Javier Cercas: The Speed of Light

I said earlier that only well into autumn did I understand that Rodney's interest in politics was not merely conversational, but very serious, although also a bit excessive or at least — to put it a more conventional way — unconventional. Actually I didn't begin to sense this until one Sunday at the beginning of October when a colleague from the depart ment called Rodrigo Gines invited me to lunch at his house, to talk about the issue of Linea Plural that was supposed to come out the following semester. Gines, who'd arrived in Urbana at the same time as me and would end up becoming one of my best friends there, was Chilean, a writer and a cellist; he was also an assistant professor of Spanish. Many years before he'd been a professor at the Austral University of Chile, but after the fall of Salvador Allende the dictatorship had dismissed him and forced him to earn his living with other jobs, among them that of cellist in the National Symphony Orchestra. He was roughly the same age as Rodney and had a wife and two children in Santiago, and the melancholy air of an orphaned Indian, with a moustache and goatee, that in no way betrayed his bleak sense of humour, his compulsive sociability or his fondness for wine and good food. That Sunday, as well as Felipe Vieri and Frank Solaun, the editors of the journal and unconditional Almodovar fans, several assistant professors came to his house, including Laura Burns and an Austrian called Gudrun with whom our host was going out at the time. We ate roast chicken with mole sauce that Gines had made, and sat round the table long after the meal discussing the contents of the journal. We talked about poems, stories, articles, about the need to find some new contributors, and when we were discussing this last point I brought up Rodney's name, with the suggestion that we could ask him to write something for the next issue; I was about to sing the praises of my friend's intellectual virtues when I noticed that all the rest of the guests were staring at me as if I'd just announced the imminent landing in Urbana of a spacecraft crewed by little green men with antennae. I shut up; there was an uncomfortable silence. That was when, as if surprised to find a suitable instrument in his hands to assure the success of the meeting, Gines interrupted to tell a story. I can't guarantee that all its details are true, I'm just telling it the way he told it. It seems that the Tuesday of that same week, as he made his way earlier than usual to his first class of the day, my Chilean friend had seen a dusty Buick stopping abruptly in the middle of Lincoln Avenue, beside a lamppost, right at the intersection with Green Street. Gines thought the car had broken down and kept walking towards the crossroads, but recognized he was mistaken when he saw the driver get out and, instead of going to look at the engine or check the state of the tires, opened the back door, took out a bucket and brush and a poster and stuck the poster on the lamppost. The driver was sporting a patch over his right eye and Gines quickly recognized it was Rodney. According to Gines, up till that day they hadn't exchanged a single word, and perhaps for that reason he stopped a few metres from the car, watching Rodney finish pasting up the poster, confused and intrigued, not knowing whether to go over to him or take off walking down Green and leave as if he hadn't seen a thing, and he was still wondering when Rodney finished smoothing the poster onto the lamppost, turned around and saw him. Then Gines had no option but to approach. He went over and, although he knew Rodney didn't have any trouble with his car, asked him if he had any trouble with his car. Rodney looked at him with his uncovered eye, smiled crookedly and assured him he didn't; then he pointed to the poster freshly pasted to the lamppost. Since he hardly understood any English, Gines didn't understand any of what was written on it, but Rodney told him that the poster was calling for a general strike against General Electric in the name of the Socialist Workers' Party or some faction of the Socialist Workers' Party, Gines didn't quite remember.

'Against General Electric,' Gines repeated, interrupting his tale. 'Shit! And I didn't even know there still was a Socialist Workers' Party in this country!'

Gines explained that he stood staring at Rodney not knowing what to say at that moment and Rodney stood staring at him not knowing what to say. A few endless seconds passed, during which, according to him, he felt successively like laughing and crying, and then, as the silence went on and he waited for Rodney to say something or for something to occur to him to say, the image of General Pinochet's face appeared in his mind, that immobile face with its invisible gaze behind those perpetual sunglasses, sitting in a box in the Military School Theatre in Santiago, while he and his colleagues in the Symphony Orchestra played the Adagio & Allegro by Saint-Saens or Dvorak's Rondo capriccioso, either of the two pieces but never any other, and almost unwittingly tried to imagine what General Pinochet would have thought or said to Rodney in a situation like that, thought about the budget of the Chilean State that Pinochet administered and also thought, with a satisfaction that he still didn't entirely understand, that, compared with the president of General Electric, Pinochet was like the foreman of an asbestos factory whose workers wouldn't outnumber the members of the Socialist Workers' Party (or the faction of the Socialist Workers' Party) Rodney belonged to or supported. Finally it was Rodney who broke the spell. 'Well,' he said. 'I'm done now. Do you want a lift to the faculty?'

'That was it,' Gines concluded in his Chilean tone, finishing off his wine and opening his eyes wide and his hands in a perplexed gesture. 'He gave me a lift to the faculty and there we parted. But I spent the whole day with the strangest feeling, as if that morning I'd mistakenly snuck into a Dadaist play in which I unintentionally ended up playing the lead part.'

Knowing Gines as I eventually came to know him, I'm sure he didn't relate this anecdote with the intention of preventing Rodney from contributing to the journal, but the fact is that Rodney's name was never mentioned again during that or any other Linea Plural meeting. Apart from that, I'll also say that in Rodney's company I, too, sometimes felt like I had wandered into a play or a joke (sometimes a disturbing or even sinister joke) that didn't fit into any known genre or aesthetic and that meant nothing, but that concerned me so intimately it was as if someone had written it deliberately for me. Other times the impression was the opposite: that it wasn't me but Rodney who was acting in a play — which at times promised to reveal areas of my friend's personality impervious to the almost involuntary scrutiny to which I subjected it during our conversations in Treno's — the real significance of which I touched and was about to grasp but in the end slipped through my fingers like water, just as if Rodney's transparent veneer hid nothing but a background that was also transparent. I can't omit here an episode that happened not long after we began to be friends, because in light of certain events that I found out about much later it acquires an ambiguous but eloquent resonance.

Some Friday evenings I'd go swimming at an indoor pool belonging to the university that was located about a twenty-minute walk from my house. I'd swim for an hour or an hour and a half, sometimes even two, sit in the sauna for a while, have a shower and go home exhausted and happy and with the feeling of having eliminated all the superfluous material accumulated during the week. One of those Fridays, just as I came out of the sports centre, I saw Rodney. He was across the street, sitting on a concrete bench, facing a wide, treeless expanse of grass on the other side of a flimsy wire fence, with his arms crossed, the patch over his eye and his legs crossed as well, as if idly drinking in the last rays of the evening sun. Seeing him there surprised me and pleased me: it surprised me because I knew Rodney didn't have any classes on Friday afternoons and I also thought I knew that my friend didn't stay in Urbana any more than strictly necessary and, except for the two days of our literary chats in Treno's, he returned to Rantoul as soon as he finished his academic obligations; it pleased me because there's nothing I'd rather do after exercise than have a beer and a cigarette and talk for a while. But, as I got closer to Rodney and past a hedge that had bloc'ked my view of the lawn, I realized my friend was not sunning himself, but watching a group of children who were playing in front of him. There were four of them and they were eight or nine, maybe ten years old, they were wearing jeans and T-shirts and baseball caps and they were throwing and catching a Frisbee that went back and forth between them spinning and gliding like a flying saucer; I imagined their parents wouldn't be too far away, but from where I was, on the opposite sidewalk, I couldn't make them out. And then, when I was going to cross the street and say hello to Rodney, I stopped. I don't really know why I did, but I think it was because I noticed something strange in my friend, something that struck me as dissuasive or perhaps threatening, a frozen stiffness in his posture, a painful, almost unbearable tension, in the way he was sitting and watching the children play. I was twenty or thirty metres from him, so I couldn't see his face clearly, or I could only see his profile. Immobile, I remember that I thought: he wants to laugh so badly he can't laugh. Then I thought: no, he's crying and he'll keep crying and won't stop crying, if he ever does stop crying, until the children have gone. Then I thought: no, he wants to cry so badly that he can't cry. Then I thought: no, he's afraid, with a fear as sharp as a razor blade, a fear that cuts and bleeds and reeks and that I cannot understand. Then I thought: no, he's mad, completely mad, so mad that he's able to fool us and pretend to be sane. I was still thinking that when one of the children threw the Frisbee too hard and it flew over the fence and landed softly a few metres from Rodney. My friend didn't move, as if he hadn't noticed the disc (which was of course impossible), the boy came over to the fence, pointed to it and said something to Rodney, who finally got up from the bench, picked up the Frisbee and, instead of returning it to its owners, went back to the fence and crouched down so he was the same height as the child, who after some hesitation came over to him. Now the two were face to face, looking at each other through the diamonds of the wire fence, or rather, Rodney was looking at the boy and the boy was looking alternately at Rodney and at the ground. For a minute or two, during which the other children stayed at a distance, watching their playmate but without making up their minds to approach, Rodney and the boy talked; or rather; it was just Rodney who talked. The boy did other things: nodded, smiled, shook his head, nodded again; at a certain moment, after looking Rodney in the eye, the boy's stance changed: he seemed incredulous or frightened or even (for a fleeting instant) gripped by panic, he seemed to want to back away from the fence, but Rodney kept him there by holding onto his wrist and telling him something he must have hoped would be calming; then the boy began to struggle and I had the impression that he was about to shout or burst into tears, but Rodney didn't let him go, he kept talking to him in a confidential and almost urgent, vehement way, and then, in a second, I was afraid too, I thought something might happen, I didn't know exactly what, I wondered if I should intervene, shout and tell Rodney to let go of the boy, let him go. The next second I calmed down: suddenly the boy seemed to relax, nodded again, smiled again, first timidly and then openly, at which moment Rodney let go of him and the boy said several words in a row, which I didn't understand although I could see his mouth and I tried to read his lips. Straight away Rodney stood up without hurrying and threw the disc, which glided and fell far from where the boy's friends were waiting. The boy, to my surprise, did not go immediately back to them, but stood for a while longer by the fence, indecisively, talking calmly to Rodney, and only left there after his friends had shouted to him several times that they had to go. Rodney watched the boys running away across the grass, and, instead of turning around and leaving as well, went back to sit on the bench, crossed his legs again, folded his arms again and stayed there immobile, facing the setting sun, and I didn't dare approach him and pretend I hadn't seen anything and suggest we go for a beer and a bit of a chat, and not only because I hadn't understood the scene and I would have felt uncomfortable or perturbed, but also because I was suddenly sure that at that moment my friend wanted above all to be alone, that he wasn't going to move from that bench for a long time, that he was going to let the light fade away and night fall and dawn arrive without doing anything except maybe weep or laugh silently, nothing other than looking at that expanse of grass like an enormous empty hangar that little by little the darkness would take over and on which he would probably see (but this I didn't know or imagine until much later) some indecipherable shadows dancing that only had any significance for him, though it was a dreadful significance.