The Speed of Light

'I know the place,' I said.

'Really?' asked Rodney.

'Yeah,' I answered. 'After you stopped teaching at Urbana I went to your house to look for you. I saw a bit of the city but I spent most of the time with your father. I thought he would have told you.'

'No,' said Rodney. 'But that's normal. It would have been strange if he had told me.'

'I hope he's well,' I said, for something to say.

Rodney didn't answer straight away; suddenly, in the yellowish light of the floor lamp, surrounded by the darkness of the foyer, he looked tired and sleepy, maybe abruptly bored, as if nothing could interest him less than talking about his father. He said, 'He died three years ago.' I was about to resort to some hackneyed consolation when Rodney interrupted to save me the trouble. 'Don't worry. There's nothing to be sorry for. For years my father did nothing but torment himself. At least he doesn't any more.'

Rodney lit another cigarette. I thought he was going to change the subject, but he didn't; with some surprise I heard him carry on, 'So you went to see him.' I nodded. 'And what did you talk about?'

'The first time we didn't,' I explained, carefully choosing my words. 'He didn't want to. But after a while he phoned me and I went back to see him. Then he told me a story.'

Now Rodney looked at me with curiosity, raising his eyebrows inquisitively. Then I said, 'Wait here for a minute. I want to show you something.'

I stood up, hurried past the receptionist, who started up from his snooze, got in the elevator, went up to my room, grabbed the three black document cases, went back down to the foyer and put them on the table, in front of Rodney. With an ironic glint in his eyes and voice, my friend asked, 'What's this?'

I didn't say anything: I just pointed to the document cases. Rodney opened one of them, contemplated the pack of chronologically arranged envelopes, took one, read the address and the return address, looked at me, took the letter out of the envelope and, as he tried to decipher his own handwriting on the rough US Army paper, since the silence was lengthening I asked, 'Recognize them?'

Rodney looked at me again, this time fleetingly, and, without answering, left the letter on the table, picked another envelope, took out another letter, started to read that one too.

'My father gave them to you?' he murmured, waving the one he had in his hand. I didn't answer. 'It's strange,' he said after a couple of seconds.

'What's strange?'

'That they should be here, in Madrid,' he answered, not taking his eyes off the letters. 'That I wrote them and now I don't understand them. That my father should have given them to you.'

Slowly he put the letters back in the envelopes, put the envelopes back in the document case, asked, 'Have you read them?'

I said I had. He nodded indifferently, forgetting about the letters and sitting back again on the sofa. After another pause he asked again with apparent interest, 'What'd you think?'

'What, of this?'

'Of my father,' he corrected me.

'I don't know,' I admitted. 'I only saw him twice. I couldn't form an opinion. But I don't think he was sure of having done the right thing.'

'In relation to what?'

'In relation to you.'

'Ah.' He smiled weakly: on his face not the slightest trace was left of the vivacity that had animated it until a few minutes ago. 'You're mistaken there. Actually he was never sure of having done the right thing. Not in relation to me or in relation to anybody. That type of person never is.'

'I don't understand.'

Rodney shrugged; by way of explanation he added, 'I don't know, maybe it's true there're only two types of people: the sinners who always think they're righteous, and the righteous who always think they're sinners. At first my father was the first type, but then he turned into the champion of the second. I imagine that happens to lots of people.' He pushed a nervous hand through his messy hair and for a moment seemed on the point of laughing, but he didn't laugh. 'What I mean is that after a certain point in time my father didn't give me many chances to feel proud of him. Of course, I didn't give him many chances to feel proud of me either. So I suppose it was all a damned misunderstanding. But, well, these things happen to everybody.' He sighed, still smiling as he put out his cigarette in the overflowing ashtray. Starting to get up from the sofa, he gestured towards the clock on the wall by the stairs: it said five o'clock. 'Ah well, I'm starting to babble. This story is of no interest to anyone any more, and I'd better get a bit of sleep, don't you think?'

But I wasn't prepared to let that occasion escape. I told him to hang on a second, that the story interested me. A little surprised, Rodney questioned me silently with a sort of malicious naivete. Then, aware it was now or never, all in one go I told him his father had summoned me to Rantoul precisely to tell me about it, I told him what his father had told me and asked him why he thought he'd done so, why he'd given me his letters and Bob's as well. Rodney listened to me attentively and settled back into his seat; after a long silence, during which his gaze was lost beyond the ring of light we'd stolen from the darkness of the room, he looked at me again and burst out laughing.

'What's so funny?' I asked.

'Either you've changed a lot or that's a rhetorical question.'

'What do you mean?'

'You know exactly what I mean,' he answered. 'What I mean is that after talking to my father you left my house convinced that what he wanted was for you to tell my story, or at least that you had to tell it. Am I wrong?'

I didn't blush; I didn't deny the truth either. Rodney moved his head from one side to the other in a gesture that resembled reproach but was actually mockery.

'The presumption,' he muttered. 'The fucking presumption of writers.' He paused and, looking me in the eye, said, 'And so?'

'And so what?'

'So why haven't you told it?'

'I tried,' I admitted. 'But I couldn't. Or rather I didn't know how.'

'Yeah,' said Rodney, as if my answer had disappointed him, and then asked, 'Tell me something? What is it that my father told you?'

'I already told you: everything.'

'What's everything?'

'What he knew, what you'd told him, what he imagined, what's in the letters,' I explained. 'He also told me there were things he didn't know. He told me about an incident in a village, for example. My Khe it was called. He didn't know what had happened there, but he explained that after that incident you spent some time in hospital, and then you re-enlisted in the army. Anyway, that's in the letters too.'

'You've read them all,' Rodney said almost as a question.

'Of course,' I said. 'Your father gave them to me to read. Besides, I've already admitted that at some point I wanted to tell your story.'

'Why?'

'For the same reason any story gets told. Because I was obsessed with it. Because I didn't understand it. Because I felt responsible for it.'

'Responsible?'

'Yeah,' I said, and, almost without realizing it, added, 'maybe a person isn't only responsible for what they do, but also for what they see or read or hear.'

As soon as I heard myself pronounce that sentence I regretted having said it. Rodney's reaction confirmed my mistake: his lips curled instantly into a cunning smile, which soon vanished, but before I could put things right my friend began to speak slowly, as if possessed by a sarcastic and controlled rage.

'Ah,' he said. 'Nice phrase. You writers sure like your pretty phrases. There's a few in your last book. Real pretty. So pretty they almost seem true. But, of course, they're not true, they're just pretty. The funny thing is you still haven't learned that writing well is the opposite of writing pretty phrases. No pretty phrase is capable of expressing truth. Probably no phrase is capable of capturing truth, but. .'