A Crack in the Wall by Claudia Piñeiro

practice was, his plastic bag, bulging with files, held on the floor between his legs as he swayed back and forth, the way he had a few days previously as he sat on the other side of Pablo’s desk. At the risk of being spotted, Pablo watched him for a time from the opposite corner to where Jara stood vainly waiting for him to arrive: he saw how the man kept checking his watch at minute intervals; how he once more rang the concierge’s bell and waited while nobody came to answer the door; how he chewed off the loose skin at the sides of his nails; how he put one hand to his face and rubbed his jaw worriedly. Without seeing it, Pablo could also guess at his furrowed brow, the pain at his waist from standing such a long time, the sweat, the raw skin around his fingernails, the anxiety. Pablo was tempted to cross over the road, stand in front of him and say:
    â€œDon’t waste any more time, Jara.” He would address him for the first time with the informal “you”.
    He felt as if he could speak like this to Jara, frankly, as you might speak to a friend, a schoolmate or someone you played football with on the weekends. An equal, that’s what he thought, with that word: equal. It was at that precisemoment that Jara was waiting for him at the door to the studio, while he spied on him from the other side of the road, that Pablo Simó felt himself and Nelson Jara both to be members of a particular species to which not everyone belonged; two men who had come from the same place and were heading for the same destination. That if every man had a label fixed to some part of his body defining what he will or will never be, he and Jara had the same tag. And this thought, far from troubling him, far from showing him something he didn’t want to see, relieved him; it made him feel that he wasn’t alone. He had never thought of himself as the equal of Borla or Marta, even though they were colleagues and had all shared an office for twenty years. He wasn’t Laura’s equal, either: he always had the impression that his wife brought more energy, willingness and effort to the conjugal partnership than he did, and that difference in contribution – it was only fair to recognize it – tipped the scales in her favour. And yet he did, oddly, feel the equal of that man who, rising from the ugliest pair of shoes Pablo had ever seen, rocked back and forth, as though cradling himself, that man who held a bulging plastic bag between his legs, waiting for something that would never arrive, while he spied, like a coward, from the opposite corner. In that place and at that moment, Pablo knew that Jara and he were, in some sense that he couldn’t define, the same thing.
    And yet, despite that epiphany – or because of it – having seen clearly where each of them belonged, Pablo Simó looked at Nelson Jara once more, as if by way of a farewell; then he turned and went, quickly, almost at a run, with no destination in mind. For a long time he wandered in circles around the city, and once he was sure nobody was following him, he found an excuse to stop off at an estateagency run by people known to him and decided to spend the rest of the afternoon there. It was there, in fact, that Pablo wrote his second note:
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  Dear Señor Jara, the matter of which you informed us is close to resolution and in a day or two you will have news from us. Please be assured that we will be in touch soon,
    Pablo Simó                                 
    Borla and Associates Architects
    After that he spoke to Marta for confirmation that in less than forty-eight hours cement would be filling the foundations of the building, and only then did he call a courier and hand over the note for delivery to Jara. At that point he knew with the certainty of someone waiting for thunder after a lightning bolt