Free The Speed of Light by Javier Cercas

father told me in the course of those hours. I have a much less precise memory, on the other hand, of the circumstances surrounding them.
    I arrived in Rantoul shortly after midday and found the house with no trouble. As soon as I rang the bell, Rodney's father opened the door and invited me into the living room, a spacious, bright and cosy room, with a fireplace and a leather sofa and two wingback chairs at one end, and at the other, beside the window that faced Belle Avenue, an oak table and chairs, walls lined to the ceiling with perfectly ordered books and floor covered with thick burgundy-coloured rugs that hushed footsteps. The truth is, after our unexpected phone conversation, I had almost anticipated that from the start Rodney's father would display a cordiality unheralded by our first encounter, but what I could in no way have predicted is that the diminished and intimidating man who, in dressing gown and slippers, had dispatched me without a second thought just a few months earlier would now receive me dressed with a sober elegance more suitable to a venerable Boston Brahmin than a retired, country doctor in the Midwest, apparently converted into one of those false elderly men who strive to exhibit, beneath the unwelcome certainty of their many years, the vitality and poise of someone who has not yet resigned himself to enjoying only the scraps of old age. However, as he came out with the story I had gone to hear, that deceptive fagade began to crumble and reveal its flaws, damp stains and deep fissures, and by the middle of his story Rodney's father was no longer talking with the exuberant energy he'd started with — when he spoke as if possessed by a long-deferred urgency, or rather as if his life depended on the act of talking and my listening to him, insistently looking me in the eye just as if he sought there an impossible confirmation of his tale—because by that point his words no longer quivered with the slightest vital impulse, but only the venomous and inflexible memory of a man consumed by regret and devastated by misfortune, and the grey light that entered through the window wrapping the living room in shadows had erased from his face all traces of his distant youth, leaving a bare preview of his skull. I remember that at one point I began to hear the pattering of rain on the porch roof, a pattering that almost immediately turned into a jubilant spring downpour that obliged us to turn on a floor lamp because by then it was almost night and we'd been sitting for many hours face to face, sunken in the two wingback chairs, he talking and me listening, with the ashtray overflowing with cigarette butts and on the table an empty coffee pot and two empty cups and a pile of much-handled letters that carried US Army postmarks, letters from Saigon and Da Nang and Xuan Loc and Quang Ngai, from various parts of the Batagan peninsula, letters that spanned a period of more than two years and carried the signatures of his two sons, Rodney and also Bob, but mostly Rodney's. They were very numerous, and were ordered chronologically and kept in three black cardboard document cases with elastic closures, each of which had a handwritten label with the name Rodney and the name Bob, the word Vietnam and the dates of the first and last letter it contained. Rodney 's father seemed to know them off by heart, or at least to have read them dozens of times, and during that afternoon he read me some fragments. That didn't surprise me; what did surprise me — what left me literally dumbfounded—was that at the end of my visit he insisted I take them with me. 'I don't want them any more,' he said before I took my leave, handing me the three document cases. 'Please, keep them and do with them as you see fit.' It was an absurd request, whichever way you look at it, but precisely because it was absurd I couldn't or didn't know how to refuse. Or perhaps, after all, it wasn't so absurd. The fact is, during these sixteen years I haven't