The Speed of Light Read Free Page A

that Rodney doesn't know a fucking word of Spanish, but that one of these days he's going to show up here with a Kalashnikov and blow us all away.'
    I still hadn't forgotten this comment, which had been greeted with riotous laughter all round, when the next day I finally met Rodney. That morning, the first of term, I arrived at the department very early, and when I opened the office door the first thing I saw was Rodney sitting at his desk, reading; the second was that he raised his eyes from the book, looked at me, stood up without a word. There was an irrational instant of panic provoked by Laura Burns' sharp remark (which suddenly no longer seemed like a sharp remark and also no longer struck me as funny) and by the size of that big, strong, reportedly unbalanced guy who was advancing towards me; but I didn't run away: I apprehensively shook the hand he held out to me and tried to smile.
    'My name's Rodney Falk,' he said, looking me in the eye with disconcerting intensity and making a noise that sounded like a martial click of the heels. 'And you?'
    I told him my name. Rodney asked me if I was Spanish. I told him I was.
    'I've never been to Spain,' he declared. 'But one day I'd like to see it. Have you read Hemingway?'
    I'd barely read Hemingway, or I'd read him carelessly, and my notion of the American writer fitted into a pitiful snapshot of a washed-up, swaggering, alcoholic old man, friend to flamenco dancers and bull fighters, who spread a postcard image of the oldest and most unbearable stereotypes of Spain through his outmoded works.
    'Yes,' I answered, relieved at that hint of a literary conversation and, since I must have seen another magnificent opportunity to make very clear to my colleagues my unimpeachable cosmopolitan calling, which I'd already thought to proclaim with my homophobic comment about Almodovar's films, I added: 'Frankly, I think he's shit.'
    The reaction of my new officemate was more expeditious than that of Vieri and Solaun a few nights before: without any gesture of disapproval or agreement, as if I'd suddenly disappeared from view, Rodney turned around and left me standing there mid-sentence; then he sat back down, picked up his book and immersed himself in it again.
    That morning there was nothing more and, if we discount the initial surprise or panic and Ernest Hemingway, the ritual of the days that followed came to be more or less identical. Despite always arriving at the office as soon as they opened the Foreign Languages Building, Rodney was always there before me and, after an obligatory greeting that in his case was more like a grunt, our mornings were spent coming and going from classrooms, and also sitting each at his desk, reading and preparing classes (Rodney mostly reading and me mostly preparing classes), but always firmly immured in a silence that I only timidly tried to break on a couple of occasions, until I came to understand that Rodney had absolutely no interest in talking to me. It was during those days that, keeping a surreptitious eye on him from my desk or in the corridors of the department, I began to get used to his presence. At first glance Rodney had the ingenuous, indifferent, anachronistic look of those hippies from the sixties who hadn't wanted or been able or known how to adapt themselves to the cheerful cynicism of the eighties, as if they'd been willingly or forcibly swept aside into a ditch so as not to interfere with the triumphant march of history. His clothing, however, was not out of keeping with the informal egalitarianism that reigned in the university: he always wore running shoes, faded jeans and baggy checked shirts, although in winter —in the polar winter of Urbana — he changed his shoes for military boots and bundled up in thick woollen sweaters, a sheepskin coat and fur cap. He was tall, heavy set and rather ungainly; he always walked with his eyes glued to the floor and sort of lurching, leaning to the right, with one shoulder higher than the