Javier Cercas - The Speed of Light

'Yes,' Jenny helped me out. 'The letter arrived not long after his death. It must be around somewhere.'

She finished her coffee and set her cup down on the table. I did the same. For something to say I said:

'I'm very sorry about what happened.'

'I know,' said Jenny. 'Rodney talked about you a lot.'

'Really?' I asked, pretending to be surprised, but only a little.

'Sure,' said Jenny, and for the first time I saw her smile: a smile at once sweet and mischievous, almost astute, which dug a tiny net of wrinkles around the corners of her mouth. 'I know the whole story, Rodney told me lots of times. He told very funny stories. He always said until he became friends with you he'd never met anyone so strange who seemed so normal.'

'That's funny,' I said, blushing as I tried to imagine what Rodney might have told her about me. 'I always thought he was the strange one.'

'Rodney wasn't strange,' Jenny corrected me. 'He was just unlucky. It was bad luck that wouldn't let him live in peace. Wouldn't even let him die in peace.'

Searching for a way to inquire into the circumstances surrounding Rodney's death, I got distracted for a moment, and when I started listening again irony had completely tainted her voice, and I had lost the thread of what she was saying.

'But, you know what I think?' I heard her say; covering up my distraction, with an interrogative gesture I urged her to go on. 'What I think is that actually it was mainly to see you.'

It took me a second to comprehend that she was talking about Rodney's trip to Spain. Now my surprise was genuine: I didn't think that I'd made the same trip Rodney had made the other way around just to see him, but I did think that in Spain I'd pursued him from hotel to hotel and that I'd finally had to travel to Madrid just to talk to him for a while. Jenny must have read the surprise on my face, because she qualified it:

'Well, perhaps not only to see you, but also to see you.' Fiddling with her hair a little while she glanced at Dan out of the corner of her eye, she leaned back in the armchair and let her hands rest on her thighs: they were long, bony, without any rings. 'I don't know,' she corrected herself. 'I might be wrong. What I do know is that he came home from the trip very happy. He told me he'd been with you in Madrid, that he'd met your wife and son, that you were a successful writer now.'

Jenny seemed to hesitate for a second, as if she wanted to keep talking about Rodney and me but the conversation had taken a wrong turn and she should put it right. We remained quiet for a moment, then Jenny began to tell me about her life in Rantoul. She told me that after Rodney's death her first thought was to sell the house and go back to Burlington. However, she soon realized that fleeing Rantoul and returning to Burlington in search of her family's protection would be an admission of defeat. After all, she said, she and Dan had their lives set there; they had their house, their friends, they didn't have any financial worries: as well as Rodney's life insurance and her widow's pension, she made a decent salary from her administrative position with a farming cooperative. So she'd decided to stay in Rantoul. She didn't regret it.

'Dan and I get along pretty well on our own,' she said. 'Besides, in Burlington I'd never be able to afford a house like the one we have here. Anyway.' She looked me in the eye, almost as if she was embarrassed to ask: 'Shall we go outside and smoke a cigarette?'

We sat on the porch steps. On Belle Avenue the air smelled intensely of spring; the afternoon light had still not begun to rust and the breeze blew more strongly, moving the leaves on the maples and making the American flag wave in the yard. Before I could light my cigarette Jenny offered me a light with Rodney's Zippo. I stared at it. She followed the direction of my gaze. She said:

'It was Rodney's.'

'I know,' I said.

She lit my cigarette and then her own, closed the Zippo, weighed it in her bony hand for a moment and then handed it to me.

'Keep it,' she said. 'I don't need it any more.'

I hesitated a moment without meeting her eyes.

'No. Thank you,' I answered.

Jenny put the Zippo away and we smoked for a while without talking, looking at the houses across the street, the cars that passed in front of us every once in a while, and as we did so I looked for the window where I'd seen a woman spying on me hours earlier; now there was no one there. We sat in silence, like old friends who don't need to talk to be together. I thought that it had been more than a year since I'd spent so long in someone's company, and for a second I thought Rantoul was a good place to live. I'd barely thought it when, as if picking up an interrupted conversation, Jenny said:

'Don't you want to know what happened?'

This time I didn't look at her either. For a moment, while I was inhaling the smoke from my cigarette, it crossed my mind that maybe it was better not to know anything. But I said yes, and it was then that, with disconcerting naturalness, as if she were telling a remote and distant tale, nothing to do with her, which couldn't affect her in any way, she told me the story of Rodney's last months. It began the previous spring, in this same season more or less a year ago. One night, while they were having dinner, a stranger phoned the house asking for Rodney; when Jenny asked who was calling he said he was a journalist who worked for an Ohio television station. They thought it strange but Rodney didn't see any reason not to talk to the man. The conversation, which Jenny didn't hear, lasted for several minutes, and when he came back to the table Rodney was changed, his gaze lost. Jenny asked him what had happened, but Rodney didn't answer (according to Jenny he probably didn't even hear the question), he kept eating and after a few minutes, when he still had food on his plate, he stood up and told Jenny he was going out for a walk. He didn't come back until after midnight. Jenny was awake waiting for him, demanded that he tell her about the conversation he'd had with the reporter and Rodney ended up acquiescing. Actually he did much more than that. Of course, Jenny knew that Rodney had spent two years in Vietnam and that the experience had marked him indelibly, but until then her husband had never told her anything more than that and she had never asked him to; that night, however, Rodney poured his heart out: he talked about Vietnam for hours; more precisely: he talked, got furious, shouted, laughed, cried, and finally dawn surprised them both on the bed, dressed, awake and exhausted, looking at each other as if they didn't recognize each other.

'From the beginning I had the feeling he was confessing to me,' Jenny told me. 'Also that I didn't know him, and that never before then had I truly loved him.'

Before explaining what he'd talked about with the reporter from Ohio, Rodney told her that towards the end of his time in Vietnam he'd been assigned to an elite platoon known as Tiger Force, with which he went into combat many times. The unit committed innumerable barbarities, which Rodney didn't describe or didn't want to describe, and when it was finally dissolved all its members swore to keep silent about them. Nevertheless, at the beginning of the seventies, when the Pentagon created a commission whose job it was to investigate the war crimes of Tiger Force, Rodney decided to break the pact of silence and cooperate with them. He was the only member of the platoon to do so, but it didn't do him any good: he testified several times before the commission, and the only thing he got out of it was the open hostility of his commanding officers and comrades-in-arms (who considered him an informer) and the veiled hostility of the rest of the army (who likewise considered him an informer), because when the report finally arrived at the White House someone decided that the best thing they could do would be to file it. 'It was all play-acting,' Rodney told Jenny. 'Deep down no one was interested in the truth.' After his appearance before the commission Rodney received several death threats; then he stopped receiving them and for years he trusted that all had been forgotten. Sometimes he heard news of his comrades from the platoon: some of them were begging on the streets, others languished in jail, others spent long periods in psychiatric hospitals; only a few had managed to stay afloat and were leading