The Speed of Light (22 page)

'There you go,' Jenny said quietly, hurrying into the living room with the coffee tray. 'Always the same story. There's no way he wants to have his nap, and then I have a terrible job to wake him up.'

She set the tray down on the coffee table between the two armchairs and, after gently moving Dan's twisted arm so it was resting naturally on his chest, she went to the far end of the room and opened the curtains of the porch window to let the golden afternoon sunlight shine into the room. Then she poured the coffee, sat down across from me, stirring hers, drank it down almost in one gulp, let the silence linger for a while and, maybe because I couldn't find a way to start the conversation, asked:

'Are you thinking of staying here long?'

'Just until Tuesday.'

'In Rantoul?'

'In Urbana.'

Jenny nodded; then she said:

'I'm sorry you've come such a long way for nothing.'

'I would have done it anyway,' I lied.

I took a sip of coffee and then I talked about my trip around the United States, making it clear that Urbana was just one more leg of the journey; knowing that Jenny probably already knew, I explained that I'd lived there for two years, which was when I became friends with Rodney, and that I'd wanted to return.

'I thought I could see Rodney again,' I continued. 'Although I wasn't sure. I haven't been in touch with him for a long time and a few months ago I wrote him a letter, but I suppose by then . . .'

'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

'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.'