The Speed of Light

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NOW I LEAD A false life, an apocryphal, clandestine, invisible life, though truer than if it were real, but I was still me when I met Rodney Falk. It was a long time ago and it was in Urbana, a city in the Midwest of the United States where I spent two years at the end of the eighties. The truth is that every time I ask myself why I ended up precisely there I tell myself I ended up there just as I might have ended up anywhere else. Let me explain why instead of ending up anywhere else I ended up precisely there.

It was by chance. Back then — seventeen years ago now — I was very young, I'd just graduated and a friend and I shared a dark, dank apartment on calle Pujol, in Barcelona, very close to plaza Bonanova. My friend was called Marcos Luna, he was from Gerona like me and in reality he was both more and less than a friend: we'd grown up together, played together, gone to school together, we had the same friends. Marcos had always wanted to be a painter; not me: I wanted to be a writer. But we'd done two useless degrees and we didn't have proper jobs and we were as poor as could be, so Marcos didn't paint and I didn't write, or we only did in those rare spare moments we were left by the more than full-time job of surviving. We barely got by.

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