Javier Cercas - The Speed of Light

While we walked back to the car Jenny suggested we go for a last cup of coffee: she still had a while before she had to start work, she said. We went to Casey's General Store and sat beside a window that overlooked the gas pumps and, beyond them, the intersection at the edge of the city; a country and western tune came quietly out of the speakers. I recognized the waitress who served us: she was the same one who'd given me haphazard directions to Rodney's house on Sunday. Jenny exchanged a few words with her and then we ordered two coffees.

'When Rodney came back from Spain he told me you wanted to write a book about him,' said Jenny as soon as the waitress had gone. 'Is that true?'

I'd been prepared for Jenny to ask me about the documentary, but not for what she actually asked. I looked at her: her grey eyes had acquired a violet-toned iridescence and revealed a curiosity for more than just my answer, or that's what I thought. My answer was:

'Yes.'

'Have you written it?'

I said no.

'Why?'

'I don't know,' I said, and remembered the conversation I'd had about the same matter with Rodney in Madrid. 'I tried several times, but I couldn't. Or I didn't know how. I think I felt his story wasn't over, or that I didn't entirely understand it.' 'And now?'

'Now what?'

'Now is it over?' she asked again. 'Now do you understand it?'

Like a sudden illumination, at that moment I thought I understood Jenny's behaviour since my arrival in Rantoul. I thought I understood why she had told me about Rodney's last days, why she'd wanted to show me his grave, why she'd wanted me to stay the night in her house, why she'd wanted me to watch the Tiger Force documentary: just as if words had the power to give meaning or an illusion of meaning to what has none, Jenny wanted me to tell Rodney's story. I thought of Rodney, I thought of Rodney's father, I thought of Tommy Birban, but most of all I thought of Gabriel and Paula, and for the first time I sensed that all those stories were actually the same story, and that only I could tell it.

'I don't know if it's over,' I answered. 'I don't know if I understand it either, or if I understand it completely.' I thought of Rodney again and said: 'Of course, you probably don't need to understand a story completely to be able to tell it.'

The waitress brought our coffee. When she'd left, Jenny asked as she stirred hers:

'What is it you don't understand? Why he did it?'

I didn't answer straight away: I tasted the coffee and lit a cigarette while I remembered the report with a shiver.

'No,' I said. 'Actually that's the only thing I do understand.' As if thinking aloud I added: 'Maybe what I don't understand is why I didn't.'

Jenny's cup remained suspended in the air, halfway between the table and her lips, while she looked at me doubtfully, as if my observation was obviously absurd or as if she'd just formed the suspicion that I was mad. Then she diverted her gaze towards the window (the sun shone right in her face, inflaming the gold earring still in view) and seemed to reflect a moment, and then turned back to look at me with a half smile as the cup concluded its interrupted voyage, wet her lips and put it down on the table.

'Well, I tried to explain it to you yesterday: you haven't killed anyone.' She lied to me, I thought in a second, in a fraction of a second. She has seen the report. As soon as she started talking again I discarded that idea. 'Not even accidentally,' she said, and then added: 'Besides, after all you're a writer, aren't you?'

'And what does that have to do with it?'

'Everything.'

'Everything?'

'Sure, don't you understand?'

I didn't say anything and we just looked at each other for a moment, until Jenny took a deep breath, let it out while diverting her gaze again towards the window and remained absorbed watching a man filling up his gas tank, and when she turned back towards me I was inundated with a kind of joy, as if I'd truly understood Jenny and understanding her would let me understand everything I hadn't yet understood. I finished drinking my coffee; Jenny did the same.

'It's getting late,' she said. 'Shall we go?'

We paid and left. Jenny came with me as far as the car, and when we got there I asked if she wanted a lift to work.

'There's no need,' she said. 'It's quite near.' She took a notebook out of her handbag, scribbled something on a page, tore it out and handed it to me. 'My email address. If you decide to write the book, keep me posted. And another thing: don't take any notice of Dan.'

'What do you mean?'

'What he said to you at the school gate,' she explained.

'Ah,' I said.

She made a face of annoyance or apology.

'I suppose he's looking for a father,' she ventured.

'Don't worry.' I ventured: 'I suppose I'm looking for a son.'

Jenny nodded, barely smiling; I thought she was going to say something, but she didn't say anything. She put her hand in her trouser pocket, in a gesture I thought shy or embarrassed, as if she couldn't quite decide how we should say goodbye, and then she held it out to me; when I took it, I noticed something cold and metallic: it was Rodney's Zippo. Jenny didn't give me time to react.

'Goodbye,' she said.

And she turned around and began to walk away. After a moment of indecision I put the Zippo in my pocket, got in the car, started it and, waiting to pull out onto the avenue that led out of Rantoul, I looked to the left and saw her in the distance, walking along the sidewalk in the shade, alone and resolved and fragile and nevertheless inspired by something like an inflexible, resolute pride, getting smaller as she went into the city, and I don't know why I thought of a bird, a hummingbird or a heron or more likely a swallow, and then I thought of the poster of John Wayne which hung on a wall of Bud's Bar and that Rodney would have seen so many times and Jenny too, no doubt, absurdly I thought of these two things while I kept watching her and waiting for her to sense my gaze at some moment and turn around and look back at me, as if that last gesture could also be an unmistakable sign of assent. But Jenny didn't turn around, didn't look at me, so I pulled out onto the avenue and drove out of Rantoul.

When I arrived in Urbana that morning I had already devised quite a precise plan of what I'd do over the next months, or rather the next years; as is logical, that plan envisaged the risk that reality would end up distorting it, but not to the point of making it unrecognizable. That, for better or worse — I'll never know whether it was more for the better or for the worse — is what happened though.

I returned to Spain after impatiently fulfilling my remaining commitments in Urbana and Los Angeles, and the first thing I did when I landed in Barcelona was look for a new flat, because as soon as I walked into the apartment in Sagrada Familia I realized it was an irredeemable pigsty. I found one immediately — a small apartment with lots of light on calle Floridablanca, not far from plaza de Espana — and as soon as I was settled in there I began to write this book. Since then I've hardly done anything else. Since then — and it's been about six months now — I feel that the life I'm living is not true, but rather false, a clandestine, hidden, apocryphal life but truer than if it were true. The change of flat made it easy to cover my tracks, so until recently no one knew where I lived. I didn't see anyone, I didn't talk to anyone, I didn't read the papers, I didn't watch television, I didn't listen to the radio. I was more alive than ever, but it was as if I were dead and writing was the only way of evoking life, the last thread that kept me joined to it. Writing and, until recently, Jenny. Because when I got back from Urbana, Jenny and I began to write to each other almost daily. At first our emails were exclusively concerned with the book I was writing about Rodney: I asked her questions, requested details and clarifications, and she answered me with diligence and application; then, little by little and almost imperceptibly, the messages began to be about other things — about Dan, about Rantoul, about her life and Dan's in Rantoul, about me and my invisible life in Barcelona, once in a while about Paula and Gabriel — and after a few weeks I'd discovered that this method of communication allowed for or encouraged more intimacy than any other. That was how I began a long, slow, complicated, sinuous and delicate process of seduction. Perhaps that's not quite the right word: perhaps the exact word is persuasion. Or maybe demonstration. I don't know which word Jenny would choose. It doesn't matter; what matters aren't the words, but the facts. And the fact is that, while I was as deeply involved in that process as in the book I was writing, I never stopped imagining my life when both were finished and I would live with Dan and Jenny in Rantoul. I imagined a placid and provincial life like the one I'd once feared and then had and later destroyed, a life that was also apocryphal and true, in the middle of nowhere. I imagined myself getting up very early, having breakfast with Dan and Jenny and then taking them to school and work and then shutting myself up to work until it was time to go and pick them up, first Dan and then Jenny, I'd go and pick them up and we'd go home and get dinner ready and have dinner and then after dinner we'd play or read or watch television or talk until sleep would overtake us one by one, and none of the three of us would ever want to admit, even to ourselves, that this daily routine was in reality a kind of spell, a magic trick with which we wanted to make the past reversible and bring the dead back to life. Other times I imagined myself lying in a hammock, in the back garden, beside the shed in which, once upon a time so long ago that it no longer seemed real, Rodney hanged himself, on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon at the end of spring or the beginning of the burning hot Rantoul summer, with Dan and his friends shouting and playing around me while I haphazardly read Hemingway and Thoreau and Emerson, sometimes even Merce Rodoreda, while I listened to Bob Dylan and shared sips of whisky and tokes of marijuana with Jenny, who came and went from the house to the garden: from there Gabriel's and Paula's deaths would be left very far away, Vietnam would be left very far away, success and fame would be left as far away as the miniscule clouds that every now and then blocked out the sun, and then I would see myself as the hippie Rodney must have been more than thirty years ago and that he never wanted to stop being. That's how I saw myself, that's how I imagined myself, happy and a little high, somehow converted into Rodney or into the instrument of Rodney, watching Dan as if I were really watching Gabriel, watching Jenny as if I were really watching Paula. And while I was imagining my happy future life in Rantoul in those months in Barcelona and continuing the long, slow, sinuous seduction or persuasion of Jenny by the intimacy of email, not one single day went by when I did not sit down at this desk and devote myself fully to the long-postponed task entrusted to me of writing this story that maybe Rodney had always been training me to write, this story I don't understand nor will I ever understand and that nevertheless, as I imagined as I was writing it, I was obliged to tell because it can only be understood if it's told by someone who, like me, will never entirely understand it, and especially because it's also my story and also Gabriel's and Paula's. So for a long time I wrote and seduced and persuaded and demonstrated and imagined, until one day, when I felt the process of seduction was mature and that, although I didn't yet know exactly how this book was going to end, I undoubtedly almost had the ending in my sights, I decided to state my plans openly to Jenny. I did so fearlessly with no beating about the bush, just as if I were reminding her of a pledge we'd both made some time ago like someone accepting a happy fate, because by that stage, after months of writing to her almost daily and insinuating ever less cryptically my intentions, I was sure my words couldn't come as a surprise to her, and also that she'd receive them with delight.