A Crack in the Wall

by Claudia Piñeiro

  “Hello?” she says.

  “Yes, still here.”

  “So which would they be?” Leonor asks again.

  “Let me think it over, five buildings with sufficient architectonic merit —”

  “Architectonic merit? What’s that?”

  “Design values, qualities that make them stand out when compared to other buildings.”

  “No, no,” she interrupts, “I’m just looking for the five façades that you like best.”

  “And what value is there in someone liking something?” Pablo asks.

  “It’s important to me that somebody likes the photos I take,” she says.

  “That doesn’t give them a value. My mother liked the house of an aunt who lived in San Martín and I can assure you that the house was a veritable eyesore.”

  “But you are not your mother, you are somebody presumed to know about architecture. If these buildings have your approval, that’s enough for me.”

  “It shouldn’t be enough, though,” Pablo insists. “You shouldn’t be content with somebody else’s taste. Taste isn’t objective – you’d never catch an art critic saying that he likes a painting, or a literary critic saying he likes a novel.”

  Pablo feels anxious. He realizes that in his cowardly insistence on precision and objectivity he’s in danger of losing an opportunity to see Leonor again. In fact, how much does it really matter what values a building has, what the architectural features are that make it stand out in the middle of a fast-expanding city, or even whether or not he likes it, when set against another chance to see this girl whose voice is dancing down the line? The chance to see Leonor again. But a chance in what sense, exactly? What is he thinking of? Simply of an opportunity to ask the girl those questions Borla wants answered, he tells himself, rescuing his line of thought from its deviant course. The answer placates him and he tells her:

  “Very well, if you need five building façades, I shall find you five building façades. I don’t know if they will be the ones I like best, but at least they will be worth photographing. Does that sound good?”

  “Fantastic. Which would they be, then?”

  Her clamour for instant answers takes him aback. He searches his mind as if riffling through a mental card-index, agile fingers flicking through the entries, but whenever the fingers alight on one and pluck it out, the card is blank. Either nothing’s written on it, or what was written there has been crossed, torn or rubbed out. So he tries to think of an excuse.

  “I’d like to take a bit of time before making my selection. There are too many buildings in Buenos Aires with different virtues” – did he really say virtues? – “and it’s not that easy to choose just five. When do you need this by?”

  “Well, I have to go out and take the photos by Saturday at the latest, so I haven’t got very long to get the project together. I have to hand it in the next week. I think that, so long as you can let me know your favourites by Saturday, there’s enough time. Or even better,” Leonor says, and then asks in that rock-leaping voice, “Would you like to come with me?”

  “Where to?” he asks her, like an idiot.

  “To take the photos,” she says, laughing.

  “I don’t know if I’d be able to this Saturday,” he says and a picture comes to mind of him and Laura doing their fortnightly shop in the hypermarket where they go every other Saturday. “I’ll let you know whether or not I can go with you nearer the time,” he says, and he feels something intangible when he says the words “go with you”. “Call me the day after tomorrow, and if I can’t go along I promise to have the addresses of the five buildings you need ready by then.”

  “Great,” she says.

  “Is that a plan, then?” he asks.

  There’s a brief silence on the line, which worries him.

  “Hello?” Pablo says.

  “Yes, yes, I’m here,” Leonor answers. “I was just thinking.”

  “What about?”

  “Shall I tell you?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “I was thinking, how odd it is – no?”

  “How odd what is?”

  “That an architect doesn’t know by heart the five buildings in the city he likes best. I mean, straight off, without having to give it so much thought. Doesn’t that seem strange to you?”

  He says nothing: he doesn’t know what it seems to him; he doesn’t know what is strange and what is normal. He remembers that only a few days ago – on the very day he met Leonor – he was asking himself the same thing in relation to his daughter and questioning what the word “normal” meant to Laura when applied to Francisca. He’s distracted by these thoughts, until the girl’s voice brings him back to the present, saying:

  “It’s unusual – don’t tell me it isn’t. I thought that I would call you and that you would reel off the five, or ten, or even fifteen buildings that are on that mental list that we all have of our favourite things.”

  “We all have lists of our favourite things?”

  “Yes! You mean you don’t?”

  “So what is on your list?”

  “You want me to tell you?”

  “Yes.”

  “OK. First place: chocolate. Second place: walking without an umbrella in a gentle but persistent drizzle, the kind that stings when it hits your face. You know the kind of drizzle I mean, right?”

  “Yes, I think so,” Pablo replies, but clearly she plans to explain the drizzle to him anyway:

  “It’s the kind where, instead of drops of water, it feels as though wet thorns are being thrown at you on a slant. Anyway, that kind of drizzle,” she says, and pauses before returning to her theme. “The third place I’m keeping to myself and the fourth —”

  “Why are you keeping the third to yourself?” Pablo interrupts.

  “Because we’ve only just met,” the girl replies. “When we know each other better, I’ll tell you.”

  Once more Pablo feels enjoyably unsettled, as though Leonor’s spiky drizzle were pricking his face. Then she laughs, and that gives him an outlet to let the thorns rush out in pent-up laughter and then to feel calmer. And by the time he’s stopped laughing, Pablo Simó has forgotten to ask Leonor about number four on her list of favourite things, because he is still wondering about number three.

  “OK, I’ll call you the day after tomorrow, then. Bye for now,” she says.

  “Bye,” he says. And he’s just about to hang up when he hears Leonor add something else.

  “It is odd though – and you’re odd. But what should I have expected from a guy who doesn’t use a mobile, right?”

  Once more, they both laugh.

  Once more, Pablo neglects to ask about Nelson Jara.

  7

  Pablo spends the rest of the day wondering which buildings he is going to choose for Leonor to photograph. It’s been a long time since he looked at the city or thought of it in that light, seeking the value that Leonor calls “what you like best”. But neither does he look for the values that are closer to meeting his own definition of “architectonic merit”. For years Pablo Simó has looked at Buenos Aires purely as a source of what Borla calls business opportunities: reasonably priced plots on which to build; public auctions; municipal land that comes up for sale and which it is feasible to buy thanks to some friend or contact; complicated estates, where the heirs want a quick sale and end up settling for a pittance; divorces that require selling off property ridiculously cheaply so as to separate what can no longer be joined. That’s what he looks at these days, because that’s what he’s been told to look for. He tries to remember a time when he saw things differently, harking back to student days when he could stand in front of a newly discovered building and feel a current pass through his body, an almost sexual sensation, a tension that nowadays he never feels so fervidly, not even in bed. Well, sometimes when he thinks of Marta. Many of the buildings he liked in those days are no longer standing, such as the “paradox” on Calle Maure at Calle Migueletes, where there used to be a h
ouse with Le Corbusier pretensions next to a house with Tudor pretensions. At the time Pablo didn’t realize how earnest those pretensions were. Tano Barletta, a fellow student throughout his time at the faculty, dubbed them “Chalk and Cheese”. And they had argued, Pablo saying that these houses had more value precisely because they were next to each other: the contrast forced you to look at them. He spoke to Tano Barletta about “contextualization” – a concept they had just been studying in the faculty and which was surely wrongly applied in this case – and Tano had said again:

  “Give them all the contextualization and whatnot you like – they’re still chalk and cheese, Pablo.”

  They used to spend hours walking and arguing: about chalk and cheese, about the city’s growth, the new buildings, the old ones. They thought about Buenos Aires with their eyes. They considered whether the eighteenth-century sanitary works building on Avenida Córdoba was enhanced or otherwise by its situation opposite a school with a mirrored façade. They wondered why the Palacio de Tribunales, housing the Supreme Court at the junction of Talcahuano and Tucumán, looked as though it were going to fall down and flatten you. They made a detailed and conscientious analysis of the postgraduate lecturer in Design II, debating whether or not she had the best tits in national architecture. Why didn’t they see each other any more? Had one of their arguments gone too far? Something about architecture? Pablo doesn’t think so, but he can’t remember any more. Try as he might, he cannot recall why he and Tano Barletta stopped seeing each other. It was probably simply that: that they didn’t see each other for a while, then began gradually to lose each other, until even their mental pictures of each other were erased. Why did he let the best friend he ever had get rubbed out? Tano Barletta was very funny; he made him laugh a lot. Together Pablo and he were also chalk and cheese. Perhaps that was the reason for their distancing: they were too different and what had started as a joke between them became a wall that neither, in the end, had enough energy to take a run-up to and jump over. But hadn’t he, Pablo Simó, been the one who defended “contextualization”? Didn’t Pablo Simó have more value with Tano Barletta at his side, and vice versa? Or perhaps the problem had been that Laura didn’t like his friend. Or that after Francisca was born Pablo hardly had any free time any more and that friendships needed free time to sustain them. Which of his old friendships are still standing? None. The Le Corbusier house and the Tudor house aren’t standing either: they got steamrollered, merged together the way copper and tin were combined in the Bronze Age. Is it better to have bronze than copper and tin separately? Is this the marker of some historic advance? Surely it is, though Pablo can’t say either way. All he knows is that those two houses were flattened so that the plots could be merged and a twenty-storey apartment block built in their place, with a marble entrance hall, armchairs in some fashionable style and twenty-four-hour security.

  He lets Tano Barletta fade away again and returns to Leonor and the buildings he owes her. Not to be distracted from the task, he doesn’t let himself dwell on the invitation to accompany her on Saturday. He wracks his brain, trying to remember which were his favourite buildings all those years ago, but of the ones that come to mind he suspects that quite a few will have aged badly. That’s definitely the case with some of them, such as the building on Calle Ugarteche close to the junction with Juncal on the even-numbered side, which had once seemed to Pablo Simó like the sole survivor of another age, lost among buildings of an indeterminate period and with no history, and which now looked shabby, tired and old, either because nobody had the energy to preserve what it had once been, or because nobody had managed to obtain an exemption to the rule that forbade demolition for the purpose of building a high-rise on a plot with insufficient square footage.

  Pablo jots down, without much conviction, a few addresses in his notebook. He glances at the clock – there’s still half an hour before he can shut up shop and go home. Neither Borla nor Marta are likely to come by the office at this time of day. He takes a blank sheet of paper and with a few deft lines summons up his north-facing eleven-storey tower. If this building existed, even outside Buenos Aires, he would take Leonor there and show it to her. He draws the tower the same way as always, with the same bricks, the same windows, the same trees. But this time, when he has finished sketching this building that he knows by heart, Pablo Simó sits looking at it feeling that, although nothing is missing, the drawing is not complete. He presses the top of his pencil to get a little more lead. He looks at it, measures it, pushes it back in with his finger, then presses the pencil top again to release exactly the length of lead with which he likes to work; returning his attention to the drawing board and now with a certainty that surprises him, he draws, for the first time, a man standing beside the much-repeated outline, a freehand representation to show the human scale. Pablo takes a moment to study the relation between the man’s height and the building’s, to consider how much greater one is than the other, to imagine what this man might be feeling as he stands in front of a brick wall, and finally he asks the question that now seems so obvious: how could he have drawn his tower block so many times, without ever putting a person next to it?

  At six o’clock he puts the sketch away, gathers up his things in accordance with his daily ritual and leaves the office. A moment later he’ll be underground, changing twice to get to Castro Barros, where he’ll step out of the carriage, emerge once more at ground level and go into his usual bar to order the coffee he has every evening before going home. That’s all for today. But tomorrow morning, once there is enough natural light, he’s going to make good on his promise to Leonor and go out earlier than usual to walk the streets of Buenos Aires. He wants to hold himself to this and not just disappear into the underground, burying himself beneath a city he no longer looks at. Tomorrow he’ll walk or take a bus – there must be a bus that follows a direct route across the city from his house to his work instead of describing the peculiar horseshoe around which he travels every day beneath the earth – he will make a journey overland, allowing him to look up and take stock of all that each street has to offer. He will roam from one side of town to the other, like a treasure seeker but with no map or coordinates, with no references or clues, leaving chance to do its work, letting an invisible hand carry him through the city, guiding his determination to rediscover something that, until recently, he didn’t even realize he had lost.

  8

  The first thing Pablo Simó notices on entering his home is Laura’s good mood. She’s in the sitting room, reading a magazine and drinking a glass of wine. Since when does Laura drink red wine at seven o’clock in the evening?

  “Hello, love,” she says.

  It’s even stranger for his wife to call him “love”, Pablo thinks, than it is for her to be drinking wine.

  “Has something happened?” he asks.

  “No, why?”

  “No reason – just asking. You look well, relaxed.”

  “I do feel more relaxed, actually,” she agrees. “You know what? I feel that as far as Francisca is concerned, the worst is over. Not that anything in particular has changed. But there are some good signs.”

  “Such as?”

  “I don’t know. That she’s getting back from school in good time, like we asked her, that she says hello when she comes in, that I haven’t heard her complaining recently. I mean, this afternoon, for example, when she got back just now she greeted me so affectionately that I thought she would even have given me a kiss if she hadn’t had Anita with her. They came in, they had some milk and then went off to do homework. For the first time in days I felt as if I could breathe properly, Pablo, without that terrible feeling that something awful is going to happen. So I decided to relax and make an effort at being better myself,” she says, indicating the glass. “You know what I want to celebrate? That of all the things we have said to Francisca, something has finally got into that head, the seed hasn’t been sown in vain.”

  Pablo tunes out of Laura’s monologue for
a moment, detained by those words “sown in vain”. When might one sow in vain? When the seed isn’t going to grow? When there’s no need for it to grow? Or when there’s no need to sow because one way or another what needs to be born is going to be born? He’s not really listening to her, but Pablo notices Laura go to the bar and pour herself another glass and one for him, too.

  “Celebrate with me,” she says, holding out the wine to him, and as soon as he takes it she clinks glasses and raises hers to him.

  Pablo finds himself obliged not only to toast but to drink; he notes with dismay how the wine overwhelms his palate, washing away the taste of the espresso he had only five minutes earlier and which he had hoped would last until the evening meal.

  “I’m going to start getting dinner ready,” says Laura and walks off to the kitchen with a smile Pablo hasn’t seen on her face for a long time.

  She seems so happy that if this were another woman and not the one he knows so well, or if the scene that has just been played in front of him were from one of those sitcoms he finds so tedious, he might suspect that his wife had taken a lover. But they aren’t TV actors, and Pablo has known Laura for nearly thirty years – how many days does that add up to? He walks to the window holding his wine glass and looks out; the city is lit up for evening and cars are jammed on the avenue in both directions. The glass steams up under his breath. Pablo does the sum in his head, adding a zero to three hundred and sixty-five, then multiplying the three thousand, six hundred and fifty by three: ten thousand nine hundred and fifty days at Laura’s side. More, because they met each other at the beginning of February, during a holiday at Villa Gesell where he was staying with Tano Barletta and she with her family. February, March, April and most of May: nearly one hundred and twenty days more. That’s eleven thousand and seventy days with the same woman. There were only a few days that could be subtracted, for example, at the beginning of their marriage, when he had sometimes travelled inland, working on social housing projects. Pablo knows every one of Laura’s gestures, her different smells; the rhythm of her breathing, which becomes jagged when she’s anxious; the blue vein above her left eye that stands out when she’s annoyed; her collection of coughs, the spring sneezes, the way she yawns. For that reason Pablo knows with absolute certainty that Laura’s head has, until very recently, been entirely occupied by Francisca and her problems, with no room for a lover. Now, on the other hand, now that she’s relaxed, drinking wine and smiling, she probably does have space to think of a man, another man. Pablo moves away from the window and sits in the armchair recently vacated by his wife and still conserving her body’s warmth; he looks at the glass in his hand and moves it, swilling the wine inside. Would it be reprehensible for Laura, after so many years as a wife, finally to have a lover, if she hasn’t had one before? Would it be so terrible for her to meet a man, to have an unexpected, unsought encounter that made her feel that something lost in an inaccessible region of her body could be rekindled? Would it be so bad for his wife to hear, as he heard this afternoon, a voice on the telephone that reminded her of jumping from rock to rock across a river?