The Extra Step

The building at Humberto Primo 1640 had one quality I could not name the first time I stood outside it, though I would spend many months trying. It sat on its block in San Telmo the way a tooth sits in a diseased jaw — technically present, technically upright, but wrong in some manner that had nothing to do with whether it was standing or not. I signed the lease that afternoon. You understand, I had no choice. I had three hundred thousand pesos a month and a suitcase and a cat named Bicho who hated travel, and this was what three hundred thousand pesos would buy in Buenos Aires in that year of our Lord: two rooms, a bathroom with a window that opened onto an airshaft, and a kitchen whose counter tilted two degrees toward the wall so that an egg, if you set one down, would roll slowly and inevitably into the gap between the counter and the stove.

The rental agent was a man named Funes who smelled of cigarettes and Paco Rabanne and who kept checking his phone while he showed me the apartment on the fourth floor. He did not comment on the stairwell. Neither did I, not then. I was tired and the light was bad and I told myself that the reason I had counted seventeen steps between the third floor and the fourth was simply that I had miscounted, because the stairwell between the second floor and the third had only sixteen, and between the first and the second, sixteen, and between the ground floor and the first, sixteen, and buildings do not add stairs between floors the way a person adds a word to a sentence — casually, without structural consequence.

But the fourth floor had seventeen steps. I counted again the next morning with Bicho pressed against my chest, his claws hooked into my sweater, and the number had not changed.

San Telmo is old. It is the kind of old that Buenos Aires wears like a scar it is secretly proud of — crumbling Italianate facades, cobblestones that will break your ankle if you aren’t watching, antique shops selling other people’s grief at weekend prices. The tourists come for the tango and the feria on Sundays. They do not come to the blocks south of Avenida San Juan, where the buildings lean into each other like drunks and the plaster falls in chunks that the super sweeps into the gutter every morning, and every morning there is more.

I had moved from Rosario after the separation. My ex-husband Tomás kept the apartment on Bulevar Oroño because his name was on the deed, and I kept the cat because Tomás was allergic and had been lying about it for seven years. There is a particular freedom in discovering that your husband has been taking antihistamines in secret for the duration of your marriage — not because the lie itself is so terrible but because it reveals the architecture of all the other lies, the way pulling one wire from a wall shows you where the others run.

I was thirty-four. I had a part-time position cataloging damaged books at the Biblioteca Nacional, a job that paid almost enough and required me to spend my days with things that were broken in ways I could precisely describe. Water damage. Foxing. Spine separation. I found it calming. You hold the book and you say what is wrong with it, and the wrongness has a name, and the name has a treatment. This was not a skill that had transferred to my marriage.

Doña Carmen on the second floor had lived in the building for thirty-one years. She was seventy or possibly eighty — the kind of old where the number stops mattering because the fact of survival has replaced it. She kept her door open during the day and her television on at all hours, the volume high enough that the news anchors’ voices echoed in the stairwell like the building’s own nervous commentary on the state of things. She was the first person to speak to me.

“The fourth floor,” she said, when I told her where I lived. She said it the way you would say “the dentist” or “the tax office” — not with fear, exactly, but with a resignation that implied she had expected this, that people ended up on the fourth floor the way they ended up in debt, through a combination of bad luck and insufficient vigilance.

“Is there something wrong with the fourth floor?” I asked.

“It’s the fourth floor,” she said, as if this were an answer, and went back to her television.

The family on the third floor was a woman named Graciela and her two daughters, who were perhaps eight and ten and who ran up and down the stairs with the furious energy of children raised in small apartments. They skipped the seventeenth step. I noticed this the second week. They would pound up the stairs — fifteen, sixteen — and then their feet would land on the fourth-floor hallway as though the seventeenth step simply were not there, as though their bodies had long ago learned a geometry that mine had not. I watched them do it over and over. I counted their steps from the landing below. Fifteen, sixteen, hallway. But when I climbed those same stairs, my foot always found the seventeenth step — that extra riser, slightly taller than the others, its edge worn smooth and dark where the tile had cracked and no one had replaced it.

I mentioned it to Graciela once. The extra step.

She looked at me with the particular patience that porteños reserve for people who have not yet learned how things work here. “Buildings settle,” she said. “Everything settles.” And she pulled her youngest daughter inside and closed the door, and I stood in the hallway and felt the floor tilt beneath me — a degree, maybe less — and I stayed there for a long time, listening to the building settle around me, if that is what it was doing.

The hallway on the fourth floor was L-shaped. It turned a corner approximately halfway between the stairwell and my apartment, which was the last door on the left. The corner should have been ninety degrees. I do not know what it was instead. It was not ninety degrees. When I stood at the bend and looked in both directions, both halves of the hallway appeared to be the same length, but when I walked from the stairwell to my door, the second half — the half after the bend — took longer than the first. Not dramatically. Not in a way I could time with a stopwatch. But my body knew. My legs knew. There were more steps after the bend than before it, the way there were more steps between the third and fourth floors than between any other pair of floors, and the building simply contained this wrongness the way a body contains a tumor — quietly, structurally, as part of its ongoing business of being a building.

I brought a tape measure from the ferretería on Defensa one Saturday. The first half of the hallway measured six meters and forty centimeters. The second half measured six meters and forty centimeters. The numbers matched. The experience did not.

I told myself it was the light. The single fluorescent tube above the bend had a flicker to it, a hesitation in its cycle, and fluorescent light does things to depth perception — I had read this somewhere, or I believed I had. I told myself it was the tilt of the floor, which was real, which I could verify with a marble from the kiosco on the corner. I told myself it was the acoustics, the way my footsteps sounded different after the bend, flatter, as though the walls had moved closer while I wasn’t looking.

I told myself many things. The building did not tell me anything. It simply was what it was, and what it was did not conform to the geometry I had been taught, and this was a fact I carried the way Doña Carmen carried her thirty-one years in that place — not with understanding, but with a kind of practiced endurance that looks, from the outside, like acceptance.

The sixth week, the cat stopped sleeping. Bicho had always been a committed sleeper — eighteen hours a day, curled in whatever square of sunlight the window provided, boneless and profoundly indifferent to my existence except at mealtimes. But in the sixth week he began pacing. He walked the perimeter of the apartment in a slow, deliberate circuit — living room, bedroom, kitchen, bathroom, living room — and at the point in the circuit where he crossed the threshold between the bedroom and the living room, he paused. Every circuit. The same pause, the same spot. He would stop, one paw raised, and stare at a point on the wall approximately one meter above the baseboard, and his ears would flatten, and then he would continue.

I inspected the wall. There was nothing on it. There was nothing behind it — the apartment next door was empty. Had been empty since before I moved in. The building had five units on the fourth floor and only two were occupied: mine and the one nearest the stairwell, which belonged to a man I had seen exactly once, from behind, as he disappeared through his door. He was tall and thin and moved with the careful slowness of someone navigating a space he did not trust, and I never learned his name.

I pressed my ear against the wall where Bicho paused. I heard nothing and then I heard the building — not its plumbing or its wiring or the distant thump of Doña Carmen’s television but the building itself, the sound a structure makes when it is bearing weight, a low, continuous, almost subterranean frequency that I felt more in my teeth than in my ears. Every building makes this sound. I knew that. But this sound had a rhythm to it, slow and regular, like breathing, and I pulled my ear away and stood in the middle of my living room and understood for the first time that I was afraid.

I tried to tell myself that fear in a building like this was rational, even expected. In Constitución, three blocks from here, a building had collapsed the previous year — just folded into itself one morning like a paper bag, killing four people. The city was full of buildings like that, buildings where the landlords collected rent and the municipality collected taxes and no one collected the garbage from the courtyard or the water that pooled in the basement or the cracks that widened in the foundation a centimeter at a time. You could live your whole life in Buenos Aires and never enter a building that was not, in some technical sense, in the process of failing.

But those buildings were falling apart. They were obeying gravity and entropy and the patient chemistry of water on concrete. Humberto Primo 1640 was not falling apart. It was holding together. Its walls were solid and its stairs were solid and its floors, despite the tilt, were solid, and the wrongness was not a failure of the building’s structure but a quality of its structure, and I could only live inside it and count the steps and hope that the counting kept me sane.

At the Biblioteca Nacional I worked beside a woman named Lucía who had been cataloging damaged books for eleven years. She told me once there was a difference between a book that had been damaged and a book that was damaging itself. She was holding a nineteenth-century atlas whose binding had begun to separate along the inner margin of the pages, as though the book were trying to open wider than its structure permitted. “Some damage is structural,” she said. “The book was made wrong.”

On the colectivo home I watched the city slide past the window — the graffiti, the jacarandas, the kioscos with their plastic chairs and old men drinking cortados in the late light — and I thought about what Lucía had said, and I climbed the stairs to the fourth floor — fifteen, sixteen, seventeen — and I walked the hallway, counting my steps, feeling the second half stretch around me like a held breath.

In the seventh week, I began to notice the doors.

There were five apartments on the fourth floor — 4A through 4E. Mine was 4E, at the far end of the hallway, past the bend. 4A was the tall man’s unit, nearest the stairwell. 4B, 4C, and 4D were between us, all vacant, all with their doors closed. The doors were wooden, painted the same institutional green as the stairwell walls, each with a brass number screwed into its face at eye level. 4A, 4B, 4C, 4D, 4E. Five doors. I had counted them the day I moved in and I counted them every day since because I was, by then, a person who counted things.

On a Wednesday — I am certain it was a Wednesday because it was my day off and I had been to the feria at Plaza Dorrego and bought a jar of dulce de membrillo that I was carrying in a plastic bag — I walked down the hallway from the stairwell to my apartment and I counted six doors.

I stood at the door marked 4E and looked back the way I had come. The hallway stretched behind me, past the bend, and I could see — or I believed I could see — that between 4C and 4D there was another door. It was the same green. It had no number. It was set slightly deeper into the wall than the other doors, recessed by perhaps five centimeters, so that the frame cast a thin shadow across its surface even in the flat fluorescent light. I stared at it from the end of the hallway. I did not walk back to examine it. I went into my apartment and I set the dulce de membrillo on the counter where it rolled, slowly, toward the wall, and I sat on the edge of my bed and I listened to Bicho make his circuits and I did not go back into the hallway until the next morning.

In the morning there were five doors. I counted twice. 4A, 4B, 4C, 4D, 4E. No unnumbered door. No extra recession in the wall. Five doors, the way there had always been five doors, and I walked to work and said nothing to anyone and cataloged three water-damaged volumes of the Enciclopedia Argentina and ate my lunch alone in the courtyard where the pigeons gathered and tried not to think about what the building did when I was not inside it to observe.

In the eighth week, I lost the hallway.

I mean that I walked from my apartment to the stairwell in the morning, the way I did every morning, and the distance was different. Not longer and not shorter. Different. The hallway bend was still there, the fluorescent light still flickered, the floor still tilted its two degrees toward the wall. But the space between my door and the bend had changed in some way that I could not describe except to say that I was no longer certain, as I walked it, that I was walking through the same hallway I had walked through the day before. It looked the same. The stain on the wall near apartment 4C was there. The crack in the tile at the bend was there. The seventeenth step was there. Everything was there and nothing was right, and I descended the stairs gripping the railing and counting each step aloud — sixteen, sixteen, sixteen, sixteen — because the numbers were the only thing that held.

I thought about calling my mother in Rosario. I thought about calling Tomás, which tells you something about how frightened I was. Instead I called the administración of the building, a number posted on a laminated card in the lobby that I had never dialed. The phone rang fourteen times and then a woman answered and said, “Humberto Primo,” in a tone that suggested she had been expecting my call for some time and was not particularly interested in having it.

I told her about the step. I told her about the hallway. I tried to explain about the angles, the distances, the feeling that the building’s geometry was not what it should be.

She was quiet for a moment. Then she said, “Which floor?”

“The fourth.”

Another silence. “We’ll send someone,” she said, and hung up.

No one came.

Doña Carmen died on a Tuesday in my tenth week. She died in her apartment with the television on and the door open, and Graciela found her in the morning when the absence of the news anchors’ voices in the stairwell told her something had changed in the building’s ambient sound. The ambulance took forty minutes. The police came and went. A nephew appeared that weekend with a van and carried out her furniture piece by piece — the television, the table, the chair where she had sat for thirty-one years wearing a groove into the upholstery that preserved the shape of her body like a mold.

After the nephew left, after the apartment was empty, I stood on the second-floor landing and counted the steps between the second and third floors. I counted them twice. I counted them a third time with my eyes closed, trusting my feet.

Seventeen.

I went downstairs. I counted between the first floor and the second. Seventeen. I went down again. Ground floor to first. Seventeen.

I stood in the lobby and looked up the stairwell, which rose above me in its tight rectangular spiral, and I understood — the way you understand gravity, the way you understand that you are standing on a planet that is moving through space at a speed you will never feel — that the building had not changed. The building had always been this way. I was simply, finally, counting correctly.

Graciela moved out the following week. She did not give notice. She carried her daughters down the stairs at six in the morning and I watched from the fourth-floor landing as they descended, the girls’ feet hitting each step — all seventeen of them, between every floor — with the resigned precision of children who have learned to navigate a space that does not want them there. Graciela looked up once, at the bend between the third and second floors, and saw me watching. She did not wave. She held my gaze for a moment that lasted longer than the architecture of the stairwell should have permitted, and then she turned the corner and I heard the lobby door open and close and they were gone.

The building was quiet after that. The television was gone. The children were gone. The tall man at the end of the hallway had not appeared in weeks, and when I pressed my ear to his door I heard nothing — not silence, which has its own texture, but an absence of sound so complete that it suggested the apartment behind the door was not merely empty but no longer present, the way a tooth socket is not merely empty but is evidence of something that has been removed.

Bicho stopped eating. He made his circuits — living room, bedroom, kitchen, bathroom — but the pauses at the wall grew longer, and in the pauses he made a sound I had never heard from him before, a low, sustained note that was not a growl and not a purr but something between the two, a vibration that matched the frequency I had felt through the wall, the building’s own breathing echoing in the chest of a five-kilogram cat.

I am writing this from the apartment. I have not left. I have not left because I signed a lease and because the rent is three hundred thousand pesos and because there is nowhere else in this city that three hundred thousand pesos will buy me two rooms and a bathroom and a kitchen where the counter tilts toward the wall. I have not left because leaving would mean admitting that the building is what I think it is, and I do not have a word for what I think it is, and I am a person who needs words — who catalogs damage, who names what is broken so that the brokenness can be contained.

The hallway is longer now. I cannot prove this. The tape measure still reads six meters forty, six meters forty. But it takes me longer to walk it. It takes Bicho longer to cross the living room. The rooms are the same size and also they are not, and I have stopped trying to reconcile the measurements with the experience because the measurements are wrong, or the experience is wrong, or the building exists in a condition that does not require measurements and experience to agree.

Doña Carmen lived here for thirty-one years. I think about this. I think about what thirty-one years in a building like this does to a person — not to their body, which ages on its own schedule regardless of architecture, but to their understanding of what a building is, what space is, what it means to live inside a structure that is slightly, persistently, undetectably more than it should be.

I think she stopped noticing. I think that is what happens. You live inside the wrongness long enough and the wrongness becomes your geometry. The seventeen steps become sixteen because your body refuses to acknowledge the one that should not be there. The hallway bends at an angle that is not ninety degrees and you walk it every day and your legs adjust and your eyes adjust and eventually the wrongness is just the way things are, the way poverty is just the way things are, the way a building that should have been condemned fifteen years ago is just the way things are, because no one is coming to fix it and no one is coming to measure it and no one is coming to tell you that the place where you live does not conform to the rules that govern the places where other people live.

I count the steps every morning. Seventeen, seventeen, seventeen, seventeen. I count them because counting is the only thing that separates me from Doña Carmen, who stopped counting, who lived here for thirty-one years and died with the television on and the door open in a building that had, by then, become the only geometry she knew.

Bicho is sitting on the windowsill. He is looking at the airshaft. There is nothing in the airshaft. There has never been anything in the airshaft. But the airshaft goes down farther than a five-story building should require, and I have never dropped anything into it because I am afraid of how long it would take to hear it land.

It is Tuesday. The rent is due on Friday. I will pay it. I will continue to live here. The building will continue to be what it is. And every morning I will walk the hallway and climb the stairs and count each step aloud, because the day I stop counting is the day I find out how many steps there really are.