The Speed of Light Read online

  I could gather a handful of analogous passages extracted from the letters Rodney wrote in that time: all in a similar tone, all equally dark, immoral or abstruse. It's true that one is assaulted by the temptation to recognize in these crazy words something like an X-ray of Rodney's mind at that point in his life, and even read into them many more things than Rodney perhaps meant to include. I shall resist the temptation, I shall avoid interpretations.

  As soon as he was discharged from the hospital, Rodney rejoined his company, and two months later, when he had only a few days left until his obligatory stay in Vietnam was up, thanks to an acquaintance who got him into the American embassy in Saigon, he phoned his parents for the first time and told them he wasn't coming home. He'dresolved to re-enlist in the army. Maybe because they immediately grasped that the decision was irrevocable, Rodney's parents didn't try to get him to reconsider, but only tried to understand. They couldn't. Nevertheless, after a long conversation choked with entreaties and sobs, they were eventually left clinging to the precarious hope that their son hadn't lost his mind, but the war had simply changed him into another person, he was no longer the boy they'd begotten and raised and that's why he could no longer imagine himself back home as if nothing had happened, because even the prospect of returning to his student life (prolonging it by doing a doctorate, as he had originally intended) or looking for work in a high school or, much less, having a long spell of rest to recover the provincial placidness of Rantoul, now seemed ridiculous or impossible to him, and overwhelmed him with a panic they just could not understand. So Rodney stayed another six months in Vietnam. His father knew almost nothing about what happened to his son during that time, when Rodney's correspondence with his family stopped altogether, no news arrived from him except for a few telegrams in which, with military concision, he informed them that he was fine. The only thing Rodney's father could find out later was that his son was then fighting in an elite anti-guerrilla unit known as Tiger Force, part of the 101st Airborne Division's first battalion, and it's beyond doubt that during those six months Rodney engaged in combat much more often than he had done up till then, because when at the end of 1969 he finally flew back home he did so with his chest emblazoned with medals — a Silver Star for bravery and a Purple Heart figured among them — and a hip injury that would stay with him for life, condemning him to walk forever with a stumbling, unsteady, defeated gait.

  The homecoming was catastrophic. Rodney's father remembered his son's arrival in Chicago all too well. For two weeks he and Julia Flores, who barely knew each other, had been phoning back and forth to finalize the preparations, but when the great day arrived everything went wrong from the start: the Greyhound bus he and his wife took from Rantoul to Chicago arrived almost two hours late because of a traffic accident; Julia was waiting for them there, got them into her car and drove as fast as possible towards O'Hare Airport, but there was a traffic jam on the way as well, so by the time they got to the terminal an hour had already gone by since Rodney's flight had landed. They asked here and there, and finally, after going around and around and making many inquiries, they had to go and find Rodney in a police station. They found him there alone and shaken, but he didn't offer any explanation, not that day or ever and, so as not to further ruin the reunion, they preferred not to ask the police for one. Only several months later did Rodney's father get a precise idea of what happened that morning in the airport. It was after the court case against Rodney — as a result of which he was sentenced to a fine, which his family paid — a case that Rodney forbade his father and mother from attending and the contents and development of which they didn't find out about until a secret interview with their son's defence lawyer. The lawyer, a well-known left-winger called Daniel Pludovsky, who had accepted the case because he was a friend of a friend of Rodney's father and who from the beginning of the conversation made an effort to calm him by trying to play down the episode, received him in his office on Wabash Street and started by telling him that Rodney had made the three-day return trip from Vietnam with a black soldier (first from Saigon to Tokyo in an Air Force C-41, then from the Philippines to San Francisco in a World Airways jet, and finally from there to Chicago) and that, disembarking in Chicago and finding no one waiting for them, the pair decided to go and have breakfast in a cafeteria. The terminal was unusually busy and a festive atmosphere prevailed, or at least that was the first, bewildering and happy impression the two recent arrivals had, until at a certain point, as they dragged their kit bags down a crowded corridor, a girl broke away from a group of students, came up to Rodney, who was the only one of the two veterans still in uniform, and asked him if he was coming from Vietnam. Surprised by the absence of his parents and Julia, who had promised to be waiting for him at the airport, Rodney might have imagined that the girl had been sent by them, so he stopped and smiled and cheerfully said yes. Then the girl spat in his face. Looking at her uncomprehendingly, Rodney asked the girl why she'd done that, but, since she didn't answer, after a moment'shesitation he wiped the saliva off his face and carried on walking. The students followed them chanting anti-war slogans, laughing, shouting things they didn't understand and insulting them. Until Rodney couldn't take any more, turned around and confronted them; the black soldier grabbed his arm and begged him not to pay any attention to them, but Rodney pulled away and, while the students kept on with their chants and their shouts, he tried to talk to them, tried to reason with them, but finally gave up, said they hadn't done anything to them and asked them to leave them alone. They were about to go on when an abusive or defiant comment, hurled by a guy with very long hair, was heard above the commotion of the students, and Rodney was instantly on top of the guy and started beating him up and would have killed him if not for the last-minute intervention of the airport police. 'And that was it,' Pludovsky told Rodney's father, leaning back in his armchair with a cigarette in hand and an undisguised air of satisfaction, downplaying it with the tone of someone who's just told a tale of amusing childish mischief. Rodney's father did not smile, said nothing, just remained silent for a few moments and then, without looking up, asked the lawyer to tell him what it was the boy had said to Rodney. 'Oh, that.' Pludovsky tried to smile. 'Well, the truth is I don't remember exactly.' 'Of course you remember,' Rodney's father said without a doubt. 'And I want you to tell me.' Suddenly uncomfortable, Pludovsky sighed, put out his cigarette, folded his hands on top of his large oak desk. 'As you wish,' he said with annoyance, as if he'd just lost a case at the last minute in the stupidest way imaginable. 'What the boy said was: "Look what cowards they are, these baby-killers".'

  By the time Rodney's father left the lawyer's office he already understood that the altercation at O'Hare had just been one reflection of what had happened in the last few months and a foreshadowing of what was going to happen in the future. He was not wrong. Because Rodney's life never again resembled the one he'd been forced to leave behind a year and a half earlier to go to Vietnam. The day of his arrival in Rantoul his old friends had organized a homecoming party; his mother convinced him to go, but, although he left the house dressed for the occasion and with the car keys in hand and returned in the early hours, the next morning his parents found out that he hadn't even shown up at the party, and in the following days discovered from neighbours and friends that he'd spent that night talking on the phone from a booth near the train station and driving around town in his father's Ford. A few months later he and Julia got married and went to live in a suburb of Minneapolis where she was teaching in a secondary school. The union lasted barely two years; in fact, it took her much less time to realize that the marriage was impossible, just as any other Rodney might have attempted then would have been. Physically, he had returned from Vietnam, but actually it was as if he were still there, or as if he'd brought Vietnam home with him. Worse still: while he was in Vietnam Rodney never stopped talking about Vietnam in the letters he wrote to his parents, to Julia, to his friends;now he ceased entirely to do so, and not, perhaps,
because he didn't want to — the truth was most likely the opposite: there was probably nothing in the world he wanted as much — but because he couldn't, who knows whether because he harboured the certainty that no one was in a position to understand what he had to tell, or because he thought he shouldn't do so, as if he'd seen or experienced something that those who knew him should remain unaware of. What's certainly clear is that, if while he was in Vietnam he didn't think about anything but the United States, now that he was in the United States he didn't think about anything but Vietnam. It's possible that he often felt nostalgia for the war, that he thought he should never have come home and that he should have died over there, fighting shoulder to shoulder with his comrades. It's possible that he often felt, compared to the life of a cornered rat he now led in the United States, life in Vietnam was more serious, more real, more worth living. It's possible that he realized he could never return to the country he'd left to go to Vietnam, and not only because it didn't exist any more and was now another, but also because he was no longer the same person who'd left it. It's possible that he might very soon have accepted that no one comes back from Vietnam: that, once you've been there, return is impossible. And it's almost surely the case that, like so many other Vietnam veterans, he felt mocked, because as soon as he set foot back on American soil he knew the whole country spurned him or, at best, wished to hide him as if his very presence was an embarrassment, an insult or an accusation. Rodney could not have expected to be received as a hero (because he wasn't one and because he was not unaware that the defeated were never received as heroes, even if they were), but neither could he have expected that the same country that had demanded he ignore his own conscience, not desert to Canada, fulfil his duty as an American and go to a despicable, faraway war, should now shrink from his presence as though he were a criminal or had the plague. His presence and that of so many veterans like him, who, if they were guilty of something, were guilty because of the brutal circumstances of a war they'd been pushed into and the country that had forced them to fight. Or at least that'swhat Rodney must have thought then, just like so many other Vietnam veterans when they went home. As for his former anti-war activism, Rodney undoubtedly now had many more reasons than in his student years to consider the war a deception orchestrated by politicians' fanaticism and irresponsibility, stoked by the fraudulent use of the rhetoric of old-fashioned American values, but it's also indisputable — or at least it was for Rodney's father — that the fact of being for or against the war had been reduced to an almost banal matter in his eyes, relegated to the background by the lacerating disgrace of the United States having sent thousands and thousands of boys to the slaughter and then abandoned them to their fate in a lost little corner of the globe, sick, exhausted and crazed, drunk on desire and impotence, fighting to the death against their own shadows in the swamps of a country reduced to ashes.

  But all this is nothing but conjecture: it's reasonable to imagine that, for a long time after his return from Vietnam, Rodney might have thought or felt like that; it's not impossible to imagine that he might have thought or felt the exact opposite. Facts, however, are facts; I'll stick to them. In the first months he spent back in the United States Rodney barely left his house (neither his family home in Rantoul nor the one he shared with Julia in Minneapolis), and when he began to go out it was only to get involved in fights almost invariably provoked by his irrepressible tendency to interpret any mention of Vietnam or his time in Vietnam, no matter how trivial or innocuous, as a personal affront. He lost his Chicago friends and his Rantoul ones, and he cut off all connections to his old comrades from Vietnam, maybe because, voluntarily or involuntarily, he wished to hide the fact that he was an ex-combatant, which would explain the fact that for a long time he categorically refused to go for help or company to the offices of the Veterans' Association. Despite Julia's unceasing efforts, shortly after their wedding the marriage had deteriorated irreversibly. As for his family, he only kept in touch with his mother, while for years he avoided his father's company and conversation. He drank and smoked a lot, whisky and beer, tobacco and marijuana, and often fell into slumps that would plunge him into deep depressions lasting weeks or months and oblige him to stuff himself with pills. He never hunted or fished again. He never mentioned his brother Bob again. He lived in a continual state of anxiety. For almost a year and a half, he suffered from a relentless insomnia, and only managed to overcome it when he went to the movies with Julia, who held his hand and felt him gradually abandon himself in the murmuring darkness of the cinema and finally immerse himself in sleep as if it were the depths of a lake. During the day he never sat with his back to a window, and he was obsessed with keeping all the blinds in the house closed. He spent his nights giving vent to his anxiety in the hallways and, before finally getting futilely into bed, he would begin a nightly ritual that involved inspecting each and every one of the doors and windows of the house, making sure there was no obstacle that might hinder his escape and that everything he needed to defend himself was at hand, as well as mentally running through the appropriate modus operandi in the implausible case of an emergency. With time he managed to fall asleep in his own bed, but he was frequently assaulted by nightmares, and an inoffensive noise in the yard would be enough to wake him and cause him to rush outside to find out what had made the noise. When he and Julia divorced he moved back to his parents' house in Rantoul, and in the years that followed crossed the country from sea to sea several times: he'd suddenly pack his bags one day, load up the car and leave without any warning or fixed destination, and after one or two or three or four months he'd come home without the slightest explanation, as if he'dbeen out for a stroll around the neighbourhood. He survived two suicide attempts, as a result of the second he eventually agreed to be admitted to the Chicago VA Medical Centre. He didn't take long to start looking for a job, but he did in finding one, because, although being an ex-combatant entitled him to certain privileges, for a long time he considered it humiliating to take advantage of them, and each time he went to an interview he returned home seized by an uncontrollable rage, convinced that prospective employers began to see him as a two-headed monster as soon as they found out he was a war veteran. The first job he got was an easy and not badly paid administrative position in a jam factory, but he barely lasted a few months in it, more or less like the ones that followed. Later he tried giving language classes in Rantoul or around Rantoul, and also tried to take up his studies again, enrolling in a master's course in philosophy at Northwestern. It was all futile. When Rodney returned from Vietnam converted into a broken-down shadow of the brilliant, hard-working and sensible young man he'd once been, his father was sure that time would eventually restore his lost nature, but eight years had gone by since his return and Rodney was still immersed in an impenetrable fog, transformed into a ghost or a zombie; in Rantoul he spent whole days lying in bed, reading novels and smoking marijuana and watching old movies on television, and when he went out it was only to drive for hours on highways that led nowhere or to drink alone in the bars around town. It was as if he was hermetically sealed inside a steel bubble, but the strange thing (or what his father found strange) is that he didn't seem to experience that situation of neglect and absolute solitude as an affliction, but rather as the triumphant fruit of a precise calculation, like the ideal antidote to his exorbitant suspicion of other people and his no less exorbitant suspicion of himself. And so at some point Rodney's parents ended up accepting, with a resignation not devoid of relief, that Vietnam had changed their son forever and that he would never go back to being who he used to be.

  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 aftern
oon 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.