Javier Cercas: The Speed of Light

As soon as I finished thinking that thought I interrupted Jenny.

'There's something I haven't told you,' I said.

She looked at me, a little surprised by my abruptness, and suddenly I didn't know how I was going to tell her what I had to tell her. I figured it out a second later. I took the photograph of Gabriel, Paula and Rodney on Les Peixe-teries Velles bridge out of my wallet and handed it to her. Jenny took it and for some moments examined it attentively. Then she asked:

'Is this your wife and son?'

'Yes,' I answered and, as if another person were speaking for me, I continued as a cold thread ran up my spine like a snake: 'They died a year ago, in a car accident. It's the only photo of them I kept.'

Jenny looked up from the photo, and at that moment I noticed the Van Morrison CD had stopped playing; reality seemed to have slowed down, gone back to its normal speed.

'What have you come here for?' asked Jenny.

'I don't know,' I said, although I did know. 'I was in a pit and I wanted to see Rodney. I thought Rodney had been in a pit too and he'd got out of it. I think I believed he could help me. Or rather: I think I believed he was the only person who could help me. . Well, I realize this all sounds a bit ridiculous, and I don't know if it makes much sense to you, but I think it's what I thought.'

Jenny scarcely took a moment to answer.

'It makes sense,' she said.

Now it was me who looked at her.

'Really?'

'Sure,' she insisted, smiling gently, again digging a tiny net of wrinkles around the corners of her mouth. For a second I knew or suspected that, because she'd lived with Rodney, her words did not stem from compassion, but that it was true she understood, that only she could understand; for a second I felt the soft radiance of her attractiveness, I suddenly believed I understood the attraction she'd exerted over Rodney. Almost as if she considered the matter settled, or as if she thought it barely merited any more time devoted to it, she went on: 'Guilt. It's not so hard to understand that. I could feel guilty for Rodney's death too, you know? Finding guilty parties is very easy; the difficult thing is accepting that there aren't any.'

I wasn't sure what she meant by those words, but for some reason I remembered others that Rodney had written to his father: 'Things that make sense are not true,' Rodney had written. 'They're only sawn-off truths, wishful thinking: truth is always absurd.' Jenny finished her glass of wine.

'I have a copy of the documentary,' she said, as if she hadn't changed the subject and was about to give me her real answer to the doubt I'd just formulated. 'Do you want to watch it?'

Because I wasn't expecting it, the question disconcerted me. First I thought I didn't want to watch the programme; then I thought I did want to watch it; then I thought I wanted to watch it but I shouldn't watch it; then I thought I wanted to watch it and should watch it. I asked:

'Have you watched it?'

'Of course not,' said Jenny. 'What for?'

Just as if my question had been an affirmative reply Jenny went upstairs, after a while she returned with the videotape and asked me to come with her to a room between the kitchen and the living room, at the foot of the stairs; in the room was a television, a sofa, two chairs, a coffee table. I sat on the sofa while Jenny turned on the television, put the video in and handed me the remote control.

'I'll wait for you upstairs,' she said.

I leaned back on the sofa and pressed play on the remote control; the programme began immediately. It was called Buried Secrets, Brutal Truths and lasted about forty minutes. It combined archive images, in black and white, from documentaries about the war, and current images, in colour, of villages and fields in the regions of Quang Ngai and Quang Nam, along with some statements made by peasants from the area. Two threads stitched the two blocks of images together: one was a dispassionate voice-over; the other, the testimony of a Vietnam veteran. The voice-over told from the outside the story of the atrocities committed thirty-five years earlier by a bloodthirsty platoon of the 101st Airborne Division of the United States Army that operated in Quang Ngai and Quang Nam, converting the regions into a vast killing field. The platoon, known as Tiger Force, was a unit composed of forty-five volunteers which acted in coordination with other units, but which functioned with a great degree of autonomy and barely any supervision, its members distinguishable by their striped camouflage uniforms, in imitation of tiger stripes; the catalogue of horrors the report documented knew no bounds: Tiger Force soldiers murdered, mutilated, tortured and raped hundreds of people between January and July 1969, and acquired a reputation among the local population for wearing around their necks, like necklaces of war that brutally commemorated their victims, collections of human ears strung together on shoelaces. Towards the end of the broadcast the voice-over mentioned the Pentagon report that the White House had shelved in 1974 with the excuse that it didn't want to reopen the wounds of the recently concluded conflict. As for the veteran, he was shown sitting in an armchair, unmoving, backlit from a window, so that a dark shadow obscured his face; his voice, on the other hand — gruff, icy, withdrawn — had not been distorted: it was clearly Rodney's voice. The voice told anecdotes; it also made comments. 'It's difficult to understand it all now,' the voice said, for example. 'But there came a time for us when it was the most natural thing in the world. At first it was a bit of an effort, but you soon got used to it and it was just like any other job.' 'We felt like gods,' the voice said. 'And in a certain way we were. We had the power of life and death over whoever we wanted and we exercised that power.' 'For years I couldn't forget each and every one of the people I saw die,' said the voice. 'They appeared to me constantly, just as if they were alive and didn't want to die, just like ghosts. Then I managed to forget them, or that's what I thought, although deep down I knew they hadn't gone away. Now they're back. They don't ask me to settle the score, and I don't. There's no score to settle. It's just that they don't want to die, they want to live in me. I don't complain, because I know it's fair.' The voice closed the report with these words: 'You can believe we were monsters, but we weren't. We were like everybody else. We were like you.'

When the report ended I remained sitting on the sofa for a while, unable to move, my eyes glued to the blizzard on the television screen. Then I took the tape out of the video, turned off the television and went out on the porch. The city was in silence and the sky full of stars; it was a little cold. I lit a cigarette and started smoking it as I contemplated the silent night of Rantoul. I didn't feel horror, I didn't feel nauseous, not even sadness, for the first time in a long time I didn't feel anguish either; what I felt was something strangely pleasant that I'd never felt before, something like an infinite exhaustion or an infinite and blank calm, or like a substitute for the exhaustion or the calm that left only the inclination to keep looking at the night and to weep. 'Our nada who art in nada,' I prayed. 'Nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada.' When I finished smoking my cigarette I went back inside the house and upstairs. Jenny had fallen asleep with a book on her lap and the light on; Dan was curled up beside her. The room next to hers also had the light on and the bed made, and I guessed Jenny had made it up for me. I turned off the light in Jenny and Dan's room, turned off mine and got into bed.

It took me a long time to get to sleep that night, and the next day I woke up very early. When Dan and Jenny got up I already had breakfast almost ready. While we ate, a little hurriedly because it was Monday and Dan had to go to school and Jenny to work, I avoided Jenny's eyes a couple of times, and when we finished I offered them a lift in the car. Dan's school was, Jenny said, as we parked in front of it, the same one where Rodney had worked: a three-storey brick building with a large iron gate guarding access to the schoolyard, surrounded by a metal fence. In front of the entrance a group of parents and children were already congregated. We joined the group and, when the gate finally opened, Dan gave his mother a kiss; then he turned to me and, scrutinizing me with Rodney's big brown eyes, asked me if I was going to come back. I said yes. He asked me when. I said soon. He asked me if I was lying to him. I said no. He nodded. Then, because I thought he was going to give me a kiss, I began to crouch down, but he stopped me by holding out his hand; I shook it. Then we watched him disappear into the schoolyard with his preschooler knapsack, among the ruckus of his classmates.