The Speed of Light

by Cercas, Javier

  But he hadn't left them behind. Rodney's father realized it one night over the Christmas holidays in 1988, a few months before he told me his son's story in his house in Rantoul, just a few days after Rodney and I had said goodbye at the door of Treno's with the finally frustrated promise that we'd see each other again as soon as I got back from my road trip through the Midwest in the company of Barbara, Gudrun and Rodrigo Gines. That evening a man had telephoned the house asking for his son. Rodney was out, so his father asked who was calling. 'Tommy Birban,' said the man. Rodney's father had never heard that surname, but the fact didn't surprise him, because since Rodney had broken out of the confinement of his bubble it was not unusual for strangers to call the house. The man said he was a friend of Rodney's, promised to call back in a while and left a phone number in case Rodney wanted to call him first. When Rodney got home that night, his father handed him a piece of paper with his friend's phone number on it; his son's reaction surprised him: slightly pale, taking the paper he was handing him, he asked if he was sure that was the name of the stranger and, although he assured him it was, he made him repeat it several times, to convince himself his father hadn't been mistaken. 'Is something up?' Rodney'sfather asked. Rodney didn't answer or answered with a gesture both discouraging and disparaging. But later, when they were having dinner, the telephone rang again, and before his father could get up to answer it Rodney stopped him sharply with a shout. The two men sat and looked at each other: that was when Rodney's father knew something was wrong. The telephone kept ringing, until it finally stopped. 'Maybe it was someone else,' said Rodney's father. Rodney said nothing. 'He's going to call again, isn't he?'t Rodney's father asked after a while. This time Rodney nodded. 'I don't want to talk to him,' he said. 'Tell him I'm not here. Or better yet, tell him I'm away and you don't know when I'll be back. Yeah: tell him that.' That night Rodney's father didn't risk any more questions, because he knew his son was not going to answer, and he spent the whole next day waiting for Tommy Birban's call. Of course, the call came, and Rodney's father picked up the receiver quickly and did what his son had asked him to do. 'Yesterday you didn't tell me Rodney was away,' Tommy Birban said suspiciously. 'I don't remember what I said yesterday,' he answered. Then he improvised: 'But it would be better if you didn't call here again. Rodney has gone away and I don't know where he is or when he'll be back.' He was just about to hang up when Tommy Birban's voice on the other end of the line stopped sounding threatening and began to sound imploring, like a perfectly articulated sob: 'You're Rodney's father, right?' He didn't have time to answer. 'I know Rodney's living with you, they told me at the Chicago Veterans' Association, they gave me your number. I want to ask you a favour. If you do me this favour I promise I won't call again, but you have to do this for me. Tell Rodney I'm not going to ask anything of him, not even that we see each other. The only thing I want is to talk to him for a while, tell him I only want to talk to him for a while, tell him I need to talk to him. That's all. But tell him, please. Will you tell him?' Rodney's father didn'tknow how to refuse, but the fact that his son received the message without batting an eyelid or making the slightest comment allowed him to kid himself that this episode he couldn't understand and didn't want to understand had concluded without any grave consequences. Predictably, a few days later Tommy Birban called again. Rodney was no longer answering the phone, so it was Rodney's father who picked it up. He and Tommy Birban argued for a few seconds fiercely, and he was about to hang up when his son asked him to hand him the phone; with some hesitation, and warning him with a look that there was still time to avoid the mistake, he handed it over. The two old friends talked for a long time, but he wouldn't allow himself to listen to the conversation, of which he only caught a few unconnected snippets. That night Rodney couldn't get to sleep, and the next morning Tommy Birban called again and the two talked again for several hours. This ominous ritual went on for over a week, and the morning of New Year's Day Rodney's father heard a noise downstairs, got up, went out onto the porch and saw his son putting the last piece of luggage in the trunk of the Buick. The scene didn't surprise him; actually, he was almost expecting it. Rodney closed the trunk and came up the steps to the porch. 'I'm off,' he said. 'I was going to come up to say goodbye.' His father knew he was lying, but he nodded. He looked at the snow-covered street, the sky almost white, the grey light; he looked at his son, tall and broken in front of him, and felt the world was an empty place, inhabited only by the two of them. He was about to tell him. 'Where are you going?' he was about to ask. 'Don't you know the world is an empty place?' but he didn't say that. What he said was: 'Isn't it about time you forgot all that?' 'I've already forgotten, Dad,' answered Rodney. 'It's all that that hasn't forgotten me.' 'And that's the last thing I heard him say,' Rodney's father concluded, sunken in his wingback chair, as exhausted as if he hadn't dedicated that endless afternoon in his house in Rantoul to reconstructing his son's story for me, but rather trying to scale an impassable mountain weighed down with useless equipment. 'Then we hugged and he left. The rest you know.'

  That's how Rodney's father finished telling his story. Neither of us had anything to add, but I stayed a little longer with him, and for an indeterminate space of time, which I wouldn't know whether to calculate in minutes or hours, we sat facing one another, keeping up a faint imitation conversation, as if we shared a shameful secret or the responsibility for a crime, or as if we were looking for excuses so I wouldn't have to face the road back to Urbana alone and he the springtime loneliness of that big house with nobody in it, and when, past midnight, I finally decided to leave, I was sure I'd always remember the story Rodney's father had told me and that I was no longer the same person who that afternoon, many hours earlier, had arrived in Rantoul. 'You're too young to think of having children,' Rodney's father said to me as we parted, and I haven't forgotten. 'Don't have any, because you'll regret it; although if you don't have any you'll regret that too. That's life: no matter what you do, you regret it. But let me tell you something: all love stories are absurd because love is an illness that only time can cure; but having a child is risking a love so absurd that only death can end it.'

  That's what Rodney's father said to me, and I have not forgotten.

  Otherwise, I never saw him again.

  STONE DOOR

  I RETURNEDTO SPAIN a little more than a year after that spring afternoon when Rodney's father told me his son's story. During the rest of the time I spent in Urbana many things happened. I'm not going to try to tell them here, and not just because it would be tedious, but mainly because most of them don't belong in this story. Or perhaps they do and I haven't figured out how yet. It doesn't matter. I'll just say that I spent a month of the summer holiday back home in Spain; that the next term I returned to Urbana, carried on with my classes and my things, and began a doctoral thesis (which I never finished) supervised by John Borgheson; that I had friends and lovers and became better friends with the friends I already had, especially Rodrigo Gines, Laura Burns, Felipe Vieri; that I was busy being born and I wasn't busy dying; that during all that time I worked diligently on my novel. So diligently that by the following spring I'dfinished it. I'm not sure it was a good novel, but it was my first novel, and writing it made me extremely happy, for the simple reason that I proved to myself I was capable of writing novels. I should perhaps add that it wasn't about Rodney, although there was a secondary character whose physical appearance owed something to Rodney's physical appearance; it was, however, a novel about ghosts or zombies set in Urbana and the protagonist was a character exactly like me who found himself in the same circumstances as me . . . So when I left Urbana I left it with my first novel in hand, feeling very fortunate and also feeling that, although I hadn't travelled much, nor seen very much of the world, nor lived very intensely, nor accumulated very many experiences, that long spell in the United States had been my real doctorate, convinced I had nothing more to learn there and that, if I wanted to become a real writer and not a ghost or a
zombie — like Rodney or like the characters in my novel and some of Urbana's inhabitants - then I had to go home immediately.

  And so I did. Although I was prepared to go back at any price, the truth is the return was less uncertain than I'dforeseen, because in May, just when I was about to start packing my bags, Marcelo Cuartero phoned from Barcelona to offer me a position as associate professor at the Autonomous University. The salary was meagre, but, supplemented by the income provided by occasional freelance jobs, was enough to rent a studio apartment in the neighbourhood of Sant Antoni and to survive without too many hardships while waiting for the novel to be published. That was how I eagerly began to regain my life in Barcelona; I also, naturally, regained Marcos Luna. By then Marcos was already living with Patricia, a photo grapher who worked for a fashion magazine, and was making a living doing illustrations for a newspaper, had begun to exhibit with certain regularity and was making a name for himself among the painters of his generation. In fact it was Marcos who, at the end of that year, after my novel had come out with a minor publisher and been greeted by a silence barely broken by one futile and rapturously complimentary review by one of Marcelo Cuartero students (or by Marcelo Cuartero himself under a pseudonym), got me an interview with a sub-editor at his paper, who in his turn invited me to write columns and reviews for the cultural supplement. So, somehow or other, with the help of Marcos and Marcelo Cuartero I began to make my way in Barcelona while getting down to work on my second novel. A long time before I managed to finish it, however, Paula came along, which ended up disrupting everything, including the novel. Paula was blonde, shy, willowy and bright, one of those disciplined and aloof thirty-somethings whose apparent haughtiness is a transparent mask over their urgent need for affection. She'd just separated from her first husband and was working for the cultural supplement of the paper; since I hardly ever went to the offices, I didn't meet her for quite a while, but when I finally did I understood that Rodney's father was right and that falling in love is letting yourself be defeated simultaneously by absurdity and by an illness that only time can cure. What I'm trying to say is that I fell so in love with Paula that, as soon as I met her, I had the certainty that those in love always have: that up till then I'd never been in love with anyone. The idyll was marvellous and exhausting, but most of all it was absurd and, since one absurdity leads to another, a few months later I moved in with Paula, then we got married and then we had a son, Gabriel. All these things happened in a very brief space of time (or in what seemed to me a very brief space of time), and before I knew it I was living in a little terraced house, with a garden and lots of sunshine, in a residential neighbourhood on the outskirts of Gerona, suddenly converted into the almost involuntary protagonist of an insipid vignette of provincial well-being that I couldn't have imagined even in my worst nightmares when I was an aspiring young writer steeped in dreams of triumph.

  But, to my surprise, the decision to change cities and lifestyle turned out to be a good move. In theory we'd taken it because Gerona was a cheaper and quieter place than Barcelona, and one could get to the centre of the capital in an hour, but in practice and in time I discovered that the advantages didn't end there: since in Gerona Paula's salary from the paper was almost enough to meet all the family needs, I was soon able to give up working at the university and writing articles to devote myself entirely to writing my books; I have to add that in Gerona we could count on all kinds of help from relatives and friends with children, and that there were hardly any distractions, so our social life was non-existent. Aside from that, Paula went to Barcelona and back daily, while I took care of the house and Gabriel, which left me lots of free time for my work. The results of this framework of favourable circumstances were the happiest years of my life and four books: two novels, one collection of columns and another of essays. It's true that they all went as unnoticed as the first, but it's also true that I didn't experience that invisibility as a frustration, much less as failure. In the first place, by way of a defensive blend of humility, arrogance and cowardice, I wasn't annoyed that my books didn't receive any more attention than they did because I didn't think they deserved it and, at the same time, because I thought very few readers would be in a position to understand them, but also because I secretly feared that had they received more attention than they did, they would inevitably reveal their glaring poverty. And, in the second place, because by then I'd already understood that, if I was a writer, it was because I'd turned into a nutcase who was obliged to look at reality and sometimes see it, and, if I'd chosen that bitch of a job, perhaps it was only because I couldn't be anything other than a writer: because in a way it hadn't been me who had chosen my trade, it had been my trade that had chosen me.

  Time went by. I began to forget Urbana. I couldn'tforget, however (or at least not entirely), my friends from Urbana, especially because occasionally, and with no effort on my part, I kept hearing news of them. The only one who was still there was John Borgheson, who I saw again several times, each time more venerable, more professorial and more British, on his occasional visits to Barcelona. Felipe Vieri had finished his studies in New York, got a job as a professor at NYU and since then lived in Greenwich Village, turned into what he'd always wanted to be: a New Yorker from head to toe. Laura Burns' life was more turbulent and more varied: she'd finished her doctorate at Urbana, married a Hawaiian computer engineer, divorced him and, after traipsing around several west coast universities, had ended up in Oklahoma City, where she'd remarried, this time to a businessman who had made her give up her work at the university and forced her to live back and forth between Oklahoma and Mexico City. As for Rodrigo Gines, he'd also finished his doctorate at Urbana and, after teaching at Purdue University for a couple of years, had returned to Chile, not to Santiago, but to Coyhaique, in the south of the country, where he'd married again and was teaching at the University of Los Lagos.

  The only one I didn't know anything about for a long time was Rodney, and that was despite the fact that, every time I was in touch with anyone who had been in Urbana when I was there (or immediately before, or immediately after), I'd always ask about him eventually. But not knowing anything about Rodney didn't mean I'd forgotten him either. In fact, it would be easy to imagine now that I never stopped thinking about him in all those years; actually that's only partly true. It's true that every once in a while I wondered what had become of Rodney and his father, how long my friend had stayed away from home after his flight and how long it had been before he'd left again after his return. It's also true that on at least a couple of occasions I was attacked by a serious desire or urgency to tell his story and that, every time that happened, I dusted off the three black cardboard document cases with elastic straps that Rodney's father had given me and reread the letters they contained and the notes that I had taken as soon as I got back to Urbana of the tale he'd told me that afternoon in Rantoul, just as it's true that I did thorough research, reading everything I could get my hands on about the war in Vietnam, and that I took pages and pages of notes, drew up outlines, sketched out characters and planned scenes and dialogues, but the fact is there were always pieces left over that wouldn't fit, blind spots impossible to clear up (especially two: what had happened in My Khe, who was Tommy Birban), and maybe that's why each time I decided to start to write I soon gave up, bogged down in my inability to invest with meaning a story that deep down (or at least that's what I suspected at the time) perhaps lacked any. It was a strange feeling, as if, despite the fact that Rodney's father had made me in some way responsible for the story of his son's disaster, that story wasn't entirely mine to tell and I wasn't the one who had to tell it and therefore I lacked the courage, madness and desperation needed to tell it, or perhaps as if it was still an unfinished story, yet to arrive at the boiling point or level of maturity or coherence that makes a story no longer stubbornly resist being written. And it's also true that, just like in Urbana with my first frustrated novel, for a long time I could never sit down to write witho
ut feeling Rodney breathing down my neck, without wondering what he'd think of this sentence or that one, of this adjective or that one — as if Rodney's shadow was at once a ferocious judge and a guardian angel - and of course I was still unable to read Rodney's favourite authors — and I read a lot of them — without mentally arguing with my friend's tastes and opinions. All that is true, but it's just as true that, as time went by and the memory of Urbana began to dissolve in the distance like the feathery vapour trail of an airplane as it vanishes into a clear blue sky, the memory of Rodney dissolved with it too, so by the time my friend unexpectedly reappeared I was not only convinced I'd never write his story, but also that, unless some improbable chance came into play, I'd never see him again.