The Speed of Light

by Cercas, Javier

  Of course I was wrong. One night at the beginning of April or the end of March, just after Spring Break — the North American equivalent ofSemana Santa —someone called me at home. I remember I was just finishing a short story by Hemingway called 'A Clean, Well-Lighted Place' when the phone rang; I also remember I picked it up thinking of that sorrowful story and especially of the sorrowful, nihilistic prayer it contained — 'Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada' — it was Rodney's father. I still hadn't recovered from the surprise when, after confessing he'd got my number from the department, he began to apologize for the way he'd treated me on my visit to Rantoul. I interrupted him; I told him he had nothing to apologize for, I asked him if he had any news from Rodney. He answered that he'd called from somewhere in New Mexico a few days ago, that they'd talked for a while and that he was well, although for the moment it wasn't likely he'd be coming home.

  'But that's not why I called,' he immediately made clear. 'I'm calling because I'd like to talk to you. Would you have any time to spare for me?'

  'Of course,' I said. 'What about?'

  Rodney's father seemed doubtful for a moment and then he said: 'The truth is I'd rather talk about it in person. Face to face. If it's not too much trouble.'

  I told him it was no trouble.

  'Would you mind coming to my house?' he asked.

  'No,' I said and, although I meant to go in any case, because by then I'd forgotten the sensation of anxiety that had seized me after my first visit to Rantoul, I added: 'But you could at least tell me what you want to talk about.'

  'It's nothing important,' he said. 'I'd just like to tell you a story. I think it might interest you. How does Saturday afternoon suit you?'

  STARS AND STRIPES

  SIXTEEN YEARS HAVE NOW gone by since that spring afternoon I spent in Rantoul, but, perhaps because during all that time I've known that sooner or later I'd have to tell it, that I couldn't not tell it, I still remember quite accurately the story Rodney's father told me in the course of those hours. I have a much less precise memory, on the other hand, of the circumstances surrounding them.

  I arrived in Rantoul shortly after midday and found the house with no trouble. As soon as I rang the bell, Rodney's father opened the door and invited me into the living room, a spacious, bright and cosy room, with a fireplace and a leather sofa and two wingback chairs at one end, and at the other, beside the window that faced Belle Avenue, an oak table and chairs, walls lined to the ceiling with perfectly ordered books and floor covered with thick burgundy-coloured rugs that hushed footsteps. The truth is, after our unexpected phone conversation, I had almost anticipated that from the start Rodney's father would display a cordiality unheralded by our first encounter, but what I could in no way have predicted is that the diminished and intimidating man who, in dressing gown and slippers, had dispatched me without a second thought just a few months earlier would now receive me dressed with a sober elegance more suitable to a venerable Boston Brahmin than a retired, country doctor in the Midwest, apparently converted into one of those false elderly men who strive to exhibit, beneath the unwelcome certainty of their many years, the vitality and poise of someone who has not yet resigned himself to enjoying only the scraps of old age. However, as he came out with the story I had gone to hear, that deceptive fagade began to crumble and reveal its flaws, damp stains and deep fissures, and by the middle of his story Rodney's father was no longer talking with the exuberant energy he'd started with — when he spoke as if possessed by a long-deferred urgency, or rather as if his life depended on the act of talking and my listening to him, insistently looking me in the eye just as if he sought there an impossible confirmation of his tale—because by that point his words no longer quivered with the slightest vital impulse, but only the venomous and inflexible memory of a man consumed by regret and devastated by misfortune, and the grey light that entered through the window wrapping the living room in shadows had erased from his face all traces of his distant youth, leaving a bare preview of his skull. I remember that at one point I began to hear the pattering of rain on the porch roof, a pattering that almost immediately turned into a jubilant spring downpour that obliged us to turn on a floor lamp because by then it was almost night and we'd been sitting for many hours face to face, sunken in the two wingback chairs, he talking and me listening, with the ashtray overflowing with cigarette butts and on the table an empty coffee pot and two empty cups and a pile of much-handled letters that carried US Army postmarks, letters from Saigon and Da Nang and Xuan Loc and Quang Ngai, from various parts of the Batagan peninsula, letters that spanned a period of more than two years and carried the signatures of his two sons, Rodney and also Bob, but mostly Rodney's. They were very numerous, and were ordered chronologically and kept in three black cardboard document cases with elastic closures, each of which had a handwritten label with the name Rodney and the name Bob, the word Vietnam and the dates of the first and last letter it contained. Rodney 's father seemed to know them off by heart, or at least to have read them dozens of times, and during that afternoon he read me some fragments. That didn't surprise me; what did surprise me — what left me literally dumbfounded—was that at the end of my visit he insisted I take them with me. 'I don't want them any more,' he said before I took my leave, handing me the three document cases. 'Please, keep them and do with them as you see fit.' It was an absurd request, whichever way you look at it, but precisely because it was absurd I couldn't or didn't know how to refuse. Or perhaps, after all, it wasn't so absurd. The fact is, during these sixteen years I haven't given up trying to explain it to myself: I've thought he entrusted his sons' letters to me because he knew he didn't have much time left and he didn't want them ending up in the hands of someone who was unaware of their significance and who might just get rid of them; I've thought he entrusted the letters to me because doing so amounted to a symbolic and hopeless attempt to forever free himself of the story of the disaster they contained and that transferring them to me would make me the repository of the tale or even responsible for it, or because in doing so he wanted to compel me to share with him the burden of his guilt. I've thought all these things and many more besides, but of course I still don't know for certain why he entrusted me with those letters and now I'll never know; perhaps he didn't even know himself. It doesn't matter: the fact is he entrusted them to me and now I have them before me, while I write. During these sixteen years I've read them many times. Bob's are few and brief, absent-mindedly kind, as if the war entirely absorbed his energy and his intelligence and made everything alien to it seem banal or illusory; Rodney's, the other hand, are frequent and voluminous, and in their craftsmanship one notices an evolution that is undoubtedly a mirror of the evolution that Rodney himself experienced during the years he spent in Vietnam: at the beginning they are careful and nuanced, careful not to let reality show through more than by way of a sophisticated rhetoric of reticence, made of silences, allusions, metaphors and implications, and at the end torrential and unbridled, often verging on delirium, just as if the uncontainable whirlwind of the war had burst a dam through the cracks of which had spilled a senseless avalanche of clear-sightedness.

  What follows is Rodney's story, or, at least, his story as his father told me that afternoon and as I remember it, and as it appears in his letters and in Bob's letters. There are no fundamental discrepancies between those two sources, and although I've checked some names, some places and some dates, I don't know which parts of this story correspond to the truth of the story and which parts to attribute to the imagination, bad memory or bad conscience of the narrators: what I'm telling is just what they told (and what I deduced or imagined from what they told), not what really happened. I should add that, at twenty-five, when I heard Rodney's story that afternoon from his father, I knew nothing or almost nothing about the Vietnam War, which was then (I suspect) no more than a confusing background noise on the television news of my adolescence and an annoying
obsession of certain Hollywood film makers, and also that, despite having been living in the United States for almost a year, I couldn't even imagine that although it had officially ended over a decade earlier, in the minds of many Americans it was still as vivid as on 29 March 1973, the day on which, after the deaths of almost sixty thousand of their compatriots — the vast majority of them boys around twenty years of age — and having completely devastated the invaded country, dropping more than eight times as many bombs on it as on all of Europe during the entire Second World War, the United States Army finally left Vietnam.

  Rodney had been born forty-one years before in Rantoul. His father came from Houlton, in the state of Maine, in the northeast of the country, way up near the Canadian border. He'd studied in Augusta, where his family had moved after his grandfather was ruined in the economic crisis of 1929, and then in New York. After graduating from medical school at Columbia in 1943, he enlisted in the army as a private, and during the next two years fought in North Africa, France and Germany. He was not a religious man (or he wasn't until very late in life), but he'd been raised with that strict sense of justice and ethical probity that seems to be the patrimony of Protestant families, and he felt a private satisfaction at having fought for the triumph of liberty and that, thanks to his sacrifice and that of many other young Americans like him, the United States had saved the world from the wicked abjection of fascism; he was also convinced that, having risen in arms to guarantee freedom, his country could not shy away, whether out of complacency or cowardice, from the moral commitment it had contracted with the rest of the world, could not leave abandoned in the hands of terror, injustice or slavery anyone who requested its help to liberate them from oppression. He returned from Europe in 1945. That same year he began to practise medicine in the public hospitals of the Midwest, first in St Paul, Minnesota, and then in Oak Park, a suburb of Chicago, until, for reasons he didn't want to explain and I didn't want to inquire into (but which, he implied or I deduced, undoubtedly had something to do with his idealism or his candour and with his absolute disillusionment with the way public medicine was run), he put down roots definitively in Rantoul, which was strange and even enigmatic, because it's impossible to imagine a destination less brilliant for a cosmopolitan and ambitious young doctor like him. There, in Rantoul, he married a girl from a very humble background he'd met in Chicago; there, that same year, Rodney was born; Bob was born the following year.

  From the beginning Rodney and Bob were two thoroughly opposite boys; the passing of time did nothing but accentuate this opposition. Both had inherited their father's physical fortitude and iron constitution, but only Bob felt comfortable with them and was able to take advantage of them, while for Rodney they seemed little less than an unhappy accident of nature, a personal circumstance that it was necessary to battle against as naturally or with the same resignation with which one battles against a congenital illness. As a child Rodney was extroverted to the point of naivete, vehement, spontaneous and affectionate, and this straightforward temperament, on top of his love of reading and his brilliance at school, turned him into his father's undisguised favourite. On the other hand — and possibly to reap the benefits of their progenitor's guilty conscience over his open preference for Rodney — Bob's relations with the family evolved into a reserved and defensive, often tyrannical, moodiness abounding in reckonings, stipulations and caution, which at the beginning was maybe only a way of demanding the attention he was denied, but which insidiously became a strategy destined to hide personal and intellectual deficiencies that, with or without reason, made him feel inferior to his brother, which in time would end up turning him into one of those classic younger sons who, because they gather up the family ruses the first-born squanders, always seem much more mature than him, and often are. Nevertheless, these imbalances and dissimilarities never translated into hostility between the two brothers, because Bob was too busy accumulating rancour towards his father to feel any towards Rodney, and because Rodney, who hadn't the slightest motive for antagonism towards Bob and who was aware of needing his brother's physical competence and vital shrewdness much more than his brother needed his affection or intelligence, knew how to constantly make amends in their shared games, their shared love of hunting, fishing and baseball, their shared outings and friendships. So, by one of those unstable balancing acts upon which the most solid and lasting friendships are based, the disparity between Rodney and Bob ended up constituting the best guarantee of a fraternal complicity that nothing seemed able to break.

  Not even the war. In the middle of 1967 Bob enlisted voluntarily in the Marine Corps, and a few months later arrived in Saigon as part of the First Infantry Division. The decision to sign up was entirely unexpected, and Rodney's father didn't rule out various different but complementary reasons that might explain it: his incapacity to face up to the demands of a degree in medicine that, out of pride rather than inclination — to demonstrate to himself he could be as good as his father — he'd begun to study for the previous year, and the insatiable eagerness to garner his family's admiration by that unexpected act of bravery. If that was the case — and in Rodney's father's judgement nothing seemed to lead one to suspect it was not — Bob's decision had been a good one, because as soon as he heard of it, his father could not help feeling secretly proud of him: like so many other Americans, Rodney's father then considered the Vietnam War a just war, and with that impetuous decision his son wasn't doing anything but continuing in southeast Asia the work he'd started in Europe twenty-four years earlier, freeing a distant and defenceless country from an ignominious tyranny. Perhaps because he knew him better than his parents did, Bob's decision didn't surprise Rodney, but it did horrify him and, given that he was the only member of the family to know of it before it was made, he did all he could to dissuade him from his determination and, once he'd done it, to persuade him to undo it. He wasn't able to. At that time Rodney was in Chicago, despite his father'sveiled but firm initial opposition, studying philosophy and literature, and his opinion on the war differed starkly from that of his brother and his father, who attributed his firstborn's position to the influence of the dissolute, anti-war atmosphere that prevailed at Northwestern University, as it did on so many campuses across the length and breadth of the United States. The fact is, however, that by the time Bob enlisted in the army, Rodney had quite a clear idea of what was going on in South Vietnam as well as in North Vietnam: he didn't just follow the vicissitudes of the war closely in the American and French newspapers, but also, as well as a complete history of Vietnam, he'd read everything he could get his hands on about the subject, including the analyses of Mary McCarthy, Philippe Devillers and Jean Lacouture and the books of Harrison Salisbury, Staughton Lynd and Tom Hayden, and he'd arrived at the conclusion, much less impulsive or more reasoned than that of many of his classmates, that the declared motivations of his country's intervention in Vietnam were false or spurious, its aim confusing and in the end unjust, and its methods of an atrociously disproportionate brutality. So Rodney began to participate very early on in all sorts of activities protesting against the war, during one of which he met Julia Flores, a Mexican girl from Oaxaca, a mathematics student at Northwestern, cheerful and uninhibited, who integrated him fully in the pacifist movement and initiated him in love and marijuana and sprinkled his rudimentary Spanish with swearwords.

  One afternoon in the summer he graduated from university, while spending some time with his family in Rantoul, Rodney received his draft notice from the army. He undoubtedly expected it, but that wouldn't have made it alarm him any less. He didn't say anything to his parents;nor did he seek refuge with Julia or the advice of any of his comrades in the peace movement. Rodney knew he couldn't put forward any real excuses to evade that order, so it'spossible he spent the days that followed torn between the fear of deserting, taking the path to exile in Canada that so many young men of his age had taken then, and the fear of going to a remote and hateful war against a martyred country, a war
he knew for certain that he — unlike his brother Bob, who he rightly considered a man of action and incalculable cunning — could not survive. One of those days of pressing doubts a letter from Bob arrived at the house and, as usual, his father read it aloud at the dinner table, peppering the reading with proud elucidation that was like a rebuke, or that in his fearful nervousness his son interpreted as a rebuke. The thing is that, in the middle of one of his father's comments, Rodney interrupted him, the interruption degenerated into an argument and the argument into one of those fights in which the two contenders, because they know each other better than anybody, know better than anybody where to wound to make the other bleed most. In this one there was no blood — at least no physical blood, no blood not merely metaphorical — but there were accusations, insults and slamming doors, and the next morning, before anyone had woken up, Rodney took his father's car and disappeared and, when he returned home after three days without a word, he called his father and mother together and unceremoniously announced, giving them no chance to reply, that in two months' time he was enlisting in the army. Almost twenty years after that fateful August day, sitting across from me in the same wingback chair where he had heard Rodney's words of no return, while he held a cup of cold coffee and searched my eyes for the relief of a glimmer of exoneration, Rodney's father was still wondering where his son had been and what he'd done during those three days of flight, and was still also wondering, as he'd done over and over again for the last twenty years, why Rodney had not deserted and had ended up complying with the order to go to Vietnam. In all that time he'd been unable to find a satisfactory answer to the first question; not so the second. 'People tend to believe that many explanations are less convincing than one alone,'Rodney's father told me. 'But the truth is there's more than one reason for almost everything.' According to Rodney'sfather, he would not have joined the army if he could have legally got out of it, but he didn't feel able to deliberately contravene the law — although he considered it unjust — and much less to humiliate himself by asking his father to pull some professional strings to get one of his colleagues to agree to commit fraud by inventing some reason for a medical exemption. On the other hand, refusing to go to war in the name of his pacifist convictions would have cost Rodney two years in prison, and the option of exile in Canada wasn't without risks either, among them that of not being able to return to his country for many years. 'Besides,'Rodney's father went on, 'deep down he was still a boy with his head full of adventure novels and John Wayne movies: he knew his father had fought a war, that his grandfather had fought a war, that war was what men did, that only in war does a man prove he's a man.' So Rodney's father guessed that in some hidden corner of his son's mind, fed by the notions of bravery, manliness and rectitude he'd inculcated in him, and in the struggle with his own nascent ideas of a young man just out of adolescence, he still cherished, a secret but powerful, heroic and romantic concept of war as an essential fact of a man's life, which explined the conviction, matured over twenty years, that if his son had betrayed his anti-war views, swallowed his fear and obeyed the order to go to Vietnam it had really been out of shame, because he knew if he hadn't, he'd never be able to face the simple folk of his country again, because he'd never be able to face his brother or his mother again, but most of all — above all else — because he'd never be able to face him again. 'So it was me who sent Rodney to Vietnam,' Rodney's father said. 'Just as I'd done to Bob.'