A Crack in the Wall

by Claudia Piñeiro

  “Something like that,” he lies.

  “You’re very funny,” Leonor says, and her eyes stretch into a smile that takes over her whole face.

  “Really?” Pablo asks. “I think that’s the first time in my life anyone has told me I’m funny.”

  “Perhaps you’re only funny with me,” she says, and Pablo feels a tightening within his body. “Do you think?”

  “Yes, perhaps,” he says.

  They wait on a corner for the lights to change; Pablo can see himself reflected in a shop window on the other side of the road. It takes him a moment to recognize himself wearing these uncustomary colours, but he knows the image must be his because beside it is the girl in the pink jacket. When the lights change, he puts his hand on Leonor’s waist and guides her past the few people coming the other way and the odd car trying to push through. As soon as they are safely on the other side, he lets her go.

  “Is it much further?” she asks.

  “Two blocks,” he says.

  And those two blocks pass without Pablo being able to think too clearly. Since they started walking, the sum of things he knows seems to have been dwindling: he knows that there is a girl in a pink jacket walking beside him, that this woman smells of a light perfume, perhaps not a perfume as such but the scent of a cream or the soap she used to wash herself that morning; that every so often this woman brushes against him as they walk; that he knows her because she came to the studio to ask about Nelson Jara, and that he likes her. He knows, too, that he is walking up Rivadavia following the ascending numbers, that soon the sun will hide itself definitively behind the buildings on his left; he knows that he has a list of art nouveau façades in his pocket along with his wallet and that, even though he hasn’t brought the measuring tape, the Caran d’Ache pencil or the notebook, their absence no longer worries him. Leonor takes his arm and leans in to say something to him he doesn’t quite catch, because he’s wondering if the hand Leonor placed on his arm and has yet to remove may have more significance than as a means of support bringing her closer to his ear to tell him whatever it is she has just told him.

  When they reach block 1,900 on Rivadavia, he stops to show her Palanti’s building on the other side of the road.

  “Which one is it?” she asks.

  “That one,” he says, pointing at it.

  A bus stops in front of them, blocking their view for a few seconds while passengers get on and off. They cross the road and Leonor studies the building for a moment before getting the camera out of her bag to take photographs.

  “That’s quite a weight they’re carrying on their shoulders,” Leonor says, pointing to two muscular figures, distant relations of Atlas, who represent men kneeling on cement blocks and appear to bear on their backs the central portion of the building.

  “They’re not holding it up,” he corrects her. “The building has an iron skeleton; those two men are simply decoration.”

  “Seriously? How do you know?”

  “I’ve seen the plans.”

  “But they think they’re carrying it. Look at their faces.”

  Pablo looks again at the sculptures and sees that what the girl says is true: those two unburdened men are labouring under a misapprehension, the effort of carrying such a load showing not only in their faces but in the muscles of their arms and backs. Leonor pauses to take a few close-ups of the decorative cherubs on either side of the doorway. Meanwhile Pablo wonders who could have authorized the placement of an air conditioning unit on the front, but only on the right, thus upsetting the harmony of the façade, like someone taking a knife to a cake and cutting it anyhow, with no respect for the natural order of things. Now Leonor walks back across the road to get perspective and take a photograph of the whole frontage. Pablo watches her from his side: her face obscured by the camera, her arms raised to the correct level; her legs slightly separate, feet firmly planted as she tilts for the best angle, as though her body were itself the tripod that would give the portrait its stability. A young man passes, sizing her up in a way Pablo doesn’t like. He walks on a few steps, then turns back to look at her again; Leonor doesn’t notice, but Pablo’s ready to charge across the street, grab the man and say, “What are you looking at, idiot?” He’ll never know whether he would have done so, because by the time he gets a chance to cross, the man has gone on his way and Leonor, who has taken all the photos she needs, sees him approaching; oblivious to the reaction she has prompted in two men, she says:

  “Which way now?”

  “The only way is up,” he says, and she laughs.

  Pablo helps her put the camera away in her rucksack and arrange it on her shoulder. He offers to carry it for her but she says that isn’t necessary: she’s used to carrying things.

  “Like those guys,” says Leonor with a wink, pointing at the stone Atlases they are leaving behind them.

  On the way to the next stop, just a block ahead, Pablo Simó thinks of several questions he would like to ask Leonor, but dismisses them one by one: some seem too silly and others too bold. He wants to tell her something she would find interesting, something that reflects well on him, but can’t think what. Now could be the time to show off his professional expertise, his knowledge of the city’s architecture or of urban planning – but he rejects this gambit as too likely to fail. Could urban planning really be of interest to Leonor? What, he wonders, could such a young woman find to admire in a man of forty-five? Because that is what he would like: for her to admire him.

  “You mean you want to seduce her,” says Barletta, who has suddenly appeared, this time without Pablo summoning him.

  “I didn’t say ‘seduce’, I said ‘admire’,” he says.

  “Call things by their names, Pablo.”

  He tries to make Barletta disappear, concentrating on Leonor and asking:

  “Don’t you need information about the architects, the technical details and so on?”

  “No, I don’t think so. I thought I would just put the address under each photo,” she says. But a few steps later, the girl changes her mind. “You know what? On second thoughts, a few facts and figures would be good. But another day, when I can sit down and make notes with more time. Would that be OK?”

  “Yes, fine,” he says.

  Pablo Simó walks the rest of that block in silence, thinking only of two of the words uttered just now by Leonor: “another day”. If she said it, that’s because she thinks they are going to meet again, that there will be another day, another walk, another moment.

  “Here it is,” he says when they are just about to walk right past it, and he points to the building by Ortega, though without mentioning his name because, for the moment, she’s not interested in the architect responsible, though perhaps she will be on “another day”.

  “Let’s cross,” says Leonor. “I can’t see it properly from so close.”

  So they cross the road, but the girl, instead of walking onto the pavement, leans against a parked car, as though she were in a cinema seat, and looks up. Meanwhile he looks at her: from this distance she doesn’t seem like a girl to him but a woman, and he begins to suspect that Leonor may be older than he thought she was. So why not ask her? Leonor’s hip, splayed against the car, attracts him strongly. He crosses over to her. The girl sees him coming, and when he is a few steps away she pats the car’s bonnet, three or four times, inviting him to sit next to her. The car is dirty and he knows that Laura would warn him to be mindful of the dust, but he doesn’t hesitate for an instant and sits where Leonor tells him.

  “Do you know what it’s called?” Pablo asks.

  “What?”

  “The House of the Lilies.”

  “Why?”

  “You see those stems winding their way around the windows up to the roof?” he says, drawing closer as he traces the lilies’ path in the air. “Do you see?”

  “Yes,” says Leonor and she looks hard at the building, her face so close to his that Pablo feels himself on the point of kissing her when she wi
thout realizing – or does she? – moves away, slipping her rucksack off her shoulder so as to get out her camera and take more photographs.

  While Leonor gets her shots, Pablo studies this building he has chosen for her. The top floor is crowned with the head of a man, or possibly the god Aeolus, presiding over a cornice of lily branches – more meaty and robust that anything you would find in a Buenos Aires garden – some of which are tangled in his hair. The stems begin at the base of the building and run up it, and every so often there is a flower, but the branches have no ends, they rampage over the building, right to its top. They’ve colonized the man’s head, he thinks. If Pablo Simó hadn’t studied this building at university, if he didn’t know that it was called The House of the Lilies, he would say that this building had fallen into the clutches of man-eating plants.

  “Ready,” Leonor says, putting her camera back into the rucksack. “Shall we carry on?”

  It’s more than ten blocks to the next building, which is also on Rivadavia, and Pablo, though not used to long walks, doesn’t feel tired. “Stubborn Blood” has been spray-painted onto one of the metal shutters and below it “MP 20 Project for the People”. Pablo fixes on the graffiti while Leonor takes her photographs. He wonders whether “Stubborn Blood” is the name of a rock group, one of those Colombian dance bands, some urban tribe, or simply represents a howl of desperation in the midst of a city where so many – he, Leonor, Francisca – live in silence. Or fill the silence with banalities. But never shout, never explode. He suspects that Leonor would understand the reference, but he’s not going to ask her; he fears that would serve to highlight the distance between them. The girl takes lots of photographs of the birds adorning the front of the building, then declares herself ready to carry on. How much older is he than this girl? Or should he say woman? Twenty years older? Fifteen? He doesn’t know. Quite a bit.

  “How old are you?” he asks abruptly as they set off for Colombo’s other buildings, this time on Calle Hipólito Yrigoyen.

  “Twenty-eight. Why?”

  “Curiosity. No other reason.”

  “Stubborn Blood”, thinks Pablo Simó, and does the arithmetic: seventeen years. Up to what age might one continue to have stubborn blood? At what age will Pablo Simó cease to feel this tension in his legs which every so often climbs through his pelvis into the base of his stomach while he walks next to a girl seventeen years younger than him? How much is left – not of life, but of this feeling he has today?

  “Art nouveau was ephemeral, Simó,” Tano Barletta whispers in his ear. “You know it yourself: no other style ever dated so fast.”

  And even though Tano Barletta isn’t there, Pablo knows that what he says is true.

  “And you know why? Because people who didn’t understand it saw it as exaggerated and sloppy, Pablo, and they even had the nerve to call it ‘spaghetti style’ like that idiot in History II, do you remember?”

  Pablo remembers the reference to “spaghetti style” and how he had had to restrain his friend to stop him thumping the assistant lecturer, and he laughs. Leonor says:

  “What’s funny?”

  “Nothing, just something I remembered,” he says.

  “Tell me,” the girl insists.

  “A friend who loved art nouveau and Colombo,” Pablo says, and explains, before she asks him, “Colombo is the architect who designed that building I just showed you, with the peacocks on it.”

  “Were they peacocks?” she asks.

  “Yes – what did you think they were?”

  “I’ve no idea, but don’t peacocks have long feathers that open out like a fan?”

  “The males do,” he says, “when they want to seduce a female.”

  “Those ones didn’t want to seduce anyone.”

  “Perhaps they were female,” reasons Pablo.

  “But what were you laughing about before?” she asks.

  “I don’t know; I don’t remember,” he says, and they both laugh again.

  After she has photographed the two buildings by Colombo at Hipólito Yrigoyen 2,500, and he has explained to Leonor what collective housing is, stealing as many glances at her as he can without her noticing, Pablo suggests taking a taxi to the next façade.

  “Do you want to take one?”

  “Well, aren’t you tired?” he asks her.

  “No,” she says, “but that’s fine. If it’s far away; perhaps we’d better, to conserve energy.”

  Conserve energy. Why does Leonor say that? Does she mean she wants to conserve energy for him? Does she want him to conserve energy for her? No, she didn’t intend that subtext, he decides, and hails a taxi that has just turned onto the road from Saavedra. Pablo opens the door for her to get in first, then gets in himself; it seems that he really is a man devoted to customs. Once the car is moving, Pablo Simó looks out of the window and takes a moment to clear his mind. The light is beginning to fade and there are things he must resign himself to accepting. For example: that if the taxi driver doesn’t hurry, it will be almost dark by the time they reach their last destination; that he is forty-five years old and his companion is twenty-eight; that by now Laura will be putting away the supermarket shop and waiting in vain to go to the cinema; that he wants to seduce this girl and he still doesn’t know how – yes, Barletta, seduce; that the car they are travelling in has just stopped at a red light and that means the loss of another moment of daylight. But in spite of everything – the lack of sun, his age, his wife, the failing light, the supermarket and cinema, the traffic – sitting there, just inches from Leonor, he feels happy.

  The taxi stops on Riobamba and Arenales, as instructed by Pablo; he pays and they get out. Leonor tries out different corners to find the best angle from which to photograph the balconies: black ironwork railings covered in flowers that are open like perfect Spanish fans or like Manila shawls. Out of curiosity, while she’s taking the photographs, he walks around the corner looking for the granite block where the architect’s signature should be engraved. He wonders if anyone, if any of the few pedestrians walking past them on this Saturday evening cares who made this building, who thought of it, imagined it, who drew it on paper like Pablo Simó draws his eleven-storey north-facing tower; who, in contrast to him, put it up. First he finds the name of the building: Camerou, and then on another stone block, the name of the architect: P. Pater. The same one who designed the Tigre Hotel, he thinks, and instinctively he looks for Leonor, to share his discovery, then thinks better of it: she said that she didn’t want that sort of detail now; “another day” she said, and he wants her to admire him, to see how much he knows, to see that he can teach her all kinds of things – but he also wants that other day to exist.

  From there they carry on up Paraguay to 1,300 and to the building that Pablo chose specially for Leonor, standing as it does for Liberty and for femininity. It surprises him, annoys him in fact, to see that a dry-cleaner has taken over the ground floor. He can’t remember what used to be in that space, if he ever knew, and, even though it’s closed for the day, there is someone working inside and Pablo Simó feels that the smell of warm fabric and dry-cleaning chemicals don’t go with this building. Until recently, the majority of buildings in Buenos Aires were designed to accommodate commercial premises on the ground floor, so the look of the building at street level was determined by luck, misfortune or the highest bidder. Often an art deco building, or one that’s rationalist, art nouveau or some other style, ends up in the care of greengrocers, electricians, hairdressers, bars and betting shops; the coups de grâce are the boxes of merchandise going in and rubbish bags coming out, the parade of customers, the curtains that open or close depending on the time of day. Pablo definitely doesn’t like the presence of a dry-cleaners here; the steam emitted by the machines every so often makes the building feel clammy and heavy, oppressive in a way that doesn’t chime with that clear, almost white façade on which a sequence of tiles evokes a striking but peaceful image of the country.

  “I’d rather any kind
of business on the ground floor than the utter lack of respect for pedestrians with which buildings are put up in this city today, Pablo.” It’s Tano Barletta again. “Nobody cares any more about pedestrian identity. Walk past these great towers set back from the road and you could be in any part of the world. São Paulo, Miami, Madrid – it’s all the same.”

  Although Pablo Simó definitely doesn’t like the dry-cleaners stuck in there, he also does not want, in the middle of his walk with Leonor, to get into an argument with Tano Barletta, especially not about architecture. He wants to be alone with her, strolling through the city, seeking out interesting places, holding her rucksack while she takes photos, touching her – accidentally? – as they walk, looking at her. Tano Barletta, right now, is out of place. Could he have a conversation with Leonor about the city’s lack of respect for pedestrians? He doesn’t think so, but it doesn’t matter. He hasn’t talked much to Laura either about architectural matters during all their years of marriage, or if he has it was only under the heading of “work”, as another man might talk to his wife about his day at the office, in a bank or in an operating theatre. He has talked about architecture with Marta:

  “Have you noticed that new buildings in Buenos Aires today are made to be looked at from a passing car?” he said to Marta one day when they were in a taxi negotiating the slopes of Belgrano, on their way to the showroom that had just opened in one of the most recent projects by Borla and Associates.

  “So?” she asked.

  “It’s a shame. Buenos Aires used not to be like that. Buenos Aires was a place for walking.”

  “It is a place for walking if you don’t have a car. You don’t have a car, right?”

  But this isn’t the day to be thinking of Marta, either.

  “Do you like it?” Pablo asks Leonor quickly, to get Barletta, Laura and Marta Horvat out of his head.

  Leonor doesn’t seem to hear him. She’s moving her lens over the façade covered with tiles brought specially from Milan and the high, narrow balconies with their ornate white railings, looking for her next shot.