Javier Cercas: The Speed of Light

I held out my hand to the boy, and after an instant'shesitation he held out his and I shook it: a soft bunch of little bones wrapped in pink flesh; when he let go he looked at me too: skinny and very serious, only his big brown eyes reminded me of his father's big brown eyes. He had fair hair and was wearing corduroy trousers and a blue T-shirt.

'How old are you?' I asked him.

'Six,' he answered.

'Just turned,' said Jenny.

Nodding my approval, I commented:

'You're a man now.'

Dan didn't smile, didn't say anything, and there was a silence during which a freight train thundered past behind me, bound for Chicago, while a slight breeze alleviated the midday heat, stirring the American flag on the pole in the yard and chilling the sweat on my skin. Once the train had passed, Dan asked:

'Were you a friend of my father's?'

'Yes,' I said.

'A good friend?'

'Pretty good,' I said, and added: 'Why do you ask?'

Dan shrugged his shoulders in an adult way, almost defiantly.

'No reason,' he said.

We were silent again, a silence more awkward than long, during which I thought the barbed wire fence was going to remain intact. I stubbed out my cigarette on the sidewalk.

'Well,' I said. 'I have to go. It was nice to have met you.'

I turned around to open the car, but then I heard Jenny's voice behind me:

'Have you had lunch yet?'

When I turned around she repeated the question. I answered truthfully.

'I was just going to make something for Dan and me,'said Jenny. 'Why don't you join us?'

We went in the house, then to the kitchen and Jenny started making lunch. I tried to help, but she wouldn't let me and, while I watched Dan watching me, leaning on the door-jamb, I sat down in a chair beside a table covered with a blue and red checked tablecloth, in front of a window that overlooked a back garden where clumps of chrysanthemums and hydrangeas were growing; I supposed that the shed where Rodney hanged himself would be in that garden. Without stopping what she was doing Jenny asked me if I'd like something to drink. I said no and asked her if I could smoke.

'I'd rather you didn't, if you don't mind,' she said.

'Because of the child.'

'I don't mind.'

'I used to smoke a lot,' she explained. 'But I quit when I got pregnant. Since then I just smoke the odd cigarette every once in a while.'

Dan wandered away somewhere inside the house, as if he'd made sure everything was going well between his mother and me, and Jenny started telling me how she'd overcome her dependence on tobacco. She barely had anything in common with the woman my imagination had constructed from the curiously discrepant descriptions contained in Rodney's letters. Small and very slim, she had the kind of discreet beauty whose destiny or whose vocation is to pass unnoticed; in fact, her features were no more than correct: slightly prominent cheekbones, tiny nose, thin lips, lustreless grey eyes; two simple earrings glittered in her earlobes and set off the dark brown of her straight hair pulled back in a messy bun. She was wearing a pair of faded jeans and a blue wool sweater that barely disguised the prominence of her breasts. Otherwise, and despite her physical fragility, she radiated a sort of energetic serenity, and while I listened to her talk I almost unwillingly tried to imagine her with Rodney, but I couldn't and, almost unwillingly as well, I wondered how that woman who seemed so cool and insignificant had managed to break through my friend's emotional solipsism.

Dan appeared again at the kitchen door; interrupting his mother, he asked me if I'd like to see his toys.

'Sure,' Jenny answered ahead of me. 'Show them to him while I finish making lunch.'

I stood up and accompanied him to the same living room with its book-lined walls, window onto the porch, leather sofa and armchairs where, fifteen years before, Dan'sgrandfather had told me, over an endless spring afternoon, Rodney's unfinished story. The room had barely changed, but now the floor, covered in claret-coloured rugs, was also covered in a chaotic mess of toys that inevitably reminded me of the mess that reigned in the living room of my house when Gabriel was the same age as Dan. He, without more ado, began to show me his toys, one by one, demonstrating the characteristics and functions of each with the concentrated seriousness that children are capable of at any moment and men only when their lives are at stake and, after a while, when Jenny announced that lunch was ready, we two were already linked by one of those subterranean currents of complicity that as adults it often takes us months or years to establish.

We ate a salad, spaghetti with tomato sauce and raspberry pie. Dan completely hogged the conversation, so we hardly talked about anything other than his school, his toys, his hobbies and his friends, and we didn't refer to Rodney even once. Jenny devoted all her attention to her son, although on a couple of occasions I thought I caught her watching me. As for me, at times I couldn't avoid the insidious suspicion that I was in a dream: still shaken by the news of Rodney's death, it was hard to get rid of the strange surprise of finding myself having lunch in his house, with his widow and his son, but at the same time I felt lulled by an almost domestic tranquillity, as if this weren't the first time I'd shared a table with them. The end of the meal, however, was not calm, because Dan roundly refused to take his nap, and the only thing his mother got him to agree to after a lot of negotiating was that he'd lie down on the sofa in the living room, waiting for us to have our coffee there. While Jenny made the coffee, I went into the living room and sat beside Dan, who, after furtively tapping the keys of the Game Boy his mother had just forbidden him to play with and staring at the ceiling for a while, fell asleep in an odd position, with his arm twisted a little behind his back. I sat watching him without daring to move his arm for fear of waking him, plunged as he was in those unfathomable depths where children sleep, and I remembered Gabriel sleeping beside me, breathing in a silent, regular, infinitely peaceful rhythm, transfigured by sleep and enjoying the perfect assurance of having his father watching over him, and for a moment I felt the desire to hug Dan as I'd so often hugged Gabriel, knowing that I wasn't hugging him to protect him, but so he could protect me.

'There you go,' Jenny said quietly, hurrying into the living room with the coffee tray. 'Always the same story. There's no way he wants to have his nap, and then I have a terrible job to wake him up.'

She set the tray down on the coffee table between the two armchairs and, after gently moving Dan's twisted arm so it was resting naturally on his chest, she went to the far end of the room and opened the curtains of the porch window to let the golden afternoon sunlight shine into the room. Then she poured the coffee, sat down across from me, stirring hers, drank it down almost in one gulp, let the silence linger for a while and, maybe because I couldn't find a way to start the conversation, asked:

'Are you thinking of staying here long?'

'Just until Tuesday.'

'In Rantoul?'

'In Urbana.'

Jenny nodded; then she said:

'I'm sorry you've come such a long way for nothing.'

'I would have done it anyway,' I lied.

I took a sip of coffee and then I talked about my trip around the United States, making it clear that Urbana was just one more leg of the journey; knowing that Jenny probably already knew, I explained that I'd lived there for two years, which was when I became friends with Rodney, and that I'd wanted to return.

'I thought I could see Rodney again,' I continued. 'Although I wasn't sure. I haven't been in touch with him for a long time and a few months ago I wrote him a letter, but I suppose by then. .'