The Speed of Light

ALL ROADS

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 fromSome 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 inSome LikeIt Hot,and how I'd write to Marcos to tell him I'd travelled ten thousand kilometres in vain, because Urbana — a little island of barely a hundred and fifty thousand souls floating in the middle of a sea of cornfields that stretched unbroken to the suburbs of Chicago — was not much bigger and didn't seem much less provincial than Gerona. Of course, I didn't tell him anything of the sort: in order not to disappoint him with my disappointment, or to try to modify reality a little, what I told him was that Marcelo Cuartero was mistaken and that Urbana was like Florida, or rather like a mix of Florida and New York in miniature, a vivacious, sunny and cosmopolitan city where my novels would practically write themselves. But, since no matter how hard we try, lies don't alter reality, it didn't take me long to discover that my first impression of the city was accurate, and so I let myself be overcome by sadness during the first days I spent in Urbana, unable as I was to shake off my nostalgia for what I'd left behind and the certainty that, rather than a city, that unrelenting furnace lost in the middle of nowhere was a cemetery where I'd soon end up turning into a ghost or a zombie.

It was Marcelo Cuartero's friend who helped me to get over that initial depression. His name was John Borgheson and he turned out to be an Americanized Englishman or an American who hadn't been able to give up being English (or just the opposite); what I mean is, although his culture and education were American and most of his life and all of his academic career had been spent in the United States, his Birmingham accent was still almost pure and he hadn't been infected by North Americans' direct manners, so he remained an Englishman of the old school, or he liked to imagine himself as one: a shy, courteous, reticent man who vainly struggled to hide his true vocation, which was for comedy. Borgheson, who was about forty and spoke that slightly archaic, stony Spanish often spoken by those who've read a lot of it and spoken it rarely, was the only person I knew in the city, and upon my arrival had been kind enough to take me in; later he helped me find an apartment to rent near the university campus and get settled in there, showed me the university and guided me through the labyrinth of its bureaucracy. During those initial days I couldn't avoid the suspicion that Borgheson's exaggerated friendliness was due to the fact that, by some misunderstanding, he thought I was one of Marcelo Cuartero's favourite students, which I couldn't help but find ironic, especially since by then I was beginning to entertain well-founded suspicions that if Cuartero hadn't sent me to a more remote and inhospitable place than Urbana it was because he didn't know of a place any more remote and inhospitable than Urbana. Borgheson also took pains to introduce me to some of my future colleagues, students of his and assistant professors like me in the Spanish department, and, one Saturday night, a few days after my arrival, he arranged a dinner with three of them at the Courier Cafe, a small restaurant on Race Street, very close to Lincoln Square.

I remember the dinner very well, among other reasons because I'm very much afraid that what went on there reveals the precise tone of what my first weeks in Urbana must have been like. The three colleagues, two men and one woman, were more or less the same age as me. The two men edited a biannual journal calledLinea Plural: one was a Venezuelan called Felipe Vieri, a very well-read, ironic, slightly haughty guy, who dressed with a meticulousness not entirely free of affectation; the other was called Frank Solaun and he was a Cuban-American, well-built, enthusiastic, with a gleaming smile and slicked-back hair. As for the woman, her name was Laura Burns and, as I found out later from Borgheson himself, she belonged to an opulent and aristocratic family from San Juan de Puerto Rico (her father owned the country's foremost newspaper), but what most caught my attention about her that night, apart from her unmistakablegringaphysique — tall, solid, blonde, very pale skin — was her intimidating propensity to sarcasm, reined in with difficulty by the respect Borgheson's presence inspired. Otherwise, he gently imposed his authority for the duration of the dinner, channelling the conversation into themes that might be of interest to me or that, he imagined or wished, at least wouldn't make me feel excluded. And so we talked about my trip, about Urbana, the university, the department; we also talked about Spanish writers and film makers, and I soon realized Borgheson and his students were more up to date on what was happening in Spain than I was, because I hadn't read the books or seen the movies of many of the film makers and writers they mentioned. I doubt the fact embarrassed me, because back then my resentment at being an unpublished, ignored and practically illiterate writer authorized me to consider everything being done in Spain to be garbage — and everything done anywhere else pure art — but I don't rule out that it may explain in part what happened when we were having coffee. By then Vieri and Solaun had been talking for a while with unrestrained devotion about the films of Pedro Almodovar; the ever attentive Borgheson took advantage of a pause in the enthusiastic duo's exchange to ask my opinion of the films of the director from La Mancha. Like everyone, I think I liked Almodovar's films back then, but at that moment I must have felt an irresistible urge to try to sound interesting or make my cosmopolitan vocation very clear by setting myself apart from those stories of drug-addled nuns, traditional transvestites and matador murderers, so I answered, 'Frankly, I think they're a pile of queer crap.'

A savage roar of laughter from Laura Burns greeted the judgement, and my satisfaction at this reception of the scandalous comment kept me from noticing the others' glacial silence, which Borgheson hurried to break by changing the subject. The dinner soon concluded without further incident and, on the way out of the Courier Cafe, Vieri and Solaun suggested going for a drink. Borgheson and Laura Burns declined the invitation; I accepted.

My new friends took me to a club called Chester Street, located appropriately enough on Chester Street, beside the train station. It was an enormous, oblong place, with bare walls, a bar on the right and in front of it a dance floor bombarded with strobes and packed with people at this hour. As soon as we got in, Solaun wasted no time in losing himself among the heaving throng on the dance floor; for our part, Vieri and I made our way to the bar to order Cuba fibres and, while we waited for them, I began a half-mocking, half-perplexed comment to Vieri about the fact that there were only men to be seen in the club, but before I could finish a guy came up to me and said something I didn't understand or didn't entirely understand. Leaning towards him, I asked him to repeat it; he repeated it: he asked me if I wanted to dance with him. I was just about to ask him to repeat it again, but instead of doing that I looked at him: he was very young, very blond, he seemed very cheerful, he was smiling; I said thanks and that I didn't want to dance. The boy shrugged and, without further explanation, he left. I was going to tell Vieri what had just happened to me when a tall, muscular guy, with a moustache and cowboy boots, came and asked me the same or a similar question; incredulous, I gave him the same or a similar reply, and without even looking at me again, the guy laughed silently and also left. At that very moment Vieri passed me my Cuba libre, but I didn't say anything and I didn't even have to read the smug and slightly vengeful sarcasm in his eyes to feel like Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis arriving in Florida dressed as girl musicians or to understand the stupefied silence that had followed my verdict on Almodovar's films. A long time later Vieri told me that when, the morning after that triumphal night, Frank Solaun told Laura Burns they'd taken me to a gay fiesta on Chester Street Laura's shriek resounded through the halls of the department like a fulmination: 'But that guy's such a Spaniard his brain must be shaped like abotijo,with a spout and everything!'

I'd like to believe that during my early days in Urbana this kind of gaffe was not as frequent as I fear, but I can't be sure; what I can be sure of is that I got used to my new life much more quickly than I expected. And it was a comfortable life. My house — a two-bedroom apartment with kitchen and bathroom — was located a five-minute walk from the Foreign Languages Building, the building that was home to the Spanish Department, at 703 West Oregon, between Busey and Coler, in a zone of narrow, private, tree-lined streets. As Marcelo Cuartero had promised, I made enough money to live without privations and my duties as Spanish teacher and doctoral student left almost all my afternoons and evenings free, as well as the lengthy weekends that included Fridays, so I had lots of time to read and write, and a vast library to keep me supplied with books. Soon curiosity for what I had in front of me replaced nostalgia for what I'd left behind. I regularly wrote to my family and my friends — especially Marcos — but I didn't feel lonely any more; in fact, I very soon discovered that, if I made an effort, nothing was easier than making friends in Urbana. Like all university cities, it was a sterile, deceptive place, a human microclimate bereft of poor and old people in which each year one population composed of young people from all over the planet on their way through touched down as another took off for the world; added to the slightly worrying evidence that neither in the city nor for several hundreds of kilometres in any direction were there any distractions other than work, this circumstance facilitated social life enormously, and in fact, in contrast to the studious quiet of the rest of the week, from Friday afternoon to Sunday night Urbana turned into a seething cauldron of house parties that no one seemed to want to miss and to which everyone seemed to be invited.

However, I didn't meet Rodney Falk at any of those many house parties, but in the office we shared for a semester on the fourth floor of the Foreign Languages Building. I'll never know if they assigned me that office by chance or because no one else wanted to share with Rodney (I'm inclined to suspect the latter is more likely than the former), but what I do know is that, if they hadn't assigned me that office, Rodney and I would probably never have become friends and everything would have been different and my life wouldn't be like it is and the memory of Rodney would have been wiped from my mind the way the memories of most of the people I knew in Urbana have faded away with the years. Or perhaps not as much, perhaps I exaggerate. After all, the truth is, although nothing could be further from his intentions, Rodney did not go unnoticed amid the rigorous uniformity that reigned in the department and to which everyone adhered without complaint, as if it were a tacit but palpable rule of intellectual immunization paradoxically bound to instigate competence among the members of that community proud of their strict meritocratic observance. Rodney transgressed the rule because he was quite a bit older than the rest of the Spanish assistants, almost none of whom were over thirty, but also because he never attended meetings, cocktail parties or get-togethers organized by the department, which everyone blamed, as I soon found out, on his reserved and eccentric, not to mention surly, nature, which contributed to him being surrounded by a disparaging myth that included his having obtained his position as a Spanish lecturer thanks to being a veteran of the Vietnam War. I remember at a reception put on by the department for the new teaching assistants, the night before classes began, someone commented on his habitual absence, which immediately provoked, among the little circle of colleagues around me, a cascade of vicious conjecture about what it was that Rodney must teach his students, because no one had ever heard him speak Spanish.

'Damn!' said Laura Burns, as she burst into the chorus. 'What worries me isn't that Rodney doesn't know a fucking word of Spanish, but that one of these days he's going to show up here with a Kalashnikov and blow us all away.'

I still hadn't forgotten this comment, which had been greeted with riotous laughter all round, when the next day I finally met Rodney. That morning, the first of term, I arrived at the department very early, and when I opened the office door the first thing I saw was Rodney sitting at his desk, reading; the second was that he raised his eyes from the book, looked at me, stood up without a word. There was an irrational instant of panic provoked by Laura Burns' sharp remark (which suddenly no longer seemed like a sharp remark and also no longer struck me as funny) and by the size of that big, strong, reportedly unbalanced guy who was advancing towards me; but I didn't run away: I apprehensively shook the hand he held out to me and tried to smile.

'My name's Rodney Falk,' he said, looking me in the eye with disconcerting intensity and making a noise that sounded like a martial click of the heels. 'And you?'

I told him my name. Rodney asked me if I was Spanish. I told him I was.

'I've never been to Spain,' he declared. 'But one day I'd like to see it. Have you read Hemingway?'

I'd barely read Hemingway, or I'd read him carelessly, and my notion of the American writer fitted into a pitiful snapshot of a washed-up, swaggering, alcoholic old man, friend to flamenco dancers and bull fighters, who spread a postcard image of the oldest and most unbearable stereotypes of Spain through his outmoded works.

'Yes,' I answered, relieved at that hint of a literary conversation and, since I must have seen another magnificent opportunity to make very clear to my colleagues my unimpeachable cosmopolitan calling, which I'd already thought to proclaim with my homophobic comment about Almodovar's films, I added: 'Frankly, I think he's shit.'

The reaction of my new officemate was more expeditious than that of Vieri and Solaun a few nights before: without any gesture of disapproval or agreement, as if I'd suddenly disappeared from view, Rodney turned around and left me standing there mid-sentence; then he sat back down, picked up his book and immersed himself in it again.

That morning there was nothing more and, if we discount the initial surprise or panic and Ernest Hemingway, the ritual of the days that followed came to be more or less identical. Despite always arriving at the office as soon as they opened the Foreign Languages Building, Rodney was always there before me and, after an obligatory greeting that in his case was more like a grunt, our mornings were spent coming and going from classrooms, and also sitting each at his desk, reading and preparing classes (Rodney mostly reading and me mostly preparing classes), but always firmly immured in a silence that I only timidly tried to break on a couple of occasions, until I came to understand that Rodney had absolutely no interest in talking to me. It was during those days that, keeping a surreptitious eye on him from my desk or in the corridors of the department, I began to get used to his presence. At first glance Rodney had the ingenuous, indifferent, anachronistic look of those hippies from the sixties who hadn't wanted or been able or known how to adapt themselves to the cheerful cynicism of the eighties, as if they'd been willingly or forcibly swept aside into a ditch so as not to interfere with the triumphant march of history. His clothing, however, was not out of keeping with the informal egalitarianism that reigned in the university: he always wore running shoes, faded jeans and baggy checked shirts, although in winter — in the polar winter of Urbana — he changed his shoes for military boots and bundled up in thick woollen sweaters, a sheepskin coat and fur cap. He was tall, heavy set and rather ungainly; he always walked with his eyes glued to the floor and sort of lurching, leaning to the right, with one shoulder higher than the other, which endowed his gait with the swaying instability of a pachyderm on the point of collapse. He had long, thick, reddish hair, and a robust, wide face, with slightly ruddy skin and features that seemed sculpted into his cranium: firm chin, prominent cheekbones, steep nose and a mocking or contemptuous mouth, which when open revealed two rows of uneven, almost ochre-coloured, quite deteriorated teeth. One of his eyes was abnormally sensitive to light, which obliged him to protect it from the sun with a black fabric patch held in place by a band around his head, making him look like an ex-combatant, an appearance his lurching walk and broken-down frame did nothing to contradict. Undoubtedly because of this ocular lesion his eyes appeared not to be of the same colour at first glance, although if you looked closely you'd see it was just that one was a slightly lighter brown, almost honey-coloured, and the other a darker brown, almost black. Furthermore, I also soon noticed that Rodney had no friends in the department and that, except for Dan Gleylock — an old linguistics professor in whose office I saw him talking once or twice, coffee in hand — with the rest of the members of the faculty he maintained a relationship that didn't even reach the level of superficial cordiality that simple politeness imposes.

Nothing suggested my case would be any different. In fact, it's almost certain the relationship between Rodney and me would never have overcome the phase of autism we'd mutually confined ourselves to had it not been for the involuntary collaboration of John Borgheson. The first Friday after the beginning of classes Borgheson invited me to lunch along with a young Italian with the languid air of a dandy, called Giuseppe Rota, who was a visiting professor at the university that semester. The lunch was in two parts. During the first, Rota spoke non-stop, while Borgheson remained immersed in a meditative or embarrassed silence; during the second they swapped roles — Borgheson spoke and Rota remained silent, as if what was being aired there had nothing whatsoever to do with him — and only then did I understand the reason for the invitation. Borgheson explained that Rota had been contracted by the university to give an introductory course in Catalan literature; up to that moment, however, only three people had enrolled, which was a serious problem since university regulations obliged the department to cancel any course with less than a minimum of four students registered to take it. When he got to this point, the tone of Borgheson's speech went from explanatory to vehement, as if he was trying to mask with emphasis the embarrassment he felt at having to discuss the matter. Because what Borgheson was begging of me, with the silent consent of Rota — and, to be on the safe side, flattering my vanity with the argument that, given my knowledge of the material and the requisite elementary level of the course, it wouldn't be very useful for me — was that I enroll in it, with the implication that he'd consider this small sacrifice a personal favour and also that the course wouldn't require of me any more effort than attending the lectures. Of course, I immediately agreed to Borgheson's request, thrilled to be able to return a small portion of the kindness he'd shown me, but what I could never have foreseen — nor could Borgheson have warned me — was quite what that trivial decision would entail.

I began to suspect the following Tuesday, late in the afternoon, when I walked into the room where the first Catalan literature class was to take place and saw the three who were soon to be my classmates sitting around a table. One was a sinister-looking guy, dressed entirely in black, with his red dyed hair in a mohican; the second was a small, gaunt, fidgety Chinese guy; the third was Rodney. The three of them smiled at me in silence and, after making sure I hadn't mistaken the room, I said hello and sat down; a moment later Rota showed up and the class began. Well, began in a manner of speaking. Actually, that class never finished beginning, simply because it was an unfeasible class. The reason is that, as we immediately realized to our astonishment, there was no common language among the five of us in the class: Rota, who spoke both Spanish and Catalan well, didn't speak a word of English, and the sinister-looking American, who soon told us that he wanted to learn Catalan because he was studying Romance languages, only spoke broken French, like Rodney, who also spoke Spanish; as for the Chinese guy, whose name was Wong and who was studying directing in the Department of Theatre, aside from Chinese he only knew English (much later I found out that his desire to learn Catalan stemmed from the fact that he had a Catalan boyfriend). It didn't take us long to realize that, given the circumstances, I was the only possible instrument of communication among the members of that improvised ecumenical assembly, so after Rota, sweating and upset, had tried in vain to make himself understood by all the means within his grasp, including hand signals, I offered to translate his words from Catalan into English, which was the only language all the interested parties understood, except for Rota himself. As well as being ridiculous, the procedure was exasperatingly slow, though somehow or other, it allowed us to ride out not just that introductory class, but, as incredible as it might seem, the whole semester, though not without large doses of generous hypocrisy and smiles on everyone's part. But naturally, that first day we all came out depressed and dumbfounded, so at first I could only interpret Rodney's comment as sarcasm when, after leaving the classroom together and walking in silence through the corridors of the Foreign Languages Building, we were on the point of separating at the door.

'I've never learned so many things in a single class,' was Rodney's comment. As I said: at first I thought he was joking; then I thought he wasn't referring to what I thought he was referring to and I looked him in the eye and thought he wasn't joking; then I thought he was joking again and then I didn't know what to think. Rodney added, 'I didn't know you spoke Catalan.

''I live in Catalonia.

''Does everyone who lives in Catalonia speak Catalan?'

'Not everyone, no.'

Rodney stopped, looked at me with a mixture of interest and wariness, asked, 'Have you read Merce Rodoreda?'

I said yes.

'Do you like her?'

As I'd learned my lesson by now and wanted to get along with the person I had to share an office with, I said yes. Rodney gestured in a strange way that I didn't know how to interpret, and for a moment I thought of Almodovar and Hemingway and I thought I'd made another mistake, that maybe admirers of Hemingway could only detest Rodoreda just as admirers of Rodoreda could do nothing but detest Hemingway. Before I could qualify or retract the lie I'd just inflicted on him, Rodney reassured me.

'I love her stuff,' he said. 'I've read her in Spanish translation, of course, but I want to learn Catalan so I can read her in the original.'

'Well, you've come to the right place,' I couldn't help but say.

'What?'

'Nothing.'

I was about to say goodbye when Rodney unexpectedly said, 'Do you want to go get a Coke?'

We went to Treno's, a bar on the corner of Goodwin and West Oregon, halfway between my house and the faculty. It was a place staffed by students, with wooden tables and walls panelled with wood too, with a big unlit fireplace and a big picture window looking out onto Goodwin. We sat beside the fireplace and ordered a Coke for Rodney, a beer for me and a bowl of popcorn to share. We talked. Rodney told me he lived in Rantoul, a small city near Urbana, and that this was the third year he'd taught Spanish at the university.

'I like it,' he added.

'Really?' I asked.

'Yeah,' he answered. 'I like teaching, I like my colleagues in the department, I like the university.' He must have seen something strange in my expression, because he asked, 'Does that surprise you?'

'No,' I lied.

Rodney offered me a light and as I lit my cigarette I looked at his Zippo: it was old and must once have been silver-plated, but now it was a rusty yellow; on the upper part, in capital letters, was the word Vietnam, and underneath some numbers (68–69) and two words: Chu Lai; on the lower part there was a dog sitting and smiling and under him a phrase: 'Fuck it. I got my orders.' Rodney noticed me looking at the lighter, because as he put it away he said, 'It's the only good thing I brought back from that fucking war.'

I was going to ask him to tell me about Vietnam when he abruptly asked me to tell him about myself. I did. I talked, I think, about Gerona, Barcelona, my first impressions of Urbana, and he interrupted me to ask me how I'd ended up there. This time I didn't lie, but I didn't tell him the truth either, at least, not the whole truth.

'Urbana is a good place to live,' Rodney declared sententiously when I'd finished speaking; then, mysteriously, he added: 'It's like nothing.'

I asked him what that meant.

'It means it's a good place to work,' is all he answered.

While I thought of the reasons Marcelo Cuartero had given me to go to Urbana, Rodney started talking about Merce Rodoreda. He'd read two of her novels(La Plafa delDiamantandBroken Mirror);I'd only read the second, but I assured him with the aplomb of an infallible reader that the two books he'd read were the best things Rodoreda had written. Then Rodney made a suggestion: he said that every Tuesday and every Thursday, after Rota's class (or after Rota's class translated by me), we could go to Treno's so I could teach him to speak Catalan; in exchange he was ready to pay me whatever we agreed. He said it in a very serious tone of voice, but strangely I felt like he'd just told me a slightly macabre joke that I hadn't been able to figure out or (stranger still) as if he were challenging me to a duel. I could not yet have known that this was Rodney's normal tone of voice, so, although I wasn't even sure if I could teach someone Catalan, more out of pride than curiosity, I answered, 'I'll settle for you paying for my beers.'

That's how Rodney and I became friends. That very Thursday we went back to Treno's, and from the following week on, as we'd agreed, we got together every Tuesday and every Thursday, at the end of the official Catalan class. We'd get there just after six, we'd sit at the table by the fireplace, we'd order Coke (for him), beer (for me) and popcorn (for both of us) and keep talking until they closed the place around nine. Especially during the first weeks, we tried to devote as much of the time as possible to my instructing Rodney in the rudiments of Catalan, but little by little laziness or boredom overcame us and the duty of learning gave way to the pleasure of conversation. Not that we didn't also talk in the free time we had in the office, but we did so in a distracted or discontinuous way, in between the hustle and bustle of other activities, as if that was not the place to continue the conversations we had in Treno's; at least maybe that's how Rodney saw it; or maybe for some reason he wanted to keep people in the department from finding out about our friendship. The thing is that as soon as I began to have dealings with him outside the office I guessed that, despite the fact that they both shared a similar battered physical appearance and the same lost air, as if they'd just been woken up and their eyes were still veiled with the cobwebs of sleep, there was a fundamental discrepancy, although indefinable to me, between the Rodney I knew and the one my colleagues in the department knew, but what I couldn't in any way have guessed at that time is that the discrepancy was linked to the very essence of Rodney's personality, to a neurological centre that he kept hidden and to which no one then — in a certain sense not even he — had access.

I don't have an accurate recollection of those evenings in Treno's, but some memories from them are extremely vivid. I remember, for example, the increasingly charged atmosphere of the bar as the evening wore on and the place filled with students reading or writing or talking. I remember the young, round, smiling face of the waitress who usually served us, and a bad copy of a Modigliani portrait that hung on a wall, just to the right of the bar. I remember Rodney smoothing down his messy hair every once in a while and leaning back uncomfortably in his chair, and stretching his legs, which barely fitted beneath the table, out towards the fireplace. I remember the music that came out of the speakers, very faint, almost like a distorted echo of other music, and I remember that music making me feel as if I weren't in a bar in a city in the Midwest at the end of the eighties but rather at the end of the seventies in a bar in Gerona, because it was the music of the bars of my teenage years in Gerona (like Led Zeppelin, ZZ Top, Frank Zappa). I remember a strange detail very well: the last song they played every night, like a discreet warning to the regulars that the bar was going to close, was 'It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)', an old Bob Dylan song that Rodney loved because, just as ZZ Top brought back the limitless despair of my adolescence, it brought back the joy of his hippy youth, it brought it back even though it was such a sad song that spoke of disillusioned words like bullets barked and of graveyards stuffed with false gods and lonely people who cry and fear and live in a vault knowing everything's a lie and who've understood they know too soon there is no sense in even trying to understand, brought back that joy perhaps because it contained a line that I haven't been able to forget either: 'That he not busy being born is busy dying.' I remember other things too. I remember Rodney spoke with a strange icy passion, smoking constantly and gesturing a lot and animated by a kind of permanent euphoria, and that although he never (or almost never) laughed, he never gave the impression of being entirely serious. I remember that we never (or almost never) spoke of the university and that, despite the fact that Rodney never (or almost never) spoke of personal things, he never (or almost never) gave the impression he was talking about anything other than himself, and I'm sure I did not even once hear him pronounce the word Vietnam. On more than one occasion, though, we talked about politics; or, more precisely, it was Rodney who talked about politics. But it wasn't until well into the autumn that I understood that, if we didn't talk about politics more often, it wasn't because it wasn't of interest to Rodney, but rather because I didn't understand a single thing about politics (and much less about US politics, which for Rodney was the only real, or at least the only relevant politics), which, to tell the truth, didn't seem to matter that much to my friend either. Every time the subject came up he gave me the impression of talking more to himself or to an abstract interlocutor than to me; one might say he was driven by a sort of furious impulse to vent, by a resentful and hopeless vehemence against the politicians of his country — whom he considered without exception a pack of liars and filibusterers — against the big corporations that held the real political power and against the media, which according to him spread the lies of politicians and corporations with impunity.

But what I mostly remember about those evenings in Treno's is that we talked almost exclusively about books. Naturally, I might be exaggerating, it might not be true and it might be that the future alters the past and that subsequent events may have distorted my memory and that in Treno's Rodney and I didn't talk almost exclusively about books, but what I remember is that we talked almost exclusively about books; in any case, what I am sure of is that I soon realized Rodney was the best-read friend I'd ever had. Although for some reason I took a while to confess that I wanted to be a writer and that there in Urbana I'd begun to write a novel, from the start I talked to him about the North American writers I was then reading: about Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Bernard Malamud, John Updike, Flannery O'Connor. To my surprise (and delight), Rodney had read them all; I should make clear that it wasn't that he said he'dread them, rather that from the comments he made to damp down or stoke my reckless enthusiasm (more often the former than the latter), I could tell he'd read them. Without a doubt it was Rodney who I first heard mention, during those evenings in Treno's, some of the writers I've since then always associated with Urbana: Stanley Elkin, Donald Barthelme, Robert Coover, John Hawkes, William Gaddis, Richard Brautigan, Harry Mathews. We also talked once in a while about Rodoreda, who before Rota's impossible classes was the only Catalan author my friend knew, as well as certain Latin American writers he liked, and I think Rodney showed on more than one occasion, or pretended to show, some interest in Spanish literature, although I soon realized that, in contrast to Borgheson's followers, he knew little of it and liked it less. What Rodney really liked, what fascinated him, was classic American literature. My ignorance of the subject was absolute, so it took me a little while to understand that, like any good reader, Rodney's tastes and opinions on the matter were saturated in prejudices; the fact is they were unequivocal: he adored Thoreau, Emerson, Hawthorne and Twain, considered Fenimore Cooper a fraud, Poe a minor author, Melville a moralist of unbearable solemnity and James an affected, snobbish and overvalued narrator; he respected Faulkner and Thomas Wolfe, and thought there was no better writer in the whole century than Scott Fitzgerald, but only Hemingway, Hemingway of all people, was the object of his unconditional devotion. Unconditional, but not uncritical: many a time I heard him scoff at the errors, banality, schmaltz and shortcomings that afflicted Hemingway's novels, but, thanks to an unexpected dodge in the line of argument that was like a sleight of hand, those blunders always ended up turning into essential seasonings of his greatness in Rodney's eyes. 'Lots of people have written better novels than Hemingway,' he told me the first time we talked about him, as if he'd forgotten the illiterate opinion I'd blurted out the day we met. 'But no one has written better short stories than Hemingway and no one can outdo a page of Hemingway. Besides,' he concluded without a smile, before I could finish blushing, 'if you pay close attention he's a very useful idiot detector: idiots never like Hemingway.' Even though it may well have been, I didn't take this last phrase as a personal allusion; I didn't get angry, although I could have. But, whether he was right or not, with time I've come to think that, more than an admired writer, Hemingway was for Rodney a dark or perhaps radiant symbol the extent of which not even he could entirely perceive.

I said earlier that only well into autumn did I understand that Rodney's interest in politics was not merely conversational, but very serious, although also a bit excessive or at least — to put it a more conventional way — unconventional. Actually I didn't begin to sense this until one Sunday at the beginning of October when a colleague from the depart ment called Rodrigo Gines invited me to lunch at his house, to talk about the issue ofLinea Pluralthat was supposed to come out the following semester. Gines, who'd arrived in Urbana at the same time as me and would end up becoming one of my best friends there, was Chilean, a writer and a cellist; he was also an assistant professor of Spanish. Many years before he'd been a professor at the Austral University of Chile, but after the fall of Salvador Allende the dictatorship had dismissed him and forced him to earn his living with other jobs, among them that of cellist in the National Symphony Orchestra. He was roughly the same age as Rodney and had a wife and two children in Santiago, and the melancholy air of an orphaned Indian, with a moustache and goatee, that in no way betrayed his bleak sense of humour, his compulsive sociability or his fondness for wine and good food. That Sunday, as well as Felipe Vieri and Frank Solaun, the editors of the journal and unconditional Almodovar fans, several assistant professors came to his house, including Laura Burns and an Austrian called Gudrun with whom our host was going out at the time. We ate roast chicken withmolesauce that Gines had made, and sat round the table long after the meal discussing the contents of the journal. We talked about poems, stories, articles, about the need to find some new contributors, and when we were discussing this last point I brought up Rodney's name, with the suggestion that we could ask him to write something for the next issue; I was about to sing the praises of my friend's intellectual virtues when I noticed that all the rest of the guests were staring at me as if I'd just announced the imminent landing in Urbana of a spacecraft crewed by little green men with antennae. I shut up; there was an uncomfortable silence. That was when, as if surprised to find a suitable instrument in his hands to assure the success of the meeting, Gines interrupted to tell a story. I can't guarantee that all its details are true, I'm just telling it the way he told it. It seems that the Tuesday of that same week, as he made his way earlier than usual to his first class of the day, my Chilean friend had seen a dusty Buick stopping abruptly in the middle of Lincoln Avenue, beside a lamppost, right at the intersection with Green Street. Gines thought the car had broken down and kept walking towards the crossroads, but recognized he was mistaken when he saw the driver get out and, instead of going to look at the engine or check the state of the tires, opened the back door, took out a bucket and brush and a poster and stuck the poster on the lamppost. The driver was sporting a patch over his right eye and Gines quickly recognized it was Rodney. According to Gines, up till that day they hadn't exchanged a single word, and perhaps for that reason he stopped a few metres from the car, watching Rodney finish pasting up the poster, confused and intrigued, not knowing whether to go over to him or take off walking down Green and leave as if he hadn't seen a thing, and he was still wondering when Rodney finished smoothing the poster onto the lamppost, turned around and saw him. Then Gines had no option but to approach. He went over and, although he knew Rodney didn't have any trouble with his car, asked him if he had any trouble with his car. Rodney looked at him with his uncovered eye, smiled crookedly and assured him he didn't; then he pointed to the poster freshly pasted to the lamppost. Since he hardly understood any English, Gines didn't understand any of what was written on it, but Rodney told him that the poster was calling for a general strike against General Electric in the name of the Socialist Workers' Party or some faction of the Socialist Workers' Party, Gines didn't quite remember.

'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 theAdagio & Allegroby Saint-Saens or Dvorak'sRondo 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 otherLinea Pluralmeeting. 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 fromLinea 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 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 faculty 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 anything 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.'

While listening to Rodney I inevitably remembered my friend Marcos and our dreams of triumph and the masterpieces with which we thought we'd get our revenge on the world, and most of all I remembered one time, some years before, when Marcos told me that an insufferable classmate at the Faculty of Fine Arts had told him that the ideal condition for an artist is failure, and that he'd replied with a quote from the French writer Jules Renard: 'Yes, I know. All great men were ignored in their lifetimes; but I'm not a great man, so I'dprefer immediate renown.' I also thought Rodney was talking as if he knew what success and failure were, when actually he didn't know either one (or he didn't know them except by way of books or any more than me, who barely knew), and that actually his words were just the words of a loser soaked in the hypocritical and sickly mythology of failure that ruled a country hysterically obsessed with success. I thought all this and was about to say it to him, but I didn't say anything. What I did, after a silence, was mock Rodney's jeremiad.

'Fucked if you fail, fucked if you succeed,' I said. 'Great prospects.'

My friend didn't even smile.

'It's a really fucked-up job,' he said. 'But not because of that. Or not only because of that.'

'That seems minor to you?'

'Yeah,' he said, and then asked:

'What's a writer?' 'What do you think?' I lost patience. 'A guy who can string words together one after the other and is able to do so with flair.'

'Exactly,' Rodney approved. 'But it's also a guy who considers extremely complicated problems and who, instead of resolving them or trying to resolve them, like any sensible person, makes them even more complicated. That is: he's a nutcase who looks at reality, and sometimes sees it.'

'Everyone sees reality,' I objected, 'even if they're not nuts.'

'That's where you're mistaken,' Rodney said. 'Everybody looks at reality, but few people see it. The artist isn't the one who makes the invisible visible: that really is romanticism, although not the worst kind; the artist is the one who makes visible what's already visible and everybody looks at and nobody can or nobody knows how or nobody wants to see. Probably nobody wants to see. It's too unpleasant, often appalling, and you really have to have balls to see it without closing your eyes or running away, because whoever sees it is destroyed or goes crazy. Unless, of course, he has a shield to protect himself or he can do something with what he sees.' Rodney paused then went on: 'I mean normal people suffer or enjoy reality, but they're powerless to do anything with it, while the writer can, because his job consists of turning reality into meaning, even if it's an illusory meaning; that is, he can turn it into beauty and that beauty or that meaning are his shield. That's why I say that the writer is a nutcase who has the obligation or the dubious privilege of seeing reality, and that's why, when a writer stops writing, he ends up killing himself, because he hasn't been able to kick the habit of seeing reality but he no longer has his shield to protect himself from it. That's why Hemingway killed himself. And that's why once you're a writer you can't stop being one, unless you decide to risk your neck. Like I said: a really fucked-up job.'

That conversation could have turned out very badly — in fact it had all the signs of turning out very badly — but I don't know why it turned out better than any other, as Rodney and I left Treno's laughing our heads off and I was feeling more his friend than ever and wanting more than ever to become a real writer. Shortly after that the winter holidays began and, almost overnight, Urbana emptied: the students fled en masse to their homes, the streets, buildings and businesses of the campus were deserted and a strange sidereal (or maybe maritime) silence took over the city, as if it had suddenly turned into a planet spinning far from its orbit or into a gleaming ocean liner miraculously run aground in the endless snows of Illinois. The last time we were together at Treno's Rodney invited me to spend Christmas Day at his house in Rantoul. I declined the invitation: I explained that for a while Rodrigo Gines and I had been planning a road trip through the Midwest, along with Gudrun and an American friend of Gudrun's I'd slept with a couple of times (Barbara, she was called); I also said that, if he gave me his phone number in Rantoul, when I got back I'd give him a call so we could see each other before classes began again.

'Don't worry,' said Rodney, 'I'll call you.'

And so we said goodbye, and less than a week later I set off travelling with Rodrigo, Barbara and Gudrun. We'd planned to be away from Urbana for two weeks, but in fact we didn't get back for almost a month. We travelled in Barbara's car, at first following a vaguely fixed plan, but then allowing whim or chance to guide us, and in this way, often driving all day and sleeping in highway motels and cheap little hotels, first we went south, through St Louis, Memphis and Jackson, until we got to New Orleans; we stayed there for several days, after which we began our return, making a detour through the east, up through Meridian, Tuscaloosa and Nashville till we got to Cincinnati and then to Indianapolis, from where we came home drenched in the light and the cold and the highways and sound and immensity and snow and the bars and the people and the plains and the filth and the skies and the sadness and the towns and cities of the Midwest. It was a huge and happy trip, during which I made the irrevocable decision to pay attention to Rodney, throw the novel I'd been working on for months in the garbage and start writing another one immediately. So the first thing I did when I got back to Urbana was to go look for Rodney. In the phone book there was only one Falk — Falk, Dr Robert — resident in Rantoul and, since I knew that Rodney lived with his father, I supposed it must be Rodney's father. I dialled the number several times, but no one answered. For his part, and contrary to what he'd promised, Rodney didn't get in touch with me either during the rest of the holidays.

Classes resumed at the end of January, and the first day, opening the door to my office, sure I was finally going to see Rodney again, I almost crashed head first into a chubby, little, albino-looking guy I'd never seen before. Naturally, I thought I'd opened the door to the wrong office and quickly apologized, but before I could shut the door the guy held out his hand and in a laboured Spanish told me I hadn't been mistaken; he then pronounced his name and announced he was the new assistant professor of Spanish. Perplexed, I shook his hand, mumbled something, introduced myself; then we chatted for a moment, I don't know what about, and only at the end did I resolve to ask him about Rodney. He told me he didn't know anything, except that he'd been hired to replace him. Before my first class that day I inquired in the offices: they didn't know anything there either. Finally it was the secretary of the department head who, the next day, gave me news of my friend. It seems just a few days before the end of the vacation a relative had called to say Rodney wouldn't be returning to work, leaving the head of the department furious and having to look as fast as possible for someone to replace him. I asked the secretary if she knew what had happened to Rodney; she said no. I asked if the boss knew; she said no and advised me not to even consider asking him. I asked if she had Rodney's phone number; she said no.

'I don't and neither does anyone else in the department,'she said, and then I realized that she was just as furious with Rodney as her boss; however, before I left she broke down in the face of my insistence and added reluctantly: 'But I have his address.'

A few days later I asked Barbara if I could borrow her car and went to Rantoul. It was a bright afternoon at the beginning of February. I drove out of Urbana along Broadway and Cunningham Avenue, went north on a highway that advanced between corn fields buried in snow, glistening in the sun, scattered with pine trees, maples, metal silos and isolated little houses, and twenty-five minutes later, after passing an army air base, I arrived at Rantoul, a small working-class city (really it was more like a large town) that gave Urbana a certain metropolitan air in comparison. On the outskirts, at the intersection of two streets — Liberty Drive and Century Boulevard — there was a gas station. I stopped and asked a man in overalls for Belle Avenue, which was the street where, according to the department head's secretary, Rodney lived; he gave me some directions and I continued on towards the centre. I was soon lost. It had started to get dark; the city seemed deserted. I stopped the car at a corner, just where a sign proclaimed Sangamon Avenue. In front of me were train tracks and beyond them the city dissolved into a wooded darkness, to my left the street was soon cut off, to my right, three hundred or so metres away, blinked a neon sign. I turned right and headed towards the sign: BUD'S BAR, it said. I parked the car in the middle of a string of cars and went in.

In the bar a smoky, jovial, Saturday-night atmosphere prevailed. There were lots of people: boys playing pool, women putting coins in the slot machines, men drinking beer and watching a basketball game on a giant television screen; a jukebox spread country music all through the place. I went over to the bar, behind which three waiters — two very young and the other somewhat older — wandered around a low table covered in bottles and, while waiting for someone to serve me, I looked at the photos of baseball stars and the big portrait of John Wayne dressed as a cowboy, with a dark red bandana knotted at his throat, which hung on the back wall. Finally one of the waiters, the oldest of the three, came over with a hurried air, but before he could ask me what I wanted to drink I told him I was looking for Belle Avenue, 25 Belle Avenue.

As if he were mocking me, the bartender asked:

'You want to see the doctor?'

'I want to see Rodney Falk,' I answered.

I must have said it too loud, because two men who were leaning on the bar nearby turned around to look at me. The waiter's expression had changed: now the mockery had turned to a mixture of surprise and interest; he leaned on the bar too, as if my answer had dispelled his hurry. He was a man of about forty, compact and dark, stony-faced, slanting eyes and boxer's nose; he was wearing a sweaty Red Sox cap, a few locks of greasy hair poked out from under it at his temples and the nape of his neck.

'You know Rodney?' he asked.

'Yeah,' I answered. 'We work together in Urbana.'

'At the university?'

'At the university.'

'I see,' he nodded thoughtfully. Then he added: 'Rodney's not home.'

'Ah,' I said, and was about to ask where he was or how he knew he wasn't home, but by then I must've started feeling uneasy, because I didn't. 'Well, it doesn't matter.' I repeated: 'Could you tell me where 25 Belle Avenue is?'

'Of course,' he smiled. 'But wouldn't you like to have a beer first?'

At that moment I noticed that the men sitting at the bar were still scrutinizing me, and absurdly imagined that everyone in the bar was waiting for my reply; a cold froth suddenly gathered in my stomach, as if I'd just entered a dream or a danger zone that I had to escape from as soon as possible. That's what I was thinking at that moment: of getting out of that bar as soon as possible. So I said: 'No, thanks.

'Just as the waiter had indicated, Rodney's house was barely five hundred metres from Bud's Bar, as soon as I turned the corner onto Belle Avenue. It was an older, bigger and more solid house than the ones lined up next to it; except for the slate grey gable roof, the rest of the building was painted white: as well as a narrow attic, it had two floors, a porch at the top of some brown steps and a front lawn buried in snow, with two bushy maples and a pole with the American flag waving gently in the breeze of twilight. I parked the car and rang the bell. No one answered and I rang again. I was just about to peer in through one of the downstairs windows when the door opened and on the threshold appeared a man with completely white hair, about seventy years old, wearing a very thick blue dressing gown and a pair of slippers of the same colour, holding the door knob in one hand and a book in the other; in the half-light of the hallway, behind him, I glimpsed a coat stand, a mirror with a wooden frame, the base of a carpeted stairway leading up to the darkness of the second floor. Except for his heavy build and the colour of his eyes, the man hardly resembled Rodney, but I immediately guessed it was his father. I smiled and, flustered, greeted him and asked for Rodney. He suddenly adopted a defensive attitude and, with intemperate severity, asked me who I was. I told him. Only then did he seem to relax a little.

'Rodney talked about you,' he said, without the little light of mistrust in his eyes going out. 'You're the writer, aren't you?'

He said this with absolutely no irony and, as had happened almost a year earlier with Marcelo Cuartero in El Yate, I felt my cheeks burn: it was the second time in my life that someone had called me a writer, and I was overwhelmed by an inextricable mix of embarrassment and pride, and also a wave of affection for Rodney. I didn't say anything, but, since the man didn't seem prepared to invite me in or break the silence, for something to say I asked if he was Rodney's father. He said yes. Then I asked for Rodney again and he answered that he didn't know where he was.

'He left a couple of weeks ago and he hasn't come back,'he said.

'Has something happened to him?' I asked.

'Why should something happen to him?' he answered.

Then I told him what they'd told me at the department.

'That's true,' the man said. 'It was me who advised them Rodney wouldn't be teaching again. I hope he hasn't caused them any problems.'

'Not at all,' I lied, thinking about the department head and his secretary.

'I'm glad,' said Rodney's father. 'Well,' he then added, beginning to close the door. 'Excuse me, but I have things to do and. .'

'Wait a second,' I interrupted him, not knowing how I was going to go on, then went on: 'I'd like you to tell Rodney that I was here.'

'Don't worry. I'll tell him.'

'Do you know when he'll be back?'Instead of answering, Rodney's father sighed, and immediately, as if his eyesight wasn't good enough to make me out clearly in the growing darkness of dusk, he let go of the door knob and flipped a switch: a white light suddenly swept the twilight off the porch.

'Tell me something,' he said then, blinking. 'What have you come here for?'

'I told you already,' I answered. 'I'm a friend of Rodney's. I wanted to know why he hadn't come back to Urbana. I wanted to know if something had happened to him. I wanted to see him.'

Now the man scrutinized me closely, as if till then he hadn't really seen me or as if my answer had disappointed him, maybe surprised him; unexpectedly, a moment later he smiled, a smile at once hard and almost affectionate, which covered his face in wrinkles, and in which, nevertheless, I recognized for the first time a distant echo of Rodney's features.

'Do you really think that Rodney and you were friends?'he asked.

'I don't understand,' I answered.

He sighed again and wanted to know how old I was. I told him.

'You're very young,' he said. 'Tell me something else: did Rodney ever talk to you about Vietnam?' He answered his own question. 'No, of course not. How could he talk to you about Vietnam? You wouldn't have understood a thing. He didn't even talk to me about that, or only at the beginning. He did to his mother, until she died. And to his wife, until she couldn't take any more. Did you know Rodney was married? No, you didn't know that either. You don't know anything about Rodney. Nothing. How could he be your friend? Rodney doesn't have friends. He can't have any. You understand, don't you?'

As he spoke, Rodney's father had been gradually raising his voice, charging himself with reason, getting furious, the words converted into fuel for his rage, and for a moment I feared he was going to slam the door in my face or burst into tears. He didn't slam the door in my face, he didn't burst into tears. He stood in silence, suddenly decrepit, a little out of breath, looking with the book in his hand at the night that was falling over Belle Avenue, badly illuminated by yellowish street lamps that gave off a dim light. I too stayed silent, feeling very small and very fragile before that enraged old man, and feeling most of all that I should never have gone to Rantoul to look for Rodney. Then it was as if the man had read my mind, because, sounding upset, he said:

'I'm sorry. I shouldn't have spoken to you like that.'

'Don't worry,' I reassured him.

'Rodney will come back,' he declared, not looking me in the eye. 'I don't know when he'll come back, but he'll come back. Or that's what I think.' He hesitated for a moment and then went on: 'For years he didn't spend much time at home, he wandered around, he wasn't well. But lately everything had changed, and he was very comfortable at the university. Did you know he was comfortable at the university?' I nodded. 'He was very comfortable, he was, but it couldn't last: too good to be true. That's why what had to happen happened.' He put his free hand back on the door knob; he looked at me again: I don't know what was in his eyes, I don't know what I saw in them (it wasn't suspicion any more, nor was it gratitude), I don't even know how to describe what I felt looking at him, but what I do know is that it was very similar to fear. 'And that's all,' he concluded. 'Believe me I'm very grateful you took the trouble to come out here, and forgive my bad manners. You 're a good person and you'll be able to understand; besides, Rodney appreciated you. But listen to me: go back to Urbana, work hard, behave as best you can and forget about Rodney. That's my advice. In any case, if you can't or don't want to forget about Rodney, the best thing you can do is pray for him.'

That night I returned to Urbana confused and maybe a little scared, as if I'd just committed a mistake that would have unforeseeable consequences, feeling lonelier than ever in Urbana and feeling as well, for the first time since my arrival there, that I shouldn't stay much longer in that country that wasn't mine and whose impossible idiosyncrasies I'd never be able to decipher, prepared in any case to forget forever my mistaken visit to Rantoul and follow Rodney's father's advice to the letter. I didn't manage this last part, of course, or at least not entirely, and not only because I'd forgotten how to pray a long time before, but also because very soon I discovered that Rodney had been too important to me to get rid of him just like that, and because all of Urbana conspired to keep his memory alive. It 's true that, in the weeks that followed and in all the rest of the time I spent in Urbana, hardly anyone in the department ever mentioned his name again, and even when I happened to meet Dan Gleylock in the faculty corridors I never made up my mind to ask if he had any news of him. But it's also true that every time I passed Treno's, and I passed it daily, I thought of Rodney, and that just at that time I began reading some of his favourite authors and I couldn't open a page of Emerson or Hawthorne or Twain — not to mention Hemingway — without thinking immediately of him, just as I couldn't write a line of the novel I'd started to write without feeling him vigilantly breathing over my shoulder. So, although Rodney had vanished into thin air, in fact he was more present than ever in my life, exactly as if he'd turned into a ghost or a zombie. Be that as it may, the fact is that not a lot of time passed before I convinced myself I'd never hear Rodney spoken of again.

Of course I was wrong. One night at the beginning of April or the end of March, just after Spring Break — the North American equivalent ofSemana Santa — someone called me at home. I remember I was just finishing a short story by Hemingway called 'A Clean, Well-Lighted Place' when the phone rang; I also remember I picked it up thinking of that sorrowful story and especially of the sorrowful, nihilistic prayer it contained — 'Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada' — it was Rodney's father. I still hadn't recovered from the surprise when, after confessing he'd got my number from the department, he began to apologize for the way he'd treated me on my visit to Rantoul. I interrupted him; I told him he had nothing to apologize for, I asked him if he had any news from Rodney. He answered that he'd called from somewhere in New Mexico a few days ago, that they'd talked for a while and that he was well, although for the moment it wasn't likely he'd be coming home.

'But that's not why I called,' he immediately made clear. 'I'm calling because I'd like to talk to you. Would you have any time to spare for me?'

'Of course,' I said. 'What about?'

Rodney's father seemed doubtful for a moment and then he said: 'The truth is I'd rather talk about it in person. Face to face. If it's not too much trouble.'

I told him it was no trouble.

'Would you mind coming to my house?' he asked.

'No,' I said and, although I meant to go in any case, because by then I'd forgotten the sensation of anxiety that had seized me after my first visit to Rantoul, I added: 'But you could at least tell me what you want to talk about.'

'It's nothing important,' he said. 'I'd just like to tell you a story. I think it might interest you. How does Saturday afternoon suit you?'