A Crack in the Wall (12 page)

“Shall we press on?” said Marta Horvat to her workmen.

And everyone got back to work.

As time went on, despite her tiredness, Marta seemed calmer – more so than Pablo had seen her since Jara entered their lives.

“You look well,” he told her.

“Because it's done, Pablo. Look at the time. It's too late now for that arsehole to do anything to stop the work, nobody can hear his complaint now, no inspector can turn up unannounced. Tomorrow at eight o'clock in the morning the pit goes, and the old man goes with it.”

That's what she said that afternoon, “the pit goes and the old man goes,” and today, when Pablo looks back, he wonders if Marta Horvat has ever recognized the prophetic quality of those words, which were said in passing, as we say so many things in our lives, without really thinking about the weight of our words.

But as Pablo Simó would soon find out, Nelson Jara had not, after all, been hiding behind his curtain spying on the work at Calle Giribone. That afternoon, after visiting Marta, Pablo took the underground back home as he did every day, journeying beneath the earth, following his usual long route with its several changes of line. Emerging onto the street at Castro Barros, he heard again the cry of “Simó” that a few days earlier he had attributed to Jara. This time, however, he didn't panic or rush to get away: given the impossibility of meeting Jara only two blocks from his own home, the cry had to have come from someone else. Only when he turned to look over his shoulder did he see that he was wrong: there was Jara, running across the road to catch up with him and clearly agitated.

“What are you doing here?” Pablo asked him, almost rudely.

“Waiting for you. What else might I be doing so far from my own stamping ground,
arquitecto
?”

“But how did you know you would find me on this particular corner?”

“It wasn't the corner I identified but the station. Two plus two is four,
arquitecto
. You come out of the underground
every morning and go back into it every afternoon. The day we met at your office I saw the gas bill on your desk, and Castro Barros is the closest station to the address that was on that bill, so I found a bar from which to watch this exit – and I waited. Did you know that if you got out in Medrano and walked seven or eight blocks you'd avoid so many changes?”

“I don't like walking.”

“What a mistake you're making; it's good to walk. I walk a lot.”

Pablo would have liked to say, “And what do I care?”, but he wasn't given to ripostes, not even when he was angry, as he was that afternoon.

“I took a gamble,” Jara went on, “because the bill wasn't in your name but in the name of a woman. Your wife – or somebody else,
arquitecto
?”

Pablo stared at him without managing to formulate a response, and Jara continued: “But you're not the sort of man to pay another woman's gas bill – correct me if I'm wrong?”

For all his carefully chosen words, his irony, his apparent mastery of the situation, Jara appeared rather tense.

“Shall we have a coffee in Las Violetas?” he suggested, and although this was phrased as a question, Pablo had the impression that saying no wasn't an option. Instead he replied with another question, somewhat out of sync, but in keeping with the strange rhythm of this absurd conversation.

“Did you really examine my gas bill?”

“Don't take offence or draw the wrong conclusions,” Jara said as they crossed back over the road and entered the café. “Shall I tell you why I looked at it? I have an obsession with the money spent on services in this city – it's an outrage – and I'm always comparing what I spend with what
other people are spending. And your bill was right there. You were taking a long time in the bathroom and I was waiting for you, staring mindlessly at your desk, not meaning to pry, but my eyes fell on it – and it wasn't even in an envelope. All I did was move it a little and have a look. Do you see what I mean?”

“I am trying to, Jara,” said Pablo, and he said nothing more, hoping not to open further avenues of conversation that he would surely regret.

They didn't speak again until the waiter came and both of them ordered a coffee.

“You're spending too much on gas,
arquitecto
– you don't think you might have a leak?”

“I don't think so. I would have smelled something.”

“Sometimes they are very small and the smell gets lost among the other household smells, or it dissipates if there is plenty of ventilation. I would get it looked at – although there are three of you, so you're using more than a single man.”

“How do you know that there are three of us?”

“Didn't you tell me yourself,
arquitecto
?”

“Not that I remember.”

“I think you must have. Otherwise how would I know? It's not mentioned on the bill.”

“Of course it's not mentioned on the bill,” Pablo repeated with irritation and a creeping unease.

“You're not thinking that I go around spying on you?”

“I'm not thinking anything, Jara.”

“You think more than you let on.”

The waiter brought their coffees and a jug of milk nobody had asked for, and after he had gone Jara said:

“You must have told me yourself; don't give it another thought.”

Without taking his eyes off Pablo, Nelson Jara drank his coffee in little measured sips. Pablo waited as long as he could, and when he couldn't bear it any more he said:

“What do you want, Jara? Didn't you get my notes?”

“Yes, I got them, but at this stage in the game I don't know how much faith to put in one of your notes. To believe you, I needed to see your face.”

“What are you trying to insinuate?”

“Insinuate, nothing; simply to convey my concern, my annoyance, even I would say my bitter certainty that something round here smells bad. In the last days there have been strange comings and goings at the site, or rather, not exactly strange, but more hurried, to be concrete, as if they were trying to get something done sooner than planned and someone had put the screws on them.”

“And why does that alarm you?”

“Because I'm frightened that in the end the screws will be on me.”

“If the work is over sooner, that's going to be better for you —”, Pablo began to say, to reassure him, but Jara shrugged his shoulders:

“I don't give a damn if they finish the work early; the only thing I care about is getting fair compensation, and you wrote in those notes – to which you put your signature – that your office was studying my case.”

“We are studying it; I just don't have a firm answer for you yet.”

“And once the foundations are covered it will be too late for answers. Look, Simó, I may seem like an idiot, but I'm not, and when people treat me like one I get very annoyed, I get very bad. I mean seriously bad.”

Jara rubbed his hands over his face, up and down, hard, as though trying to wake himself from a dream, then he
looked around him and paused just long enough to take a deep breath and calm his uneven breathing. Then he went back in for the kill:

“All you've done is make
me
lose time in order to give it to others,” Jara said, looking him straight in the eye, and this time Pablo couldn't hold his gaze. “Or am I wrong?” he added, and thumped the table so that the cups jangled on their saucers and customers sitting at a neighbouring table turned to look at them. “Always the same,” he said, and stopped himself just before making a second strike, his clenched fist in the air as if he were thumping some nonexistent thing. “Always the same story, Simó,” Jara repeated and stood up to leave, but Pablo stopped him:

“What do you mean by ‘always the same', Jara?”

“That the little fish, instead of looking after their own, always end up defending the interests of the big fish. Take a look at the history of humanity and see if I'm wrong. And you know why they do it? To flatter themselves that they can become something they aren't. Simó, no matter how much you put yourself on their side, you're never going to be one of them – do you understand?”

And Pablo, silent opposite Jara, understood, understood all too well and knew himself to be vermin. But the epiphany wasn't enough to persuade him that he – Pablo Simó, unaided – might choose this moment to change the course of humanity. Jara, after waiting in silence for a moment, seemed to see that.

“At least pay for my coffee,” he said, standing up, and he left.

The afternoon, the encounter and this unpleasant episode appeared to be over, yet Pablo felt even more troubled than he had when Jara was sitting across the table from him. He stayed sitting in Las Violetas for a while, staring at
the famous stained-glass dome that crowned that corner of the street, not even noticing the imagery on it, but dazed by the clatter of teaspoons on crockery all around him. And he waited. He was scared to leave and find Jara still prowling around outside; knowing him, it was possible. In fact, at the very moment Pablo turned and gestured to the waiter to bring his bill, Nelson Jara burst back in through the door and walked with determination towards his table. He seemed very out of breath.

“Just one more thing, Simó – an architectonic query, if you'll allow me. Is there any thing, any circumstance, any strange happening that could halt the cement tomorrow?”

“Rain,” Pablo answered automatically, almost without thinking.

Jara stared at him, nodding as a light smile appeared on his face. “So, if it has to rain, it will rain. Make no mistake: it's going to rain, Simó,” he said. And this time, when he left, he didn't come back.

It would be a shame if it rained on Saturday, the day he's going out with Leonor, Pablo thinks as the sales assistant rings up his dark jeans and his yellow cardigan. Though perhaps “going out” isn't really the right way to put it. They're going on a stroll, an excursion, an architectural tour, a photographic safari. He settles on “tour”, plain and simple, while tucking his credit card back into his wallet; it would be a shame to make their tour in the rain, unless it was that kind of drizzle that comes second on Leonor's list of favourite things.

Or unless – and this would be even better – he plucked up the courage to ask her what number three was. And she told him.

At the very moment that Pablo is pulling up the zipper of his yellow cardigan, Laura comes into the bedroom.

“And this?” she asks.

“And this what?” he says.

His wife nods at the sweater.

“I bought it the other day. I saw it in a shop window near the office. I needed a lightweight jacket,” he offers, by way of justification.

“A little zip-up,” she says.

“Isn't it what the English call a ‘cardigan'?” Pablo asks.

“I don't know – it doesn't matter,” Laura replies. “But you don't need to go buying the first one you see. You could have told me and I would have looked for one for you.”

“You don't like it.”

“No – yes – it's not ugly,” she says. “I just don't know if it's your style.”

“Why not?” Pablo probes.

“Other things suit you better,” Laura says.

“What suits me better?”

“It's fine – ignore me. What counts is that you like it,” his wife says and adds, as though drawing a line under this exchange, “I'm going to the supermarket now, so remember that if you finish early we can go to the cinema.”

But Pablo insists:

“Why do you say it isn't my style?”

“Did I say that?” Laura asks, picking up her bag and taking her winter jacket off a hanger.

“Yes, you said it wasn't my style.”

“I didn't say that.”

“But you said it just a minute ago!”

“I said that I didn't
know
if it was your style, not that it wasn't.”

“And there's a difference?”

“Are you trying to pick a fight? You see – that's not your style either.”

Laura puts on her jacket. Her hair gets caught under the jacket collar and she rearranges it in front of the mirror.

“Perhaps my style is changing,” he says.

Laura looks at him but says nothing. Then Pablo adds, “I bought these jeans too,” pulling up his jeans from the waistband, tugging at them a little as though to suggest that he could fill them better. “Do you like them?”

She studies Pablo's reflection in the mirror and says:

“Try not to go anywhere very dusty – dark jeans are impossible to clean.”

“Yes, don't worry,” says Pablo Simó, giving his wife a kiss. He picks up the list of buildings for Leonor that was lying on the bed with his wallet, puts both of these in his pocket and leaves the room before Laura.

He's arranged to meet Leonor at the corner of Rivadavia and Callao. Even though most of the buildings selected for this tour are in the danger zone because of their proximity to his house, Pablo knows that Laura's route to the supermarket will take her in the direction of the Flores district, not towards the centre, like him. By the time Pablo arrives with Leonor at Rivadavia 3,200, their furthest point on this
avenue, his wife will be safely far away. Glancing at his watch, he sees that he has arrived twenty-five minutes early. He looks over at the El Molino café, closed in 1997 and seemingly doomed to remain closed; the National Congress building; the bar on the opposite corner, across Callao; beyond it the Plaza de los Dos Congresos is thronged with flags and banners making demands Pablo can't quite make out. He sees a small, grubby tent – not part of today's protest, he decides, but left over from some previous demonstration. He wonders at which of the four cardinal points Leonor will appear. So as not to spend too long waiting on this corner, he walks up the Avenida Rivadavia, looking for a quiet bar where he can wait for the girl away from the clamour of a protest that doesn't interest him. Ought he to be interested? Not today, he tells himself, not on the day he's going out for the first time with a girl – though strictly speaking this isn't “going out” – after eleven thousand and seventy days of monogamy.