The Speed of Light

by Cercas, Javier

  'Well, actually he's not here,' said Dan finally. After pondering for a moment he asked: 'Where are you when you're dead?'

  The question wasn't directed at anyone in particular, but I waited for Jenny to answer it; she didn't answer. After a few seconds had gone by I felt obliged to say:

  'Nowhere.'

  'Nowhere?' asked Dan, exaggerating the interrogative tone.

  'Nowhere,' I repeated.

  Dan remained pensive.

  'Then you're the same as a ghost?' he asked.

  'Exactly,' I answered, and then I lied without knowing it:

  'Except that ghosts don't exist, and the dead do.'

  Dan looked away from the tombstone finally and, sneaking a look at me, made as if to smile, as if he was as sure of not having understood as of not wanting to show he hadn't understood. Then he moved away from us and walked to one edge of the cemetery, beyond which you could see in the distance a cluster of houses with paint peeling off the walls, maybe abandoned, and he began to pick up pebbles from the ground and throw them gently onto the neighbouring fields: a succession of uncultivated plots with a few weeds here and there. Jenny and I stayed beside one another, without saying anything, looking alternately at Dan and at Rodney's grave. It was getting dark and starting to feel a little cold; the sky was a dark blue, almost black, but an irregular strip of orange light still illuminated the horizon, and only the early chirping of crickets and a dim and distant rumble of traffic perturbed the impeccable silence of the hill.

  'Well,' said Jenny after a while, during which I didn't think anything, didn't feel anything, not even an urge to pray. 'It's getting late. Shall we go back?'

  It was almost dark by the time we got home. I had a dinner date in Urbana, with Borgheson and a group of professors, and if I wanted to get back to the Chancellor by the agreed time I'd have to leave immediately, so I told Dan and Jenny that I had to go. They both stared at me, a bit stunned, as if, rather than a surprise, my words were the prelude to a desertion; after an indecisive silence, Jenny asked:

  'Is the dinner important?'

  It wasn't. It wasn't at all. I told her.

  'Then why don't you cancel?' asked Jenny. 'You can stay here: there're lots of bedrooms.'

  She didn't have to repeat the offer: I phoned Borgheson and told him I felt tired and feverish and that, in order to be on form for the lecture the following day, it would be best if I skipped dinner and stayed in the hotel to rest. Borgheson accepted the lie without complaint, although it took a lot of doing to convince him not to come to my aid at the Chancellor. The problem solved, I invited Dan and Jenny to dinner at a restaurant called Kennedy's, a few kilometres out of town on the way to Urbana, and after dinner, while Dan played on his Game Boy with a classmate whose family was also eating there, Jenny told me how she'd met Rodney, talked about her job, her family, the life she led in Rantoul. When we left the restaurant it was almost ten. On the way back, Dan fell asleep, and when we got to the house I picked him up in my arms, carried him up to his room and, while Jenny put him to bed, I waited for her in the living room, looking at the CDs lined up in an aluminum pyramid beside the sound system. Most of them were rock and roll, and there were several by Bob Dylan. Among themBringing It All Back Home,an album that contained a song I knew well: 'It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)'. With the disk in my hands I began to hear in my head that inconsolable song that always used to bring back to Rodney the intact joy of his youth, and suddenly, as I waited for Jenny, remembering the lyrics as precisely as I did the music, I was certain that deep down that song spoke of nothing but Rodney, of Rodney's cancelled-out life, because it spoke of disillusioned words that bark like bullets and stuffed graveyards and false gods and lonely people who cry and fear and live in a vault knowing everything's a lie and who understand they know too soon there is no use in trying, because it spoke of all that and especially because it said that he not busy being born is busy dying. 'Rodney's only busy dying now,' I thought. And I thought: 'I'm not, yet.'

  'Do you feel like listening to some music?' said Jenny as she came into the living room.

  I said yes, and she turned on the machine and went to the kitchen. I avoided the temptation of Dylan and put onAstral Weeksby Van Morrison, and when Jenny came back, carrying a bottle of wine and two glasses, we sat down across from one another and let the record play, chatting with an effusiveness fostered by the alcohol and by Van Morrison's raw voice. I don't remember what we talked about at first, but when we'd already been sitting there for a while, I don't know exactly why (maybe owing to something I said, probably owing to something Jenny said), I suddenly remembered a letter Rodney had sent his father from hospital in Vietnam, after the incident at My Khe, a letter in which he talked of the beauty of war, of the devastating speed of war, and then I thought that since I'd been in Rantoul I had the impression that everything had accelerated, that everything had started to run faster than usual, faster and faster, faster, faster, and at some moment there had been a blaze, a maelstrom and a loss, I thought I'd unknowingly travelled faster than the speed of light and what I was now seeing was the future. And that was also when, mingled with Van Morrison's music and Jenny's voice, I felt for the first time something both unusual and familiar, something I'd maybe sensed wordlessly as soon as I'd seen Dan and Jenny coming towards me that afternoon on Belle Avenue, and what I felt was that here, in this house that wasn't my house, before this woman who wasn't mine, with this sleeping child who wasn't my son but who was sleeping upstairs as if I were his father, that here I was invulnerable; I also wondered, with a twinkling commencement of joy, whether I wasn't obliged to give some meaning to Rodney's suicide, whether the house I was in wasn't a reflection of my house and Dan and Jenny a reflection of the family I'd lost, I wondered if that was what one saw upon emerging from the filth underground out into the open, if the past was not a place permanently altered by the future and nothing of what had already happened was irreversible and what was there at the end of the tunnel echoed what had been there before entering it, I wondered if this was not the true end of it all, the end of the road, the end of the tunnel, the breach in the stone door. This is it, I said to myself, possessed by a strange euphoria. It's over. Finito. Kaput.

  As soon as I finished thinking that thought I interrupted Jenny.

  'There's something I haven't told you,' I said.

  She looked at me, a little surprised by my abruptness, and suddenly I didn't know how I was going to tell her what I had to tell her. I figured it out a second later. I took the photograph of Gabriel, Paula and Rodney on Les Peixe-teries Velles bridge out of my wallet and handed it to her. Jenny took it and for some moments examined it attentively. Then she asked:

  'Is this your wife and son?'

  'Yes,' I answered and, as if another person were speaking for me, I continued as a cold thread ran up my spine like a snake: 'They died a year ago, in a car accident. It's the only photo of them I kept.'

  Jenny looked up from the photo, and at that moment I noticed the Van Morrison CD had stopped playing; reality seemed to have slowed down, gone back to its normal speed.

  'What have you come here for?' asked Jenny.

  'I don't know,' I said, although I did know. 'I was in a pit and I wanted to see Rodney. I thought Rodney had been in a pit too and he'd got out of it. I think I believed he could help me. Or rather: I think I believed he was the only person who could help me . . . Well, I realize this all sounds a bit ridiculous, and I don't know if it makes much sense to you, but I think it's what I thought.'

  Jenny scarcely took a moment to answer.

  'It makes sense,' she said.

  Now it was me who looked at her.

  'Really?'

  'Sure,' she insisted, smiling gently, again digging a tiny net of wrinkles around the corners of her mouth. For a second I knew or suspected that, because she'd lived with Rodney, her words did not stem from compassion, but that it was true she understood, that only she could understand; for a second I felt the
soft radiance of her attractiveness, I suddenly believed I understood the attraction she'd exerted over Rodney. Almost as if she considered the matter settled, or as if she thought it barely merited any more time devoted to it, she went on: 'Guilt. It's not so hard to understand that. I could feel guilty for Rodney's death too, you know? Finding guilty parties is very easy; the difficult thing is accepting that there aren't any.'

  I wasn't sure what she meant by those words, but for some reason I remembered others that Rodney had written to his father: 'Things that make sense are not true,' Rodney had written. 'They're only sawn-off truths, wishful thinking: truth is always absurd.' Jenny finished her glass of wine.

  'I have a copy of the documentary,' she said, as if she hadn't changed the subject and was about to give me her real answer to the doubt I'd just formulated. 'Do you want to watch it?'

  Because I wasn't expecting it, the question disconcerted me. First I thought I didn't want to watch the programme; then I thought I did want to watch it; then I thought I wanted to watch it but I shouldn't watch it; then I thought I wanted to watch it and should watch it. I asked:

  'Have you watched it?'

  'Of course not,' said Jenny. 'What for?'

  Just as if my question had been an affirmative reply Jenny went upstairs, after a while she returned with the videotape and asked me to come with her to a room between the kitchen and the living room, at the foot of the stairs; in the room was a television, a sofa, two chairs, a coffee table. I sat on the sofa while Jenny turned on the television, put the video in and handed me the remote control.

  'I'll wait for you upstairs,' she said.

  I leaned back on the sofa and pressed play on the remote control; the programme began immediately. It was calledBuried Secrets, Brutal Truthsand lasted about forty minutes. It combined archive images, in black and white, from documentaries about the war, and current images, in colour, of villages and fields in the regions of Quang Ngai and Quang Nam, along with some statements made by peasants from the area. Two threads stitched the two blocks of images together: one was a dispassionate voice-over; the other, the testimony of a Vietnam veteran. The voice-over told from the outside the story of the atrocities committed thirty-five years earlier by a bloodthirsty platoon of the 101st Airborne Division of the United States Army that operated in Quang Ngai and Quang Nam, converting the regions into a vast killing field. The platoon, known as Tiger Force, was a unit composed of forty-five volunteers which acted in coordination with other units, but which functioned with a great degree of autonomy and barely any supervision, its members distinguishable by their striped camouflage uniforms, in imitation of tiger stripes; the catalogue of horrors the report documented knew no bounds: Tiger Force soldiers murdered, mutilated, tortured and raped hundreds of people between January and July 1969, and acquired a reputation among the local population for wearing around their necks, like necklaces of war that brutally commemorated their victims, collections of human ears strung together on shoelaces. Towards the end of the broadcast the voice-over mentioned the Pentagon report that the White House had shelved in 1974 with the excuse that it didn't want to reopen the wounds of the recently concluded conflict. As for the veteran, he was shown sitting in an armchair, unmoving, backlit from a window, so that a dark shadow obscured his face; his voice, on the other hand — gruff, icy, withdrawn — had not been distorted: it was clearly Rodney's voice. The voice told anecdotes; it also made comments. 'It's difficult to understand it all now,' the voice said, for example. 'But there came a time for us when it was the most natural thing in the world. At first it was a bit of an effort, but you soon got used to it and it was just like any other job.' 'We felt like gods,' the voice said. 'And in a certain way we were. We had the power of life and death over whoever we wanted and we exercised that power.' 'For years I couldn't forget each and every one of the people I saw die,' said the voice. 'They appeared to me constantly, just as if they were alive and didn't want to die, just like ghosts. Then I managed to forget them, or that's what I thought, although deep down I knew they hadn't gone away. Now they're back. They don't ask me to settle the score, and I don't. There's no score to settle. It's just that they don't want to die, they want to live in me. I don't complain, because I know it's fair.' The voice closed the report with these words: 'You can believe we were monsters, but we weren't. We were like everybody else. We were like you.'

  When the report ended I remained sitting on the sofa for a while, unable to move, my eyes glued to the blizzard on the television screen. Then I took the tape out of the video, turned off the television and went out on the porch. The city was in silence and the sky full of stars; it was a little cold. I lit a cigarette and started smoking it as I contemplated the silent night of Rantoul. I didn't feel horror, I didn't feel nauseous, not even sadness, for the first time in a long time I didn't feel anguish either; what I felt was something strangely pleasant that I'd never felt before, something like an infinite exhaustion or an infinite and blank calm, or like a substitute for the exhaustion or the calm that left only the inclination to keep looking at the night and to weep. 'Our nada who art in nada,' I prayed. 'Nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada.' When I finished smoking my cigarette I went back inside the house and upstairs. Jenny had fallen asleep with a book on her lap and the light on; Dan was curled up beside her. The room next to hers also had the light on and the bed made, and I guessed Jenny had made it up for me. I turned off the light in Jenny and Dan's room, turned off mine and got into bed.

  It took me a long time to get to sleep that night, and the next day I woke up very early. When Dan and Jenny got up I already had breakfast almost ready. While we ate, a little hurriedly because it was Monday and Dan had to go to school and Jenny to work, I avoided Jenny's eyes a couple of times, and when we finished I offered them a lift in the car. Dan's school was, Jenny said, as we parked in front of it, the same one where Rodney had worked: a three-storey brick building with a large iron gate guarding access to the schoolyard, surrounded by a metal fence. In front of the entrance a group of parents and children were already congregated. We joined the group and, when the gate finally opened, Dan gave his mother a kiss; then he turned to me and, scrutinizing me with Rodney's big brown eyes, asked me if I was going to come back. I said yes. He asked me when. I said soon. He asked me if I was lying to him. I said no. He nodded. Then, because I thought he was going to give me a kiss, I began to crouch down, but he stopped me by holding out his hand; I shook it. Then we watched him disappear into the schoolyard with his preschooler knapsack, among the ruckus of his classmates.

  While we walked back to the car Jenny suggested we go for a last cup of coffee: she still had a while before she had to start work, she said. We went to Casey's General Store and sat beside a window that overlooked the gas pumps and, beyond them, the intersection at the edge of the city; a country and western tune came quietly out of the speakers. I recognized the waitress who served us: she was the same one who'd given me haphazard directions to Rodney's house on Sunday. Jenny exchanged a few words with her and then we ordered two coffees.

  'When Rodney came back from Spain he told me you wanted to write a book about him,' said Jenny as soon as the waitress had gone. 'Is that true?'

  I'd been prepared for Jenny to ask me about the documentary, but not for what she actually asked. I looked at her: her grey eyes had acquired a violet-toned iridescence and revealed a curiosity for more than just my answer, or that's what I thought. My answer was:

  'Yes.'

  'Have you written it?'

  I said no.

  'Why?'

  'I don't know,' I said, and remembered the conversation I'd had about the same matter with Rodney in Madrid. 'I tried several times, but I couldn't. Or I didn't know how. I think I felt his story wasn't over, or that I didn't entirely understand it.' 'And now?'

  'Now what?'

  'Now is it over?' she asked again. 'Now do you understand it?'

  Like a sudden illumination,
at that moment I thought I understood Jenny's behaviour since my arrival in Rantoul. I thought I understood why she had told me about Rodney's last days, why she'd wanted to show me his grave, why she'd wanted me to stay the night in her house, why she'd wanted me to watch the Tiger Force documentary: just as if words had the power to give meaning or an illusion of meaning to what has none, Jenny wanted me to tell Rodney's story. I thought of Rodney, I thought of Rodney's father, I thought of Tommy Birban, but most of all I thought of Gabriel and Paula, and for the first time I sensed that all those stories were actually the same story, and that only I could tell it.

  'I don't know if it's over,' I answered. 'I don't know if I understand it either, or if I understand it completely.' I thought of Rodney again and said: 'Of course, you probably don't need to understand a story completely to be able to tell it.'

  The waitress brought our coffee. When she'd left, Jenny asked as she stirred hers:

  'What is it you don't understand? Why he did it?'

  I didn't answer straight away: I tasted the coffee and lit a cigarette while I remembered the report with a shiver.

  'No,' I said. 'Actually that's the only thing I do understand.' As if thinking aloud I added: 'Maybe what I don't understand is why I didn't.'

  Jenny's cup remained suspended in the air, halfway between the table and her lips, while she looked at me doubtfully, as if my observation was obviously absurd or as if she'd just formed the suspicion that I was mad. Then she diverted her gaze towards the window (the sun shone right in her face, inflaming the gold earring still in view) and seemed to reflect a moment, and then turned back to look at me with a half smile as the cup concluded its interrupted voyage, wet her lips and put it down on the table.

  'Well, I tried to explain it to you yesterday: you haven't killed anyone.'She lied to me,I thought in a second, in a fraction of a second.She has seen the report.As soon as she started talking again I discarded that idea. 'Not even accidentally,' she said, and then added: 'Besides, after all you're a writer, aren't you?'