'Of course,' he finally said. 'Falk. Rodney Falk. The big guy who'd been in Vietnam. I'd completely forgotten him. He was from around here somewhere, Decatur or somewhere like that, wasn't he?' I didn't say anything, and Borgheson went on, 'Of course I remember. But I didn'thave much to do with him. You don't mean to say you were friends?'
'We shared an office for a semester,' I answered evasively. 'Then he disappeared.'
'Oh, come on now,' Laura burst in, draping herself over my shoulder. 'But the two of you were always conspiring together in Treno's like you were in the CIA. I always wondered what you spent so much time talking about.'
'Nothing,' I said. 'Books.'
'Books?' said Laura.
'He was a strange fellow,' Borgheson intervened, addressing Vinas and the teaching assistant, who were following the conversation looking like they were actually interested. 'He looked like a typical redneck, a boor, and then he never did give the impression of having his head screwed on entirely right. But he was a very cultured guy, extremely well-read. Or at least that's what Dan Gleylock, who actually was friends with him, said. Do you remember Gleylock?'
'But how could he not remember?' Laura answered for me. 'I don't know about you, but I've never met anyone else who could speak seventeen Amerindian languages. You know, John, I always thought, if Martians landed on Earth, we'd have at least one way of making sure whether they were Martians or not: send them to Gleylock and if he doesn't understand them, they're Martians alright.'
Borgheson, Vinas and the teaching assistant laughed.
'He retired two years ago,' Borgheson continued. 'He lives in Florida now, every once in a while I get an email from him. . As for Falk, the truth is I haven't heard a single word about him.'
The party ended about nine, but Laura and I went to have a drink by ourselves before she headed back to St Louis. She took me to The Embassy, a small bar, dark and narrow, the walls and floors covered in wood, located beside Lincoln Square, and as soon as we sat at the bar, facing a mirror that reflected the quiet atmosphere of the place, I remembered that a scene in my novel set in Urbana took place in that bar. As we ordered our drinks I told Laura.
'Obviously,' she smiled. 'Why do you think I brought you here?'
We stayed in The Embassy talking until very late. We talked a bit about everything, including, as if they were alive, about my wife and my son. But what I most remember about that conversation is the end of it, perhaps because at that moment, for the first time, I had the deceptive intuition that the past is not a stable place but changeable, permanently altered by the future, and that therefore none of what had already happened was irreversible. We'd asked for the bill when, not like someone summing up the evening but like someone offering a nonchalant comment, Laura said that success agreed with me.
'Why should it disagree with me?' I asked, and immediately, automatically said what I'd said every time, over the last two years, someone had made that same mistake:'Successful writers say that the ideal condition for a writer is failure. Believe me: don't believe them. There's nothing better than success.'
And then, as I also always did, I quoted the French writer Jules Renard's phrase, with which Marcos had shut up a classmate at the Faculty of Fine Arts: 'Yes, I know. All great men were ignored in their lifetimes; but I'm not a great man, so I'd prefer immediate renown.'
Laura laughed.
'No doubt about it,' she said. 'It agrees with you. But whatever you say, it's rare. Look at my second husband. The fucking gringo made a mint doing what he enjoys doing, but he never stops complaining about the slavery of success, this, that and the other. Bullshit. At least those of us who fail don't waste time trying everyone else's fucking patience with our failure.'
With deliberate naivete I asked:
'You've failed?'
Her lips curved into a scathing smile.'
Of course not,' she said in an ambiguous tone, halfway between aggressive and reassuring. 'It was just a manner of speaking. We all know only idiots fail. But tell me something: what do you call having thrown two marriages overboard, being all alone in the world, forty years old and not even having forged a decent academic career?' She paused and, since I didn't respond, went on harshly, 'Anyway, let's drop the subject. . What are you going to do tomorrow?'
The waiter came over with the bill.
'Nothing,' I lied as I paid, shrugging my shoulders. 'Take a walk around here. See the city.'
'Good idea,' said Laura. 'You know something? I have the impression that in the two years you spent in Urbana you didn't see anything, didn't understand a thing. The truth is, kiddo, it seemed like you had blinkers on.'
Laura sat there for a moment looking at me as if she hadn't just spoken, as if she was hesitating or as if she was going to apologize for her words, but then she put her glass down on the bar, stroked my cheek, kissed me on the lips, smiled gently as she leaned back from the kiss, and repeated in a low voice:
'Not a thing.'
I sat there in silence, perplexed. Laura picked her glass up again and finished off her drink in one swallow.
'Don't worry, kid,' she said then, going back to her usual tone of voice. 'I'm not going to ask you to go to bed with me, I'm a bit grown-up now to get the brush-off from a jerk like you, but at least do me the favour of wiping that fucking stunned look off your face. . So, shall we go?'
Laura gave me a lift to the Chancellor, and when she pulled up outside the door I suggested we have one last drink in the hotel bar; as soon as I pronounced those words I thought of Patricia, Marcos' wife, and regretted the suggestion: more than an insinuation, it seemed like a pathetic attempt at making amends, a consoling pat on the back. Laura shook her head.
'Better not,' she said, barely smiling. 'It's very late and I've still got a two-hour drive ahead of me.'
We hugged and, as we did, for an instant I felt a stab of anticipated nostalgia, because I sensed that was the last time I was going to see Laura, and I sensed that she sensed it too.
'I'm very glad to've seen you,' she said when I opened the car door. 'I'm glad you're well. Who knows: maybe I'llget to Barcelona one of these days, I'd like to meet your wife and son.'
Not yet all the way out of the car I looked her in the eye and thought of saying: 'They're both dead, Laura. I killed them.'
'Sure, Laura,' was what I actually said. 'Come whenever you want. They'd love to meet you.'
Then I closed the door and went into the hotel without turning around to watch her go.
The next day I woke up not knowing where I was, but that feeling only lasted a few seconds and, after reconciling myself to the astonishing fact that I was back in Urbana, while I was showering I decided to turn the lie I'd told Laura in The Embassy into truth and postpone until midday my visit to Rodney in Rantoul. So after having breakfast in the Chancellor I started walking downtown. It was Sunday, the streets were almost deserted and at first they all seemed vaguely familiar, but after just a few minutes I was already lost and I couldn't help but think that maybe Laura was right and I had spent those two years in Urbana with blinkers on, like a ghost or a zombie wandering among that population of ghosts and zombies. I had to stop a jogger who was listening to a Walkman to ask him to tell me how to get to campus; when I finally came out onto Green Street, by following his directions, I got my bearings. That was how, just as if I were following the shadow of the cheerful, fearsome, arrogant kamikaze I'd been in Urbana, I saw the Quad, the Foreign Languages Building, my old house at 703 West Oregon, Treno's. It was all more or less as I'd remembered it, except Treno's, converted into one of those interchangeable cafes that American snobs consider European (from Rome) and European snobs consider American (from New York), but which are impossible to find in either New York or Rome. I went in, ordered a Coke at the bar and, watching the sunny morning through the big windows that gave onto Goodwin, I drank a couple of sips. Then I paid and left.