The next day I was woken by anxiety. I shaved, showered, got dressed and, while I was having coffee and smoking a cigarette, I decided to write to Rodney. I remember the letter very well. I started it by apologizing for having stopped writing to him; then I asked about his life, asked after his wife and son; then I lied: I wrote about Gabriel and Paula as if they were still alive, and I also talked about myself as if for many months I hadn't been busy dying but being born, as if I hadn't turned into a ghost or a zombie and was still living and writing just as if the house of my soul had not been consumed. I immediately noticed that writing to Rodney operated on me like a soothing balm and, while watching the words appear like insects on the computer screen, almost without noticing it I conceived the unarguable illusion that visiting Rodney at his house in Rantoul was the only way to break the logic of annihilation in which I found myself trapped. I had barely formulated this idea when I began putting it in writing, but, because I realized it was imperious and incredible and demanded too many explanations, I immediately deleted it, and, after thinking it over and over and going through several drafts, I ended up simply expressing my desire to return to Urbana one day and for us to see each other again there or in Rantoul, a vague enough declaration not to be out of synch with the placid and casual mood of the rest of the missive. Night had fallen by the time I finished writing it, and the next morning I sent it to Rantoul by express mail.
For a couple of weeks I waited in vain for Rodney'sreply. Fearing my letter had got lost, I printed up another copy and sent it again; the result was the same. This silence was disconcerting. I didn't think it plausible that neither of the two letters had reached their destination, but I did think Rodney might have received them and, for some reason (maybe because he'd taken as ingratitude or insult my inexplicable interruption of our correspondence in the middle of the maelstrom of my success), refused to answer them; there was also the possibility that Rodney no longer lived in Rantoul, a speculation backed up by the fact that, as far as I could find out, there was no listing for a telephone number under the name of Falk in Rantoul. Either of the two hypotheses was credible, but I don't remember how I arrived at the conclusion that the second was the more reasonable, and that it was also the most worrying or least optimistic: after all, if hurt pride was the cause of Rodney's silence, then there was hope of breaking it, because it wasn'tfoolish to think that sooner or later it would heal; but if the cause of his silence was that Rodney hadn't received my letters because he'd moved with his family to another city (or, even worse, because he'd fled again, turned back into the chronic fugitive incapable of freeing himself from his dishonourable past), then any prospect of seeing Rodney again evaporated forever. Soon the unease turned to despondency, and the fleeting fantasy that an encounter with Rodney would have the effect of a sort of salubrious sorcery on me was suddenly revealed as a last and ridiculous decoy of my powerlessness. Once again I had nothing before me but a stone door.
I went back to my underground life; I let time pass. One Friday in February, two months, more or less, after trying to resume my correspondence with Rodney, when I opened my mailbox to retrieve the packet of joints that Marcos left for me each week I found a letter from my literary agent. Unusually, this time I opened it: my agent told me in the letter that the Spanish Embassy in Washington was proposing a promotional trip to various universities in the United States. I don't know if I've already said that these invitations to travel here and there had turned into something as routine as the administrative silence with which I answered them all. I was about to throw the letter away when I thought of Rodney; I opened Marcos' packet, took out a joint, lit it, took a coupleoftokes and put the letter in my pocket. Then I went outside and started walking towards the city centre. That night I didn't do anything different from what I'd been doing for months; same on the Saturday and the Sunday night. But during the whole weekend I didn't stop thinking about the proposal, and on the Monday afternoon, after giving no sign of life for a long time, I called my agent. She still hadn't recovered from the shock of hearing from me when I gave her the additional surprise of my decision to accept the proposal for the trip to the United States with the non-negotiable condition that one of its legs include Urbana. From there everything moved very quickly: the embassy and the universities accepted my conditions, organized the trip and in the middle of April, almost fifteen years after leaving Urbana, I got back on a plane for the United States.
ALGEBRA OF THE DEAD
THE TRIP TO THE United States lasted two weeks during which I crossed the country from coast to coast, dominated at first by a state of mind that was at the very least contradictory: on the one hand I was expectant, keen not only to return to Urbana, to see Rodney again, but also — which perhaps amounted to the same thing — to emerge for a while from the filth of the underground and unburden myself of the weight of a past that didn't exist or that I could pretend did not exist once I arrived; but, on the other hand, I also felt a gnawing apprehension because for the first time in almost a year I was going to emerge from the state of hibernation in which I'd tried to protect myself from reality and I had no idea what my reaction would be when I exposed myself to it again in the flesh. So, though I soon realized I wasn't entirely unaccustomed to being out in the open, for the first few days I had a bit of a feeling of groping my way around, like someone taking a while to get used to the light after a long confinement in darkness. I left Spain on a Saturday and only arrived in Urbana seven days later, but as soon as I set foot in the United States I began to receive news of people from Urbana. The first stop was at the University of Virginia, in Charlottesville. My host, Professor Victor T. Davies, a renowned specialist in literature of the Enlightenment, came to pick me up at Dulles Airport, in Washington, and during the two-hour drive to the university we talked about acquaintances we had in common; Laura Burns turned out to be one of them. I hadn't had any news of Laura for years, nor of any of the rest of my friends from Urbana, but Davies had kept in frequent contact with her since she'd published a critical edition (which he described as excellent) ofLos eruditos a lavioleta,the book by Jose Cadalso; according to what Davies told me, Laura had been divorced from her second husband for several years and now taught at the University of St Louis, less than three hours' drive from Urbana.
'If I'd known you were friends, I would have told her you were coming,' Davies said ruefully.
When we got to Charlottesville I asked him for Laura's phone number and that same night I phoned her from my room in the Colonnade Club, a sumptuous eighteenth-century pavilion where official visitors to the university are put up. The call filled Laura with an exaggerated and almost contagious jubilation and, once we got beyond the first moment of astonishment and a quick exchange of information, we agreed that she'd get in touch with John Borgheson, who was now the head of the department and had organized my stay in Urbana, and in any case we'd see each other there the following Saturday.
The second city I visited was New York, where I was supposed to speak at Barnard College, an affiliate of Columbia University. The night I arrived, after the lecture, my host, a Spanish professor called Mercedes Esteban, took me out for dinner along with two other colleagues to a Mexican restaurant on 43rd Street; there, sitting at a table waiting for us was Felipe Vieri. It seems Esteban and he had met when they were both teaching at NYU and had remained close friends since then; she'd let him know about my visit, and between the two of them they'd organized that unexpected reunion. Vieri and I had stopped writing to each other many years before and, apart from the odd bit of news caught here and there (of course, echoes of my novel's success had reached Vieri's ears, too), we knew nothing about each other's lives, but during the meal my friend did what he could to fill that void. So I found out that Vieri was still teaching at NYU, still living in Greenwich Village, he'dpublished a novel and several non-fiction books, one of which dealt with the films of Almodovar; for my part I lied to him the same way I'd done in the useless letter I'd sent to Rodney, just as I'd lied to Davies and Laura: I talked about Gabriel and Paula as if they were alive and about my happy life as a successful provincial writer. But what we mostly talked about was Urbana. Vieri had brought several copies ofLinea Plural('an elusive gem,' he joked, putting on an effeminate voice and gesture and addressing the rest of the dinner guests) and a pile of photos among which I recognized one from the meeting of contributors to the journal when Rodrigo Gines told of his Dadaist encounter with Rodney while he was sticking up Socialist Workers' Party posters against General Electric. Pointing at a guy in the photo who was looking at the camera with a radiant smile, sandwiched between Rodrigo and me, Vieri asked: