A Crack in the Wall Read Free Page A

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 hisown 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.
    â€œI 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.
    â€œThree boys,” Pablo corrects her.
    â€œGuys,” 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