A Crack in the Wall

by Claudia Piñeiro

  “Do you like it?” he asks her again.

  “It’s a bit naive, isn’t it?” she says and surprises him, not only with the observation, but by suddenly turning the camera on him.

  “Why me?” says Pablo, covering his face.

  She laughs, takes another picture of him and says:

  “Because.”

  Leonor moves in front of Pablo, experimenting with different angles while he plays at hiding, at putting on silly faces, sticking out his tongue, and finally he grabs the camera and takes a picture of her, and then another, and another until Leonor is posing for him as naturally as Pablo sketches a building.

  “You seriously think it’s naive?” says Pablo, and when he gives back the camera he lets his hand cover Leonor’s for a moment, without caring whether the girl realizes it’s not accidental.

  “Yes, I seriously do. I don’t know – isn’t it a bit silly? If I had to choose between this guy with a bull or the other one with lilies in his hair, I think I’d choose the other one.”

  “But they’re not men,” he says. “They’re sculptures and mosaics.”

  “The thing is that I don’t know anything about sculptures and mosaics,” she says, looking at him intently.

  Stupid, stupid man, Pablo tells himself, before Barletta says it for him, and while the girl takes her last photographs he turns his attention to the picture formed by the tiles: a peasant woman and a man herding an animal, one on each side of the balcony. A few of the original tiles are missing and he wonders how they came to be replaced by plain ones that wilfully disrupt the composition. Leonor seems not to have noticed this. He knows that Tano Barletta would also have detected these hiccups in the imagery and that it would bother him equally – but Tano Barletta is barred for what little remains of this city walk. It would have been better not to fill the gaps revealed by the missing tiles, he thinks, to show that there was a loss it wasn’t possible to make good, rather than deceive the onlooker by covering them with any old thing.

  “That’s it,” says Leonor. She puts the camera away with a decisiveness that makes it clear there will be no more photographs that day; then, without prevarication, with a spontaneity he has come to expect of her, she adds:

  “Do you want to come back to my place for a bit?”

  Pablo freezes for a moment, wondering if he heard correctly but, looking at her, he sees that she is waiting for an answer. Yes, he heard right.

  “The two of us?” he asks her, immediately berating himself for saying something so stupid, a man of his age to a girl seventeen years his junior.

  “If you want to, yes: I’m inviting you,” Leonor says.

  And he wants to, of course he wants to, it’s what he wants more than anything.

  13

  Following custom – whose custom? – Leonor gets into the taxi first and for that reason, when she directs the driver to Giribone and Virrey Loreto, Pablo Simó, who’s settling into his seat and about to close the door, hears only “Loreto”. That name, being all he hears, isn’t enough for him to make an association between the place where they’re going and the studio where he works. The sun has set now, but the streetlights are not yet on, and that penumbra between the dying afternoon and the coming night makes him feel strangely giddy. He’s sitting very close to her, too close – he hears her breathing, hears her laughter and watches her unpainted lips; and beneath the lips the teeth, white, young. And still looking at them, Pablo remembers that she has invited him to her house without specifying what the invitation is for. She didn’t say it was “to have a coffee”, “to eat something”, not even “for a chat” or to “watch a film”, and that lack of certainty gives him vertigo. He remembers her words clearly, because she said them only a few minutes ago: “Do you want to come back to my place for a bit?” Just like that.

  Pablo glances out of the window then back at her; she has closed her eyes now, as if wanting to rest after a long day. He looks out of the window again; he can’t really believe that he’s going with this girl to her house, can’t imagine what will happen once they get there, and as if in need of confirmation that he deserves none of this, he mentally replays the fatal moment in which he asked “the two of us?” – and that makes him feel insecure and foolish.

  As they get closer, Pablo picks out certain streets, recognizes places, reads illuminated signs he has read before. However, none of this is sufficiently familiar to ring alarm bells, because for years he has been going to work underground, crossing the city beneath its surface, changing twice in a journey that is shaped like a narrow horseshoe and re-emerging only when he reaches the corner nearest to his studio. Nobody understands why he chooses this route, which is longer than the journey he would make by bus, but Pablo Simó likes it. So what he sees now, although it prompts in him that feeling you get when you meet a person you know from somewhere but can’t recall where, doesn’t actually surprise him, and Pablo still makes no connection between the view through the window and their destination.

  He steals another glance at her. First the face, and as she is still asleep, or at least has her eyes closed, he dares to let his gaze drift downward, past Leonor’s neck, her breasts, her waist, her stomach. Her thighs are squeezed into tight jeans and he knows now with a certainty that he would like to undress them, touch them, move his hand up between her legs and leave it right there, touching her for as long as she will let him while he feels the thrum of his own stubborn blood surging up through his legs.

  Only as they pass the bar where he and she met for the first time outside the studio does Pablo fully become aware of his surroundings. Even then, despite a slight consternation, he reminds himself that that day, in the bar where he never usually goes, she had said:

  “I live near here. I’ve moved into the area.”

  The relief doesn’t last long. As the taxi drives right past the Borla and Associates studio it slows down and Leonor, as though responding to an interior alarm bell, opens her eyes, looks outside and says:

  “Just a few yards further on.”

  “This all right for you?” asks the taxi driver, coming to a stop in front of the building where Nelson Jara used to live.

  “Yes, perfect,” she says.

  Then the girl waits for Pablo to take out money to pay for the trip, but he doesn’t – he’s distracted, his mind somewhere else, struggling to fathom whether what has happened is the product of chance or fate. The taxi driver repeats the fare and Leonor, not waiting any longer, opens her rucksack and takes out a few notes, but Pablo reacts just in time:

  “No, please, let me,” he says, and pays.

  They enter the building and walk through the hall towards the lift. She catches sight of herself in the mirror, makes some comment about her hair and laughs; Pablo tells himself that they aren’t going to 5C, that they can’t be going to 5C, the flat where Nelson Jara lived, the one that he, Pablo Simó, still reproaches himself for never having entered in order to see the crack that man told him so much about – and he tries to focus all his attention on Leonor, on some part of Leonor’s body, her perfume or her smell, on what it will be like to touch her, kiss her, caress her, and he promises himself that Jara will not ruin this moment. But when they are inside the lift she pushes the button for the fifth floor, and even though the action causes her to rub against him, exciting him, Pablo feels that once again, he is fighting body-to-body with Jara. The floors stack up underneath them, one by one, until the lift stops at the fifth floor. Pablo opens the door, Leonor steps out; the corridor is dark and the girl fumbles for the light, bumping into Pablo and laughing. He laughs too, not out of amusement but because he is so nervous. The light goes on, she looks at him with a certain provocation (does she look at him with a certain provocation?), she walks ahead of him and, even though Pablo is silently praying that she won’t do this, that she won’t stop in front of door C and put the key she’s playing with at the moment into the lock, Leonor stops there anyway, in front of this door, her back to him while he follows in
a daze. He waits behind her while the girl gropes for the lock, puts her key into it, and some difficulty in turning it makes her lean back, scarcely bending from the waist, but it’s enough to bring her body even closer to his and she rubs against him again. Then Leonor opens the door and motions him inside. Pablo nods, but gestures for her to go in first, then he follows her inside.

  They go in together, very close to one another. She puts on the light and he immediately looks for the crack in the wall. He can’t see it – has it been covered perhaps? If so, when? And by whom? He doesn’t know. Leonor smiles at him; she puts down the rucksack and he suddenly realizes that the crack may be hidden behind an Indian cloth that is attached to the side wall, like a hanging or a false curtain. Leonor takes off her jacket and he discovers all over again her neck, the hands arranging her hair, her firm breasts which are coming towards him, which are definitely coming his way, which stop in front of him and wait. And Pablo’s breathing becomes agitated, his thighs harden and his hands prick; he thinks he has to do something, knows he must do something, and just as he is about to decide what exactly he will do, Leonor kisses him. Simple as that, without asking permission: standing in front of him, looking into his eyes, she lifts her arms to encircle his neck, barely opens her mouth while looking at his, pauses for a second then kisses him. And he lets himself be kissed and kisses her, and holds her, pressing this woman’s body against his, running his hands up and down Leonor’s back as though looking for something, feeling her breasts against his chest and her pelvis against his pelvis and his thighs between her thighs. He kisses her, his tongue running over her lips and probing her mouth, going in and out – God forbid he should be clumsy – until Leonor finally pulls away from him and, without taking her eyes off his, lies down on the floor and beckons to him, pulling him down to lie on top of her. And when Pablo lies on her and moves his face close to hers to kiss her again, the girl puts her mouth to his ear and says:

  “Third place on the list of my favourite things: making love on a wooden floor that smells of wax.”

  And then he comes undone on her and she on the waxed floor and it seems that Pablo has succeeded in forgetting where he is, has forgotten about the Indian hanging, the wall behind it and Jara himself. But a minute later she twists to the side and climbs on top of him and now Pablo, from his new position, prostrate on the wood floor, can’t help but fix on the wall that he knows, once and for all, he will have to see. For some reason, what’s hidden by the hanging fuels his excitement, and as he goes inside the girl who’s moving back and forth on top of him, as he runs his hands over her, bites her, possesses her, penetrates her, Pablo Simó can’t stop thinking about the crack and that, the image of the slashed wall superimposed on the warm and sweaty body rocking on top of him, brings all the tension in his own body to a climax more powerful than anything he remembers experiencing before, and with it relief, as he lies next to her.

  After a few moments lying like this in each other’s arms, Leonor gets up and goes to the bathroom.

  “Back in a minute,” she says.

  Pablo is left alone on the floor, staring at the wall-hanging, scrutinizing it, following the arabesques in burgundy, ochre and black as though they were hieroglyphs he needed to decipher. He stands up and, still with his eyes on the fabric, puts his trousers back on, pulls up his zipper and, bare-chested, bare-footed, approaches the wall. The material hangs from a rod improvised from a wooden stick and thick braided cords attached to two gold-coloured hooks hammered in at the wall’s edges. Pablo thinks that this cloth is masquerading as something it isn’t, that it’s not a curtain, nor a hanging or a picture, though it pretends to be one of those things. Even though he thinks he knows what it conceals, in spite of that inevitability, as he stands in front of the cloth. Pablo feels strange, uncomfortable and even shaken. He doesn’t yet dare to look, and it’s as if this wall and he were sizing each other up, as he and Jara once did. So Pablo Simó waits, he’s not sure what for – a sign, permission or something finally to make him draw aside this veil and look at last. He takes one step forward, positioning himself within touching distance of the hanging, and does just that – touches it – holding it a few inches away from the wall for an instant, running his fingers over the border but nothing more, as if his three-year wait demanded some sort of ceremony before he dare go further. Because he feels at fault: he knows that he ought to have come here at the time, he should have examined the crack, he should have evaluated its significance and repaired it. But he didn’t, Jara himself had told him not to, that there was no need: all he wanted was the money. Over my dead body, Borla had said. And so he never went.

  Leonor calls from the bathroom, “I’ll be right with you, OK?”

  It’s the prospect of her return, of her naked body distracting him from the task in hand, that induces him to lift up the cloth – before he thinks better of it, before he runs out of there like a coward – to see what is underneath. And even though he finds exactly what he was expecting, exactly what he didn’t want to see three years ago – Jara’s wall bisected by a crack as-yet unmended – something in what he sees, as his eyes move along its extent, strikes him as unusual.

  “What are you looking at?” she says, standing behind him, wrapped in a short towel that barely covers her groin.

  Pablo doesn’t answer; he holds the cloth in one hand and runs the other one over the crack, up high, as far as he can reach and then downwards; he assesses its width, which is consistent along its length; he puts his finger into the crack to estimate its depth and verifies this as not greater than half an inch. He pays special attention to the biro marks all the way along it, measuring the distance between them with his thumb and index finger, and he could swear that it is always the same – two inches? And then he is left in no doubt: the width, the length and the depth of that crack are regular and calculated. Somebody must have planned and drawn it, then chipped at the wall until the fissure appeared.

  “I’m going to get it fixed when I have some spare cash. It’s not serious, is it?” Leonor asks.

  Pablo shakes his head and, feeling a mix of rage and admiration for Jara, he smiles and says:

  “No, it’s not serious.”

  This time he can say it with total certainty. Because now Pablo Simó knows that the crack – which he hadn’t wanted to see, which prompted the events leading to Jara’s death and everything that followed – wasn’t caused by soil movement, or the pit they sank, or the building they put up. Today he knows that the crack was created by Jara himself, painstakingly, inch by inch, across the wall.

  And that Jara, the man he buried that night within the foundations of the building where he now works, deceived him. That Nelson Jara – why did he never see this before? – was just as much vermin as is Pablo himself.

  14

  Over the three years that have passed since the night they buried Jara under the building from which the Borla and Associates architectural studio now operates, Pablo has constructed and reconstructed countless versions of the events leading to the entombment, finally arriving at one that seems plausible and may be definitive – though he will never know for sure. He has pieced it together going on what he saw, heard, touched and even smelled that night; on what Marta Horvat and Borla told him; but also on his own conjecture based on sources that, though less reliable, are more instinctive: deduction, suspicions and hunches.

  That night began for Pablo a little after three o’clock in the morning. Laura had been asleep for some time and he had fallen into that dozy state that precedes deep sleep when the telephone rang. Waking with a start, he answered quickly; Laura merely turned onto her side, as though a sharp ringing in the middle of the night were bothersome but not worth waking up for. It was Marta Horvat; she seemed to be crying, saying things that Pablo couldn’t get straight in his head, and he didn’t know if that was because he was still half-asleep, because Marta was incoherent or because of the excitement of getting a call from her at that time of night.


  “Speak to Borla,” Marta said. “You’ve got to ring him at home, his mobile is switched off. Tell him to come right now to the Giribone site.”

  Pablo rubbed his face, groped for the wristwatch he had left on the bedside table he didn’t know how long before, looked at the time and said:

  “You think I can ring him at home at this time of night?”

  “I couldn’t, but you can,” Marta replied.

  “Why can I?”

  “Because his wife won’t have a fit if it’s you calling, Pablo,” said Marta bluntly, and then she ordered, “Call him right now.”

  Pablo knew he ought to say something, but couldn’t think what. Beside him, Laura opened her eyes, looked at him, and seemed surprised to see him sitting up in the middle of the night, silently holding the receiver against his ear, but just as Pablo was thinking up some explanation for his wife, she turned away from him and pulled the pillow over her head. Then Marta Horvat repeated her instruction again, this time in a helpless tone Pablo didn’t remember having heard before.

  “Call him, Pablo, please.”

  “It’s all right, I’ll call him, don’t worry,” he said. “Is there a message I can pass on? Some problem with the work?”

  “Tell him that Jara’s…ruined everything and that…” she broke off. “Nothing else. Tell him that, and to come quickly.”

  Pablo remembered Jara, that afternoon, sitting opposite him at the table in Las Violetas, bent on doing whatever it took to stop the cementing going ahead, and he wondered if he had tried to carry out his threat; but he couldn’t ask Marta for any details because she was now really crying on the other end of the phone. He would have loved to put his arms around her, hold her face against his shoulder, dry her tears one by one; he would have told her that the fault lay with him, Pablo Simó, and nowhere else, because he hadn’t known how to stop the man in time, because he hadn’t gone to check on the crack as he should, hoping that the little he had done would be enough. But that now he would do everything to stop him, for her sake and so that she wouldn’t cry any more. Pablo Simó would have loved to do that and many other things besides, however Marta Horvat hadn’t asked for his help or consolation; she only wanted him to act as an intermediary in making the call to Borla. It hardly even qualified as a minor role.