Suddenly everything changed. A year and a half before Rodney began giving classes at Urbana, his mother died of stomach cancer. Her suffering was long but not terrible, and Rodney endured it without frights or dramatics, giving up from one day to the next his vague, lazy habits to take care of his dying mother, who during all those years of convalescence from the war had been his sole and silent moral support; the afternoon they buried her no one saw him shed a single tear. Nevertheless, days later, returning from a house call, Rodney's father found his son leaning on the kitchen table, lit up by the bright midday sun that was pouring in through the window, crying his eyes out. He couldn't remember having seen Rodney cry since he was a boy, but he didn't say a thing: he left his things in the hall, went back to the kitchen, made two cups of camomile tea, one for his son, the other for himself, sat down at the table, held his son's big, rough, veiny hand, and stayed beside him for a long time, in silence, sipping his camomile tea and then Rodney's as well, without letting go of his hand, listening to him cry as if he'd stored up an inexhaustible reserve of tears during all those years and he wasn't ever going to stop crying. For a long time father and son had been living in the same house hardly ever speaking to each other, but that evening Rodney began to talk, and it was only then that his father had a blinding glimpse of the vertigo of remorse his son had been living in for all those years, because he came to understand that Rodney didn't only feel he was to blame for the deaths of his brother and his mother and an indefinable number of people, but also for not having had the courage to obey his conscience and having yielded to the order to go to war, for having abandoned his comrades there, for having witnessed the unmitigated horror of Vietnam and for having survived it. The conversation ended in the early hours, and the next day, when they woke up, Rodney asked to borrow his father's car and went to Chicago. The trip was repeated the following week and the one after that, and Rodney's visits to the capital soon became a weekly ritual. At first he'd go and come back on the same day, leaving very early in the morning and getting home at night, but as time went by he began to spend two or sometimes three days away from Rantoul. In order not to spoil the improvement in relations with his son since the death of his wife, Rodney's father didn't make enquiries, but merely lent him the car and asked when he thought he might be back. But one evening, on his return from one of those journeys, Rodney told him: told him that he went each week to the Chicago headquarters of the Vietnam Veterans' Association — the same place where he'dbeen admitted twice in the past and treated with Largactil injections — where he received the help of a psychiatrist who specialized in war-induced disturbances and where he got together with other veterans with whom he collaborated in the organization of public functions, demonstrations and conferences, as well as the production of a magazine in which for several years he published articles on film and literature and furious denunciations of the culpable frivolity of his country's politicians and their servile compliance with the dictates of big corporations. The news didn't surprise Rodney's father, who by then had been noticing for a while the changes his son had undergone in just a few months, and not just in relation to him; Rodney had stopped drinking and smoking marijuana, had started to share in the running of the house, to eradicate his eccentric habits and recover some of his old friends. Gradually that transformation became more solid and more visible because Rodney soon accepted a job keeping the books for a restaurant in Urbana, began to work as a volunteer for a small independent trade union and to frequent the local chapter of the Association of Veterans of Foreign Wars. It was as if Rodney's entire life had hit crisis point with the death of his mother: as if, thanks to his trips to Chicago and the help of the Veterans' Association, the bubble he'd spent more than fifteen years suffocating inside had begun to disintegrate and he was overcoming the shame of being a former Vietnam combatant or finding some form of pride in the fact of being a survivor of that phantasmagoric war. So, by the time he got his job as a Spanish teacher at Urbana, Rodney led such an orderly and industrious life that there was no reason to suspect he hadn't left behind once and for all the infinite consequences of his stint in Vietnam.
But he hadn't left them behind. Rodney's father realized it one night over the Christmas holidays in 1988, a few months before he told me his son's story in his house in Rantoul, just a few days after Rodney and I had said goodbye at the door of Treno's with the finally frustrated promise that we'd see each other again as soon as I got back from my road trip through the Midwest in the company of Barbara, Gudrun and Rodrigo Gines. That evening a man had telephoned the house asking for his son. Rodney was out, so his father asked who was calling. 'Tommy Birban,' said the man. Rodney's father had never heard that surname, but the fact didn't surprise him, because since Rodney had broken out of the confinement of his bubble it was not unusual for strangers to call the house. The man said he was a friend of Rodney's, promised to call back in a while and left a phone number in case Rodney wanted to call him first. When Rodney got home that night, his father handed him a piece of paper with his friend's phone number on it; his son's reaction surprised him: slightly pale, taking the paper he was handing him, he asked if he was sure that was the name of the stranger and, although he assured him it was, he made him repeat it several times, to convince himself his father hadn't been mistaken. 'Is something up?' Rodney'sfather asked. Rodney didn't answer or answered with a gesture both discouraging and disparaging. But later, when they were having dinner, the telephone rang again, and before his father could get up to answer it Rodney stopped him sharply with a shout. The two men sat and looked at each other: that was when Rodney's father knew something was wrong. The telephone kept ringing, until it finally stopped. 'Maybe it was someone else,' said Rodney's father. Rodney said nothing. 'He's going to call again, isn't he?'t Rodney's father asked after a while. This time Rodney nodded. 'I don't want to talk to him,' he said. 'Tell him I'm not here. Or better yet, tell him I'm away and you don't know when I'll be back. Yeah: tell him that.' That night Rodney's father didn't risk any more questions, because he knew his son was not going to answer, and he spent the whole next day waiting for Tommy Birban's call. Of course, the call came, and Rodney's father picked up the receiver quickly and did what his son had asked him to do. 'Yesterday you didn't tell me Rodney was away,' Tommy Birban said suspiciously. 'I don't remember what I said yesterday,' he answered. Then he improvised: 'But it would be better if you didn't call here again. Rodney has gone away and I don't know where he is or when he'll be back.' He was just about to hang up when Tommy Birban's voice on the other end of the line stopped sounding threatening and began to sound imploring, like a perfectly articulated sob: 'You're Rodney's father, right?' He didn't have time to answer. 'I know Rodney's living with you, they told me at the Chicago Veterans' Association, they gave me your number. I want to ask you a favour. If you do me this favour I promise I won't call again, but you have to do this for me. Tell Rodney I'm not going to ask anything of him, not even that we see each other. The only thing I want is to talk to him for a while, tell him I only want to talk to him for a while, tell him I need to talk to him. That's all. But tell him, please. Will you tell him?' Rodney's father didn'tknow how to refuse, but the fact that his son received the message without batting an eyelid or making the slightest comment allowed him to kid himself that this episode he couldn't understand and didn't want to understand had concluded without any grave consequences. Predictably, a few days later Tommy Birban called again. Rodney was no longer answering the phone, so it was Rodney's father who picked it up. He and Tommy Birban argued for a few seconds fiercely, and he was about to hang up when his son asked him to hand him the phone; with some hesitation, and warning him with a look that there was still time to avoid the mistake, he handed it over. The two old friends talked for a long time, but he wouldn't allow himself to listen to the conversation, of which he only caught a few unconnected snippets. That night Rodney couldn't get to sleep, and the next morning Tommy Birban called again and the two talked again for several hours. This ominous ritual went on for over a week, and the morning of New Year's Day Rodney's father heard a noise downstairs, got up, went out onto the porch and saw his son putting the last piece of luggage in the trunk of the Buick. The scene didn't surprise him; actually, he was almost expecting it. Rodney closed the trunk and came up the steps to the porch. 'I'm off,' he said. 'I was going to come up to say goodbye.' His father knew he was lying, but he nodded. He looked at the snow-covered street, the sky almost white, the grey light; he looked at his son, tall and broken in front of him, and felt the world was an empty place, inhabited only by the two of them. He was about to tell him. 'Where are you going?' he was about to ask. 'Don't you know the world is an empty place?' but he didn't say that. What he said was: 'Isn't it about time you forgot all that?' 'I've already forgotten, Dad,' answered Rodney. 'It's all that that hasn't forgotten me.' 'And that's the last thing I heard him say,' Rodney's father concluded, sunken in his wingback chair, as exhausted as if he hadn't dedicated that endless afternoon in his house in Rantoul to reconstructing his son's story for me, but rather trying to scale an impassable mountain weighed down with useless equipment. 'Then we hugged and he left. The rest you know.'