The Speed of Light Page 19

  '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 thi
ng,' 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.'

  Rodney and the three visitors spent all morning and much of the afternoon shut up in the living room. At first Jenny had to overcome the urge to listen through the closed door, but when, after half an hour of secret discussions, she saw the two people who'd come with the reporter go outside and return with recording equipment, she didn't even attempt to persuade Rodney not to commit the error he was about to commit. She spent the rest of the day out of the house, with Dan, and returned in the evening when the journalists had gone. Rodney was sitting in the living room, in darkness and silence, and although, after giving Dan his supper and putting him quickly to bed, Jenny tried to find out what had happened during her deliberate absence, she couldn't get a single word out of him, and she had the impression that he was mad or drugged or drunk, and that he no longer understood her language. That was the first sign of alarm. The second arrived shortly after. That night Rodney did not sleep, nor the ones that followed: lying awake in bed, Jenny heard him wandering around downstairs, heard him talking to himself or maybe on the phone; on one occasion she thought she heard laughter, muffled laughter, like the kind you stifle at a funeral. That's how an unstoppable process of deterioration began: Rodney asked for a leave of absence from the school and stopped teaching, he didn't go outside, spent the days sleeping or lying in bed and ended up having nothing to do with Dan or with her. It was as if someone had torn out a tiny connection that turned out to be indispensable to his continued functioning and his whole organism had suffered a collapse, reducing him to a ghost of himself. Jenny tried to talk to him, tried to force him to accept the help of a psychiatrist; it was useless: he seemed to listen to her (maybe he really did listen), he smiled at her, touched her, asked her not to worry, over and over again he told her he was fine, but she felt that Rodney was living as far away from everything around him as a planet spinning in its own self-absorbed orbit. She let time pass, hoping things would change. Things didn't change. The broadcast of the television report did nothing but make everything worse. At first it didn't have much impact, because it was a local station that had produced it, but very soon the national newspapers were repeating its revelations and a major network bought the rights and broadcast the piece at prime time. Although the journalist sent them a copy, Rodney didn't want to see it; although in the accompanying note the reporter assured him that he'd fulfilled his promise of guarding Rodney's anonymity, reality contradicted him: it really wasn't difficult to identify Rodney in the report, and the result of this indiscretion or breach of confidence was that Jenny's life became stifled by hounding journalists and questions and gossip about her husband's seclusion. As for her relationship with Rodney, it quickly deteriorated until it became unsustainable. One day she took a drastic decision: she told Rodney that it would be better if they separated; she would go back to Burlington with Dan and he could stay by himself in Rantoul. The ultimatum was a last feint that Jenny hoped would get Rodney to react, confronting him unceremoniously with the evidence that, unless he restrained his free fall, he was going to end up ruining his life and losing his family. But the trick didn't work: Rodney meekly accepted her proposal, and the only thing he asked Jenny was when she intended to leave. At that moment Jenny understood that all was lost, and it was also then that she had her first conversation with Rodney in a long time. It was not an enlightening conversation. Actually, Rodney hardly spoke: he limited himself to answering, in an exasperatingly laconic manner, the questions she put to him and Jenny couldn't get rid of the feeling that she was talking to a child with no future or an elderly man with no past, because Rodney looked at her exactly as if he were trying to look through the sky. At some moment Jenny asked him if he was afraid. With a wisp of relief, as if her fingertip had just brushed the hidden heart of his anguish, Rodney said yes. 'Of what?' Jenny asked him. 'I don't know,' said Rodney. 'Of people. Of you guys. Sometimes I'm afraid of myself.' 'Of us?' Jenny asked. 'Who's us?' 'You and Dan,' answered Rodney. 'We aren't going to hurt you,' Jenny smiled. 'I know that,' said Rodney. 'But that's what I'm most afraid of.' Jenny remembered that when she heard those words she felt afraid of Rodney for the first time, and also that it was then she understood that she should leave Rantoul with her son as soon as possible. But she didn't; she decided to stay: she loved Rodney and felt that, whatever happened, she should help him. She couldn't help him. The last weeks were a nightmare. In the daytime Jenny tried to talk to him, but it was almost always futile, because, despite understanding his words, she was unable to invest the phrases he pronounced with any intelligible meaning, as they were closer to the hermetic and rigorously coherent ravings of a lunatic than to any articulate discourse. As for the nights, Rodney continued to pass them wakefully, but now he spent much of them writing: Jenny fell asleep rocked by the unceasing tapping of the computer keyboard, but when, some days after Rodney's death, she got up the courage to open his files she found them all blank, as if at the last moment her husband had decided to spare her the venomous outpourings from the hell in which he was being consumed. Jenny maintained that in the days leading up to his death Rodney had completely lost his mind; also that what happened was the best thing that could have happened. And what happened was that one morning, not long after Christmas, Jenny got up earlier than usual and, when she walked past the room where Rodney had been sleeping for the last while, she saw it empty and the bed still made. Worried, she looked for Rodney in the dining room, the kitchen, all over the house, and finally found him hanging from a rope in the shed.

  'That was all,' Jenny concluded, abandoning for a few seconds the distant manner she'd managed until then to impart to her tale. 'The rest you can imagine. Death improves the dead, so it turns out everyone loved Rodney very much. Even the journalists came to see me . . . Just crap.'

  For a moment I thought Jenny was going to start to cry, but she didn't cry: she stubbed out her second cigarette on the porch step, and just as she'd done with her first, kept it in her hand; after a long silence she turned towards me and looked me in the eye.

  'Didn't I tell you?' she said, almost smiling. 'The problem isn't getting Dan to sleep. The problem is waking him up.'

  Dan did indeed wake up in a foul mood, but it gradually eased as he had a bowl of cereal and his mother and I kept him company with a coffee. When we finished Jenny suggested we go for a walk before it got dark.

  'Dan and I are going to take you someplace,' she said.

  'What place?'

  Jenny crouched down beside him and, making a screen with her hand, whispered in his ear.

  'OK?' she asked, st
anding up again.

  Dan just shrugged his shoulders.

  When we left the house we turned left, crossed the railway tracks and walked along Ohio, a well-paved street, with hardly any houses or businesses, which headed towards the outskirts of the city. Five hundred metres on, across from a dense birch wood, stood a building with white walls, a sort of enormous granary surrounded by grass on the front of which was painted in large red letters: VETERANS OF FOREIGN WARS POST 6750; beside it there was another smaller sign, similar to the one outside Bud's Bar, except that it was decorated with an American flag; the sign read: SUPPORT OUR TROOPS. The building looked empty, but it must not have been, because there were several cars parked in front of the door; as we passed Jenny commented:

  'The war veterans' club. They're all over the place. They hold parties, reunions, things like that. I've only been inside once, but I know that before we met Rodney used to go there quite a lot, or that's what he told me. Do you want to go in?'

  I said there was no need and we walked away from the club along a dirt path that ran beside the highway, chatting, Dan in the middle and Jenny and I on either side, Jenny holding his left hand and I his right. After a while we left the highway, taking a path that went gently up to the left, between fields of young corn, and when we got to the top of a small hill we left the path, going into an irregular quadrilateral strewn with a handful of scattered graves, where there stood a couple of ash trees feeding on the earth of the dead and a rusty iron flagpole without a flag. Dan let go of our hands and ran across the cemetery lawn until he stopped in front of an unpolished tombstone.

  'Here he is,' said Dan when we reached his side, pointing to the grave with one finger.

  I looked at the tombstone, on the front face of which was carved a boy sitting under a tree reading and an inscription: RODNEY FALK. APR. 6 1948 - JAN. 4 2004; beside the inscription there was a fresh bouquet of flowers. 'A clean, well-lighted place,' I thought. The three of us stood in front of the grave in silence.