Javier Cercas: The Speed of Light

NOW I LEAD A false life, an apocryphal, clandestine, invisible life, though truer than if it were real, but I was still me when I met Rodney Falk. It was a long time ago and it was in Urbana, a city in the Midwest of the United States where I spent two years at the end of the eighties. The truth is that every time I ask myself why I ended up precisely there I tell myself I ended up there just as I might have ended up anywhere else. Let me explain why instead of ending up anywhere else I ended up precisely there.

It was by chance. Back then — seventeen years ago now — I was very young, I'd just graduated and a friend and I shared a dark, dank apartment on calle Pujol, in Barcelona, very close to plaza Bonanova. My friend was called Marcos Luna, he was from Gerona like me and in reality he was both more and less than a friend: we'd grown up together, played together, gone to school together, we had the same friends. Marcos had always wanted to be a painter; not me: I wanted to be a writer. But we'd done two useless degrees and we didn't have proper jobs and we were as poor as could be, so Marcos didn't paint and I didn't write, or we only did in those rare spare moments we were left by the more than full-time job of surviving. We barely got by. He gave classes at a school as dank as the apartment we lived in and I did piecework for a publisher run by slave drivers (copy-editing, correcting translations, proof-reading), but since our miserable salaries combined weren't even enough to keep ourselves housed and fed, we took on anything we could scrape up here and there, no matter how peculiar, from proposing a list of possible names for a new airline to an advertising company to putting the archives of the Hospital del Vail d'Hebron in order, as well as writing unpaid song lyrics for a floundering musician friend. Otherwise, when we weren't working or writing or painting, we wandered around the city, smoked marijuana, drank beer and talked about the masterpieces with which we'd one day take our revenge on a world that, despite our never having exhibited a single painting or published a single story, we felt was blatantly ignoring us. We didn't know any painters or writers, we didn't go to art openings or book launches but we probably liked to imagine ourselves as two bohemians in an era when bohemians no longer existed or as two terrible kamikazes ready to explode cheerfully against reality; in fact we were nothing more than two arrogant provincials lost in the capital, lonely and furious, and the only sacrifice we felt unable to make for anything in the world was to return to Gerona, because that would amount to giving up the dreams of triumph we'd always cherished. We were brutally ambitious. We aspired to fail. But not simply to fail any old way: we aspired to total, radical, absolute failure. It was our way of aspiring to success.

One night in the spring of 1987 something happened that would change everything. Marcos and I had just left the house when, right at the intersection of Muntaner and Arimon, we ran into Marcelo Cuartero. Cuartero was a professor of literature at the Autonomous University of Barcelona whose dazzling lectures I'd attended with enthusiasm, despite being a mediocre student. He was a heavy-set, short, red-headed man in his fifties, a sloppy dresser, with a big, sad turtle face dominated by bad-guy eyebrows and sarcastic, slightly intimidating eyes; he was also one of the foremost experts on the nineteenth-century novel, had led the university protests against the Franco regime in the sixties and seventies and, it was said (though this was difficult to deduce from his classes or his books, scrupulously free of any political content), was still a heartfelt, resigned and unrepentant communist. Cuartero and I had spoken once or maybe twice in the corridor when I was a student, but that night he stopped to talk to me and to Marcos, told us he was coming home from a literary gathering that met every Friday in the Oxford, a nearby bar, and, as if the meeting hadn't satisfied his conversational craving, asked me what I was reading and we started talking about literature; then he invited us for a drink in El Yate, a bar with huge windows and burnished wood where Marcos and I didn't often go, because it seemed too posh for our skimpy budget. Leaning on the bar, we spent a while talking about books, at the end of which Cuartero suddenly asked me where I was working; since Marcos was there, I wasn't brave enough to lie to him, but I did all I could to embellish the truth. He, however, must have guessed, because that was when he told me about Urbana. Cuartero said he had a good friend there, at the University of Illinois, and that his friend had told him that next term the Spanish department was offering several teaching-assistant scholarships to Spanish graduates.

'I have no idea what the city's like,' Marcelo admitted. 'The only thing I know about it is from Some Like it Hot'

'Some Like it Hot?' Marcos and I asked in unison.

'The movie,' he answered. 'At the beginning Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis have to play a concert in a freezing Midwestern city, near Chicago, but due to some trouble with gangsters they end up running away to Florida disguised as girl musicians and living it up like crazy. Well anyway, Urbana is the freezing city they never get to, so I guess Urbana must not be too wonderful or at least it must be the total opposite of Florida, supposing that Florida is so wonderful. Anyway, that's all I know. But the university is good, and I think the job is too. They pay you a salary to give language classes, just enough to live on, and you have to enrol in the doctoral programme. Nothing too demanding. Besides, you want to be a writer, don't you?'

I felt my cheeks flare up. Without daring to look at Marcos I stammered out something, but Cuartero interrupted me:

'Well, a writer has to travel. You'll see different things, meet new people, read other books. That's healthy. Anyway,' he concluded, 'if you're interested, give me a call.'

Cuartero left not long after that, but Marcos and I stayed in El Yate, ordered another beer and spent a while drinking and smoking in silence; we both knew what the other was thinking, and we both knew that the other knew. We thought that Cuartero had just said in a few words what we'd been thinking for a long time without saying it: we were thinking that, besides reading everything, a writer should travel and see the world and accumulate experiences, and that the United States — any place in the United States — was the ideal place to do all those things and become a writer; we were thinking that a steady, paid job that left time to write was much more than I could dream of finding at that moment in Barcelona; too young or too naive to know what it means for a life to be going to hell, we thought our lives were going to hell.

'Well,' said Marcos eventually and, knowing the decision was already made, drained his glass in one gulp. 'Another beer?'

So it was that, six months after this chance encounter with Marcelo Cuartero, after an interminable flight with stopovers in London and New York, I ended up in Urbana just as I might have ended up anywhere else. I remember the first thing I thought when I arrived, as the Greyhound bus that brought me from Chicago entered a succession of deserted avenues flanked by little houses with porches, redbrick buildings with meticulous flowerbeds that shimmered beneath the burning August sky, was how tremendously lucky Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon had been in