Free A Crack in the Wall by Claudia Piñeiro Page A

sensation, a tension that nowadays he never feels so fervidly, not even in bed. Well, sometimes when he thinks of Marta. Many of the buildings he liked in those days are no longer standing, such as the “paradox”on Calle Maure at Calle Migueletes, where there used to be a house with Le Corbusier pretensions next to a house with Tudor pretensions. At the time Pablo didn’t realize how earnest those pretensions were. Tano Barletta, a fellow student throughout his time at the faculty, dubbed them “Chalk and Cheese”. And they had argued, Pablo saying that these houses had more value precisely because they were next to each other: the contrast forced you to look at them. He spoke to Tano Barletta about “contextualization” – a concept they had just been studying in the faculty and which was surely wrongly applied in this case – and Tano had said again:
    â€œGive them all the contextualization and whatnot you like – they’re still chalk and cheese, Pablo.”
    They used to spend hours walking and arguing: about chalk and cheese, about the city’s growth, the new buildings, the old ones. They thought about Buenos Aires with their eyes. They considered whether the eighteenth-century sanitary works building on Avenida Córdoba was enhanced or otherwise by its situation opposite a school with a mirrored façade. They wondered why the Palacio de Tribunales, housing the Supreme Court at the junction of Talcahuano and Tucumán, looked as though it were going to fall down and flatten you. They made a detailed and conscientious analysis of the postgraduate lecturer in Design II, debating whether or not she had the best tits in national architecture. Why didn’t they see each other any more? Had one of their arguments gone too far? Something about architecture? Pablo doesn’t think so, but he can’t remember any more. Try as he might, he cannot recall why he and Tano Barletta stopped seeing each other. It was probably simply that: that they didn’t see each other for a while, then began gradually to lose each other, until even their mental pictures ofeach other were erased. Why did he let the best friend he ever had get rubbed out? Tano Barletta was very funny; he made him laugh a lot. Together Pablo and he were also chalk and cheese. Perhaps that was the reason for their distancing: they were too different and what had started as a joke between them became a wall that neither, in the end, had enough energy to take a run-up to and jump over. But hadn’t he, Pablo Simó, been the one who defended “contextualization”? Didn’t Pablo Simó have more value with Tano Barletta at his side, and vice versa? Or perhaps the problem had been that Laura didn’t like his friend. Or that after Francisca was born Pablo hardly had any free time any more and that friendships needed free time to sustain them. Which of his old friendships are still standing? None. The Le Corbusier house and the Tudor house aren’t standing either: they got steamrollered, merged together the way copper and tin were combined in the Bronze Age. Is it better to have bronze than copper and tin separately? Is this the marker of some historic advance? Surely it is, though Pablo can’t say either way. All he knows is that those two houses were flattened so that the plots could be merged and a twenty-storey apartment block built in their place, with a marble entrance hall, armchairs in some fashionable style and twenty-four-hour security.
    He lets Tano Barletta fade away again and returns to Leonor and the buildings he owes her. Not to be distracted from the task, he doesn’t let himself dwell on the invitation to accompany her on Saturday. He wracks his brain, trying to remember which were his favourite buildings all those years ago, but of the ones that come to mind he suspects that quite a few will have aged badly. That’s definitely the case with some of them,