The Speed of Light by Javier Cercas Read Free Book Online Page A

talking about. I looked at him: the fur hat and raised lapels of his coat almost entirely hid his face; in his eyes there was no trace of tears, in fact I thought he might be smiling.
    'What's what about?' I said.
    'The novel,' he answered.
    'Oh, that,' I said with a gesture that was at once self-satisfied and easygoing, as if Rodney's inexplicable indifference towards that matter hadn't been the reason I'd cancelled our get-togethers in Treno's. 'Well, I'm not really sure yet . . .'
    'I like it,' Rodney interrupted me.
    'What do you like?' I asked in astonishment.
    'That you don't know what the novel's about yet,' he answered. 'If you know beforehand, that's bad: you'll just say what you already know, which is what we all know. On the other hand, if you don't yet know what you want to say but you're crazy enough or desperate enough or brave enough to keep writing, you might end up saying something that you didn't even know you knew and that only you can come to know, and that might be of interest.' As usual I didn't know whether Rodney was talking seriously or joking, but on that occasion I didn't understand a single one of his words. Rodney must have noticed, because, starting to walk again, he concluded: 'What I mean is that someone who always knows where they're going never gets anywhere, and you only know what you're trying to say once you've said it.'
    That night we parted next to the Courier Cafe, very close to my house, and the following week we started getting together at Treno's again. After that we often talked about my novel; in fact, and although we certainly talked about other things, that's almost all I remember us talking about. They were slightly strange conversations, often confusing, in a certain sense always stimulating but only in a certain sense. Rodney, for example, wasn't interested in talking about the plot of my book, which was what I was most worried about, but rather who expounded the plot. 'Stories don't exist,' he once told me. 'What does exist is who tells them. If you know who it is, there's a story, if you don't know who it is, there's no story.' 'Then I've already got mine,' I told him. I explained that the only thing I was clear about in my novel was precisely the identity of the narrator: a guy exactly like me who found himself in the exact same situation as I did. 'Then the narrator is yourself?' Rodney postulated. 'No way,' I said, content at being the one to confound him for a change. 'He's exactly like me, but it's not me.' Overdosing on Flaubert and Eliot's objectivism, I argued that the narrator of my novel couldn't be me because in that case I'd be obliged to talk about myself, which was not only a form of exhibitionism or immodesty, but also a literary error, because authentic literature never revealed the personality of the author, but rather hid it.'That's true,' agreed Rodney. 'But talking a lot about oneself is the best way of hiding.' Rodney didn't seem too interested in what I was telling or proposed to tell in my book; what did interest him was what I wasn't going to tell. 'In a novel what is not told is always more relevant than what is told,' he said another time. 'I mean that silences are more eloquent than words, and all narrative art consists of knowing when to shut up: that's why the best way to tell a story is not to tell it.' I listened to Rodney enthralled, almost as if he were an alchemist and each phrase he pronounced the necessary ingredient for an infallible potion, but it'sprobable that these discussions about my future frustrated novel — which in the long run would be decisive for me and that, though neither of us could have predicted it, were also going to be practically the last Rodney and I would have —contributed in the short run to confusing me, because the truth was that almost every week the direction of my book changed completely. I've already said that back then I was very young and lacking in experience and judgement, which are as useful to life as