The Speed of Light (17 page)

'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.