It was at that moment of unexpected joy that Rodney reappeared. One Saturday night, when I returned from a promotional tour of several cities in Andalucia, Paula greeted me at home with the news that Rodney had been in Gerona that very day.
'Who?' I asked incredulously.
'Rodney,' Paula repeated. 'Rodney Falk. Your friend from Urbana.'
Of course, I'd often talked to Paula about Rodney, but that didn't diminish the shock of hearing that foreign and familiar name coming from the lips of my wife. Paula went on to tell me about Rodney's visit. Apparently, the doorbell had rung midway through the morning; since she wasn'texpecting anyone, before opening the door she looked out through the peephole, and was so alarmed by the sight of a heavy-set stranger with his right eye covered with a veteran's cloth patch that she was tempted to keep quiet and not answer. Her curiosity, however, was stronger than her anxiety, and she ended up asking who it was. Rodney identified himself, asked for me, said who he was again, and Paula finally clicked, opened the door, told him I was away, invited him in and made some coffee. While they were drinking it, watched by Gabriel from a suspicious distance, Rodney told her he'd been travelling around Spain for a week, and had arrived in Barcelona three days ago, seen my latest book in a bookshop, bought it, read it, called the publisher's office and, after trying and trying and finally tricking one of the publicists, managed to get them to give him my address. It wasn't long before Gabriel abandoned his initial distrust and — according to Paula, maybe because he was amused by Rodney's orthopaedic Spanish, or his impossible Catalan learned from me in Urbana, or because Rodney had the shrewdness or instinct to treat him like an adult, which is the best way to win over children — hit it off immediately with my friend, so before Paula knew it Gabriel and Rodney were playing ping pong in the garden. The three of them spent the day together, wandering around the old part of the city and spending a long time in a bar on the plaza de Sant Domenec playing table football, a game Gabriel loved and Rodney had never seen, which didn't stop him, according to Paula, playing with the passion of a novice and celebrating every goal with shouts, hugging Gabriel and lifting him up in the air and kissing him. So at dusk, when Rodney announced he had to leave, Gabriel and Paula tried to persuade him to change his mind with the argument that I'd be back in just a few hours; they didn't succeed: Rodney claimed he had to catch a train that same night from Barcelona to Pamplona, where he planned to spend the San Fermin fiestas.
'He's staying here,' said Paula at the conclusion of her tale, handing me a piece of paper with a name and telephone number scrawled in Rodney's pointy and unmistakable hand. 'Hotel Albret.'
That night a double uneasiness kept me awake, only half related to Rodney's visit. On the one hand, it was barely twenty-four hours since I'd slept with the local writer who'dpresented my book in Malaga; it wasn't the first time in the last few months I'd been unfaithful to Paula, but after each tryst I was viciously tortured by remorse for days. But on the other hand I was also uneasy about Rodney's unexpected reappearance, his reappearance precisely at the moment I became established as a writer, perhaps as if I feared my friend had not shown up to celebrate my success, but to reveal the sham of it, humiliating me with the memory of my farcical beginnings as an aspiring writer in Urbana. I think I fell asleep that night before I extinguished the remorse, but having decided I wouldn'tphone Rodney and would try to forget about his visit as soon as possible.
The next day, however, there didn't seem to be any topic of conversation in my house other than Rodney. Among other things Paula and Gabriel told me that my friend lived in Burlington, a city in the state of Vermont, that he had a wife and had just had a son, and that he worked for a real estate agency. I don't know what surprised me more: the fact that Rodney, always so reluctant to talk to me about his private life, had talked about it to Paula and Gabriel, or the no less puzzling fact that, judging from what he'd told my wife and son, Rodney now led the tranquil life of a husband and father incompatible with the man secretly corroded by his past who, though no one could have suspected it, he still had been in Urbana, just as if the time gone by since then had eventually cured his war wounds and allowed him to emerge from the interminable tunnel of misfortune through which he'd walked alone and in darkness for thirty years. On Monday Paula got the photographs that she and Gabriel had taken with Rodney developed; they were happy photos: most showed just Gabriel and Rodney (in one they're playing table football; in another they're sitting on the cathedral steps; in another they're walking along the Rambla, holding hands); but in two of them Paula appeared as welclass="underline" one was taken on Les Peixeteries Velles bridge, the other at the station entrance, just before Rodney caught his train. Finally, on Tuesday morning, after having turned the matter over and over in my mind, I decided to call Rodney. It wasn't because Paula and Gabriel asked me again and again during those three days if I'd spoken to him yet, but for three distinct but complementary reasons: the first is that I realized I wanted to talk to Rodney; the second is that I came to understand that the suspicion that Rodney had come to rain on my parade was absurd and petty; the third — though not the least important — is that by then I'd spent more than half a year without writing a single line, and at some point it occurred to me that if I managed to talk to Rodney about his time in Vietnam and throw light on the blind spots of that story as I knew it from the testimony of his father and the letters Rodney and Bob had sent from the front, then maybe I'd get a complete understanding of it and be able to safely tackle the ever-postponed task of telling it.
So on Tuesday morning I phoned the Hotel Albret in Pamplona and asked for Rodney. To my surprise, the receptionist told me he wasn't staying there. Since I thought there'd been a mistake, I insisted and, after a few seconds, the receptionist told me that in fact Rodney had stayed in the hotel on Sunday night, but on Monday morning he'dsuddenly cancelled his five-night reservation and left for Madrid. 'He left word that if anyone asked for him to say he'd be at the Hotel San Antonio de La Florida,' the receptionist added. I asked if they had the telephone number of the hotel; he said no. I hung up. I picked up the phone. I got the number for the Hotel San Antonio de La Florida from directory inquiries; I called and asked for Rodney. 'One moment, please.' I waited a moment, after which I again heard the voice of the receptionist. 'I'm sorry,' he said. 'Senor Falk is not in his room.' The next morning I phoned the hotel again, I asked for Rodney again. 'He just went out,' the same receptionist told me (or maybe it was another). Furious, I was about to slam down the receiver, but I stopped myself in time to ask how many days Rodney had reserved his room for. 'He'll still be here tonight,' answered the receptionist. 'But not tomorrow.' I thanked him and hung up the phone. Half an hour later, once I arrived at the conclusion that if I lost Rodney's trail I'd never find it again, I called the hotel again and reserved a room for that night. Then I called Paula at the newspaper, I told her I was going to Madrid to see Rodney, packed a change of clothes, a book and the three document cases with Rodney's and his brother's letters and left for Barcelona airport.