At noon, when reception woke me up to tell me I had to check out, it took me a few seconds to accept that I was in a hotel room in Madrid and that my encounter with Rodney hadn't been a dream, or rather a nightmare. Two hours later I flew back to Barcelona, with my mind made up to forget once and for all my friend from Urbana.
I didn't manage it. Or rather: Rodney kept me from managing it. Over the following weeks I received several letters from him; at first I didn't answer them, but my silence didn't daunt him and he kept writing, and after a while I gave in to Rodney's stubbornness and to the uncomfortable evidence that our encounter in Madrid had sealed an intimacy between the two of us that I didn't want. His letters from those days were about different things: his work, his acquaintances, what he was reading, Dan and Jenny, especially about Dan and about Jenny. So I found out that the woman with whom Rodney had a son was almost my age, fifteen years younger than him, that she'd been born in Middlebury, a small town near Burlington, and that she worked as a cashier in a supermarket;in several letters he described her to me in detail, but curiously the descriptions differed, as if he had too deep a knowledge of her to be able to capture her in a bunch of improvised words. Another curious detail (or one that now seems curious to me): on at least two or three occasions Rodney again tried, as he already had in Madrid, to talk me out of my plan to tell his story; insisting so much struck me as strange, among other reasons because I judged it superfluous, and I think at some point it ended up arousing the ephemeral suspicion that deep down my friend had always wanted me to write a book about him, and that the conversation we'd had in Madrid, like all the ones we'dhad in Urbana, contained a sort of coded instruction manual about how to write it, or at least about how not to write it, just as if Rodney had been training me, surreptitiously and since we met, so that one day I'd tell his story. At the beginning of August Rodney announced that he'd got the teaching job he'd been hoping for and was preparing to move with Dan and with Jenny to his old family home in Rantoul. Over the next couple of weeks Rodney almost stopped writing to me and, by the time his correspondence began to resume its previous rhythm, in the middle of September, my life had experienced a change the real extent of which I could not even have suspected then.
It was an unforeseeable change, although perhaps in a way Rodney had foreseen it. I've already said that before the summer break the reception given my novel about the Spanish Civil War, which unexpectedly became a notable critical success and a small success in terms of sales, had surpassed my rosiest expectations; nevertheless, between the end of August and the beginning of September, when the new literary season begins and the books from the previous one get confined to the oblivion of the bookshops' back shelves, the surprise struck: as if during the summer journalists had reached an agreement not to read anything but my book, suddenly they began to summon me to talk about it in newspapers and magazines, on radio and television; as if during the summer readers had reached an agreement not to read anything but my book, I suddenly started to receive jubilant news from my publisher about sales of the book skyrocketing. I'll leave out the details of the story, because they're public and more than one will still remember them; I won't leave out that in this case the image of a snowball, despite being a cliche (or precisely because it is one), is accurate: in less than a year the book had been reprinted fifteen times, had sold more than three hundred thousand copies, was being translated into twenty languages and adapted for the cinema. It was an unmitigated triumph, which no one in my situation would have dared imagine in their wildest dreams, and the result was that from one day to the next I went from being an unknown, insolvent writer, who led an isolated, provincial life, to being famous, having more money than I knew how to spend and finding myself caught up in a whirlwind of trips, awards ceremonies, launches, interviews, round tables, book fairs and literary festivals that dragged me from one place to another all over the country and to every capital on the continent. Incredulous and exultant, at first I couldn't even recognize I was spinning uncontrollably in the vortex of a demented cyclone. I sensed it was a perfectly unreal life, a farce of colossal dimensions resembling an enormous spider's web that I was secreting and weaving myself and in which I was caught, but, though it might be a deception and I an impostor, I was willing to run all the risks with the only condition being that no one snatched away the pleasure of thoroughly enjoying that hoax. Smug professionals affirm that they don't write to be read by anyone except the select minority who can appreciate their select writings, but the truth is that every writer, no matter how ambitious or hermetic, secretly yearns to have innumerable readers, and that even the most unyielding, degraded, courageous, damned poet dreams of youngsters reciting his verses in the streets. But deep down that hurricane had nothing to do with literature or readers, but rather with success and fame. We know wise men have always advised accepting success with the same indifference as failure, not boasting of victories or degrading yourself with tears in defeat, but we also know that even they (especially they) cry and degrade themselves and boast, unable to respect that magnificent ideal of impassivity, and that's why they recommend we aspire to it, because they know better than anyone that there is nothing more poisonous than success and nothing more lethal than fame.
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.