Javier Cercas - The Speed of Light

'Anything but a translator.' We laughed, or at least I laughed, but as I did I remembered another pending discussion, that about the first pages of my novel and, like a careless prolonging of the previous joke, I asked: 'Was it that bad?'

'Not bad,' Rodney answered. 'Dreadful.'

The comment was like a kick in the gut. I reacted quickly: I tried to explain that what he'd read was only a first draft, I tried to defend the approach of the novel I had in mind; in vain: Rodney took the pages of the novel out of the pocket of his coat, unfolded them and proceeded to pulverize the contents. He did it dispassionately, like a coroner performing an autopsy, which hurt even more; but what hurt most of all was that deep down I knew my friend was right. Depressed and furious, with all the bitterness accumulating while Rodney spoke, I asked him whether what I should do according to him was stop writing.

'I didn't say that,' he corrected me, impassively. 'What you should or shouldn't do is up to you. There's no writer who didn't start off writing garbage like this or worse, because to be a decent writer you don't even need talent: a little effort is enough. Besides, talent isn't something you have, it's something you conquer.'

'So why did you ask me if I was sure I wanted to be a writer?' I asked.

'Because you could just end up managing it.'

'And where's the problem?'

'It's a bitch of a job.'

'No worse than being a translator, I suppose. Not to mention a miner.'

'Don't be so sure,' he said with an uncertain gesture. 'I don't know, maybe only someone who can't be anything else should be a writer.'

I laughed as if trying to imitate the ferocious laughter of a kamikaze, or as if I were taking revenge.

'Come on, Rodney: don't tell me now you're going to reveal yourself as a fucking romantic. Or sentimental. Or a coward. I'm not the slightest bit afraid of failure.'

'Of course not,' he said. 'Because you don't have the slightest idea what it means. But who said anything about failure? I was talking about success.''

Oh, so that's it,' I said. 'Now I understand. The catastrophe of success. That's what it was. But that's not an idea, man: that's just a cliché.'

'Could be,' he said, and then, as if he were laughing at me or scolding me but didn't want me to suspect either of them, he added: 'But ideas don't become cliched because they're false, but because they're true, or at least contain a substantial part of truth. And when you get bored of truth and start saying original things in order to try to sound interesting, you end up saying nothing but nonsense. In the best cases original and even interesting nonsense, but nonsense.'

I didn't know how to answer and took a sip of beer. Noticing that sarcasm alleviated the outrage of my disappointment, I said: 'Well, at least after what you've read you'll admit that I'm immune to success.'

'Don't be too sure about that either,' Rodney replied. 'Maybe nobody's immune to success; maybe it's enough to be able to endure failure to get caught up by success. And then there's no escape. It's over. Finito. Kaput. Look at Scott, Hemingway: both of them were in love with success, and it killed them both, and long before they were buried. Especially poor Scott, who was the weaker and the most talented one and that's why the disaster caught him sooner and he didn't have time to notice that success is lethal, shameless, an unmitigated disaster, an endless humiliation. He liked it so much that when he got it he didn't even realize, although he kidded himself with protests of pride and demonstrations of cynicism, that actually he'd done nothing but search for it, and now that he had it in his hands it was useless to him and he could do nothing with it but let it corrupt him. And it corrupted him. It corrupted him till the end. You know what Oscar Wilde said: "There are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.'" Rodney laughed; I didn't. 'Anyway, what I mean is that no one dies for having failed, but it's impossible to survive success with dignity. No one says this, not even Oscar Wilde, because it's obvious or because it's very embarrassing, but that's the way it is. So, if you insist on being a writer, put off success as long as you can.'

While listening to Rodney I inevitably remembered my friend Marcos and our dreams of triumph and the masterpieces with which we thought we'd get our revenge on the world, and most of all I remembered one time, some years before, when Marcos told me that an insufferable classmate at the Faculty of Fine Arts had told him that the ideal condition for an artist is failure, and that he'd replied with a quote from the French writer Jules Renard: 'Yes, I know. All great men were ignored in their lifetimes; but I'm not a great man, so I'dprefer immediate renown.' I also thought Rodney was talking as if he knew what success and failure were, when actually he didn't know either one (or he didn't know them except by way of books or any more than me, who barely knew), and that actually his words were just the words of a loser soaked in the hypocritical and sickly mythology of failure that ruled a country hysterically obsessed with success. I thought all this and was about to say it to him, but I didn't say anything. What I did, after a silence, was mock Rodney's jeremiad.

'Fucked if you fail, fucked if you succeed,' I said. 'Great prospects.'

My friend didn't even smile.

'It's a really fucked-up job,' he said. 'But not because of that. Or not only because of that.'

'That seems minor to you?'

'Yeah,' he said, and then asked:

'What's a writer?' 'What do you think?' I lost patience. 'A guy who can string words together one after the other and is able to do so with flair.'

'Exactly,' Rodney approved. 'But it's also a guy who considers extremely complicated problems and who, instead of resolving them or trying to resolve them, like any sensible person, makes them even more complicated. That is: he's a nutcase who looks at reality, and sometimes sees it.'

'Everyone sees reality,' I objected, 'even if they're not nuts.'

'That's where you're mistaken,' Rodney said. 'Everybody looks at reality, but few people see it. The artist isn't the one who makes the invisible visible: that really is romanticism, although not the worst kind; the artist is the one who makes visible what's already visible and everybody looks at and nobody can or nobody knows how or nobody wants to see. Probably nobody wants to see. It's too unpleasant, often appalling, and you really have to have balls to see it without closing your eyes or running away, because whoever sees it is destroyed or goes crazy. Unless, of course, he has a shield to protect himself or he can do something with what he sees.' Rodney paused then went on: 'I mean normal people suffer or enjoy reality, but they're powerless to do anything with it, while the writer can, because his job consists of turning reality into meaning, even if it's an illusory meaning; that is, he can turn it into beauty and that beauty or that meaning are his shield. That's why I say that the writer is a nutcase who has the obligation or the dubious privilege of seeing reality, and that's why, when a writer stops writing, he ends up killing himself, because he hasn't been able to kick the habit of seeing reality but he no longer has his shield to protect himself from it. That's why Hemingway killed himself. And that's why once you're a writer you can't stop being one, unless you decide to risk your neck. Like I said: a really fucked-up job.'

That conversation could have turned out very badly — in fact it had all the signs of turning out very badly — but I don't know why it turned out better than any other, as Rodney and I left Treno's laughing our heads off and I was feeling more his friend than ever and wanting more than ever to become a real writer. Shortly after that the winter holidays began and, almost overnight, Urbana emptied: the students fled en masse to their homes, the streets, buildings and businesses of the campus were deserted and a strange sidereal (or maybe maritime) silence took over the city, as if it had suddenly turned into a planet spinning far from its orbit or into a gleaming ocean liner miraculously run aground in the endless snows of Illinois. The last time we were together at Treno's Rodney invited me to spend Christmas Day at his house in Rantoul. I declined the invitation: I explained that for a while Rodrigo Gines and I had been planning a road trip through the Midwest, along with Gudrun and an American friend of Gudrun's I'd slept with a couple of times (Barbara, she was called); I also said that, if he gave me his phone number in Rantoul, when I got back I'd give him a call so we could see each other before classes began again.