Javier Cercas - The Speed of Light

But he hadn't left them behind. Rodney's father realized it one night over the Christmas holidays in 1988, a few months before he told me his son's story in his house in Rantoul, just a few days after Rodney and I had said goodbye at the door of Treno's with the finally frustrated promise that we'd see each other again as soon as I got back from my road trip through the Midwest in the company of Barbara, Gudrun and Rodrigo Gines. That evening a man had telephoned the house asking for his son. Rodney was out, so his father asked who was calling. 'Tommy Birban,' said the man. Rodney's father had never heard that surname, but the fact didn't surprise him, because since Rodney had broken out of the confinement of his bubble it was not unusual for strangers to call the house. The man said he was a friend of Rodney's, promised to call back in a while and left a phone number in case Rodney wanted to call him first. When Rodney got home that night, his father handed him a piece of paper with his friend's phone number on it; his son's reaction surprised him: slightly pale, taking the paper he was handing him, he asked if he was sure that was the name of the stranger and, although he assured him it was, he made him repeat it several times, to convince himself his father hadn't been mistaken. 'Is something up?' Rodney'sfather asked. Rodney didn't answer or answered with a gesture both discouraging and disparaging. But later, when they were having dinner, the telephone rang again, and before his father could get up to answer it Rodney stopped him sharply with a shout. The two men sat and looked at each other: that was when Rodney's father knew something was wrong. The telephone kept ringing, until it finally stopped. 'Maybe it was someone else,' said Rodney's father. Rodney said nothing. 'He's going to call again, isn't he?'t Rodney's father asked after a while. This time Rodney nodded. 'I don't want to talk to him,' he said. 'Tell him I'm not here. Or better yet, tell him I'm away and you don't know when I'll be back. Yeah: tell him that.' That night Rodney's father didn't risk any more questions, because he knew his son was not going to answer, and he spent the whole next day waiting for Tommy Birban's call. Of course, the call came, and Rodney's father picked up the receiver quickly and did what his son had asked him to do. 'Yesterday you didn't tell me Rodney was away,' Tommy Birban said suspiciously. 'I don't remember what I said yesterday,' he answered. Then he improvised: 'But it would be better if you didn't call here again. Rodney has gone away and I don't know where he is or when he'll be back.' He was just about to hang up when Tommy Birban's voice on the other end of the line stopped sounding threatening and began to sound imploring, like a perfectly articulated sob: 'You're Rodney's father, right?' He didn't have time to answer. 'I know Rodney's living with you, they told me at the Chicago Veterans' Association, they gave me your number. I want to ask you a favour. If you do me this favour I promise I won't call again, but you have to do this for me. Tell Rodney I'm not going to ask anything of him, not even that we see each other. The only thing I want is to talk to him for a while, tell him I only want to talk to him for a while, tell him I need to talk to him. That's all. But tell him, please. Will you tell him?' Rodney's father didn'tknow how to refuse, but the fact that his son received the message without batting an eyelid or making the slightest comment allowed him to kid himself that this episode he couldn't understand and didn't want to understand had concluded without any grave consequences. Predictably, a few days later Tommy Birban called again. Rodney was no longer answering the phone, so it was Rodney's father who picked it up. He and Tommy Birban argued for a few seconds fiercely, and he was about to hang up when his son asked him to hand him the phone; with some hesitation, and warning him with a look that there was still time to avoid the mistake, he handed it over. The two old friends talked for a long time, but he wouldn't allow himself to listen to the conversation, of which he only caught a few unconnected snippets. That night Rodney couldn't get to sleep, and the next morning Tommy Birban called again and the two talked again for several hours. This ominous ritual went on for over a week, and the morning of New Year's Day Rodney's father heard a noise downstairs, got up, went out onto the porch and saw his son putting the last piece of luggage in the trunk of the Buick. The scene didn't surprise him; actually, he was almost expecting it. Rodney closed the trunk and came up the steps to the porch. 'I'm off,' he said. 'I was going to come up to say goodbye.' His father knew he was lying, but he nodded. He looked at the snow-covered street, the sky almost white, the grey light; he looked at his son, tall and broken in front of him, and felt the world was an empty place, inhabited only by the two of them. He was about to tell him. 'Where are you going?' he was about to ask. 'Don't you know the world is an empty place?' but he didn't say that. What he said was: 'Isn't it about time you forgot all that?' 'I've already forgotten, Dad,' answered Rodney. 'It's all that that hasn't forgotten me.' 'And that's the last thing I heard him say,' Rodney's father concluded, sunken in his wingback chair, as exhausted as if he hadn't dedicated that endless afternoon in his house in Rantoul to reconstructing his son's story for me, but rather trying to scale an impassable mountain weighed down with useless equipment. 'Then we hugged and he left. The rest you know.'

That's how Rodney's father finished telling his story. Neither of us had anything to add, but I stayed a little longer with him, and for an indeterminate space of time, which I wouldn't know whether to calculate in minutes or hours, we sat facing one another, keeping up a faint imitation conversation, as if we shared a shameful secret or the responsibility for a crime, or as if we were looking for excuses so I wouldn't have to face the road back to Urbana alone and he the springtime loneliness of that big house with nobody in it, and when, past midnight, I finally decided to leave, I was sure I'd always remember the story Rodney's father had told me and that I was no longer the same person who that afternoon, many hours earlier, had arrived in Rantoul. 'You're too young to think of having children,' Rodney's father said to me as we parted, and I haven't forgotten. 'Don't have any, because you'll regret it; although if you don't have any you'll regret that too. That's life: no matter what you do, you regret it. But let me tell you something: all love stories are absurd because love is an illness that only time can cure; but having a child is risking a love so absurd that only death can end it.'

That's what Rodney's father said to me, and I have not forgotten.

Otherwise, I never saw him again.

I RETURNEDTO SPAIN a little more than a year after that spring afternoon when Rodney's father told me his son's story. During the rest of the time I spent in Urbana many things happened. I'm not going to try to tell them here, and not just because it would be tedious, but mainly because most of them don't belong in this story. Or perhaps they do and I haven't figured out how yet. It doesn't matter. I'll just say that I spent a month of the summer holiday back home in Spain; that the next term I returned to Urbana, carried on with my classes and my things, and began a doctoral thesis (which I never finished) supervised by John Borgheson; that I had friends and lovers and became better friends with the friends I already had, especially Rodrigo Gines, Laura Burns, Felipe Vieri; that I was busy being born and I wasn't busy dying; that during all that time I worked diligently on my novel. So diligently that by the following spring I'dfinished it. I'm not sure it was a good novel, but it was my first novel, and writing it made me extremely happy, for the simple reason that I proved to myself I was capable of writing novels. I should perhaps add that it wasn't about Rodney, although there was a secondary character whose physical appearance owed something to Rodney's physical appearance; it was, however, a novel about ghosts or zombies set in Urbana and the protagonist was a character exactly like me who found himself in the same circumstances as me. . So when I left Urbana I left it with my first novel in hand, feeling very fortunate and also feeling that, although I hadn't travelled much, nor seen very much of the world, nor lived very intensely, nor accumulated very many experiences, that long spell in the United States had been my real doctorate, convinced I had nothing more to learn there and that, if I wanted to become a real writer and not a ghost or a zombie — like Rodney or like the characters in my novel and some of Urbana's inhabitants — then I had to go home immediately.