A Crack in the Wall (16 page)

“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.

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.

Pablo got up and looked for his address book; despite having worked with him for so many years, he had only occasionally called Borla at home, and even though he had a good memory for his clients' telephone numbers or those of suppliers or developers, he knew that he would struggle to remember his boss's, given the time of night and the disorientating urgency of Marta's call. He dialled from the kitchen extension, so as not to wake Laura; after three rings, Borla's wife answered, sounding as bewildered as he had been minutes before, when Marta had woken him up.

“Hello Señora, good evening, and forgive my ringing at this time. I'm Pablo Simó and I'm calling because…” he said, and he would have carried on explaining himself, except that he heard the woman at the other end of the line holding the receiver away and saying, “It's for you, Mario.”

To start with, when Pablo began telling him about Marta's call, Borla sounded strange and disengaged; Pablo suspected that it was possibly not the first time that she had found some pretext to wake him in the night. But when he finally uttered the name Nelson Jara, Borla seemed to grasp that, at least on this occasion, there was a serious motive for the call.

“What a bastard,” Borla said, more to himself than to Pablo. “I'll go to the site straight away, thanks,” and then he hung up.

So it was done – he had fulfilled his part of the deal. Today he reproaches himself for not leaving it at that, for not sticking to his minor role and going back to bed with his wife after carrying out Marta's instructions. But there was no more chance of sleeping that night and Pablo was beset by a different set of recriminations. He couldn't help berating himself for not having known how to handle Jara. He reproached himself for each of the things he now realized he should have said to Marta before hanging up. He could have reacted better after the shock of the call and taken charge of the situation when he spoke to Borla, by saying something like: Do you want me to go with you? Shall I drop you off at Giribone in case you need some help? Shall I go instead of you? Why trouble yourself in the middle of the night? Let me go – I know Jara and I can handle the situation. But there was the crux that was bound to doom any belated attempts to help solve this intractable problem: he had not yet proved himself able to handle Jara and he knew that at some point, the next morning, the next day, when things were calmer, Marta and Borla were going to throw his failure in his face.

He walked around the house, back and forth between the kitchen and the bedrooms countless times; he went into Francisca's room and looked at his sleeping daughter; he dialled Marta's mobile number but hung up before it rang; he put on the television in the living room and zapped between channels without taking anything in; he dialled Marta's number again and it went to answerphone, but he didn't leave a message; he made himself a coffee and drank it looking out of the steamed-up window, wiping it first
with his hand and then with the voile curtain – something Laura would have forbidden, had she seen it – until the whole pane was transparent; he washed the cup; he rang Marta's mobile again and it went straight to messages again; he went back into Francisca's room and then into his own. His daughter and his wife slept on. He got dressed in the same clothes he had taken off the night before, located his Caran d'Ache pencil in the jacket pocket, tore a page out of his smooth-paged notebook and wrote a note for Laura, explaining that there had been a problem at one of the worksites and that he was leaving earlier than usual – as early as four o'clock in the morning, in fact, although he left out the detail of the time.

Down he went to the street and to the entrance of the underground, but the padlocked metal gates reminded him that the last train had gone hours ago and it was still a long time before the first one of the morning. He looked up and down the street: at that time of day Avenida Rivadavia seemed unworldly, deserted and silent. He stopped the first taxi to pass, and once he had sat down realized, too late, that he didn't like it – it was old, untidy, the card bearing the driver's particulars was smudged, its tatty plastic cover sticky and dusty – but he didn't dare get out and wait for another one, so with resignation he said, “Calle Giribone.”

When the driver asked him what number, he chose one two blocks before the site where Marta was crying because – so he thought – Jara had managed to stop the base slab being laid the following day. He still wasn't sure what he was going to do, whether he would simply watch from a safe distance or whether he would be bold enough to step forward and offer his help, in spite of his recent run of failures.

Once out of the taxi, he began to walk. The street was badly lit, and so Pablo was barely twenty yards away before he could confirm that the car parked in front of the entrance to the site was Borla's. He stopped beside the security fence, leaning against it in the hope of hearing something that would throw light on what was happening inside, and he waited. Even from this side of the wooden fence he could smell damp earth. In the distance, barely discernible, he thought he could hear Marta's voice, or not so much her voice as a jagged wail, like an anguished hiccuping that every so often rose above another clearer and more defined sound: that of gushing water. He pushed the gate and found it open; his foot struck some hard object and, bending down to pick it up, he saw that it was the padlock that was used to secure the entrance gates at night. As soon as he started to walk he felt his shoes sinking in the mud. It was too dark to see anybody, but as he moved forward the noise of running water got louder and the sound of Marta crying seemed to disappear – or had he imagined it when he thought he heard it before? He stepped into a deep puddle and felt the force of the liquid pushing his foot away, how the bubbles crowded the water's surface then burst beside his shoe, under his shoe, in front of his shoe. To one side of the puddle a spade was stuck in the ground, like the flag of a victorious climber arriving at the summit of a mountain; somebody – Jara, who else? – had used it to dig down to the mains water supply and ruptured the pipe. Once again, he remembered that meeting with Jara the previous afternoon at Las Violetas, when he had said: