The Speed of Light Read Free

in Urbana this kind of gaffe was not as frequent as I fear, but I can't be sure; what I can be sure of is that I got used to my new life much more quickly than I expected. And it was a comfortable life. My house — a two-bedroom apartment with kitchen and bathroom — was located a five-minute walk from the Foreign Languages Building, the building that was home to the Spanish Department, at 703 West Oregon, between Busey and Coler, in a zone of narrow, private, tree-lined streets. As Marcelo Cuartero had promised, I made enough money to live without privations and my duties as Spanish teacher and doctoral student left almost all my afternoons and evenings free, as well as the lengthy weekends that included Fridays, so I had lots of time to read and write, and a vast library to keep me supplied with books. Soon curiosity for what I had in front of me replaced nostalgia for what I'd left behind. I regularly wrote to my family and my friends — especially Marcos — but I didn't feel lonely any more; in fact, I very soon discovered that, if I made an effort, nothing was easier than making friends in Urbana. Like all university cities, it was a sterile, deceptive place, a human microclimate bereft of poor and old people in which each year one population composed of young people from all over the planet on their way through touched down as another took off for the world; added to the slightly worrying evidence that neither in the city nor for several hundreds of kilometres in any direction were there any distractions other than work, this circumstance facilitated social life enormously, and in fact, in contrast to the studious quiet of the rest of the week, from Friday afternoon to Sunday night Urbana turned into a seething cauldron of house parties that no one seemed to want to miss and to which everyone seemed to be invited.
    However, I didn't meet Rodney Falk at any of those many house parties, but in the office we shared for a semester on the fourth floor of the Foreign Languages Building. I'll never know if they assigned me that office by chance or because no one else wanted to share with Rodney (I'm inclined to suspect the latter is more likely than the former), but what I do know is that, if they hadn't assigned me that office, Rodney and I would probably never have become friends and everything would have been different and my life wouldn't be like it is and the memory of Rodney would have been wiped from my mind the way the memories of most of the people I knew in Urbana have faded away with the years. Or perhaps not as much, perhaps I exaggerate. After all, the truth is, although nothing could be further from his intentions, Rodney did not go unnoticed amid the rigorous uniformity that reigned in the department and to which everyone adhered without complaint, as if it were a tacit but palpable rule of intellectual immunization paradoxically bound to instigate competence among the members of that community proud of their strict meritocratic observance. Rodney transgressed the rule because he was quite a bit older than the rest of the Spanish assistants, almost none of whom were over thirty, but also because he never attended meetings, cocktail parties or get-togethers organized by the department, which everyone blamed, as I soon found out, on his reserved and eccentric, not to mention surly, nature, which contributed to him being surrounded by a disparaging myth that included his having obtained his position as a Spanish lecturer thanks to being a veteran of the Vietnam War. I remember at a reception put on by the department for the new teaching assistants, the night before classes began, someone commented on his habitual absence, which immediately provoked, among the little circle of colleagues around me, a cascade of vicious conjecture about what it was that Rodney must teach his students, because no one had ever heard him speak Spanish.
    'Damn!' said Laura Burns, as she burst into the chorus. 'What worries me isn't