A Crack in the Wall

by Claudia Piñeiro

  And further down:

  He takes the underground to work even though this entails a much longer and less direct journey than he would make by bus. Either the traffic bothers him or he likes burying himself alive beneath the city.

  The traffic never bothered him. So does he choose the underground in order to bury himself alive? A living man under the city. A living man beneath the earth. If there were even a remote possibility of Jara not being dead when he buried him, then his label shouldn’t be “accomplice” but “murderer”. He’ll never know now which of these he is. How many people have been buried alive in the soil of Buenos Aires? How many deaths that nobody ever found out about? How many deaths denied? Tano Barletta used to claim that when the underground was built the workers who died on the job were buried there and then, in the tunnels that they themselves had dug, through which rails would later pass and, over them, Pablo Simó in a compartment en route to his destination. And he also said that there were corpses buried under the motorway between Buenos Aires and Ezeiza airport. And under what was once the Ital Park funfair. And under the Costanera Sur, in amongst the rubble of demolished houses from San Telmo that was used to fill land reclaimed from the river to create an ecological reserve.

  “What can you expect of a city where so many of the dead lie outside the cemetery walls?” Barletta used to complain.

  Pablo Simó flicks a few pages on and alights on this paragraph:

  It isn’t known whether he pursues relationships outside his marriage, which football team he supports or who his friends are.

  And a few pages further on there is a chronology of each of their meetings: the first time at the studio (“Simó is upset by any change in the arrangement of objects on his desk”; “He worries about the shoes people wear”), the afternoon of Jara’s fruitless wait at the main entrance (“Simó spied on me from the corner, he knows that I was there and he knows that he neglected to receive me”) and the coffee on that last occasion at Las Violetas (“Today Simó was incapable of looking me in the eye”). Beneath each date and description there is a summary. The one after the first meeting reads:

  Pablo Simó is an obsessive perfectionist. At times he believes that he ought to be hard and he attempts this, as if someone had taught him that these are the rules of the game. But it isn’t in his nature to be like that. He’s more on this side than on the side of the others. A potential friend? An ally?

  And then a paragraph that Jara wrote the afternoon he had waited at the main entrance:

  There is something disconcerting about Pablo Simó’s behaviour. He seems to be on my side and says he’s going to help, but then he doesn’t. Is he a liar? A coward? Is he under pressure from his boss? If he were only a bit more open I would have offered him a cut of whatever we manage to get from Borla. Why do I like Pablo Simó?

  The description of their last meeting at Las Violetas is written in telegraphic form – short sentences shorn of detail, almost as if Jara had been obliged to record it, but had had neither the enthusiasm nor the time for his task. And the conclusion is as follows:

  Alone again. I was wrong: I can’t count on Pablo Simó. So it will have to be without an ally. Simó is on this side, but he seems not to know it. The die is cast.

  And then the word “End”, which holds Pablo’s gaze. The end for him and the end for Nelson Jara.

  Soon afterwards Pablo calls Leonor, waking her up: it’s still early on this Sunday morning. She says it doesn’t matter, that she was about to get up to go for a bicycle ride with a friend. A friend, Pablo says to himself, and he asks her if there are any other notebooks in the box, if there is a notebook for Borla and one for Marta Horvat. Leonor says she doesn’t think there is, but that she is going to check and will let him know, and she asks if she can call him at this number. He says yes and prepares to wait for her call.

  “No, there aren’t any other personal notebooks in that box. But there are books in the others.”

  “What others?”

  “I’ve still got two or three other boxes – I threw away the others. I couldn’t hang on to so much paper.”

  “So what’s in the other boxes?”

  “They seem to correspond to other buildings. The papers are similar to those ones I showed you, but there are loads of them. They all have a label on the front with an address, a date and an amount in dollars. On your one the sum isn’t filled in. There’s a space for it but no figure. On all of them there are photographs with cracked walls, diagrams showing the cracks, and newspaper cuttings. And in each of those boxes there is a book with someone’s name and a photograph. Would you like me to have a look and tell you the names?”

  “No, that’s not necessary,” says Pablo. He thanks her and hangs up.

  Nelson Jara, a one-man crack squad. That could be his label. A professional fraudster. A swindler of architects. One or all of these things. Pablo smiles to himself; he can’t help but feel a sneaking sympathy for this man who tricked so many of his colleagues, himself included. It’s a shame he’s dead, otherwise he’d like to take Jara for a coffee and have him spill all the details. Which studio he got the most money from. Which crack was the hardest to make. He would ask if anyone ever caught him out. How he chose his victims – if that is what they were. How he chose this as a way to make a living. What his retirement plans were. But Jara isn’t around and the questions will have to go unanswered. He looks again at the lines that man wrote about him and uses them as the basis to write his own CV, after the word “End”:

  Pablo Simó is a frustrated architect who, despite having very little to lose, panics at the thought of moving beyond the places where he is established: his work, his marriage, his life without music, friends, a football team to cheer for on Sundays, without lovers and without love. He knows very little about himself: that he has a daughter he loves, that he buried a man in the foundations of a building, that he would like to construct an eleven-storey, north-facing tower block, that he fears he will never make that eleven-storey tower and that, until today, he was stuck on the side to which he didn’t belong.

  He looks at what he has written and sees that almost unintentionally he has mimicked Nelson Jara’s handwriting. With a bit of practice he could replicate it exactly, he thinks. At that moment Laura comes into the kitchen. Her eyes are swollen from hours of crying and her expression suggests she plans to cry again, once her tear ducts have recuperated.

  “Could you sleep?” she asks.

  “Not much, but a bit.”

  “Men are lucky, almost nothing keeps them awake.”

  “Don’t you believe it. I’ve had many sleepless nights.”

  “When?”

  “Lots of times, during all these years we’ve been together.”

  “I never realized.”

  “You were asleep!”

  “Well, it would have been for some minor thing; nothing as serious as this has ever happened to us before.”

  “Speak for yourself.”

  “What do you mean? Are you going to tell me that something as serious as this has happened to you and I never found out about it?”

  “A few years ago I buried a man under the cement of a building that we had under construction. I still don’t know today whether that man was alive or dead. On your scale of serious events, which would rank higher, Laura: Francisca’s sexuality or me burying a man alive?”

  18

  On Monday before entering the studio Pablo goes for his usual coffee, a prerequisite for starting the day. Open in front of him is the notebook Nelson Jara dedicated to him. It doesn’t matter which page is in front of his eyes because this time Pablo Simó isn’t focusing on the content, on what the words say, but on the writing itself, the strokes that Nelson Jara effected with a steady hand and painstaking calligraphy. He notices that the “o” and the “a” shaped by this man are almost identical except in their final curlicue, that they have the same degree of slant towards the right, the same size of ellipsis, and that the “t” extends hig
her than Simó’s own “t” – when he writes “Marta”, for example – and the “p” also extends lower than his own “p”. Pablo tries copying Jara’s writing on a paper napkin. He writes, “What would happen if…?” And again, “What would happen if…?” And then, “happen”. And “happen”, again. And he tries out the question mark. “What would happen if one afternoon…?” “…one afternoon.” “if one afternoon…” “…afternoon…”.

  He looks at the clock: it’s time to go to work. He pays for the coffee, picks up Jara’s notebook and leaves, but even as he’s arriving at the door to the studio, he realizes that he has left on the table the napkin on which he was practising letters and goes back to get it. That’s when Leonor, approaching on a bicycle, has to swerve to avoid crashing into him.

  “Hello!” she says.

  “Hello!” he says.

  “Are you going for a ride?”

  “No, I’m going to work.”

  “By bike…”

  “Yes, I’m sick of the bus. The traffic in this city gets worse and worse and I get later and later to work. Don’t you find the same thing?”

  “I go by underground.”

  “Of course – I read that in your notes.”

  Pablo blushes as it dawns on him that Leonor must have read everything that Jara wrote about him in the exercise book. He hesitates between clearing up a few details, refuting others, denying the whole thing, or saying nothing and accepting the portrait as essentially accurate. He decides to ask her:

  “The other day, at your house” – and it moves him to say “your house” – “you said that you wanted to ask me something about what Jara says about me in the notebook.”

  “Oh yes, true. Shall I ask you now?”

  “Go on then.”

  “Has there really never been another woman in your life since you got married?”

  “It depends what’s meant by the phrase ‘another woman in your life’.”

  “That you’ve been with another woman; that you’ve been in love.”

  “No. Up until the time Jara wrote that there hadn’t been, no.”

  “And afterwards there was?”

  “That’s not part of our pact. I agreed to answer questions to do with the notebook. A deal’s a deal.”

  “You’re right.”

  “Coward,” says Barletta, but Pablo pretends not to see or hear him.

  For a moment there is silence between them; both are uncomfortable, not knowing what else to say. When they do opt to speak it’s at the same time and what one says is lost in the other’s murmur.

  “Do you want to see how the project came out?” she says while he is saying, “So you’ve bought a bicycle?”

  Leonor laughs at the mix-up, making Pablo laugh in turn.

  “Go ahead,” the girl says.

  “No – you first,” says Pablo.

  “I was asking if you would like to see the end result of my photographic project. I’ve got it in the rucksack,” she says, pointing to the one on her back that Pablo knows so well.

  “Is it finished already?”

  “Yes, I have to hand it in today.”

  “Oh, I thought that perhaps…another day…”

  Without waiting for him to finish the sentence – something Pablo wouldn’t have done anyway – the girl takes the rucksack off her back, opens it, pulls out a folder and passes it to him. On the folder there’s a title, “Five Faces of a City”, and her name, Leonor Corell. Pablo opens the folder and looks through it. He’s not an expert in photography but he likes what he sees and would even say that these are good photographs. Leonor has given each of them a caption: 1) Men who labour in vain; 2) Head with lilies; 3) Peacocks, some displaying their tails (the only caption on the page where she had stuck the three Colombo façades); 4) Railing in Barrio Norte; 5) Liberty with dry-cleaners.

  Pablo wonders how he would have titled them. Looking through the pictures again, mentally he gives them captions: 1) The first time I really looked at Leonor; 2) She and I sit together on a car boot; 3) Stubborn Blood – a seventeen-year age gap; 4) Leonor among Spanish ironwork; 5) Leonor invites me to her house.

  “What do you think?” she asks.

  “It’s turned out really well,” he answers, and hands her back the folder.

  “Did you see this?” Leonor asks him, and holds the folder open on the last page so that he can read, “With special thanks to the architect Pablo Simó.”

  Pablo stares at his name written in Leonor’s hand.

  If he could, he would caress his name handwritten by Leonor; he would trace the blue-ink letters with his index finger, but he knows he can’t do this in front of her, so he simply thanks her and hands back the folder for her to put it away. As she bends down to put the folder in her rucksack her hair falls over her face, and Pablo realizes that she isn’t wearing her hair tied up today and that he likes it that way. And that he also likes her T-shirt, which is similar to the ones she always wears, her worn jeans and her high-top canvas trainers, which she was also wearing the first time they met.

  “And what were you saying?”

  “When?”

  “Just now, when we both started talking at the same time.”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Something about a bicycle, I think.”

  “Oh yes, I was asking if you’d bought this bicycle.”

  “No, it’s Damian’s. We went out for a ride yesterday and he left it at mine.”

  “Who’s Damian?”

  “My boyfriend.”

  “Bitch,” says Barletta, and Pablo wonders why his friend has to choose this moment to appear.

  “My ex-boyfriend, really. The one from Mar del Plata.”

  “Oh, so you still see each other,” he says.

  “Yes, we’re cool, totally.”

  “And he left his bike with you. So he’s coming back.”

  “Yes, he comes round all the time. Or I go there.”

  “They’re like that, brother,” says Barletta, putting an arm around his shoulder. “Girls are like that these days – free. You want them to be yours alone but you have to be content with just a bit of them because the alternative is nothing. They’re free, beautiful – and bitches.”

  Pablo changes position, hoping to make Barletta disappear. He doesn’t feel like having an argument with him about what Leonor Corell is or isn’t like.

  “Can I ask you something?” he says to the girl.

  “Yes.”

  “I need you to look among Jara’s papers for something for me.”

  “What sort of thing?”

  “A sheet of paper where you can see his handwriting really well, like a report about the building or the crack, talking about the work but not about me.”

  “I’ll have a look and let you know. I’m sure there’s something like that.”

  “I need it quite urgently.”

  “I’ll look tonight.”

  They both fall silent again for a moment, then Leonor straightens her bicycle, aligns the pedals so they’re ready to go and says goodbye.

  “OK, I’d better go or I’ll end up being late today, as well. I’ll send you that thing as soon as I find it,” she says, getting onto the bike and riding away.

  “Thanks, and good luck at work,” Pablo shouts as she cycles away and he is left to admire the way her hair fans over her back.

  “It wasn’t after all, then”, says Barletta.

  “It wasn’t what?” he replies.

  “Love.”

  Pablo hesitates, watching Leonor until she is out of sight.

  “No,” he says finally, when he can’t see her any more. “If she was love, she never knew it.”

  “Yet again it wasn’t to be.”

  “Yet again.”

  “And now where are you going to look for it?”

  “For what?”

  “For love.”

  “I’m not going to look for it any more. If it’s somewhere out there, I suppose it will send a sign.”


  “A sign? What kind of sign?”

  “A clear and distinct one.”

  19

  Pablo spends all day at the studio, as though nothing has happened. There’s less work around these days: although there are various jobs with feasibility reports started, the financial insecurity in some country’s stock market, or in all countries that have a stock market – he can never quite understand how their effects reach Calle Giribone – have caused investment in property development to be suspended over the next few months.

  “We’re on standby, Pablo, waiting for things to settle down,” says Borla when he comes by the office that afternoon, and he asks Pablo, “What do you think of what’s happening in the markets?”

  But if there is one thing that Pablo is not even the slightest bit interested in at this moment in his life, it is what’s happening “in the markets”. What exactly are the markets? Who are the markets? Where are they? Can you touch them, like he touched Leonor Corell? Or like he touched the crack in Jara’s apartment? Can they be thrown into a footing and have cement poured over them? Well then, don’t come and talk to him about the markets.

  “Anything else to report?” Borla asks before going into his office.

  “Not for the moment, everything’s fine,” Pablo answers.

  Marta Horvat doesn’t even come to the studio. It’s been a while since she and Pablo crossed paths. He knows that she’s starting on a new job this week – the last to be approved by Borla, right before the crisis, if that is what it is – and the smell of churned-up earth, the lorries unloading supplies, the chit-chat of the workers who answer to her, all of this exerts such a strong attraction on Marta that she often doesn’t set foot on solid ground for weeks.

  In free moments, Pablo Simó tries again to master Jara’s handwriting style. “What would happen if…” “What would happen…” “…if one afternoon…” “because that night…” “That night…” “…an error…” “…there was an error…” “What would happen if…”