The Speed of Light

by Cercas, Javier

  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, sup
porting 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.