A Crack in the Wall (6 page)

Jara moved his index finger quickly up and down in the air, as if to say, “I get the joke,” and began riffling through his own disordered papers, then pulled out a photo album which he laid out on top of everything, open on the first page, and said:

“Here you have all the evidence you need,
arquitecto
. I doubt you'll need much more if you are a specialist in excavations and demolition, as your colleague Borla claims. Colleague or boss?” he asked, as he swivelled the album round and nudged it forwards so that the photograph was facing Pablo.

Pablo didn't answer the question, nor did he immediately take up the album. He was distracted by the reference to Borla and wondered if his boss had in fact described him in those words, as a “specialist in excavations and demolition”. If so, he wondered whether the phrase had been without any particular significance, used simply to satisfy a man who demanded attention, or whether it concealed an ironic reference that lay beyond Pablo's understanding. Can someone be an
expert
in excavations and demolitions?
Jara nudged the open album further forwards, landing it in Pablo's line of sight, so that he could now see a series of three photographs showing the same wall traversed by a crack. The wall didn't change in any of the photographs, but the crack did; it was advancing at a rate Pablo estimated at about two inches between one photo and the next. Now he gave the album his full attention, studied the photos and made as if to turn the page:

“May I?”

“Please, feel free,
arquitecto,
” Jara answered.

Pablo turned the page to find more pictures of the same wall, the same crack, except in each successive photo the fissure was longer. He could see that this was something significant but, as in a game of brinkmanship, Pablo closed the album, put it to one side and said.

“Anything else?”

Jara, perhaps trying to conceal his disappointment, fixed him for a moment with his salesman's smile and, as though preparing to show him a model even better than the last, made with Indian natural silk and hand-finished, he put the album back into the bag. Then, in what struck Pablo as a deliberate attempt to generate suspense, he slowly opened another of the files where, on an
x
-and-
y
-axis graph, a curve had been plotted to represent the growing crack Pablo had just seen photographed. The
x
stood for the inches covered by the crack's progress across the wall and the
y
for the time that had elapsed from the moment it first appeared until that day, the very day on which they were meeting for the first time.

“You went to the trouble of measuring it this morning, Señor Jara?” Pablo asked him.

“I measure it every day,
arquitecto
, twice: first at breakfast time and then at night, before I go to bed.”

Pablo lifted a hand to touch the measuring tapes in the breast pocket of his jacket and imagined this man – perhaps with a tape similar to his own, perhaps with a yellow oilcloth one like dressmakers use, the kind that get hopelessly stretched from measuring so many hips and sleeve lengths, or perhaps with the same plastic ruler Pablo guessed Jara used to plot his
x
and
y
lines – up on a chair, measuring the extent of the crack as it made its way along the wall of his home.

“Do you need me to show you anything else, or is that enough?” Jara asked.

And even though the image of that old fellow wobbling on a chair made him feel a little for Jara, Pablo didn't forget the objective of this meeting that had obliged him to sit opposite this man, and asked:

“What's the width?”

“The width?” Jara repeated.

“Yes, the width,” Pablo said again, with the confidence that comes from knowing you have made a good play: “Señor Jara, you know that this practice will pay to have your wall replastered, but from what my colleague Señor Borla tells me, you aren't satisfied with that, correct?”

“Absolutely correct, it doesn't satisfy me at all. That crack threatens the structure of my house and it appeared the day after you began digging under the adjacent plot of land. Do you know something? It is through that space that the sun enters my house every morning.”

“I cannot give you back the sun, Señor Jara; you are lucky to have had it for so many years without anyone building next to you.”

“I'm here about the crack, not the sun,” the man clarified.

For the first time in their meeting, Jara lost his smile; he seemed to be focussing hard, thinking carefully about
his next move. Pablo saw this and made a pre-emptive strike.

“The length of the crack is less important than the width. Perhaps you didn't know that? The crack you've shown me in these photographs is certainly long, but it implies no threat whatsoever to the structure of your house – do you understand?” Pablo waited for a reply, but rather than give one, Jara began once again to rock back and forth. So he continued: “Listen, Señor Borla will be happy to plaster over the crack, whether or not he is responsible, as long as our contractors' work schedules allow it. Please be assured on that count.”

But Nelson Jara, far from seeming assured, had begun to sweat. A fat drop was rolling down his forehead.

“No, no, you don't understand me,
arquitecto
. A nice bit of replastering isn't going to do the trick. I know this city's building regulations and under article…” he paused to put on his glasses before reading from a paper highlighted in yellow that he had taken out of another file and now held in front of his eyes, closer than seemed necessary, as if the lenses' magnification factor were not enough. “In Article 5.2.2.6 it states that ‘the excavations shall be done in such a way as to ensure the stability of retaining walls and vertical cuts etc. etc., unless a soil survey indicates that underpinning is not necessary.'” When he had finished reading, he pushed his glasses up onto his forehead and looked Pablo straight in the eye, in a way that seemed calculated to intimidate. “However, in the land survey your company presented to the municipality, engineer…” He paused, trying for a moment to bring to mind the elusive name, then, not finding it, was obliged to put on his glasses again to read a fuzzy photocopy that he took out of an envelope bearing the words “Various Documents”. “Zanotti, engineer Luis
Zanotti… did not say at any point that underpinning was not necessary and you – I've got all this photocopied – you went ahead with the work, without underpinning and with longer transverse cuts than are permitted.”

“Forgive me, Señor Jara,” Pablo interrupted, “but what has all this got to do with your crack?”

“Because
my crack
– as you call it, and quite rightly, because it is mine, in my apartment where I sit down to eat opposite it at lunch and dinner every day, where I measure it, take photographs of it, even talk to it – can you believe I sometimes even
speak
to that wall,
arquitecto
?” He waited for a reply but, since Pablo gave none, continued. “My crack, as I was saying, appeared while your people were digging without underpinning. You caused it; the work you were doing caused it. That's all there is to it.”

“I wouldn't be so categorical. There are all manner of technical details to take into account,” Pablo began, but this time Jara was the one to interrupt.

“The lack of underpinning caused structural collapse, which then set off a series of movements, causing the ground to shift underneath my building,” he said. His choice of words and intonation made Jara sound as though he were reciting a report he had made an effort to learn and commit to memory.

“You sound more expert on the subject than I am,” Pablo said dryly.

“The circumstances have obliged me to become an expert, and those same circumstances oblige you to offer me something more than the miserable offer of a plastering job. You're going to have to think of something else,
arquitecto
.”

With this Jara took off his glasses again, reassumed the smile of a tie salesman and waited. Neither of them moved, each holding the other's gaze while saying nothing – Jara
because he was waiting for Simó's proposal, Pablo because he still couldn't think what to say. Then, for want of a better alternative, Pablo Simó said:

“Give me a moment, Señor Jara. I'm just going to the bathroom.”

Standing in front of the urinal, watching his piss fall onto the little balls of naphthalene dancing against the white porcelain, Pablo Simó considered his options. It was obvious that this man, owner of the ugliest pair of shoes Pablo had ever seen, had a stronger case than any other aggrieved neighbours he had had to deal with on past jobs. It was also obvious that Jara wouldn't easily be placated, that he was brandishing all this legal terminology with the clear intention of applying pressure – there were other words that Pablo didn't yet dare to think of, “extortion”, for example – and obtaining a favourable response to his claim. What he could not yet understand was
what
exactly Nelson Jara wanted. Pablo had already offered to have the wall mended, he could even offer to get it done as soon as possible, but Jara had said nothing about a time frame. “You're going to have to think of something else,” was what he had said, and Pablo Simó was particularly struck by those words “something else”. He pulled up his zip and went over to the basins. As he washed his hands, he felt displeased by his reflection in the mirror: not by the bags under his eyes – they had been with him for years – nor by the hair, which at this point in the month was too long to be neatly combed and not yet long enough to merit a haircut; it was probably the teeth, which, although Pablo brushed them meticulously, were beginning to look yellowish along their upper edges. He thought grimly that he would have to live with discoloured teeth until the time came to swap them for false ones. He wasn't really sure which feature
was most to blame; he just knew that he didn't like what he saw. His hands still wet, he dug his fingers like claws into the quiff that flopped over his face and combed it back off his forehead. The reflection barely changed. With the tip of his index finger he tried to rub his front teeth and incisors, also without improvement. He closed his mouth and thought of speaking to the image looking out of the mirror, except that no words came to mind. The light flickered; suspecting that the bulb was loose, Pablo stretched up onto the balls of his feet to adjust it. An image came to mind of Jara in his flat, balancing on tiptoe like him, up on a chair measuring the crack in his wall. The bulb was hot: it burned his fingertips and he swore aloud. He turned on the tap again, putting his fingers in the stream of cold water. There was knocking at the door and Jara, who must have heard him shout, called from outside.

“Everything all right,
arquitecto
?”

“Yes, yes, I'll be out in a minute,” he answered.

“Can I help you with anything?”

“No, thank you,” Pablo said.

“You definitely don't need anything?” the man insisted.

“No,” Pablo said emphatically, hoping to deter any more questions.

Before closing the tap, he washed his face, rubbing it hard, as he did first thing in the mornings when he was trying to wake up and get Marta out of his head before Laura read her presence in his face. “How does this guy plan to help someone swearing in a lavatory?” he thought.

“Shall we carry on,
arquitecto
?”

Pablo looked up and saw the reflection of Nelson Jara, who was peeping through a gap in the door now, chin resting on the latch, smiling at him.

“I'll just dry my face, then I'm with you,” Pablo said, and though he would have liked to add “You could at least let me have a piss on my own,” he settled for glaring at the image of the man reflected in the mirror until Jara, whether or not in reaction to Pablo's irritation, closed the door again.

His face was wet and he couldn't bring himself to dry it with the hand-towels Borla always bought, which were as hard as sandpaper – “At least you get a free facelift,” he had quipped to Marta once when she complained about it, and she didn't find the joke at all funny. He wondered if the man waiting for him with piles of documents about his cracked wall woke up alone every morning, or if he lived with someone; was there a Señora Jara, or was he a widower? Did he have children, grandchildren even? And although he didn't know the answer he felt sure that, even if he did share his life with someone, for Nelson Jara there was nothing more important in the world than the crack that was gradually opening up his wall and which Pablo had been ordered by Borla to ignore.

Some minutes later, Pablo Simó came out of the lavatory and sat down again at his desk. Jara hardly let him settle into his chair before asking:

“Is an inch enough,
arquitecto
?”

Pablo didn't understand.

“An inch and one-eighth, to be precise,” Jara went on. “You asked a moment ago how wide the crack was and I couldn't say. I confess you got me there,
arquitecto
, but now I do know; while you were in the lavatory I took the liberty of calling my building's caretaker, and he went and measured it. Will an inch and one-eighth do?” he repeated, and sat waiting for Pablo's reply with his rictus smile.

“It will do, it will do,” Pablo answered, increasingly persuaded that this man would have made an excellent tie salesman.

“Shall we proceed, then, or would you prefer to take some time to evaluate the situation more fully?”

Pablo, who had hoped to dispatch this problem in one day and was quite sure that he couldn't stand to have a second meeting with this specimen, said:

“Look, Señor Jara, as I said earlier, Borla and Associates do not believe that the crack that has appeared in your apartment necessarily has any connection to our work.”

“And I say that it has, that your practice is responsible,” Jara quickly interjected, but Pablo didn't let himself be cowed by this fighting talk or, if he did, he didn't let it show. Instead he said: