The Speed of Light (21 page)

'Did you know him?'

'Rodney?' the bartender asked stupidly, leaning against the bar again.

I nodded.

'Of course,' he smiled. 'How could I not know him? This is a small place: we all know each other here.' He finished off his beer and, suddenly talkative again, went on: 'How am I not going to know him? We were both from here, we lived nearby, we grew up together, went to school together. We were the same age, a year older than his brother Bob. Now they're both dead . . . Well. You know something? Rodney was an exceptional guy, we were all sure he'd do something great, that he'd go far. Then came the war, the one in Vietnam, I mean. Did you know Rodney was in Vietnam?' I nodded again. 'I wanted to enlist too. But they wouldn't let me: a heart murmur, they said, or something like that. I suppose I was lucky, because later it turned out that it was all a lie, the politicians tricked us all, just like now: all those boys dying like flies over there in Iraq. You tell me what business we've got in that fucking country. And what business we had in Vietnam. Once I heard someone say, it might have even been Rodney, I can'tremember, I heard him say that when you go to war the least you can do is win it, because if you lose you lose everything, including your dignity. I don't know what you think, but it seems to me he was right. Rodney lost Bob over there, he was blown up by a mine. And, well, in a way I suppose he died over there too. When he came back he wasn't the same any more. It's easy to say now, but maybe deep down we all knew it'd end like this. Or maybe not, I don't know. Where did you know him from?'

'We worked together in Urbana,' I said. 'It was a while ago, at the university.''

Oh yeah,' said the bartender. 'I didn't know he made any friends there, but that was a good time for him. He seemed content. Then he left and for a long time he hardly ever came back here. When he did he came back married and with a son. He was teaching at the school, I'd never seen him better, he seemed like a new person, he seemed . . . I don't know, he almost seemed like what we always thought he was going to be. Until that report came out and everything got fucked up.'

At that moment two middle-aged couples came into the bar, cheerful and in their Sunday best. The bartender stopped talking, waved a greeting, turned towards the swinging door and called the girl, but, since she didn't come out, the man had no choice but to go and attend to his customers. While he was doing so the girl reappeared and took over the order, not without exchanging a couple more jibes with the boss in passing. Then the bartender returned heavily to where I was.

'Want another?' he asked, pointing to my empty beer bottle. 'It's on the house.'

I shook my head.

'You were telling me about Rodney and some news report.'

The bartender made a disgusted face, as if his nose had just detected a gust of foul-smelling air.

'It was a television documentary, a report on the Vietnam War,' he explained half-heartedly. 'Apparently it told of horrible things. I say apparently because I haven't seen it, nor do I need to, but anyway those things came out later everywhere. In the papers, on TV, everywhere. If you'dbeen living here you'd know about it, lots of people talked about it.'

'And what did Rodney have to do with the report?'

'They say he appeared in it.'

'They say?'

'People say. I told you I didn't see the report. What they say is that the man who appeared telling these horrible things was Rodney. Apparently you couldn't recognize him, the television people had done something so he couldn't be recognized, he spoke with his back to the camera or something like that, but people started putting two and two together and soon arrived at the conclusion that it was him. I don't know, like I said. What I do know is that before they showed that report on TV and everything got complicated Rodney had already spent several weeks without leaving the house, and then after that nobody knew anything until, well, until he got himself out of the way. Anyway, don't make me talk about this, it's a terrible fucking story and I don't really know it. Who you should see is the wife. Rodney's wife, I mean. Since you've come all this way . . .'

'His wife still lives in Rantoul?'

'Sure. Right around the corner, in Rodney's house.'

'I was just there and no one was home. Like I told you.'

'They must have gone out somewhere. But I bet they'llbe home for lunch. I'm not sure Jenny will be very keen to talk about these things after all she's had to put up with, but you could at least say hello.'

I thanked the bartender and went to pay for my beer, but he wouldn't let me.

'Tell me something,' he said as we shook hands and he held onto mine a second longer than was normal. 'Are you thinking of spending much time in Rantoul?'

'No,' I answered. 'Why do you ask?'

'No reason.' He let go of my hand and smoothed his thinning hair under his cap. 'But you know how these small towns are: if you do stay, take my advice and don't believe everything you hear about Rodney. People talk a lot of nonsense.'

An explosion of light blinded me when I got outside: it was noon. More confused than depressed, I started walking automatically towards Belle Avenue. My mind was a blank, and the only thing I remember having thought, mistakenly, is that this really was the end of the road, and also, not mistakenly or less mistakenly, that it was true that Rodney had found his way out of the tunnel, only that it was a different way out from the one I'd imagined. When I reached the front of Rodney's house I was soaked in sweat and had already decided the best thing to do would be to return immediately to Urbana, among other reasons because my presence here could only importune Rodney's family. I got in the Chrysler, started it, and was just about to turn around on Belle to take the road back to Urbana when I told myself I couldn't just leave like that, with all those unanswered questions strung out before me like a barbed wire fence and without even having seen Rodney's wife and son. I hadn't even finished thinking that when I saw them. They'd just turned the corner and were holding hands, walking along the sidewalk that ran between the road and the front gardens of the houses, in the green shade of the maples, and as they were coming towards me, bereft and unhurried down the empty street, I suddenly saw Gabriel and Paula walking down other empty streets, and then Gabriel letting go of his mother's hand to break into his oscillating run, smiling and eager to throw his arms around my neck. I felt my eyes were about to fill with tears. Holding them back, I turned off the engine, took a deep breath, got out again and waited for them, leaning against the car, smoking; the cigarette trembled a little in my hand. It wasn't long before they were standing in front of me. Regarding me with a mixture of worry and suspicion, the woman asked me if I was a journalist, but didn't let me answer.

'If you're a journalist you can just turn around and go back where you came from,' she ordered me, pallid and tense. 'I have nothing to say to you and . . .'

'I'm not a journalist,' I interrupted.

She stood looking at me. I explained that I was a friend of Rodney's, I told her my name. The woman blinked and asked me to repeat it, I repeated it. Then, without taking her eyes off me, she let go of the child's hand, took him by the shoulder, pressed him to her hip and, after looking away for a second, as if something had distracted her, I felt her whole body ease. Before she spoke I realized that she knew who I was, that Rodney had talked about me. She said:

'You're too late.'

'I know,' I said, and I wanted to add something, but I didn't know what to add.

'My name's Jenny,' she said after a moment, and, without looking down towards her son, added: 'This is Dan.'

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.