The Speed of Light (4 page)

'Against General Electric,' Gines repeated, interrupting his tale. 'Shit! And I didn't even know there still was a Socialist Workers' Party in this country!'

Gines explained that he stood staring at Rodney not knowing what to say at that moment and Rodney stood staring at him not knowing what to say. A few endless seconds passed, during which, according to him, he felt successively like laughing and crying, and then, as the silence went on and he waited for Rodney to say something or for something to occur to him to say, the image of General Pinochet's face appeared in his mind, that immobile face with its invisible gaze behind those perpetual sunglasses, sitting in a box in the Military School Theatre in Santiago, while he and his colleagues in the Symphony Orchestra played the
Adagio & Allegro
by Saint-Saens or Dvorak's
Rondo capriccioso,
either of the two pieces but never any other, and almost unwittingly tried to imagine what General Pinochet would have thought or said to Rodney in a situation like that, thought about the budget of the Chilean State that Pinochet administered and also thought, with a satisfaction that he still didn't entirely understand, that, compared with the president of General Electric, Pinochet was like the foreman of an asbestos factory whose workers wouldn't outnumber the members of the Socialist Workers' Party (or the faction of the Socialist Workers' Party) Rodney belonged to or supported. Finally it was Rodney who broke the spell. 'Well,' he said. 'I'm done now. Do you want a lift to the faculty?'

'That was it,' Gines concluded in his Chilean tone, finishing off his wine and opening his eyes wide and his hands in a perplexed gesture. 'He gave me a lift to the faculty and there we parted. But I spent the whole day with the strangest feeling, as if that morning I'd mistakenly snuck into a Dadaist play in which I unintentionally ended up playing the lead part.'

Knowing Gines as I eventually came to know him, I'm sure he didn't relate this anecdote with the intention of preventing Rodney from contributing to the journal, but the fact is that Rodney's name was never mentioned again during that or any other
Linea Plural
meeting. Apart from that, I'll also say that in Rodney's company I, too, sometimes felt like I had wandered into a play or a joke (sometimes a disturbing or even sinister joke) that didn't fit into any known genre or aesthetic and that meant nothing, but that concerned me so intimately it was as if someone had written it deliberately for me. Other times the impression was the opposite: that it wasn't me but Rodney who was acting in a play — which at times promised to reveal areas of my friend's personality impervious to the almost involuntary scrutiny to which I subjected it during our conversations in Treno's — the real significance of which I touched and was about to grasp but in the end slipped through my fingers like water, just as if Rodney's transparent veneer hid nothing but a background that was also transparent. I can't omit here an episode that happened not long after we began to be friends, because in light of certain events that I found out about much later it acquires an ambiguous but eloquent resonance.

Some Friday evenings I'd go swimming at an indoor pool belonging to the university that was located about a twenty-minute walk from my house. I'd swim for an hour or an hour and a half, sometimes even two, sit in the sauna for a while, have a shower and go home exhausted and happy and with the feeling of having eliminated all the superfluous material accumulated during the week. One of those Fridays, just as I came out of the sports centre, I saw Rodney. He was across the street, sitting on a concrete bench, facing a wide, treeless expanse of grass on the other side of a flimsy wire fence, with his arms crossed, the patch over his eye and his legs crossed as well, as if idly drinking in the last rays of the evening sun. Seeing him there surprised me and pleased me: it surprised me because I knew Rodney didn't have any classes on Friday afternoons and I also thought I knew that my friend didn't stay in Urbana any more than strictly necessary and, except for the two days of our literary chats in Treno's, he returned to Rantoul as soon as he finished his academic obligations; it pleased me because there's nothing I'd rather do after exercise than have a beer and a cigarette and talk for a while. But, as I got closer to Rodney and past a hedge that had bloc'ked my view of the lawn, I realized my friend was not sunning himself, but watching a group of children who were playing in front of him. There were four of them and they were eight or nine, maybe ten years old, they were wearing jeans and T-shirts and baseball caps and they were throwing and catching a Frisbee that went back and forth between them spinning and gliding like a flying saucer; I imagined their parents wouldn't be too far away, but from where I was, on the opposite sidewalk, I couldn't make them out. And then, when I was going to cross the street and say hello to Rodney, I stopped. I don't really know why I did, but I think it was because I noticed something strange in my friend, something that struck me as dissuasive or perhaps threatening, a frozen stiffness in his posture, a painful, almost unbearable tension, in the way he was sitting and watching the children play. I was twenty or thirty metres from him, so I couldn't see his face clearly, or I could only see his profile. Immobile, I remember that I thought: he wants to laugh so badly he can't laugh. Then I thought: no, he's crying and he'll keep crying and won't stop crying, if he ever does stop crying, until the children have gone. Then I thought: no, he wants to cry so badly that he can't cry. Then I thought: no, he's afraid, with a fear as sharp as a razor blade, a fear that cuts and bleeds and reeks and that I cannot understand. Then I thought: no, he's mad, completely mad, so mad that he's able to fool us and pretend to be sane. I was still thinking that when one of the children threw the Frisbee too hard and it flew over the fence and landed softly a few metres from Rodney. My friend didn't move, as if he hadn't noticed the disc (which was of course impossible), the boy came over to the fence, pointed to it and said something to Rodney, who finally got up from the bench, picked up the Frisbee and, instead of returning it to its owners, went back to the fence and crouched down so he was the same height as the child, who after some hesitation came over to him. Now the two were face to face, looking at each other through the diamonds of the wire fence, or rather, Rodney was looking at the boy and the boy was looking alternately at Rodney and at the ground. For a minute or two, during which the other children stayed at a distance, watching their playmate but without making up their minds to approach, Rodney and the boy talked; or rather; it was just Rodney who talked. The boy did other things: nodded, smiled, shook his head, nodded again; at a certain moment, after looking Rodney in the eye, the boy's stance changed: he seemed incredulous or frightened or even (for a fleeting instant) gripped by panic, he seemed to want to back away from the fence, but Rodney kept him there by holding onto his wrist and telling him something he must have hoped would be calming; then the boy began to struggle and I had the impression that he was about to shout or burst into tears, but Rodney didn't let him go, he kept talking to him in a confidential and almost urgent, vehement way, and then, in a second, I was afraid too, I thought something might happen, I didn't know exactly what, I wondered if I should intervene, shout and tell Rodney to let go of the boy, let him go. The next second I calmed down: suddenly the boy seemed to relax, nodded again, smiled again, first timidly and then openly, at which moment Rodney let go of him and the boy said several words in a row, which I didn't understand although I could see his mouth and I tried to read his lips. Straight away Rodney stood up without hurrying and threw the disc, which glided and fell far from where the boy's friends were waiting. The boy, to my surprise, did not go immediately back to them, but stood for a while longer by the fence, indecisively, talking calmly to Rodney, and only left there after his friends had shouted to him several times that they had to go. Rodney watched the boys running away across the grass, and, instead of turning around and leaving as well, went back to sit on the bench, crossed his legs again, folded his arms again and stayed there immobile, facing the setting sun, and I didn't dare approach him and pretend I hadn't seen anything and suggest we go for a beer and a bit of a chat, and not only because I hadn't understood the scene and I would have felt uncomfortable or perturbed, but also because I was suddenly sure that at that moment my friend wanted above all to be alone, that he wasn't going to move from that bench for a long time, that he was going to let the light fade away and night fall and dawn arrive without doing anything except maybe weep or laugh silently, nothing other than looking at that expanse of grass like an enormous empty hangar that little by little the darkness would take over and on which he would probably see (but this I didn't know or imagine until much later) some indecipherable shadows dancing that only had any significance for him, though it was a dreadful significance.

Rodney was like that. Or at least that was what Rodney was like in Urbana seventeen years ago, during the months that I was his friend. Like that and at times much more irritating, more disconcerting too. Or at least much more disconcerting and irritating to me. I remember, for example, the day I told him I wanted to be a writer. As with the friends from
Linea Plural,
in whose pages I published nothing except reviews and articles, I had not confessed it to Rodney out of cowardice or modesty (or a mixture of the two), but by that evening in late November I'd spent a month and a half investing all the free time my classes left me in writing a novel I would never finish, so I must have felt less insecure than usual, and at some point I told him that I was writing a novel. I told him eagerly, as if I were revealing a great secret, but, contrary to my expectations, Rodney didn't react with enthusiasm or show interest in the news; far from it: for an instant his expression seemed to darken and, with an air of boredom or disappointment, turned away towards Treno's big picture window, at that hour dappled with night-time lights; seconds later he recovered his usual cheerful, sleepy air, and looked at me with curiosity, but didn't say anything. The silence embarrassed me, made me feel ridiculous; embarrassment quickly gave way to resentment. To get out of that spot I must have asked him if he wasn't surprised by what I'd just said, because Rodney answered:

'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 called
Betrayal
performed 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.