The Speed of Light (7 page)

'I'm glad,' said Rodney's father. 'Well,' he then added, beginning to close the door. 'Excuse me, but I have things to do and . . .'

'Wait a second,' I interrupted him, not knowing how I was going to go on, then went on: 'I'd like you to tell Rodney that I was here.'

'Don't worry. I'll tell him.'

'Do you know when he'll be back?'Instead of answering, Rodney's father sighed, and immediately, as if his eyesight wasn't good enough to make me out clearly in the growing darkness of dusk, he let go of the door knob and flipped a switch: a white light suddenly swept the twilight off the porch.

'Tell me something,' he said then, blinking. 'What have you come here for?'

'I told you already,' I answered. 'I'm a friend of Rodney's. I wanted to know why he hadn't come back to Urbana. I wanted to know if something had happened to him. I wanted to see him.'

Now the man scrutinized me closely, as if till then he hadn't really seen me or as if my answer had disappointed him, maybe surprised him; unexpectedly, a moment later he smiled, a smile at once hard and almost affectionate, which covered his face in wrinkles, and in which, nevertheless, I recognized for the first time a distant echo of Rodney's features.

'Do you really think that Rodney and you were friends?'he asked.

'I don't understand,' I answered.

He sighed again and wanted to know how old I was. I told him.

'You're very young,' he said. 'Tell me something else: did Rodney ever talk to you about Vietnam?' He answered his own question. 'No, of course not. How could he talk to you about Vietnam? You wouldn't have understood a thing. He didn't even talk to me about that, or only at the beginning. He did to his mother, until she died. And to his wife, until she couldn't take any more. Did you know Rodney was married? No, you didn't know that either. You don't know anything about Rodney. Nothing. How could he be your friend? Rodney doesn't have friends. He can't have any. You understand, don't you?'

As he spoke, Rodney's father had been gradually raising his voice, charging himself with reason, getting furious, the words converted into fuel for his rage, and for a moment I feared he was going to slam the door in my face or burst into tears. He didn't slam the door in my face, he didn't burst into tears. He stood in silence, suddenly decrepit, a little out of breath, looking with the book in his hand at the night that was falling over Belle Avenue, badly illuminated by yellowish street lamps that gave off a dim light. I too stayed silent, feeling very small and very fragile before that enraged old man, and feeling most of all that I should never have gone to Rantoul to look for Rodney. Then it was as if the man had read my mind, because, sounding upset, he said:

'I'm sorry. I shouldn't have spoken to you like that.'

'Don't worry,' I reassured him.

'Rodney will come back,' he declared, not looking me in the eye. 'I don't know when he'll come back, but he'll come back. Or that's what I think.' He hesitated for a moment and then went on: 'For years he didn't spend much time at home, he wandered around, he wasn't well. But lately everything had changed, and he was very comfortable at the university. Did you know he was comfortable at the university?' I nodded. 'He was very comfortable, he was, but it couldn't last: too good to be true. That's why what had to happen happened.' He put his free hand back on the door knob; he looked at me again: I don't know what was in his eyes, I don't know what I saw in them (it wasn't suspicion any more, nor was it gratitude), I don't even know how to describe what I felt looking at him, but what I do know is that it was very similar to fear. 'And that's all,' he concluded. 'Believe me I'm very grateful you took the trouble to come out here, and forgive my bad manners. You 're a good person and you'll be able to understand; besides, Rodney appreciated you. But listen to me: go back to Urbana, work hard, behave as best you can and forget about Rodney. That's my advice. In any case, if you can't or don't want to forget about Rodney, the best thing you can do is pray for him.'

That night I returned to Urbana confused and maybe a little scared, as if I'd just committed a mistake that would have unforeseeable consequences, feeling lonelier than ever in Urbana and feeling as well, for the first time since my arrival there, that I shouldn't stay much longer in that country that wasn't mine and whose impossible idiosyncrasies I'd never be able to decipher, prepared in any case to forget forever my mistaken visit to Rantoul and follow Rodney's father's advice to the letter. I didn't manage this last part, of course, or at least not entirely, and not only because I'd forgotten how to pray a long time before, but also because very soon I discovered that Rodney had been too important to me to get rid of him just like that, and because all of Urbana conspired to keep his memory alive. It 's true that, in the weeks that followed and in all the rest of the time I spent in Urbana, hardly anyone in the department ever mentioned his name again, and even when I happened to meet Dan Gleylock in the faculty corridors I never made up my mind to ask if he had any news of him. But it's also true that every time I passed Treno's, and I passed it daily, I thought of Rodney, and that just at that time I began reading some of his favourite authors and I couldn't open a page of Emerson or Hawthorne or Twain — not to mention Hemingway — without thinking immediately of him, just as I couldn't write a line of the novel I'd started to write without feeling him vigilantly breathing over my shoulder. So, although Rodney had vanished into thin air, in fact he was more present than ever in my life, exactly as if he'd turned into a ghost or a zombie. Be that as it may, the fact is that not a lot of time passed before I convinced myself I'd never hear Rodney spoken of again.

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 of
Semana 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.