The Speed of Light Page 11

  It happened three years ago, but it didn't happen by chance. A few months earlier I'd published a novel that hinged on a tiny episode of the Spanish Civil War; except for its subject matter, it wasn't a very different novel from my previous novels — although it was more complex and less timely, perhaps more eccentric — but, to everyone's surprise and with very few exceptions, the critics received it with a certain enthusiasm, and in the short space of time since its publication it had sold more copies than all my previous books put together, which to tell the truth still wasn't enough to turn it into a bestseller: at most it was asucces d'estime,although in any case that was more than enough to provoke happiness or even euphoria in someone like me, who by that stage had begun to fall into that habitual scepticism of those forty-something scribblers who've long since silently dumped the furious aspirations of glory they'd nourished in their youth and have resigned themselves to the golden mediocrity the future has in store for them with hardly any sadness or any more cynicism than strictly necessary to survive with some semblance of dignity.

  It was at that moment of unexpected joy that Rodney reappeared. One Saturday night, when I returned from a promotional tour of several cities in Andalucia, Paula greeted me at home with the news that Rodney had been in Gerona that very day.

  'Who?' I asked incredulously.

  'Rodney,' Paula repeated. 'Rodney Falk. Your friend from Urbana.'

  Of course, I'd often talked to Paula about Rodney, but that didn't diminish the shock of hearing that foreign and familiar name coming from the lips of my wife. Paula went on to tell me about Rodney's visit. Apparently, the doorbell had rung midway through the morning; since she wasn'texpecting anyone, before opening the door she looked out through the peephole, and was so alarmed by the sight of a heavy-set stranger with his right eye covered with a veteran's cloth patch that she was tempted to keep quiet and not answer. Her curiosity, however, was stronger than her anxiety, and she ended up asking who it was. Rodney identified himself, asked for me, said who he was again, and Paula finally clicked, opened the door, told him I was away, invited him in and made some coffee. While they were drinking it, watched by Gabriel from a suspicious distance, Rodney told her he'd been travelling around Spain for a week, and had arrived in Barcelona three days ago, seen my latest book in a bookshop, bought it, read it, called the publisher's office and, after trying and trying and finally tricking one of the publicists, managed to get them to give him my address. It wasn't long before Gabriel abandoned his initial distrust and — according to Paula, maybe because he was amused by Rodney's orthopaedic Spanish, or his impossible Catalan learned from me in Urbana, or because Rodney had the shrewdness or instinct to treat him like an adult, which is the best way to win over children — hit it off immediately with my friend, so before Paula knew it Gabriel and Rodney were playing ping pong in the garden. The three of them spent the day together, wandering around the old part of the city and spending a long time in a bar on the plaza de Sant Domenec playing table football, a game Gabriel loved and Rodney had never seen, which didn't stop him, according to Paula, playing with the passion of a novice and celebrating every goal with shouts, hugging Gabriel and lifting him up in the air and kissing him. So at dusk, when Rodney announced he had to leave, Gabriel and Paula tried to persuade him to change his mind with the argument that I'd be back in just a few hours; they didn't succeed: Rodney claimed he had to catch a train that same night from Barcelona to Pamplona, where he planned to spend the San Fermin fiestas.

  'He's staying here,' said Paula at the conclusion of her tale, handing me a piece of paper with a name and telephone number scrawled in Rodney's pointy and unmistakable hand. 'Hotel Albret.'

  That night a double uneasiness kept me awake, only half related to Rodney's visit. On the one hand, it was barely twenty-four hours since I'd slept with the local writer who'dpresented my book in Malaga; it wasn't the first time in the last few months I'd been unfaithful to Paula, but after each tryst I was viciously tortured by remorse for days. But on the other hand I was also uneasy about Rodney's unexpected reappearance, his reappearance precisely at the moment I became established as a writer, perhaps as if I feared my friend had not shown up to celebrate my success, but to reveal the sham of it, humiliating me with the memory of my farcical beginnings as an aspiring writer in Urbana. I think I fell asleep that night before I extinguished the remorse, but having decided I wouldn'tphone Rodney and would try to forget about his visit as soon as possible.

  The next day, however, there didn't seem to be any topic of conversation in my house other than Rodney. Among other things Paula and Gabriel told me that my friend lived in Burlington, a city in the state of Vermont, that he had a wife and had just had a son, and that he worked for a real estate agency. I don't know what surprised me more: the fact that Rodney, always so reluctant to talk to me about his private life, had talked about it to Paula and Gabriel, or the no less puzzling fact that, judging from what he'd told my wife and son, Rodney now led the tranquil life of a husband and father incompatible with the man secretly corroded by his past who, though no one could have suspected it, he still had been in Urbana, just as if the time gone by since then had eventually cured his war wounds and allowed him to emerge from the interminable tunnel of misfortune through which he'd walked alone and in darkness for thirty years. On Monday Paula got the photographs that she and Gabriel had taken with Rodney developed; they were happy photos: most showed just Gabriel and Rodney (in one they're playing table football; in another they're sitting on the cathedral steps; in another they're walking along the Rambla, holding hands); but in two of them Paula appeared as well: one was taken on Les Peixeteries Velles bridge, the other at the station entrance, just before Rodney caught his train. Finally, on Tuesday morning, after having turned the matter over and over in my mind, I decided to call Rodney. It wasn't because Paula and Gabriel asked me again and again during those three days if I'd spoken to him yet, but for three distinct but complementary reasons: the first is that I realized I wanted to talk to Rodney; the second is that I came to understand that the suspicion that Rodney had come to rain on my parade was absurd and petty; the third —though not the least important — is that by then I'd spent more than half a year without writing a single line, and at some point it occurred to me that if I managed to talk to Rodney about his time in Vietnam and throw light on the blind spots of that story as I knew it from the testimony of his father and the letters Rodney and Bob had sent from the front, then maybe I'd get a complete understanding of it and be able to safely tackle the ever-postponed task of telling it.

  So on Tuesday morning I phoned the Hotel Albret in Pamplona and asked for Rodney. To my surprise, the receptionist told me he wasn't staying there. Since I thought there'd been a mistake, I insisted and, after a few seconds, the receptionist told me that in fact Rodney had stayed in the hotel on Sunday night, but on Monday morning he'dsuddenly cancelled his five-night reservation and left for Madrid. 'He left word that if anyone asked for him to say he'd be at the Hotel San Antonio de La Florida,' the receptionist added. I asked if they had the telephone number of the hotel; he said no. I hung up. I picked up the phone. I got the number for the Hotel San Antonio de La Florida from directory inquiries; I called and asked for Rodney. 'One moment, please.' I waited a moment, after which I again heard the voice of the receptionist. 'I'm sorry,' he said. 'Senor Falk is not in his room.' The next morning I phoned the hotel again, I asked for Rodney again. 'He just went out,' the same receptionist told me (or maybe it was another). Furious, I was about to slam down the receiver, but I stopped myself in time to ask how many days Rodney had reserved his room for. 'He'll still be here tonight,' answered the receptionist. 'But not tomorrow.' I thanked him and hung up the phone. Half an hour later, once I arrived at the conclusion that if I lost Rodney's trail I'd never find it again, I called the hotel again and reserved a room for that night. Then I called Paula at the newspaper, I told her I was going to Madrid to see Rodney, packed a change of clothes, a boo
k and the three document cases with Rodney's and his brother's letters and left for Barcelona airport.

  I landed in Madrid at six, and forty minutes later, after skirting the city along the M-30, a taxi dropped me off at the Hotel San Antonio de La Florida, in the neighbourhood of La Florida, just across the street from the Principe Pio railway station. It was a modest hotel, whose fa$ade gave onto a noisy sidewalk filled with old-fashioned bars and patios. I crossed a hall and went up some carpeted steps that led to a spacious foyer; at one end was the reception, flanked by two phone booths and a plastic pyramid of tourist postcards. I registered, they gave me the key to my room, I asked for Rodney. The receptionist — a very neat, sallow-skinned, bespectacled man — consulted the registry and then a set of pigeonholes.

  'Room 334,' was his answer. 'But he's not there now. Do you want me to give him a message when he comes back?' '

  Tell him I'm staying in the hotel,' I answered. 'And that I'm waiting for him.'

  The receptionist wrote down the message on a piece of paper and a bellhop led me to a tiny, slightly sordid room with cream-coloured walls and blood-red doors and frames. I got undressed, had a shower, got dressed again. Lying on a hard old bed covered by a bedspread with a floral print identical to the one on the drawn curtains, which spared the vision of a knot of highways and a densely treed corner of the Casa de Campo, beyond which began the outskirts of the city, expecting Rodney to knock on my door at any moment, I kept myself busy imagining our encounter. I wondered how Rodney would have changed since the last time I'd seen him, a winter night fourteen years earlier, on the snowy sidewalk in front of Treno's; I wondered if his father would have told him about my visit to Rantoul and what he'd told me about him; I wondered if he'd agree to talk to me about his years in Vietnam, to explain to me what had happened in My Khe, who Tommy Birban was; I wondered why he'd gone to Gerona to see me and what he thought of my novel. Until, consumed with impatience or tired of wondering, towards nine I went back downstairs to reception and asked the receptionist to tell Rodney when he arrived that I was waiting for him in the cafe.

  The café was very busy. I sat at the only free table, ordered a beer and buried myself in the novel I'd brought from home. Several beers later I ordered a sandwich, and then a coffee and a double whisky. Time went by; people came and went from the place, but Rodney still didn't show up. It must have been very late by the time I ordered a second coffee, because the euphoric effect of the whisky and the first coffee had completely vanished. 'I'm sorry,' the waiter answered. 'We're just closing.' I persuaded him to serve me a coffee in a plastic cup and, carrying it, went up to the foyer, where at that moment the receptionist was attending to a pair of late arrivals. Hours earlier, when I had come down to eat, the foyer was brightly lit by a row of spotlights pointed at the ceiling, but now it had been overtaken by a darkness only lessened by the light of the reception desk and that of a couple of floor lamps whose circle of light barely managed to drag from the shadows the prints of old Madrid, the Goyaesque lithographs and the charmless still lifes that decorated the walls. I sat beneath the light of one of the lamps, my back to the big window that ran the length of the room and almost at the top of the steps that came up from the entrance, facing a wall clock that showed two o'clock; beyond, beneath another lamp, a man sat alone watching a black and white film on the television. The man soon turned off the television and took the elevator up to his room. By then the receptionist had dealt with the pair of tourists and was dozing behind the counter. I kept waiting and, pausing from my reading, disheartened by fatigue and sleepiness, wondered whether Rodney hadn't escaped again and the most sensible thing might not be to go to bed.

  Shortly after that he appeared. I heard the street door open and, as I'd done each time that had happened, waited expectantly for a moment; this time I saw Rodney emerge from the shadows of the stairway and, without noticing my presence, head towards the reception desk with his quick and stumbling gait. While Rodney woke up the receptionist from his snooze, I felt my heart in my mouth: I set my book down on the coffee table beside my chair, got up and stood there, without managing to take a step or say anything, as if bewitched by the expected appearance of my friend. The receptionist's voice shattering the silence of the foyer broke the spell. '

  That man is waiting for you,' he said to Rodney, pointing over his shoulder.

  Rodney turned around and, after a few seconds' hesitation, began to advance towards me, peering through the semi-darkness of the room with a look more inquisitive than incredulous, as if his poor eyes couldn't quite recognize me.

  'Well, well, well,' he finally croaked when he was a few steps away from me, smiling with his whole mouthful of mistreated teeth and throwing open two arms like sails. 'I can't believe it. The celebrated author in person. But what the hell are you doing here?'

  He didn't give me time to answer: we hugged. '

  Have you been waiting long?' he asked. '

  A while,' I answered. 'Yesterday I phoned the number in Pamplona you gave Paula and they told me you were staying here. I tried to get in touch with you, but I couldn't, this afternoon I got on a plane and came to Madrid.'

  'Just to see me?' he feigned surprise, shaking me by the shoulders. 'You could have at least told me you were coming. I would have been waiting for you.'

  As if he were apologizing, Rodney recounted the circumstances that had disrupted his travel arrangements. At first, he explained, his plan had been to spend the week of San Fermin in Pamplona, but when he arrived in the city last Sunday and checked into the Hotel Albret — a hotel quite a distance from the centre, near the university clinic —he realized he'd made a mistake and that it wasn't worth running the risk of letting the realSanferminesspoil the radiant fictionalSanferminesthat Hemingway had taught him to remember. So the next day he packed his bags again, cancelled his hotel reservation and, without allowing himself even a glimpse of the festive city, went to Madrid. That said, Rodney began describing the circuitous itinerary of his trip through Spain, and then talked enthusiastically about his visit to Gerona, about Gabriel and about Paula. As he did so I was trying to superimpose my precarious memory of him on the reality of this man I now had before me; despite the fourteen years that had passed since the last time I'd seen him, the fit was almost perfect, with barely any need for adjustments, because in all that time Rodney'sphysical appearance hadn't changed much: maybe the pounds he'd put on gave him a less stony and more vulnerable air, maybe his features had softened a little, maybe his body leaned a little further to the right, but he dressed with the same militant sloppiness as ever — running shoes, faded jeans, blue checked shirt — and his long hair, reddish and a bit messy, the permanent restlessness of his eyes which were almost different colours and his ungainly heaviness still gave him that lost pachyderm air of my memories.

  At some point Rodney broke off his explanation mid-sentence with another explanation.

  'Tomorrow I'm catching the 7 a.m. train for Seville,' he said. 'We've got the whole night ahead of us. Shall we go have a drink?'

  We asked at the desk for a nearby bar where we could have a drink, but he told us that all the ones in the neighbourhood were closed by that time, and in the centre we'd only find the clubs open. Annoyed, we asked him if he could serve us something in the foyer.

  'I'm sorry,' he said. 'But there is a coffee machine on the first floor.'

  We went up to the first floor laughing about Madrid's nonstop nightlife which, according to Rodney, the travel guides all touted, and then returned to the hall with the concoction from the coffee machine and sat down on the sofa where I'd been waiting for him. Rodney couldn't resist the temptation of taking a quick glance at the cover of the novel lying on the table; since I noticed he made a perplexed grimace, I couldn't resist the temptation of asking him if he knew the author.