The Speed of Light (26 page)

'No?'

'No.' He pursed his lips in a disparaging gesture. 'The best is what's happening to us now.'

There was a silence, after which I heard that Marcos was laughing; it was contagious and I started laughing too, and for a while a feeble, strange and uncontrollable laughter kept us from talking. Then Marcos suggested we have another beer and, while they were pouring it, for something to say I asked him how his work was going. Marcos took a sip of beer; it left a trace of foam around his mouth.

'About a year ago, just after Patricia and I split up, I stopped painting,' he explained. 'I did nothing but suffer. I hadn't sold a bloody painting for months and I couldn't even save face by blaming the market, that handy gentleman, because I felt that what I was painting was rubbish. So I stopped painting. You don't know how good it felt. Suddenly I realized that it was all an absurd misunderstanding: someone or something had convinced me I was an artist when I really wasn't one, and that's why I suffered so much and everything was so shit. Twenty years pulling in one direction when in reality I wanted to go in another, twenty years down the drain . . . A damned misunderstanding. But, instead of getting depressed, as soon as I understood that I felt better, it was as if I'd taken a huge weight off my shoulders. So I decided to change my life.' He took a drag on his cigarette and started to laugh, but he choked on the smoke and a cough interrupted his laughter. 'Change my life,' he continued after a gulp of beer to clear his throat. 'That's a laugh. You've got to be a jerk to think you can change a life, as if after forty years we still didn't know that it's not us that changes life, but life that changes us. Anyway . . . the thing is I rented a house in the country, in a village in Cerdanya, and said to hell with everything. The first month was great: I walked, looked after the vegetable plot, chatted with the neighbours, I didn't do anything; I even met a girl, a nurse who worked in Puigcerda. It seemed like paradise, and I started making plans to stay there. Until the shit hit the fan. First there were problems with the neighbours, then the girl got bored with me, then I started getting bored. Suddenly the days felt endless, I wondered what the hell I was doing there.' He was quiet for a moment and then he asked: 'You know what I did then?' I could imagine, I almost knew, but I let Marcos answer his own question. 'I started painting. Who'd have fucking believed it, eh? I started painting out of boredom, to kill time, because I had nothing better to do.'

I thought of my interrupted book and of the two joyful kamikazes Marcos and I had imagined ourselves to be sixteen years earlier and of the masterpieces we were going to create to take revenge on the world. I said:

'It seems as good a reason as any.'

'You're wrong,' Marcos disagreed. 'It's the best reason. Or at least the best that's ever occurred to me. The proof is that I've never had as much fun painting as I have since then. I don't know whether what I've painted is good or bad. It might be bad. Or it might be the best stuff I've ever painted. I don't know, and the truth is it doesn't matter. The only thing I know is, well . . .' He hesitated a moment, looked at me and I thought he was going to burst out laughing again. 'The only thing I know is that if I hadn't painted it I'd still be living in that fucking village.'

Although the hands of the pendulum clock in the shape of a tennis racket were frozen at five o'clock, it must have been after nine, because the solitary drinkers of gin and Marie Brizard had disappeared from El Yate and the waiters had been serving dinner at the tables by the windows for a while; beyond that it was completely dark, and the lights of the cars and street lamps and traffic lights made the street look like a shimmering aquarium. When Marcos tired of his monologue about the paintings he'd done or imagined or sketched in Cerdanya, he asked:

'And you?'

'What about me?'

'Are you writing?'

I said no. Then I said yes. Then I asked him if he wanted to have another beer. He said yes. While we drank it I told him I'd spent the last few months writing a book, that I'd given up on it two weeks ago and I didn't know if it was worth finishing, or if I even wanted to finish it. Marcos asked me what the book was about.

'Lots of things,' I said.

'For example?' he insisted.

That was when, at first reluctantly, almost just to repay Marcos's confidences, then enthusiastically and finally transported by my own words, I began to talk to him of the apartment we shared on the calle Pujol, of our encounter with Marcelo Cuartero in El Yate, of my trip to Urbana and my work in Urbana and my friendship with Rodney, of Rodney's father, of Rodney's years in Vietnam, of my return to Barcelona and then to Gerona, of Paula and Gabriel and my encounter with Rodney in the Hotel San Antonio de La Florida in Madrid, of the two tragedies there are in life and of the joy of success and its euphoria and humiliation and catastrophe, of Gabriel's and Paula's deaths, of my purgatory in the apartment in Sagrada Familia, of tunnels and undergrounds and stone doors, of my trip to the United States and my return to Rantoul, of Dan and Jenny, of the crimes of Tiger Force and of Tommy Birban's death and of Rodney's suicide, of my return to Barcelona, of my frustrated return to Rantoul, of the illusions of algebra and geometry. I talked to him of all these things and others, and as I did so I knew that Jenny was right, that Marcos was right; I should finish the book. I should finish it because I owed it to Gabriel and Paula and Rodney, also to Dan and Jenny, but most of all because I owed it to myself, I would finish it because I was a writer and I couldn't be anything else, because writing was the only thing that could let me look at reality without being destroyed by it or having it collapse on top of me like a burning house, the only thing that could give it meaning or an illusion of meaning, the only thing that, as had happened during those months of seclusion and work and vain hope and seduction or persuasion or demonstration, had allowed me to glimpse for real and without knowing it the end of the road, the end of the tunnel, the breach in the stone door, the only thing that had got me out from under the ground into the open and had allowed me to travel faster than the speed of light and recover part of what I'd lost among the crash of the collapse, that's why I'd finish the book, and because finishing it was also the only way that, albeit enclosed in these pages, Gabriel and Paula would somehow stay alive, and I would stop being who I'd been up till then, who I was with Rodney — my fellow, my brother — to become someone else, to be somehow and partially and forever Rodney. And at some point, while I was still telling Marcos about my book, already knowing that I was going to finish it, I was struck by the suspicion that perhaps I hadn't given up on it two weeks earlier because I hadn't wanted to finish it or wasn't sure if it was worth finishing, but because I didn't want it to finish: because, when I was already glimpsing its ending — when I almost knew what I wanted this story to say, because I'd almost already said it; when I'd almost got where I wanted to get to, precisely because I'd never known where I was going — the vertigo of not knowing what would be on the other side got to me, what abyss or mirror was waiting for me beyond these pages, when I again had all roads before me. And that was when I didn't only know the exact ending of my book, but also when I found the solution I was looking for. Euphoric, with the last beer I explained it to Marcos. I explained that I was going to publish the book under a different name, a pseudonym. I explained that before I published it I'd completely rewrite it. I'll change all the names, the places, the dates, I explained. I'll lie about everything, I explained, but only to better tell the truth. I explained: it will be an apocryphal novel, like my clandestine and invisible life, a false novel but truer than if it were true. When I finished explaining it all, Marcos remained quiet for a few seconds, smoking with an absent expression; then he drank down the rest of his beer.

'And how does it end?' he asked.

I looked around the almost empty bar and, feeling almost happy, answered:

'It ends like this.'

AUTHOR'S NOTE

Like all books, this book is in debt to many other books. Among them I should mention two volumes that collect experiences of ex-combatants from Vietnam:
Nam
by Mark Baker and
War and Aftermath in
Vietnam
by T. Louise Brown. The following texts have also been very useful:
A Rumor of War
by Philip Caputo;
Vietnam: A War Lost and Won
by Nigel Cawthorne;
Dispatches,
by Michael Herr; 'Trip to Hanoy' in
Styles of Radical Will
by Susan Sontag. Furthermore, I am grateful for the disinterested help I have received from Quico Auquer, Andres Barba, Jessica Berman, Frederic Bonet, David Castillo Buils, Angel Duarte, Tomas Frauca, David T. Gies, Cris-tina Llençana, Rosa Negre, Nuria Prats, Guillem Terribas, John C. Wilcox and, especially, Jordi Gracia, Felip Ortega and David Trueba, to whom this book owes even more than they think.

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