Free A Crack in the Wall by Claudia Piñeiro Page B

such as the building on Calle Ugarteche close to the junction with Juncal on the even-numbered side,which had once seemed to Pablo Simó like the sole survivor of another age, lost among buildings of an indeterminate period and with no history, and which now looked shabby, tired and old, either because nobody had the energy to preserve what it had once been, or because nobody had managed to obtain an exemption to the rule that forbade demolition for the purpose of building a high-rise on a plot with insufficient square footage.
    Pablo jots down, without much conviction, a few addresses in his notebook. He glances at the clock – there’s still half an hour before he can shut up shop and go home. Neither Borla nor Marta are likely to come by the office at this time of day. He takes a blank sheet of paper and with a few deft lines summons up his north-facing eleven-storey tower. If this building existed, even outside Buenos Aires, he would take Leonor there and show it to her. He draws the tower the same way as always, with the same bricks, the same windows, the same trees. But this time, when he has finished sketching this building that he knows by heart, Pablo Simó sits looking at it feeling that, although nothing is missing, the drawing is not complete. He presses the top of his pencil to get a little more lead. He looks at it, measures it, pushes it back in with his finger, then presses the pencil top again to release exactly the length of lead with which he likes to work; returning his attention to the drawing board and now with a certainty that surprises him, he draws, for the first time, a man standing beside the much-repeated outline, a freehand representation to show the human scale. Pablo takes a moment to study the relation between the man’s height and the building’s, to consider how much greater one is than the other, to imagine what this man might be feeling as he stands in front of a brick wall, and finally he asks the question that now seems so obvious: how couldhe have drawn his tower block so many times, without ever putting a person next to it?
    At six o’clock he puts the sketch away, gathers up his things in accordance with his daily ritual and leaves the office. A moment later he’ll be underground, changing twice to get to Castro Barros, where he’ll step out of the carriage, emerge once more at ground level and go into his usual bar to order the coffee he has every evening before going home. That’s all for today. But tomorrow morning, once there is enough natural light, he’s going to make good on his promise to Leonor and go out earlier than usual to walk the streets of Buenos Aires. He wants to hold himself to this and not just disappear into the underground, burying himself beneath a city he no longer looks at. Tomorrow he’ll walk or take a bus – there must be a bus that follows a direct route across the city from his house to his work instead of describing the peculiar horseshoe around which he travels every day beneath the earth – he will make a journey overland, allowing him to look up and take stock of all that each street has to offer. He will roam from one side of town to the other, like a treasure seeker but with no map or coordinates, with no references or clues, leaving chance to do its work, letting an invisible hand carry him through the city, guiding his determination to rediscover something that, until recently, he didn’t even realize he had lost.

8
    The first thing Pablo Simó notices on entering his home is Laura’s good mood. She’s in the sitting room, reading a magazine and drinking a glass of wine. Since when does Laura drink red wine at seven o’clock in the evening?
    â€œHello, love,” she says.
    It’s even stranger for his wife to call him “love”, Pablo thinks, than it is for her to be drinking wine.
    â€œHas something happened?” he asks.
    â€œNo, why?”
    â€œNo reason