The Speed of Light Page 4

  'No. Why would it surprise me?'

  'Because not everyone writes novels,' I said.

  Now Rodney smiled.

  'That's true,' he said. 'Not even you.'

  'What do you mean?' I asked.

  'That you don't write novels, you're trying to write one, which is quite different. You'd do well not to confuse the two. Besides,' he added with no attempt to soften the harshness of his previous comment, 'no normal person reads as many novels as you do if not to end up writing them.'

  'You haven't written any,' I objected.

  'I'm not a normal person,' he answered.

  I wanted to ask him why he wasn't a normal person, but I couldn't, because Rodney quickly changed the subject.

  This interrupted conversation left me with such an unpleasant aftertaste that I cancelled our get-togethers in Treno's with the false excuse of being overwhelmed with work, but the following week we talked about the novel again and were reconciled, or rather we were reconciled and then we talked about the novel again. It wasn't in Treno's, nor in our office, but after a party at Wong's house. It happened like this. One day, as the Catalan class finished, Wong asked for the floor with a certain solemnity in order to explain that his end of term project in the Department of Theatre consisted in the staging of a one-act play and, with ceremonious humility, he assured us that it would be an honour for him if we would attend the dress rehearsal of the play, which would take place at his house that Friday evening, and tell him what we thought of it. Of course, I didn't have the slightest intention of turning up, but upon returning from the pool on Friday night, with an immense weekend devoid of activities stretching out before me, I must have thought that any excuse was a good one to avoid working and went to Wong's house. He received me with a great show of gratitude and surprise, and deferentially led me up to an attic room at one end of which was a clear space occupied only by a table and two chairs in front of which, on the floor, several spectators were already seated, among them the sinister-looking American from the Catalan literature class. Slightly embarrassed, as if I'd been caught out, I said hello, then I sat down beside him and we talked until Wong decided that no one else would show up and ordered the play to begin. What we watched was a work by Harold Pinter calledBetrayalperformed by acting students from the university; I don't remember the plot, but I do remember there were only four characters, that the chronology was reversed (it began at the end and ended at the beginning) and that it took place over several years and in several different locations, including a hotel room in Venice. Well into the play the doorbell rang. The performance did not pause, Wong got up quietly, went to open the door and immediately returned with Rodney, who, bending over so as not to bump his head on the sloping ceiling, came to sit down beside me.

  'What are you doing here?' I whispered to him.

  'And you?' he answered, with a wink.

  When the play finished we applauded enthusiastically and, after taking the stage to greet the audience in the company of his actors, with several bows prepared for the occasion, Wong announced that some light refreshments awaited us on the floor below. Rodney and I went down the attic stairs along with the sinister-looking American, who praised Wong's production and compared it to another he'd seen years before in Chicago. In the living room was a table covered with a paper tablecloth and heaped with sandwiches, canapes and large bottles; the guests swarmed around it eagerly, starting to drink and eat without waiting until the host and actors joined us. Following their example, I poured myself a glass of beer; following my example, Rodney poured himself a glass of Coke and began to eat a sandwich. Frugal or without appetite, the sinister-looking American chatted, cigarette in hand, with a very thin, very tall girl, whose underprivileged student look perfectly complemented my classmate's punk look. Rodney took advantage of his absence to talk.

  'What did you think?' he asked.

  'Of the play?'

  He nodded as he chewed. I shrugged.

  'Good,' I said. 'Pretty good.'

  Rodney's expression demanded an explanation.

  'Well,' I admitted, 'the truth is I'm not sure I understood it all'

  'I, on the other hand, am sure I didn't understand any of it,' Rodney said after emitting a grunt and swallowing his mouthful with a gulp of Coke. 'But I fear that's not Wong's fault but Pinter's. I can't remember where I read how he discovered his writing method. The guy was with his wife and he said to her: "Darling, I've got quite a few good scenes written, but they've got nothing to do with each other. What should I do?" And his wife answered: "Don't worry: you just put them all together, the critics will take care of explaining what they mean." And it worked: the proof is that there's not a single line of Pinter the critics don't understand perfectly.'

  I laughed, but I didn't make any comment on Rodney'scomment, because at that moment Wong and the actors appeared in the living room. There was an outbreak of applause, which didn't take off, and then I went over to Wong to congratulate him. We talked about the play for a while; then he introduced me one by one to the actors, and finally to his Catalan boyfriend, a blond, haughty, chubby-cheeked computer science student who, despite the displays of affection Wong lavished on him, gave the impression of doing his utmost to hide the nature of their relationship from me. Rodney didn't approach us; he didn't even say hello to Wong; he wasn't talking to anybody either. He was leaning against the frame of the door to the kitchen, perfectly still, with a half-smile on his face and a drink in his hand, just as though he was watching another production. I kept an eye on him surreptitiously, making sure I didn't meet his gaze: there he was, alone and as if invisible to all in the middle of the hubbub of the party. He didn't look uncomfortable; on the contrary: he seemed to be really enjoying the music and laughter and conversations that bubbled up around him, he seemed to be getting up the courage to break his self-imposed isolation and join in with any of the circles that were constantly forming and dissolving, but most of all (this occurred to me as I watched him watch a couple trying out a few dance steps at a clear end of the living room) he seemed like a child lost among adults or an adult lost among children or an animal lost in a herd of animals of a different species. Then I stopped spying on him and started to talk to one of the actresses, a quite good-looking blonde girl with freckles who told me how difficult Pinter was to perform; I told her how difficult Pinter was to understand, about Pinter's writing method, about Pinter's wife, about Pinter's critics; the girl looked at me very closely, unsure whether to get angry, feel flattered or laugh. When I looked around for Rodney again I didn't see him; I looked all round the living room: nothing. Then I went over to Wong and asked if he'd seen him.

  '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 facult
y 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, andthatmight 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:

  '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 anyth
ing 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.'