The Speed of Light

STONE DOOR

I RETURNEDTO SPAIN a little more than a year after that spring afternoon when Rodney's father told me his son's story. During the rest of the time I spent in Urbana many things happened. I'm not going to try to tell them here, and not just because it would be tedious, but mainly because most of them don't belong in this story. Or perhaps they do and I haven't figured out how yet. It doesn't matter. I'll just say that I spent a month of the summer holiday back home in Spain; that the next term I returned to Urbana, carried on with my classes and my things, and began a doctoral thesis (which I never finished) supervised by John Borgheson; that I had friends and lovers and became better friends with the friends I already had, especially Rodrigo Gines, Laura Burns, Felipe Vieri; that I was busy being born and I wasn't busy dying; that during all that time I worked diligently on my novel. So diligently that by the following spring I'dfinished it. I'm not sure it was a good novel, but it was my first novel, and writing it made me extremely happy, for the simple reason that I proved to myself I was capable of writing novels. I should perhaps add that it wasn't about Rodney, although there was a secondary character whose physical appearance owed something to Rodney's physical appearance; it was, however, a novel about ghosts or zombies set in Urbana and the protagonist was a character exactly like me who found himself in the same circumstances as me. . So when I left Urbana I left it with my first novel in hand, feeling very fortunate and also feeling that, although I hadn't travelled much, nor seen very much of the world, nor lived very intensely, nor accumulated very many experiences, that long spell in the United States had been my real doctorate, convinced I had nothing more to learn there and that, if I wanted to become a real writer and not a ghost or a zombie — like Rodney or like the characters in my novel and some of Urbana's inhabitants — then I had to go home immediately.

And so I did. Although I was prepared to go back at any price, the truth is the return was less uncertain than I'dforeseen, because in May, just when I was about to start packing my bags, Marcelo Cuartero phoned from Barcelona to offer me a position as associate professor at the Autonomous University. The salary was meagre, but, supplemented by the income provided by occasional freelance jobs, was enough to rent a studio apartment in the neighbourhood of Sant Antoni and to survive without too many hardships while waiting for the novel to be published. That was how I eagerly began to regain my life in Barcelona; I also, naturally, regained Marcos Luna. By then Marcos was already living with Patricia, a photo grapher who worked for a fashion magazine, and was making a living doing illustrations for a newspaper, had begun to exhibit with certain regularity and was making a name for himself among the painters of his generation. In fact it was Marcos who, at the end of that year, after my novel had come out with a minor publisher and been greeted by a silence barely broken by one futile and rapturously complimentary review by one of Marcelo Cuartero students (or by Marcelo Cuartero himself under a pseudonym), got me an interview with a sub-editor at his paper, who in his turn invited me to write columns and reviews for the cultural supplement. So, somehow or other, with the help of Marcos and Marcelo Cuartero I began to make my way in Barcelona while getting down to work on my second novel. A long time before I managed to finish it, however, Paula came along, which ended up disrupting everything, including the novel. Paula was blonde, shy, willowy and bright, one of those disciplined and aloof thirty-somethings whose apparent haughtiness is a transparent mask over their urgent need for affection. She'd just separated from her first husband and was working for the cultural supplement of the paper; since I hardly ever went to the offices, I didn't meet her for quite a while, but when I finally did I understood that Rodney's father was right and that falling in love is letting yourself be defeated simultaneously by absurdity and by an illness that only time can cure. What I'm trying to say is that I fell so in love with Paula that, as soon as I met her, I had the certainty that those in love always have: that up till then I'd never been in love with anyone. The idyll was marvellous and exhausting, but most of all it was absurd and, since one absurdity leads to another, a few months later I moved in with Paula, then we got married and then we had a son, Gabriel. All these things happened in a very brief space of time (or in what seemed to me a very brief space of time), and before I knew it I was living in a little terraced house, with a garden and lots of sunshine, in a residential neighbourhood on the outskirts of Gerona, suddenly converted into the almost involuntary protagonist of an insipid vignette of provincial well-being that I couldn't have imagined even in my worst nightmares when I was an aspiring young writer steeped in dreams of triumph.

But, to my surprise, the decision to change cities and lifestyle turned out to be a good move. In theory we'd taken it because Gerona was a cheaper and quieter place than Barcelona, and one could get to the centre of the capital in an hour, but in practice and in time I discovered that the advantages didn't end there: since in Gerona Paula's salary from the paper was almost enough to meet all the family needs, I was soon able to give up working at the university and writing articles to devote myself entirely to writing my books; I have to add that in Gerona we could count on all kinds of help from relatives and friends with children, and that there were hardly any distractions, so our social life was non-existent. Aside from that, Paula went to Barcelona and back daily, while I took care of the house and Gabriel, which left me lots of free time for my work. The results of this framework of favourable circumstances were the happiest years of my life and four books: two novels, one collection of columns and another of essays. It's true that they all went as unnoticed as the first, but it's also true that I didn't experience that invisibility as a frustration, much less as failure. In the first place, by way of a defensive blend of humility, arrogance and cowardice, I wasn't annoyed that my books didn't receive any more attention than they did because I didn't think they deserved it and, at the same time, because I thought very few readers would be in a position to understand them, but also because I secretly feared that had they received more attention than they did, they would inevitably reveal their glaring poverty. And, in the second place, because by then I'd already understood that, if I was a writer, it was because I'd turned into a nutcase who was obliged to look at reality and sometimes see it, and, if I'd chosen that bitch of a job, perhaps it was only because I couldn't be anything other than a writer: because in a way it hadn't been me who had chosen my trade, it had been my trade that had chosen me.

Time went by. I began to forget Urbana. I couldn'tforget, however (or at least not entirely), my friends from Urbana, especially because occasionally, and with no effort on my part, I kept hearing news of them. The only one who was still there was John Borgheson, who I saw again several times, each time more venerable, more professorial and more British, on his occasional visits to Barcelona. Felipe Vieri had finished his studies in New York, got a job as a professor at NYU and since then lived in Greenwich Village, turned into what he'd always wanted to be: a New Yorker from head to toe. Laura Burns' life was more turbulent and more varied: she'd finished her doctorate at Urbana, married a Hawaiian computer engineer, divorced him and, after traipsing around several west coast universities, had ended up in Oklahoma City, where she'd remarried, this time to a businessman who had made her give up her work at the university and forced her to live back and forth between Oklahoma and Mexico City. As for Rodrigo Gines, he'd also finished his doctorate at Urbana and, after teaching at Purdue University for a couple of years, had returned to Chile, not to Santiago, but to Coyhaique, in the south of the country, where he'd married again and was teaching at the University of Los Lagos.

The only one I didn't know anything about for a long time was Rodney, and that was despite the fact that, every time I was in touch with anyone who had been in Urbana when I was there (or immediately before, or immediately after), I'd always ask about him eventually. But not knowing anything about Rodney didn't mean I'd forgotten him either. In fact, it would be easy to imagine now that I never stopped thinking about him in all those years; actually that's only partly true. It's true that every once in a while I wondered what had become of Rodney and his father, how long my friend had stayed away from home after his flight and how long it had been before he'd left again after his return. It's also true that on at least a couple of occasions I was attacked by a serious desire or urgency to tell his story and that, every time that happened, I dusted off the three black cardboard document cases with elastic straps that Rodney's father had given me and reread the letters they contained and the notes that I had taken as soon as I got back to Urbana of the tale he'd told me that afternoon in Rantoul, just as it's true that I did thorough research, reading everything I could get my hands on about the war in Vietnam, and that I took pages and pages of notes, drew up outlines, sketched out characters and planned scenes and dialogues, but the fact is there were always pieces left over that wouldn't fit, blind spots impossible to clear up (especially two: what had happened in My Khe, who was Tommy Birban), and maybe that's why each time I decided to start to write I soon gave up, bogged down in my inability to invest with meaning a story that deep down (or at least that's what I suspected at the time) perhaps lacked any. It was a strange feeling, as if, despite the fact that Rodney's father had made me in some way responsible for the story of his son's disaster, that story wasn't entirely mine to tell and I wasn't the one who had to tell it and therefore I lacked the courage, madness and desperation needed to tell it, or perhaps as if it was still an unfinished story, yet to arrive at the boiling point or level of maturity or coherence that makes a story no longer stubbornly resist being written. And it's also true that, just like in Urbana with my first frustrated novel, for a long time I could never sit down to write without feeling Rodney breathing down my neck, without wondering what he'd think of this sentence or that one, of this adjective or that one — as if Rodney's shadow was at once a ferocious judge and a guardian angel — and of course I was still unable to read Rodney's favourite authors — and I read a lot of them — without mentally arguing with my friend's tastes and opinions. All that is true, but it's just as true that, as time went by and the memory of Urbana began to dissolve in the distance like the feathery vapour trail of an airplane as it vanishes into a clear blue sky, the memory of Rodney dissolved with it too, so by the time my friend unexpectedly reappeared I was not only convinced I'd never write his story, but also that, unless some improbable chance came into play, I'd never see him again.

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

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

'Who?' I asked incredulously.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Have you been waiting long?' he asked. '

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'Of course,' he answered. 'But he's too intelligent for me. Actually I'm afraid he's too intelligent to be a good novelist. He's always demonstrating how intelligent he is, instead of letting the novel be the intelligent one.' Taking a sip of coffee, he leaned back on the sofa and carried on, 'And speaking of novels, I suppose you must've started turning into a cretin or a son of a bitch by now, huh?'

I stared at him, uncomprehending.

'Don't make that face, man,' he laughed. 'It was a joke. But, really, isn't that what all successful guys end up turning into?'

'I'm not so sure,' I defended myself. 'Maybe what success does is just bring out some people's inner cretin or son of a bitch. It's not the same. Besides, I hate to tell you but my success is so minor, it's not even enough for that.'

'Don't be so optimistic,' he insisted. 'Since I've been in Spain two or three different people have already told me about your book.Malum signum.By the way: did Paula tell you that even I've read it?'

I nodded and, to save myself from the humiliation of asking him what he'd thought of it, in one motion I finished off my coffee and put a cigarette between my lips. Rodney leaned over with his rusty old yellowing Zippo he'd brought back from Vietnam.

'Well, actually I think I've read them all,' he said.

I choked on the first drag.

'All of them?' I asked once I'd stopped coughing.

'I think so,' he said after lighting himself a cigarette as well. 'In fact, I think I've become a notable expert on your oeuvre. Oeuvre with a capital or small O?'

'Go to hell.'

Rodney laughed again happily. He really seemed glad that we were together again; I was too, but less so, perhaps because Rodney's provocations wouldn't allow me to entirely discard the paranoid fear that my friend had travelled all the way from the United States just to ridicule my success, or at least to take me down a peg or two. Maybe to rule out this fear once and for all, or to confirm it, since Rodney didn't seem willing to go on, I asked, 'Well, aren't you going to tell me what you thought of it?'

'Your latest novel?'

'My latest novel.'

'I thought it was good,' said Rodney, making an uncertain gesture of assent and looking at me with his cheerful, brown eyes. 'But, can I tell you the truth?' '

Of course,' I said, cursing the hour I'd decided to travel to Madrid in search of Rodney. 'As long as it's not too offensive.'

'Well, the truth is I liked the first one you wrote more,' he said. 'The one about Urbana, I mean. What's it called?'

'The Tenant!

'Yeah, that's the one.'

'I'm so pleased,' I lied, thinking of Marcelo Cuartero or Marcelo Cuartero's student who had written about that book. 'I have a friend who thinks the same. I thought he was the only one who'd read it. In his review he more or less said there was an immense gulf in universal literature between me and Cervantes.'

Rodney let out a guffaw that revealed his whole mouthful of bad teeth.

'What I like about it is that it seems like a cerebral novel, but it's actually full of feeling,' he said afterwards. 'But this latest one seems full of feeling, but it's actually too cerebral.'

'Exactly the opposite to what the critics who didn't like it thought. They say it's sentimental.'

'You don't say? Then I'm right. These days, when some halfwit doesn't know how to attack a novel, they attack it by saying it's sentimental. The halfwits don't understand that writing a novel consists of choosing the most moving words to provoke as much emotion as possible; nor do they understand that sentiments are one thing and sentimentalism something else entirely, and that sentimentalism is the failure of sentiment. And, since writers are a bunch of cowards who don't dare take issue with the halfwits in charge and who've banned sentiment and emotions, the result is all these well-mannered, cold, pale, lifeless novels that seem like they've come directly out of some avant-garde civil servant's office to please the critics. .' Rodney took a greedy drag on his cigarette and seemed lost in thought for a few seconds. 'Listen, tell me something,' he added, then suddenly looked me in the eye. 'The nutcase professor in the novel is me, right?'

The question shouldn't have caught me off guard. I'vealready said that in my Urbana novel there was a semi-hopeless character whose eccentric physical appearance is based on Rodney's physical appearance, and at that moment I remembered that while I was writing the novel, I often imagined that, in the unlikely case that he read it, Rodney would unavoidably recognize himself. I suppose to gain time and find a convincing reply that, without straying from the truth, wouldn't hurt Rodney's feelings, I asked, 'What professor? What novel?'

'What novel do you think?' answered Rodney.'TheTenant.Is Olalde me or not?'

'Olalde is Olalde,' I improvised. 'And you're you.'

'Throw another dog that bone,' he said in Spanish, as if he'd just learned the phrase and was using it for the first time. 'Don't give me that old story of novels being one thing and life another,' he went on, back in English now. 'All novels are autobiographical, my friend, even the bad ones. And as for Olalde, well, I think he's the best thing in the book. But, in truth, what I think is funniest is that you saw me like that.'

'How?' I asked, no longer trying to hide the obvious.

'As the only one who really understands what's going on.'

'And why do you think that's funny?'

'Because that's exactly how I saw myself.'

Now we both laughed, and I took advantage of the situation to change the subject. Of course, I was eager to talk to him about Vietnam and my frustrated attempts to tell his story, but because I thought it might be counterproductive to be too hasty or premature and could put him off broaching a subject he'd never wanted to talk about with me, I opted to wait, sure that the night would eventually afford me the opportunity without turning that friendly reunion into an interrogation and without Rodney conceiving the not entirely baseless suspicion that I'd only come to see him to pump him for information; so, trying to recover in the late summer night of that Madrid hotel the complicity of those winter evenings in Treno's — with the snow lashing the windows and ZZ Top or Bob Dylan coming out of the speakers — I started talking about Urbana: about John Borgheson, Giuseppe Rota, Wong, the Chinese guy and the sinister-looking American, whose name we'd both forgotten or never known, about Rodrigo Gines, Laura Burns, Felipe Vieri and Frank Solaun. Then we talked at length about Gabriel and Paula, and I summed up my life in Urbana after he disappeared and also my life in Barcelona and Gerona after Urbana disappeared, and finally, without my asking, Rodney told me with a few extra bits what Paula had already told me: that he'd been living in Burlington, Vermont for almost ten years, that he had a son (called Dan) and a wife (called Jenny), that he was employed at a real estate agency; he also told me that in the next few days he would find out if he'd got a position as a teacher in a public school in Rantoul, something he fervently desired, because he very much wanted to go back to live in his home town. As soon as he pronounced that name I realized my opportunity had arrived.

'I know the place,' I said.

'Really?' asked Rodney.

'Yeah,' I answered. 'After you stopped teaching at Urbana I went to your house to look for you. I saw a bit of the city but I spent most of the time with your father. I thought he would have told you.'

'No,' said Rodney. 'But that's normal. It would have been strange if he had told me.'

'I hope he's well,' I said, for something to say.

Rodney didn't answer straight away; suddenly, in the yellowish light of the floor lamp, surrounded by the darkness of the foyer, he looked tired and sleepy, maybe abruptly bored, as if nothing could interest him less than talking about his father. He said, 'He died three years ago.' I was about to resort to some hackneyed consolation when Rodney interrupted to save me the trouble. 'Don't worry. There's nothing to be sorry for. For years my father did nothing but torment himself. At least he doesn't any more.'

Rodney lit another cigarette. I thought he was going to change the subject, but he didn't; with some surprise I heard him carry on, 'So you went to see him.' I nodded. 'And what did you talk about?'

'The first time we didn't,' I explained, carefully choosing my words. 'He didn't want to. But after a while he phoned me and I went back to see him. Then he told me a story.'

Now Rodney looked at me with curiosity, raising his eyebrows inquisitively. Then I said, 'Wait here for a minute. I want to show you something.'

I stood up, hurried past the receptionist, who started up from his snooze, got in the elevator, went up to my room, grabbed the three black document cases, went back down to the foyer and put them on the table, in front of Rodney. With an ironic glint in his eyes and voice, my friend asked, 'What's this?'

I didn't say anything: I just pointed to the document cases. Rodney opened one of them, contemplated the pack of chronologically arranged envelopes, took one, read the address and the return address, looked at me, took the letter out of the envelope and, as he tried to decipher his own handwriting on the rough US Army paper, since the silence was lengthening I asked, 'Recognize them?'

Rodney looked at me again, this time fleetingly, and, without answering, left the letter on the table, picked another envelope, took out another letter, started to read that one too.

'My father gave them to you?' he murmured, waving the one he had in his hand. I didn't answer. 'It's strange,' he said after a couple of seconds.

'What's strange?'

'That they should be here, in Madrid,' he answered, not taking his eyes off the letters. 'That I wrote them and now I don't understand them. That my father should have given them to you.'

Slowly he put the letters back in the envelopes, put the envelopes back in the document case, asked, 'Have you read them?'

I said I had. He nodded indifferently, forgetting about the letters and sitting back again on the sofa. After another pause he asked again with apparent interest, 'What'd you think?'

'What, of this?'

'Of my father,' he corrected me.

'I don't know,' I admitted. 'I only saw him twice. I couldn't form an opinion. But I don't think he was sure of having done the right thing.'

'In relation to what?'

'In relation to you.'

'Ah.' He smiled weakly: on his face not the slightest trace was left of the vivacity that had animated it until a few minutes ago. 'You're mistaken there. Actually he was never sure of having done the right thing. Not in relation to me or in relation to anybody. That type of person never is.'

'I don't understand.'

Rodney shrugged; by way of explanation he added, 'I don't know, maybe it's true there're only two types of people: the sinners who always think they're righteous, and the righteous who always think they're sinners. At first my father was the first type, but then he turned into the champion of the second. I imagine that happens to lots of people.' He pushed a nervous hand through his messy hair and for a moment seemed on the point of laughing, but he didn't laugh. 'What I mean is that after a certain point in time my father didn't give me many chances to feel proud of him. Of course, I didn't give him many chances to feel proud of me either. So I suppose it was all a damned misunderstanding. But, well, these things happen to everybody.' He sighed, still smiling as he put out his cigarette in the overflowing ashtray. Starting to get up from the sofa, he gestured towards the clock on the wall by the stairs: it said five o'clock. 'Ah well, I'm starting to babble. This story is of no interest to anyone any more, and I'd better get a bit of sleep, don't you think?'

But I wasn't prepared to let that occasion escape. I told him to hang on a second, that the story interested me. A little surprised, Rodney questioned me silently with a sort of malicious naivete. Then, aware it was now or never, all in one go I told him his father had summoned me to Rantoul precisely to tell me about it, I told him what his father had told me and asked him why he thought he'd done so, why he'd given me his letters and Bob's as well. Rodney listened to me attentively and settled back into his seat; after a long silence, during which his gaze was lost beyond the ring of light we'd stolen from the darkness of the room, he looked at me again and burst out laughing.

'What's so funny?' I asked.

'Either you've changed a lot or that's a rhetorical question.'

'What do you mean?'

'You know exactly what I mean,' he answered. 'What I mean is that after talking to my father you left my house convinced that what he wanted was for you to tell my story, or at least that you had to tell it. Am I wrong?'

I didn't blush; I didn't deny the truth either. Rodney moved his head from one side to the other in a gesture that resembled reproach but was actually mockery.

'The presumption,' he muttered. 'The fucking presumption of writers.' He paused and, looking me in the eye, said, 'And so?'

'And so what?'

'So why haven't you told it?'

'I tried,' I admitted. 'But I couldn't. Or rather I didn't know how.'

'Yeah,' said Rodney, as if my answer had disappointed him, and then asked, 'Tell me something? What is it that my father told you?'

'I already told you: everything.'

'What's everything?'

'What he knew, what you'd told him, what he imagined, what's in the letters,' I explained. 'He also told me there were things he didn't know. He told me about an incident in a village, for example. My Khe it was called. He didn't know what had happened there, but he explained that after that incident you spent some time in hospital, and then you re-enlisted in the army. Anyway, that's in the letters too.'

'You've read them all,' Rodney said almost as a question.

'Of course,' I said. 'Your father gave them to me to read. Besides, I've already admitted that at some point I wanted to tell your story.'

'Why?'

'For the same reason any story gets told. Because I was obsessed with it. Because I didn't understand it. Because I felt responsible for it.'

'Responsible?'

'Yeah,' I said, and, almost without realizing it, added, 'maybe a person isn't only responsible for what they do, but also for what they see or read or hear.'

As soon as I heard myself pronounce that sentence I regretted having said it. Rodney's reaction confirmed my mistake: his lips curled instantly into a cunning smile, which soon vanished, but before I could put things right my friend began to speak slowly, as if possessed by a sarcastic and controlled rage.

'Ah,' he said. 'Nice phrase. You writers sure like your pretty phrases. There's a few in your last book. Real pretty. So pretty they almost seem true. But, of course, they're not true, they're just pretty. The funny thing is you still haven't learned that writing well is the opposite of writing pretty phrases. No pretty phrase is capable of expressing truth. Probably no phrase is capable of capturing truth, but. .'

'I didn't say I wanted to tell the truth,' I interrupted him in irritation. 'I just said I wanted to tell your story.'

'And what difference is there between the two?' he answered, trying to catch my eye with a sad air of defiance. 'The only stories worth telling are the true ones, and if you couldn't tell my story it might not be that you're not capable of it, it might be that it can't be told.'

I held my tongue. I shouldn't have held my tongue, but I did. I should have said: 'That's a pretty phrase too, Rodney, and perhaps it's true.' I should have said: 'You're wrong, Rodney. The only stories worth telling are the ones that can't be told.' I should have said one of those two things, or perhaps both of them, but I didn't say either and I held my tongue. I was sleepy, I was hungry, I felt the night was beginning to turn to dawn, but most of all I felt the astonishment of being embroiled in that conversation that I'd never imagined I could have had with Rodney and that I thought we were only having because Rodney secretly knew he owed it to me, and maybe as well because, against all expectations, time had ended up cauterizing my friend's interminable wounds. I let a few seconds go by, lit a cigarette and after the first drag heard myself say: 'What happened in My Khe, Rodney?'

We were almost whispering, but the question resounded in the quiet of the foyer like a shot. I'd been asking myself for fourteen years, and during that time I'd found out a few things about My Khe. I knew, for example, that nowadays it was a vast tourist beach located fifteen kilometres from Quang Ngai, in the Son Tinh district, not far from the port of Sa Ky, a ribbon of land seven kilometres long, squeezed between a dark forest of poplars and the clear waters of the Kinh River, of which I'd seen many photographs that showed the same anodyne images of summery idleness as any beach in the world: women and children paddling near the calm shore, the gentle slope of very fine sand scattered with red plastic tables and chairs, a crest of rolling hills in the distance placidly cut out against a sky as blue as the sea; I also knew that thirty-two years earlier there'd been a village beside that beach and that one day in 1968 Rodney had been there. But although I had imagined many times what happened in My Khe — with my imagination by then corroded by reportage, history books, novels, documentaries and films about Vietnam — I knew nothing for certain. I thought Rodney had read my mind when he asked with a sort of resignation or indifference: 'Can't you guess?'

'More or less,' I answered, sincerely. 'But I don't know what happened.'

'You don't need to,' he assured me. 'What you imagined is what happened. What happens in all wars happened. No more, no less. My Khe is only an anecdote. Besides, in Vietnam there wasn't just one My Khe, there were many. What happened in one happened more or less in all of them. Satisfied?'

I said nothing.

'No, of course not,' guessed Rodney, hardening his voice again, and then went on as if he didn't want me to understand what he said but rather what he meant. 'But if it means that much to you I can tell you something that'llleave you satisfied. What would you prefer? I know lots of stories. I've got an imagination too. Tell me what you need to make you think your story tallies and make yourself believe you understand it. You tell me and I'll tell you and we'll be done, okay? But before that let me warn you about something: no matter what I tell you, no matter what I invent, you're never going to understand the only thing that matters, and that's that I don't want your pity. Understand? Not yours or anybody else's. I don't need it. That's the only thing that matters, or at least it's the only thing that matters to me. You understand, right?'

I nodded, regretting having pushed the conversation to such an extreme and, as I looked away from Rodney's gaze, I noticed a bitter taste of ashes or old coins in my mouth. In the big window that overlooked Principe Pio station, dawn was already vying with the morning's waning darkness, unhurriedly sweeping away the room's shadows. The receptionist had stopped dozing a while ago and was scurrying about in his cubicle. I exchanged a blank look with him and, looking back at Rodney, muttered an apology. Rodney didn't give any sign of having heard it, but after a long silence sighed, and at that moment I thought I guessed from a barely perceptible change in his expression what was going to happen. I wasn't wrong. With a calmed voice and a tired air he asked, 'Do you really want me to tell you?'

Knowing that I'd won, or that my friend had let me win, I didn't say anything. Then Rodney crossed his legs and, after thinking for a moment, began to tell the story. He did so in a strange way, quick, cold and precise all at the same time; I don't know if he'd told it to someone before, but while I listened I knew he'd told it to himself many times. Rodney told me that the week before the incident at My Khe, a routine patrol made up of soldiers from his company had been accosted at a crossroads by a Vietnamese teenager, who, as she went from one to the next asking for help with urgent gestures, set off a hand grenade hidden inside her clothing, and that the result of this encounter was that, along with the teenager, two members of the patrol were blown to pieces, another lost an eye and two others were injured less seriously. The episode obliged them to redouble security, injecting the company with extra nervousness, which might partly explain what happened later. And what happened was that one morning his company was sent on a reconnaissance mission to the village of My Khe with the object of making sure some information they'd received that members of the Vietcong were hiding there was false. Rodney remembered it all like it was wrapped in the fog of a dream, the Chinook they travelled in descending first over the sea and then over the sand and finally in circles over a handful of neat garden plots while the peasants ran towards the village square, seized with panic because of the peremptory voices spat out by the loudspeakers, the helicopter landing beside a graveyard and then the flash of the sun in the exemplary blue sky and the dazzle of the flowers on the windowsills and a diffuse or remote clamour of hens or children in the crystal-clear morning air as the soldiers dispersed in an impeccable geometrical formation down the deserted streets until at some moment, without really knowing how or why or who had started it, the shooting broke out, first a single shot was heard and almost immediately bursts of machine gun fire and later screams and explosions, and in just a few seconds an insane torment of fire pulverized the miraculous tranquillity of the village, and when Rodney went towards the place where he imagined the battle had started he heard at his back a confused noise of mass escape or ambush and he turned and shouted in rage and fright and opened fire, and then he kept shouting and shooting not knowing why he was shouting or where or at whom he was shooting, shooting, shooting, shooting, and shouting too, and when he stopped the only thing he saw in front of him was an unintelligible jumble of clothes and hair soaked in blood and tiny, dismembered hands and feet and lifeless or still imploring eyes, he saw something multiple, wet and slippery that quickly escaped his comprehension, he saw all the horror in the world concentrated in a few metres of death, but he couldn't bear that refulgent vision and from that moment his conscience abdicated, and of what came next he had only a very vague, dreamlike memory of fires and disemboweled animals and weeping old men and corpses of women and children with their mouths open like exposed entrails. Rodney didn't remember anything more; during his months in hospital and during the rest of his time in Vietnam no one ever mentioned the incident again, and only much later, when they had a trial back in the United States, Rodney found out what his father also found out and had told me: there hadn't been any battle in My Khe, there weren't any guerrillas hiding there, none of the members of his company had even been injured, and the incident had left fifty-four Vietnamese dead, most of them women, old people and children.

When Rodney finished talking we remained still for a moment, not even daring to look at each other, as if his tale had taken us to a place where only fear was real and we were waiting for the benign apparition of a visitor who would give us back the shared safety of that squalid foyer of a Madrid hotel. The visitor did not arrive. Rodney leaned his big hands on his knees and got up from the sofa with a creaking of joints; bent over and a little unsteady, as if he were dizzy or suffering from vertigo or nausea, he took a few steps and stood looking at the street, leaning on the window frame.

'It's almost daylight,' I heard him say.

It was true: the skeletal light of dawn was inundating the room, endowing everything in it with a phantasmal or precarious reality, as if it were scenery submerged in a lake, and at the same time sharpening Rodney's profile, his silhouette standing out doubtfully against the cobalt blue of the sky; for an instant I thought that, rather than a bird of prey, it was the profile of a predator or a big cat.

'Well, that's more or less the story,' he said in a perfectly neutral tone of voice, returning to the sofa with his hands hidden in his pockets. 'Is that how you imagined it?'

I pondered my answer for a moment. My mouth didn'ttaste of ashes or old coins any more, but of something that very closely resembled blood but wasn't blood. I felt horror, but I didn't manage to feel pity, and at some moment I felt — hating myself for feeling it and hating Rodney for making me feel it — that all the suffering his time in Vietnam had inflicted on him was justified.

'No,' I finally answered. 'But it's not far off.'

Rodney kept talking, standing up in front of me, but I was too stunned to process his words, and after a while he took one hand out of his pocket and pointed at the clock on the wall.

'My train's leaving in just over an hour,' he said. 'I better go upstairs and get my things. Will you wait for me here?'

I said I would and stayed waiting for him in the foyer, looking through the big unsleeping window at the people going into the Principe Pio station and the traffic and the incipient morning activity in the neighbourhood of La Florida, watching them without seeing them because the only thing that occupied my mind was the mistaken and bittersweet certainty that Rodney's entire story only just now made sense to me, an atrocious sense that nothing could soften or rectify, and ten minutes later Rodney returned weighed down with luggage and freshly showered. While he checked out of the hotel a guy went into one of the two phone booths that flanked the reception desk and, I don't know why, but as I saw him dial the number and wait for an answer, with a start I remembered a name and almost said it out loud. Without taking my eyes off the guy inside the phone booth I heard Rodney ask the receptionist how to get to Atocha station and the receptionist telling him the quickest way was to get a train from Principe Pio station. Then Rodney turned back to me to say goodbye, but I insisted on accompanying him to the station.

We went down to the hall and before going outside onto paseo de La Florida, Rodney put his eye patch on. We crossed the street, went inside the station, Rodney bought a ticket and we went towards the platform beneath an enormous steel framework with translucent glass like the skeleton of an enormous prehistoric animal. While we waited on the platform I asked if I could ask one more question.

'Not if it's for your book,' he answered. I tried to smile, but I couldn't. 'Take my advice and don't write it. Anyone can write a book if they put their mind to it, but not everyone can keep quiet. Besides, I already told you, that story can't be told.'

'That may be,' I admitted, though now I didn't want to hold my tongue, 'but maybe the only stories worth telling are the ones that can't be told.'

'Another pretty phrase,' said Rodney. 'If you write the book, remember not to include it. What is it you wanted to ask me?'

Without a second's doubt I asked: 'Who is Tommy Birban?'

Rodney's face didn't change, and I didn't know how to read the look in his one eye, or maybe there was nothing to read in it. When he spoke he managed to keep his voice sounding normal.

'Where did you get that name?'

'Your father mentioned it. He said that before you left Urbana you and he spoke on the phone and that's why you left.'

'He didn't tell you anything else?'

'What else should he have told me?'

'Nothing.'

At that moment they announced over the loudspeakers the imminent arrival of the Atocha train.

'Tommy was a comrade,' said Rodney. 'He arrived in Quang Ngai when I was already a veteran, and we became friends. We left almost at the same time, and I haven't seen him since. .' He paused. 'But you know something?'

'What?'

'When I met you, you reminded me of him. I don't know why.' With the trace of a smile on his lips Rodney waited for my reaction, but I didn't react. 'Well, I do actually. You know? In war there are those who go under and those who save themselves. That's all. Tommy was one of those who go under, and you would have been too. But Tommy survived, I don't know how but he survived. Sometimes I think it would have been better for him if he hadn't. . Anyway, that was Tommy Birban: an underdog who sunk even further to save himself.'

'That doesn't answer my question.'

'What question?'

'Why did you leave after talking to him on the phone?'

'You didn't ask me that question.'

'I'm asking you now.'

Knowing time was on his side, Rodney just answered with an impatient gesture and an evasive: 'Because Tommy wanted to get me involved in a mess.'

'What kind of mess? Was Tommy at My Khe?'

'No. He arrived long after that.'

'So?'

'So nothing. Soldier things. Believe me: if I explained it to you, you wouldn't understand. Tommy was weak and he kept obsessing over things from the war. . Grudges, enmities, things like that. I didn't want to know about any of that stuff any more.'

'And you left just because of that?'

'Yeah. I thought I was over all that, but I wasn't. I wouldn't do it now.'

I realized Rodney was lying to me; I also understood or thought I understood that, contrary to what I'd thought in the hotel foyer only a little while earlier, the horror of My Khe didn't explain everything.

'Anyway,' said Rodney as the Atocha train stopped beside us. 'We've spent the night talking nonsense. I'll write you.' He hugged me, picked up his bags and, before climbing onto the train, added: 'Take good care of Gabriel and Paula. And take care of yourself.'

I nodded, but didn't manage to say anything, because I could only think that that was the first time in my life I'd hugged a murderer.

I went back to the hotel. When I got to my room I was sticky with sweat, so I took a shower, changed my clothes and lay down on the bed to rest a while before getting the plane back. I had a bitter taste in my mouth, a headache and a buzzing in my temples; I couldn't stop going over and over my encounter with Rodney. I regretted having gone to see him in Madrid; I regretted knowing the truth and having insisted on finding it out. Of course, before that night's conversation I imagined Rodney had killed: he'd been to war and dying and killing is what you do in wars; but what I couldn't imagine was that he'd participated in a massacre, that he'd murdered women and children. Knowing what he'd done filled me with a pitiless, unflinching aversion;having heard him tell it with the indifference with which you describe an innocuous domestic incident increased the horror to disgust. Now the misery of remorse in which Rodney had spent years bleeding seemed a benevolent punishment, and I wondered if the implausible fact that he'd survived the guilt, far from being commendable, didn'tincrease the appalling burden of responsibility. There were, of course, explanations for what he'd told me, but none of them equal to the size of the disgrace. On the other hand, I didn't understand why, having revealed without beating about the bush what happened in My Khe, Rodney would have avoided telling me who Tommy Birban was and what he represented, unless his evasions were meant to try to hide from me a greater horror than My Khe, a horror so unjustifiable and unutterable that, to his eyes and by contrast, it turned My Khe into an utterable and justifiable horror. But what unimaginable horror of horrors could that be? A horror in any case sufficient to pulverize Rodney'smental equilibrium fourteen years before and make him leave his home and his job and resume his fugitive life as soon as Tommy Birban had reappeared. Of course it was also possible that Rodney hadn't told me the whole truth of My Khe and that Tommy Birban had arrived in Vietnam by the time it happened and was in some way linked to the massacre. And what had he meant when he said that Tommy Birban was weak and that he shouldn't have survived and that he reminded him of me? Did this mean that he'd protected Tommy Birban or he was protecting him like he'd protected me? But what had he protected Tommy Birban from, if he had protected him? And what had he protected me from?

At noon, when reception woke me up to tell me I had to check out, it took me a few seconds to accept that I was in a hotel room in Madrid and that my encounter with Rodney hadn't been a dream, or rather a nightmare. Two hours later I flew back to Barcelona, with my mind made up to forget once and for all my friend from Urbana.

I didn't manage it. Or rather: Rodney kept me from managing it. Over the following weeks I received several letters from him; at first I didn't answer them, but my silence didn't daunt him and he kept writing, and after a while I gave in to Rodney's stubbornness and to the uncomfortable evidence that our encounter in Madrid had sealed an intimacy between the two of us that I didn't want. His letters from those days were about different things: his work, his acquaintances, what he was reading, Dan and Jenny, especially about Dan and about Jenny. So I found out that the woman with whom Rodney had a son was almost my age, fifteen years younger than him, that she'd been born in Middlebury, a small town near Burlington, and that she worked as a cashier in a supermarket;in several letters he described her to me in detail, but curiously the descriptions differed, as if he had too deep a knowledge of her to be able to capture her in a bunch of improvised words. Another curious detail (or one that now seems curious to me): on at least two or three occasions Rodney again tried, as he already had in Madrid, to talk me out of my plan to tell his story; insisting so much struck me as strange, among other reasons because I judged it superfluous, and I think at some point it ended up arousing the ephemeral suspicion that deep down my friend had always wanted me to write a book about him, and that the conversation we'd had in Madrid, like all the ones we'dhad in Urbana, contained a sort of coded instruction manual about how to write it, or at least about how not to write it, just as if Rodney had been training me, surreptitiously and since we met, so that one day I'd tell his story. At the beginning of August Rodney announced that he'd got the teaching job he'd been hoping for and was preparing to move with Dan and with Jenny to his old family home in Rantoul. Over the next couple of weeks Rodney almost stopped writing to me and, by the time his correspondence began to resume its previous rhythm, in the middle of September, my life had experienced a change the real extent of which I could not even have suspected then.

It was an unforeseeable change, although perhaps in a way Rodney had foreseen it. I've already said that before the summer break the reception given my novel about the Spanish Civil War, which unexpectedly became a notable critical success and a small success in terms of sales, had surpassed my rosiest expectations; nevertheless, between the end of August and the beginning of September, when the new literary season begins and the books from the previous one get confined to the oblivion of the bookshops' back shelves, the surprise struck: as if during the summer journalists had reached an agreement not to read anything but my book, suddenly they began to summon me to talk about it in newspapers and magazines, on radio and television; as if during the summer readers had reached an agreement not to read anything but my book, I suddenly started to receive jubilant news from my publisher about sales of the book skyrocketing. I'll leave out the details of the story, because they're public and more than one will still remember them; I won't leave out that in this case the image of a snowball, despite being a cliche (or precisely because it is one), is accurate: in less than a year the book had been reprinted fifteen times, had sold more than three hundred thousand copies, was being translated into twenty languages and adapted for the cinema. It was an unmitigated triumph, which no one in my situation would have dared imagine in their wildest dreams, and the result was that from one day to the next I went from being an unknown, insolvent writer, who led an isolated, provincial life, to being famous, having more money than I knew how to spend and finding myself caught up in a whirlwind of trips, awards ceremonies, launches, interviews, round tables, book fairs and literary festivals that dragged me from one place to another all over the country and to every capital on the continent. Incredulous and exultant, at first I couldn't even recognize I was spinning uncontrollably in the vortex of a demented cyclone. I sensed it was a perfectly unreal life, a farce of colossal dimensions resembling an enormous spider's web that I was secreting and weaving myself and in which I was caught, but, though it might be a deception and I an impostor, I was willing to run all the risks with the only condition being that no one snatched away the pleasure of thoroughly enjoying that hoax. Smug professionals affirm that they don't write to be read by anyone except the select minority who can appreciate their select writings, but the truth is that every writer, no matter how ambitious or hermetic, secretly yearns to have innumerable readers, and that even the most unyielding, degraded, courageous, damned poet dreams of youngsters reciting his verses in the streets. But deep down that hurricane had nothing to do with literature or readers, but rather with success and fame. We know wise men have always advised accepting success with the same indifference as failure, not boasting of victories or degrading yourself with tears in defeat, but we also know that even they (especially they) cry and degrade themselves and boast, unable to respect that magnificent ideal of impassivity, and that's why they recommend we aspire to it, because they know better than anyone that there is nothing more poisonous than success and nothing more lethal than fame.

Although at first I was barely conscious of it, success and fame began to degrade me straight away. They say that someone who rejects a compliment wants two: the one that's already been paid him and the one his false modesty extracts with the denial. I learned very soon to garner more compliments by turning them away, and to exercise modesty, which is the best way to feed vanity; I also soon learned to feign fatigue and chagrin at fame and to invent small misfortunes that would win me compassion and ward off envy. These strategies weren't always effective and, as is logical, I was often the victim of lies and slander, but the worst thing about slander and lies is they always end up contaminating us, because it's very difficult not to cede to the temptation of defending ourselves against them by turning into liars and slanderers. Nothing secretly pleased me more than rubbing shoulders with the rich, the powerful and the winners, and being seen with them. Reality seemed to offer no resistance (or it offered only a tiny resistance compared to what it used to offer), so, in a vertiginous way, everything I'd ever desired seemed now to be within reach, and bit by bit everything that used to be flavoursome began to taste insipid. That's why I drank at all hours: when I was bored, to not be bored; when I was having fun, to have more fun. It was undoubtedly the drink that finally pushed me onto a roller coaster of euphoric nights of alcohol and sex and days of apocalyptic hangovers, and which revealed guilt, not as an occasional discomfort as a result of breaking self-imposed rules, but as a drug whose dose had to be continually increased in order to keep having its narcotic effects. Maybe for that reason — and because the intoxication of success blinded me with an illusion of omnipotence, whispering in my ear that the long-awaited moment to take my revenge on reality had arrived — I suddenly turned into an indiscriminate womanizer; I still loved Paula and still felt guilty every time I cheated on her, but I couldn't stop cheating on her, nor did I want to. For the same reasons, and also because I felt celebrity had suddenly elevated me above them and I didn't need them any more, I looked down on those I'd always admired and those who'd always been friendly to me, while I flattered those who used to look down on me or did look down on me, or who I'd looked down on, with the insatiable hope — because once you'vegot success then you only want success — of winning their approval. I remember, for example, what happened with Marcelo Cuartero. One afternoon of that frenetic autumn we were about to run into each other on a street in central Barcelona, but as we got closer I suddenly felt uncomfortable with the idea that I'd have to stop and talk to him and at the last minute I crossed the street to avoid him. Not long after that thwarted encounter someone brought up Marcelo's name in one of those impromptu groups at a literary cocktail party. I don't know what we were talking about, but the thing is at some point a reviewer who wanted to be a non-fiction writer mentioned a book of Marcelo's as an example of the kind of arid, sterile and narrow-minded nonfiction writing that triumphed in the universities, and a successful non-fiction writer who wanted to be a novelist seconded his opinion with a comment that was more bloody than sharp. That was when I joined in, sure of winning the smiling acquiescence of the little chorus.

'Sure,' I said, agreeing with the non-fiction writer's comment, despite having read Marcelo's book and having thought it brilliant. 'But the worst thing about Cuartero isn't that he's boring, or even that he thinks we should admire him for demonstrating he's read stuff no one wants to read. The worst thing is he's gaga, for fuck's sake.' I haven't forgotten what happened in those months with Marcos Luna either. If it's true that no one is entirely saddened by a friend's misfortune, then it's also true that no one is entirely delighted by a friend's happiness; it's possible, however, that in those days no one was closer to being entirely delighted by my happiness than Marcos Luna. Furthermore, it came at a particularly rough time for him. In September, just as my book began its climb towards fame, Marcos had surgery for a detached retina;the operation didn't go well, and two weeks later they had to do it again. He had a prolonged convalescence: Marcos spent over two months in hospital altogether, laid up with the depressing certainty that he would be half blind when he finally got out of there. But this time he was lucky, and by the time he went home he had almost entirely recovered his sight in the affected eye. During the time he spent in hospital I spoke to him several times by phone, when he called me from his bed to congratulate me each time he heard someone talking about my book or heard me talking on the radio, or each time that someone told him of my triumphs; but, trapped as I was by the proliferating obligations of success, I never found time to visit him, and when I did see him again fleetingly, in a terrace bar in Eixample, just before some publicity dinner, I almost didn't recognize him: old and shrunken, his hair thinning and almost entirely grey, he looked the very image of defeat. We didn't see each other again for a long time, but in the meantime we got into the habit (or I got into it, or imposed it) of talking almost every week by phone. We usually spoke on Saturday nights, when I'd already been drinking for many hours and, using the alibi of our old friendship, I'd call him and unburden myself of all the anguish caused by the sudden change my life had undergone, and while I was at it I flattered my pride by showing myself that success hadn't changed me and I was still friends with my old friends; I know there is a kind of inverse vanity in someone who torments himself with blame for disgraces he hasn't committed, and I don't want to make that mistake, but I can't help suspecting that those late-night alcoholic confidences functioned between Marcos and me as a periodic and subliminal reminder of my victories, and maybe they were another way of inflicting on my friend, beneath the deceitful disguise of my complaints against my privileged situation, the humiliation of my triumphs at a moment when, with his health in a bad way and his career as a painter stagnating, he was reasonably feeling the same we'd both unreasonably felt many years before when we'd shared an apartment on calle Pujol: that his life was going to hell. Maybe that explains why on one of those Saturday nights, impassioned by the hypocritical arrogance of virtue, I remembered the conversation I'd had with Rodney in Madrid.

'Success doesn't turn you into a cretin or a son of a bitch,' I said to Marcos at some point. 'But it can release the inner son of a bitch or cretin.' And then I added: 'Who knows: if it had been you, and not me, who'd been successful, maybe we wouldn't be talking right now.'

Marcos didn't hang up on me at that moment, but he did the next day, when I called him to apologize for my pettiness: he didn't accept my apology, he reminded me of my words, reproached me for them, called me a son of a bitch and a cretin, told me not to phone him again and slammed the phone down. Two days later, however, I received an email message from him asking for my forgiveness. 'If I can't even hang onto a thirty-year-old friendship, then I really am finished,' he grumbled. Marcos and I were reconciled, but a few weeks later came an episode that sums up better than any other the dimensions of my disloyalty to him. I won't go into many details, after all, the facts themselves (not what they reveal) are perhaps unimportant. It was after the launch of a book by a Mexican photographer for which I'd written the prologue. The event was some place in Barcelona (maybe it was the MACBA, maybe the Palau Robert) and Marcos was there with Patricia, his wife, who, it seems, was old friends with the photographer. During the cocktail party after the presentation, Marcos, Patricia and I were talking, but when it was over, alleging an early start the next day, my friend refused to come along to dinner, and Patricia and I couldn'tconvince him to change his mind. My memory of what follows is fuzzy, even more so than other nights around that time, possibly because in this case my memory has made an effort to suppress or confuse what happened. What I remember is that Patricia and I went along with a big group for supper at Casa Leopoldo; we sat together and although we'd always had a cordial but distant relationship — as if we'd both agreed that my friendship with Marcos didn't automatically make us friends — that night we sought a complicity that we'd never wished for or allowed ourselves. I think it was with the first after-dinner whisky that the desire to sleep with her crossed my mind; startled by my temerity, I tried to push the thought away immediately. I didn't manage it, or at least I didn't manage to keep it from hanging around in my head insidiously, like an obscenity that was ever less obscene and ever more plausible, while a few nighthawks carried on the festivities in the bar of the Giardinetto and I poured whiskies down my neck talking to this person and the next, but always aware that Patricia was still there. Finally, when they closed the Giardinetto in the early hours, Patricia gave me a lift to my hotel. During the journey I didn't stop talking for a second, as if looking for a formula to hold onto her, but when she stopped her car in front of the door and leaned over to kiss me on the cheek I could only think to suggest we have one last drink in my room. Patricia looked amused, almost as if I were a teenager and she an older nurse who had to take my clothes off. 'You wouldn't be insinuating anything, would you?' she laughed.

I didn't have time to feel ashamed, because before that could happen a cold fury seared my throat. 'You're not a very good whore,' I heard myself spit out. 'You spend all night leading me on and now you leave me in the lurch. Go to hell.'

I slammed the car door and, instead of going into the hotel, began to walk. I don't know how long I was walking, but by the time I got back to the hotel my fury had turned to remorse. The effect of the alcohol, however, had not yet dissipated, because the first thing I did when I got to my room was to call Marcos' house. Luckily, it was Patricia who answered. Stumbling over my words, I begged her to forgive me, pleaded with her to ignore what I'd said, claimed I'd had too much to drink, asked for her forgiveness again. With a cold voice Patricia accepted my apology, and I asked her if she was planning to tell Marcos.

'No,' she answered before hanging up. 'Now go to bed and sleep it off.'

I won't go on. I could go on, but I won't go on. I could tell more anecdotes, but I don't want to forget the bigger picture. A few days ago I read a poem Malcolm Lowry wrote after publishing the novel that brought him fame, money and prestige; it's a truculent, emphatic poem, but sometimes there's no alternative but to be truculent and emphatic, because reality, which almost never respects the laws of good taste, often abounds in truculence and emphasis. The poem goes like this:

Success is like some horrible disaster

Worse than your house burning, the sounds of ruination

As the roof tree falls following each other faster

While you stand, the helpless witness of your damnation.

Fame like a drunkard consumes the house of the soul

Exposing that you have worked for only this —

Ah, that I had never suffered this treacherous kiss

And had been left in darkness forever to founder and fail.

Many years earlier Rodney had warned me and, although at the time I interpreted his words as the inevitable moralizing discharge of a loser drenched in the sickly mythology of failure that governs a country hysterically obsessed with success, at least I should have foreseen that no one is immune to success, and that only when you have to confront it do you understand that it's not just a misunderstanding, one day's cheerful disgrace, rather it's a humiliating and disgraceful misunderstanding and disgrace; I should also have foreseen that it's impossible to survive it with dignity, because it consumes the house of the soul and because it's so beautiful that you discover that, though you kid yourself with protests of pride and cleansing demonstrations of cynicism, in reality you've done nothing but seek it, just as you discover, as soon as you have it in your hands and it's too late to turn it down, that it's only good for destroying you and everything around you. I should have foreseen it, but I didn't. The result was that I lost respect for reality; I also lost respect for literature, which was the only thing that had given reality meaning or an illusion of meaning up till then. Because what I thought I discovered then is exactly the worst thing to discover: that my real vocation wasn't writing but having written, that I wasn't a real writer, that I wasn't a writer because I couldn't be anything else, but because writing was the only instrument I'd had at hand to aspire to success, fame and money. Now I'd achieved them: now I could stop writing. That's why, perhaps, I stopped writing; for that reason and because I was too alive to write, too keen to drain success of its last breath, and you can only write when you write as if you're dead and writing is the only way to evoke life, the last strand that unites us with it. So, after twelve years of living only to write, with the exclusive vehemence and passion of a dead man who won't be resigned to his death, I suddenly stopped writing. That was when I really began to be at risk: I found out that, just as Rodney had told me years before — when I was so young and unwary I couldn't even have dreamt that success might one day crash down on me like a burning house — the writer who stops writing ends up seeking or attracting destruction, because he's contracted the disease of looking at reality, and sometimes of seeing it, but he can no longer use it, can no longer turn it into sense or beauty, no longer has the shield of writing to protect himself from it. Then it's the end. It's over. Finito. Kaput.

The end came one Saturday in April 2002, exactly a year after the publication of my novel. By then it had been many months since I had completely stopped writing and begun to relish the jubilant toxin of triumph; by then the lies, infidelities and alcohol had completely poisoned my relationship with Paula. That night the proprietor of a literary magazine that had just awarded me a prize for the best book of the year gave a dinner in my honour at his house in the country, in a village in L'Emporda; there was a large group of people gathered there: journalists, writers, film-makers, architects, photographers, professors, literary critics, friends of the family. I attended the engagement with Paula and Gabriel. This was unusual and I can't remember why I did: maybe because the host had assured me on the phone that it was going to be almost a family party and that other guests would also be bringing their children with them, maybe to quiet my guilty conscience for cheating on Paula so often and barely spending any time with Gabriel, maybe because I judged that this domestic image would endorse my reputation as a writer impervious to the trappings of fame, a reputation for incorruptibility and modesty that, as I discovered very early, was the ideal tool to win me the favour of the most powerful members of literary society — who are always the most candid, because they feel their status is secure — and also to protect me from the hostility that my success had elicited among those who felt neglected because of it, who felt I'd snatched it away from them. The fact of the matter is that, unusually, I attended the dinner with Gabriel and with Paula. They seated me across the table from the host, an elderly businessman with interests in Barcelona newspapers and publishing companies; Paula was beside me, and on the other side was a young radio journalist, the host's niece, who, following her uncle's instructions, made sure the whole conversation revolved around the causes of my book's unexpected success. Since the journalist practically forced all the guests to participate, there were opinions of every stripe; as for me, happily settled into my position as protagonist of the evening, I confined myself to commenting with hesitant approval on everything that was said and, in a gently ironic tone, begging our host every once in a while that we change the subject, which was interpreted by all as proof of my humility, and not as a ruse designed to prevent the discussion of my merits from flagging. After dinner we had coffee and liqueurs in a large entrance hall that had been fitted out as a reception room, where the guests mingled in smaller groups that assembled and reassembled at the whims of the various conversations. It was after midnight when Paula interrupted a conversation that I, whisky in hand, was having with a screenwriter, his wife and the host's niece about the cinematic adaptation of my novel; she told me that Gabriel had fallen asleep and that she had to work the next morning.

'We're leaving,' she announced, adding without conviction: 'but you stay if you want.'

I was already probing for arguments to try to convince her we should stay a little longer when the screenwriter interjected.

'Of course,' he said, supporting Paula's insincere suggestion and pointing at his wife. 'We're driving back to Barcelona tonight. If you want we can stop in Gerona and drop you off at home.'

I looked with relief into Paula's eyes.

'You wouldn't mind?'

All eyes converged on her. I knew she minded, but she said, 'Of course not.'

I accompanied Gabriel and Paula to the car and, when Gabriel was stretched out on the back seat, exhausted, Paula closed the door and muttered, 'Next time you can go to your party by yourself.'

'Didn't you say you wouldn't mind if I stayed?'

'You're a bastard.'

We argued; I don't remember what we said, but as I watched my car disappear as fast as possible down the gravel driveway that led out of the property I thought what I'd thought so often during that time: that a moment arrives in the life of every couple when everything they say they say to hurt each other, that my marriage had turned into a refined form of torture and the sooner it ended the better for all concerned.

But I soon forgot about my fight with Paula and continued enjoying the party. It went on into the early hours, and when I got into the screenwriter's car I found myself sitting beside a very serious young woman with an intellectual air, who I'd barely noticed all night. The trip to Gerona was brief, but long enough for me to realize that the girl had had quite a bit to drink, to be sure she was flirting with me and to vaguely ascertain that she was a friend of the host's niece and worked for a local television station. When we got to the city the girl suggested we all go for one more drink at a bar that belonged to some friends of hers, and which, she said, never closed before dawn. The screenwriter and his wife declined the offer arguing that it was very late and they should keep going to Barcelona; I accepted.

We went to the bar. We drank, chatted, danced and I finished off the night in the girl's bed. When I left her house dawn was about to break. In the street the taxi I'd phoned was waiting for me; I gave the driver my address and dozed the whole way, but when the taxi stopped at the door of my house I wished I were dead: standing in front of a squad car, two Mossos d'Esquadra were waiting beside the driveway that led to the garage. I paid the taxi driver with a trembling note, and as I got out of the car I noticed the driveway, where we usually parked the car, was empty, and I knew that Paula and Gabriel weren't home.

'What's happened?' I asked as I approached the two officers.

Young, grave, almost spectral in the livid light of daybreak, they asked me if I was me. I said I was.

'What's happened?' I repeated.

One of the policemen pointed to the door of my house and asked: 'Could we speak to you inside for a moment, please?'

I opened the door for the two policemen, we sat in the dining room, I asked again what had happened. The policeman who'd spoken before was the one to answer me.

'We've come to inform you that your wife and your son have been involved in an accident,' he said.

The news didn't surprise me; with a thread of a voice I managed to ask: 'Are they injured?'

The policeman swallowed before he answered: 'They're dead.'

The policeman then took out a notebook and must have begun an antiseptic and detailed account of the circumstances of the accident, but, despite making an effort to pay attention to the explanation, the only thing I could catch were random words, incoherent or meaningless phrases. My memory of the hours that followed is even more shaky: I know I went to the hospital where they'd taken Paula and Gabriel that morning, that I didn't see or didn't want to see their bodies, that relatives and the odd friend immediately started arriving, that I made some confusing arrangement for funerals, which took place the next day, that I didn'tattend them, that some newspaper included my name in the article about the accident and that my house filled up with telegrams and faxes of condolence that I didn't read or that I read as veiled accusations. In reality, there's only one thing I remember from those days with an hallucinatory clarity — my visits to the Mossos d'Esquadra headquarters. In a very short space of time I was there four times, maybe five, although now they all seem like the same one. I was received in an office by a pretty, cold, painstakingly professional uniformed sergeant, who, sitting across from me behind a very cheerful desk, with flowers and family photographs, set out for me the information the police had gathered concerning the accident, sketched diagrams and answered my questions over and over again. They were long meetings, but, despite the causes and circumstances of the accident not raising any doubts for the police (the road surface made slippery by the damp night air, maybe a tiny distraction, a curve taken a bit faster than advisable, a desperate swerve into the oncoming lane, the final horror of blinding lights in front of you), I always left them with new questions, which I'd return to try to clear up at the station hours or days later. The sergeant arranged a meeting for me with the two officers who'd arrived first at the scene of the accident and been in charge of the investigation and, in the company of one of them, took me one afternoon to the exact curve where it had happened; the next morning I went back to the place alone and stayed there for a while, watching the cars go past, not thinking about anything, looking at the sky and the asphalt and the desolation of that piece of open ground swept by the north wind. I couldn't say why I acted like that, but I wouldn't rule out the idea that part of me suspected that something didn't quite tally, there were still loose ends in that story, the police were hiding something from me and, if I could discover what it was, that a door would immediately open and Paula and Gabriel would walk through it, alive and smiling, just as if it had all been a mistake or a bad joke. Until one morning, when I walked into the sergeant's office for our umpteenth interview, I found her accompanied by an older man, with a beard and civilian clothes. The sergeant introduced us and the man explained that he was a psychologist and director of an association called Bereavement Support Services (or something like that), assigned to offer help to relatives of people killed in accidents. The psychologist carried on with his presentation for a while, but I stopped listening to him; I didn't even look at him: I confined myself to looking at the sergeant, who tired of avoiding my eyes and interrupted the man.

'Take my advice and go with him,' she said, finally meeting my gaze, and for the first time I perceived a trace of cordiality or emotion in her voice. 'There's nothing more I can do for you.'

I left the station and never went back. That same afternoon I went to a real estate agency, rented the first apartment they offered me in Barcelona, a flat near Sagrada Familia, and, after selling the house in Gerona at a loss as quickly as possible and getting rid of all of Gabriel's and Paula's belongings, I moved into it and prepared to busy myself conscientiously with the job of dying, and not with that of being born. I discovered that Rodney's father was right and the world was an empty place; but I also discovered that in those moments solitude was less a bane for me than the only possible balm, the only possible blessing. I didn't see my family, I didn't see my friends, I didn't have a television or a radio or a telephone. Aside from that I made sure that only the absolutely indispensable people had my address, and when one of them (or someone who had located me through one of them) knocked on my door, I simply didn't answer. That happened with Marcos Luna, who for a while appeared regularly at my house and got sick of ringing the bell knowing I was inside, listening to him, until he realized that he wasn't going to get to talk to me and from then on he just left in my mailbox, every Friday at lunchtime, a cigarette packet full of freshly rolled joints. My literary agent also sent me a list of the people who called her office requesting my presence somewhere or asking after me every once in a while, although I never answered. Of course, I didn't work, but the sales of the book had provided me with enough income to live without working for years, and I didn't see any reason not to let time go by until that money ran out. My only effort consisted in not thinking, especially in not remembering. At first it had been impossible. Until I left the house I'dshared with Paula and Gabriel and went to Barcelona I couldn't stop torturing myself thinking about the accident: I wondered if Gabriel had woken up at the last moment and been aware of what was about to happen; I wondered what Paula had thought at that moment, what memory had distracted her as she drove, provoking the swerve that in its turn had provoked the accident, what would have happened if, instead of staying at the party, I'd gone home with them. . Those who experienced the programmed brutality of the Nazi or Soviet concentration camps often say that, to bear it, they kept themselves going by remembering the happiness they'd left behind, because, remote though it may have been, they always held on to the hope that they might one day recover it; I lacked that comfort: since the dead don't come back to life, my past was irretrievable, so I applied myself conscientiously to obliterating it. Maybe that's why, as soon as I installed myself in Barcelona, I began to live by night. I sometimes spent entire weeks without leaving the house, reading detective novels in bed, living on packets of soup, tinned food, tobacco, marijuana and beer, but normally I'd spend the nights outside, traipsing relentlessly all over the city, walking aimlessly, stopping now and then to have a drink and rest awhile and get my strength back before continuing my walk to nowhere until dawn, when I'd return home wrecked and throw myself into bed, desperate for rest and unable to sleep, maddened by other people's noises in the world, which incredibly kept to its imperturbable course. Insomnia turned me into a passionate theoretician of suicide, and I now think that if I didn't put it into practice it wasn't only due to cowardice or excess of imagination, but also because I feared my remorse would survive me, or more likely because I discovered that, more than to die, what I desired was never to have lived at all, and that's why sometimes I managed a clear, dreamless sleep when I imagined myself living in the pure limbo of non-existence, in the happiness before light, before words. I took to playing with death. Sometimes I'd take the car and drive obsessively and rashly for days on end, on a whim, stopping only to eat or to sleep, comforted by the permanent certainty that at any moment I could swerve or go into a skid like the one that had killed Gabriel and Paula. One night, in a brothel in Montpellier, I got involved in a meaningless argument with two individuals who ended up giving me a beating that put me in hospital, from which I emerged with my body black and blue and my nose broken. I also bought a pistol: I kept it in a drawer and took it out every once in a while, loaded it and pointed it at my forehead or under my chin or put it in my mouth and held it there, tasting the acidity of the barrel and gently caressing the trigger while sweat poured down my temples and my panting seemed to thunder in my head and fill the silence of the flat to bursting. One night I spent a long time walking along the parapet of my roof terrace, happy, naked and precariously balanced, with my mind a blank, aware only of the breeze that made my skin bristle and the lights of the city and the vertiginous precipice gaping beside me, humming a song I've now forgotten.

I spent the spring, summer and autumn in this dead-end tightrope-walking state, and it wasn't until one night at the beginning of last winter that, thanks to the providential alliance of a disagreeable incident, a chance discovery and a revived memory, I suddenly had a flicker of a hint that I wasn't condemned to endure forever the underground life I'd been leading for months. It all started in Tabu, a nightclub on the lower part of the Rambla frequented by tourists, who go there to see local porn shows at an affordable price. It's a dark and threadbare place, with a bar off at an angle to the right of the entrance and a stage surrounded by metal tables and chairs with silvery sequined lampshades suspended above them, to the left of which a curtain hides the booths reserved for paying couples. I'dalready been there a couple of times, always very late, and, as I'd done on my previous visits, that night I ordered a whisky from the slight, old woman plastered in makeup who seemed to be in charge of the place and who stayed at one end of the bar, drinking and smoking and watching the show from a distance. It must have been a weekday, because although among the clients there was a conspicuous group of loud, frenzied youths fraternizing effusively with the artistes and climbing up on stage as soon as they hinted at it, the rest of the bar was almost deserted, and there were only two couples leaning on the bar not far from me: one halfway down, the other a bit further along. I'd already had my first whisky and was just about to order a second when, just as a naked woman began fellating a man dressed as a Roman soldier on stage, I felt something abnormal was going on beside me; I turned and saw that the couple halfway down the bar were arguing violently. I'm lying: I didn't see that;what I saw, in a few flashing seconds of stupefaction, was that the man and the woman were shouting at each other wildly, the man slapped the woman across the face, the woman tried unsuccessfully to retaliate in kind, and, seized by a blind fury, the man began to hit the woman, and he kept hitting her and hitting her until he knocked her to the floor, from where she tried to defend herself with tears, insults, punches and kicks. I also saw the couple that were further down the bar move away from the scene, fascinated and terrified; the volume of the music prevented the audience over by the stage from noticing the fight, and the only person who seemed determined to stop it, shouting herself hoarse behind the bar, was the old woman who ran the place. As for me, I stood stock-still, paralyzed, watching the fight with my empty whisky glass gripped tightly in my fist, until, undoubtedly alerted by the manager, two bouncers appeared, subdued the aggressor with quite a bit of difficulty and took him outside with one arm twisted up behind his back, while the manager took the girl backstage escorted by other prostitutes. It was also the manager who, once she was back in the room, took care of calming the worries of a clientele who, for the most part, had seen only a confusing glimpse of the end of the altercation, and it was also she who, after making sure the show was going on, as she passed me on her way back behind the bar, spat out without even looking at me, as if I were a regular customer and she could give vent to the accumulated tension with me: 'And you could have done something too, don't you think?'

I didn't say anything; I didn't order a second whisky; I left the place. Outside it was bone-chillingly cold. I went up the Rambla towards the plaza de Catalunya and, as soon as I saw an open bar, went in and ordered the whisky I hadn't dared order in Tabu. I downed it in a couple of hurried gulps and ordered another. Comforted by the alcohol, I reflected on what had just happened. I wondered what state the woman was in, since at the last moment she'd stopped resisting her aggressor's kicks and lay defenceless on the floor, exhausted or maybe unconscious. I told myself that, had it not been for the last-minute intervention of the two bouncers, there was nothing to indicate that the man would have stopped beating his victim until he ran out of steam or killed her. I didn't ask myself, however, what the manager of the place had asked me — why had I done nothing to stop the fight — I didn't ask myself because I knew — out of fear, maybe out of indifference, and even out of a shadow of cruelty — it's possible that some part of me had enjoyed that spectacle of pain and fury, and that same part wouldn't have minded if it had gone on. That was when, as if emerging from a centuries-old chasm, I remembered a parallel and reverse scene to the one I'd just witnessed in Tabu, a scene that happened more than thirty years before in a bar in a distant city I'd never seen. There, some place in Saigon, my friend Rodney had defended a Vietnamese waitress from the boozed-up brutality of a Green Beret NCO; he hadn't been indifferent or cruel: he'd overcome his fear and his courage hadn't failed him. Exactly what I hadn't done a few minutes earlier. More than shame for my cowardice, my cruelty and my indifference, I felt surprise at the fact of remembering Rodney at precisely that moment, when it had been almost two years since I'd forgotten him.

Hours later, going over what had happened that night, I thought that untimely memory was actually a premonition. That's what I thought then, but I could have thought it long before, just when, as I finished my whisky in that bar on the Rambla and took out my wallet to pay for it, a bunch of disorderly papers I kept in it fell out onto the floor; I bent down to pick them up: there were credit cards, my driver's licence and ID card, overdue bills, pieces of paper with scribbled phone numbers and vaguely familiar names. Among them was a folded and wrinkled photograph; I unfolded it, looked at it for a second, less than a second, recognizing it without wanting to recognize it, more incredulous than astonished; then I folded it up againquickly and put it back in my wallet with the other papers. I paid at once, went out onto the street with a sensation of vertigo or real danger, as if I were carrying a bomb in my wallet, and started walking very fast, not feeling the night'scold, not noticing the lights and people of the night, trying not to think about the photograph but knowing that image from a life I almost believed cancelled could explode before the stone door my future had become, opening a crack through which reality, future and past, would filter into the present. I went up the Rambla, crossed the plaza de Catalunya, walked up the paseo de Gracia, turned left when I got to Diagonal and kept walking very quickly, as if I needed to exhaust myself as soon as possible or gather courage or postpone as much as possible the inevitable moment. Finally, at a corner in Balmes, in the changing light of a traffic signal, I made up my mind: I opened my wallet, took out the photo and looked at it. It was one of the pictures of Paula and Gabriel with Rodney during my friend's visit to Gerona, and also the only image of Paula and Gabriel that I had accidentally kept: I'd got rid of the rest when I moved to Barcelona. There they both were, on that forgotten piece of paper, like two ghosts who refuse to disappear, diaphanous, smiling and intact on Les Peixeteries Velles bridge; and there was Rodney, standing up straight between the two of them, with his patch over his eye and his two enormous hands resting on the shoulders of my wife and my son, like a Cyclops ready to protect them from an as yet invisible threat. I kept looking at the photograph; I won't try to describe what I was thinking: to do so would distort what I felt while I was thinking. I'll only say that I had been staring at the photo for a long time when I realized I was crying, because the tears, which were streaming down my cheeks, were soaking my flannel shirt and the collar of my coat. I was crying as if I would never stop. I was crying for Paula and for Gabriel, but perhaps most of all I was crying because up till then I hadn't cried for them, not when they died or in the months of panic, blame and reclusion that followed. I cried for them and for me; I also knew or thought I knew that I was crying for Rodney and, with a strange sense of relief — as if thinking of him was the only thing that could exempt me from having to think about Paula and Gabriel — I imagined him at that very moment in his house in Rantoul, his provincial two-storey house with an attic and a porch, a front yard with two maples on Belle Avenue, with his calm, routine work as a schoolteacher, watching his son grow up and his wife mature, redeemed from the incurable, maladjusted fate that for more than thirty years had fiercely cornered him, master of all that I'd had in the glossy and inaccessible time of the photograph that now brought it back.

I don't know how long I'd been standing beside the traffic light when I managed to put the photograph back in my wallet, crossed Balmes and, still crying (or I think so), started walking as far as Muntaner and then towards the upper part of the city. Again I tried not to think of anything, but I thought of Paula and Gabriel; doing so hurt like an amputation: to avoid the pain I forced myself to think about Rodney again. I remembered our tireless conversations at Treno's, my visit to his father in Rantoul, my ever-postponed plan to one day write his story and the conversation we had in Madrid, when I discovered with a repugnance that now struck me as repugnant that my friend had the deaths of women and children on his conscience. And at some point, among the images that crossed my disturbed mind like clouds or meteorites, I remembered Rodney at that party of Wong's, surrounded by people and yet impervious, as alone as a lost animal in the middle of a herd of animals of another species, I remember him on Wong's porch steps, that same night, tall, wrecked, vulnerable and hesitant, wrapped in his sheepskin coat and fur hat as I observed him from the window that overlooked the street and the snow fell on the road in big flakes and he looked at the night without crying (although at first I'd thought he was crying), looked at it more like he was walking along a narrow pass beside a very dark abyss and there was no one who had as much vertigo and as much fear as him. And then I suddenly understood what I hadn't understood that night so many years before, and it was that if I had left the party and had gone in search of Rodney it was because, watching him from the window, I knew he was the loneliest man in the world and that, for some unquestionable reason that was nevertheless beyond my reach, I was the only person who could keep him company, and I also understood that on this night so many years later the tables had turned. Now I was responsible for the death of a woman and a child (or I felt responsible for the death of a woman and a child), now I was the loneliest man in the world, a lost animal in the middle of a herd of animals of a different species, now it was Rodney, and perhaps only Rodney, who could keep me company, because he had travelled long before and for much longer than me the same corridor of fright and remorse along which I had been feeling my way and had found an exit: only Rodney, my fellow, my brother — a monster like me, like me a murderer — could show me a sliver of light in that tunnel of woe through which, without even having the energy to want to get out of it, I had been walking alone and in the dark since the deaths of Gabriel and Paula, just like Rodney had done for thirty years since he rounded some bend on some trail in some unnamed place in Vietnam and saw a soldier appear who was him.

That night I went home earlier than usual, lay down in bed with my eyes open and, for the first time in many months, slept for six hours straight. I had two dreams. In the first only Gabriel appeared. He was playing table football in a big, dilapidated, empty place like a garage, hitting the balls with adult, almost ferocious glee; he had no opponent or I couldn't see his opponent, and he didn't seem to hear my shouts as I tried to get his attention; until suddenly he let go of the handles and, frustrated or furious, turned towards me. 'Don't cry, Papa,' he said then, with a voice that wasn't his, or that I couldn't quite recognize. 'It didn't hurt.' The second dream was longer and more complicated, more disconnected as well. First I saw Paula and Gabriel'sfaces, close together, almost cheek to cheek, smiling at me in an inquisitive way as if they were on the other side of a pane of glass. Then Rodney's face joined theirs and the three began to superimpose like transparencies, blending into each other, so Gabriel's face changed until it turned into Paula's or Rodney's, and Paula's face changed until it turned into Rodney's or Gabriel's, and Rodney's face changed until it turned into Gabriel's or Paula's. At the end of the dream I saw myself arriving at Rodney's house in Rantoul, on a bright, sunny day, and discovering, with unspeakable anguish, between false smiles and suspicious looks, not his wife and son living with my friend, but Paula and Gabriel, or a woman and a boy who imitated Paula and Gabriel's voices and appearance and even their affectionate gestures but who, in some perverse way, weren't them.

The next day I was woken by anxiety. I shaved, showered, got dressed and, while I was having coffee and smoking a cigarette, I decided to write to Rodney. I remember the letter very well. I started it by apologizing for having stopped writing to him; then I asked about his life, asked after his wife and son; then I lied: I wrote about Gabriel and Paula as if they were still alive, and I also talked about myself as if for many months I hadn't been busy dying but being born, as if I hadn't turned into a ghost or a zombie and was still living and writing just as if the house of my soul had not been consumed. I immediately noticed that writing to Rodney operated on me like a soothing balm and, while watching the words appear like insects on the computer screen, almost without noticing it I conceived the unarguable illusion that visiting Rodney at his house in Rantoul was the only way to break the logic of annihilation in which I found myself trapped. I had barely formulated this idea when I began putting it in writing, but, because I realized it was imperious and incredible and demanded too many explanations, I immediately deleted it, and, after thinking it over and over and going through several drafts, I ended up simply expressing my desire to return to Urbana one day and for us to see each other again there or in Rantoul, a vague enough declaration not to be out of synch with the placid and casual mood of the rest of the missive. Night had fallen by the time I finished writing it, and the next morning I sent it to Rantoul by express mail.

For a couple of weeks I waited in vain for Rodney'sreply. Fearing my letter had got lost, I printed up another copy and sent it again; the result was the same. This silence was disconcerting. I didn't think it plausible that neither of the two letters had reached their destination, but I did think Rodney might have received them and, for some reason (maybe because he'd taken as ingratitude or insult my inexplicable interruption of our correspondence in the middle of the maelstrom of my success), refused to answer them; there was also the possibility that Rodney no longer lived in Rantoul, a speculation backed up by the fact that, as far as I could find out, there was no listing for a telephone number under the name of Falk in Rantoul. Either of the two hypotheses was credible, but I don't remember how I arrived at the conclusion that the second was the more reasonable, and that it was also the most worrying or least optimistic: after all, if hurt pride was the cause of Rodney's silence, then there was hope of breaking it, because it wasn'tfoolish to think that sooner or later it would heal; but if the cause of his silence was that Rodney hadn't received my letters because he'd moved with his family to another city (or, even worse, because he'd fled again, turned back into the chronic fugitive incapable of freeing himself from his dishonourable past), then any prospect of seeing Rodney again evaporated forever. Soon the unease turned to despondency, and the fleeting fantasy that an encounter with Rodney would have the effect of a sort of salubrious sorcery on me was suddenly revealed as a last and ridiculous decoy of my powerlessness. Once again I had nothing before me but a stone door.

I went back to my underground life; I let time pass. One Friday in February, two months, more or less, after trying to resume my correspondence with Rodney, when I opened my mailbox to retrieve the packet of joints that Marcos left for me each week I found a letter from my literary agent. Unusually, this time I opened it: my agent told me in the letter that the Spanish Embassy in Washington was proposing a promotional trip to various universities in the United States. I don't know if I've already said that these invitations to travel here and there had turned into something as routine as the administrative silence with which I answered them all. I was about to throw the letter away when I thought of Rodney; I opened Marcos' packet, took out a joint, lit it, took a coupleoftokes and put the letter in my pocket. Then I went outside and started walking towards the city centre. That night I didn't do anything different from what I'd been doing for months; same on the Saturday and the Sunday night. But during the whole weekend I didn't stop thinking about the proposal, and on the Monday afternoon, after giving no sign of life for a long time, I called my agent. She still hadn't recovered from the shock of hearing from me when I gave her the additional surprise of my decision to accept the proposal for the trip to the United States with the non-negotiable condition that one of its legs include Urbana. From there everything moved very quickly: the embassy and the universities accepted my conditions, organized the trip and in the middle of April, almost fifteen years after leaving Urbana, I got back on a plane for the United States.