A Crack in the Wall (2 page)

“Do any of you know Nelson Jara?”

And at that moment, just as Pablo had always feared might one day come to pass, the world pauses for a fraction of a second before immediately beginning to spin at top speed in the opposite direction. All three of them, without answering the woman or saying anything, without even exchanging glances, feel themselves transported back through time to the night, three years ago, that they swore together never to revisit.

“I'm sorry, but I'm looking for Nelson Jara…” the girl tries again.

Borla is the first to break his trance and ask, “For whom?”

“Nelson Jara,” she repeats.

“It doesn't ring a bell,” says Borla. Then he asks, “Does the name mean anything to you, Pablo? Do you know of any Nelson Jara?”

Borla waits for the answer they agreed on, but Pablo Simó isn't going to give it. “No, I don't remember” – that's what he's supposed to say, but he says neither that nor anything else. He keeps quiet, following Borla in as far as his silence will take him, yet unable to utter a single word, for all that the other man is fixing him with that particular expression. How can Pablo deny what he knows, and what Marta knows and what Borla knows: that Nelson Jara is dead, buried a few feet beneath the heavy-wear tiles over which the three of them walk every day on their way into or out of the office, under the concrete floor of the parking lot, exactly where they left him that night, three years ago.

It takes Borla less than five minutes to get rid of the girl. He says that the name – was it Nelson Jara? – does in fact sound familiar, perhaps because he sold him a flat or contracted him for some job; that if it's important he can look in the files, but if her concrete question is does any of them know anything about this gentleman, then the answer would have to be no. Borla sounds entirely truthful; even Pablo would believe him if he didn't know that he was lying. But the situation isn't quite so simple for Marta, who cracks the knuckles on both hands, making a dry sound as though the bones were literally breaking under the pressure, like the one Pablo kept hearing her make that night, and that sound, or the memory of that sound, heightens his feeling of unease. Then Borla speaks again, directing himself more casually to this girl who has waylaid the end of their working day.

“Now, forgive my asking, but who are you?”

And this time she is the one who seems uncomfortable and unwilling to give an answer that may provoke more questions.

“I just need to find him and sort out some business, that's all.”

“It must be important business,” Borla says.

“It is to me.”

“What sort of business is it?”

“Personal business,” she says, indicating by the tone of her voice that she doesn't wish to go into details.

Pablo hears these words, “personal business”, and looks up. The girl's hiding something and, although she holds her head high and looks Borla in the eye, Pablo discerns a hesitancy in her movements that shows she didn't come prepared for this barrage of questions. Whereas they have had time in the last three years to prepare. They decided in advance how they would respond to all the possible questions. They tested their answers, they practised in front of mirrors, agreeing among themselves – Marta, Borla and Simó – what they would and wouldn't say.

Borla has successfully turned the tables and now it's evident that the girl is under scrutiny.

“It's personal business,” she repeats, picking up her backpack and slinging it over her shoulder. “But if Jara doesn't show up he won't be able to help with it, so thanks anyway.” And with no further explanation she opens the door and leaves.

For a few seconds Borla, Marta Horvat and Pablo Simó remain in the same attitudes they had adopted when the girl disappeared through the door, and who knows how much longer they might have stayed in them – but just then the telephone rings and all three jump. Pablo answers. It's Laura, who, giving him no time to say anything, begs him to come home early. He hears a kind of strangled sigh at the other end of the line, as though she were making an effort not to cry. Then she says again:

“Can you get back early, Pablo?”

“I'm always home early, Laura. What's wrong? Why don't you tell me what's happened?”

“I'll tell you when you get here.”

“Is it something to do with Francisca again?”

“When you get here, I said.”

Laura hangs up. Pablo stares for a moment at the receiver before hanging up himself. He's about to explain the conversation to Borla and Marta when he realizes that they haven't paid the slightest attention to it, that not only do they not care who rang him or what's going on but, also, that they would be irritated to hear any observation not connected to the girl who has just left and what her unexpected presence in their office might signify for the three of them.

“What do we do, Mario?” Marta asks Borla.

“Nothing,” he says, and Pablo can't decide whether his assurance is real or feigned. “Don't let's give it a greater significance than it has. The girl came looking for Jara. Jara isn't here and that's all there is to it. These are normal things that happen all the time. We knew it could happen, we've always known. We've been amazingly lucky that for three years nobody came asking for him, right Pablo?”

But Pablo Simó doesn't answer; he doesn't even realize that Borla is speaking to him. He stares at his hands, as he stared at Marta's in the office, though without cracking the knuckles as she did a moment ago. Pablo simply looks at them, turning the palms up and down, opening and closing his fists while he remembers how muddy they got that night, all that earth under his nails, and, above all, the pain – a pain that took a long time to fade and that comes back in damp weather, speaking to him of the thing he cannot forget. Marta, though still shaking, jumps in and answers for him, as if they had been playing cards and Pablo had said “pass”.

“I am worried, though…Why did this girl come precisely
here
to look for Jara? What gave her the idea that we might know something?”

“She won't only have come here, Marta,” Borla says. “She'll have been asking for him all around the neighbourhood. I bet she'd already been to the café, the butcher, the concierge at his building.” And in a final attempt to reassure her he makes a stab at metaphor: “Marta, let's not make a mountain out of a molehill.”

His eyes are open wider than usual, and Borla waits to see the effect of this idiom. When neither Marta nor Pablo says anything, he continues:

“Look, I don't think that girl's going to come back asking for Jara, and if she does we'll tell her the same thing – that we don't have a clue where he is.”

Borla speaks these last words with a conviction aimed at ending the discussion and, without waiting for any reaction from the others, he takes the initiative: he walks over to Marta, picks up her handbag and hands it to her, helps her to put on her linen jacket and, as she puts her arm through one of the proffered sleeves, says again, with emphasis:

“There's no danger, Marta, don't worry.”

Then Borla opens the door and ushers them out of it, switches off the lights – which is usually Pablo's job – and stands waiting for them outside, signalling an end to the working day without a thought for the tumult these actions provoke in Pablo Simó, who finds himself obliged to gather up his things in a hurry and bundle them away without due respect for his usual daily ceremony. Although the tape measure, the pencil and the notebook leave with him, they are not in the places that have so long been assigned to them, and that, Pablo senses, cannot be a good omen.

They leave the office, the three of them walking briskly and talking of interchangeable banalities that could equally concern the unseasonably warm mid-March weather as the fact that the days will soon be getting shorter. They alight
on whatever subject will allow them to pretend that the afternoon ended when Borla said to Marta, “Would you like a lift anywhere?”, that the door never opened, that there was never a girl in jeans, white T-shirt and black trainers asking fateful questions about Nelson Jara. All they have to do is stroll a few steps to the corner, where Pablo will say goodbye to the others and walk the remaining blocks to the underground station and Marta will get into Borla's car, and each one of them will continue on to wherever they have to go.

The underground journey doesn't give Pablo Simó much of a chance to occupy his mind with other thoughts, and as he passes through the intermittent light of stations back into the darkness of the tunnel, he can't help but think of Jara. Since the thoughts are inescapable, he makes an effort at least to picture him alive. Jara entering the office laden with files and papers; Jara choosing the worst moments to be a pain; Jara waiting for him, crouching in the dark passage outside the old office. Jara with his double-entry tables, Jara with his documents highlighted in fluorescent yellow, Jara in his worn suit, Jara and his shoes. They were ugly shoes – he thought as much the first time he saw Jara enter the office carrying a bag full of files, notes and case studies, but he didn't say anything until the afternoon Jara tripped over some rolls of masking tape that Marta had left beside her desk. Helping him to his feet, Pablo was transfixed by those shoes made of rough, unyielding and shapeless leather, with lots of pleats at the toe, like the crimped edge of a pasty. He couldn't help asking:

“Why do you wear those shoes, Señor Jara?”

“Because I have flat feet,
arquitecto
,” the man replied.

They didn't look like orthopaedic shoes, though perhaps they were, but leaving aside the pleating and the bad-quality
leather, the laces were pulled tight and tied with a double knot, and they were badly polished. Jara had gone to the trouble of applying polish – you could see that – but then hadn't been sufficiently motivated to rub the cloth on the leather and bring out the shine. Even though Pablo is concentrating on shoe care as a way of evoking Jara while he lived, the shoes quickly become a snare, bringing him back again to that night they were worn for the last time. It was Pablo's job to lift Jara by the feet while Borla had him under the arms. And those shoes were the last thing Pablo saw before they let Nelson Jara fall, finally, into what would become his grave.

The sequence of images is interrupted only twice, on the two occasions Pablo has to change from one line to another. It's a short respite, because on the next train the sequence rewinds to the beginning. As he's remembering how his arms felt once they were relieved of that weight, and the muffled sound of Jara's body falling onto damp earth, the train doors open at Castro Barros and Pablo hurries to get out. He takes the stairs two at a time, anxious to breathe the night air; it's later than usual and he knows that Laura is waiting for him with some worry related to their daughter. Even though his arrival will not resolve the problem, at least it will allow Laura to unburden herself on him. But half an hour earlier he broke a Kabbalah: before leaving the office he didn't put his things away according to the usual ritual; he pats his pockets and confirms the absence of his pencil, notebook and tape measure. It's now all the more important not to neglect the other evening ritual – the last coffee of the day at the corner bar, an ordinary bar, a small and unlikely survivor given its proximity to the Las Violetas patisserie at the intersection of Rivadavia and Medrano, but which, in contrast to Las Violetas, Pablo Simó feels to be his
own because he doesn't have to share it with tourists and the customers who sometimes make their way here from other parts of Buenos Aires.

He picks a table by the window and stirs sugar into his coffee while attempting another strategy for arriving home without Jara, dead, on his brain – think of Marta instead. Best to focus on what works: that reddish-brown mole that Marta Horvat has on one leg, almost at the point where the curve elides into the knee joint. By the time the spoon has completed several circuits of the coffee cup, his strategy is beginning to work and everything in the world is falling away, apart from that mole and the leg to which it belongs and the woman to whom the leg belongs. He pays for his coffee and walks on home, fighting not to let the mole disappear; in this way Pablo manages to relegate what just happened in the office, the rucksack girl, Borla's lies and Jara's shoes to the status of minor irritations held in some unidentified place from which Marta's mole will not let them escape. He puts his key in the lock, opens the door, and on the other side of it finds Laura, sitting in the livingroom armchair, crying.

“I can't take her any more,” she says.

And Pablo knows that when his wife says “her” in that tone of voice, she means Francisca.

Her quivering voice is a sure sign that she has been shouting, a lot. Laura tells him that she dropped by the school today, unannounced, to pick their daughter up, but that Francisca wasn't there, nor had she been to any lessons that day, according to the secretary. Then she had gone looking for her and found her in a bar drinking beer with her friend Anita – of all her friends the one Laura likes least – and three guys.

“Three boys,” Pablo corrects her.

“Guys,” she says again. “One of them even had a beard.”

And she says nothing more, just cries and cries from then until dinner time. This isn't the first time Francisca has bunked off school, nor the first time she's drunk beer, nor even, Laura suspects, the first time she's gone out with boys significantly older than herself, but it is the first time her mother has been a witness to these events, and that image – of Francisca hugging her bare legs on the chair, laughing, drinking beer straight from the bottle, passing it to some man, letting another one stroke her knee – is something she cannot transmit to Pablo in any other words than these: I can't take her any more.