Javier Cercas - The Speed of Light

But all this is nothing but conjecture: it's reasonable to imagine that, for a long time after his return from Vietnam, Rodney might have thought or felt like that; it's not impossible to imagine that he might have thought or felt the exact opposite. Facts, however, are facts; I'll stick to them. In the first months he spent back in the United States Rodney barely left his house (neither his family home in Rantoul nor the one he shared with Julia in Minneapolis), and when he began to go out it was only to get involved in fights almost invariably provoked by his irrepressible tendency to interpret any mention of Vietnam or his time in Vietnam, no matter how trivial or innocuous, as a personal affront. He lost his Chicago friends and his Rantoul ones, and he cut off all connections to his old comrades from Vietnam, maybe because, voluntarily or involuntarily, he wished to hide the fact that he was an ex-combatant, which would explain the fact that for a long time he categorically refused to go for help or company to the offices of the Veterans' Association. Despite Julia's unceasing efforts, shortly after their wedding the marriage had deteriorated irreversibly. As for his family, he only kept in touch with his mother, while for years he avoided his father's company and conversation. He drank and smoked a lot, whisky and beer, tobacco and marijuana, and often fell into slumps that would plunge him into deep depressions lasting weeks or months and oblige him to stuff himself with pills. He never hunted or fished again. He never mentioned his brother Bob again. He lived in a continual state of anxiety. For almost a year and a half, he suffered from a relentless insomnia, and only managed to overcome it when he went to the movies with Julia, who held his hand and felt him gradually abandon himself in the murmuring darkness of the cinema and finally immerse himself in sleep as if it were the depths of a lake. During the day he never sat with his back to a window, and he was obsessed with keeping all the blinds in the house closed. He spent his nights giving vent to his anxiety in the hallways and, before finally getting futilely into bed, he would begin a nightly ritual that involved inspecting each and every one of the doors and windows of the house, making sure there was no obstacle that might hinder his escape and that everything he needed to defend himself was at hand, as well as mentally running through the appropriate modus operandi in the implausible case of an emergency. With time he managed to fall asleep in his own bed, but he was frequently assaulted by nightmares, and an inoffensive noise in the yard would be enough to wake him and cause him to rush outside to find out what had made the noise. When he and Julia divorced he moved back to his parents' house in Rantoul, and in the years that followed crossed the country from sea to sea several times: he'd suddenly pack his bags one day, load up the car and leave without any warning or fixed destination, and after one or two or three or four months he'd come home without the slightest explanation, as if he'dbeen out for a stroll around the neighbourhood. He survived two suicide attempts, as a result of the second he eventually agreed to be admitted to the Chicago VA Medical Centre. He didn't take long to start looking for a job, but he did in finding one, because, although being an ex-combatant entitled him to certain privileges, for a long time he considered it humiliating to take advantage of them, and each time he went to an interview he returned home seized by an uncontrollable rage, convinced that prospective employers began to see him as a two-headed monster as soon as they found out he was a war veteran. The first job he got was an easy and not badly paid administrative position in a jam factory, but he barely lasted a few months in it, more or less like the ones that followed. Later he tried giving language classes in Rantoul or around Rantoul, and also tried to take up his studies again, enrolling in a master's course in philosophy at Northwestern. It was all futile. When Rodney returned from Vietnam converted into a broken-down shadow of the brilliant, hard-working and sensible young man he'd once been, his father was sure that time would eventually restore his lost nature, but eight years had gone by since his return and Rodney was still immersed in an impenetrable fog, transformed into a ghost or a zombie; in Rantoul he spent whole days lying in bed, reading novels and smoking marijuana and watching old movies on television, and when he went out it was only to drive for hours on highways that led nowhere or to drink alone in the bars around town. It was as if he was hermetically sealed inside a steel bubble, but the strange thing (or what his father found strange) is that he didn't seem to experience that situation of neglect and absolute solitude as an affliction, but rather as the triumphant fruit of a precise calculation, like the ideal antidote to his exorbitant suspicion of other people and his no less exorbitant suspicion of himself. And so at some point Rodney's parents ended up accepting, with a resignation not devoid of relief, that Vietnam had changed their son forever and that he would never go back to being who he used to be.

Suddenly everything changed. A year and a half before Rodney began giving classes at Urbana, his mother died of stomach cancer. Her suffering was long but not terrible, and Rodney endured it without frights or dramatics, giving up from one day to the next his vague, lazy habits to take care of his dying mother, who during all those years of convalescence from the war had been his sole and silent moral support; the afternoon they buried her no one saw him shed a single tear. Nevertheless, days later, returning from a house call, Rodney's father found his son leaning on the kitchen table, lit up by the bright midday sun that was pouring in through the window, crying his eyes out. He couldn't remember having seen Rodney cry since he was a boy, but he didn't say a thing: he left his things in the hall, went back to the kitchen, made two cups of camomile tea, one for his son, the other for himself, sat down at the table, held his son's big, rough, veiny hand, and stayed beside him for a long time, in silence, sipping his camomile tea and then Rodney's as well, without letting go of his hand, listening to him cry as if he'd stored up an inexhaustible reserve of tears during all those years and he wasn't ever going to stop crying. For a long time father and son had been living in the same house hardly ever speaking to each other, but that evening Rodney began to talk, and it was only then that his father had a blinding glimpse of the vertigo of remorse his son had been living in for all those years, because he came to understand that Rodney didn't only feel he was to blame for the deaths of his brother and his mother and an indefinable number of people, but also for not having had the courage to obey his conscience and having yielded to the order to go to war, for having abandoned his comrades there, for having witnessed the unmitigated horror of Vietnam and for having survived it. The conversation ended in the early hours, and the next day, when they woke up, Rodney asked to borrow his father's car and went to Chicago. The trip was repeated the following week and the one after that, and Rodney's visits to the capital soon became a weekly ritual. At first he'd go and come back on the same day, leaving very early in the morning and getting home at night, but as time went by he began to spend two or sometimes three days away from Rantoul. In order not to spoil the improvement in relations with his son since the death of his wife, Rodney's father didn't make enquiries, but merely lent him the car and asked when he thought he might be back. But one evening, on his return from one of those journeys, Rodney told him: told him that he went each week to the Chicago headquarters of the Vietnam Veterans' Association — the same place where he'dbeen admitted twice in the past and treated with Largactil injections — where he received the help of a psychiatrist who specialized in war-induced disturbances and where he got together with other veterans with whom he collaborated in the organization of public functions, demonstrations and conferences, as well as the production of a magazine in which for several years he published articles on film and literature and furious denunciations of the culpable frivolity of his country's politicians and their servile compliance with the dictates of big corporations. The news didn't surprise Rodney's father, who by then had been noticing for a while the changes his son had undergone in just a few months, and not just in relation to him; Rodney had stopped drinking and smoking marijuana, had started to share in the running of the house, to eradicate his eccentric habits and recover some of his old friends. Gradually that transformation became more solid and more visible because Rodney soon accepted a job keeping the books for a restaurant in Urbana, began to work as a volunteer for a small independent trade union and to frequent the local chapter of the Association of Veterans of Foreign Wars. It was as if Rodney's entire life had hit crisis point with the death of his mother: as if, thanks to his trips to Chicago and the help of the Veterans' Association, the bubble he'd spent more than fifteen years suffocating inside had begun to disintegrate and he was overcoming the shame of being a former Vietnam combatant or finding some form of pride in the fact of being a survivor of that phantasmagoric war. So, by the time he got his job as a Spanish teacher at Urbana, Rodney led such an orderly and industrious life that there was no reason to suspect he hadn't left behind once and for all the infinite consequences of his stint in Vietnam.