The Speed of Light

by Cercas, Javier

  But I soon forgot about my fight with Paula and continued enjoying the party. It went on into the early hours, and when I got into the screenwriter's car I found myself sitting beside a very serious young woman with an intellectual air, who I'd barely noticed all night. The trip to Gerona was brief, but long enough for me to realize that the girl had had quite a bit to drink, to be sure she was flirting with me and to vaguely ascertain that she was a friend of the host's niece and worked for a local television station. When we got to the city the girl suggested we all go for one more drink at a bar that belonged to some friends of hers, and which, she said, never closed before dawn. The screenwriter and his wife declined the offer arguing that it was very late and they should keep going to Barcelona; I accepted.

  We went to the bar. We drank, chatted, danced and I finished off the night in the girl's bed. When I left her house dawn was about to break. In the street the taxi I'd phoned was waiting for me; I gave the driver my address and dozed the whole way, but when the taxi stopped at the door of my house I wished I were dead: standing in front of a squad car, two Mossos d'Esquadra were waiting beside the driveway that led to the garage. I paid the taxi driver with a trembling note, and as I got out of the car I noticed the driveway, where we usually parked the car, was empty, and I knew that Paula and Gabriel weren't home.

  'What's happened?' I asked as I approached the two officers.

  Young, grave, almost spectral in the livid light of daybreak, they asked me if I was me. I said I was.

  'What's happened?' I repeated.

  One of the policemen pointed to the door of my house and asked: 'Could we speak to you inside for a moment, please?'

  I opened the door for the two policemen, we sat in the dining room, I asked again what had happened. The policeman who'd spoken before was the one to answer me.

  'We've come to inform you that your wife and your son have been involved in an accident,' he said.

  The news didn't surprise me; with a thread of a voice I managed to ask: 'Are they injured?'

  The policeman swallowed before he answered: 'They're dead.'

  The policeman then took out a notebook and must have begun an antiseptic and detailed account of the circumstances of the accident, but, despite making an effort to pay attention to the explanation, the only thing I could catch were random words, incoherent or meaningless phrases. My memory of the hours that followed is even more shaky: I know I went to the hospital where they'd taken Paula and Gabriel that morning, that I didn't see or didn't want to see their bodies, that relatives and the odd friend immediately started arriving, that I made some confusing arrangement for funerals, which took place the next day, that I didn'tattend them, that some newspaper included my name in the article about the accident and that my house filled up with telegrams and faxes of condolence that I didn't read or that I read as veiled accusations. In reality, there's only one thing I remember from those days with an hallucinatory clarity —my visits to the Mossos d'Esquadra headquarters. In a very short space of time I was there four times, maybe five, although now they all seem like the same one. I was received in an office by a pretty, cold, painstakingly professional uniformed sergeant, who, sitting across from me behind a very cheerful desk, with flowers and family photographs, set out for me the information the police had gathered concerning the accident, sketched diagrams and answered my questions over and over again. They were long meetings, but, despite the causes and circumstances of the accident not raising any doubts for the police (the road surface made slippery by the damp night air, maybe a tiny distraction, a curve taken a bit faster than advisable, a desperate swerve into the oncoming lane, the final horror of blinding lights in front of you), I always left them with new questions, which I'd return to try to clear up at the station hours or days later. The sergeant arranged a meeting for me with the two officers who'd arrived first at the scene of the accident and been in charge of the investigation and, in the company of one of them, took me one afternoon to the exact curve where it had happened; the next morning I went back to the place alone and stayed there for a while, watching the cars go past, not thinking about anything, looking at the sky and the asphalt and the desolation of that piece of open ground swept by the north wind. I couldn't say why I acted like that, but I wouldn't rule out the idea that part of me suspected that something didn't quite tally, there were still loose ends in that story, the police were hiding something from me and, if I could discover what it was, that a door would immediately open and Paula and Gabriel would walk through it, alive and smiling, just as if it had all been a mistake or a bad joke. Until one morning, when I walked into the sergeant's office for our umpteenth interview, I found her accompanied by an older man, with a beard and civilian clothes. The sergeant introduced us and the man explained that he was a psychologist and director of an association called Bereavement Support Services (or something like that), assigned to offer help to relatives of people killed in accidents. The psychologist carried on with his presentation for a while, but I stopped listening to him; I didn't even look at him: I confined myself to looking at the sergeant, who tired of avoiding my eyes and interrupted the man.

  'Take my advice and go with him,' she said, finally meeting my gaze, and for the first time I perceived a trace of cordiality or emotion in her voice. 'There's nothing more I can do for you.'

  I left the station and never went back. That same afternoon I went to a real estate agency, rented the first apartment they offered me in Barcelona, a flat near Sagrada Familia, and, after selling the house in Gerona at a loss as quickly as possible and getting rid of all of Gabriel's and Paula's belongings, I moved into it and prepared to busy myself conscientiously with the job of dying, and not with that of being born. I discovered that Rodney's father was right and the world was an empty place; but I also discovered that in those moments solitude was less a bane for me than the only possible balm, the only possible blessing. I didn't see my family, I didn't see my friends, I didn't have a television or a radio or a telephone. Aside from that I made sure that only the absolutely indispensable people had my address, and when one of them (or someone who had located me through one of them) knocked on my door, I simply didn't answer. That happened with Marcos Luna, who for a while appeared regularly at my house and got sick of ringing the bell knowing I was inside, listening to him, until he realized that he wasn't going to get to talk to me and from then on he just left in my mailbox, every Friday at lunchtime, a cigarette packet full of freshly rolled joints. My literary agent also sent me a list of the people who called her office requesting my presence somewhere or asking after me every once in a while, although I never answered. Of course, I didn't work, but the sales of the book had provided me with enough income to live without working for years, and I didn't see any reason not to let time go by until that money ran out. My only effort consisted in not thinking, especially in not remembering. At first it had been impossible. Until I left the house I'dshared with Paula and Gabriel and went to Barcelona I couldn't stop torturing myself thinking about the accident: I wondered if Gabriel had woken up at the last moment and been aware of what was about to happen; I wondered what Paula had thought at that moment, what memory had distracted her as she drove, provoking the swerve that in its turn had provoked the accident, what would have happened if, instead of staying at the party, I'd gone home with them . . . Those who experienced the programmed brutality of the Nazi or Soviet concentration camps often say that, to bear it, they kept themselves going by remembering the happiness they'd left behind, because, remote though it may have been, they always held on to the hope that they might one day recover it; I lacked that comfort: since the dead don't come back to life, my past was irretrievable, so I applied myself conscientiously to obliterating it. Maybe that's why, as soon as I installed myself in Barcelona, I began to live by night. I sometimes spent entire weeks without leaving the house, reading detective novels in bed, living on packets of soup, tinned food, tobacco, marijuana and beer, but normally I'd spend the nights o
utside, traipsing relentlessly all over the city, walking aimlessly, stopping now and then to have a drink and rest awhile and get my strength back before continuing my walk to nowhere until dawn, when I'd return home wrecked and throw myself into bed, desperate for rest and unable to sleep, maddened by other people's noises in the world, which incredibly kept to its imperturbable course. Insomnia turned me into a passionate theoretician of suicide, and I now think that if I didn't put it into practice it wasn't only due to cowardice or excess of imagination, but also because I feared my remorse would survive me, or more likely because I discovered that, more than to die, what I desired was never to have lived at all, and that's why sometimes I managed a clear, dreamless sleep when I imagined myself living in the pure limbo of non-existence, in the happiness before light, before words. I took to playing with death. Sometimes I'd take the car and drive obsessively and rashly for days on end, on a whim, stopping only to eat or to sleep, comforted by the permanent certainty that at any moment I could swerve or go into a skid like the one that had killed Gabriel and Paula. One night, in a brothel in Montpellier, I got involved in a meaningless argument with two individuals who ended up giving me a beating that put me in hospital, from which I emerged with my body black and blue and my nose broken. I also bought a pistol: I kept it in a drawer and took it out every once in a while, loaded it and pointed it at my forehead or under my chin or put it in my mouth and held it there, tasting the acidity of the barrel and gently caressing the trigger while sweat poured down my temples and my panting seemed to thunder in my head and fill the silence of the flat to bursting. One night I spent a long time walking along the parapet of my roof terrace, happy, naked and precariously balanced, with my mind a blank, aware only of the breeze that made my skin bristle and the lights of the city and the vertiginous precipice gaping beside me, humming a song I've now forgotten.

  I spent the spring, summer and autumn in this dead-end tightrope-walking state, and it wasn't until one night at the beginning of last winter that, thanks to the providential alliance of a disagreeable incident, a chance discovery and a revived memory, I suddenly had a flicker of a hint that I wasn't condemned to endure forever the underground life I'd been leading for months. It all started in Tabu, a nightclub on the lower part of the Rambla frequented by tourists, who go there to see local porn shows at an affordable price. It's a dark and threadbare place, with a bar off at an angle to the right of the entrance and a stage surrounded by metal tables and chairs with silvery sequined lampshades suspended above them, to the left of which a curtain hides the booths reserved for paying couples. I'dalready been there a couple of times, always very late, and, as I'd done on my previous visits, that night I ordered a whisky from the slight, old woman plastered in makeup who seemed to be in charge of the place and who stayed at one end of the bar, drinking and smoking and watching the show from a distance. It must have been a weekday, because although among the clients there was a conspicuous group of loud, frenzied youths fraternizing effusively with the artistes and climbing up on stage as soon as they hinted at it, the rest of the bar was almost deserted, and there were only two couples leaning on the bar not far from me: one halfway down, the other a bit further along. I'd already had my first whisky and was just about to order a second when, just as a naked woman began fellating a man dressed as a Roman soldier on stage, I felt something abnormal was going on beside me; I turned and saw that the couple halfway down the bar were arguing violently. I'm lying: I didn't see that;what I saw, in a few flashing seconds of stupefaction, was that the man and the woman were shouting at each other wildly, the man slapped the woman across the face, the woman tried unsuccessfully to retaliate in kind, and, seized by a blind fury, the man began to hit the woman, and he kept hitting her and hitting her until he knocked her to the floor, from where she tried to defend herself with tears, insults, punches and kicks. I also saw the couple that were further down the bar move away from the scene, fascinated and terrified; the volume of the music prevented the audience over by the stage from noticing the fight, and the only person who seemed determined to stop it, shouting herself hoarse behind the bar, was the old woman who ran the place. As for me, I stood stock-still, paralyzed, watching the fight with my empty whisky glass gripped tightly in my fist, until, undoubtedly alerted by the manager, two bouncers appeared, subdued the aggressor with quite a bit of difficulty and took him outside with one arm twisted up behind his back, while the manager took the girl backstage escorted by other prostitutes. It was also the manager who, once she was back in the room, took care of calming the worries of a clientele who, for the most part, had seen only a confusing glimpse of the end of the altercation, and it was also she who, after making sure the show was going on, as she passed me on her way back behind the bar, spat out without even looking at me, as if I were a regular customer and she could give vent to the accumulated tension with me: 'And you could have done something too, don't you think?'

  I didn't say anything; I didn't order a second whisky; I left the place. Outside it was bone-chillingly cold. I went up the Rambla towards the plaza de Catalunya and, as soon as I saw an open bar, went in and ordered the whisky I hadn't dared order in Tabu. I downed it in a couple of hurried gulps and ordered another. Comforted by the alcohol, I reflected on what had just happened. I wondered what state the woman was in, since at the last moment she'd stopped resisting her aggressor's kicks and lay defenceless on the floor, exhausted or maybe unconscious. I told myself that, had it not been for the last-minute intervention of the two bouncers, there was nothing to indicate that the man would have stopped beating his victim until he ran out of steam or killed her. I didn't ask myself, however, what the manager of the place had asked me — why had I done nothing to stop the fight — I didn't ask myself because I knew — out of fear, maybe out of indifference, and even out of a shadow of cruelty — it's possible that some part of me had enjoyed that spectacle of pain and fury, and that same part wouldn't have minded if it had gone on. That was when, as if emerging from a centuries-old chasm, I remembered a parallel and reverse scene to the one I'd just witnessed in Tabu, a scene that happened more than thirty years before in a bar in a distant city I'd never seen. There, some place in Saigon, my friend Rodney had defended a Vietnamese waitress from the boozed-up brutality of a Green Beret NCO; he hadn't been indifferent or cruel: he'd overcome his fear and his courage hadn't failed him. Exactly what I hadn't done a few minutes earlier. More than shame for my cowardice, my cruelty and my indifference, I felt surprise at the fact of remembering Rodney at precisely that moment, when it had been almost two years since I'd forgotten him.

  Hours later, going over what had happened that night, I thought that untimely memory was actually a premonition. That's what I thought then, but I could have thought it long before, just when, as I finished my whisky in that bar on the Rambla and took out my wallet to pay for it, a bunch of disorderly papers I kept in it fell out onto the floor; I bent down to pick them up: there were credit cards, my driver's licence and ID card, overdue bills, pieces of paper with scribbled phone numbers and vaguely familiar names. Among them was a folded and wrinkled photograph; I unfolded it, looked at it for a second, less than a second, recognizing it without wanting to recognize it, more incredulous than astonished; then I folded it up againquickly and put it back in my wallet with the other papers. I paid at once, went out onto the street with a sensation of vertigo or real danger, as if I were carrying a bomb in my wallet, and started walking very fast, not feeling the night'scold, not noticing the lights and people of the night, trying not to think about the photograph but knowing that image from a life I almost believed cancelled could explode before the stone door my future had become, opening a crack through which reality, future and past, would filter into the present. I went up the Rambla, crossed the plaza de Catalunya, walked up the paseo de Gracia, turned left when I got to Diagonal and kept walking very quickly, as if I needed to exhaust myself as soon as possible or gather courage or postpone as much as possible the inevit
able moment. Finally, at a corner in Balmes, in the changing light of a traffic signal, I made up my mind: I opened my wallet, took out the photo and looked at it. It was one of the pictures of Paula and Gabriel with Rodney during my friend's visit to Gerona, and also the only image of Paula and Gabriel that I had accidentally kept: I'd got rid of the rest when I moved to Barcelona. There they both were, on that forgotten piece of paper, like two ghosts who refuse to disappear, diaphanous, smiling and intact on Les Peixeteries Velles bridge; and there was Rodney, standing up straight between the two of them, with his patch over his eye and his two enormous hands resting on the shoulders of my wife and my son, like a Cyclops ready to protect them from an as yet invisible threat. I kept looking at the photograph; I won't try to describe what I was thinking: to do so would distort what I felt while I was thinking. I'll only say that I had been staring at the photo for a long time when I realized I was crying, because the tears, which were streaming down my cheeks, were soaking my flannel shirt and the collar of my coat. I was crying as if I would never stop. I was crying for Paula and for Gabriel, but perhaps most of all I was crying because up till then I hadn't cried for them, not when they died or in the months of panic, blame and reclusion that followed. I cried for them and for me; I also knew or thought I knew that I was crying for Rodney and, with a strange sense of relief — as if thinking of him was the only thing that could exempt me from having to think about Paula and Gabriel — I imagined him at that very moment in his house in Rantoul, his provincial two-storey house with an attic and a porch, a front yard with two maples on Belle Avenue, with his calm, routine work as a schoolteacher, watching his son grow up and his wife mature, redeemed from the incurable, maladjusted fate that for more than thirty years had fiercely cornered him, master of all that I'd had in the glossy and inaccessible time of the photograph that now brought it back.