person uttering it but of the one hearing it, and which in most cases leaves Pablo speechless, as though even the sound of that five-lettered word confirmed that Marta Horvat wasn’t willing to speak to him any more than was strictly necessary. Different, too, to Francisca’s “hello”, which is sucked in, a prisoner of her mouth, a “hello” weary of giving explanations.

  “Hello,” he says. “Who’s speaking?”

  “It’s Leonor. Do you remember me?”

  Yes, Pablo remembers: the backpack, the jeans, the ponytail secured at the nape of her neck, the smiling, caramel-coloured eyes. And Jara. He had told her to call if she needed anything and for that reason he asks:

  “What do you need?”

  “Five buildings,” Leonor says.

  “Five buildings?”

  “Well, actually just the front of five buildings.”

  “What for?”

  “To photograph them – didn’t I tell you?” the girl says.

  She hadn’t tol
d him – he is sure of that, he would remember otherwise – and this worries Pablo, though it pleases him, too, that she thinks they spoke for longer than the brief exchange that day in the café that he never usually goes to. Then Leonor explains, apparently in the belief that she is doing so for the second time; she tells him that she is finishing a photography course – “I told you, remember?” – and that when different subjects were proposed for the final practical assignment, she immediately chose “building façades” because she knows a bit about buildings and because she knew that he would be able to help her.

  “So can you?” she asks him.

  “Yes, I think so. What sort of façades are you looking for?”

  “The five that you like best, the city’s five most beautiful buildings, according to the architect Pablo Simó.”

  He stops to think.