A Crack in the Wall

by Claudia Piñeiro

  “What are you doing here, Pablo? Is something up?”

  “No, nothing. I need to visit a site a few blocks from here,” he lied, “so I thought I’d drop in to see if everything was OK or if you needed anything.”

  “For this to be over – that’s what I need,” she said, and turned her attention to the shuttering of a beam.

  Marta looked tired, but she still seemed even prettier to Pablo than when she was dressed as an executive for the office: her trousers tucked into low-heeled boots, a long, tight polo neck that emphasized her waist, hips and breasts. An outfit doubtless chosen to allow free movement on irregular terrain without sacrificing that sensuality that Marta liked to flaunt, even in a place like this, full of men who didn’t mind eyeing her up even if she was their boss, and clearly they had no qualms about it that day as they boldly ran their eyes over her, even when Pablo stood glowering next to Marta Horvat, as though he enjoyed sole rights to this woman. Marta went to speak to the foreman; from where Pablo was standing, it looked as though they were going over a task list together, checking that everything was going according to plan. The man showed her some forms, which she read and signed with a ballpoint pen – blue? – every so often holding it between her teeth. When she had finished with the forms, Marta returned to where Pablo was standing, took him by the arm and led him behind a wall of hollow bricks that had been piled up near the party wall.

  “Come, I want to tell you something,” she said.

  The confined space forced a proximity on them that made Pablo nervous, as it always did to have Marta so close.

  “He’s spent the whole day watching.”

  “Who?” Pablo asked.

  “Jara. He stood there, behind the fence, next to the site board, and looked right inside, cool as a cucumber. Nothing fazes that guy. He made notes in a file and took photographs; I sent the foreman over to tell him that taking photographs of the work wasn’t permitted and to frighten him a bit. He spoke to Jara for about ten minutes, but it made no difference – he didn’t care. He said that the street is public and that if we didn’t like him watching, it must be because we had something to hide, ‘a dirty arse’, he said. ‘Dirty arse’,” repeated Marta. “I wouldn’t like to know what that old man’s arse smells like. He was here for nearly an hour, taking folders out of his bag and putting them in again; I don’t know what he was up to – reading, making notes, all rubbish, I expect. What else would you expect from a man like that? The foreman said he even tried talking to him about football – that got rid of him. Have you got a cigarette?”

  Pablo took a moment to answer because he was thinking that, although he had never liked women swearing, hearing Marta say “dirty arse” made him feel mildly excited. She patted his jacket pockets, feeling for a cigarette packet, first the breast pocket and then the sides. Only when she had finished touching him did Pablo say, “I don’t smoke, Marta.”

  “Right,” she said. “I’ll go and ask the boys.”

  And off she went. Pablo followed her with his eyes and so did the other men; it seemed to him that some of them even stopped or at least slowed their work as she walked past. Finally someone offered her a packet and she took a cigarette, lifting it to her mouth; the foreman stepped forward with a lighter and lit it for her. Marta inhaled and blew out hard – harder than necessary, Pablo thought – as if hoping to expel all the tensions of the day in a puff. Somebody rolled a tin drum over to her and turned it on its end, offering it as a seat. One of the workmen must have made a joke, because Marta laughed, then she said something and laughed again, the men who had gathered around her laughing too. Marta Horvat gestured with her hand for him to join them. Pablo walked over to the group and stood as close to Marta as he could. As he had thought, they were telling jokes. A playful duel was taking place between a builder from Córdoba and a pitman from Tucumán who they called “King Mole” and who headed the team that had excavated the base level and opened the footings ready to receive the cement. Pablo thought the duel would be won by King Mole, whose years digging earth had given him strong arms and who was very funny besides. He would have been happy to listen to King Mole tell his jokes, but Pablo’s eyes were drawn to the side wall of Jara’s building and he couldn’t help counting the floors to the level he guessed must be his. He stood staring at that window which, as so often, had been opened up in the wall in contravention of building regulations. If he had realized before that Jara’s apartment had an unauthorized window, he would have used that argument to reverse the burden of proof and assure the man that the true cause of his crack was there, in his illegal window. But he doesn’t need any new arguments now. Tomorrow it will all be over. The side wall was dirty, like the rest of the building, and from where he was standing it was impossible to distinguish the crack. But Pablo Simó could imagine it. Just as he imagined each of the things that Jara had described to him: the table, chairs, the fridge, the boiler, his markings on the wall. And Jara, too, spying on them from behind the curtain, wondering why they were laughing, as though no one ought to laugh at such a short distance from his wounded wall. Pablo looked down and spotted the glowing butt of the cigarette Marta had smoked and was now stamping on with the toe of her boot, grinding it until it was out.

  “Shall we press on?” said Marta Horvat to her workmen.

  And everyone got back to work.

  As time went on, despite her tiredness, Marta seemed calmer – more so than Pablo had seen her since Jara entered their lives.

  “You look well,” he told her.

  “Because it’s done, Pablo. Look at the time. It’s too late now for that arsehole to do anything to stop the work, nobody can hear his complaint now, no inspector can turn up unannounced. Tomorrow at eight o’clock in the morning the pit goes, and the old man goes with it.”

  That’s what she said that afternoon, “the pit goes and the old man goes,” and today, when Pablo looks back, he wonders if Marta Horvat has ever recognized the prophetic quality of those words, which were said in passing, as we say so many things in our lives, without really thinking about the weight of our words.

  But as Pablo Simó would soon find out, Nelson Jara had not, after all, been hiding behind his curtain spying on the work at Calle Giribone. That afternoon, after visiting Marta, Pablo took the underground back home as he did every day, journeying beneath the earth, following his usual long route with its several changes of line. Emerging onto the street at Castro Barros, he heard again the cry of “Simó” that a few days earlier he had attributed to Jara. This time, however, he didn’t panic or rush to get away: given the impossibility of meeting Jara only two blocks from his own home, the cry had to have come from someone else. Only when he turned to look over his shoulder did he see that he was wrong: there was Jara, running across the road to catch up with him and clearly agitated.

  “What are you doing here?” Pablo asked him, almost rudely.

  “Waiting for you. What else might I be doing so far from my own stamping ground, arquitecto?”

  “But how did you know you would find me on this particular corner?”

  “It wasn’t the corner I identified but the station. Two plus two is four, arquitecto. You come out of the underground every morning and go back into it every afternoon. The day we met at your office I saw the gas bill on your desk, and Castro Barros is the closest station to the address that was on that bill, so I found a bar from which to watch this exit – and I waited. Did you know that if you got out in Medrano and walked seven or eight blocks you’d avoid so many changes?”

  “I don’t like walking.”

  “What a mistake you’re making; it’s good to walk. I walk a lot.”

  Pablo would have liked to say, “And what do I care?”, but he wasn’t given to ripostes, not even when he was angry, as he was that afternoon.

  “I took a gamble,” Jara went on, “because the bill wasn’t in your name but in the name of a woman. Your wife – or somebody else, arquitecto?”

  Pablo stared at him wi
thout managing to formulate a response, and Jara continued: “But you’re not the sort of man to pay another woman’s gas bill – correct me if I’m wrong?”

  For all his carefully chosen words, his irony, his apparent mastery of the situation, Jara appeared rather tense.

  “Shall we have a coffee in Las Violetas?” he suggested, and although this was phrased as a question, Pablo had the impression that saying no wasn’t an option. Instead he replied with another question, somewhat out of sync, but in keeping with the strange rhythm of this absurd conversation.

  “Did you really examine my gas bill?”

  “Don’t take offence or draw the wrong conclusions,” Jara said as they crossed back over the road and entered the café. “Shall I tell you why I looked at it? I have an obsession with the money spent on services in this city – it’s an outrage – and I’m always comparing what I spend with what other people are spending. And your bill was right there. You were taking a long time in the bathroom and I was waiting for you, staring mindlessly at your desk, not meaning to pry, but my eyes fell on it – and it wasn’t even in an envelope. All I did was move it a little and have a look. Do you see what I mean?”

  “I am trying to, Jara,” said Pablo, and he said nothing more, hoping not to open further avenues of conversation that he would surely regret.

  They didn’t speak again until the waiter came and both of them ordered a coffee.

  “You’re spending too much on gas, arquitecto – you don’t think you might have a leak?”

  “I don’t think so. I would have smelled something.”

  “Sometimes they are very small and the smell gets lost among the other household smells, or it dissipates if there is plenty of ventilation. I would get it looked at – although there are three of you, so you’re using more than a single man.”

  “How do you know that there are three of us?”

  “Didn’t you tell me yourself, arquitecto?”

  “Not that I remember.”

  “I think you must have. Otherwise how would I know? It’s not mentioned on the bill.”

  “Of course it’s not mentioned on the bill,” Pablo repeated with irritation and a creeping unease.

  “You’re not thinking that I go around spying on you?”

  “I’m not thinking anything, Jara.”

  “You think more than you let on.”

  The waiter brought their coffees and a jug of milk nobody had asked for, and after he had gone Jara said:

  “You must have told me yourself; don’t give it another thought.”

  Without taking his eyes off Pablo, Nelson Jara drank his coffee in little measured sips. Pablo waited as long as he could, and when he couldn’t bear it any more he said:

  “What do you want, Jara? Didn’t you get my notes?”

  “Yes, I got them, but at this stage in the game I don’t know how much faith to put in one of your notes. To believe you, I needed to see your face.”

  “What are you trying to insinuate?”

  “Insinuate, nothing; simply to convey my concern, my annoyance, even I would say my bitter certainty that something round here smells bad. In the last days there have been strange comings and goings at the site, or rather, not exactly strange, but more hurried, to be concrete, as if they were trying to get something done sooner than planned and someone had put the screws on them.”

  “And why does that alarm you?”

  “Because I’m frightened that in the end the screws will be on me.”

  “If the work is over sooner, that’s going to be better for you —”, Pablo began to say, to reassure him, but Jara shrugged his shoulders:

  “I don’t give a damn if they finish the work early; the only thing I care about is getting fair compensation, and you wrote in those notes – to which you put your signature – that your office was studying my case.”

  “We are studying it; I just don’t have a firm answer for you yet.”

  “And once the foundations are covered it will be too late for answers. Look, Simó, I may seem like an idiot, but I’m not, and when people treat me like one I get very annoyed, I get very bad. I mean seriously bad.”

  Jara rubbed his hands over his face, up and down, hard, as though trying to wake himself from a dream, then he looked around him and paused just long enough to take a deep breath and calm his uneven breathing. Then he went back in for the kill:

  “All you’ve done is make me lose time in order to give it to others,” Jara said, looking him straight in the eye, and this time Pablo couldn’t hold his gaze. “Or am I wrong?” he added, and thumped the table so that the cups jangled on their saucers and customers sitting at a neighbouring table turned to look at them. “Always the same,” he said, and stopped himself just before making a second strike, his clenched fist in the air as if he were thumping some nonexistent thing. “Always the same story, Simó,” Jara repeated and stood up to leave, but Pablo stopped him:

  “What do you mean by ‘always the same’, Jara?”

  “That the little fish, instead of looking after their own, always end up defending the interests of the big fish. Take a look at the history of humanity and see if I’m wrong. And you know why they do it? To flatter themselves that they can become something they aren’t. Simó, no matter how much you put yourself on their side, you’re never going to be one of them – do you understand?”

  And Pablo, silent opposite Jara, understood, understood all too well and knew himself to be vermin. But the epiphany wasn’t enough to persuade him that he – Pablo Simó, unaided – might choose this moment to change the course of humanity. Jara, after waiting in silence for a moment, seemed to see that.

  “At least pay for my coffee,” he said, standing up, and he left.

  The afternoon, the encounter and this unpleasant episode appeared to be over, yet Pablo felt even more troubled than he had when Jara was sitting across the table from him. He stayed sitting in Las Violetas for a while, staring at the famous stained-glass dome that crowned that corner of the street, not even noticing the imagery on it, but dazed by the clatter of teaspoons on crockery all around him. And he waited. He was scared to leave and find Jara still prowling around outside; knowing him, it was possible. In fact, at the very moment Pablo turned and gestured to the waiter to bring his bill, Nelson Jara burst back in through the door and walked with determination towards his table. He seemed very out of breath.

  “Just one more thing, Simó – an architectonic query, if you’ll allow me. Is there any thing, any circumstance, any strange happening that could halt the cement tomorrow?”

  “Rain,” Pablo answered automatically, almost without thinking.

  Jara stared at him, nodding as a light smile appeared on his face. “So, if it has to rain, it will rain. Make no mistake: it’s going to rain, Simó,” he said. And this time, when he left, he didn’t come back.

  It would be a shame if it rained on Saturday, the day he’s going out with Leonor, Pablo thinks as the sales assistant rings up his dark jeans and his yellow cardigan. Though perhaps “going out” isn’t really the right way to put it. They’re going on a stroll, an excursion, an architectural tour, a photographic safari. He settles on “tour”, plain and simple, while tucking his credit card back into his wallet; it would be a shame to make their tour in the rain, unless it was that kind of drizzle that comes second on Leonor’s list of favourite things.

  Or unless – and this would be even better – he plucked up the courage to ask her what number three was. And she told him.

  11

  At the very moment that Pablo is pulling up the zipper of his yellow cardigan, Laura comes into the bedroom.

  “And this?” she asks.

  “And this what?” he says.

  His wife nods at the sweater.

  “I bought it the other day. I saw it in a shop window near the office. I needed a lightweight jacket,” he offers, by way of justification.

  “A little zip-up,” she says.

  “Isn’t it what
the English call a ‘cardigan’?” Pablo asks.

  “I don’t know – it doesn’t matter,” Laura replies. “But you don’t need to go buying the first one you see. You could have told me and I would have looked for one for you.”

  “You don’t like it.”

  “No – yes – it’s not ugly,” she says. “I just don’t know if it’s your style.”

  “Why not?” Pablo probes.

  “Other things suit you better,” Laura says.

  “What suits me better?”

  “It’s fine – ignore me. What counts is that you like it,” his wife says and adds, as though drawing a line under this exchange, “I’m going to the supermarket now, so remember that if you finish early we can go to the cinema.”

  But Pablo insists:

  “Why do you say it isn’t my style?”

  “Did I say that?” Laura asks, picking up her bag and taking her winter jacket off a hanger.

  “Yes, you said it wasn’t my style.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “But you said it just a minute ago!”

  “I said that I didn’t know if it was your style, not that it wasn’t.”