Javier Cercas: The Speed of Light

While I thought of the reasons Marcelo Cuartero had given me to go to Urbana, Rodney started talking about Merce Rodoreda. He'd read two of her novels (La Plafa delDiamant and Broken Mirror); I'd only read the second, but I assured him with the aplomb of an infallible reader that the two books he'd read were the best things Rodoreda had written. Then Rodney made a suggestion: he said that every Tuesday and every Thursday, after Rota's class (or after Rota's class translated by me), we could go to Treno's so I could teach him to speak Catalan; in exchange he was ready to pay me whatever we agreed. He said it in a very serious tone of voice, but strangely I felt like he'd just told me a slightly macabre joke that I hadn't been able to figure out or (stranger still) as if he were challenging me to a duel. I could not yet have known that this was Rodney's normal tone of voice, so, although I wasn't even sure if I could teach someone Catalan, more out of pride than curiosity, I answered, 'I'll settle for you paying for my beers.'

That's how Rodney and I became friends. That very Thursday we went back to Treno's, and from the following week on, as we'd agreed, we got together every Tuesday and every Thursday, at the end of the official Catalan class. We'd get there just after six, we'd sit at the table by the fireplace, we'd order Coke (for him), beer (for me) and popcorn (for both of us) and keep talking until they closed the place around nine. Especially during the first weeks, we tried to devote as much of the time as possible to my instructing Rodney in the rudiments of Catalan, but little by little laziness or boredom overcame us and the duty of learning gave way to the pleasure of conversation. Not that we didn't also talk in the free time we had in the office, but we did so in a distracted or discontinuous way, in between the hustle and bustle of other activities, as if that was not the place to continue the conversations we had in Treno's; at least maybe that's how Rodney saw it; or maybe for some reason he wanted to keep people in the department from finding out about our friendship. The thing is that as soon as I began to have dealings with him outside the office I guessed that, despite the fact that they both shared a similar battered physical appearance and the same lost air, as if they'd just been woken up and their eyes were still veiled with the cobwebs of sleep, there was a fundamental discrepancy, although indefinable to me, between the Rodney I knew and the one my colleagues in the department knew, but what I couldn't in any way have guessed at that time is that the discrepancy was linked to the very essence of Rodney's personality, to a neurological centre that he kept hidden and to which no one then — in a certain sense not even he — had access.

I don't have an accurate recollection of those evenings in Treno's, but some memories from them are extremely vivid. I remember, for example, the increasingly charged atmosphere of the bar as the evening wore on and the place filled with students reading or writing or talking. I remember the young, round, smiling face of the waitress who usually served us, and a bad copy of a Modigliani portrait that hung on a wall, just to the right of the bar. I remember Rodney smoothing down his messy hair every once in a while and leaning back uncomfortably in his chair, and stretching his legs, which barely fitted beneath the table, out towards the fireplace. I remember the music that came out of the speakers, very faint, almost like a distorted echo of other music, and I remember that music making me feel as if I weren't in a bar in a city in the Midwest at the end of the eighties but rather at the end of the seventies in a bar in Gerona, because it was the music of the bars of my teenage years in Gerona (like Led Zeppelin, ZZ Top, Frank Zappa). I remember a strange detail very well: the last song they played every night, like a discreet warning to the regulars that the bar was going to close, was 'It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)', an old Bob Dylan song that Rodney loved because, just as ZZ Top brought back the limitless despair of my adolescence, it brought back the joy of his hippy youth, it brought it back even though it was such a sad song that spoke of disillusioned words like bullets barked and of graveyards stuffed with false gods and lonely people who cry and fear and live in a vault knowing everything's a lie and who've understood they know too soon there is no sense in even trying to understand, brought back that joy perhaps because it contained a line that I haven't been able to forget either: 'That he not busy being born is busy dying.' I remember other things too. I remember Rodney spoke with a strange icy passion, smoking constantly and gesturing a lot and animated by a kind of permanent euphoria, and that although he never (or almost never) laughed, he never gave the impression of being entirely serious. I remember that we never (or almost never) spoke of the university and that, despite the fact that Rodney never (or almost never) spoke of personal things, he never (or almost never) gave the impression he was talking about anything other than himself, and I'm sure I did not even once hear him pronounce the word Vietnam. On more than one occasion, though, we talked about politics; or, more precisely, it was Rodney who talked about politics. But it wasn't until well into the autumn that I understood that, if we didn't talk about politics more often, it wasn't because it wasn't of interest to Rodney, but rather because I didn't understand a single thing about politics (and much less about US politics, which for Rodney was the only real, or at least the only relevant politics), which, to tell the truth, didn't seem to matter that much to my friend either. Every time the subject came up he gave me the impression of talking more to himself or to an abstract interlocutor than to me; one might say he was driven by a sort of furious impulse to vent, by a resentful and hopeless vehemence against the politicians of his country — whom he considered without exception a pack of liars and filibusterers — against the big corporations that held the real political power and against the media, which according to him spread the lies of politicians and corporations with impunity.

But what I mostly remember about those evenings in Treno's is that we talked almost exclusively about books. Naturally, I might be exaggerating, it might not be true and it might be that the future alters the past and that subsequent events may have distorted my memory and that in Treno's Rodney and I didn't talk almost exclusively about books, but what I remember is that we talked almost exclusively about books; in any case, what I am sure of is that I soon realized Rodney was the best-read friend I'd ever had. Although for some reason I took a while to confess that I wanted to be a writer and that there in Urbana I'd begun to write a novel, from the start I talked to him about the North American writers I was then reading: about Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Bernard Malamud, John Updike, Flannery O'Connor. To my surprise (and delight), Rodney had read them all; I should make clear that it wasn't that he said he'dread them, rather that from the comments he made to damp down or stoke my reckless enthusiasm (more often the former than the latter), I could tell he'd read them. Without a doubt it was Rodney who I first heard mention, during those evenings in Treno's, some of the writers I've since then always associated with Urbana: Stanley Elkin, Donald Barthelme, Robert Coover, John Hawkes, William Gaddis, Richard Brautigan, Harry Mathews. We also talked once in a while about Rodoreda, who before Rota's impossible classes was the only Catalan author my friend knew, as well as certain Latin American writers he liked, and I think Rodney showed on more than one occasion, or pretended to show, some interest in Spanish literature, although I soon realized that, in contrast to Borgheson's followers, he knew little of it and liked it less. What Rodney really liked, what fascinated him, was classic American literature. My ignorance of the subject was absolute, so it took me a little while to understand that, like any good reader, Rodney's tastes and opinions on the matter were saturated in prejudices; the fact is they were unequivocal: he adored Thoreau, Emerson, Hawthorne and Twain, considered Fenimore Cooper a fraud, Poe a minor author, Melville a moralist of unbearable solemnity and James an affected, snobbish and overvalued narrator; he respected Faulkner and Thomas Wolfe, and thought there was no better writer in the whole century than Scott Fitzgerald, but only Hemingway, Hemingway of all people, was the object of his unconditional devotion. Unconditional, but not uncritical: many a time I heard him scoff at the errors, banality, schmaltz and shortcomings that afflicted Hemingway's novels, but, thanks to an unexpected dodge in the line of argument that was like a sleight of hand, those blunders always ended up turning into essential seasonings of his greatness in Rodney's eyes. 'Lots of people have written better novels than Hemingway,' he told me the first time we talked about him, as if he'd forgotten the illiterate opinion I'd blurted out the day we met. 'But no one has written better short stories than Hemingway and no one can outdo a page of Hemingway. Besides,' he concluded without a smile, before I could finish blushing, 'if you pay close attention he's a very useful idiot detector: idiots never like Hemingway.' Even though it may well have been, I didn't take this last phrase as a personal allusion; I didn't get angry, although I could have. But, whether he was right or not, with time I've come to think that, more than an admired writer, Hemingway was for Rodney a dark or perhaps radiant symbol the extent of which not even he could entirely perceive.