Javier Cercas - The Speed of Light

THE TRIP TO THE United States lasted two weeks during which I crossed the country from coast to coast, dominated at first by a state of mind that was at the very least contradictory: on the one hand I was expectant, keen not only to return to Urbana, to see Rodney again, but also — which perhaps amounted to the same thing — to emerge for a while from the filth of the underground and unburden myself of the weight of a past that didn't exist or that I could pretend did not exist once I arrived; but, on the other hand, I also felt a gnawing apprehension because for the first time in almost a year I was going to emerge from the state of hibernation in which I'd tried to protect myself from reality and I had no idea what my reaction would be when I exposed myself to it again in the flesh. So, though I soon realized I wasn't entirely unaccustomed to being out in the open, for the first few days I had a bit of a feeling of groping my way around, like someone taking a while to get used to the light after a long confinement in darkness. I left Spain on a Saturday and only arrived in Urbana seven days later, but as soon as I set foot in the United States I began to receive news of people from Urbana. The first stop was at the University of Virginia, in Charlottesville. My host, Professor Victor T. Davies, a renowned specialist in literature of the Enlightenment, came to pick me up at Dulles Airport, in Washington, and during the two-hour drive to the university we talked about acquaintances we had in common; Laura Burns turned out to be one of them. I hadn't had any news of Laura for years, nor of any of the rest of my friends from Urbana, but Davies had kept in frequent contact with her since she'd published a critical edition (which he described as excellent) of Los eruditos a lavioleta, the book by Jose Cadalso; according to what Davies told me, Laura had been divorced from her second husband for several years and now taught at the University of St Louis, less than three hours' drive from Urbana.

'If I'd known you were friends, I would have told her you were coming,' Davies said ruefully.

When we got to Charlottesville I asked him for Laura's phone number and that same night I phoned her from my room in the Colonnade Club, a sumptuous eighteenth-century pavilion where official visitors to the university are put up. The call filled Laura with an exaggerated and almost contagious jubilation and, once we got beyond the first moment of astonishment and a quick exchange of information, we agreed that she'd get in touch with John Borgheson, who was now the head of the department and had organized my stay in Urbana, and in any case we'd see each other there the following Saturday.

The second city I visited was New York, where I was supposed to speak at Barnard College, an affiliate of Columbia University. The night I arrived, after the lecture, my host, a Spanish professor called Mercedes Esteban, took me out for dinner along with two other colleagues to a Mexican restaurant on 43rd Street; there, sitting at a table waiting for us was Felipe Vieri. It seems Esteban and he had met when they were both teaching at NYU and had remained close friends since then; she'd let him know about my visit, and between the two of them they'd organized that unexpected reunion. Vieri and I had stopped writing to each other many years before and, apart from the odd bit of news caught here and there (of course, echoes of my novel's success had reached Vieri's ears, too), we knew nothing about each other's lives, but during the meal my friend did what he could to fill that void. So I found out that Vieri was still teaching at NYU, still living in Greenwich Village, he'dpublished a novel and several non-fiction books, one of which dealt with the films of Almodovar; for my part I lied to him the same way I'd done in the useless letter I'd sent to Rodney, just as I'd lied to Davies and Laura: I talked about Gabriel and Paula as if they were alive and about my happy life as a successful provincial writer. But what we mostly talked about was Urbana. Vieri had brought several copies of Linea Plural ('an elusive gem,' he joked, putting on an effeminate voice and gesture and addressing the rest of the dinner guests) and a pile of photos among which I recognized one from the meeting of contributors to the journal when Rodrigo Gines told of his Dadaist encounter with Rodney while he was sticking up Socialist Workers' Party posters against General Electric. Pointing at a guy in the photo who was looking at the camera with a radiant smile, sandwiched between Rodrigo and me, Vieri asked:

'Remember Frank Solaun?'

'Of course,' I answered. 'Whatever happened to him?'

'He died seven years ago,' said Vieri, without taking his eyes off the photo, 'of AIDS.'

I nodded, but no one said anything else and we kept on talking: of Borgheson, of Laura, of Rodrigo Gines, of friends and acquaintances; Vieri had quite specific news of many of them, but during the dinner I didn't dare ask him about Rodney. I did later, in a bar at the corner of Broadway and 121st Street, near the Union Theological Seminary — the university dormitory where I was staying — where we were talking on our own until the early hours.Predictably, Vieri remembered Rodney very well; predictably, he hadn't heard anything about him; also predictably, he thought it strange that I, who had been his only friend in Urbana, should be asking him about Rodney.

'I'm sure they'll know something in Urbana,' he ventured.

With that hope I finally got to Urbana at midday on Saturday, arriving from Chicago. I remember as we took off from O'Hare and began to fly over the suburbs of the city — with the serrated line of the skyscrapers cut out against the vehement blue of the sky and the vivid blue of Lake Michigan — I couldn't help remembering my first trip from Chicago to Urbana, seventeen years earlier, in the dog days of August, in a Greyhound bus, while around me an endless expanse of brown uninhabited land rolled past, just like the land that now seemed to be held almost perfectly still beneath my plane, dotted here and there with green patches and the occasional farm; I remembered that first trip and it seemed astonishing to be about to arrive in Urbana, which at that moment, just when I was going to set foot in it again after so long, suddenly seemed as illusory as an invention of desire or nostalgia. But Urbana was not an invention. In the airport John Borgheson was waiting for me, maybe a bit more bald but no more decrepit than the last time I'd seen him, years ago, in Barcelona, in any case just as affable and welcoming and more British than ever and, as he drove me to the Chancellor Hotel and I gazed at the streets of Urbana without recognizing them, he outlined the plan for my stay in the city, told me the welcome party was set for that very evening at six and he would come and pick me up at the hotel ten minutes before. In the Chancellor I took a shower and changed my clothes; then I went down to the foyer and killed time walking up and down waiting for Borgheson, until at some point I fleetingly thought I recognized someone; surprised, I backtracked, but the only thing I saw was my face reflected in a large wall mirror. Wondering how long it had been since the last time I'd looked at myself in a mirror, I stared at the image of my face in the mirror as if I were looking at a stranger, and while I was doing so I imagined I was shedding my skin, thought that this was the port in the storm, thought about the weight of the past and the filth underground and the promising clarity outside, and I also thought that, although the objective of that trip was chimerical or absurd, the fact of embarking on it was not.

Borgheson arrived at the agreed time and took me to the house of a literature professor who had insisted on organizing the party. Her name was Elizabeth Bell and she had started at Urbana about the same time I finished there, so I only vaguely remembered her; as for the rest of the guests, the majority of them were Spanish professors and teaching assistants. I didn't know a single one, until Laura Burns rushed in, blonde and beautiful, and hugged and kissed me noisily, kissed and hugged Borgheson noisily, noisily greeted the rest of the guests and immediately took over the conversation, seemingly determined to make us pay for the two-and-a-half-hour drive it had taken her to get there from St Louis with her absolute starring role. It wasn't the first time she'd made that trip: during the conversation I'dhad with her on the phone from Charlottesville, Laura told me that every once in a while she went to visit Borgheson, who, as I found out that evening, had given up treating her like an exceptional student in order to treat her like an unruly stepdaughter whose madcap escapades he was slightly embarrassed to find irresistibly amusing. During dinner Laura didn't stop talking for a second, although, despite the fact that we were sitting beside each other, she didn't exchange a word with me alone or in an aside; what she did was talk to the others about me, as if she were one of those wives or mothers who, like symbiotic creatures, seem to live only through the achievements of their husbands or children. First she talked about the success of my novel, which she'd reviewed rapturously for World LiteratureToday, and later she argued with Borgheson, Elizabeth Bell and her husband — a Spanish linguist called Andres Vinas — about the real characters hidden behind the fictional characters in The Tenant, the novella I'd written and set in Urbana, and at some point told us that the head of the department at the time had considered the head of the department who appeared in the book to be a depiction of him and had arranged for all the copies in the library to disappear, however, I was surprised that neither Laura nor Borgheson nor Elizabeth Bell nor Vinas mentioned Olalde, the fictitious Spanish professor whose exaggerated appearance — and perhaps not just his physical appearance — was so clearly inspired by Rodney. Then Laura seemed to tire of talking about me and started telling anecdotes at the expense of her two ex-husbands and especially at her own expense as the wife of her two ex-husbands. Not until after dinner did Laura cede the monopoly on the conversation, which inevitably drifted into an itemized list of the differences between the Urbana of fifteen years ago and the Urbana of today, and then into a frayed recounting of the disparate and eventful lives led by the professors and teaching assistants who'd been there at the same time as me. Everyone knew a story or a snippet of a story, but the one who seemed best informed was Borgheson, who was the longest-serving professor in the department after all, so when we stepped outside to smoke a cigarette along with Laura, Vinas and a teaching assistant, I asked him if he knew anything of Rodney.