The Speed of Light (25 page)

'Don't worry.' I ventured: 'I suppose I'm looking for a son.'

Jenny nodded, barely smiling; I thought she was going to say something, but she didn't say anything. She put her hand in her trouser pocket, in a gesture I thought shy or embarrassed, as if she couldn't quite decide how we should say goodbye, and then she held it out to me; when I took it, I noticed something cold and metallic: it was Rodney's Zippo. Jenny didn't give me time to react.

'Goodbye,' she said.

And she turned around and began to walk away. After a moment of indecision I put the Zippo in my pocket, got in the car, started it and, waiting to pull out onto the avenue that led out of Rantoul, I looked to the left and saw her in the distance, walking along the sidewalk in the shade, alone and resolved and fragile and nevertheless inspired by something like an inflexible, resolute pride, getting smaller as she went into the city, and I don't know why I thought of a bird, a hummingbird or a heron or more likely a swallow, and then I thought of the poster of John Wayne which hung on a wall of Bud's Bar and that Rodney would have seen so many times and Jenny too, no doubt, absurdly I thought of these two things while I kept watching her and waiting for her to sense my gaze at some moment and turn around and look back at me, as if that last gesture could also be an unmistakable sign of assent. But Jenny didn't turn around, didn't look at me, so I pulled out onto the avenue and drove out of Rantoul.

When I arrived in Urbana that morning I had already devised quite a precise plan of what I'd do over the next months, or rather the next years; as is logical, that plan envisaged the risk that reality would end up distorting it, but not to the point of making it unrecognizable. That, for better or worse — I'll never know whether it was more for the better or for the worse — is what happened though.

I returned to Spain after impatiently fulfilling my remaining commitments in Urbana and Los Angeles, and the first thing I did when I landed in Barcelona was look for a new flat, because as soon as I walked into the apartment in Sagrada Familia I realized it was an irredeemable pigsty. I found one immediately — a small apartment with lots of light on calle Floridablanca, not far from plaza de Espana —and as soon as I was settled in there I began to write this book. Since then I've hardly done anything else. Since then — and it's been about six months now — I feel that the life I'm living is not true, but rather false, a clandestine, hidden, apocryphal life but truer than if it were true. The change of flat made it easy to cover my tracks, so until recently no one knew where I lived. I didn't see anyone, I didn't talk to anyone, I didn't read the papers, I didn't watch television, I didn't listen to the radio. I was more alive than ever, but it was as if I were dead and writing was the only way of evoking life, the last thread that kept me joined to it. Writing and, until recently, Jenny. Because when I got back from Urbana, Jenny and I began to write to each other almost daily. At first our emails were exclusively concerned with the book I was writing about Rodney: I asked her questions, requested details and clarifications, and she answered me with diligence and application; then, little by little and almost imperceptibly, the messages began to be about other things — about Dan, about Rantoul, about her life and Dan's in Rantoul, about me and my invisible life in Barcelona, once in a while about Paula and Gabriel — and after a few weeks I'd discovered that this method of communication allowed for or encouraged more intimacy than any other. That was how I began a long, slow, complicated, sinuous and delicate process of seduction. Perhaps that's not quite the right word: perhaps the exact word is persuasion. Or maybe demonstration. I don't know which word Jenny would choose. It doesn't matter; what matters aren't the words, but the facts. And the fact is that, while I was as deeply involved in that process as in the book I was writing, I never stopped imagining my life when both were finished and I would live with Dan and Jenny in Rantoul. I imagined a placid and provincial life like the one I'd once feared and then had and later destroyed, a life that was also apocryphal and true, in the middle of nowhere. I imagined myself getting up very early, having breakfast with Dan and Jenny and then taking them to school and work and then shutting myself up to work until it was time to go and pick them up, first Dan and then Jenny, I'd go and pick them up and we'd go home and get dinner ready and have dinner and then after dinner we'd play or read or watch television or talk until sleep would overtake us one by one, and none of the three of us would ever want to admit, even to ourselves, that this daily routine was in reality a kind of spell, a magic trick with which we wanted to make the past reversible and bring the dead back to life. Other times I imagined myself lying in a hammock, in the back garden, beside the shed in which, once upon a time so long ago that it no longer seemed real, Rodney hanged himself, on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon at the end of spring or the beginning of the burning hot Rantoul summer, with Dan and his friends shouting and playing around me while I haphazardly read Hemingway and Thoreau and Emerson, sometimes even Merce Rodoreda, while I listened to Bob Dylan and shared sips of whisky and tokes of marijuana with Jenny, who came and went from the house to the garden: from there Gabriel's and Paula's deaths would be left very far away, Vietnam would be left very far away, success and fame would be left as far away as the miniscule clouds that every now and then blocked out the sun, and then I would see myself as the hippie Rodney must have been more than thirty years ago and that he never wanted to stop being. That's how I saw myself, that's how I imagined myself, happy and a little high, somehow converted into Rodney or into the instrument of Rodney, watching Dan as if I were really watching Gabriel, watching Jenny as if I were really watching Paula. And while I was imagining my happy future life in Rantoul in those months in Barcelona and continuing the long, slow, sinuous seduction or persuasion of Jenny by the intimacy of email, not one single day went by when I did not sit down at this desk and devote myself fully to the long-postponed task entrusted to me of writing this story that maybe Rodney had always been training me to write, this story I don't understand nor will I ever understand and that nevertheless, as I imagined as I was writing it, I was obliged to tell because it can only be understood if it's told by someone who, like me, will never entirely understand it, and especially because it's also my story and also Gabriel's and Paula's. So for a long time I wrote and seduced and persuaded and demonstrated and imagined, until one day, when I felt the process of seduction was mature and that, although I didn't yet know exactly how this book was going to end, I undoubtedly almost had the ending in my sights, I decided to state my plans openly to Jenny. I did so fearlessly with no beating about the bush, just as if I were reminding her of a pledge we'd both made some time ago like someone accepting a happy fate, because by that stage, after months of writing to her almost daily and insinuating ever less cryptically my intentions, I was sure my words couldn't come as a surprise to her, and also that she'd receive them with delight.

It didn't happen like that. Incredibly — at least incredibly to me — both certainties proved false. Jenny took a while to answer my message, and when she finally did it was to thank me for my proposal and immediately turn it down affectionately but categorically. 'It wouldn't work,' Jenny wrote to me. 'Anticipating something is not enough to make it happen, neither is wanting it. This isn't algebra or geometry: when you're talking about people, two plus two never makes four. I mean none of us can replace anybody: Dan can't replace Gabriel, I can't replace Paula; you, no matter how much you want to, can't replace Rodney.' . . . 'Finish the book,' Jenny concluded. 'You owe it to Rodney. You owe it to Gabriel and to Paula. You owe it to Dan and to me. Most of all you owe it to yourself. Finish it and then, if you feel like it, come and spend a few days with us. We'll be waiting for you.' Jenny's reply left me dumbfounded, unable to react, as if someone had just punched me and I didn't know who or how or why they'd punched me. I reread it, I reread it again; I understood all the words, but found it impossible to take them in. I was so convinced that my future was in Rantoul, with Dan and with her, that I hadn't even imagined an alternative future if that one proved illusory or failed. Furthermore, Jenny's refusal was so unequivocal and her arguments so watertight that I didn't have the strength to try to refute them and insist on my proposal.

I didn't answer Jenny's message: there wasn't going to be any magic trick, there wasn't going to be any spell, I wasn't going to recover what I'd lost. I suddenly saw myself returning to my old underground life; I suddenly thought I understood it was absurd to keep writing this book. And I was about to abandon it definitively when I discovered exactly how it ended and why I had to finish it. It happened a little while after I found a cigarette packet full of joints sticking out of the slot of my mailbox as I was on my way out to have lunch one afternoon. I couldn't help but smile. The next morning I phoned Marcos, and two days later we arranged to meet for a beer in El Yate.

It was Marcos who chose the bar. When I arrived, quite a while before the time we'd arranged, my friend was already there, sitting on a stool, his back to the door and elbows on the bar. Without a word I sat down beside him and ordered a beer; Marcos didn't say anything either, or look up from his glass. It was a Thursday in the middle of October, and the last light of the afternoon was about to fade from the windows overlooking the corner of Muntaner and Arimon. While I was waiting for my beer I asked:

'How did you track me down?'

Marcos sighed before answering.

'By accident,' he said. 'I saw you on the street the other day and followed you. I knew you'd moved, but you could at least have let me know. I'm not rich enough to be throwing marijuana away.'

'You haven't thrown it away,' I said. 'I'm sure whoever rented the apartment after me was very grateful to you.'

'Very funny.' He turned to look at me. Then he said: 'How are you?'

With some apprehension I too turned around. At first glance he didn't remind me of the aged forty-year-old of our last encounter, in the MACBA or the Palau Robert, the same disastrous night I tried to seduce Patricia; he just looked tired, maybe bored: in fact, the faded jeans, the baggy blue sweater and the lighter blue untucked shirt gave him an air of vaguely youthful sloppiness, not entirely contradicted by his thinning, grey hair or his thick and slightly old-fashioned tortoiseshell glasses; two days' stubble shadowed his cheeks. As I was studying him I felt myself studied by him, and before answering his question I wondered if I was reminding him of a ghost or a zombie.

'Fine,' I lied. 'And you?'

'Me too.'

I nodded approvingly. The bartender brought my beer, I took a sip, lit a cigarette and then I gave a light to Marcos, who stared at Rodney's Zippo; I looked at it too: for a moment it seemed a remote and strange object, a tiny meteorite or a fossil or a survivor of an ice age; for a second it seemed like the dog engraved on it wasn't smiling at me, but mocking me. I put the lighter down on the bar, on top of the cigarette packet; I asked:

'How's Patricia?'

Marcos sighed again.

'We split up a year or so ago,' he said. 'I thought you knew.'

'I didn't know.'

'Well, it doesn't matter,' he said as if it really didn't matter, running his hand over his stubble; I noticed a blotch of paint darkening his ring finger. 'I suppose we'd been together too long and, well. . . She's been living in Madrid for a few months now, so I haven't seen her.'

I didn't say anything. We kept drinking and smoking in silence, and at some point I inevitably remembered the last time I'd been in El Yate, sixteen years before, with Marcos and with Marcelo Cuartero, when he suggested I go to Urbana and the whole thing started. I looked along the bar. I remembered a luxurious uptown place, inaccessible given our destitute finances, frequented by executives and shiny with mirrors and polished wood, but the place where I now found myself seemed (or at least seemed to me) more like a dark village tavern: certain details of the decoration pathetically strained to mimic the interior of a yacht — dull seascapes, lamps in the shape of anchors, a pendulum clock in the shape of a tennis racket — but there were also horrible pink curtains tied back against window frames painted a horrible green, trays of rancid-looking tapas lined up on the unpolished bar, slot machines blinking their urgent promise of riches, the waiters' uniforms dusted with dandruff and the clientele of solitary ladies drinking Marie Brizard and solitary men drinking gin, who every once in a while exchanged comments seasoned by alcohol and cynicism, all of which drew El Yate closer to Bud's Bar than to my memory of El Yate. Suddenly I felt at ease there, with my cigarette and beer in hand, as if I should never have left that Barcelona bar with its village bar atmosphere; suddenly I asked Marcos why he'd suggested we meet precisely there.

'Why did you suggest we meet here?' I asked.

'I haven't been here for ages,' he said. And he added: 'It hasn't changed a bit.'

Perplexed, I asked him if he meant the bar.

'I mean the bar, the calle Pujol, the neighbourhood, all of it,' he answered. 'I bet even our apartment is exactly the same, for fuck's sake.'

I smiled.

'You're not going to start getting nostalgic?'

'Nostalgic?' The interrogative tone contained not surprise but annoyance, an annoyance that verged on irritation. 'Why nostalgic? That wasn't the best time we ever had in our lives. It might seem like it sometimes, but it wasn't.'