The Speed of Light

ALGEBRA OF THE DEAD

THE TRIP TO THE United States lasted two weeks during which I crossed the country from coast to coast, dominated at first by a state of mind that was at the very least contradictory: on the one hand I was expectant, keen not only to return to Urbana, to see Rodney again, but also — which perhaps amounted to the same thing — to emerge for a while from the filth of the underground and unburden myself of the weight of a past that didn't exist or that I could pretend did not exist once I arrived; but, on the other hand, I also felt a gnawing apprehension because for the first time in almost a year I was going to emerge from the state of hibernation in which I'd tried to protect myself from reality and I had no idea what my reaction would be when I exposed myself to it again in the flesh. So, though I soon realized I wasn't entirely unaccustomed to being out in the open, for the first few days I had a bit of a feeling of groping my way around, like someone taking a while to get used to the light after a long confinement in darkness. I left Spain on a Saturday and only arrived in Urbana seven days later, but as soon as I set foot in the United States I began to receive news of people from Urbana. The first stop was at the University of Virginia, in Charlottesville. My host, Professor Victor T. Davies, a renowned specialist in literature of the Enlightenment, came to pick me up at Dulles Airport, in Washington, and during the two-hour drive to the university we talked about acquaintances we had in common; Laura Burns turned out to be one of them. I hadn't had any news of Laura for years, nor of any of the rest of my friends from Urbana, but Davies had kept in frequent contact with her since she'd published a critical edition (which he described as excellent) ofLos eruditos a lavioleta,the book by Jose Cadalso; according to what Davies told me, Laura had been divorced from her second husband for several years and now taught at the University of St Louis, less than three hours' drive from Urbana.

'If I'd known you were friends, I would have told her you were coming,' Davies said ruefully.

When we got to Charlottesville I asked him for Laura's phone number and that same night I phoned her from my room in the Colonnade Club, a sumptuous eighteenth-century pavilion where official visitors to the university are put up. The call filled Laura with an exaggerated and almost contagious jubilation and, once we got beyond the first moment of astonishment and a quick exchange of information, we agreed that she'd get in touch with John Borgheson, who was now the head of the department and had organized my stay in Urbana, and in any case we'd see each other there the following Saturday.

The second city I visited was New York, where I was supposed to speak at Barnard College, an affiliate of Columbia University. The night I arrived, after the lecture, my host, a Spanish professor called Mercedes Esteban, took me out for dinner along with two other colleagues to a Mexican restaurant on 43rd Street; there, sitting at a table waiting for us was Felipe Vieri. It seems Esteban and he had met when they were both teaching at NYU and had remained close friends since then; she'd let him know about my visit, and between the two of them they'd organized that unexpected reunion. Vieri and I had stopped writing to each other many years before and, apart from the odd bit of news caught here and there (of course, echoes of my novel's success had reached Vieri's ears, too), we knew nothing about each other's lives, but during the meal my friend did what he could to fill that void. So I found out that Vieri was still teaching at NYU, still living in Greenwich Village, he'dpublished a novel and several non-fiction books, one of which dealt with the films of Almodovar; for my part I lied to him the same way I'd done in the useless letter I'd sent to Rodney, just as I'd lied to Davies and Laura: I talked about Gabriel and Paula as if they were alive and about my happy life as a successful provincial writer. But what we mostly talked about was Urbana. Vieri had brought several copies ofLinea Plural('an elusive gem,' he joked, putting on an effeminate voice and gesture and addressing the rest of the dinner guests) and a pile of photos among which I recognized one from the meeting of contributors to the journal when Rodrigo Gines told of his Dadaist encounter with Rodney while he was sticking up Socialist Workers' Party posters against General Electric. Pointing at a guy in the photo who was looking at the camera with a radiant smile, sandwiched between Rodrigo and me, Vieri asked:

'Remember Frank Solaun?'

'Of course,' I answered. 'Whatever happened to him?'

'He died seven years ago,' said Vieri, without taking his eyes off the photo, 'of AIDS.'

I nodded, but no one said anything else and we kept on talking: of Borgheson, of Laura, of Rodrigo Gines, of friends and acquaintances; Vieri had quite specific news of many of them, but during the dinner I didn't dare ask him about Rodney. I did later, in a bar at the corner of Broadway and 121st Street, near the Union Theological Seminary — the university dormitory where I was staying — where we were talking on our own until the early hours.Predictably, Vieri remembered Rodney very well; predictably, he hadn't heard anything about him; also predictably, he thought it strange that I, who had been his only friend in Urbana, should be asking him about Rodney.

'I'm sure they'll know something in Urbana,' he ventured.

With that hope I finally got to Urbana at midday on Saturday, arriving from Chicago. I remember as we took off from O'Hare and began to fly over the suburbs of the city — with the serrated line of the skyscrapers cut out against the vehement blue of the sky and the vivid blue of Lake Michigan — I couldn't help remembering my first trip from Chicago to Urbana, seventeen years earlier, in the dog days of August, in a Greyhound bus, while around me an endless expanse of brown uninhabited land rolled past, just like the land that now seemed to be held almost perfectly still beneath my plane, dotted here and there with green patches and the occasional farm; I remembered that first trip and it seemed astonishing to be about to arrive in Urbana, which at that moment, just when I was going to set foot in it again after so long, suddenly seemed as illusory as an invention of desire or nostalgia. But Urbana was not an invention. In the airport John Borgheson was waiting for me, maybe a bit more bald but no more decrepit than the last time I'd seen him, years ago, in Barcelona, in any case just as affable and welcoming and more British than ever and, as he drove me to the Chancellor Hotel and I gazed at the streets of Urbana without recognizing them, he outlined the plan for my stay in the city, told me the welcome party was set for that very evening at six and he would come and pick me up at the hotel ten minutes before. In the Chancellor I took a shower and changed my clothes; then I went down to the foyer and killed time walking up and down waiting for Borgheson, until at some point I fleetingly thought I recognized someone; surprised, I backtracked, but the only thing I saw was my face reflected in a large wall mirror. Wondering how long it had been since the last time I'd looked at myself in a mirror, I stared at the image of my face in the mirror as if I were looking at a stranger, and while I was doing so I imagined I was shedding my skin, thought that this was the port in the storm, thought about the weight of the past and the filth underground and the promising clarity outside, and I also thought that, although the objective of that trip was chimerical or absurd, the fact of embarking on it was not.

Borgheson arrived at the agreed time and took me to the house of a literature professor who had insisted on organizing the party. Her name was Elizabeth Bell and she had started at Urbana about the same time I finished there, so I only vaguely remembered her; as for the rest of the guests, the majority of them were Spanish professors and teaching assistants. I didn't know a single one, until Laura Burns rushed in, blonde and beautiful, and hugged and kissed me noisily, kissed and hugged Borgheson noisily, noisily greeted the rest of the guests and immediately took over the conversation, seemingly determined to make us pay for the two-and-a-half-hour drive it had taken her to get there from St Louis with her absolute starring role. It wasn't the first time she'd made that trip: during the conversation I'dhad with her on the phone from Charlottesville, Laura told me that every once in a while she went to visit Borgheson, who, as I found out that evening, had given up treating her like an exceptional student in order to treat her like an unruly stepdaughter whose madcap escapades he was slightly embarrassed to find irresistibly amusing. During dinner Laura didn't stop talking for a second, although, despite the fact that we were sitting beside each other, she didn't exchange a word with me alone or in an aside; what she did was talk to the others about me, as if she were one of those wives or mothers who, like symbiotic creatures, seem to live only through the achievements of their husbands or children. First she talked about the success of my novel, which she'd reviewed rapturously forWorld LiteratureToday,and later she argued with Borgheson, Elizabeth Bell and her husband — a Spanish linguist called Andres Vinas — about the real characters hidden behind the fictional characters inThe Tenant,the novella I'd written and set in Urbana, and at some point told us that the head of the department at the time had considered the head of the department who appeared in the book to be a depiction of him and had arranged for all the copies in the library to disappear, however, I was surprised that neither Laura nor Borgheson nor Elizabeth Bell nor Vinas mentioned Olalde, the fictitious Spanish professor whose exaggerated appearance — and perhaps not just his physical appearance — was so clearly inspired by Rodney. Then Laura seemed to tire of talking about me and started telling anecdotes at the expense of her two ex-husbands and especially at her own expense as the wife of her two ex-husbands. Not until after dinner did Laura cede the monopoly on the conversation, which inevitably drifted into an itemized list of the differences between the Urbana of fifteen years ago and the Urbana of today, and then into a frayed recounting of the disparate and eventful lives led by the professors and teaching assistants who'd been there at the same time as me. Everyone knew a story or a snippet of a story, but the one who seemed best informed was Borgheson, who was the longest-serving professor in the department after all, so when we stepped outside to smoke a cigarette along with Laura, Vinas and a teaching assistant, I asked him if he knew anything of Rodney.

'Shit, yeah,' said Laura. 'That's right: that nutcase Rodney.'

Borgheson didn't remember him, but Laura and I helped to remind him.

'Of course,' he finally said. 'Falk. Rodney Falk. The big guy who'd been in Vietnam. I'd completely forgotten him. He was from around here somewhere, Decatur or somewhere like that, wasn't he?' I didn't say anything, and Borgheson went on, 'Of course I remember. But I didn'thave much to do with him. You don't mean to say you were friends?'

'We shared an office for a semester,' I answered evasively. 'Then he disappeared.'

'Oh, come on now,' Laura burst in, draping herself over my shoulder. 'But the two of you were always conspiring together in Treno's like you were in the CIA. I always wondered what you spent so much time talking about.'

'Nothing,' I said. 'Books.'

'Books?' said Laura.

'He was a strange fellow,' Borgheson intervened, addressing Vinas and the teaching assistant, who were following the conversation looking like they were actually interested. 'He looked like a typical redneck, a boor, and then he never did give the impression of having his head screwed on entirely right. But he was a very cultured guy, extremely well-read. Or at least that's what Dan Gleylock, who actually was friends with him, said. Do you remember Gleylock?'

'But how could he not remember?' Laura answered for me. 'I don't know about you, but I've never met anyone else who could speak seventeen Amerindian languages. You know, John, I always thought, if Martians landed on Earth, we'd have at least one way of making sure whether they were Martians or not: send them to Gleylock and if he doesn't understand them, they're Martians alright.'

Borgheson, Vinas and the teaching assistant laughed.

'He retired two years ago,' Borgheson continued. 'He lives in Florida now, every once in a while I get an email from him. . As for Falk, the truth is I haven't heard a single word about him.'

The party ended about nine, but Laura and I went to have a drink by ourselves before she headed back to St Louis. She took me to The Embassy, a small bar, dark and narrow, the walls and floors covered in wood, located beside Lincoln Square, and as soon as we sat at the bar, facing a mirror that reflected the quiet atmosphere of the place, I remembered that a scene in my novel set in Urbana took place in that bar. As we ordered our drinks I told Laura.

'Obviously,' she smiled. 'Why do you think I brought you here?'

We stayed in The Embassy talking until very late. We talked a bit about everything, including, as if they were alive, about my wife and my son. But what I most remember about that conversation is the end of it, perhaps because at that moment, for the first time, I had the deceptive intuition that the past is not a stable place but changeable, permanently altered by the future, and that therefore none of what had already happened was irreversible. We'd asked for the bill when, not like someone summing up the evening but like someone offering a nonchalant comment, Laura said that success agreed with me.

'Why should it disagree with me?' I asked, and immediately, automatically said what I'd said every time, over the last two years, someone had made that same mistake:'Successful writers say that the ideal condition for a writer is failure. Believe me: don't believe them. There's nothing better than success.'

And then, as I also always did, I quoted the French writer Jules Renard's phrase, with which Marcos had shut up a classmate at the Faculty of Fine Arts: 'Yes, I know. All great men were ignored in their lifetimes; but I'm not a great man, so I'd prefer immediate renown.'

Laura laughed.

'No doubt about it,' she said. 'It agrees with you. But whatever you say, it's rare. Look at my second husband. The fucking gringo made a mint doing what he enjoys doing, but he never stops complaining about the slavery of success, this, that and the other. Bullshit. At least those of us who fail don't waste time trying everyone else's fucking patience with our failure.'

With deliberate naivete I asked:

'You've failed?'

Her lips curved into a scathing smile.'

Of course not,' she said in an ambiguous tone, halfway between aggressive and reassuring. 'It was just a manner of speaking. We all know only idiots fail. But tell me something: what do you call having thrown two marriages overboard, being all alone in the world, forty years old and not even having forged a decent academic career?' She paused and, since I didn't respond, went on harshly, 'Anyway, let's drop the subject. . What are you going to do tomorrow?'

The waiter came over with the bill.

'Nothing,' I lied as I paid, shrugging my shoulders. 'Take a walk around here. See the city.'

'Good idea,' said Laura. 'You know something? I have the impression that in the two years you spent in Urbana you didn't see anything, didn't understand a thing. The truth is, kiddo, it seemed like you had blinkers on.'

Laura sat there for a moment looking at me as if she hadn't just spoken, as if she was hesitating or as if she was going to apologize for her words, but then she put her glass down on the bar, stroked my cheek, kissed me on the lips, smiled gently as she leaned back from the kiss, and repeated in a low voice:

'Not a thing.'

I sat there in silence, perplexed. Laura picked her glass up again and finished off her drink in one swallow.

'Don't worry, kid,' she said then, going back to her usual tone of voice. 'I'm not going to ask you to go to bed with me, I'm a bit grown-up now to get the brush-off from a jerk like you, but at least do me the favour of wiping that fucking stunned look off your face. . So, shall we go?'

Laura gave me a lift to the Chancellor, and when she pulled up outside the door I suggested we have one last drink in the hotel bar; as soon as I pronounced those words I thought of Patricia, Marcos' wife, and regretted the suggestion: more than an insinuation, it seemed like a pathetic attempt at making amends, a consoling pat on the back. Laura shook her head.

'Better not,' she said, barely smiling. 'It's very late and I've still got a two-hour drive ahead of me.'

We hugged and, as we did, for an instant I felt a stab of anticipated nostalgia, because I sensed that was the last time I was going to see Laura, and I sensed that she sensed it too.

'I'm very glad to've seen you,' she said when I opened the car door. 'I'm glad you're well. Who knows: maybe I'llget to Barcelona one of these days, I'd like to meet your wife and son.'

Not yet all the way out of the car I looked her in the eye and thought of saying: 'They're both dead, Laura. I killed them.'

'Sure, Laura,' was what I actually said. 'Come whenever you want. They'd love to meet you.'

Then I closed the door and went into the hotel without turning around to watch her go.

The next day I woke up not knowing where I was, but that feeling only lasted a few seconds and, after reconciling myself to the astonishing fact that I was back in Urbana, while I was showering I decided to turn the lie I'd told Laura in The Embassy into truth and postpone until midday my visit to Rodney in Rantoul. So after having breakfast in the Chancellor I started walking downtown. It was Sunday, the streets were almost deserted and at first they all seemed vaguely familiar, but after just a few minutes I was already lost and I couldn't help but think that maybe Laura was right and I had spent those two years in Urbana with blinkers on, like a ghost or a zombie wandering among that population of ghosts and zombies. I had to stop a jogger who was listening to a Walkman to ask him to tell me how to get to campus; when I finally came out onto Green Street, by following his directions, I got my bearings. That was how, just as if I were following the shadow of the cheerful, fearsome, arrogant kamikaze I'd been in Urbana, I saw the Quad, the Foreign Languages Building, my old house at 703 West Oregon, Treno's. It was all more or less as I'd remembered it, except Treno's, converted into one of those interchangeable cafes that American snobs consider European (from Rome) and European snobs consider American (from New York), but which are impossible to find in either New York or Rome. I went in, ordered a Coke at the bar and, watching the sunny morning through the big windows that gave onto Goodwin, I drank a couple of sips. Then I paid and left.

At the front desk in the Chancellor they'd told me where there was a car rental agency that was open on Sundays. I rented a Chrysler there, checked my route with the guy behind the counter to make sure I remembered the way, and half an hour later, after following the same route I'dtravelled fifteen years before to see Rodney's father (up Broadway and across Cunningham Avenue and then the highway north), I arrived in Rantoul. As soon as I got into the city I recognized the intersection of Liberty Drive and Century Boulevard, and also the gas station, which was now called Casey's General Store and had been refurbished with modern gas pumps and expanded with a supermarket and cafeteria. Since I wasn't sure of being able to find Rodney'shouse, I stopped the car there, went into the cafeteria and asked where Belle Avenue was; a fat waitress in a white uniform and cap shouted some directions at me without pausing from attending her customers. I went back to the car, tried to follow the waitress's directions and, just when I thought I was lost again, saw the railway tracks and suddenly knew where I was. I backed up, turned right, passed the closed door of Bud's Bar and soon I was parked in front of Rodney's house. It didn't look much different than it had fifteen years ago, although its size and the slightly faded elegance of an old country mansion contrasted even more than in my memory with the blandly functional neighbouring buildings. Rodney had no doubt renovated it for his family, because the fagade and the porch looked freshly whitewashed, and so I was surprised to see that, between the pair of maples in the front yard, the stars and stripes of the American flag still waved from a small pole stuck in the lawn. I stayed in the car for a moment, with my heart pounding in my throat, trying to absorb the fact of finally being there, at the end of the road, about to see Rodney again, and after a few seconds I went up the porch steps and rang the bell. No one answered. Then I rang again, with the same result. A few metres from the door, to the right, there was a window that, as far as I remembered, looked into the living room where I had talked with Rodney's father, but I couldn't see inside the house through it because a pair of white curtains were drawn. I turned around. A 4 X 4 driven by an old man came round the corner, passed slowly in front of me and carried on towards town. I went down the porch steps and, while I lit a cigarette in the front yard, thought of knocking on the door of one of the neighbours' houses to ask after Rodney, but I discarded the idea after I noticed a woman in a housecoat scrutinizing me through a window on the other side of the street. I decided to go for a walk. I walked towards the tracks, beyond which the city seemed to disintegrate into a disorderly mix of vacant lots, tiny woods and cultivated fields, and then walked along parallel to them retracing the route I'd just travelled by car, and when I reached Bud's Bar again I saw they'd just opened: the door was still closed but there was a pick-up truck parked in front of it and, despite the vertical morning sun, illuminated ads for Miller Lite, Budweiser, Icehouse and Milwaukee Best shone feebly in the windows; above them was a big sign in support of the American soldiers fighting overseas: PRAY FOR PEACE. SUPPORT OUR TROOPS.

I went in. The place was empty. I sat on a stool, in front of the bar, and waited for someone to come and serve me. Bud's was still the charmless small town bar I remembered, with its faint smell of stables and its pool tables and jukebox and television screens all over the place, and when I saw a sluggish guy appear through the swinging door, wearing a Red Sox baseball cap, I wanted to think it was the same waiter who, fifteen years before, had told me where Rodney's house was. The man made some comment that I didn't entirely understand (something about not being able to trust people who start drinking before breakfast), and then when he was behind the bar, a little dazzled by the glare of the sun that came in through the windows at my back, he asked me what I wanted to drink. I looked at his stony face, his slanting eyes, his boxer's nose and the few locks of greasy hair poking out from under his sweaty cap; not without a certain surprise I said to myself that it was indeed the same man, fifteen years older. I ordered a beer, he served it, leaned his slaughterman's hands on the bar and before I could interrogate him about Rodney he asked:

'You're not from around here, are you?'

'No,' I answered.

'Can I ask where you're from?'

I told him.

'Shit,' he exclaimed. 'That's far away, huh?' He corrected himself: 'Well, not that far. Nowhere's that far away any more. Besides, you guys are in the war, aren't you?'

'The war?'

' God almighty, where've you been for the last year, buddy? Iraq, Madrid, haven't you heard anything about that?'

'Yes,' I said, after lighting a cigarette. 'I have heard something. But I'm not sure we're as much in the war as you guys.'

The man blinked.

'I don't understand,' he said.

Luckily at that moment a girl with circles under her eyes and a shiny silver stud in her belly button suddenly rushed into the bar. Without even saying hello the man began to reproach her for something, but the girl told him to go to hell and disappeared through the swinging door; I wondered if the girl was his daughter.

'Shit,' the owner said again, as if laughing at his own anger. 'These kids don't respect anyone any more. In our day things were different, don't you think?' And, as if the girl bursting into the bar had paradoxically improved the morning's outlook, the man added: 'Hey, would you mind if I joined you?'

I didn't need to answer. While he got himself a beer I thought he must be fifty-five or sixty years old, more or less the same age as Rodney; mentally I repeated: 'Our day?' The bartender had a sip of beer and set the bottle down on the bar; smoothing his hair under his Red Sox cap, he asked:

'What were we talking about?'

'Nothing important,' I hurried to say. 'But I wanted to ask you a question.'

'Fire away.'

'I've come to Rantoul to see a friend,' I began. 'Rodney Falk. I just called at his house but no one answered. It's been a while since I lost track of him, so I don't even know if he's still. .'

I stopped talking: the bartender had calmly raised his hand and, making a screen to defend himself from the light, was examining me with interest.

'Hey, I know you, don't I?' he finally said.

'You know me, but you don't remember me,' I answered. 'I was here a long time ago.'

The man nodded and lowered his hand; in a few seconds the happiness had drained from his face, to be replaced by an expression that wasn't mockery, but resembled it.

'I'm afraid you've made the journey in vain,' he said.

'Rodney doesn't live here any more?'

'Rodney died four months ago,' he answered. 'Hung himself from a beam in his shed.'

I was speechless; for a second I couldn't breathe. Stunned, I looked away from the bartender and, trying to find something to focus on behind the bar, I saw the photos of baseball stars and the big portrait of John Wayne hanging on the walls; in that decade and a half the baseball stars had changed, but not John Wayne: there he still was, legendary, imperturbable and dressed as a cowboy, with a dark red bandana knotted at his throat and an invincible smile in his eyes, like an abiding icon of the triumph of virtue. I put out my cigarette, took a sip of beer and suddenly had an icy feeling of dizziness, of unreality, as if I'd already lived through that moment or as if I were dreaming it: a solitary bar lost in the Midwest, the light pouring in through the windows and a lazy, talkative barman who, as if he were whispering a message in my ear that had no precise meaning but for me at that moment had all the meaning in the world, gave me the news of the death of a friend who I actually hardly knew and who, perhaps more than a friend, was a symbol whose scope not even I myself could entirely define, a dark or radiant symbol like maybe Hemingway had been for Rodney. And while I unthinkingly thought of Rodney and of Hemingway — of Rodney's suicide four months before in the shed of his house in Rantoul, Illinois, and of Hemingway's suicide in his house in Ketchum, Idaho, when Rodney was just a teenager — I thought also of Gabriel and Paula, or rather what happened is that they appeared to me, happy, luminous and dead, and then I felt an irrepressible desire to pray, to pray for Gabriel and for Paula and for Rodney, for Hemingway too, and at that very moment, as if a butterfly had just flown in through the open window of Bud's Bar, I suddenly remembered a prayer that appears in 'A Clean, Well-Lighted Place', that desolate story by Hemingway I had read many times since I first read it that long ago night when Rodney's father called me in Urbana to tell me the story of his son, a prayer that I knew instantly was the only suitable prayer for Rodney because Hemingway had unknowingly written it for him many years before he died, a bleak prayer that Rodney had undoubtedly read as many times I had and that, I imagined for a second, maybe Rodney and Hemingway recited before taking their lives and that Paula and Gabriel wouldn't even have had time to pray: 'Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada.' Mentally I recited this prayer while I watched the bartender approach from the back of the bar, fat and grave, or maybe indifferent, drying his hands on a rag, as if he'd stepped away for a moment out of the pure necessity to do something or as if he too had been praying. For a moment I thought of leaving; then I thought I couldn't leave; stupidly I asked:

'Did you know him?'

'Rodney?' the bartender asked stupidly, leaning against the bar again.

I nodded.

'Of course,' he smiled. 'How could I not know him? This is a small place: we all know each other here.' He finished off his beer and, suddenly talkative again, went on: 'How am I not going to know him? We were both from here, we lived nearby, we grew up together, went to school together. We were the same age, a year older than his brother Bob. Now they're both dead. . Well. You know something? Rodney was an exceptional guy, we were all sure he'd do something great, that he'd go far. Then came the war, the one in Vietnam, I mean. Did you know Rodney was in Vietnam?' I nodded again. 'I wanted to enlist too. But they wouldn't let me: a heart murmur, they said, or something like that. I suppose I was lucky, because later it turned out that it was all a lie, the politicians tricked us all, just like now: all those boys dying like flies over there in Iraq. You tell me what business we've got in that fucking country. And what business we had in Vietnam. Once I heard someone say, it might have even been Rodney, I can'tremember, I heard him say that when you go to war the least you can do is win it, because if you lose you lose everything, including your dignity. I don't know what you think, but it seems to me he was right. Rodney lost Bob over there, he was blown up by a mine. And, well, in a way I suppose he died over there too. When he came back he wasn't the same any more. It's easy to say now, but maybe deep down we all knew it'd end like this. Or maybe not, I don't know. Where did you know him from?'

'We worked together in Urbana,' I said. 'It was a while ago, at the university.''

Oh yeah,' said the bartender. 'I didn't know he made any friends there, but that was a good time for him. He seemed content. Then he left and for a long time he hardly ever came back here. When he did he came back married and with a son. He was teaching at the school, I'd never seen him better, he seemed like a new person, he seemed. . I don't know, he almost seemed like what we always thought he was going to be. Until that report came out and everything got fucked up.'

At that moment two middle-aged couples came into the bar, cheerful and in their Sunday best. The bartender stopped talking, waved a greeting, turned towards the swinging door and called the girl, but, since she didn't come out, the man had no choice but to go and attend to his customers. While he was doing so the girl reappeared and took over the order, not without exchanging a couple more jibes with the boss in passing. Then the bartender returned heavily to where I was.

'Want another?' he asked, pointing to my empty beer bottle. 'It's on the house.'

I shook my head.

'You were telling me about Rodney and some news report.'

The bartender made a disgusted face, as if his nose had just detected a gust of foul-smelling air.

'It was a television documentary, a report on the Vietnam War,' he explained half-heartedly. 'Apparently it told of horrible things. I say apparently because I haven't seen it, nor do I need to, but anyway those things came out later everywhere. In the papers, on TV, everywhere. If you'dbeen living here you'd know about it, lots of people talked about it.'

'And what did Rodney have to do with the report?'

'They say he appeared in it.'

'They say?'

'People say. I told you I didn't see the report. What they say is that the man who appeared telling these horrible things was Rodney. Apparently you couldn't recognize him, the television people had done something so he couldn't be recognized, he spoke with his back to the camera or something like that, but people started putting two and two together and soon arrived at the conclusion that it was him. I don't know, like I said. What I do know is that before they showed that report on TV and everything got complicated Rodney had already spent several weeks without leaving the house, and then after that nobody knew anything until, well, until he got himself out of the way. Anyway, don't make me talk about this, it's a terrible fucking story and I don't really know it. Who you should see is the wife. Rodney's wife, I mean. Since you've come all this way. .'

'His wife still lives in Rantoul?'

'Sure. Right around the corner, in Rodney's house.'

'I was just there and no one was home. Like I told you.'

'They must have gone out somewhere. But I bet they'llbe home for lunch. I'm not sure Jenny will be very keen to talk about these things after all she's had to put up with, but you could at least say hello.'

I thanked the bartender and went to pay for my beer, but he wouldn't let me.

'Tell me something,' he said as we shook hands and he held onto mine a second longer than was normal. 'Are you thinking of spending much time in Rantoul?'

'No,' I answered. 'Why do you ask?'

'No reason.' He let go of my hand and smoothed his thinning hair under his cap. 'But you know how these small towns are: if you do stay, take my advice and don't believe everything you hear about Rodney. People talk a lot of nonsense.'

An explosion of light blinded me when I got outside: it was noon. More confused than depressed, I started walking automatically towards Belle Avenue. My mind was a blank, and the only thing I remember having thought, mistakenly, is that this really was the end of the road, and also, not mistakenly or less mistakenly, that it was true that Rodney had found his way out of the tunnel, only that it was a different way out from the one I'd imagined. When I reached the front of Rodney's house I was soaked in sweat and had already decided the best thing to do would be to return immediately to Urbana, among other reasons because my presence here could only importune Rodney's family. I got in the Chrysler, started it, and was just about to turn around on Belle to take the road back to Urbana when I told myself I couldn't just leave like that, with all those unanswered questions strung out before me like a barbed wire fence and without even having seen Rodney's wife and son. I hadn't even finished thinking that when I saw them. They'd just turned the corner and were holding hands, walking along the sidewalk that ran between the road and the front gardens of the houses, in the green shade of the maples, and as they were coming towards me, bereft and unhurried down the empty street, I suddenly saw Gabriel and Paula walking down other empty streets, and then Gabriel letting go of his mother's hand to break into his oscillating run, smiling and eager to throw his arms around my neck. I felt my eyes were about to fill with tears. Holding them back, I turned off the engine, took a deep breath, got out again and waited for them, leaning against the car, smoking; the cigarette trembled a little in my hand. It wasn't long before they were standing in front of me. Regarding me with a mixture of worry and suspicion, the woman asked me if I was a journalist, but didn't let me answer.

'If you're a journalist you can just turn around and go back where you came from,' she ordered me, pallid and tense. 'I have nothing to say to you and. .'

'I'm not a journalist,' I interrupted.

She stood looking at me. I explained that I was a friend of Rodney's, I told her my name. The woman blinked and asked me to repeat it, I repeated it. Then, without taking her eyes off me, she let go of the child's hand, took him by the shoulder, pressed him to her hip and, after looking away for a second, as if something had distracted her, I felt her whole body ease. Before she spoke I realized that she knew who I was, that Rodney had talked about me. She said:

'You're too late.'

'I know,' I said, and I wanted to add something, but I didn't know what to add.

'My name's Jenny,' she said after a moment, and, without looking down towards her son, added: 'This is Dan.'

I held out my hand to the boy, and after an instant'shesitation he held out his and I shook it: a soft bunch of little bones wrapped in pink flesh; when he let go he looked at me too: skinny and very serious, only his big brown eyes reminded me of his father's big brown eyes. He had fair hair and was wearing corduroy trousers and a blue T-shirt.

'How old are you?' I asked him.

'Six,' he answered.

'Just turned,' said Jenny.

Nodding my approval, I commented:

'You're a man now.'

Dan didn't smile, didn't say anything, and there was a silence during which a freight train thundered past behind me, bound for Chicago, while a slight breeze alleviated the midday heat, stirring the American flag on the pole in the yard and chilling the sweat on my skin. Once the train had passed, Dan asked:

'Were you a friend of my father's?'

'Yes,' I said.

'A good friend?'

'Pretty good,' I said, and added: 'Why do you ask?'

Dan shrugged his shoulders in an adult way, almost defiantly.

'No reason,' he said.

We were silent again, a silence more awkward than long, during which I thought the barbed wire fence was going to remain intact. I stubbed out my cigarette on the sidewalk.

'Well,' I said. 'I have to go. It was nice to have met you.'

I turned around to open the car, but then I heard Jenny's voice behind me:

'Have you had lunch yet?'

When I turned around she repeated the question. I answered truthfully.

'I was just going to make something for Dan and me,'said Jenny. 'Why don't you join us?'

We went in the house, then to the kitchen and Jenny started making lunch. I tried to help, but she wouldn't let me and, while I watched Dan watching me, leaning on the door-jamb, I sat down in a chair beside a table covered with a blue and red checked tablecloth, in front of a window that overlooked a back garden where clumps of chrysanthemums and hydrangeas were growing; I supposed that the shed where Rodney hanged himself would be in that garden. Without stopping what she was doing Jenny asked me if I'd like something to drink. I said no and asked her if I could smoke.

'I'd rather you didn't, if you don't mind,' she said.

'Because of the child.'

'I don't mind.'

'I used to smoke a lot,' she explained. 'But I quit when I got pregnant. Since then I just smoke the odd cigarette every once in a while.'

Dan wandered away somewhere inside the house, as if he'd made sure everything was going well between his mother and me, and Jenny started telling me how she'd overcome her dependence on tobacco. She barely had anything in common with the woman my imagination had constructed from the curiously discrepant descriptions contained in Rodney's letters. Small and very slim, she had the kind of discreet beauty whose destiny or whose vocation is to pass unnoticed; in fact, her features were no more than correct: slightly prominent cheekbones, tiny nose, thin lips, lustreless grey eyes; two simple earrings glittered in her earlobes and set off the dark brown of her straight hair pulled back in a messy bun. She was wearing a pair of faded jeans and a blue wool sweater that barely disguised the prominence of her breasts. Otherwise, and despite her physical fragility, she radiated a sort of energetic serenity, and while I listened to her talk I almost unwillingly tried to imagine her with Rodney, but I couldn't and, almost unwillingly as well, I wondered how that woman who seemed so cool and insignificant had managed to break through my friend's emotional solipsism.

Dan appeared again at the kitchen door; interrupting his mother, he asked me if I'd like to see his toys.

'Sure,' Jenny answered ahead of me. 'Show them to him while I finish making lunch.'

I stood up and accompanied him to the same living room with its book-lined walls, window onto the porch, leather sofa and armchairs where, fifteen years before, Dan'sgrandfather had told me, over an endless spring afternoon, Rodney's unfinished story. The room had barely changed, but now the floor, covered in claret-coloured rugs, was also covered in a chaotic mess of toys that inevitably reminded me of the mess that reigned in the living room of my house when Gabriel was the same age as Dan. He, without more ado, began to show me his toys, one by one, demonstrating the characteristics and functions of each with the concentrated seriousness that children are capable of at any moment and men only when their lives are at stake and, after a while, when Jenny announced that lunch was ready, we two were already linked by one of those subterranean currents of complicity that as adults it often takes us months or years to establish.

We ate a salad, spaghetti with tomato sauce and raspberry pie. Dan completely hogged the conversation, so we hardly talked about anything other than his school, his toys, his hobbies and his friends, and we didn't refer to Rodney even once. Jenny devoted all her attention to her son, although on a couple of occasions I thought I caught her watching me. As for me, at times I couldn't avoid the insidious suspicion that I was in a dream: still shaken by the news of Rodney's death, it was hard to get rid of the strange surprise of finding myself having lunch in his house, with his widow and his son, but at the same time I felt lulled by an almost domestic tranquillity, as if this weren't the first time I'd shared a table with them. The end of the meal, however, was not calm, because Dan roundly refused to take his nap, and the only thing his mother got him to agree to after a lot of negotiating was that he'd lie down on the sofa in the living room, waiting for us to have our coffee there. While Jenny made the coffee, I went into the living room and sat beside Dan, who, after furtively tapping the keys of the Game Boy his mother had just forbidden him to play with and staring at the ceiling for a while, fell asleep in an odd position, with his arm twisted a little behind his back. I sat watching him without daring to move his arm for fear of waking him, plunged as he was in those unfathomable depths where children sleep, and I remembered Gabriel sleeping beside me, breathing in a silent, regular, infinitely peaceful rhythm, transfigured by sleep and enjoying the perfect assurance of having his father watching over him, and for a moment I felt the desire to hug Dan as I'd so often hugged Gabriel, knowing that I wasn't hugging him to protect him, but so he could protect me.

'There you go,' Jenny said quietly, hurrying into the living room with the coffee tray. 'Always the same story. There's no way he wants to have his nap, and then I have a terrible job to wake him up.'

She set the tray down on the coffee table between the two armchairs and, after gently moving Dan's twisted arm so it was resting naturally on his chest, she went to the far end of the room and opened the curtains of the porch window to let the golden afternoon sunlight shine into the room. Then she poured the coffee, sat down across from me, stirring hers, drank it down almost in one gulp, let the silence linger for a while and, maybe because I couldn't find a way to start the conversation, asked:

'Are you thinking of staying here long?'

'Just until Tuesday.'

'In Rantoul?'

'In Urbana.'

Jenny nodded; then she said:

'I'm sorry you've come such a long way for nothing.'

'I would have done it anyway,' I lied.

I took a sip of coffee and then I talked about my trip around the United States, making it clear that Urbana was just one more leg of the journey; knowing that Jenny probably already knew, I explained that I'd lived there for two years, which was when I became friends with Rodney, and that I'd wanted to return.

'I thought I could see Rodney again,' I continued. 'Although I wasn't sure. I haven't been in touch with him for a long time and a few months ago I wrote him a letter, but I suppose by then. .'

'Yes,' Jenny helped me out. 'The letter arrived not long after his death. It must be around somewhere.'

She finished her coffee and set her cup down on the table. I did the same. For something to say I said:

'I'm very sorry about what happened.'

'I know,' said Jenny. 'Rodney talked about you a lot.'

'Really?' I asked, pretending to be surprised, but only a little.

'Sure,' said Jenny, and for the first time I saw her smile: a smile at once sweet and mischievous, almost astute, which dug a tiny net of wrinkles around the corners of her mouth. 'I know the whole story, Rodney told me lots of times. He told very funny stories. He always said until he became friends with you he'd never met anyone so strange who seemed so normal.'

'That's funny,' I said, blushing as I tried to imagine what Rodney might have told her about me. 'I always thought he was the strange one.'

'Rodney wasn't strange,' Jenny corrected me. 'He was just unlucky. It was bad luck that wouldn't let him live in peace. Wouldn't even let him die in peace.'

Searching for a way to inquire into the circumstances surrounding Rodney's death, I got distracted for a moment, and when I started listening again irony had completely tainted her voice, and I had lost the thread of what she was saying.

'But, you know what I think?' I heard her say; covering up my distraction, with an interrogative gesture I urged her to go on. 'What I think is that actually it was mainly to see you.'

It took me a second to comprehend that she was talking about Rodney's trip to Spain. Now my surprise was genuine: I didn't think that I'd made the same trip Rodney had made the other way around just to see him, but I did think that in Spain I'd pursued him from hotel to hotel and that I'd finally had to travel to Madrid just to talk to him for a while. Jenny must have read the surprise on my face, because she qualified it:

'Well, perhaps not only to see you, but also to see you.' Fiddling with her hair a little while she glanced at Dan out of the corner of her eye, she leaned back in the armchair and let her hands rest on her thighs: they were long, bony, without any rings. 'I don't know,' she corrected herself. 'I might be wrong. What I do know is that he came home from the trip very happy. He told me he'd been with you in Madrid, that he'd met your wife and son, that you were a successful writer now.'

Jenny seemed to hesitate for a second, as if she wanted to keep talking about Rodney and me but the conversation had taken a wrong turn and she should put it right. We remained quiet for a moment, then Jenny began to tell me about her life in Rantoul. She told me that after Rodney's death her first thought was to sell the house and go back to Burlington. However, she soon realized that fleeing Rantoul and returning to Burlington in search of her family's protection would be an admission of defeat. After all, she said, she and Dan had their lives set there; they had their house, their friends, they didn't have any financial worries: as well as Rodney's life insurance and her widow's pension, she made a decent salary from her administrative position with a farming cooperative. So she'd decided to stay in Rantoul. She didn't regret it.

'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 thing,' 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, standing 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.

'Well, actually he's not here,' said Dan finally. After pondering for a moment he asked: 'Where are you when you're dead?'

The question wasn't directed at anyone in particular, but I waited for Jenny to answer it; she didn't answer. After a few seconds had gone by I felt obliged to say:

'Nowhere.'

'Nowhere?' asked Dan, exaggerating the interrogative tone.

'Nowhere,' I repeated.

Dan remained pensive.

'Then you're the same as a ghost?' he asked.

'Exactly,' I answered, and then I lied without knowing it:

'Except that ghosts don't exist, and the dead do.'

Dan looked away from the tombstone finally and, sneaking a look at me, made as if to smile, as if he was as sure of not having understood as of not wanting to show he hadn't understood. Then he moved away from us and walked to one edge of the cemetery, beyond which you could see in the distance a cluster of houses with paint peeling off the walls, maybe abandoned, and he began to pick up pebbles from the ground and throw them gently onto the neighbouring fields: a succession of uncultivated plots with a few weeds here and there. Jenny and I stayed beside one another, without saying anything, looking alternately at Dan and at Rodney's grave. It was getting dark and starting to feel a little cold; the sky was a dark blue, almost black, but an irregular strip of orange light still illuminated the horizon, and only the early chirping of crickets and a dim and distant rumble of traffic perturbed the impeccable silence of the hill.

'Well,' said Jenny after a while, during which I didn't think anything, didn't feel anything, not even an urge to pray. 'It's getting late. Shall we go back?'

It was almost dark by the time we got home. I had a dinner date in Urbana, with Borgheson and a group of professors, and if I wanted to get back to the Chancellor by the agreed time I'd have to leave immediately, so I told Dan and Jenny that I had to go. They both stared at me, a bit stunned, as if, rather than a surprise, my words were the prelude to a desertion; after an indecisive silence, Jenny asked:

'Is the dinner important?'

It wasn't. It wasn't at all. I told her.

'Then why don't you cancel?' asked Jenny. 'You can stay here: there're lots of bedrooms.'

She didn't have to repeat the offer: I phoned Borgheson and told him I felt tired and feverish and that, in order to be on form for the lecture the following day, it would be best if I skipped dinner and stayed in the hotel to rest. Borgheson accepted the lie without complaint, although it took a lot of doing to convince him not to come to my aid at the Chancellor. The problem solved, I invited Dan and Jenny to dinner at a restaurant called Kennedy's, a few kilometres out of town on the way to Urbana, and after dinner, while Dan played on his Game Boy with a classmate whose family was also eating there, Jenny told me how she'd met Rodney, talked about her job, her family, the life she led in Rantoul. When we left the restaurant it was almost ten. On the way back, Dan fell asleep, and when we got to the house I picked him up in my arms, carried him up to his room and, while Jenny put him to bed, I waited for her in the living room, looking at the CDs lined up in an aluminum pyramid beside the sound system. Most of them were rock and roll, and there were several by Bob Dylan. Among themBringing It All Back Home,an album that contained a song I knew well: 'It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)'. With the disk in my hands I began to hear in my head that inconsolable song that always used to bring back to Rodney the intact joy of his youth, and suddenly, as I waited for Jenny, remembering the lyrics as precisely as I did the music, I was certain that deep down that song spoke of nothing but Rodney, of Rodney's cancelled-out life, because it spoke of disillusioned words that bark like bullets and stuffed graveyards and false gods and lonely people who cry and fear and live in a vault knowing everything's a lie and who understand they know too soon there is no use in trying, because it spoke of all that and especially because it said that he not busy being born is busy dying. 'Rodney's only busy dying now,' I thought. And I thought: 'I'm not, yet.'

'Do you feel like listening to some music?' said Jenny as she came into the living room.

I said yes, and she turned on the machine and went to the kitchen. I avoided the temptation of Dylan and put onAstral Weeksby Van Morrison, and when Jenny came back, carrying a bottle of wine and two glasses, we sat down across from one another and let the record play, chatting with an effusiveness fostered by the alcohol and by Van Morrison's raw voice. I don't remember what we talked about at first, but when we'd already been sitting there for a while, I don't know exactly why (maybe owing to something I said, probably owing to something Jenny said), I suddenly remembered a letter Rodney had sent his father from hospital in Vietnam, after the incident at My Khe, a letter in which he talked of the beauty of war, of the devastating speed of war, and then I thought that since I'd been in Rantoul I had the impression that everything had accelerated, that everything had started to run faster than usual, faster and faster, faster, faster, and at some moment there had been a blaze, a maelstrom and a loss, I thought I'd unknowingly travelled faster than the speed of light and what I was now seeing was the future. And that was also when, mingled with Van Morrison's music and Jenny's voice, I felt for the first time something both unusual and familiar, something I'd maybe sensed wordlessly as soon as I'd seen Dan and Jenny coming towards me that afternoon on Belle Avenue, and what I felt was that here, in this house that wasn't my house, before this woman who wasn't mine, with this sleeping child who wasn't my son but who was sleeping upstairs as if I were his father, that here I was invulnerable; I also wondered, with a twinkling commencement of joy, whether I wasn't obliged to give some meaning to Rodney's suicide, whether the house I was in wasn't a reflection of my house and Dan and Jenny a reflection of the family I'd lost, I wondered if that was what one saw upon emerging from the filth underground out into the open, if the past was not a place permanently altered by the future and nothing of what had already happened was irreversible and what was there at the end of the tunnel echoed what had been there before entering it, I wondered if this was not the true end of it all, the end of the road, the end of the tunnel, the breach in the stone door. This is it, I said to myself, possessed by a strange euphoria. It's over. Finito. Kaput.

As soon as I finished thinking that thought I interrupted Jenny.

'There's something I haven't told you,' I said.

She looked at me, a little surprised by my abruptness, and suddenly I didn't know how I was going to tell her what I had to tell her. I figured it out a second later. I took the photograph of Gabriel, Paula and Rodney on Les Peixe-teries Velles bridge out of my wallet and handed it to her. Jenny took it and for some moments examined it attentively. Then she asked:

'Is this your wife and son?'

'Yes,' I answered and, as if another person were speaking for me, I continued as a cold thread ran up my spine like a snake: 'They died a year ago, in a car accident. It's the only photo of them I kept.'

Jenny looked up from the photo, and at that moment I noticed the Van Morrison CD had stopped playing; reality seemed to have slowed down, gone back to its normal speed.

'What have you come here for?' asked Jenny.

'I don't know,' I said, although I did know. 'I was in a pit and I wanted to see Rodney. I thought Rodney had been in a pit too and he'd got out of it. I think I believed he could help me. Or rather: I think I believed he was the only person who could help me. . Well, I realize this all sounds a bit ridiculous, and I don't know if it makes much sense to you, but I think it's what I thought.'

Jenny scarcely took a moment to answer.

'It makes sense,' she said.

Now it was me who looked at her.

'Really?'

'Sure,' she insisted, smiling gently, again digging a tiny net of wrinkles around the corners of her mouth. For a second I knew or suspected that, because she'd lived with Rodney, her words did not stem from compassion, but that it was true she understood, that only she could understand; for a second I felt the soft radiance of her attractiveness, I suddenly believed I understood the attraction she'd exerted over Rodney. Almost as if she considered the matter settled, or as if she thought it barely merited any more time devoted to it, she went on: 'Guilt. It's not so hard to understand that. I could feel guilty for Rodney's death too, you know? Finding guilty parties is very easy; the difficult thing is accepting that there aren't any.'

I wasn't sure what she meant by those words, but for some reason I remembered others that Rodney had written to his father: 'Things that make sense are not true,' Rodney had written. 'They're only sawn-off truths, wishful thinking: truth is always absurd.' Jenny finished her glass of wine.

'I have a copy of the documentary,' she said, as if she hadn't changed the subject and was about to give me her real answer to the doubt I'd just formulated. 'Do you want to watch it?'

Because I wasn't expecting it, the question disconcerted me. First I thought I didn't want to watch the programme; then I thought I did want to watch it; then I thought I wanted to watch it but I shouldn't watch it; then I thought I wanted to watch it and should watch it. I asked:

'Have you watched it?'

'Of course not,' said Jenny. 'What for?'

Just as if my question had been an affirmative reply Jenny went upstairs, after a while she returned with the videotape and asked me to come with her to a room between the kitchen and the living room, at the foot of the stairs; in the room was a television, a sofa, two chairs, a coffee table. I sat on the sofa while Jenny turned on the television, put the video in and handed me the remote control.

'I'll wait for you upstairs,' she said.

I leaned back on the sofa and pressed play on the remote control; the programme began immediately. It was calledBuried Secrets, Brutal Truthsand lasted about forty minutes. It combined archive images, in black and white, from documentaries about the war, and current images, in colour, of villages and fields in the regions of Quang Ngai and Quang Nam, along with some statements made by peasants from the area. Two threads stitched the two blocks of images together: one was a dispassionate voice-over; the other, the testimony of a Vietnam veteran. The voice-over told from the outside the story of the atrocities committed thirty-five years earlier by a bloodthirsty platoon of the 101st Airborne Division of the United States Army that operated in Quang Ngai and Quang Nam, converting the regions into a vast killing field. The platoon, known as Tiger Force, was a unit composed of forty-five volunteers which acted in coordination with other units, but which functioned with a great degree of autonomy and barely any supervision, its members distinguishable by their striped camouflage uniforms, in imitation of tiger stripes; the catalogue of horrors the report documented knew no bounds: Tiger Force soldiers murdered, mutilated, tortured and raped hundreds of people between January and July 1969, and acquired a reputation among the local population for wearing around their necks, like necklaces of war that brutally commemorated their victims, collections of human ears strung together on shoelaces. Towards the end of the broadcast the voice-over mentioned the Pentagon report that the White House had shelved in 1974 with the excuse that it didn't want to reopen the wounds of the recently concluded conflict. As for the veteran, he was shown sitting in an armchair, unmoving, backlit from a window, so that a dark shadow obscured his face; his voice, on the other hand — gruff, icy, withdrawn — had not been distorted: it was clearly Rodney's voice. The voice told anecdotes; it also made comments. 'It's difficult to understand it all now,' the voice said, for example. 'But there came a time for us when it was the most natural thing in the world. At first it was a bit of an effort, but you soon got used to it and it was just like any other job.' 'We felt like gods,' the voice said. 'And in a certain way we were. We had the power of life and death over whoever we wanted and we exercised that power.' 'For years I couldn't forget each and every one of the people I saw die,' said the voice. 'They appeared to me constantly, just as if they were alive and didn't want to die, just like ghosts. Then I managed to forget them, or that's what I thought, although deep down I knew they hadn't gone away. Now they're back. They don't ask me to settle the score, and I don't. There's no score to settle. It's just that they don't want to die, they want to live in me. I don't complain, because I know it's fair.' The voice closed the report with these words: 'You can believe we were monsters, but we weren't. We were like everybody else. We were like you.'

When the report ended I remained sitting on the sofa for a while, unable to move, my eyes glued to the blizzard on the television screen. Then I took the tape out of the video, turned off the television and went out on the porch. The city was in silence and the sky full of stars; it was a little cold. I lit a cigarette and started smoking it as I contemplated the silent night of Rantoul. I didn't feel horror, I didn't feel nauseous, not even sadness, for the first time in a long time I didn't feel anguish either; what I felt was something strangely pleasant that I'd never felt before, something like an infinite exhaustion or an infinite and blank calm, or like a substitute for the exhaustion or the calm that left only the inclination to keep looking at the night and to weep. 'Our nada who art in nada,' I prayed. 'Nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada.' When I finished smoking my cigarette I went back inside the house and upstairs. Jenny had fallen asleep with a book on her lap and the light on; Dan was curled up beside her. The room next to hers also had the light on and the bed made, and I guessed Jenny had made it up for me. I turned off the light in Jenny and Dan's room, turned off mine and got into bed.

It took me a long time to get to sleep that night, and the next day I woke up very early. When Dan and Jenny got up I already had breakfast almost ready. While we ate, a little hurriedly because it was Monday and Dan had to go to school and Jenny to work, I avoided Jenny's eyes a couple of times, and when we finished I offered them a lift in the car. Dan's school was, Jenny said, as we parked in front of it, the same one where Rodney had worked: a three-storey brick building with a large iron gate guarding access to the schoolyard, surrounded by a metal fence. In front of the entrance a group of parents and children were already congregated. We joined the group and, when the gate finally opened, Dan gave his mother a kiss; then he turned to me and, scrutinizing me with Rodney's big brown eyes, asked me if I was going to come back. I said yes. He asked me when. I said soon. He asked me if I was lying to him. I said no. He nodded. Then, because I thought he was going to give me a kiss, I began to crouch down, but he stopped me by holding out his hand; I shook it. Then we watched him disappear into the schoolyard with his preschooler knapsack, among the ruckus of his classmates.

While we walked back to the car Jenny suggested we go for a last cup of coffee: she still had a while before she had to start work, she said. We went to Casey's General Store and sat beside a window that overlooked the gas pumps and, beyond them, the intersection at the edge of the city; a country and western tune came quietly out of the speakers. I recognized the waitress who served us: she was the same one who'd given me haphazard directions to Rodney's house on Sunday. Jenny exchanged a few words with her and then we ordered two coffees.

'When Rodney came back from Spain he told me you wanted to write a book about him,' said Jenny as soon as the waitress had gone. 'Is that true?'

I'd been prepared for Jenny to ask me about the documentary, but not for what she actually asked. I looked at her: her grey eyes had acquired a violet-toned iridescence and revealed a curiosity for more than just my answer, or that's what I thought. My answer was:

'Yes.'

'Have you written it?'

I said no.

'Why?'

'I don't know,' I said, and remembered the conversation I'd had about the same matter with Rodney in Madrid. 'I tried several times, but I couldn't. Or I didn't know how. I think I felt his story wasn't over, or that I didn't entirely understand it.' 'And now?'

'Now what?'

'Now is it over?' she asked again. 'Now do you understand it?'

Like a sudden illumination, at that moment I thought I understood Jenny's behaviour since my arrival in Rantoul. I thought I understood why she had told me about Rodney's last days, why she'd wanted to show me his grave, why she'd wanted me to stay the night in her house, why she'd wanted me to watch the Tiger Force documentary: just as if words had the power to give meaning or an illusion of meaning to what has none, Jenny wanted me to tell Rodney's story. I thought of Rodney, I thought of Rodney's father, I thought of Tommy Birban, but most of all I thought of Gabriel and Paula, and for the first time I sensed that all those stories were actually the same story, and that only I could tell it.

'I don't know if it's over,' I answered. 'I don't know if I understand it either, or if I understand it completely.' I thought of Rodney again and said: 'Of course, you probably don't need to understand a story completely to be able to tell it.'

The waitress brought our coffee. When she'd left, Jenny asked as she stirred hers:

'What is it you don't understand? Why he did it?'

I didn't answer straight away: I tasted the coffee and lit a cigarette while I remembered the report with a shiver.

'No,' I said. 'Actually that's the only thing I do understand.' As if thinking aloud I added: 'Maybe what I don't understand is why I didn't.'

Jenny's cup remained suspended in the air, halfway between the table and her lips, while she looked at me doubtfully, as if my observation was obviously absurd or as if she'd just formed the suspicion that I was mad. Then she diverted her gaze towards the window (the sun shone right in her face, inflaming the gold earring still in view) and seemed to reflect a moment, and then turned back to look at me with a half smile as the cup concluded its interrupted voyage, wet her lips and put it down on the table.

'Well, I tried to explain it to you yesterday: you haven't killed anyone.'She lied to me,I thought in a second, in a fraction of a second.She has seen the report.As soon as she started talking again I discarded that idea. 'Not even accidentally,' she said, and then added: 'Besides, after all you're a writer, aren't you?'

'And what does that have to do with it?'

'Everything.'

'Everything?'

'Sure, don't you understand?'

I didn't say anything and we just looked at each other for a moment, until Jenny took a deep breath, let it out while diverting her gaze again towards the window and remained absorbed watching a man filling up his gas tank, and when she turned back towards me I was inundated with a kind of joy, as if I'd truly understood Jenny and understanding her would let me understand everything I hadn't yet understood. I finished drinking my coffee; Jenny did the same.

'It's getting late,' she said. 'Shall we go?'

We paid and left. Jenny came with me as far as the car, and when we got there I asked if she wanted a lift to work.

'There's no need,' she said. 'It's quite near.' She took a notebook out of her handbag, scribbled something on a page, tore it out and handed it to me. 'My email address. If you decide to write the book, keep me posted. And another thing: don't take any notice of Dan.'

'What do you mean?'

'What he said to you at the school gate,' she explained.

'Ah,' I said.

She made a face of annoyance or apology.

'I suppose he's looking for a father,' she ventured.

'Don't worry.' I ventured: 'I suppose I'm looking for a son.'

Jenny nodded, barely smiling; I thought she was going to say something, but she didn't say anything. She put her hand in her trouser pocket, in a gesture I thought shy or embarrassed, as if she couldn't quite decide how we should say goodbye, and then she held it out to me; when I took it, I noticed something cold and metallic: it was Rodney's Zippo. Jenny didn't give me time to react.

'Goodbye,' she said.

And she turned around and began to walk away. After a moment of indecision I put the Zippo in my pocket, got in the car, started it and, waiting to pull out onto the avenue that led out of Rantoul, I looked to the left and saw her in the distance, walking along the sidewalk in the shade, alone and resolved and fragile and nevertheless inspired by something like an inflexible, resolute pride, getting smaller as she went into the city, and I don't know why I thought of a bird, a hummingbird or a heron or more likely a swallow, and then I thought of the poster of John Wayne which hung on a wall of Bud's Bar and that Rodney would have seen so many times and Jenny too, no doubt, absurdly I thought of these two things while I kept watching her and waiting for her to sense my gaze at some moment and turn around and look back at me, as if that last gesture could also be an unmistakable sign of assent. But Jenny didn't turn around, didn't look at me, so I pulled out onto the avenue and drove out of Rantoul.

When I arrived in Urbana that morning I had already devised quite a precise plan of what I'd do over the next months, or rather the next years; as is logical, that plan envisaged the risk that reality would end up distorting it, but not to the point of making it unrecognizable. That, for better or worse — I'll never know whether it was more for the better or for the worse — is what happened though.

I returned to Spain after impatiently fulfilling my remaining commitments in Urbana and Los Angeles, and the first thing I did when I landed in Barcelona was look for a new flat, because as soon as I walked into the apartment in Sagrada Familia I realized it was an irredeemable pigsty. I found one immediately — a small apartment with lots of light on calle Floridablanca, not far from plaza de Espana — and as soon as I was settled in there I began to write this book. Since then I've hardly done anything else. Since then — and it's been about six months now — I feel that the life I'm living is not true, but rather false, a clandestine, hidden, apocryphal life but truer than if it were true. The change of flat made it easy to cover my tracks, so until recently no one knew where I lived. I didn't see anyone, I didn't talk to anyone, I didn't read the papers, I didn't watch television, I didn't listen to the radio. I was more alive than ever, but it was as if I were dead and writing was the only way of evoking life, the last thread that kept me joined to it. Writing and, until recently, Jenny. Because when I got back from Urbana, Jenny and I began to write to each other almost daily. At first our emails were exclusively concerned with the book I was writing about Rodney: I asked her questions, requested details and clarifications, and she answered me with diligence and application; then, little by little and almost imperceptibly, the messages began to be about other things — about Dan, about Rantoul, about her life and Dan's in Rantoul, about me and my invisible life in Barcelona, once in a while about Paula and Gabriel — and after a few weeks I'd discovered that this method of communication allowed for or encouraged more intimacy than any other. That was how I began a long, slow, complicated, sinuous and delicate process of seduction. Perhaps that's not quite the right word: perhaps the exact word is persuasion. Or maybe demonstration. I don't know which word Jenny would choose. It doesn't matter; what matters aren't the words, but the facts. And the fact is that, while I was as deeply involved in that process as in the book I was writing, I never stopped imagining my life when both were finished and I would live with Dan and Jenny in Rantoul. I imagined a placid and provincial life like the one I'd once feared and then had and later destroyed, a life that was also apocryphal and true, in the middle of nowhere. I imagined myself getting up very early, having breakfast with Dan and Jenny and then taking them to school and work and then shutting myself up to work until it was time to go and pick them up, first Dan and then Jenny, I'd go and pick them up and we'd go home and get dinner ready and have dinner and then after dinner we'd play or read or watch television or talk until sleep would overtake us one by one, and none of the three of us would ever want to admit, even to ourselves, that this daily routine was in reality a kind of spell, a magic trick with which we wanted to make the past reversible and bring the dead back to life. Other times I imagined myself lying in a hammock, in the back garden, beside the shed in which, once upon a time so long ago that it no longer seemed real, Rodney hanged himself, on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon at the end of spring or the beginning of the burning hot Rantoul summer, with Dan and his friends shouting and playing around me while I haphazardly read Hemingway and Thoreau and Emerson, sometimes even Merce Rodoreda, while I listened to Bob Dylan and shared sips of whisky and tokes of marijuana with Jenny, who came and went from the house to the garden: from there Gabriel's and Paula's deaths would be left very far away, Vietnam would be left very far away, success and fame would be left as far away as the miniscule clouds that every now and then blocked out the sun, and then I would see myself as the hippie Rodney must have been more than thirty years ago and that he never wanted to stop being. That's how I saw myself, that's how I imagined myself, happy and a little high, somehow converted into Rodney or into the instrument of Rodney, watching Dan as if I were really watching Gabriel, watching Jenny as if I were really watching Paula. And while I was imagining my happy future life in Rantoul in those months in Barcelona and continuing the long, slow, sinuous seduction or persuasion of Jenny by the intimacy of email, not one single day went by when I did not sit down at this desk and devote myself fully to the long-postponed task entrusted to me of writing this story that maybe Rodney had always been training me to write, this story I don't understand nor will I ever understand and that nevertheless, as I imagined as I was writing it, I was obliged to tell because it can only be understood if it's told by someone who, like me, will never entirely understand it, and especially because it's also my story and also Gabriel's and Paula's. So for a long time I wrote and seduced and persuaded and demonstrated and imagined, until one day, when I felt the process of seduction was mature and that, although I didn't yet know exactly how this book was going to end, I undoubtedly almost had the ending in my sights, I decided to state my plans openly to Jenny. I did so fearlessly with no beating about the bush, just as if I were reminding her of a pledge we'd both made some time ago like someone accepting a happy fate, because by that stage, after months of writing to her almost daily and insinuating ever less cryptically my intentions, I was sure my words couldn't come as a surprise to her, and also that she'd receive them with delight.

It didn't happen like that. Incredibly — at least incredibly to me — both certainties proved false. Jenny took a while to answer my message, and when she finally did it was to thank me for my proposal and immediately turn it down affectionately but categorically. 'It wouldn't work,' Jenny wrote to me. 'Anticipating something is not enough to make it happen, neither is wanting it. This isn't algebra or geometry: when you're talking about people, two plus two never makes four. I mean none of us can replace anybody: Dan can't replace Gabriel, I can't replace Paula; you, no matter how much you want to, can't replace Rodney.'. . 'Finish the book,' Jenny concluded. 'You owe it to Rodney. You owe it to Gabriel and to Paula. You owe it to Dan and to me. Most of all you owe it to yourself. Finish it and then, if you feel like it, come and spend a few days with us. We'll be waiting for you.' Jenny's reply left me dumbfounded, unable to react, as if someone had just punched me and I didn't know who or how or why they'd punched me. I reread it, I reread it again; I understood all the words, but found it impossible to take them in. I was so convinced that my future was in Rantoul, with Dan and with her, that I hadn't even imagined an alternative future if that one proved illusory or failed. Furthermore, Jenny's refusal was so unequivocal and her arguments so watertight that I didn't have the strength to try to refute them and insist on my proposal.

I didn't answer Jenny's message: there wasn't going to be any magic trick, there wasn't going to be any spell, I wasn't going to recover what I'd lost. I suddenly saw myself returning to my old underground life; I suddenly thought I understood it was absurd to keep writing this book. And I was about to abandon it definitively when I discovered exactly how it ended and why I had to finish it. It happened a little while after I found a cigarette packet full of joints sticking out of the slot of my mailbox as I was on my way out to have lunch one afternoon. I couldn't help but smile. The next morning I phoned Marcos, and two days later we arranged to meet for a beer in El Yate.

It was Marcos who chose the bar. When I arrived, quite a while before the time we'd arranged, my friend was already there, sitting on a stool, his back to the door and elbows on the bar. Without a word I sat down beside him and ordered a beer; Marcos didn't say anything either, or look up from his glass. It was a Thursday in the middle of October, and the last light of the afternoon was about to fade from the windows overlooking the corner of Muntaner and Arimon. While I was waiting for my beer I asked:

'How did you track me down?'

Marcos sighed before answering.

'By accident,' he said. 'I saw you on the street the other day and followed you. I knew you'd moved, but you could at least have let me know. I'm not rich enough to be throwing marijuana away.'

'You haven't thrown it away,' I said. 'I'm sure whoever rented the apartment after me was very grateful to you.'

'Very funny.' He turned to look at me. Then he said: 'How are you?'

With some apprehension I too turned around. At first glance he didn't remind me of the aged forty-year-old of our last encounter, in the MACBA or the Palau Robert, the same disastrous night I tried to seduce Patricia; he just looked tired, maybe bored: in fact, the faded jeans, the baggy blue sweater and the lighter blue untucked shirt gave him an air of vaguely youthful sloppiness, not entirely contradicted by his thinning, grey hair or his thick and slightly old-fashioned tortoiseshell glasses; two days' stubble shadowed his cheeks. As I was studying him I felt myself studied by him, and before answering his question I wondered if I was reminding him of a ghost or a zombie.

'Fine,' I lied. 'And you?'

'Me too.'

I nodded approvingly. The bartender brought my beer, I took a sip, lit a cigarette and then I gave a light to Marcos, who stared at Rodney's Zippo; I looked at it too: for a moment it seemed a remote and strange object, a tiny meteorite or a fossil or a survivor of an ice age; for a second it seemed like the dog engraved on it wasn't smiling at me, but mocking me. I put the lighter down on the bar, on top of the cigarette packet; I asked:

'How's Patricia?'

Marcos sighed again.

'We split up a year or so ago,' he said. 'I thought you knew.'

'I didn't know.'

'Well, it doesn't matter,' he said as if it really didn't matter, running his hand over his stubble; I noticed a blotch of paint darkening his ring finger. 'I suppose we'd been together too long and, well. . She's been living in Madrid for a few months now, so I haven't seen her.'

I didn't say anything. We kept drinking and smoking in silence, and at some point I inevitably remembered the last time I'd been in El Yate, sixteen years before, with Marcos and with Marcelo Cuartero, when he suggested I go to Urbana and the whole thing started. I looked along the bar. I remembered a luxurious uptown place, inaccessible given our destitute finances, frequented by executives and shiny with mirrors and polished wood, but the place where I now found myself seemed (or at least seemed to me) more like a dark village tavern: certain details of the decoration pathetically strained to mimic the interior of a yacht — dull seascapes, lamps in the shape of anchors, a pendulum clock in the shape of a tennis racket — but there were also horrible pink curtains tied back against window frames painted a horrible green, trays of rancid-looking tapas lined up on the unpolished bar, slot machines blinking their urgent promise of riches, the waiters' uniforms dusted with dandruff and the clientele of solitary ladies drinking Marie Brizard and solitary men drinking gin, who every once in a while exchanged comments seasoned by alcohol and cynicism, all of which drew El Yate closer to Bud's Bar than to my memory of El Yate. Suddenly I felt at ease there, with my cigarette and beer in hand, as if I should never have left that Barcelona bar with its village bar atmosphere; suddenly I asked Marcos why he'd suggested we meet precisely there.

'Why did you suggest we meet here?' I asked.

'I haven't been here for ages,' he said. And he added: 'It hasn't changed a bit.'

Perplexed, I asked him if he meant the bar.

'I mean the bar, the calle Pujol, the neighbourhood, all of it,' he answered. 'I bet even our apartment is exactly the same, for fuck's sake.'

I smiled.

'You're not going to start getting nostalgic?'

'Nostalgic?' The interrogative tone contained not surprise but annoyance, an annoyance that verged on irritation. 'Why nostalgic? That wasn't the best time we ever had in our lives. It might seem like it sometimes, but it wasn't.'

'No?'

'No.' He pursed his lips in a disparaging gesture. 'The best is what's happening to us now.'

There was a silence, after which I heard that Marcos was laughing; it was contagious and I started laughing too, and for a while a feeble, strange and uncontrollable laughter kept us from talking. Then Marcos suggested we have another beer and, while they were pouring it, for something to say I asked him how his work was going. Marcos took a sip of beer; it left a trace of foam around his mouth.

'About a year ago, just after Patricia and I split up, I stopped painting,' he explained. 'I did nothing but suffer. I hadn't sold a bloody painting for months and I couldn't even save face by blaming the market, that handy gentleman, because I felt that what I was painting was rubbish. So I stopped painting. You don't know how good it felt. Suddenly I realized that it was all an absurd misunderstanding: someone or something had convinced me I was an artist when I really wasn't one, and that's why I suffered so much and everything was so shit. Twenty years pulling in one direction when in reality I wanted to go in another, twenty years down the drain. . A damned misunderstanding. But, instead of getting depressed, as soon as I understood that I felt better, it was as if I'd taken a huge weight off my shoulders. So I decided to change my life.' He took a drag on his cigarette and started to laugh, but he choked on the smoke and a cough interrupted his laughter. 'Change my life,' he continued after a gulp of beer to clear his throat. 'That's a laugh. You've got to be a jerk to think you can change a life, as if after forty years we still didn't know that it's not us that changes life, but life that changes us. Anyway. . the thing is I rented a house in the country, in a village in Cerdanya, and said to hell with everything. The first month was great: I walked, looked after the vegetable plot, chatted with the neighbours, I didn't do anything; I even met a girl, a nurse who worked in Puigcerda. It seemed like paradise, and I started making plans to stay there. Until the shit hit the fan. First there were problems with the neighbours, then the girl got bored with me, then I started getting bored. Suddenly the days felt endless, I wondered what the hell I was doing there.' He was quiet for a moment and then he asked: 'You know what I did then?' I could imagine, I almost knew, but I let Marcos answer his own question. 'I started painting. Who'd have fucking believed it, eh? I started painting out of boredom, to kill time, because I had nothing better to do.'

I thought of my interrupted book and of the two joyful kamikazes Marcos and I had imagined ourselves to be sixteen years earlier and of the masterpieces we were going to create to take revenge on the world. I said:

'It seems as good a reason as any.'

'You're wrong,' Marcos disagreed. 'It's the best reason. Or at least the best that's ever occurred to me. The proof is that I've never had as much fun painting as I have since then. I don't know whether what I've painted is good or bad. It might be bad. Or it might be the best stuff I've ever painted. I don't know, and the truth is it doesn't matter. The only thing I know is, well. .' He hesitated a moment, looked at me and I thought he was going to burst out laughing again. 'The only thing I know is that if I hadn't painted it I'd still be living in that fucking village.'

Although the hands of the pendulum clock in the shape of a tennis racket were frozen at five o'clock, it must have been after nine, because the solitary drinkers of gin and Marie Brizard had disappeared from El Yate and the waiters had been serving dinner at the tables by the windows for a while; beyond that it was completely dark, and the lights of the cars and street lamps and traffic lights made the street look like a shimmering aquarium. When Marcos tired of his monologue about the paintings he'd done or imagined or sketched in Cerdanya, he asked:

'And you?'

'What about me?'

'Are you writing?'

I said no. Then I said yes. Then I asked him if he wanted to have another beer. He said yes. While we drank it I told him I'd spent the last few months writing a book, that I'd given up on it two weeks ago and I didn't know if it was worth finishing, or if I even wanted to finish it. Marcos asked me what the book was about.

'Lots of things,' I said.

'For example?' he insisted.

That was when, at first reluctantly, almost just to repay Marcos's confidences, then enthusiastically and finally transported by my own words, I began to talk to him of the apartment we shared on the calle Pujol, of our encounter with Marcelo Cuartero in El Yate, of my trip to Urbana and my work in Urbana and my friendship with Rodney, of Rodney's father, of Rodney's years in Vietnam, of my return to Barcelona and then to Gerona, of Paula and Gabriel and my encounter with Rodney in the Hotel San Antonio de La Florida in Madrid, of the two tragedies there are in life and of the joy of success and its euphoria and humiliation and catastrophe, of Gabriel's and Paula's deaths, of my purgatory in the apartment in Sagrada Familia, of tunnels and undergrounds and stone doors, of my trip to the United States and my return to Rantoul, of Dan and Jenny, of the crimes of Tiger Force and of Tommy Birban's death and of Rodney's suicide, of my return to Barcelona, of my frustrated return to Rantoul, of the illusions of algebra and geometry. I talked to him of all these things and others, and as I did so I knew that Jenny was right, that Marcos was right; I should finish the book. I should finish it because I owed it to Gabriel and Paula and Rodney, also to Dan and Jenny, but most of all because I owed it to myself, I would finish it because I was a writer and I couldn't be anything else, because writing was the only thing that could let me look at reality without being destroyed by it or having it collapse on top of me like a burning house, the only thing that could give it meaning or an illusion of meaning, the only thing that, as had happened during those months of seclusion and work and vain hope and seduction or persuasion or demonstration, had allowed me to glimpse for real and without knowing it the end of the road, the end of the tunnel, the breach in the stone door, the only thing that had got me out from under the ground into the open and had allowed me to travel faster than the speed of light and recover part of what I'd lost among the crash of the collapse, that's why I'd finish the book, and because finishing it was also the only way that, albeit enclosed in these pages, Gabriel and Paula would somehow stay alive, and I would stop being who I'd been up till then, who I was with Rodney — my fellow, my brother — to become someone else, to be somehow and partially and forever Rodney. And at some point, while I was still telling Marcos about my book, already knowing that I was going to finish it, I was struck by the suspicion that perhaps I hadn't given up on it two weeks earlier because I hadn't wanted to finish it or wasn't sure if it was worth finishing, but because I didn't want it to finish: because, when I was already glimpsing its ending — when I almost knew what I wanted this story to say, because I'd almost already said it; when I'd almost got where I wanted to get to, precisely because I'd never known where I was going — the vertigo of not knowing what would be on the other side got to me, what abyss or mirror was waiting for me beyond these pages, when I again had all roads before me. And that was when I didn't only know the exact ending of my book, but also when I found the solution I was looking for. Euphoric, with the last beer I explained it to Marcos. I explained that I was going to publish the book under a different name, a pseudonym. I explained that before I published it I'd completely rewrite it. I'll change all the names, the places, the dates, I explained. I'll lie about everything, I explained, but only to better tell the truth. I explained: it will be an apocryphal novel, like my clandestine and invisible life, a false novel but truer than if it were true. When I finished explaining it all, Marcos remained quiet for a few seconds, smoking with an absent expression; then he drank down the rest of his beer.

'And how does it end?' he asked.

I looked around the almost empty bar and, feeling almost happy, answered:

'It ends like this.'