Javier Cercas - The Speed of Light

And so I did. Although I was prepared to go back at any price, the truth is the return was less uncertain than I'dforeseen, because in May, just when I was about to start packing my bags, Marcelo Cuartero phoned from Barcelona to offer me a position as associate professor at the Autonomous University. The salary was meagre, but, supplemented by the income provided by occasional freelance jobs, was enough to rent a studio apartment in the neighbourhood of Sant Antoni and to survive without too many hardships while waiting for the novel to be published. That was how I eagerly began to regain my life in Barcelona; I also, naturally, regained Marcos Luna. By then Marcos was already living with Patricia, a photo grapher who worked for a fashion magazine, and was making a living doing illustrations for a newspaper, had begun to exhibit with certain regularity and was making a name for himself among the painters of his generation. In fact it was Marcos who, at the end of that year, after my novel had come out with a minor publisher and been greeted by a silence barely broken by one futile and rapturously complimentary review by one of Marcelo Cuartero students (or by Marcelo Cuartero himself under a pseudonym), got me an interview with a sub-editor at his paper, who in his turn invited me to write columns and reviews for the cultural supplement. So, somehow or other, with the help of Marcos and Marcelo Cuartero I began to make my way in Barcelona while getting down to work on my second novel. A long time before I managed to finish it, however, Paula came along, which ended up disrupting everything, including the novel. Paula was blonde, shy, willowy and bright, one of those disciplined and aloof thirty-somethings whose apparent haughtiness is a transparent mask over their urgent need for affection. She'd just separated from her first husband and was working for the cultural supplement of the paper; since I hardly ever went to the offices, I didn't meet her for quite a while, but when I finally did I understood that Rodney's father was right and that falling in love is letting yourself be defeated simultaneously by absurdity and by an illness that only time can cure. What I'm trying to say is that I fell so in love with Paula that, as soon as I met her, I had the certainty that those in love always have: that up till then I'd never been in love with anyone. The idyll was marvellous and exhausting, but most of all it was absurd and, since one absurdity leads to another, a few months later I moved in with Paula, then we got married and then we had a son, Gabriel. All these things happened in a very brief space of time (or in what seemed to me a very brief space of time), and before I knew it I was living in a little terraced house, with a garden and lots of sunshine, in a residential neighbourhood on the outskirts of Gerona, suddenly converted into the almost involuntary protagonist of an insipid vignette of provincial well-being that I couldn't have imagined even in my worst nightmares when I was an aspiring young writer steeped in dreams of triumph.

But, to my surprise, the decision to change cities and lifestyle turned out to be a good move. In theory we'd taken it because Gerona was a cheaper and quieter place than Barcelona, and one could get to the centre of the capital in an hour, but in practice and in time I discovered that the advantages didn't end there: since in Gerona Paula's salary from the paper was almost enough to meet all the family needs, I was soon able to give up working at the university and writing articles to devote myself entirely to writing my books; I have to add that in Gerona we could count on all kinds of help from relatives and friends with children, and that there were hardly any distractions, so our social life was non-existent. Aside from that, Paula went to Barcelona and back daily, while I took care of the house and Gabriel, which left me lots of free time for my work. The results of this framework of favourable circumstances were the happiest years of my life and four books: two novels, one collection of columns and another of essays. It's true that they all went as unnoticed as the first, but it's also true that I didn't experience that invisibility as a frustration, much less as failure. In the first place, by way of a defensive blend of humility, arrogance and cowardice, I wasn't annoyed that my books didn't receive any more attention than they did because I didn't think they deserved it and, at the same time, because I thought very few readers would be in a position to understand them, but also because I secretly feared that had they received more attention than they did, they would inevitably reveal their glaring poverty. And, in the second place, because by then I'd already understood that, if I was a writer, it was because I'd turned into a nutcase who was obliged to look at reality and sometimes see it, and, if I'd chosen that bitch of a job, perhaps it was only because I couldn't be anything other than a writer: because in a way it hadn't been me who had chosen my trade, it had been my trade that had chosen me.

Time went by. I began to forget Urbana. I couldn'tforget, however (or at least not entirely), my friends from Urbana, especially because occasionally, and with no effort on my part, I kept hearing news of them. The only one who was still there was John Borgheson, who I saw again several times, each time more venerable, more professorial and more British, on his occasional visits to Barcelona. Felipe Vieri had finished his studies in New York, got a job as a professor at NYU and since then lived in Greenwich Village, turned into what he'd always wanted to be: a New Yorker from head to toe. Laura Burns' life was more turbulent and more varied: she'd finished her doctorate at Urbana, married a Hawaiian computer engineer, divorced him and, after traipsing around several west coast universities, had ended up in Oklahoma City, where she'd remarried, this time to a businessman who had made her give up her work at the university and forced her to live back and forth between Oklahoma and Mexico City. As for Rodrigo Gines, he'd also finished his doctorate at Urbana and, after teaching at Purdue University for a couple of years, had returned to Chile, not to Santiago, but to Coyhaique, in the south of the country, where he'd married again and was teaching at the University of Los Lagos.

The only one I didn't know anything about for a long time was Rodney, and that was despite the fact that, every time I was in touch with anyone who had been in Urbana when I was there (or immediately before, or immediately after), I'd always ask about him eventually. But not knowing anything about Rodney didn't mean I'd forgotten him either. In fact, it would be easy to imagine now that I never stopped thinking about him in all those years; actually that's only partly true. It's true that every once in a while I wondered what had become of Rodney and his father, how long my friend had stayed away from home after his flight and how long it had been before he'd left again after his return. It's also true that on at least a couple of occasions I was attacked by a serious desire or urgency to tell his story and that, every time that happened, I dusted off the three black cardboard document cases with elastic straps that Rodney's father had given me and reread the letters they contained and the notes that I had taken as soon as I got back to Urbana of the tale he'd told me that afternoon in Rantoul, just as it's true that I did thorough research, reading everything I could get my hands on about the war in Vietnam, and that I took pages and pages of notes, drew up outlines, sketched out characters and planned scenes and dialogues, but the fact is there were always pieces left over that wouldn't fit, blind spots impossible to clear up (especially two: what had happened in My Khe, who was Tommy Birban), and maybe that's why each time I decided to start to write I soon gave up, bogged down in my inability to invest with meaning a story that deep down (or at least that's what I suspected at the time) perhaps lacked any. It was a strange feeling, as if, despite the fact that Rodney's father had made me in some way responsible for the story of his son's disaster, that story wasn't entirely mine to tell and I wasn't the one who had to tell it and therefore I lacked the courage, madness and desperation needed to tell it, or perhaps as if it was still an unfinished story, yet to arrive at the boiling point or level of maturity or coherence that makes a story no longer stubbornly resist being written. And it's also true that, just like in Urbana with my first frustrated novel, for a long time I could never sit down to write without feeling Rodney breathing down my neck, without wondering what he'd think of this sentence or that one, of this adjective or that one — as if Rodney's shadow was at once a ferocious judge and a guardian angel — and of course I was still unable to read Rodney's favourite authors — and I read a lot of them — without mentally arguing with my friend's tastes and opinions. All that is true, but it's just as true that, as time went by and the memory of Urbana began to dissolve in the distance like the feathery vapour trail of an airplane as it vanishes into a clear blue sky, the memory of Rodney dissolved with it too, so by the time my friend unexpectedly reappeared I was not only convinced I'd never write his story, but also that, unless some improbable chance came into play, I'd never see him again.