The Speed of Light (15 page)

'Yeah,' I said, and, almost without realizing it, added, 'maybe a person isn't only responsible for what they do, but also for what they see or read or hear.'

As soon as I heard myself pronounce that sentence I regretted having said it. Rodney's reaction confirmed my mistake: his lips curled instantly into a cunning smile, which soon vanished, but before I could put things right my friend began to speak slowly, as if possessed by a sarcastic and controlled rage.

'Ah,' he said. 'Nice phrase. You writers sure like your pretty phrases. There's a few in your last book. Real pretty. So pretty they almost seem true. But, of course, they're not true, they're just pretty. The funny thing is you still haven't learned that writing well is the opposite of writing pretty phrases. No pretty phrase is capable of expressing truth. Probably no phrase is capable of capturing truth, but . . .'

'I didn't say I wanted to tell the truth,' I interrupted him in irritation. 'I just said I wanted to tell your story.'

'And what difference is there between the two?' he answered, trying to catch my eye with a sad air of defiance. 'The only stories worth telling are the true ones, and if you couldn't tell my story it might not be that you're not capable of it, it might be that it can't be told.'

I held my tongue. I shouldn't have held my tongue, but I did. I should have said: 'That's a pretty phrase too, Rodney, and perhaps it's true.' I should have said: 'You're wrong, Rodney. The only stories worth telling are the ones that can't be told.' I should have said one of those two things, or perhaps both of them, but I didn't say either and I held my tongue. I was sleepy, I was hungry, I felt the night was beginning to turn to dawn, but most of all I felt the astonishment of being embroiled in that conversation that I'd never imagined I could have had with Rodney and that I thought we were only having because Rodney secretly knew he owed it to me, and maybe as well because, against all expectations, time had ended up cauterizing my friend's interminable wounds. I let a few seconds go by, lit a cigarette and after the first drag heard myself say: 'What happened in My Khe, Rodney?'

We were almost whispering, but the question resounded in the quiet of the foyer like a shot. I'd been asking myself for fourteen years, and during that time I'd found out a few things about My Khe. I knew, for example, that nowadays it was a vast tourist beach located fifteen kilometres from Quang Ngai, in the Son Tinh district, not far from the port of Sa Ky, a ribbon of land seven kilometres long, squeezed between a dark forest of poplars and the clear waters of the Kinh River, of which I'd seen many photographs that showed the same anodyne images of summery idleness as any beach in the world: women and children paddling near the calm shore, the gentle slope of very fine sand scattered with red plastic tables and chairs, a crest of rolling hills in the distance placidly cut out against a sky as blue as the sea; I also knew that thirty-two years earlier there'd been a village beside that beach and that one day in 1968 Rodney had been there. But although I had imagined many times what happened in My Khe — with my imagination by then corroded by reportage, history books, novels, documentaries and films about Vietnam — I knew nothing for certain. I thought Rodney had read my mind when he asked with a sort of resignation or indifference: 'Can't you guess?'

'More or less,' I answered, sincerely. 'But I don't know what happened.'

'You don't need to,' he assured me. 'What you imagined is what happened. What happens in all wars happened. No more, no less. My Khe is only an anecdote. Besides, in Vietnam there wasn't just one My Khe, there were many. What happened in one happened more or less in all of them. Satisfied?'

I said nothing.

'No, of course not,' guessed Rodney, hardening his voice again, and then went on as if he didn't want me to understand what he said but rather what he meant. 'But if it means that much to you I can tell you something that'llleave you satisfied. What would you prefer? I know lots of stories. I've got an imagination too. Tell me what you need to make you think your story tallies and make yourself believe you understand it. You tell me and I'll tell you and we'll be done, okay? But before that let me warn you about something: no matter what I tell you, no matter what I invent, you're never going to understand the only thing that matters, and that's that I don't want your pity. Understand? Not yours or anybody else's. I don't need it. That's the only thing that matters, or at least it's the only thing that matters to me. You understand, right?'

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.'