Javier Cercas - The Speed of Light

I don't know how long I'd been standing beside the traffic light when I managed to put the photograph back in my wallet, crossed Balmes and, still crying (or I think so), started walking as far as Muntaner and then towards the upper part of the city. Again I tried not to think of anything, but I thought of Paula and Gabriel; doing so hurt like an amputation: to avoid the pain I forced myself to think about Rodney again. I remembered our tireless conversations at Treno's, my visit to his father in Rantoul, my ever-postponed plan to one day write his story and the conversation we had in Madrid, when I discovered with a repugnance that now struck me as repugnant that my friend had the deaths of women and children on his conscience. And at some point, among the images that crossed my disturbed mind like clouds or meteorites, I remembered Rodney at that party of Wong's, surrounded by people and yet impervious, as alone as a lost animal in the middle of a herd of animals of another species, I remember him on Wong's porch steps, that same night, tall, wrecked, vulnerable and hesitant, wrapped in his sheepskin coat and fur hat as I observed him from the window that overlooked the street and the snow fell on the road in big flakes and he looked at the night without crying (although at first I'd thought he was crying), looked at it more like he was walking along a narrow pass beside a very dark abyss and there was no one who had as much vertigo and as much fear as him. And then I suddenly understood what I hadn't understood that night so many years before, and it was that if I had left the party and had gone in search of Rodney it was because, watching him from the window, I knew he was the loneliest man in the world and that, for some unquestionable reason that was nevertheless beyond my reach, I was the only person who could keep him company, and I also understood that on this night so many years later the tables had turned. Now I was responsible for the death of a woman and a child (or I felt responsible for the death of a woman and a child), now I was the loneliest man in the world, a lost animal in the middle of a herd of animals of a different species, now it was Rodney, and perhaps only Rodney, who could keep me company, because he had travelled long before and for much longer than me the same corridor of fright and remorse along which I had been feeling my way and had found an exit: only Rodney, my fellow, my brother — a monster like me, like me a murderer — could show me a sliver of light in that tunnel of woe through which, without even having the energy to want to get out of it, I had been walking alone and in the dark since the deaths of Gabriel and Paula, just like Rodney had done for thirty years since he rounded some bend on some trail in some unnamed place in Vietnam and saw a soldier appear who was him.

That night I went home earlier than usual, lay down in bed with my eyes open and, for the first time in many months, slept for six hours straight. I had two dreams. In the first only Gabriel appeared. He was playing table football in a big, dilapidated, empty place like a garage, hitting the balls with adult, almost ferocious glee; he had no opponent or I couldn't see his opponent, and he didn't seem to hear my shouts as I tried to get his attention; until suddenly he let go of the handles and, frustrated or furious, turned towards me. 'Don't cry, Papa,' he said then, with a voice that wasn't his, or that I couldn't quite recognize. 'It didn't hurt.' The second dream was longer and more complicated, more disconnected as well. First I saw Paula and Gabriel'sfaces, close together, almost cheek to cheek, smiling at me in an inquisitive way as if they were on the other side of a pane of glass. Then Rodney's face joined theirs and the three began to superimpose like transparencies, blending into each other, so Gabriel's face changed until it turned into Paula's or Rodney's, and Paula's face changed until it turned into Rodney's or Gabriel's, and Rodney's face changed until it turned into Gabriel's or Paula's. At the end of the dream I saw myself arriving at Rodney's house in Rantoul, on a bright, sunny day, and discovering, with unspeakable anguish, between false smiles and suspicious looks, not his wife and son living with my friend, but Paula and Gabriel, or a woman and a boy who imitated Paula and Gabriel's voices and appearance and even their affectionate gestures but who, in some perverse way, weren't them.

The next day I was woken by anxiety. I shaved, showered, got dressed and, while I was having coffee and smoking a cigarette, I decided to write to Rodney. I remember the letter very well. I started it by apologizing for having stopped writing to him; then I asked about his life, asked after his wife and son; then I lied: I wrote about Gabriel and Paula as if they were still alive, and I also talked about myself as if for many months I hadn't been busy dying but being born, as if I hadn't turned into a ghost or a zombie and was still living and writing just as if the house of my soul had not been consumed. I immediately noticed that writing to Rodney operated on me like a soothing balm and, while watching the words appear like insects on the computer screen, almost without noticing it I conceived the unarguable illusion that visiting Rodney at his house in Rantoul was the only way to break the logic of annihilation in which I found myself trapped. I had barely formulated this idea when I began putting it in writing, but, because I realized it was imperious and incredible and demanded too many explanations, I immediately deleted it, and, after thinking it over and over and going through several drafts, I ended up simply expressing my desire to return to Urbana one day and for us to see each other again there or in Rantoul, a vague enough declaration not to be out of synch with the placid and casual mood of the rest of the missive. Night had fallen by the time I finished writing it, and the next morning I sent it to Rantoul by express mail.

For a couple of weeks I waited in vain for Rodney'sreply. Fearing my letter had got lost, I printed up another copy and sent it again; the result was the same. This silence was disconcerting. I didn't think it plausible that neither of the two letters had reached their destination, but I did think Rodney might have received them and, for some reason (maybe because he'd taken as ingratitude or insult my inexplicable interruption of our correspondence in the middle of the maelstrom of my success), refused to answer them; there was also the possibility that Rodney no longer lived in Rantoul, a speculation backed up by the fact that, as far as I could find out, there was no listing for a telephone number under the name of Falk in Rantoul. Either of the two hypotheses was credible, but I don't remember how I arrived at the conclusion that the second was the more reasonable, and that it was also the most worrying or least optimistic: after all, if hurt pride was the cause of Rodney's silence, then there was hope of breaking it, because it wasn'tfoolish to think that sooner or later it would heal; but if the cause of his silence was that Rodney hadn't received my letters because he'd moved with his family to another city (or, even worse, because he'd fled again, turned back into the chronic fugitive incapable of freeing himself from his dishonourable past), then any prospect of seeing Rodney again evaporated forever. Soon the unease turned to despondency, and the fleeting fantasy that an encounter with Rodney would have the effect of a sort of salubrious sorcery on me was suddenly revealed as a last and ridiculous decoy of my powerlessness. Once again I had nothing before me but a stone door.

I went back to my underground life; I let time pass. One Friday in February, two months, more or less, after trying to resume my correspondence with Rodney, when I opened my mailbox to retrieve the packet of joints that Marcos left for me each week I found a letter from my literary agent. Unusually, this time I opened it: my agent told me in the letter that the Spanish Embassy in Washington was proposing a promotional trip to various universities in the United States. I don't know if I've already said that these invitations to travel here and there had turned into something as routine as the administrative silence with which I answered them all. I was about to throw the letter away when I thought of Rodney; I opened Marcos' packet, took out a joint, lit it, took a couple of tokes and put the letter in my pocket. Then I went outside and started walking towards the city centre. That night I didn't do anything different from what I'd been doing for months; same on the Saturday and the Sunday night. But during the whole weekend I didn't stop thinking about the proposal, and on the Monday afternoon, after giving no sign of life for a long time, I called my agent. She still hadn't recovered from the shock of hearing from me when I gave her the additional surprise of my decision to accept the proposal for the trip to the United States with the non-negotiable condition that one of its legs include Urbana. From there everything moved very quickly: the embassy and the universities accepted my conditions, organized the trip and in the middle of April, almost fifteen years after leaving Urbana, I got back on a plane for the United States.