Pablo got up and looked for his address book; despite having worked with him for so many years, he had only occasionally called Borla at home, and even though he had a good memory for his clients’ telephone numbers or those of suppliers or developers, he knew that he would struggle to remember his boss’s, given the time of night and the disorientating urgency of Marta’s call. He dialled from the kitchen extension, so as not to wake Laura; after three rings, Borla’s wife answered, sounding as bewildered as he had been minutes before, when Marta had woken him up.
“Hello Señora, good evening, and forgive my ringing at this time. I’m Pablo Simó and I’m calling because…” he said, and he would have carried on explaining himself, except that he heard the woman at the other end of the line holding the receiver away and saying, “It’s for you, Mario.”
To start with, when Pablo began telling him about Marta’s call, Borla sounded strange and disengaged; Pablo suspected that it was possibly not the first time that she had found some pretext to wake him in the night. But when he finally uttered the name Nelson Jara, Borla seemed to grasp that, at least on this occasion, there was a serious motive for the call.
“What a bastard,” Borla said, more to himself than to Pablo. “I’ll go to the site straight away, thanks,” and then he hung up.
So it was done – he had fulfilled his part of the deal. Today he reproaches himself for not leaving it at that, for not sticking to his minor role and going back to bed with his wife after carrying out Marta’s instructions. But there was no more chance of sleeping that night and Pablo was beset by a different set of recriminations. He couldn’t help berating himself for not having known how to handle Jara. He reproached himself for each of the things he now realized he should have said to Marta before hanging up. He could have reacted better after the shock of the call and taken charge of the situation when he spoke to Borla, by saying something like: Do you want me to go with you? Shall I drop you off at Giribone in case you need some help? Shall I go instead of you? Why trouble yourself in the middle of the night? Let me go – I know Jara and I can handle the situation. But there was the crux that was bound to doom any belated attempts to help solve this intractable problem: he had not yet proved himself able to handle Jara and he knew that at some point, the next morning, the next day, when things were calmer, Marta and Borla were going to throw his failure in his face.
He walked around the house, back and forth between the kitchen and the bedrooms countless times; he went into Francisca’s room and looked at his sleeping daughter; he dialled Marta’s mobile number but hung up before it rang; he put on the television in the living room and zapped between channels without taking anything in; he dialled Marta’s number again and it went to answerphone, but he didn’t leave a message; he made himself a coffee and drank it looking out of the steamed-up window, wiping it first with his hand and then with the voile curtain – something Laura would have forbidden, had she seen it – until the whole pane was transparent; he washed the cup; he rang Marta’s mobile again and it went straight to messages again; he went back into Francisca’s room and then into his own. His daughter and his wife slept on. He got dressed in the same clothes he had taken off the night before, located his Caran d’Ache pencil in the jacket pocket, tore a page out of his smooth-paged notebook and wrote a note for Laura, explaining that there had been a problem at one of the worksites and that he was leaving earlier than usual – as early as four o’clock in the morning, in fact, although he left out the detail of the time.
Down he went to the street and to the entrance of the underground, but the padlocked metal gates reminded him that the last train had gone hours ago and it was still a long time before the first one of the morning. He looked up and down the street: at that time of day Avenida Rivadavia seemed unworldly, deserted and silent. He stopped the first taxi to pass, and once he had sat down realized, too late, that he didn’t like it – it was old, untidy, the card bearing the driver’s particulars was smudged, its tatty plastic cover sticky and dusty – but he didn’t dare get out and wait for another one, so with resignation he said, “Calle Giribone.”
When the driver asked him what number, he chose one two blocks before the site where Marta was crying because – so he thought – Jara had managed to stop the base slab being laid the following day. He still wasn’t sure what he was going to do, whether he would simply watch from a safe distance or whether he would be bold enough to step forward and offer his help, in spite of his recent run of failures.
Once out of the taxi, he began to walk. The street was badly lit, and so Pablo was barely twenty yards away before he could confirm that the car parked in front of the entrance to the site was Borla’s. He stopped beside the security fence, leaning against it in the hope of hearing something that would throw light on what was happening inside, and he waited. Even from this side of the wooden fence he could smell damp earth. In the distance, barely discernible, he thought he could hear Marta’s voice, or not so much her voice as a jagged wail, like an anguished hiccuping that every so often rose above another clearer and more defined sound: that of gushing water. He pushed the gate and found it open; his foot struck some hard object and, bending down to pick it up, he saw that it was the padlock that was used to secure the entrance gates at night. As soon as he started to walk he felt his shoes sinking in the mud. It was too dark to see anybody, but as he moved forward the noise of running water got louder and the sound of Marta crying seemed to disappear – or had he imagined it when he thought he heard it before? He stepped into a deep puddle and felt the force of the liquid pushing his foot away, how the bubbles crowded the water’s surface then burst beside his shoe, under his shoe, in front of his shoe. To one side of the puddle a spade was stuck in the ground, like the flag of a victorious climber arriving at the summit of a mountain; somebody – Jara, who else? – had used it to dig down to the mains water supply and ruptured the pipe. Once again, he remembered that meeting with Jara the previous afternoon at Las Violetas, when he had said:
“If it has to rain, it will rain, Simó.”
The water was bursting out like a spring, spreading over the ground and draining into the pit. Looking up, Pablo tried to pick out Jara’s window; there was no light in it, but he waited and watched, half-expecting the man to appear at any moment from behind his curtain. Could it be that Jara, after flooding the plot, had gone home and was watching now, relishing the consequences of his action? Jara was definitely capable of that, Pablo thought, and of much else besides – but he would soon find out that he was mistaken.
He walked on and out of the middle of the puddle. First he found Marta, kneeling beside a column, her clothes covered in mud and her muddy hands clawing at her face, not caring about the state she was in, shaking her head from one side to the other as if to say no, that this wasn’t real, that this couldn’t be happening. And Borla was standing a yard away, staring vacantly into the pit. A single bulb hanging inside the workshop partially lit up the area; Pablo was surprised to see the workshop open; the door seemed to have been forced and the nightwatchman was nowhere to be seen. Indecipherable sounds came from a badly tuned radio inside, and on top of a table and benches improvised from bricks were the remains of a dinner for two: a pizza box with some portions still in it, two pieces of card that must have served as plates, two plastic glasses and two bottles of red wine: one empty, one opened but almost full. Pablo walked towards Marta and stood beside her, waiting for her reaction; when he saw that she was neither surprised nor angered by his presence, he said:
“Don’t worry, Marta. We can repair the pipes at first light and if the weather’s on our side we can still pour the cement tomorrow, in spite of Jara.”
She lifted her head and looked straight into his eyes. Now she did seem angry, but not with him – was she angry about Jara’s act of destruction? In fact she looked devastated, as if this were not the footprint of a building under construction but the site of a battle she had lost. For a moment she stared at him, watchi
ng him with desperation, halfway between screaming and subsiding again into tears. And then, in an effort to speak, for all that her teeth were chattering and she was trembling from shock, rather than cold, she said:
“Go and take a look inside the pit.”
Pablo was scared then; he saw that what Marta had just said contained a meaning he couldn’t yet decipher, that when she said, “Take a look inside in the pit,” she wasn’t merely sending him to look at more mud and water. He walked towards where Borla was standing, almost at the lip of the open ground.
“Hello,” Pablo said.
“Ah, Pablo.” Borla didn’t seem surprised to see him. “It’s a good thing you came. I won’t be able to do this alone,” he said, and he nodded towards a point inside the pit, not far from where they were standing.
Pablo tried to accustom his eyes to the lack of light, and when he was able to focus he understood what was happening: six yards below them a body hung on its back, like a cloth draped over a table, held up by the reinforcement bars in the shuttering of one of the open footings in the pit that was waiting to be filled with cement.
“Jara?” he asked, though he already knew the answer.
“Yes, Jara,” Borla said.
“What happened?”
“He slipped…He was arguing with Marta. He went mad, completely lost it, and he slipped.”
Hearing her own name was a trigger for Marta to start crying again, more wretchedly than ever. Pablo turned round to look at her; she was clutching her head, her whole body shaking uncontrollably.
“Have you called an ambulance?” he asked.
“He’s dead, Pablo,” Borla said. “Do you think calling an ambulance would be helpful?”
“What about the police?” he insisted.
Borla turned to look at him then spoke slowly, enunciating the words as though he had already decided on them before Pablo’s arrival:
“I don’t know. I was just about to call them when you arrived, but then I started wondering if it was for the best. What do you think?” he asked, but didn’t wait for Pablo’s answer. “Do you know how long they’ll close the site because of an accident like this? A month at least, maybe two months. We can forget about meeting deadlines, about our commitments and especially our salaries. You know very well that if we don’t have work under way on the building it will be much harder to sell. I don’t even want to think about this, but if word gets out that somebody died here, the superstitious just won’t want to buy. There are so many buildings in Buenos Aires – why choose one where a man got killed? And if we can’t sell quickly, Pablo, you know what will happen: our flow of income is cut off. We’ve got too much in play at the moment. There’s no cushion.”
Borla fell silent for a moment, ostensibly leaving Pablo a chance to digest what he had just said, though more likely with the intention of letting him appropriate it, this idea that was not his. Then, when he judged that the necessary time had passed, he posed the question again, as though Pablo’s opinion really mattered to him.
“What shall we do? What do you think?”
And when Pablo still seemed unsure, Borla continued:
“My main concern is her.” He nodded towards Marta Horvat. “They’re going to arrest her, however much we explain that the guy was a bastard, that he tried to blackmail us, that he planned this fiasco to extort money out of us. You know what he did? He made friends with the nightwatchman, he turned up with a radio so that they could listen to the Argentina v. Brazil match. He brought a pizza, wine, and when the guy wasn’t paying attention he locked him in the workshop. Thank God the nightwatchman had his mobile on him and called Marta, and she called you and you me. Well, you already know that part. By the time Marta arrived, Jara had already broken the mains pipe with a spade and caused this quagmire. I tried to shut off the mains supply from the street, but I couldn’t – I didn’t have the right tools. First thing tomorrow we’ll have to send a team in.”
Borla took a minute to survey the damage around him and give Pablo a chance to do the same. Then he said:
“Marta says he seemed like a man possessed, that when she arrived Jara was holding up the spade like a trophy and laughing like a child, or like a madman. I can just imagine him, can’t you?”
Pablo nodded. Borla went on:
“He asked her for money. You know how much he asked for? Thirty thousand dollars! Talk about a brass neck! Had he mentioned such a high figure to you?”
“He told me he was after money, but he didn’t specify how much.”
“Well, tonight he certainly did specify it, spelt it out. Now tell me, Pablo, do you think we should have to swallow such a bitter pill, when everything, absolutely everything, is his fault?”
“I don’t know,” said Pablo. “All the same, I think the police —”
“The police what? You really think the police are required here?” asked Borla, and went on: “And to top it all, he tried to touch her. That dirty old pervert tried to touch Marta.”
“Jara?”
“Yes, Jara.”
Pablo could picture Jara jumping around with his spade after breaking a water pipe, but he had difficulty picturing the same man trying to touch Marta. He had never given the slightest indication of being interested in Marta or finding her attractive; he had never even made the kind of jokes that Pablo often heard other men make about women as devastatingly pretty as her. Jara seemed more anodyne, the kind of man who may once have known what it was like to be with a woman but for whom sex had long since ceased to be a priority. His only priority as far as Pablo could see had been to lay his hands on the money he thought they owed him for the crack that had appeared in his wall – had he really asked for thirty thousand dollars? – and there was no need to touch Marta Horvat for that. Pablo turned to look at her again: she was crying like a little girl now, hugging her knees, and, without letting her legs go, cracking the fingers of one hand with the other. Could it be true? He found it hard to believe, but if it was, if Jara had really groped Marta or tried it on, Pablo Simó would personally kill him – if he weren’t already dead.
Borla said, dropping his voice – Pablo guessed with the aim of protecting Marta:
“He touched her and was taking her off somewhere, so she tried to shake him off and that’s when the guy slipped and fell into the pit. I can’t help thinking, and I don’t think anyone would judge me for it – that it was really a piece of luck this man fell in before he had a chance to do something to Marta that neither you nor I would have forgiven.”
Neither you nor I. Pablo was surprised by the certainty with which Borla counted him among the defenders of Marta’s virtue, but it was true, all the same: he would never have forgiven it. He examined the pit’s muddy walls for marks left by Jara’s body as it fell: skids or grooves made by his feet as he slipped; he wanted to imagine the fall, the thud, the death. The light was bad and water was still sweeping over everything; he guessed that that was why he couldn’t see any marks at all.
“I ask you, again, what use will the police be? We know that this was an accident, befalling a first-class shit, a would-be rapist. But that doesn’t alter anything: not the time during which the work will be stopped, nor people’s superstitions, nor the police, nor the problems that this may end up bringing her. You go and explain all that to the cops and spend however many days you get inside until they can prove that you’re not lying, that it was an accident or, as a last resort, that it was self-defence. Can you see Marta in prison?”
And Pablo couldn’t see her there, nor did he want to. Borla lit a cigarette, then asked him:
“Has this guy got any family?”
“I don’t think so. He told me once that he lived alone…” Pablo didn’t elucidate further, but he did remember the calculations Jara had made that same afternoon to show how much each of them was spending on electricity.
“That’s good, Pablo. It’s better for him not to have relations. It gives us a freer hand.”
“You’re thinking�
�”
“Yes, I’m thinking that, given the circumstances, the best thing is for Jara to disappear without trace. To choose the other path – to face up to the situation and tell the truth – would still leave this man in the same place, but not us, at least not without paying a very high price first. It won’t be too difficult to put him in the middle of the footing, don’t you think? And then tomorrow afternoon, when this mud finally dries, we’ll tip cement over the bastard and bury him once and for all. Not a conventional burial, but in short… What do you say?”
“I don’t know,” Pablo replied.
“You can’t not know, Pablo, there’s no alternative. The man’s dead. It was an accident, there’s no family – nobody’s going to go looking for him under the concrete. You and I have to take this decision. We’re the ones who ended up being here; what choice do we have? You can’t walk away from every eventuality unscathed – sometimes life puts you in places where you have to decide which side you’re on. Which side are you on, Pablo?”
And Pablo decided, that night, that he was on Marta’s side – for what other side could he be on? If Marta Horvat needed him, he was going to stand beside her, so he said:
“All right then, let’s put him in the footing.”
“Well done Pablo, it’s the right decision. There are no witnesses other than us three to what’s going to happen, so in that respect we can rest easy.”
“And the nightwatchman?”
“He doesn’t know anything, at least not about the accident. We opened the door to the workshop after Jara had already fallen in, and what with the shock he could scarcely even get into the taxi I ordered him; anyway, he’s conscious that to a certain extent this is his fault – at least, I don’t know if it is, but I was careful to spell out his part in what happened: he was the one who opened the door to Jara, allowing him to create this mayhem; he accepted the pizza; he compromised site security in order to listen to some lousy qualifier; he drank on the job. When he was in the taxi I got him to wind down the window, and you know what I said to him? I said, ‘You’re lucky that Jara went away without hurting anyone, but tomorrow we’re going to have a conversation about who’s shouldering the cost of all this damage.’ Listen, Pablo, I’ve been in this profession a long time, and if there’s one thing I know about people like that – believe me, he won’t be coming back.”
A Crack in the Wall Page 13
