A Crack in the Wall (20 page)

“Have you read it?”

“Yes, pretty much.”

“And?”

“Well – it's all about you,” says Leonor, and she smiles again.

Pablo gathers up his things, puts on his yellow cardigan and his shoes.

“Right, I'm going.”

He moves towards the door. Leonor goes with him, turns the key and opens the door. He looks at her and makes as though to kiss her on the cheek, but the girl takes his chin, and turns his face just enough that his mouth faces hers, then presses her lips against his in a brief, gentle kiss. It's more than Pablo feels he deserves. Why did she move her bare foot away when he brushed against it, if she's kissing him on the lips now?

“Women are like that,” Barletta tells him.

He waits for a moment, but he knows that he can't expect more of Leonor this evening. So he steps away from her,
walks towards the lift, pushes the button and waits. She waits too, in the doorway, until the lift arrives, and then they wave to one another, without saying anything else. Pablo opens the lift door, goes in and closes it, and as he presses the ground-floor button he hears the sound of the door to Leonor's apartment closing.

The lift jerks into action, removing Pablo Simó from view and with him the book written by Nelson Jara.

On the underground, Pablo Simó sits with the book on his knees. He looks at the cover, tracing with one finger the letters, written by hand in thick, black ink, that spell out his name. Then he turns his attention to the photo, which must be more than ten years old, and wonders where Jara could have found it. He suspects that it's the photograph from his student identity card at the School of Architecture; he's sure that there's no other photograph of him wearing that shirt with the thick purple lines – though Laura insists they're blue – which never wholly convinced him but which he certainly wore that day. He remembers it well because his wife had given it to him for a wedding anniversary that happened to coincide with the day identity cards were renewed in the architecture department, and Laura had insisted on him wearing it – even to the point of making him take off the shirt he already had on to change it for this purple striped one. How did Jara get a copy of that photograph? Pablo doesn't know. Nor does he know what's stopping him from opening the notebook. He tells himself that he would rather take his time over it at home. Looking at his watch, he sees that it is nearly eleven o'clock at night; it's going to be difficult to explain his lateness to Laura. But he doesn't feel worried, and much less sorry;
it was worth running the risk for all kinds of reasons: he got to walk through the city with a girl he thinks he's in love with. He kissed her, caressed her, and, in a wonderful encounter far surpassing any fantasy he might have had before their meeting, he made love to her. Besides (and it shames him to put this other revelation on a par with making love to Leonor) he established that Jara's crack was nothing more than a fraud fabricated by the man himself. That alone may be justification enough for braving Laura's anger. He closes his eyes and, letting himself be rocked by the motion of the carriage as it lurches from one station to the next, he imagines Jara marking up the wall according to the sketch that he wants his fake crack to follow, standing on a chair, using a plastic ruler to measure the distance between each twist of the fissure he is going to carve, joining up the points – would he use a cross, a dot or a dash to make each mark? – and then drawing in every stroke of the crack exactly as he had imagined it, chipping at the wall above the drawing with a chisel, a gouge, even a screwdriver. And once the groove was opened, he imagines the man brushing out the debris, blowing on the crack to dislodge dust and plaster, shaking off any fragments of the wall still clinging to his clothes and finally sweeping up the rubble with obsessive care just as he, Pablo Simó, would have done in his place.

The train comes into a station, slows and stops. Pablo opens his eyes and looks for the name: Callao. There are two more stops before he has to get out and change lines. He looks again at the notebook,
his
book; in a way it makes him feel important – if Jara dedicated one entirely to him, he must have deserved it. Or did he also write one for Borla and another for Marta Horvat? He resolves to ask Leonor the next time he sees her, or when they next talk, and to
ask her for these other books, if they exist. The next time he sees her, he thinks, as the train sets off again. He closes his eyes, imagining Leonor naked. He wonders if there'll be another chance to see her like that and promises himself that there will be and that this time Jara won't be allowed to spoil things, especially not now that he knows that everything to do with that man and the crack was a fraud, an invention. Well, not absolutely everything: his corpse, or what's left of it, is still buried under the cement, that's for sure. That, regardless of any lies Jara may have told, remains true. It will always be true.

He changes trains first at Carlos Pellegrini and then at Avenida de Mayo, where he finally gets onto the line that will take him home. He dozes, but wakes up just in time to get out at his stop, Castro Barros. Outside he's dazed by the lights of a Saturday night in Buenos Aires. The cars don't hurtle past the way they would on a weekday and there are groups of young people out on the street. A man walks past him – surely on his way to a date – fresh from the shower and smelling strongly of aftershave. As Pablo continues towards his house, he hears laughter, murmurs, a car horn, another horn answering it, screeching brakes, another horn, somebody shouting to a friend from the other side of the avenue, a rowing couple making up with a kiss. The smell of pizza gusts over him and Pablo realizes that he's hungry – how many hours is it since he last ate? A boy wearing a sweatshirt with the logo of a local pizzeria passes him carrying a pile of takeaway boxes, confirming that his senses don't lie.

He's yards away now from the building where he lives and he wonders if he ought to be fabricating some sort of excuse to explain his lateness to Laura: the usual work complications; Borla's lack of consideration when he's not
the one in a hurry; the reduced frequency of underground trains on weekends. In spite of his trepidation, Pablo Simó dares to hope that Laura will still be in a good mood, as she has been these last few days, and that his lateness won't have given her a reason to be annoyed or irritable as she usually is. He prays that she went to the cinema without him, that she enjoyed the film and is flung in an armchair now, glass of wine in hand, or in bed watching another film on TV, maybe even an old one she's seen several times, while she waits for him. He wonders if his wife will suspect that he's been making love to someone else. He smells his hands, checking that they don't smell of Leonor, and even though it's necessary to conceal from Laura what he was doing only a few hours earlier, it saddens Pablo Simó not to have the girl's smell still on his body. He pulls up the collar of his cardigan to sniff that too, and although he picks up a scent that isn't his and isn't recognizable, he takes it to be a new clothes smell – the starch or fabric softener the garment was washed in before it was put on sale – whatever, but definitely not Leonor's smell.

However, Pablo's hopes are simply that: hopes, and as soon as he puts his key in the door, before he's even opened it, he can hear Laura crying. It's tempting to pull the key out again and run away, but that's not an option – he wouldn't be capable of it. So he does what he ought to do: he opens the door and goes in. On the other side of it is Laura, her face a picture of devastation, the blue vein pulsing above her left eye, clutching a handkerchief which every so often she dabs her eyes with, blows her nose on or bites as if it were guilty of some terrible thing that has happened. Pablo struggles to understand what his wife is saying, but even though it surprises him that his late arrival one Saturday after twenty years of marriage should cause
such a scandal, it never occurs to him that Laura's wailing might have some other cause than him and his romance – romance? – with Leonor Corell. He tries to make sense of a few broken phrases he can pick out from the midst of howling and hiccupy sobbing, but however much he tries, it all sounds incoherent. Could Laura know more than he suspects? Could she have followed him, spied on him? No, she couldn't, he tells himself – but then why is she shouting, why does she grab onto his jacket, as though he might be about to escape, why does she say, breathlessly, “I want to kill myself,” and then release him and throw herself onto the armchair, weeping disconsolately? Pablo doesn't dare ask her what has happened, because he knows that she has already said it, between howls, perhaps even more than once, although he wasn't able to understand, and he also knows that if his wife repeats it in this state, he still won't be able to understand. He waits for Laura to catch her breath, to calm her weeping, to control her hiccups and lower her voice. When she manages that and says again, “I want to kill myself,” the words sound clear, modulated in every syllable, without shrieking, and are therefore intelligible to Pablo, who happens to say that it's not that bad, that he was at work, that it got much later than he had realized, but before he has finished Laura's fury grows again and she shouts:

“If this isn't ‘that bad', what is ‘that bad' for you?”

That much he hears – loud and clear – but he still doesn't grasp the significance. Then Laura complains that if he had been there that afternoon, perhaps the girl wouldn't have stopped being what she is, but at least she, Laura, would not have had to be alone at that awful moment, alone when she slapped her, alone when she kicked her friend out of the house. It's only then that Pablo Simó
realizes that when his wife says “the girl” she isn't referring to Leonor, but to Francisca, and he feels greatly relieved, though simultaneously bored of this family drama, which seems to be dragging on indefinitely. Laura's screaming now that this is the worst thing that has ever happened in her life, she screams that even his – Pablo Simó's – death would not be such a grave event, because that is the law of nature and everyone must die some day, a theory Pablo agrees with, although they have never talked about it, but not this, she repeats, not this. Pablo, not understanding what “this” refers to, asks his wife:

“What do you mean by ‘this', Laura?”

“Haven't you been listening to me, Pablo?”

“Yes, but try not to shout and to be a little more clear. Otherwise I can't understand you.”

“You'd like me to be clear?”

“Yes…”

“Really clear?”

“Yes – of course.”

“Your daughter's a dyke, Pablo,” says Laura, exaggeratedly opening not only her mouth, but also her eyes and even her nostrils.

“My daughter's a what?” he asks.

“A dyke! Are you going to tell me now that you don't know what a dyke is?”

“Dyke?”

“A lesbian, gay, homosexual…”

“Francisca?”

“Yes, Pablo, Francisca. Have you got any other daughters?”

“Where did you get that from?”

“I went into her room and I found her and her dyke friend, sucking each other's faces off.”

“Ana?”

“Yes, that revolting —”

“They were kissing?”

“They were halfway down each other's throats, Pablo. Mouths open, tongues inside one another. You can't imagine what it was like for me to see them, the shock I had. Our daughter was never butch. She was a sweet little girl. The other one was, but not her. How could I even have imagined…” And once again Laura swaps shouting for weeping.

Pablo goes to the kitchen and returns with a glass of water for his wife. Francisca appears in the doorway of the corridor that leads to the bedrooms. She looks at him, he looks at her; Laura, with her back to her daughter, is saved a moment's disgust. The girl's face is misshapen, swollen from crying, and her eyes look inflamed and red, more from anger, Pablo suspects, than from grief.

“Can you come to my room a moment, Dad?” says Francisca in a stifled, barely audible voice.

But Laura hears her and before Pablo can say anything, without turning to look at her daughter, she yells:

“Get out of here you disgusting animal, get out!”

And the girl returns to her room, putting up no more resistance than a hateful face.

“Laura, do you think it's helpful to treat her like that?”

“I treat her in the way I'm able, in the way that comes naturally, in the way she deserves.”

“What does she say about it?” he asks.

“She's got nothing to say – what would you expect her to say? Does it matter what she says, Pablo?”

“Let me speak to her.”

“There's nothing to talk about. What do you want to talk about? What it's like playing tonsil tennis with another woman?”

“Why don't you take a pill to calm yourself down?”

“Because I've already had three and they made absolutely no difference.”

“Then have a wine, or a whisky, whatever it takes to unwind a bit. The way you are at the moment isn't going to help solve anything.”

“Because this has no solution, Pablo – that's what you seem not to understand. How the hell do you solve the fact that your daughter is a lesbian? Is there a lesbian help centre? Is there a rehab farm, like for drug addicts? Is there some new kind of medication?”

“Let me speak to her.”

“Do what you want,” says Laura, getting up abruptly and spilling the water left in her glass, then disappearing down the same corridor along which Francisca also disappeared a moment ago, with the same aim of shutting herself in her room behind a slammed door.

Pablo waits a few minutes before going to his daughter's room. He pours himself a glass of water, drinks and thinks about what he is going to say. He doesn't really know. Probably it's better to let Francisca speak first, he thinks; after all, she did ask him to go to her room. Remembering that makes it easier to broach his journey down the corridor; however, when he gets to Francisca's room he still doesn't feel ready to face her and lingers by the door, waiting, he's not sure what for. His daughter is listening to music, but he can hear her sobbing even though the sound's turned up. He waits a moment more, captive to the music, which he likes although he doesn't know it, and the weeping, which pains him, as if the two elements combined to form an improvised duet that sounds better than expected. Finally he takes a couple of deep breaths and knocks on the door, saying: