That's how Rodney's father finished telling his story. Neither of us had anything to add, but I stayed a little longer with him, and for an indeterminate space of time, which I wouldn't know whether to calculate in minutes or hours, we sat facing one another, keeping up a faint imitation conversation, as if we shared a shameful secret or the responsibility for a crime, or as if we were looking for excuses so I wouldn't have to face the road back to Urbana alone and he the springtime loneliness of that big house with nobody in it, and when, past midnight, I finally decided to leave, I was sure I'd always remember the story Rodney's father had told me and that I was no longer the same person who that afternoon, many hours earlier, had arrived in Rantoul. 'You're too young to think of having children,' Rodney's father said to me as we parted, and I haven't forgotten. 'Don't have any, because you'll regret it; although if you don't have any you'll regret that too. That's life: no matter what you do, you regret it. But let me tell you something: all love stories are absurd because love is an illness that only time can cure; but having a child is risking a love so absurd that only death can end it.'
That's what Rodney's father said to me, and I have not forgotten.
Otherwise, I never saw him again.
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.