A Crack in the Wall
Page 19
“Give me a few days to find a replacement. Can I count on you for that?”
“Yes, so long as it’s only for a few days.”
Their conversation is over, but Pablo doesn’t leave. He feels that something is missing, that, after so many years as colleagues, their farewell ought to end with a hug, with a meaningful handshake or with a punch-up. Should he take the initiative, walk the few paces between them and embrace Borla – or hit him? It seems to make his boss uncomfortable that Pablo is still standing there without saying anything.
“Right, well…that’s settled, then,” he says.
“Yes, absolutely,” Pablo says finally, and he leaves Borla’s office.
At lunchtime he goes to the property agency and signs a rental contract on the apartment in Calle Tronador, but, in spite of his protests, they say it’s not possible for him to move in until the following day. He hadn’t bargained on having to find somewhere else to spend that night. Walking back to the studio from the agency, he stops at a post office to post the envelope in his pocket – with a second-class stamp so that it arrives after he has left the studio – and he feels that everything is finally moving in the right direction.
A little later, on the corner of Céspedes and Alvarez Thomas, a man who’s crossing the street and pushing a pram waves to him. Pablo has the strange sensation of knowing the man without having the slightest idea who he is. The man is very overweight and his remaining hair encircles a recent but undeniable bald patch. This hair – long, wispy and grey – is worn in a ponytail. He’s sporting office clothes – a white shirt, tie and grey trousers without a jacket – all of it rumpled and bad quality. The man looks too old to have such a small baby, but too young to be a grandfather. There are sweat marks on his shirt, around his chest. And this man is now making for him with determination.
“Pablo Simó, am I right, brother?” he says, and before Pablo can answer, the man’s embracing him.
Hearing the word “brother” is enough to tip Pablo off that the man before him is Tano Barletta.
“You haven’t changed,” his friend says.
“Neither have you,” Pablo lies, for the Barletta who pops into his mind every so often had been frozen at twenty-four or twenty-five years old. “The baby’s yours?”
“Yes, our little accident. I’ve got two more – they’re over there with my wife,” he says, and points towards a bar.
“So you finally got married…”
“Ah yes, well what choice is there? Eventually you get tired of being alone.”
“And where are you working?” Pablo asks him.
“In a factory that makes office furniture. It’s good work, good quality furniture, big clients, you know – important.”
“You design furniture?”
“No, I’m more on the marketing side of things, you know?”
“I think so.”
“I sell, basically. I visit the clients, assess their needs and sell to them.”
“And are you happy?”
“Yes, yes…well, happy in that I’ve got work, the family is well – what more can you ask for?”
“No, you can’t really ask for more than that, can you?”
They’re both silent for a moment, looking at each other. Chalk and cheese, thinks Pablo, even now, twenty years on, and he wonders what Tano Barletta’s impression of them both is, at this moment.
“Here comes my wife. Wait and I’ll introduce you.”
Barletta explains who Pablo is to his wife and she shakes hands with him, and makes her children do likewise. From her reaction, Pablo realizes that Tano has probably never spoken to her about him, or if he has she doesn’t remember it. The two older children start hitting each other and Barletta delivers a sharp but gentle smack to the head nearest to him.
“Hey, don’t make me look bad in front of my friend,” he says.
They exchange a few more awkward pleasantries so as not to cut the meeting short there.
“I’ll give you my number,” Barletta says, and hands him a card with the logo of the office supplies company for which he works. “Call me and we’ll get together for a meal, OK? We can relive the old days. We had some great times together, didn’t we?”
“Yes, we had a good time,” Pablo says.
Barletta, his wife and children are already crossing Avenida Álvarez Thomas when Tano turns round and shouts:
“Say hello to Laura and your daughter.”
“Thanks,” he calls back.
In the afternoon, Pablo goes to say goodbye to Marta Horvat. Entering the site, he stops just inside the security fence and observes from a distance, perhaps for the last time, her interaction with the workers. She is their queen, he thinks, the queen of those men who run back and forth with bricks, cables, trowels, picks and shovels. But even though the passing years have been much kinder to her than to other women – and she is still one of the most beautiful he has ever known – Marta Horvat no longer bewitches Pablo Simó in the way she once did. Why, he wonders, why can he look at her now without needing to imagine her naked, why does he no longer feel jealous of the men moving around close to her, why does his body not signal an alert when in proximity to Marta Horvat’s body, as it has done so many times before? Is the desire awakened by a woman also a firework that goes out, the same as love?
Pablo walks towards her and, for the first time, isn’t scared that she’s about to humiliate him.
“What are you doing here?” Marta asks.
“I came to say goodbye. I’m leaving the practice,” says Pablo and he could swear – could it really be? – that the news comes as an unwelcome surprise to her.
“No, no, I can’t believe it…you’re not serious.”
“Yes, Marta, I really am.”
“But why? Why are you going?”
“I’m going to build that tower block you’ve seen me draw thousands of times in the studio. And please don’t tell me again that the plot ratio isn’t in my favour,” he says, and Marta, to his surprise, smiles.
“I swear I never told you the plot ratio wasn’t in your favour.”
“I swear you did.”
“God, I’m terrible.”
“Yes, you’re terrible.”
Pablo has the impression that Marta Horvat’s eyes are filling with tears. In fact she lowers the sunglasses that had been perched on her head even though the sun, at that time of day, can’t be bothering her any more.
“How old are you, Pablo?” she asks, and the question surprises him.
“Forty-five.”
“Three years younger than me,” says Marta, who thinks for a moment then continues. “Do you think there is still time to turn the wheel and set a different course?”
“I’ve hit an iceberg. I’ve got no option but to change course.”
“You were lucky – sometimes it’s necessary to hit an iceberg,” she tells him, and he wonders if the letter he wrote in Jara’s handwriting could end up being the iceberg that Marta Horvat needs.
And then, surpassing any expectation that Simó could have had even at the best times, Marta comes close, hugs him and stays for a moment pressed against him; then she gives him a quick kiss on the cheek and, as though embarrassed by such a display of affection, she quickly says goodbye:
“Well, I’ll let you get on, I have a lot to do. Good luck, Pablo. If you need anything, you know where I am.”
She’s already walking away by the time she finishes speaking and so she doesn’t hear Pablo when he says:
“I know where you are, yes.”
Pablo returns to the studio after everyone else has left – not just from his office but from almost all the others in the block. Before going up to his floor he buys some slices of pizza and a small bottle of beer. He moves aside the few things left on his desk and uses it as a dinner table. He remembers Nelson Jara’s last supper, in that same place, but when the building was still only a promise based on an open pit in the ground. He remembers the leftovers of pizza that he hims
elf cleared away. And Jara’s shoes, and the heft of his body, and that hammer – but today he notes that the memories do not weigh as heavily on him as they did, as though, finally, he has made his peace with them. Then he calls Francisca and tells her that that night he will sleep in a hotel, but that he will have a flat the next day and that he will give her the details as soon as possible so that she can find him. She asks if he would like to speak to Laura and he says no, that he would prefer not to speak to her again that day, but that tomorrow he will call her too. After hanging up, he casts a glance around the place, looking at the corners that he will soon not see again. He imagines the moment that Borla receives the envelope sent by Nelson Jara, and that’s exactly how he thinks it, “the envelope sent by Nelson Jara”, as if the man really existed, as if the man really were about to call on those people who believe him dead and buried. He knows that it will be better for Borla and Marta to read the letter when he is no longer there. It avoids him having to lie to them, pretending that he too is worried by the letter, that he is also alarmed by the thought that Jara is alive. It will save him having to say, “But are you sure that’s Jara’s handwriting?” and having to open the bottom drawer of his desk, taking out the written sheet for them to compare the handwriting and confirm their worst fears. He goes to the storeroom to get some clothes from his suitcase so as to make a makeshift bed between his desk and Marta Horvat’s. He lies down, folding his arms behind his head, and realizes that it is the first time in twenty years that he has looked at the ceiling of his workplace. He studies every corner, every light fitting, every imperfection in the plaster or paintwork.
Finally he closes his eyes and tries to sleep. He knows that tonight he might dream of Marta Horvat, or of Leonor Corell or of Laura or Francisca. If he had a choice, though, he would prefer not to dream, but simply to close his eyes and sleep, without the intervention of any of these women who in different ways and to different degrees have so often infiltrated his dreams. Because tonight he is truly tired, really tired. Tonight he wants nothing of them: not love, or affection, or desire, or “I love you”s, or joined bodies, seeking one another.
Tonight Pablo Simó wants only to close his eyes and be allowed to sleep.
21
Early the following morning, Pablo Simó goes to the property agency to pick up the keys for the apartment he’s rented, carrying his suitcase and the file with the sketches of the north-facing eleven-storey tower. And not long afterwards he is opening the door to the place where he plans to spend the next few months. He puts his suitcase in the bedroom, then he returns to the living room, opens the window and breathes deeply, letting the sun bathe his face. Making a quick survey of the four cardinal points, he concludes that by the time Garrido and Associates have put up the duplex flats promised on their hoarding, the sun will no longer come through this window as it does today.
There isn’t much action on the neighbouring plot, but there’s quite a stockpile of materials, and that reassures him; nobody invests in bricks without pressing ahead with the job in hand.
He returns to his room, opens the suitcase and puts on more comfortable clothes: shorts, a T-shirt and trainers. From an inside pocket he takes out his toolbox, then he returns to the living room. He takes from his folder the most recent sketch, the one incorporating Jara’s crack. He leans it against the side wall, as though it were a picture that he has not yet had a chance to hang but will, as soon as he has properly moved in. He walks towards the other wall, the party wall, the one bordering the plot where Garrido and Associates will soon be excavating a pit and then cementing the foundations of the duplex building they plan to build. He opens the toolbox, takes out a hammer and chisel, runs his hand over the wall, detecting two or three imperfections in the paintwork, and then, as though this were familiar work, he starts to carve a crack. Patiently he chips at the beginning of this fissure, which he knows is going to grow little by little, by dint of the strokes he makes. Day by day he will take photographs as the crack advances, he will note down its progress in inches, he will carry notebooks in which he records the meetings with enemies and with potential allies. He will measure the width and depth of the crack and he will wait.
He strikes and chips at the wall, strikes and chips, strikes and chips once more.
The dust makes him cough, but he doesn’t stop, he will stop only when he has chipped away the amount by which the crack is going to grow that day, according to his own plan.
Then he turns his head over his shoulder and looks for him. He knows that he must be there, and indeed there he is, standing behind him, observing his work.
Pablo Simó looks at him, waiting for an opinion, and Nelson Jara, without saying a word, with a clear movement of his head and a barely insinuated smile, nods.
ALL YOURS
Claudia Piñeiro
Infidelity and obsession lead to murder…
Inés is convinced that every wife is bound to be betrayed one day, so she is not surprised to find a note in her husband Ernesto’s briefcase with a heart smeared in lipstick crossed by the words “All Yours”. Following him to a park in Buenos Aires on a rainy winter evening, she witnesses a violent quarrel between her husband and another woman. The woman collapses; Ernesto sinks her body in a nearby lake.
When Ernesto becomes a suspect in the case Inés provides him with an alibi. After all, hatred can bring people together as urgently as love. But Ernesto cannot bring his sexual adventures to an end, so Inés concocts a plan for revenge from which there is no return.
“If you read only one crime book in translation this year, make All Yours the one, a book that grabs you from the start and whips along at pace. Piñeiro is a best-selling Argentinean author, and unlike many South American books this one doesn’t loiter. It screams out to become a film – The Postman Only Brings Double Indemnity perhaps”. CrimeTime
£8.99/$14.95
Crime Paperback Original
ISBN 978 1904738 800
eBook ISBN 978 1904738 817
www.bitterlemonpress.com
THURSDAY NIGHT WIDOWS
Claudia Piñeiro
“A nimble novel, a ruthless dissection of a fast-decaying society”—José Saramago, winner of the Nobel prize for literature
Three bodies lie at the bottom of a swimming pool in a gated country estate near Buenos Aires. Under the gaze of fifteen security guards, the pampered residents of Cascade Heights lead a charmed life of parties and tennis tournaments, ignoring the poverty outside the perimeter wall. Claudia Piñeiro’s novel eerily foreshadowed a criminal case that generated a scandal in the Argentine media. But this is more than a tale about crime, it is a psychological portrait of a middle class living beyond its means and struggling to conceal deadly secrets. Set during the post-9/11 economic meltdown in Argentina, this story will resonate among credit-crunched readers of today.
Winner of the Clarín Prize for fiction and now a film by Argentine New Wave director Marcelo Piñeyro.
“A gripping story. The dystopia portrayed is an indictment not solely of an assassin but of Argentina’s class structure and the wilful blindness of its petty bourgeoisie.” Times Literary Supplement
“A fine morality tale which explores the dark places societies enter when they place material comfort before social justice, and security before morality.” Publishers Weekly
£7.99/$14.95
Crime Paperback Original
ISBN 978 1904738 411
eBook ISBN 978 1904738 589
www.bitterlemonpress.com
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