Javier Cercas - The Speed of Light

'Sure,' I said, agreeing with the non-fiction writer's comment, despite having read Marcelo's book and having thought it brilliant. 'But the worst thing about Cuartero isn't that he's boring, or even that he thinks we should admire him for demonstrating he's read stuff no one wants to read. The worst thing is he's gaga, for fuck's sake.' I haven't forgotten what happened in those months with Marcos Luna either. If it's true that no one is entirely saddened by a friend's misfortune, then it's also true that no one is entirely delighted by a friend's happiness; it's possible, however, that in those days no one was closer to being entirely delighted by my happiness than Marcos Luna. Furthermore, it came at a particularly rough time for him. In September, just as my book began its climb towards fame, Marcos had surgery for a detached retina;the operation didn't go well, and two weeks later they had to do it again. He had a prolonged convalescence: Marcos spent over two months in hospital altogether, laid up with the depressing certainty that he would be half blind when he finally got out of there. But this time he was lucky, and by the time he went home he had almost entirely recovered his sight in the affected eye. During the time he spent in hospital I spoke to him several times by phone, when he called me from his bed to congratulate me each time he heard someone talking about my book or heard me talking on the radio, or each time that someone told him of my triumphs; but, trapped as I was by the proliferating obligations of success, I never found time to visit him, and when I did see him again fleetingly, in a terrace bar in Eixample, just before some publicity dinner, I almost didn't recognize him: old and shrunken, his hair thinning and almost entirely grey, he looked the very image of defeat. We didn't see each other again for a long time, but in the meantime we got into the habit (or I got into it, or imposed it) of talking almost every week by phone. We usually spoke on Saturday nights, when I'd already been drinking for many hours and, using the alibi of our old friendship, I'd call him and unburden myself of all the anguish caused by the sudden change my life had undergone, and while I was at it I flattered my pride by showing myself that success hadn't changed me and I was still friends with my old friends; I know there is a kind of inverse vanity in someone who torments himself with blame for disgraces he hasn't committed, and I don't want to make that mistake, but I can't help suspecting that those late-night alcoholic confidences functioned between Marcos and me as a periodic and subliminal reminder of my victories, and maybe they were another way of inflicting on my friend, beneath the deceitful disguise of my complaints against my privileged situation, the humiliation of my triumphs at a moment when, with his health in a bad way and his career as a painter stagnating, he was reasonably feeling the same we'd both unreasonably felt many years before when we'd shared an apartment on calle Pujol: that his life was going to hell. Maybe that explains why on one of those Saturday nights, impassioned by the hypocritical arrogance of virtue, I remembered the conversation I'd had with Rodney in Madrid.

'Success doesn't turn you into a cretin or a son of a bitch,' I said to Marcos at some point. 'But it can release the inner son of a bitch or cretin.' And then I added: 'Who knows: if it had been you, and not me, who'd been successful, maybe we wouldn't be talking right now.'

Marcos didn't hang up on me at that moment, but he did the next day, when I called him to apologize for my pettiness: he didn't accept my apology, he reminded me of my words, reproached me for them, called me a son of a bitch and a cretin, told me not to phone him again and slammed the phone down. Two days later, however, I received an email message from him asking for my forgiveness. 'If I can't even hang onto a thirty-year-old friendship, then I really am finished,' he grumbled. Marcos and I were reconciled, but a few weeks later came an episode that sums up better than any other the dimensions of my disloyalty to him. I won't go into many details, after all, the facts themselves (not what they reveal) are perhaps unimportant. It was after the launch of a book by a Mexican photographer for which I'd written the prologue. The event was some place in Barcelona (maybe it was the MACBA, maybe the Palau Robert) and Marcos was there with Patricia, his wife, who, it seems, was old friends with the photographer. During the cocktail party after the presentation, Marcos, Patricia and I were talking, but when it was over, alleging an early start the next day, my friend refused to come along to dinner, and Patricia and I couldn'tconvince him to change his mind. My memory of what follows is fuzzy, even more so than other nights around that time, possibly because in this case my memory has made an effort to suppress or confuse what happened. What I remember is that Patricia and I went along with a big group for supper at Casa Leopoldo; we sat together and although we'd always had a cordial but distant relationship — as if we'd both agreed that my friendship with Marcos didn't automatically make us friends — that night we sought a complicity that we'd never wished for or allowed ourselves. I think it was with the first after-dinner whisky that the desire to sleep with her crossed my mind; startled by my temerity, I tried to push the thought away immediately. I didn't manage it, or at least I didn't manage to keep it from hanging around in my head insidiously, like an obscenity that was ever less obscene and ever more plausible, while a few nighthawks carried on the festivities in the bar of the Giardinetto and I poured whiskies down my neck talking to this person and the next, but always aware that Patricia was still there. Finally, when they closed the Giardinetto in the early hours, Patricia gave me a lift to my hotel. During the journey I didn't stop talking for a second, as if looking for a formula to hold onto her, but when she stopped her car in front of the door and leaned over to kiss me on the cheek I could only think to suggest we have one last drink in my room. Patricia looked amused, almost as if I were a teenager and she an older nurse who had to take my clothes off. 'You wouldn't be insinuating anything, would you?' she laughed.

I didn't have time to feel ashamed, because before that could happen a cold fury seared my throat. 'You're not a very good whore,' I heard myself spit out. 'You spend all night leading me on and now you leave me in the lurch. Go to hell.'

I slammed the car door and, instead of going into the hotel, began to walk. I don't know how long I was walking, but by the time I got back to the hotel my fury had turned to remorse. The effect of the alcohol, however, had not yet dissipated, because the first thing I did when I got to my room was to call Marcos' house. Luckily, it was Patricia who answered. Stumbling over my words, I begged her to forgive me, pleaded with her to ignore what I'd said, claimed I'd had too much to drink, asked for her forgiveness again. With a cold voice Patricia accepted my apology, and I asked her if she was planning to tell Marcos.

'No,' she answered before hanging up. 'Now go to bed and sleep it off.'

I won't go on. I could go on, but I won't go on. I could tell more anecdotes, but I don't want to forget the bigger picture. A few days ago I read a poem Malcolm Lowry wrote after publishing the novel that brought him fame, money and prestige; it's a truculent, emphatic poem, but sometimes there's no alternative but to be truculent and emphatic, because reality, which almost never respects the laws of good taste, often abounds in truculence and emphasis. The poem goes like this:

Success is like some horrible disaster

Worse than your house burning, the sounds of ruination

As the roof tree falls following each other faster