I landed in Madrid at six, and forty minutes later, after skirting the city along the M-30, a taxi dropped me off at the Hotel San Antonio de La Florida, in the neighbourhood of La Florida, just across the street from the Principe Pio railway station. It was a modest hotel, whose fa$ade gave onto a noisy sidewalk filled with old-fashioned bars and patios. I crossed a hall and went up some carpeted steps that led to a spacious foyer; at one end was the reception, flanked by two phone booths and a plastic pyramid of tourist postcards. I registered, they gave me the key to my room, I asked for Rodney. The receptionist — a very neat, sallow-skinned, bespectacled man — consulted the registry and then a set of pigeonholes.
'Room 334,' was his answer. 'But he's not there now. Do you want me to give him a message when he comes back?' '
Tell him I'm staying in the hotel,' I answered. 'And that I'm waiting for him.'
The receptionist wrote down the message on a piece of paper and a bellhop led me to a tiny, slightly sordid room with cream-coloured walls and blood-red doors and frames. I got undressed, had a shower, got dressed again. Lying on a hard old bed covered by a bedspread with a floral print identical to the one on the drawn curtains, which spared the vision of a knot of highways and a densely treed corner of the Casa de Campo, beyond which began the outskirts of the city, expecting Rodney to knock on my door at any moment, I kept myself busy imagining our encounter. I wondered how Rodney would have changed since the last time I'd seen him, a winter night fourteen years earlier, on the snowy sidewalk in front of Treno's; I wondered if his father would have told him about my visit to Rantoul and what he'd told me about him; I wondered if he'd agree to talk to me about his years in Vietnam, to explain to me what had happened in My Khe, who Tommy Birban was; I wondered why he'd gone to Gerona to see me and what he thought of my novel. Until, consumed with impatience or tired of wondering, towards nine I went back downstairs to reception and asked the receptionist to tell Rodney when he arrived that I was waiting for him in the cafe.
The café was very busy. I sat at the only free table, ordered a beer and buried myself in the novel I'd brought from home. Several beers later I ordered a sandwich, and then a coffee and a double whisky. Time went by; people came and went from the place, but Rodney still didn't show up. It must have been very late by the time I ordered a second coffee, because the euphoric effect of the whisky and the first coffee had completely vanished. 'I'm sorry,' the waiter answered. 'We're just closing.' I persuaded him to serve me a coffee in a plastic cup and, carrying it, went up to the foyer, where at that moment the receptionist was attending to a pair of late arrivals. Hours earlier, when I had come down to eat, the foyer was brightly lit by a row of spotlights pointed at the ceiling, but now it had been overtaken by a darkness only lessened by the light of the reception desk and that of a couple of floor lamps whose circle of light barely managed to drag from the shadows the prints of old Madrid, the Goyaesque lithographs and the charmless still lifes that decorated the walls. I sat beneath the light of one of the lamps, my back to the big window that ran the length of the room and almost at the top of the steps that came up from the entrance, facing a wall clock that showed two o'clock; beyond, beneath another lamp, a man sat alone watching a black and white film on the television. The man soon turned off the television and took the elevator up to his room. By then the receptionist had dealt with the pair of tourists and was dozing behind the counter. I kept waiting and, pausing from my reading, disheartened by fatigue and sleepiness, wondered whether Rodney hadn't escaped again and the most sensible thing might not be to go to bed.
Shortly after that he appeared. I heard the street door open and, as I'd done each time that had happened, waited expectantly for a moment; this time I saw Rodney emerge from the shadows of the stairway and, without noticing my presence, head towards the reception desk with his quick and stumbling gait. While Rodney woke up the receptionist from his snooze, I felt my heart in my mouth: I set my book down on the coffee table beside my chair, got up and stood there, without managing to take a step or say anything, as if bewitched by the expected appearance of my friend. The receptionist's voice shattering the silence of the foyer broke the spell. '
That man is waiting for you,' he said to Rodney, pointing over his shoulder.
Rodney turned around and, after a few seconds' hesitation, began to advance towards me, peering through the semi-darkness of the room with a look more inquisitive than incredulous, as if his poor eyes couldn't quite recognize me.
'Well, well, well,' he finally croaked when he was a few steps away from me, smiling with his whole mouthful of mistreated teeth and throwing open two arms like sails. 'I can't believe it. The celebrated author in person. But what the hell are you doing here?'
He didn't give me time to answer: we hugged. '
Have you been waiting long?' he asked. '
A while,' I answered. 'Yesterday I phoned the number in Pamplona you gave Paula and they told me you were staying here. I tried to get in touch with you, but I couldn't, this afternoon I got on a plane and came to Madrid.'
'Just to see me?' he feigned surprise, shaking me by the shoulders. 'You could have at least told me you were coming. I would have been waiting for you.'
As if he were apologizing, Rodney recounted the circumstances that had disrupted his travel arrangements. At first, he explained, his plan had been to spend the week of San Fermin in Pamplona, but when he arrived in the city last Sunday and checked into the Hotel Albret — a hotel quite a distance from the centre, near the university clinic — he realized he'd made a mistake and that it wasn't worth running the risk of letting the realSanferminesspoil the radiant fictionalSanferminesthat Hemingway had taught him to remember. So the next day he packed his bags again, cancelled his hotel reservation and, without allowing himself even a glimpse of the festive city, went to Madrid. That said, Rodney began describing the circuitous itinerary of his trip through Spain, and then talked enthusiastically about his visit to Gerona, about Gabriel and about Paula. As he did so I was trying to superimpose my precarious memory of him on the reality of this man I now had before me; despite the fourteen years that had passed since the last time I'd seen him, the fit was almost perfect, with barely any need for adjustments, because in all that time Rodney'sphysical appearance hadn't changed much: maybe the pounds he'd put on gave him a less stony and more vulnerable air, maybe his features had softened a little, maybe his body leaned a little further to the right, but he dressed with the same militant sloppiness as ever — running shoes, faded jeans, blue checked shirt — and his long hair, reddish and a bit messy, the permanent restlessness of his eyes which were almost different colours and his ungainly heaviness still gave him that lost pachyderm air of my memories.
At some point Rodney broke off his explanation mid-sentence with another explanation.
'Tomorrow I'm catching the 7 a.m. train for Seville,' he said. 'We've got the whole night ahead of us. Shall we go have a drink?'
We asked at the desk for a nearby bar where we could have a drink, but he told us that all the ones in the neighbourhood were closed by that time, and in the centre we'd only find the clubs open. Annoyed, we asked him if he could serve us something in the foyer.