Javier Cercas - The Speed of Light

It didn't happen like that. Incredibly — at least incredibly to me — both certainties proved false. Jenny took a while to answer my message, and when she finally did it was to thank me for my proposal and immediately turn it down affectionately but categorically. 'It wouldn't work,' Jenny wrote to me. 'Anticipating something is not enough to make it happen, neither is wanting it. This isn't algebra or geometry: when you're talking about people, two plus two never makes four. I mean none of us can replace anybody: Dan can't replace Gabriel, I can't replace Paula; you, no matter how much you want to, can't replace Rodney.'. . 'Finish the book,' Jenny concluded. 'You owe it to Rodney. You owe it to Gabriel and to Paula. You owe it to Dan and to me. Most of all you owe it to yourself. Finish it and then, if you feel like it, come and spend a few days with us. We'll be waiting for you.' Jenny's reply left me dumbfounded, unable to react, as if someone had just punched me and I didn't know who or how or why they'd punched me. I reread it, I reread it again; I understood all the words, but found it impossible to take them in. I was so convinced that my future was in Rantoul, with Dan and with her, that I hadn't even imagined an alternative future if that one proved illusory or failed. Furthermore, Jenny's refusal was so unequivocal and her arguments so watertight that I didn't have the strength to try to refute them and insist on my proposal.

I didn't answer Jenny's message: there wasn't going to be any magic trick, there wasn't going to be any spell, I wasn't going to recover what I'd lost. I suddenly saw myself returning to my old underground life; I suddenly thought I understood it was absurd to keep writing this book. And I was about to abandon it definitively when I discovered exactly how it ended and why I had to finish it. It happened a little while after I found a cigarette packet full of joints sticking out of the slot of my mailbox as I was on my way out to have lunch one afternoon. I couldn't help but smile. The next morning I phoned Marcos, and two days later we arranged to meet for a beer in El Yate.

It was Marcos who chose the bar. When I arrived, quite a while before the time we'd arranged, my friend was already there, sitting on a stool, his back to the door and elbows on the bar. Without a word I sat down beside him and ordered a beer; Marcos didn't say anything either, or look up from his glass. It was a Thursday in the middle of October, and the last light of the afternoon was about to fade from the windows overlooking the corner of Muntaner and Arimon. While I was waiting for my beer I asked:

'How did you track me down?'

Marcos sighed before answering.

'By accident,' he said. 'I saw you on the street the other day and followed you. I knew you'd moved, but you could at least have let me know. I'm not rich enough to be throwing marijuana away.'

'You haven't thrown it away,' I said. 'I'm sure whoever rented the apartment after me was very grateful to you.'

'Very funny.' He turned to look at me. Then he said: 'How are you?'

With some apprehension I too turned around. At first glance he didn't remind me of the aged forty-year-old of our last encounter, in the MACBA or the Palau Robert, the same disastrous night I tried to seduce Patricia; he just looked tired, maybe bored: in fact, the faded jeans, the baggy blue sweater and the lighter blue untucked shirt gave him an air of vaguely youthful sloppiness, not entirely contradicted by his thinning, grey hair or his thick and slightly old-fashioned tortoiseshell glasses; two days' stubble shadowed his cheeks. As I was studying him I felt myself studied by him, and before answering his question I wondered if I was reminding him of a ghost or a zombie.

'Fine,' I lied. 'And you?'

'Me too.'

I nodded approvingly. The bartender brought my beer, I took a sip, lit a cigarette and then I gave a light to Marcos, who stared at Rodney's Zippo; I looked at it too: for a moment it seemed a remote and strange object, a tiny meteorite or a fossil or a survivor of an ice age; for a second it seemed like the dog engraved on it wasn't smiling at me, but mocking me. I put the lighter down on the bar, on top of the cigarette packet; I asked:

'How's Patricia?'

Marcos sighed again.

'We split up a year or so ago,' he said. 'I thought you knew.'

'I didn't know.'

'Well, it doesn't matter,' he said as if it really didn't matter, running his hand over his stubble; I noticed a blotch of paint darkening his ring finger. 'I suppose we'd been together too long and, well. . She's been living in Madrid for a few months now, so I haven't seen her.'

I didn't say anything. We kept drinking and smoking in silence, and at some point I inevitably remembered the last time I'd been in El Yate, sixteen years before, with Marcos and with Marcelo Cuartero, when he suggested I go to Urbana and the whole thing started. I looked along the bar. I remembered a luxurious uptown place, inaccessible given our destitute finances, frequented by executives and shiny with mirrors and polished wood, but the place where I now found myself seemed (or at least seemed to me) more like a dark village tavern: certain details of the decoration pathetically strained to mimic the interior of a yacht — dull seascapes, lamps in the shape of anchors, a pendulum clock in the shape of a tennis racket — but there were also horrible pink curtains tied back against window frames painted a horrible green, trays of rancid-looking tapas lined up on the unpolished bar, slot machines blinking their urgent promise of riches, the waiters' uniforms dusted with dandruff and the clientele of solitary ladies drinking Marie Brizard and solitary men drinking gin, who every once in a while exchanged comments seasoned by alcohol and cynicism, all of which drew El Yate closer to Bud's Bar than to my memory of El Yate. Suddenly I felt at ease there, with my cigarette and beer in hand, as if I should never have left that Barcelona bar with its village bar atmosphere; suddenly I asked Marcos why he'd suggested we meet precisely there.

'Why did you suggest we meet here?' I asked.

'I haven't been here for ages,' he said. And he added: 'It hasn't changed a bit.'

Perplexed, I asked him if he meant the bar.

'I mean the bar, the calle Pujol, the neighbourhood, all of it,' he answered. 'I bet even our apartment is exactly the same, for fuck's sake.'

I smiled.

'You're not going to start getting nostalgic?'

'Nostalgic?' The interrogative tone contained not surprise but annoyance, an annoyance that verged on irritation. 'Why nostalgic? That wasn't the best time we ever had in our lives. It might seem like it sometimes, but it wasn't.'

'No?'

'No.' He pursed his lips in a disparaging gesture. 'The best is what's happening to us now.'

There was a silence, after which I heard that Marcos was laughing; it was contagious and I started laughing too, and for a while a feeble, strange and uncontrollable laughter kept us from talking. Then Marcos suggested we have another beer and, while they were pouring it, for something to say I asked him how his work was going. Marcos took a sip of beer; it left a trace of foam around his mouth.

'About a year ago, just after Patricia and I split up, I stopped painting,' he explained. 'I did nothing but suffer. I hadn't sold a bloody painting for months and I couldn't even save face by blaming the market, that handy gentleman, because I felt that what I was painting was rubbish. So I stopped painting. You don't know how good it felt. Suddenly I realized that it was all an absurd misunderstanding: someone or something had convinced me I was an artist when I really wasn't one, and that's why I suffered so much and everything was so shit. Twenty years pulling in one direction when in reality I wanted to go in another, twenty years down the drain. . A damned misunderstanding. But, instead of getting depressed, as soon as I understood that I felt better, it was as if I'd taken a huge weight off my shoulders. So I decided to change my life.' He took a drag on his cigarette and started to laugh, but he choked on the smoke and a cough interrupted his laughter. 'Change my life,' he continued after a gulp of beer to clear his throat. 'That's a laugh. You've got to be a jerk to think you can change a life, as if after forty years we still didn't know that it's not us that changes life, but life that changes us. Anyway. . the thing is I rented a house in the country, in a village in Cerdanya, and said to hell with everything. The first month was great: I walked, looked after the vegetable plot, chatted with the neighbours, I didn't do anything; I even met a girl, a nurse who worked in Puigcerda. It seemed like paradise, and I started making plans to stay there. Until the shit hit the fan. First there were problems with the neighbours, then the girl got bored with me, then I started getting bored. Suddenly the days felt endless, I wondered what the hell I was doing there.' He was quiet for a moment and then he asked: 'You know what I did then?' I could imagine, I almost knew, but I let Marcos answer his own question. 'I started painting. Who'd have fucking believed it, eh? I started painting out of boredom, to kill time, because I had nothing better to do.'