A Crack in the Wall (19 page)

If he had done that – if he had come to the flat and seen it for himself – on realizing that the crack wasn't the product of soil movement but of a man's handiwork, of the very man standing behind him waiting for a verdict, Pablo Simó would have spun on his heel, looked him in the eye and said, “You're a scumbag, Jara.” But he wouldn't have got angry, he would have laughed, and Nelson Jara, who would initially have denied everything, would have had to give in when presented with the evidence, and above all in the face of Pablo's laughter, and he would have laughed too, they would have had a beer together and they would have worked out how he, Pablo Simó, having decided this time to put himself on the side to which he belonged, was going to help a fellow scumbag to get what he wanted.

Leonor returns with a bottle of soft drink and two glasses. She's wearing – as always – jeans and a white T-shirt, but she's still barefoot like him. Pablo picks up his own T-shirt and puts it on, too, while she lays the things she has brought out on the table, then sits down and offers him a drink.

“Want some?”

“OK,” he says, and he sits down too, opposite her. As he does so, Pablo's bare foot grazes Leonor's and he notices how she swiftly withdraws it at his touch. He grieves to think he may have thrown everything away. And immediately he wonders what that “everything” might have amounted to. Was it really necessary to look behind the cloth that very day? Was it necessary to pressure Leonor into talking? Was it necessary to behave with a violence he didn't recognize in himself, going through her things, rebuking her? Pablo tells himself that, although perhaps none of these things was necessary, they were inevitable, and he suspects – he
is almost certain of the fact – that he is going to leave this house with some answers, but without Leonor.

They drink, watching each other over the rims of their glasses.

“Am I going to regret confiding in you?” she asks him.

“I don't think so.”

“Look, if you betray me, I'll be merciless.”

“I'm not going to betray you,” he says, and he tries to imagine what “merciless” might signify for this girl.

Leonor looks at him while taking another sip of lemonade and then, just when she seems ready to start talking, she unexpectedly gets up, goes back to her room without explanation and returns with an enormous bar of dark chocolate. She opens it, carefully to start with, but when the foil won't peel away easily she tears it off, breaks off a piece and offers it to him.

“Do you want some?”

“No thanks,” he says. “Number one on your list of favourite things?”

“Number one, yes.”

Leonor plays with the chocolate without yet eating it, making it spin on the tray, stopping it suddenly then spinning it again, repeating the action several times before she finally says:

“I've been working with a lawyer for four years, nearly five; I started working with him not long after I arrived here from Mar del Plata. Dr Delpech, the guy's called. He works in debt collection. Someone owes money, someone else wants to call in the debt and can't – Delpech takes on the case, chases the debtor, puts pressure on him, whatever it takes to scare the debtor and make him pay up. I handle the admin – the papers, the procedures. We work with people who are behind with their rent, or with the monthly
payments on their appliances or someone with a loan of a couple of grand that they took out to get a new car and then couldn't pay off. Two-bit jobs, nothing, small change.”

She cuts the bar in half, offers him one of the pieces again, and again Pablo declines it. She eats it. He waits, but when Leonor has finished she doesn't immediately return to her theme but plays again with the paper, as if she were ordering the words in her head before speaking them aloud. Or summoning up courage.

“Carry on,” Pablo says.

“OK, well that's Delpech's business. Or his front, because his real business is something else.”

The girl drinks the rest of the lemonade and looks at him. Then she takes Pablo's glass and drinks the little he had left, too. She wraps up the chocolate like someone trying to convince herself she won't eat more. Pablo is tempted to take her hands, to stop their constant activity and hold them, stroke them, but before he has a chance Leonor abandons the chocolate and now one of her hands fiddles with her hair while the fingers of the other drum a repetitive rhythm on the tabletop. He doesn't take her hands; he knows that he shouldn't. It would come too late now, a gesture out of time and place, something to which he no longer has the right. Barletta himself, standing behind Leonor, says:

“Man, what a dickhead. You really screwed that up. Was Jara's crack that important to you?”

Leonor looks at him, her hands lying calmly on the table now. Pablo is relieved to note that her anger seems almost entirely gone.

“I'm going to ask some questions too,” she says, and Barletta disappears. “After I fulfil my part of the deal, will you give me answers to what I want to know?”

He nods; he knows he's made a deal, but it worries him to think what of interest he may have to offer this girl.

“You don't want to know what Delpech's real business is?”

“Yes, of course.”

“You still can't guess?”

“No.”

“Taking over other people's flats.”

“What?”

“Identifying properties to usurp.”

“Usurp?”

“That's what the lawyers call it: usurpation. According to Delpech it's the legal term for it. There are cases cropping up almost every day: a man, or a family or whoever gets into a house that may have owners but isn't inhabited, and as time goes by not even a judge can get them out. Squatters – you know what I'm talking about, right?”

“Was Jara working for you, then?”

“No, no. Delpech has a network of informers in the administrations of residents' associations, in some rental agencies, among caretakers. When someone finds out that a worthwhile apartment is accumulating significant debt and that the owner is nowhere to be seen, he goes with a locksmith, gains entry, changes the locks and starts paying the bills – the electricity, gas, whatever. And after a while, if all goes to plan, if the owner doesn't turn up and there are no heirs, he starts to rent it out. The idea is that, a few years later, after a period of time stipulated in law, Delpech will put his name to these properties and make money out of them.”

“If they don't put him in prison first.”

“He's not breaking any law. He doesn't take anything away from the owners or legitimate heirs. Delpech always says that if he didn't take over those flats they'd go to the
state, to the same coffers where everything they take from us ends up.”

“You mean he's some kind of Robin Hood, your lawyer?”

“No, come on, I'm not that naive. I know that he's not whiter than white. But who is? Look around you, the people that you know. Did they get everything fair and square? That architect you work for, the investors who fund his projects, your neighbours, the guy you're selling your next apartment to – was all their money made above board? And what about the people we see on TV? Or the politicians? Even you, yourself: have you never in your life done something a bit shady? Why should other people get away with it and not us? Those are the rules of the game – and we weren't the ones who invented them.”

Pablo doesn't answer, and he wonders if he will ever be brave enough to tell her – supposing their relationship doesn't end badly and for good tonight when he leaves the apartment – that he, Pablo Simó, buried Jara beneath the concrete of the building next door. He keeps asking himself the question, but has no answer for either her or himself. Then Leonor continues:

“Everybody's played the system, Simó, you know that – some more than others, but they've still done it. And if they haven't done it, they're going to one day, and if they don't end up doing it, they're going to regret it; nobody wants to be the chump.”

“So how did you play it?”

“I kept this flat for myself. When it first turned up I started by doing the work I always do for Delpech: asking for title deeds, checking whether there were heirs, doing a search on any long-term debt, to see if there were any moratoria we could exploit. The apartment was clean, and I don't know what came over me or exactly when I
made the decision, but I remember that I was on my way to Delpech's office, holding my report, making a mental calculation of what it would be necessary to put down to secure the flat, and just as I was about to open the door and go into his office this question popped into my mind: ‘And why not for me?' That's exactly what I thought: ‘Why not for me?' And right there I turned round and went back to my desk. I put the folder in a box and bided my time. I hadn't mentioned to Delpech that I was working on this flat; by this stage I hardly ever consulted him, I just went to him with the final package. I told him how much a place was worth, how much he would need to pay, and then he made a decision. Even so, I was cautious, in case he came by the information some other way. I waited a month, two months, and after nearly three months I decided to start paying off the debts myself. I let another two months go by and still nothing had happened. So then I went with a locksmith. The caretaker didn't bat an eyelid because he had given me the information himself and been paid for it, but I still didn't move in.”

“When was that?”

“About two years ago.”

“So why have you only just moved in?”

“Because I've recently split up with someone. I used to live with my boyfriend, who had moved here from Mar del Plata first. When I came, he had a little flat that belonged to his grandmother that nobody was living in. So I didn't need a place because we were living together. This flat was more like an investment, to have something of my own. Everybody needs something, right? But anyway, events conspired. I had to move out very quickly, and that was how I wound up here.”

If Leonor believes Pablo Simó to be absorbed in the story
of how she ended up with Nelson Jara's apartment, she's wrong. Pablo is thinking about that boyfriend she used to live with. And he wonders if the girl still loves him, or if he loves her, why she hasn't mentioned him before, why they split up and if the split is definitive. Pablo Simó would like to ask Leonor Corell these questions, but he knows that none of them is permissible under the terms of their pact.

“What are you thinking?” she asks him.

“Nothing.”

“You think I'm a monster.”

“No, of course not. Everyone plays the system – you said so yourself.”

“So what have you done, Simó?”

“Is that what you wanted to ask me?”

“It's one of the questions I have.”

“I haven't done anything,” he lies.

“Well, then it's about time you started.”

“It's about time, yes.”

Pablo Simó wishes he could turn back time, return to the moment they were lying together on the wooden floor and kiss her again, and get on top of Leonor, caress her, enter her.

“I have something to show you, something I'm sure you'll be interested in,” she says then.

“What?”

“When I moved in I did a thorough clean – the place was disgusting, nobody had cleaned it for years. There was even a cup with some remains in it, milk I suppose, that was full of maggots and giving off a stench I can still smell sometimes. Can you smell it?”

“No.”

“I can, I suppose just because it made an impression on me,” she says and, as if the smell really were still there, she
sniffs her hands. “I cleaned everything on my own. I didn't ask anyone to help me, so as not to arouse suspicion. My hands were raw from so much scrubbing. After that, after the deep clean, I wanted to throw away all the junk Jara had kept everywhere. That was when I found these boxes under his bed, and inside one of them was all this information about his building and about Borla's studio that I couldn't really understand: Jara's last diary was there with appointments, calculations, photos. I don't know, there was so much stuff mentioning Borla and Associates that you would think there was nothing in this man's life that mattered more to him. So I thought it would be better to go and meet you and find out if you knew anything about him. You remember when I went to see you?”

“Yes, I remember.” Of course he remembers.

“I had the rucksack stuffed with Jara's papers – I don't know why, just in case. I thought perhaps you might need them. Shall I show you your book?”

“What book?”

“There's a book that has your name on the cover and your photo.”

Pablo is stunned. Leonor goes to her room again and a minute later reappears with a box she puts on the table and then opens. Pablo instantly recognizes Jara's plastic bags and his orange folders; the very same ones the man thrust at him in their first meeting, the ones he had with him when he stood at the door to the studio waiting in vain that day that Pablo spied on him from the opposite corner then fled like a coward. But Leonor, rifling through the box, takes out something he has not seen before: an exercise book with his name written in a cursive hand and a photograph of him, blown up in a colour photocopy.

“Do you want to read it? Have a look.”

And Pablo doesn't know if he wants to, but he takes the book and flicks through it without daring to focus on the personal information in front of him. He feels as if he were holding his own diary – but written by someone else. And he doesn't want Leonor to witness his reaction to the book when he does read it.

“Do you mind if I take this away? I'd like to have a proper look at it. Anyway, it's getting late and I ought to go – it's been a very long day.”

“Long and strange,” she says, and smiles in that distinctive way that makes Pablo forget about the world. “Take it, yes. But after you read it you're going to have to tell me if everything he says in it is true. That's what I wanted to ask you; that's my part of the deal.”