Javier Cercas - The Speed of Light

'He just left,' he answered, pointing at the door with an offended gesture, 'without saying anything to me about the play. Without saying goodbye. That guy is obviously nuts, unless he's a complete bastard.'

I peered out a window that looked onto the street and saw him. He was standing on the porch steps, tall, bulky, vulnerable and hesitant, his aquiline profile barely standing out against the wan light of the street lamps while he turned up the collar of his sheepskin coat and adjusted his fur cap and stood very still, looking at the darkness of the night and the big snowflakes falling in front of him, covering the garden and road in a dull brightness. For a second I remembered him sitting on the bench and watching the children playing Frisbee and I thought he was crying, or rather, I was sure he was crying, but the next second what I thought was that actually he was just looking at the night in a very strange way, as if he could see things in it that I couldn't see, as if he were looking at an enormous insect or a distorting mirror, and then I thought no, actually he was looking at the night as if he were walking along a narrow pass beside a very dark abyss and no one had as much vertigo or as much fear as he did, and suddenly, while I was thinking that, I noticed all the resentment I'd been harbouring against Rodney during the week had evaporated, who knows whether because at that moment I thought I glimpsed the reason he never attended faculty meetings or parties and had, nevertheless, attended that one.

I grabbed my coat, said a rushed goodbye to Wong and went out to find Rodney. I found him when he was opening his car door; he didn't seem especially glad to see me. I asked him where he was going; he answered home. I thought of Wong and said:

'You could at least have said goodbye, no?'

He didn't say anything, he pointed to his car and asked:

'Do you want a lift?'

I answered that my house was only a fifteen-minute walk from there and that I preferred to walk; then I asked him if he wanted to walk with me for a while. Rodney shrugged his shoulders, closed the car door and began walking alongside me, at first without saying anything and then talking with sudden animation, though I don't remember what about. What I do remember is that we walked along Race and that when we reached Silver Creek — an old brick mill converted into a chic restaurant — after a silence Rodney stopped.

'What's it about?' he asked out of the blue.

I immediately knew what he was talking about. I looked at him: the fur hat and raised lapels of his coat almost entirely hid his face; in his eyes there was no trace of tears, in fact I thought he might be smiling.

'What's what about?' I said.

'The novel,' he answered.

'Oh, that,' I said with a gesture that was at once self-satisfied and easygoing, as if Rodney's inexplicable indifference towards that matter hadn't been the reason I'd cancelled our get-togethers in Treno's. 'Well, I'm not really sure yet. .'

'I like it,' Rodney interrupted me.

'What do you like?' I asked in astonishment.

'That you don't know what the novel's about yet,' he answered. 'If you know beforehand, that's bad: you'll just say what you already know, which is what we all know. On the other hand, if you don't yet know what you want to say but you're crazy enough or desperate enough or brave enough to keep writing, you might end up saying something that you didn't even know you knew and that only you can come to know, and that might be of interest.' As usual I didn't know whether Rodney was talking seriously or joking, but on that occasion I didn't understand a single one of his words. Rodney must have noticed, because, starting to walk again, he concluded: 'What I mean is that someone who always knows where they're going never gets anywhere, and you only know what you're trying to say once you've said it.'

That night we parted next to the Courier Cafe, very close to my house, and the following week we started getting together at Treno's again. After that we often talked about my novel; in fact, and although we certainly talked about other things, that's almost all I remember us talking about. They were slightly strange conversations, often confusing, in a certain sense always stimulating but only in a certain sense. Rodney, for example, wasn't interested in talking about the plot of my book, which was what I was most worried about, but rather who expounded the plot. 'Stories don't exist,' he once told me. 'What does exist is who tells them. If you know who it is, there's a story, if you don't know who it is, there's no story.' 'Then I've already got mine,' I told him. I explained that the only thing I was clear about in my novel was precisely the identity of the narrator: a guy exactly like me who found himself in the exact same situation as I did. 'Then the narrator is yourself?' Rodney postulated. 'No way,' I said, content at being the one to confound him for a change. 'He's exactly like me, but it's not me.' Overdosing on Flaubert and Eliot's objectivism, I argued that the narrator of my novel couldn't be me because in that case I'd be obliged to talk about myself, which was not only a form of exhibitionism or immodesty, but also a literary error, because authentic literature never revealed the personality of the author, but rather hid it.'That's true,' agreed Rodney. 'But talking a lot about oneself is the best way of hiding.' Rodney didn't seem too interested in what I was telling or proposed to tell in my book; what did interest him was what I wasn't going to tell. 'In a novel what is not told is always more relevant than what is told,' he said another time. 'I mean that silences are more eloquent than words, and all narrative art consists of knowing when to shut up: that's why the best way to tell a story is not to tell it.' I listened to Rodney enthralled, almost as if he were an alchemist and each phrase he pronounced the necessary ingredient for an infallible potion, but it'sprobable that these discussions about my future frustrated novel — which in the long run would be decisive for me and that, though neither of us could have predicted it, were also going to be practically the last Rodney and I would have — contributed in the short run to confusing me, because the truth was that almost every week the direction of my book changed completely. I've already said that back then I was very young and lacking in experience and judgement, which are as useful to life as to literature and that explains why in those conversations about literature I paid inordinate attention to anodyne observations Rodney made and barely registered others that sooner or later would prove very useful; I could be mistaken, but I now tend to believe, although it's paradoxical — or precisely because it is — that what allowed me to survive Rodney's often delirious avalanche of lucidity without suffering irreparable damage was precisely my incapacity to distinguish the essential from the superfluous and the sensible from the senseless.

Finally, one morning at the beginning of December I handed Rodney the first pages of my novel, and the next day, when I arrived at the office, I asked him if he'd read them; he said we'd talk about the matter in Treno's, after Rota's class. I was impatient to know Rodney's opinion, but that afternoon the class was so exhausting that when we got to Treno's my impatience had passed or I'd forgotten about the novel, and the only thing I wanted was to have a beer and forget about Rota and the sinister-looking American, who during an endless hour had tortured me by obliging me to translate from Catalan to English and from English to Catalan a grotesque discussion about the similarities that linked a poem by J.V. Foix and another by Arnaut Daniel. So it's natural that when, after the second beer and without advance warning, Rodney asked me if I was sure I wanted to be a writer, I should have answered: