Javier Cercas - The Speed of Light

'What was his friend's name?' I interrupted at this point in Jenny's tale.

'Tommy Birban,' she answered. 'Why do you ask?'

'No reason,' I said and urged her to go on: 'What was it that the journalist from Ohio wanted?'

'For Rodney to tell him everything he knew about Tiger Force,' Jenny answered.

Rodney explained to Jenny that the journalist was preparing a feature about the matter. It seems that Tommy Birban had got in contact with him and told him the story; then he had gained access to the filed Pentagon report and there he'd found out that the only testimony was Rodney's, and that, in broad strokes, it confirmed what Tommy Birban had told him. That's why the reporter asked Rodney to tell before the cameras what he'd told the commission years before; then he'd get in touch with all the members of the unit he could manage to find to ask them the same. When the reporter finished explaining his project Rodney told him too much time had gone by since the war and he didn't want to talk about it any more, the reporter insisted time and again, trying to blackmail him morally, but Rodney was inflexible. 'No way,' he said that night to Jenny, shouting and shaken and as if it wasn't really Jenny he was talking to. 'It's taken me too much trouble to learn to live with this to fuck it all up now.' Jenny tried to calm him down: it was all over, he'd made it quite clear to the journalist that he didn't want to appear in the report, he wouldn't bother them again. 'You're wrong,' Rodney said. 'He'll be back. This has only just begun.'

He was right. A few days later the reporter phoned again to try to convince him and he again refused to cooperate; he tried a couple more times, with new arguments (among them that, except for Tommy Birban, all the other members of the platoon he'd been able to locate had refused to talk, and that his testimony was essential, because it constituted the fundamental source of the Pentagon report), but Rodney stood his ground. One morning, not long after the latest phone call, the journalist turned up unexpectedly at his house accompanied by another man and a woman. Jenny made them wait on the porch and went to find Rodney, who was having breakfast with Dan and who, when he got to the porch, asked the two men and the woman to leave without even saying hello. 'We will, just as soon as you let me tell you one thing,' said the journalist. 'What?' asked Rodney. 'Tommy Birban is dead,' said the reporter. 'We have reason to think he's been murdered.' There was a silence, during which the journalist seemed to be waiting for the news to take effect on Rodney, and then he explained that, after he'd got in touch with other members of the unit to ask them to collaborate with the report, Birban had begun to receive anonymous threats trying to convince him not to speak before the cameras; he was very scared, full of doubts, but finally decided not to let himself be intimidated by the blackmail and to carry on with the project, and a week later, not two days before they were to record his testimony, as he left his house he was the victim of a hit-and-run. 'The police are investigating,' said the reporter. 'It's unlikely they'll find those responsible, but you and I know who they are. We also both know that, if you still refuse to talk, your friend will have died for nothing.' Rodney remained silent, as still as a statue. 'That's all I wanted to tell you,' the reporter concluded, holding out a card that Rodney did not take; Jenny did, instinctively, knowing she'd tear it up as soon as the man left. 'Now the decision is yours. Call me if you need me.' The journalist and his two colleagues turned around and Jenny watched with the beginning of happiness as they walked towards the car parked in front of their house, but before her happiness was complete she heard at her side a voice that resembled Rodney's without entirely being his, and she knew that those inoffensive words were going to change their life: 'Wait a moment.'

Rodney and the three visitors spent all morning and much of the afternoon shut up in the living room. At first Jenny had to overcome the urge to listen through the closed door, but when, after half an hour of secret discussions, she saw the two people who'd come with the reporter go outside and return with recording equipment, she didn't even attempt to persuade Rodney not to commit the error he was about to commit. She spent the rest of the day out of the house, with Dan, and returned in the evening when the journalists had gone. Rodney was sitting in the living room, in darkness and silence, and although, after giving Dan his supper and putting him quickly to bed, Jenny tried to find out what had happened during her deliberate absence, she couldn't get a single word out of him, and she had the impression that he was mad or drugged or drunk, and that he no longer understood her language. That was the first sign of alarm. The second arrived shortly after. That night Rodney did not sleep, nor the ones that followed: lying awake in bed, Jenny heard him wandering around downstairs, heard him talking to himself or maybe on the phone; on one occasion she thought she heard laughter, muffled laughter, like the kind you stifle at a funeral. That's how an unstoppable process of deterioration began: Rodney asked for a leave of absence from the school and stopped teaching, he didn't go outside, spent the days sleeping or lying in bed and ended up having nothing to do with Dan or with her. It was as if someone had torn out a tiny connection that turned out to be indispensable to his continued functioning and his whole organism had suffered a collapse, reducing him to a ghost of himself. Jenny tried to talk to him, tried to force him to accept the help of a psychiatrist; it was useless: he seemed to listen to her (maybe he really did listen), he smiled at her, touched her, asked her not to worry, over and over again he told her he was fine, but she felt that Rodney was living as far away from everything around him as a planet spinning in its own self-absorbed orbit. She let time pass, hoping things would change. Things didn't change. The broadcast of the television report did nothing but make everything worse. At first it didn't have much impact, because it was a local station that had produced it, but very soon the national newspapers were repeating its revelations and a major network bought the rights and broadcast the piece at prime time. Although the journalist sent them a copy, Rodney didn't want to see it; although in the accompanying note the reporter assured him that he'd fulfilled his promise of guarding Rodney's anonymity, reality contradicted him: it really wasn't difficult to identify Rodney in the report, and the result of this indiscretion or breach of confidence was that Jenny's life became stifled by hounding journalists and questions and gossip about her husband's seclusion. As for her relationship with Rodney, it quickly deteriorated until it became unsustainable. One day she took a drastic decision: she told Rodney that it would be better if they separated; she would go back to Burlington with Dan and he could stay by himself in Rantoul. The ultimatum was a last feint that Jenny hoped would get Rodney to react, confronting him unceremoniously with the evidence that, unless he restrained his free fall, he was going to end up ruining his life and losing his family. But the trick didn't work: Rodney meekly accepted her proposal, and the only thing he asked Jenny was when she intended to leave. At that moment Jenny understood that all was lost, and it was also then that she had her first conversation with Rodney in a long time. It was not an enlightening conversation. Actually, Rodney hardly spoke: he limited himself to answering, in an exasperatingly laconic manner, the questions she put to him and Jenny couldn't get rid of the feeling that she was talking to a child with no future or an elderly man with no past, because Rodney looked at her exactly as if he were trying to look through the sky. At some moment Jenny asked him if he was afraid. With a wisp of relief, as if her fingertip had just brushed the hidden heart of his anguish, Rodney said yes. 'Of what?' Jenny asked him. 'I don't know,' said Rodney. 'Of people. Of you guys. Sometimes I'm afraid of myself.' 'Of us?' Jenny asked. 'Who's us?' 'You and Dan,' answered Rodney. 'We aren't going to hurt you,' Jenny smiled. 'I know that,' said Rodney. 'But that's what I'm most afraid of.' Jenny remembered that when she heard those words she felt afraid of Rodney for the first time, and also that it was then she understood that she should leave Rantoul with her son as soon as possible. But she didn't; she decided to stay: she loved Rodney and felt that, whatever happened, she should help him. She couldn't help him. The last weeks were a nightmare. In the daytime Jenny tried to talk to him, but it was almost always futile, because, despite understanding his words, she was unable to invest the phrases he pronounced with any intelligible meaning, as they were closer to the hermetic and rigorously coherent ravings of a lunatic than to any articulate discourse. As for the nights, Rodney continued to pass them wakefully, but now he spent much of them writing: Jenny fell asleep rocked by the unceasing tapping of the computer keyboard, but when, some days after Rodney's death, she got up the courage to open his files she found them all blank, as if at the last moment her husband had decided to spare her the venomous outpourings from the hell in which he was being consumed. Jenny maintained that in the days leading up to his death Rodney had completely lost his mind; also that what happened was the best thing that could have happened. And what happened was that one morning, not long after Christmas, Jenny got up earlier than usual and, when she walked past the room where Rodney had been sleeping for the last while, she saw it empty and the bed still made. Worried, she looked for Rodney in the dining room, the kitchen, all over the house, and finally found him hanging from a rope in the shed.