The Speed of Light

When Rodney finished talking we remained still for a moment, not even daring to look at each other, as if his tale had taken us to a place where only fear was real and we were waiting for the benign apparition of a visitor who would give us back the shared safety of that squalid foyer of a Madrid hotel. The visitor did not arrive. Rodney leaned his big hands on his knees and got up from the sofa with a creaking of joints; bent over and a little unsteady, as if he were dizzy or suffering from vertigo or nausea, he took a few steps and stood looking at the street, leaning on the window frame.

'It's almost daylight,' I heard him say.

It was true: the skeletal light of dawn was inundating the room, endowing everything in it with a phantasmal or precarious reality, as if it were scenery submerged in a lake, and at the same time sharpening Rodney's profile, his silhouette standing out doubtfully against the cobalt blue of the sky; for an instant I thought that, rather than a bird of prey, it was the profile of a predator or a big cat.

'Well, that's more or less the story,' he said in a perfectly neutral tone of voice, returning to the sofa with his hands hidden in his pockets. 'Is that how you imagined it?'

I pondered my answer for a moment. My mouth didn'ttaste of ashes or old coins any more, but of something that very closely resembled blood but wasn't blood. I felt horror, but I didn't manage to feel pity, and at some moment I felt — hating myself for feeling it and hating Rodney for making me feel it — that all the suffering his time in Vietnam had inflicted on him was justified.

'No,' I finally answered. 'But it's not far off.'

Rodney kept talking, standing up in front of me, but I was too stunned to process his words, and after a while he took one hand out of his pocket and pointed at the clock on the wall.

'My train's leaving in just over an hour,' he said. 'I better go upstairs and get my things. Will you wait for me here?'

I said I would and stayed waiting for him in the foyer, looking through the big unsleeping window at the people going into the Principe Pio station and the traffic and the incipient morning activity in the neighbourhood of La Florida, watching them without seeing them because the only thing that occupied my mind was the mistaken and bittersweet certainty that Rodney's entire story only just now made sense to me, an atrocious sense that nothing could soften or rectify, and ten minutes later Rodney returned weighed down with luggage and freshly showered. While he checked out of the hotel a guy went into one of the two phone booths that flanked the reception desk and, I don't know why, but as I saw him dial the number and wait for an answer, with a start I remembered a name and almost said it out loud. Without taking my eyes off the guy inside the phone booth I heard Rodney ask the receptionist how to get to Atocha station and the receptionist telling him the quickest way was to get a train from Principe Pio station. Then Rodney turned back to me to say goodbye, but I insisted on accompanying him to the station.

We went down to the hall and before going outside onto paseo de La Florida, Rodney put his eye patch on. We crossed the street, went inside the station, Rodney bought a ticket and we went towards the platform beneath an enormous steel framework with translucent glass like the skeleton of an enormous prehistoric animal. While we waited on the platform I asked if I could ask one more question.

'Not if it's for your book,' he answered. I tried to smile, but I couldn't. 'Take my advice and don't write it. Anyone can write a book if they put their mind to it, but not everyone can keep quiet. Besides, I already told you, that story can't be told.'

'That may be,' I admitted, though now I didn't want to hold my tongue, 'but maybe the only stories worth telling are the ones that can't be told.'

'Another pretty phrase,' said Rodney. 'If you write the book, remember not to include it. What is it you wanted to ask me?'

Without a second's doubt I asked: 'Who is Tommy Birban?'

Rodney's face didn't change, and I didn't know how to read the look in his one eye, or maybe there was nothing to read in it. When he spoke he managed to keep his voice sounding normal.

'Where did you get that name?'

'Your father mentioned it. He said that before you left Urbana you and he spoke on the phone and that's why you left.'

'He didn't tell you anything else?'

'What else should he have told me?'

'Nothing.'

At that moment they announced over the loudspeakers the imminent arrival of the Atocha train.

'Tommy was a comrade,' said Rodney. 'He arrived in Quang Ngai when I was already a veteran, and we became friends. We left almost at the same time, and I haven't seen him since. .' He paused. 'But you know something?'

'What?'

'When I met you, you reminded me of him. I don't know why.' With the trace of a smile on his lips Rodney waited for my reaction, but I didn't react. 'Well, I do actually. You know? In war there are those who go under and those who save themselves. That's all. Tommy was one of those who go under, and you would have been too. But Tommy survived, I don't know how but he survived. Sometimes I think it would have been better for him if he hadn't. . Anyway, that was Tommy Birban: an underdog who sunk even further to save himself.'

'That doesn't answer my question.'

'What question?'

'Why did you leave after talking to him on the phone?'

'You didn't ask me that question.'

'I'm asking you now.'

Knowing time was on his side, Rodney just answered with an impatient gesture and an evasive: 'Because Tommy wanted to get me involved in a mess.'

'What kind of mess? Was Tommy at My Khe?'

'No. He arrived long after that.'

'So?'

'So nothing. Soldier things. Believe me: if I explained it to you, you wouldn't understand. Tommy was weak and he kept obsessing over things from the war. . Grudges, enmities, things like that. I didn't want to know about any of that stuff any more.'

'And you left just because of that?'

'Yeah. I thought I was over all that, but I wasn't. I wouldn't do it now.'

I realized Rodney was lying to me; I also understood or thought I understood that, contrary to what I'd thought in the hotel foyer only a little while earlier, the horror of My Khe didn't explain everything.

'Anyway,' said Rodney as the Atocha train stopped beside us. 'We've spent the night talking nonsense. I'll write you.' He hugged me, picked up his bags and, before climbing onto the train, added: 'Take good care of Gabriel and Paula. And take care of yourself.'

I nodded, but didn't manage to say anything, because I could only think that that was the first time in my life I'd hugged a murderer.

I went back to the hotel. When I got to my room I was sticky with sweat, so I took a shower, changed my clothes and lay down on the bed to rest a while before getting the plane back. I had a bitter taste in my mouth, a headache and a buzzing in my temples; I couldn't stop going over and over my encounter with Rodney. I regretted having gone to see him in Madrid; I regretted knowing the truth and having insisted on finding it out. Of course, before that night's conversation I imagined Rodney had killed: he'd been to war and dying and killing is what you do in wars; but what I couldn't imagine was that he'd participated in a massacre, that he'd murdered women and children. Knowing what he'd done filled me with a pitiless, unflinching aversion;having heard him tell it with the indifference with which you describe an innocuous domestic incident increased the horror to disgust. Now the misery of remorse in which Rodney had spent years bleeding seemed a benevolent punishment, and I wondered if the implausible fact that he'd survived the guilt, far from being commendable, didn'tincrease the appalling burden of responsibility. There were, of course, explanations for what he'd told me, but none of them equal to the size of the disgrace. On the other hand, I didn't understand why, having revealed without beating about the bush what happened in My Khe, Rodney would have avoided telling me who Tommy Birban was and what he represented, unless his evasions were meant to try to hide from me a greater horror than My Khe, a horror so unjustifiable and unutterable that, to his eyes and by contrast, it turned My Khe into an utterable and justifiable horror. But what unimaginable horror of horrors could that be? A horror in any case sufficient to pulverize Rodney'smental equilibrium fourteen years before and make him leave his home and his job and resume his fugitive life as soon as Tommy Birban had reappeared. Of course it was also possible that Rodney hadn't told me the whole truth of My Khe and that Tommy Birban had arrived in Vietnam by the time it happened and was in some way linked to the massacre. And what had he meant when he said that Tommy Birban was weak and that he shouldn't have survived and that he reminded him of me? Did this mean that he'd protected Tommy Birban or he was protecting him like he'd protected me? But what had he protected Tommy Birban from, if he had protected him? And what had he protected me from?