A Crack in the Wall (3 page)

Half an hour later the three of them are sitting around the table. They've hardly sat down when the telephone rings. Laura, still red-eyed, looks at them both: first at Pablo, then at Francisca, then at Pablo again. He knows that look, knows it to be his wife's way of declaring, without recourse to speech, that she is not going to be the one to get up and answer the phone. Francisca holds her mother's gaze, to Pablo's dismay, because he knows that it irritates Laura even more. He can detect his wife's annoyance in the tension of her neck muscles, in the way she moves her food around the plate without eating any of it, but above all the anger shows in the blueish vein that stands out on her forehead, just above the left eye. Pablo gets to his feet and goes to answer the phone; he knows that this gesture won't improve the atmosphere, but he doesn't want it worsened by a ringing telephone, left unanswered. Just before he gets to the receiver, it stops ringing anyway.

Pablo returns to his seat and makes an effort at starting a conversation. Hurriedly he tries to think up a subject, but nothing comes as strongly to mind as Marta's mole and Jara's shoes. Further brain-wracking turns up a girl in
jeans, white T-shirt and black trainers. He can't talk about any of these things to his wife or daughter so, opting for a blend of truth and fiction, he invents a lie about his underground journey that evening, how the trains stopped between two stations and how the confinement brought on a panic attack in one passenger. He describes the tension on that man's face exactly as he sees it etched now on Laura's face opposite him, but leaving out the blue vein above her left eye because that would give him away. Other details he invents, such as the badly polished shoes, tied with a double knot. He tells how the man even tried to open a window to throw himself out and how several passengers had to hold him back. He resists the temptation to claim to have been one of those passengers – he knows the limits of his own lie – saying instead that they were a man and a girl who had a strange mole on her leg, close to the knee. Pablo Simó tells his story with such gusto that you might think he, and not the man with claustrophobia, was the drama's real protagonist. But neither Laura nor Francisca are interested enough in his anecdote to do more than look up at him occasionally from their plates.

“Pass the salt,” says his daughter, and as he does so Laura's eyes fill with tears.

How must his wife have interpreted “pass the salt” for her eyes to well up like that? Or what interpretation has she given to the fact of his passing the salt to his daughter? Pablo Simó doesn't know. The phone rings again and he quickly says to Francisca, “Can you get it?”

As soon as the girl stands up, Laura warns her:

“If it's for you, hang up straight away – you're banned from using the phone for a week.”

“Then someone else can answer,” says Francisca, sitting down.

Laura shoots Pablo a pleading look. He'd like to oblige her by doing whatever it is her eyes are demanding of him, but he isn't sure exactly what that is. Even though he knows that it isn't to do with him answering the telephone, he moves back his chair and prepares to do just that. The telephone rings twice more then stops. Pablo returns to his seat; the three continue to eat, in silence; for a long time the only sound is the scraping of cutlery against china or water being poured into a glass. Pablo no longer feels able to take up the story of the underground drama and embarking on a new one would seem to be forcing matters too far; he decides that silence is perhaps far better for them all, that for the moment there isn't much more they can do than let time pass; Francisca, however angry it makes her, must stick for several weeks, a month even, to the routine of a normal fifteen-year-old who goes to school every day, succeeds in class, comes home early, and in so doing brings peace to her mother. The normal routine of a normal girl, that is what Laura needs from her daughter; Pablo knows as much because that is how, using exactly that word, Laura referred to her daughter half an hour earlier when she said:

“Is it so hard for her to be normal?”

And he didn't know how to answer because he isn't even exactly sure what it means to be normal. Is he normal himself? As time goes by, will Francisca come to seem more like him or like Laura? He suspects that his daughter won't live up to her mother's expectations, but that by the time the failure becomes evident it will also be irretrievable and Laura will have no option but to accept it. Pablo's immediate task is to get through this time however he can, waiting for Francisca to mature, to pass this age at which children can still be influenced by their parents until finally
she leaves behind girlhood and with it the obligation to render accounts of what she drinks, with whom, where and when. After all, has he ever rendered accounts of what he did three years ago? Pablo looks over at his daughter, who's furious but holding her tongue, and wonders if the girl eating opposite him is closer to the one who used to sit on his lap, cuddling him and provoking her mother by whispering “Do you want to marry me?” or to the one who drinks beer in bars and is on the verge of having sex, if she hasn't already, with someone whose name she doesn't even know. He wonders, does he have a right to know the name of the man his daughter will sleep with for the first time? At Francisca's age Pablo and Laura were already going out together, although they didn't have relations until a few years later. At Francisca's age he was happy enough just to feel Laura's tits – that was as far as she'd let him go and it was prize enough. First he would grope them through her clothes with his hands spread like claws, stroking them, squeezing them, weighing them up, and only after a while would he try to put his hand under her top. Laura always stopped him, although she let him rub his face against her chest and kiss it through her clothes as much as he wanted. When Pablo got hard he grabbed Laura's hand and placed it there for her to feel and she, as soon as she had felt it, would send him away, saying:

“Go on, get lost.”

And obediently he would go, walking the three blocks that separated his house from Laura's, in a painful stoop, wondering whether to sit on the edge of the pavement until his erection subsided or hurry back to his room to masturbate, and knowing that neither option would be a relief. They must have been fifteen when they touched each other this way, or sixteen at the most, and Pablo wonders
how different their behaviour was to his daughter's now. It's one of many questions to which he has no answer.

Pablo glances at Francisca and then at Laura, so distant from each other. He also feels far away. He concludes that the misunderstanding is an inevitable consequence of time's passing, the years on either side of a line that is always moving, a line marking the arrival of one's children at an age in which they cease to be – if ever they were – the consequence of our actions. What would relieve Laura of the weight Francisca signifies for her? If Francisca were either a little girl again or a woman once and for all, if she were firmly on one side or the other of that line. It would be a relief to see his daughter safely on one or other side of the river, and not floundering in the current, which is where she seems to be at the moment, and from where they still entertain notions of being able to save her. Even if that's not altogether possible. Even if nobody is really safe.

Breaking the silence, which he had begun to find almost comfortable, Laura rises from the table, takes her plate to the sink and returns with a bowl of fruit. Pablo selects an apple and bites into it, watching his daughter again; she's not wearing a bra and he can see that her breasts are much smaller than Laura's were at her age. He wonders if they may still grow a bit or if, like Marta, one day she'll buy a pair in the size she wants. Pablo suspects that comparing Francisca's tits with her mother's, or with Marta's, probably isn't politically correct. He tries to change the focus of his attention without letting it return to the events of that terrible night that began when Marta Horvat rang his house in tears. He asks Francisca:

“Not having any fruit?” gesturing with the half-eaten apple.

“May I leave the table?” Francisca replies.

Pablo says nothing. If he says yes Laura will be annoyed, and if he says no his daughter will be annoyed. He opts for silence, pretending to be hindered by a mouthful of apple, then when he's finished that he takes another bite and another, filling his mouth and leaving the question unanswered. She may well deny it, but Marta Horvat's had her tits done – he knows she has. One time she came back from annual leave in a white strappy top and Pablo only had to watch her come in the door to know that she was bringing something extra to the table. That white strappy top showed the edging on her bra and had been made to accommodate an enlargement of about three cup sizes, deforming the word emblazoned across her bust:
Beloved
. He could have printed the word on himself, and not on the fabric of her T-shirt but on Marta's skin itself. It's in the middle of Pablo's reverie about that T-shirt – which he recalls as clearly as if it were in front of him – that the telephone rings for the third time and he, wary of exacerbating the bad atmosphere, automatically gets up. But Francisca, demonstrating that she can do what she likes when she likes – or better, that she will never do what is expected of her – gets there before him.

“It's Booorrrrrrrrrla,” says Francisca, rolling the “r” more than seems appropriate to Pablo, given that this particular “r” belongs in the surname of the man who's been paying his salary for nearly twenty years.

He makes his way to the phone with trepidation; it's unusual for Borla to call him at home at this hour, especially with no warning.

“Hello,” he says.

Borla kicks off, without preamble:

“I didn't like that girl, what about you?”

“I don't know, I thought you were relaxed about it,” Pablo answers, perplexed not only because Borla has called him but because he is asking his opinion.

“I wasn't relaxed at all – I pretended to be for Marta's sake. I don't want her to start panicking, you know what she's like when she's scared,” says Borla, calling on a complicity that is also unusual between them.

“May I leave the table?” asks Francisca.

“What worries me is why she came to see us,” says Borla, speaking almost at the same time as Pablo's daughter.

“Because she must have been asking all around the neighbourhood – the concierge, the butcher…” says Pablo, repeating the very words Borla had spoken that afternoon.

“Yes, but we're not doormen,” Borla interrupts, “and we don't run a butcher's shop. Nobody is the regular customer of an architect's practice. You see what I mean? There's something fishy there, something I don't like, Pablo. I want you to be on your guard. If that girl comes back, find out who she is and what she's after – why she came to the office, and why now, after three years.”

“And if she doesn't come back?” asks Pablo.

“So can I leave the table or not?” Francisca asks again.

Pablo sees Laura looking at her without saying anything, then looking at him, and begins to lose the train of what Borla's saying. He sees the blue vein standing out above his wife's left eye and, hoping to defuse the tension, tells his daughter:

“Yes, go on.”

The girl gets up. His wife snorts. Borla asks:

“What do you mean, Simó?” as if “Yes, go on” had been intended for him. Pablo skirts the issue by repeating his question:

“What if she doesn't come back?”

“If she doesn't come back there's nothing to worry about – I'm just ringing you in case, so that you can be prepared, that's all,” says Borla and ends the conversation as curtly as he had started it.

Pablo stands for a moment with the receiver still in his hand.

“What did he want?” Laura asks.

“Nothing important,” he tells her.

“All the same, you could have said to help me clear the table,” Laura complains, seamlessly changing the subject and confusing Pablo for the time it takes him to realize that she is referring to Francisca, not Borla.

Laura gets up and takes the dirty plates left on the table over to the sink.

“Leave it, I'll do it,” he says.

She accepts, but doesn't want to go to bed before returning to her theme, as if to remind Pablo that if there is going to be an important worry keeping him awake all night, it should be one supplied by her:

“Please – speak to Francisca.”

She leaves the room and for a moment he doesn't move, staring at their dirty plates and glasses, the half-cleared table. He wonders what would happen to this household if Laura or Francisca ever found out what he did. Whether they would be able to understand or would condemn him. Whether they would have done the same, in his position. Then he clears away the last things, takes them to the sink and makes a start on the washing-up. He could leave everything in the sink for the woman who comes in the morning to help with housework, but he likes washing, letting the water run in with the soap, watching the bubbles rise on the crockery, rinsing everything and putting it to dry on a dishcloth so nothing slips. The telephone rings again and
Pablo shakes his hands, looks for another dishcloth and, not finding one, dries his hands on the back of his trousers. He answers and this time hears Marta's voice.

“I'm scared, are you?”

For a moment he says nothing, such is the surprise of hearing her. Marta tries again:

“Hello! Are you there, Pablo?”

“Yes, I'm here,” he says quickly, fearful that she may cut him off if he doesn't speak.

“Aren't you scared?”

“No, I'm not scared.”

“Seriously?”

“I'm not even worried, Marta, and you shouldn't be either,” he says, trying to sound convincing. “I really think Borla's right – there's nothing to fear.”