Javier Cercas: The Speed of Light

I'd like to believe that during my early days in Urbana this kind of gaffe was not as frequent as I fear, but I can't be sure; what I can be sure of is that I got used to my new life much more quickly than I expected. And it was a comfortable life. My house — a two-bedroom apartment with kitchen and bathroom — was located a five-minute walk from the Foreign Languages Building, the building that was home to the Spanish Department, at 703 West Oregon, between Busey and Coler, in a zone of narrow, private, tree-lined streets. As Marcelo Cuartero had promised, I made enough money to live without privations and my duties as Spanish teacher and doctoral student left almost all my afternoons and evenings free, as well as the lengthy weekends that included Fridays, so I had lots of time to read and write, and a vast library to keep me supplied with books. Soon curiosity for what I had in front of me replaced nostalgia for what I'd left behind. I regularly wrote to my family and my friends — especially Marcos — but I didn't feel lonely any more; in fact, I very soon discovered that, if I made an effort, nothing was easier than making friends in Urbana. Like all university cities, it was a sterile, deceptive place, a human microclimate bereft of poor and old people in which each year one population composed of young people from all over the planet on their way through touched down as another took off for the world; added to the slightly worrying evidence that neither in the city nor for several hundreds of kilometres in any direction were there any distractions other than work, this circumstance facilitated social life enormously, and in fact, in contrast to the studious quiet of the rest of the week, from Friday afternoon to Sunday night Urbana turned into a seething cauldron of house parties that no one seemed to want to miss and to which everyone seemed to be invited.

However, I didn't meet Rodney Falk at any of those many house parties, but in the office we shared for a semester on the fourth floor of the Foreign Languages Building. I'll never know if they assigned me that office by chance or because no one else wanted to share with Rodney (I'm inclined to suspect the latter is more likely than the former), but what I do know is that, if they hadn't assigned me that office, Rodney and I would probably never have become friends and everything would have been different and my life wouldn't be like it is and the memory of Rodney would have been wiped from my mind the way the memories of most of the people I knew in Urbana have faded away with the years. Or perhaps not as much, perhaps I exaggerate. After all, the truth is, although nothing could be further from his intentions, Rodney did not go unnoticed amid the rigorous uniformity that reigned in the department and to which everyone adhered without complaint, as if it were a tacit but palpable rule of intellectual immunization paradoxically bound to instigate competence among the members of that community proud of their strict meritocratic observance. Rodney transgressed the rule because he was quite a bit older than the rest of the Spanish assistants, almost none of whom were over thirty, but also because he never attended meetings, cocktail parties or get-togethers organized by the department, which everyone blamed, as I soon found out, on his reserved and eccentric, not to mention surly, nature, which contributed to him being surrounded by a disparaging myth that included his having obtained his position as a Spanish lecturer thanks to being a veteran of the Vietnam War. I remember at a reception put on by the department for the new teaching assistants, the night before classes began, someone commented on his habitual absence, which immediately provoked, among the little circle of colleagues around me, a cascade of vicious conjecture about what it was that Rodney must teach his students, because no one had ever heard him speak Spanish.

'Damn!' said Laura Burns, as she burst into the chorus. 'What worries me isn't that Rodney doesn't know a fucking word of Spanish, but that one of these days he's going to show up here with a Kalashnikov and blow us all away.'

I still hadn't forgotten this comment, which had been greeted with riotous laughter all round, when the next day I finally met Rodney. That morning, the first of term, I arrived at the department very early, and when I opened the office door the first thing I saw was Rodney sitting at his desk, reading; the second was that he raised his eyes from the book, looked at me, stood up without a word. There was an irrational instant of panic provoked by Laura Burns' sharp remark (which suddenly no longer seemed like a sharp remark and also no longer struck me as funny) and by the size of that big, strong, reportedly unbalanced guy who was advancing towards me; but I didn't run away: I apprehensively shook the hand he held out to me and tried to smile.

'My name's Rodney Falk,' he said, looking me in the eye with disconcerting intensity and making a noise that sounded like a martial click of the heels. 'And you?'

I told him my name. Rodney asked me if I was Spanish. I told him I was.

'I've never been to Spain,' he declared. 'But one day I'd like to see it. Have you read Hemingway?'

I'd barely read Hemingway, or I'd read him carelessly, and my notion of the American writer fitted into a pitiful snapshot of a washed-up, swaggering, alcoholic old man, friend to flamenco dancers and bull fighters, who spread a postcard image of the oldest and most unbearable stereotypes of Spain through his outmoded works.

'Yes,' I answered, relieved at that hint of a literary conversation and, since I must have seen another magnificent opportunity to make very clear to my colleagues my unimpeachable cosmopolitan calling, which I'd already thought to proclaim with my homophobic comment about Almodovar's films, I added: 'Frankly, I think he's shit.'

The reaction of my new officemate was more expeditious than that of Vieri and Solaun a few nights before: without any gesture of disapproval or agreement, as if I'd suddenly disappeared from view, Rodney turned around and left me standing there mid-sentence; then he sat back down, picked up his book and immersed himself in it again.

That morning there was nothing more and, if we discount the initial surprise or panic and Ernest Hemingway, the ritual of the days that followed came to be more or less identical. Despite always arriving at the office as soon as they opened the Foreign Languages Building, Rodney was always there before me and, after an obligatory greeting that in his case was more like a grunt, our mornings were spent coming and going from classrooms, and also sitting each at his desk, reading and preparing classes (Rodney mostly reading and me mostly preparing classes), but always firmly immured in a silence that I only timidly tried to break on a couple of occasions, until I came to understand that Rodney had absolutely no interest in talking to me. It was during those days that, keeping a surreptitious eye on him from my desk or in the corridors of the department, I began to get used to his presence. At first glance Rodney had the ingenuous, indifferent, anachronistic look of those hippies from the sixties who hadn't wanted or been able or known how to adapt themselves to the cheerful cynicism of the eighties, as if they'd been willingly or forcibly swept aside into a ditch so as not to interfere with the triumphant march of history. His clothing, however, was not out of keeping with the informal egalitarianism that reigned in the university: he always wore running shoes, faded jeans and baggy checked shirts, although in winter — in the polar winter of Urbana — he changed his shoes for military boots and bundled up in thick woollen sweaters, a sheepskin coat and fur cap. He was tall, heavy set and rather ungainly; he always walked with his eyes glued to the floor and sort of lurching, leaning to the right, with one shoulder higher than the other, which endowed his gait with the swaying instability of a pachyderm on the point of collapse. He had long, thick, reddish hair, and a robust, wide face, with slightly ruddy skin and features that seemed sculpted into his cranium: firm chin, prominent cheekbones, steep nose and a mocking or contemptuous mouth, which when open revealed two rows of uneven, almost ochre-coloured, quite deteriorated teeth. One of his eyes was abnormally sensitive to light, which obliged him to protect it from the sun with a black fabric patch held in place by a band around his head, making him look like an ex-combatant, an appearance his lurching walk and broken-down frame did nothing to contradict. Undoubtedly because of this ocular lesion his eyes appeared not to be of the same colour at first glance, although if you looked closely you'd see it was just that one was a slightly lighter brown, almost honey-coloured, and the other a darker brown, almost black. Furthermore, I also soon noticed that Rodney had no friends in the department and that, except for Dan Gleylock — an old linguistics professor in whose office I saw him talking once or twice, coffee in hand — with the rest of the members of the faculty he maintained a relationship that didn't even reach the level of superficial cordiality that simple politeness imposes.