The Speed of Light

by Cercas, Javier

  I nodded, regretting having pushed the conversation to such an extreme and, as I looked away from Rodney's gaze, I noticed a bitter taste of ashes or old coins in my mouth. In the big window that overlooked Principe Pio station, dawn was already vying with the morning's waning darkness, unhurriedly sweeping away the room's shadows. The receptionist had stopped dozing a while ago and was scurrying about in his cubicle. I exchanged a blank look with him and, looking back at Rodney, muttered an apology. Rodney didn't give any sign of having heard it, but after a long silence sighed, and at that moment I thought I guessed from a barely perceptible change in his expression what was going to happen. I wasn't wrong. With a calmed voice and a tired air he asked, 'Do you really want me to tell you?'

  Knowing that I'd won, or that my friend had let me win, I didn't say anything. Then Rodney crossed his legs and, after thinking for a moment, began to tell the story. He did so in a strange way, quick, cold and precise all at the same time; I don't know if he'd told it to someone before, but while I listened I knew he'd told it to himself many times. Rodney told me that the week before the incident at My Khe, a routine patrol made up of soldiers from his company had been accosted at a crossroads by a Vietnamese teenager, who, as she went from one to the next asking for help with urgent gestures, set off a hand grenade hidden inside her clothing, and that the result of this encounter was that, along with the teenager, two members of the patrol were blown to pieces, another lost an eye and two others were injured less seriously. The episode obliged them to redouble security, injecting the company with extra nervousness, which might partly explain what happened later. And what happened was that one morning his company was sent on a reconnaissance mission to the village of My Khe with the object of making sure some information they'd received that members of the Vietcong were hiding there was false. Rodney remembered it all like it was wrapped in the fog of a dream, the Chinook they travelled in descending first over the sea and then over the sand and finally in circles over a handful of neat garden plots while the peasants ran towards the village square, seized with panic because of the peremptory voices spat out by the loudspeakers, the helicopter landing beside a graveyard and then the flash of the sun in the exemplary blue sky and the dazzle of the flowers on the windowsills and a diffuse or remote clamour of hens or children in the crystal-clear morning air as the soldiers dispersed in an impeccable geometrical formation down the deserted streets until at some moment, without really knowing how or why or who had started it, the shooting broke out, first a single shot was heard and almost immediately bursts of machine gun fire and later screams and explosions, and in just a few seconds an insane torment of fire pulverized the miraculous tranquillity of the village, and when Rodney went towards the place where he imagined the battle had started he heard at his back a confused noise of mass escape or ambush and he turned and shouted in rage and fright and opened fire, and then he kept shouting and shooting not knowing why he was shouting or where or at whom he was shooting, shooting, shooting, shooting, and shouting too, and when he stopped the only thing he saw in front of him was an unintelligible jumble of clothes and hair soaked in blood and tiny, dismembered hands and feet and lifeless or still imploring eyes, he saw something multiple, wet and slippery that quickly escaped his comprehension, he saw all the horror in the world concentrated in a few metres of death, but he couldn't bear that refulgent vision and from that moment his conscience abdicated, and of what came next he had only a very vague, dreamlike memory of fires and disemboweled animals and weeping old men and corpses of women and children with their mouths open like exposed entrails. Rodney didn't remember anything more; during his months in hospital and during the rest of his time in Vietnam no one ever mentioned the incident again, and only much later, when they had a trial back in the United States, Rodney found out what his father also found out and had told me: there hadn't been any battle in My Khe, there weren't any guerrillas hiding there, none of the members of his company had even been injured, and the incident had left fifty-four Vietnamese dead, most of them women, old people and children.

  When Rodney finished talking we remained still for a moment, not even daring to look at each other, as if his tale had taken us to a place where only fear was real and we were waiting for the benign apparition of a visitor who would give us back the shared safety of that squalid foyer of a Madrid hotel. The visitor did not arrive. Rodney leaned his big hands on his knees and got up from the sofa with a creaking of joints; bent over and a little unsteady, as if he were dizzy or suffering from vertigo or nausea, he took a few steps and stood looking at the street, leaning on the window frame.

  'It's almost daylight,' I heard him say.

  It was true: the skeletal light of dawn was inundating the room, endowing everything in it with a phantasmal or precarious reality, as if it were scenery submerged in a lake, and at the same time sharpening Rodney's profile, his silhouette standing out doubtfully against the cobalt blue of the sky; for an instant I thought that, rather than a bird of prey, it was the profile of a predator or a big cat.

  'Well, that's more or less the story,' he said in a perfectly neutral tone of voice, returning to the sofa with his hands hidden in his pockets. 'Is that how you imagined it?'

  I pondered my answer for a moment. My mouth didn'ttaste of ashes or old coins any more, but of something that very closely resembled blood but wasn't blood. I felt horror, but I didn't manage to feel pity, and at some moment I felt —hating myself for feeling it and hating Rodney for making me feel it — that all the suffering his time in Vietnam had inflicted on him was justified.

  'No,' I finally answered. 'But it's not far off.'

  Rodney kept talking, standing up in front of me, but I was too stunned to process his words, and after a while he took one hand out of his pocket and pointed at the clock on the wall.

  'My train's leaving in just over an hour,' he said. 'I better go upstairs and get my things. Will you wait for me here?'

  I said I would and stayed waiting for him in the foyer, looking through the big unsleeping window at the people going into the Principe Pio station and the traffic and the incipient morning activity in the neighbourhood of La Florida, watching them without seeing them because the only thing that occupied my mind was the mistaken and bittersweet certainty that Rodney's entire story only just now made sense to me, an atrocious sense that nothing could soften or rectify, and ten minutes later Rodney returned weighed down with luggage and freshly showered. While he checked out of the hotel a guy went into one of the two phone booths that flanked the reception desk and, I don't know why, but as I saw him dial the number and wait for an answer, with a start I remembered a name and almost said it out loud. Without taking my eyes off the guy inside the phone booth I heard Rodney ask the receptionist how to get to Atocha station and the receptionist telling him the quickest way was to get a train from Principe Pio station. Then Rodney turned back to me to say goodbye, but I insisted on accompanying him to the station.

  We went down to the hall and before going outside onto paseo de La Florida, Rodney put his eye patch on. We crossed the street, went inside the station, Rodney bought a ticket and we went towards the platform beneath an enormous steel framework with translucent glass like the skeleton of an enormous prehistoric animal. While we waited on the platform I asked if I could ask one more question.

  'Not if it's for your book,' he answered. I tried to smile, but I couldn't. 'Take my advice and don't write it. Anyone can write a book if they put their mind to it, but not everyone can keep quiet. Besides, I already told you, that story can't be told.'

  'That may be,' I admitted, though now I didn't want to hold my tongue, 'but maybe the only stories worth telling are the ones that can't be told.'

  'Another pretty phrase,' said Rodney. 'If you write the book, remember not to include it. What is it you wanted to ask me?'

  Without a second's doubt I asked: 'Who is Tommy Birban?'

  Rodney's face didn't change, and I didn't know how to read the look
in his one eye, or maybe there was nothing to read in it. When he spoke he managed to keep his voice sounding normal.

  'Where did you get that name?'

  'Your father mentioned it. He said that before you left Urbana you and he spoke on the phone and that's why you left.'

  'He didn't tell you anything else?'

  'What else should he have told me?'

  'Nothing.'

  At that moment they announced over the loudspeakers the imminent arrival of the Atocha train.

  'Tommy was a comrade,' said Rodney. 'He arrived in Quang Ngai when I was already a veteran, and we became friends. We left almost at the same time, and I haven't seen him since . . .' He paused. 'But you know something?'

  'What?'

  'When I met you, you reminded me of him. I don't know why.' With the trace of a smile on his lips Rodney waited for my reaction, but I didn't react. 'Well, I do actually. You know? In war there are those who go under and those who save themselves. That's all. Tommy was one of those who go under, and you would have been too. But Tommy survived, I don't know how but he survived. Sometimes I think it would have been better for him if he hadn't . . . Anyway, that was Tommy Birban: an underdog who sunk even further to save himself.'

  'That doesn't answer my question.'

  'What question?'

  'Why did you leave after talking to him on the phone?'

  'You didn't ask me that question.'

  'I'm asking you now.'

  Knowing time was on his side, Rodney just answered with an impatient gesture and an evasive: 'Because Tommy wanted to get me involved in a mess.'

  'What kind of mess? Was Tommy at My Khe?'

  'No. He arrived long after that.'

  'So?'

  'So nothing. Soldier things. Believe me: if I explained it to you, you wouldn't understand. Tommy was weak and he kept obsessing over things from the war . . . Grudges, enmities, things like that. I didn't want to know about any of that stuff any more.'

  'And you left just because of that?'

  'Yeah. I thought I was over all that, but I wasn't. I wouldn't do it now.'

  I realized Rodney was lying to me; I also understood or thought I understood that, contrary to what I'd thought in the hotel foyer only a little while earlier, the horror of My Khe didn't explain everything.

  'Anyway,' said Rodney as the Atocha train stopped beside us. 'We've spent the night talking nonsense. I'll write you.' He hugged me, picked up his bags and, before climbing onto the train, added: 'Take good care of Gabriel and Paula. And take care of yourself.'

  I nodded, but didn't manage to say anything, because I could only think that that was the first time in my life I'd hugged a murderer.

  I went back to the hotel. When I got to my room I was sticky with sweat, so I took a shower, changed my clothes and lay down on the bed to rest a while before getting the plane back. I had a bitter taste in my mouth, a headache and a buzzing in my temples; I couldn't stop going over and over my encounter with Rodney. I regretted having gone to see him in Madrid; I regretted knowing the truth and having insisted on finding it out. Of course, before that night's conversation I imagined Rodney had killed: he'd been to war and dying and killing is what you do in wars; but what I couldn't imagine was that he'd participated in a massacre, that he'd murdered women and children. Knowing what he'd done filled me with a pitiless, unflinching aversion;having heard him tell it with the indifference with which you describe an innocuous domestic incident increased the horror to disgust. Now the misery of remorse in which Rodney had spent years bleeding seemed a benevolent punishment, and I wondered if the implausible fact that he'd survived the guilt, far from being commendable, didn'tincrease the appalling burden of responsibility. There were, of course, explanations for what he'd told me, but none of them equal to the size of the disgrace. On the other hand, I didn't understand why, having revealed without beating about the bush what happened in My Khe, Rodney would have avoided telling me who Tommy Birban was and what he represented, unless his evasions were meant to try to hide from me a greater horror than My Khe, a horror so unjustifiable and unutterable that, to his eyes and by contrast, it turned My Khe into an utterable and justifiable horror. But what unimaginable horror of horrors could that be? A horror in any case sufficient to pulverize Rodney'smental equilibrium fourteen years before and make him leave his home and his job and resume his fugitive life as soon as Tommy Birban had reappeared. Of course it was also possible that Rodney hadn't told me the whole truth of My Khe and that Tommy Birban had arrived in Vietnam by the time it happened and was in some way linked to the massacre. And what had he meant when he said that Tommy Birban was weak and that he shouldn't have survived and that he reminded him of me? Did this mean that he'd protected Tommy Birban or he was protecting him like he'd protected me? But what had he protected Tommy Birban from, if he had protected him? And what had he protected me from?

  At noon, when reception woke me up to tell me I had to check out, it took me a few seconds to accept that I was in a hotel room in Madrid and that my encounter with Rodney hadn't been a dream, or rather a nightmare. Two hours later I flew back to Barcelona, with my mind made up to forget once and for all my friend from Urbana.

  I didn't manage it. Or rather: Rodney kept me from managing it. Over the following weeks I received several letters from him; at first I didn't answer them, but my silence didn't daunt him and he kept writing, and after a while I gave in to Rodney's stubbornness and to the uncomfortable evidence that our encounter in Madrid had sealed an intimacy between the two of us that I didn't want. His letters from those days were about different things: his work, his acquaintances, what he was reading, Dan and Jenny, especially about Dan and about Jenny. So I found out that the woman with whom Rodney had a son was almost my age, fifteen years younger than him, that she'd been born in Middlebury, a small town near Burlington, and that she worked as a cashier in a supermarket;in several letters he described her to me in detail, but curiously the descriptions differed, as if he had too deep a knowledge of her to be able to capture her in a bunch of improvised words. Another curious detail (or one that now seems curious to me): on at least two or three occasions Rodney again tried, as he already had in Madrid, to talk me out of my plan to tell his story; insisting so much struck me as strange, among other reasons because I judged it superfluous, and I think at some point it ended up arousing the ephemeral suspicion that deep down my friend had always wanted me to write a book about him, and that the conversation we'd had in Madrid, like all the ones we'dhad in Urbana, contained a sort of coded instruction manual about how to write it, or at least about how not to write it, just as if Rodney had been training me, surreptitiously and since we met, so that one day I'd tell his story. At the beginning of August Rodney announced that he'd got the teaching job he'd been hoping for and was preparing to move with Dan and with Jenny to his old family home in Rantoul. Over the next couple of weeks Rodney almost stopped writing to me and, by the time his correspondence began to resume its previous rhythm, in the middle of September, my life had experienced a change the real extent of which I could not even have suspected then.

  It was an unforeseeable change, although perhaps in a way Rodney had foreseen it. I've already said that before the summer break the reception given my novel about the Spanish Civil War, which unexpectedly became a notable critical success and a small success in terms of sales, had surpassed my rosiest expectations; nevertheless, between the end of August and the beginning of September, when the new literary season begins and the books from the previous one get confined to the oblivion of the bookshops' back shelves, the surprise struck: as if during the summer journalists had reached an agreement not to read anything but my book, suddenly they began to summon me to talk about it in newspapers and magazines, on radio and television; as if during the summer readers had reached an agreement not to read anything but my book, I suddenly started to receive jubilant news from my publisher about sales of the book skyrocketing. I'll leave out the details of the story,
because they're public and more than one will still remember them; I won't leave out that in this case the image of a snowball, despite being a cliche (or precisely because it is one), is accurate: in less than a year the book had been reprinted fifteen times, had sold more than three hundred thousand copies, was being translated into twenty languages and adapted for the cinema. It was an unmitigated triumph, which no one in my situation would have dared imagine in their wildest dreams, and the result was that from one day to the next I went from being an unknown, insolvent writer, who led an isolated, provincial life, to being famous, having more money than I knew how to spend and finding myself caught up in a whirlwind of trips, awards ceremonies, launches, interviews, round tables, book fairs and literary festivals that dragged me from one place to another all over the country and to every capital on the continent. Incredulous and exultant, at first I couldn't even recognize I was spinning uncontrollably in the vortex of a demented cyclone. I sensed it was a perfectly unreal life, a farce of colossal dimensions resembling an enormous spider's web that I was secreting and weaving myself and in which I was caught, but, though it might be a deception and I an impostor, I was willing to run all the risks with the only condition being that no one snatched away the pleasure of thoroughly enjoying that hoax. Smug professionals affirm that they don't write to be read by anyone except the select minority who can appreciate their select writings, but the truth is that every writer, no matter how ambitious or hermetic, secretly yearns to have innumerable readers, and that even the most unyielding, degraded, courageous, damned poet dreams of youngsters reciting his verses in the streets. But deep down that hurricane had nothing to do with literature or readers, but rather with success and fame. We know wise men have always advised accepting success with the same indifference as failure, not boasting of victories or degrading yourself with tears in defeat, but we also know that even they (especially they) cry and degrade themselves and boast, unable to respect that magnificent ideal of impassivity, and that's why they recommend we aspire to it, because they know better than anyone that there is nothing more poisonous than success and nothing more lethal than fame.