A Crack in the Wall (21 page)

“It's Daddy, can I come in?”

Francisca doesn't respond, but after a few minutes the handle turns and the door opens just enough to let Pablo know that he has permission to go in. He does so, cautiously, as though asking for approval with every step. The room is illuminated only by the computer screen from which the music emanates. The girl is sitting on the floor, leaning against the wall, hugging her knees. Pablo moves aside some large cushions and sits on the edge of the bed.

“What are you listening to?”

“Leonard Cohen.”

“Where did you get it from?”

“It was recorded for me by a friend who's good at finding weird stuff,” she says, wiping her nose with the back of her hand. “Do you know him?”

“No,” he says. “Should I?”

“If you like it, yes; if not, no. There's no point in listening to someone you don't like.”

“I do like this guy.”

“I can make you a copy if you like.”

“Go on then. Who's the friend that's good at finding weird stuff?”

“Toni.”

“Do I know him?”

“He's the guy I sometimes meet up with after school, the one Mum doesn't like because he has a beard.”

“Today your mother must be wishing she'd never said a word against Toni and his beard,” he says with a smile, which she returns. “Toni knows his music.”

“Do you lot ever listen to music?” Francisca asks.

“Us lot?”

“You and Mum.”

Pablo hesitates, not answering, as though Francisca's question posed some difficulty in answering. She says:

“I mean, I've never seen either of you listening to music at home. Do you listen to music somewhere else, like at the office?”

“Yes, sometimes I listen to it at the office,” he lies.

“I'm going to play you my favourite song,” says Francisca.

And while she goes to the computer to select the track she wants to share with him, Pablo wonders why he hardly listens to music when, up until a few years ago – fifteen? twenty? – it occupied an important place in his life. He wasn't ever an expert or a passionate fan, but he enjoyed it. And Tano Barletta too; they used to listen to all kinds of things during the long nights they stayed awake working on presentations for the faculty. Barletta really did know about music: everything he made Pablo listen to was good, unusual – like what Toni finds for Francisca – a “jewel”, Tano used to say. Even without his passionate endorsements, Pablo had to admit that Barletta's choice in music reached him, got right inside him and moved him. Tano is bound to know of Leonard Cohen, Pablo thinks, and his gaze falls once more on his daughter, sitting against the wall and hugging her legs. Even the scant light falling on her face is sufficient confirmation of her beauty, her youth and her desolation. Why is his daughter, at this early stage in her life, as desolate as he is? Can that kind of misery be genetic or inherited, he wonders? Are some of us predisposed to be crushed by events that pass by others leaving no mark? Why do some suffer what others barely notice? Cohen's music isn't helping. It only seems to underscore his own sense of desolation.

“Did she tell you?” Francisca asks.

“Mum? Yes, she told me. Do you want to tell me in your own words?”

“Mum always makes such a drama of everything. I kissed Ana, it's true. But does that make me a certain thing from now until the day I die?”

“So – aren't you?”

“Aren't I what, Dad?”

“Um…”

“Say it.”

“Aren't you…gay?”

“I don't know, you tell me. Ana is my friend. She asked me to kiss her and I wanted to kiss her, nothing more than that. I wanted to know what it was like. Does that make me gay, Dad? If so, why don't all those men I kissed make me the opposite?”

“
All
those men?”

“Dad…”

“Sorry.”

“I kissed a few men, and I kissed a woman – do I have to know now who I'll want to kiss for the rest of my life?”

“No, nobody knows who they'll want to kiss for the rest of their life.”

“But Mum's forcing me into that decision. Mum's waiting for me to announce that I'm gay, and I can't tell her that I am to get her off my back, because the truth is that I really don't know what I am at the moment. Is she going to stick a label on me with each new thing I try? If I smoke a joint I'm going to be a drug addict, if I get drunk I'm going to be an alcoholic, if I go out with more than five blokes I'm going to be a whore. I kissed a friend, Dad, that's what happened, nothing more, I swear.”

“You don't have to swear anything to me,” he says, and for a while they sit in silence. Pablo's wondering how many things, even if done only once in a lifetime, confer a label on the doer. Is Barletta a “thief” because he stole a
Keith Jarrett CD that summer in Villa Gesell? Is Leonor a “squatter” because she's living in a flat that isn't hers? What label would befit someone who has buried a man (a dead one?) in sordid circumstances and without involving the police? “Accomplice”? What label applies to Marta and Borla, after the events of that night? The same for both? And is he already labelled “adulterer”, having slept with Leonor Corell a few hours earlier? Is Laura already a “wronged woman”?

“Haven't you ever kissed a man, Dad?” Francisca asks him, interrupting his reverie.

“No, never,” he says, trying to conceal the shock he feels at being asked such a question by his daughter.

“Why not?”

“Because I haven't, because it never came up, because I was always attracted to women, I don't know…”

“Do you think I'm a lesbian, like Mum does?”

“No, no, Francisca, I don't think anything. Or rather, I think the same as you: that you don't know, that almost nobody knows.”

“What am I in your eyes?”

“You're my daughter, my little girl.”

“Ana says that she knows for sure, that she's never liked boys.”

“She probably does know, then.”

“Probably.”

Cautiously Pablo moves towards her, crouches beside her and hugs her. She lets herself be hugged and starts to cry on his shoulder.

“Will you stay beside me until I go to sleep?” Francisca asks.

“Yes, I'll stay.”

The girl slips out of his arms, turns off the computer and gets into bed. Pablo switches off the light, sits beside her
and takes her hand. Francisca sobs a little, but gradually the rhythm of her breathing calms and finally she falls asleep. Pablo looks at her, kisses her hand and tucks away a strand of hair that has fallen across her face. Pulling the sheet up to cover her shoulders, he kisses her hand again. And as he sits there on the edge of his daughter's bed, he realizes that he feels neither pity nor concern for her. He gazes at her – he can't stop gazing at her – and wishes he could find a word for what he feels. Respect? Admiration? Yes, he thinks, it's that: he admires his daughter. He, even if he had wanted to, would never have dared to kiss another man.

He gets up early. It's Sunday and the likelihood is that Laura and Francisca – unless last night's episode has altered their respective biorhythms – will sleep on until midday. He fetches the newspaper from the doormat outside and goes to have breakfast in the kitchen, taking Jara's notebook too. The book about him. He places it on the table next to the cup into which he's going to pour his coffee when it's ready. He looks at it, still not daring to open it. Instead, he begins with the newspaper; Sunday papers have more and more advertising and that irritates him. He quickly skips over the advertisements for domestic appliances and reads the international news, the politics sections, sports. Most of this he scans; none of the headings draw him into reading the whole piece. His gaze falls on the book again. He looks at his photograph on the book's cover. He looks at the purple stripes on the shirt he's wearing in the photo. He goes to check if the coffee is ready yet. He pours it out, leaves it to cool a little. He drinks it. He opens the cover of the book and on the first page finds the following lines:

It's chilling enough that Nelson Jara should have known details of his life including the name of his daughter and wife and whether or not his parents are living, but the passage that most reverberates in his head is “He's been in full-time employment since graduation. He is not an associate…” Why did that fact strike Jara as worthy of inclusion in his notebook? Why has Borla never offered to make him an associate? Why has he not demanded it?

And further down:

The traffic never bothered him. So does he choose the underground in order to bury himself alive? A living man under the city. A living man beneath the earth. If there were even a remote possibility of Jara not being dead when he buried him, then his label shouldn't be “accomplice” but “murderer”. He'll never know now which of these he is. How many people have been buried alive in the soil of Buenos Aires? How many deaths that nobody ever found out about? How many deaths denied? Tano Barletta used to claim that when the underground was built the workers who died on the job were buried there and then, in the tunnels that they themselves had dug, through which rails would later pass and, over them, Pablo Simó in a compartment en route to his destination. And he also said that there were corpses buried under the motorway between Buenos
Aires and Ezeiza airport. And under what was once the Ital Park funfair. And under the Costanera Sur, in amongst the rubble of demolished houses from San Telmo that was used to fill land reclaimed from the river to create an ecological reserve.

“What can you expect of a city where so many of the dead lie outside the cemetery walls?” Barletta used to complain.

Pablo Simó flicks a few pages on and alights on this paragraph:

And a few pages further on there is a chronology of each of their meetings: the first time at the studio (“
Simó is upset by any change in the arrangement of objects on his desk”
;
“He worries about the shoes people wear”
), the afternoon of Jara's fruitless wait at the main entrance (“
Simó spied on me from the corner, he knows that I was there and he knows that he neglected to receive me”
) and the coffee on that last occasion at Las Violetas (“
Today Simó was incapable of looking me in the eye”
). Beneath each date and description there is a summary. The one after the first meeting reads:

And then a paragraph that Jara wrote the afternoon he had waited at the main entrance:

The description of their last meeting at Las Violetas is written in telegraphic form – short sentences shorn of detail, almost as if Jara had been obliged to record it, but had had neither the enthusiasm nor the time for his task. And the conclusion is as follows:

And then the word “
End
”, which holds Pablo's gaze. The end for him and the end for Nelson Jara.

Soon afterwards Pablo calls Leonor, waking her up: it's still early on this Sunday morning. She says it doesn't matter, that she was about to get up to go for a bicycle ride with a friend. A friend, Pablo says to himself, and he asks her if there are any other notebooks in the box, if there is a notebook for Borla and one for Marta Horvat. Leonor says she doesn't think there is, but that she is going to check and will let him know, and she asks if she can call him at this number. He says yes and prepares to wait for her call.

“No, there aren't any other personal notebooks in that box. But there are books in the others.”

“What others?”

“I've still got two or three other boxes – I threw away the others. I couldn't hang on to so much paper.”

“So what's in the other boxes?”

“They seem to correspond to other buildings. The papers are similar to those ones I showed you, but there are loads of them. They all have a label on the front with an address, a date and an amount in dollars. On your one the sum isn't filled in. There's a space for it but no figure. On all of them there are photographs with cracked walls, diagrams showing the cracks, and newspaper cuttings. And in each of those boxes there is a book with someone's name and a photograph. Would you like me to have a look and tell you the names?”