'Don't worry,' said Rodney, 'I'll call you.'
And so we said goodbye, and less than a week later I set off travelling with Rodrigo, Barbara and Gudrun. We'd planned to be away from Urbana for two weeks, but in fact we didn't get back for almost a month. We travelled in Barbara's car, at first following a vaguely fixed plan, but then allowing whim or chance to guide us, and in this way, often driving all day and sleeping in highway motels and cheap little hotels, first we went south, through St Louis, Memphis and Jackson, until we got to New Orleans; we stayed there for several days, after which we began our return, making a detour through the east, up through Meridian, Tuscaloosa and Nashville till we got to Cincinnati and then to Indianapolis, from where we came home drenched in the light and the cold and the highways and sound and immensity and snow and the bars and the people and the plains and the filth and the skies and the sadness and the towns and cities of the Midwest. It was a huge and happy trip, during which I made the irrevocable decision to pay attention to Rodney, throw the novel I'd been working on for months in the garbage and start writing another one immediately. So the first thing I did when I got back to Urbana was to go look for Rodney. In the phone book there was only one Falk — Falk, Dr Robert — resident in Rantoul and, since I knew that Rodney lived with his father, I supposed it must be Rodney's father. I dialled the number several times, but no one answered. For his part, and contrary to what he'd promised, Rodney didn't get in touch with me either during the rest of the holidays.
Classes resumed at the end of January, and the first day, opening the door to my office, sure I was finally going to see Rodney again, I almost crashed head first into a chubby, little, albino-looking guy I'd never seen before. Naturally, I thought I'd opened the door to the wrong office and quickly apologized, but before I could shut the door the guy held out his hand and in a laboured Spanish told me I hadn't been mistaken; he then pronounced his name and announced he was the new assistant professor of Spanish. Perplexed, I shook his hand, mumbled something, introduced myself; then we chatted for a moment, I don't know what about, and only at the end did I resolve to ask him about Rodney. He told me he didn't know anything, except that he'd been hired to replace him. Before my first class that day I inquired in the offices: they didn't know anything there either. Finally it was the secretary of the department head who, the next day, gave me news of my friend. It seems just a few days before the end of the vacation a relative had called to say Rodney wouldn't be returning to work, leaving the head of the department furious and having to look as fast as possible for someone to replace him. I asked the secretary if she knew what had happened to Rodney; she said no. I asked if the boss knew; she said no and advised me not to even consider asking him. I asked if she had Rodney's phone number; she said no.
'I don't and neither does anyone else in the department,'she said, and then I realized that she was just as furious with Rodney as her boss; however, before I left she broke down in the face of my insistence and added reluctantly: 'But I have his address.'
A few days later I asked Barbara if I could borrow her car and went to Rantoul. It was a bright afternoon at the beginning of February. I drove out of Urbana along Broadway and Cunningham Avenue, went north on a highway that advanced between corn fields buried in snow, glistening in the sun, scattered with pine trees, maples, metal silos and isolated little houses, and twenty-five minutes later, after passing an army air base, I arrived at Rantoul, a small working-class city (really it was more like a large town) that gave Urbana a certain metropolitan air in comparison. On the outskirts, at the intersection of two streets — Liberty Drive and Century Boulevard — there was a gas station. I stopped and asked a man in overalls for Belle Avenue, which was the street where, according to the department head's secretary, Rodney lived; he gave me some directions and I continued on towards the centre. I was soon lost. It had started to get dark; the city seemed deserted. I stopped the car at a corner, just where a sign proclaimed Sangamon Avenue. In front of me were train tracks and beyond them the city dissolved into a wooded darkness, to my left the street was soon cut off, to my right, three hundred or so metres away, blinked a neon sign. I turned right and headed towards the sign: BUD'S BAR, it said. I parked the car in the middle of a string of cars and went in.
In the bar a smoky, jovial, Saturday-night atmosphere prevailed. There were lots of people: boys playing pool, women putting coins in the slot machines, men drinking beer and watching a basketball game on a giant television screen; a jukebox spread country music all through the place. I went over to the bar, behind which three waiters — two very young and the other somewhat older — wandered around a low table covered in bottles and, while waiting for someone to serve me, I looked at the photos of baseball stars and the big portrait of John Wayne dressed as a cowboy, with a dark red bandana knotted at his throat, which hung on the back wall. Finally one of the waiters, the oldest of the three, came over with a hurried air, but before he could ask me what I wanted to drink I told him I was looking for Belle Avenue, 25 Belle Avenue.
As if he were mocking me, the bartender asked:
'You want to see the doctor?'
'I want to see Rodney Falk,' I answered.
I must have said it too loud, because two men who were leaning on the bar nearby turned around to look at me. The waiter's expression had changed: now the mockery had turned to a mixture of surprise and interest; he leaned on the bar too, as if my answer had dispelled his hurry. He was a man of about forty, compact and dark, stony-faced, slanting eyes and boxer's nose; he was wearing a sweaty Red Sox cap, a few locks of greasy hair poked out from under it at his temples and the nape of his neck.
'You know Rodney?' he asked.
'Yeah,' I answered. 'We work together in Urbana.'
'At the university?'
'At the university.'
'I see,' he nodded thoughtfully. Then he added: 'Rodney's not home.'
'Ah,' I said, and was about to ask where he was or how he knew he wasn't home, but by then I must've started feeling uneasy, because I didn't. 'Well, it doesn't matter.' I repeated: 'Could you tell me where 25 Belle Avenue is?'
'Of course,' he smiled. 'But wouldn't you like to have a beer first?'
At that moment I noticed that the men sitting at the bar were still scrutinizing me, and absurdly imagined that everyone in the bar was waiting for my reply; a cold froth suddenly gathered in my stomach, as if I'd just entered a dream or a danger zone that I had to escape from as soon as possible. That's what I was thinking at that moment: of getting out of that bar as soon as possible. So I said: 'No, thanks.
'Just as the waiter had indicated, Rodney's house was barely five hundred metres from Bud's Bar, as soon as I turned the corner onto Belle Avenue. It was an older, bigger and more solid house than the ones lined up next to it; except for the slate grey gable roof, the rest of the building was painted white: as well as a narrow attic, it had two floors, a porch at the top of some brown steps and a front lawn buried in snow, with two bushy maples and a pole with the American flag waving gently in the breeze of twilight. I parked the car and rang the bell. No one answered and I rang again. I was just about to peer in through one of the downstairs windows when the door opened and on the threshold appeared a man with completely white hair, about seventy years old, wearing a very thick blue dressing gown and a pair of slippers of the same colour, holding the door knob in one hand and a book in the other; in the half-light of the hallway, behind him, I glimpsed a coat stand, a mirror with a wooden frame, the base of a carpeted stairway leading up to the darkness of the second floor. Except for his heavy build and the colour of his eyes, the man hardly resembled Rodney, but I immediately guessed it was his father. I smiled and, flustered, greeted him and asked for Rodney. He suddenly adopted a defensive attitude and, with intemperate severity, asked me who I was. I told him. Only then did he seem to relax a little.