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

to literature and that explains why in those conversations about literature I paid inordinate attention to anodyne observations Rodney made and barely registered others that sooner or later would prove very useful; I could be mistaken, but I now tend to believe, although it's paradoxical — or precisely because it is — that what allowed me to survive Rodney's often delirious avalanche of lucidity without suffering irreparable damage was precisely my incapacity to distinguish the essential from the superfluous and the sensible from the senseless.
    Finally, one morning at the beginning of December I handed Rodney the first pages of my novel, and the next day, when I arrived at the office, I asked him if he'd read them; he said we'd talk about the matter in Treno's, after Rota's class. I was impatient to know Rodney's opinion, but that afternoon the class was so exhausting that when we got to Treno's my impatience had passed or I'd forgotten about the novel, and the only thing I wanted was to have a beer and forget about Rota and the sinister-looking American, who during an endless hour had tortured me by obliging me to translate from Catalan to English and from English to Catalan a grotesque discussion about the similarities that linked a poem by J.V. Foix and another by Arnaut Daniel. So it's natural that when, after the second beer and without advance warning, Rodney asked me if I was sure I wanted to be a writer, I should have answered:
    'Anything but a translator.' We laughed, or at least I laughed, but as I did I remembered another pending discussion, that about the first pages of my novel and, like a careless prolonging of the previous joke, I asked: 'Was it that bad?'
    'Not bad,' Rodney answered. 'Dreadful.'
    The comment was like a kick in the gut. I reacted quickly: I tried to explain that what he'd read was only a first draft, I tried to defend the approach of the novel I had in mind; in vain: Rodney took the pages of the novel out of the pocket of his coat, unfolded them and proceeded to pulverize the contents. He did it dispassionately, like a coroner performing an autopsy, which hurt even more; but what hurt most of all was that deep down I knew my friend was right. Depressed and furious, with all the bitterness accumulating while Rodney spoke, I asked him whether what I should do according to him was stop writing.
    'I didn't say that,' he corrected me, impassively. 'What you should or shouldn't do is up to you. There's no writer who didn't start off writing garbage like this or worse, because to be a decent writer you don't even need talent: a little effort is enough. Besides, talent isn't something you have, it's something you conquer.'
    'So why did you ask me if I was sure I wanted to be a writer?' I asked.
    'Because you could just end up managing it.'
    'And where's the problem?'
    'It's a bitch of a job.'
    'No worse than being a translator, I suppose. Not to mention a miner.'
    'Don't be so sure,' he said with an uncertain gesture. 'I don't know, maybe only someone who can't be anything else should be a writer.'
    I laughed as if trying to imitate the ferocious laughter of a kamikaze, or as if I were taking revenge.
    'Come on, Rodney: don't tell me now you're going to reveal yourself as a fucking romantic. Or sentimental. Or a coward. I'm not the slightest bit afraid of failure.'
    'Of course not,' he said. 'Because you don't have the slightest idea what it means. But who said anything about failure? I was talking about success.''
    Oh, so that's it,' I said. 'Now I understand. The catastrophe of success. That's what it was. But that's not an idea, man: that's just a cliché.'
    'Could be,' he said, and then, as if he were laughing at me or scolding me but didn't want me to suspect either of them, he added: 'But ideas don't become cliched because they're false, but because they're true, or at least contain a substantial part of truth. And when you get bored of truth and start saying original things in order to try