A Possible Life (17 page)

Elena didn’t try to match Bruno’s invention, preferring the
wonder
of the real world. She explained to him some of the awe she had felt on discovering how humans had evolved; the puzzle of how and why they had developed a sense of self-awareness and had become burdened with the foreknowledge of their own death – a weight no other creature had to bear.

‘But wasn’t that original sin?’ said Bruno. ‘Wasn’t that the curse that God put on Adam and Eve?’

‘I don’t know. I haven’t read the Bible.’

‘How can you not know the Bible?’

Elena laughed. ‘It’s just stories, isn’t it? I’d rather deal with the real world. It’s so intricate and beautiful.’

‘We weren’t given a choice in the orphanage. Hearing the Bible stories was the best part of the day.’

‘There are more scientific explanations for things now,’ said Elena. ‘Scanners are very advanced.’

One day Bruno suddenly pulled off his shirt and said, ‘Look.’

Elena climbed off her bed and crossed the room. Bruno turned round and showed her his back. There were scars – large, raised weals that ran across his back, from one side of his ribcage to the other.

Without thinking, Elena reached out and touched one with the tip of her finger. ‘Does it hurt?’

‘No. Not now.’

‘Who did it?’

‘Some people.’

‘At the orphanage?’

‘No. Before that. But I don’t remember where. There was a long journey by train.’

He turned to face her, taking her hand away, but holding it between his own. ‘Never tell your parents. Promise.’

‘I promise,’ said Elena.

Her eyes were full of tears, but Bruno was smiling faintly, as
though
showing her his scars was a repayment for the way Elena had shared her private world with him. He carefully tucked his shirt back beneath his belt.

Sometimes it seemed to Elena that her thoughts were not fully validated until she had shared them with Bruno. His sharp edges helped reshape her; the friends she’d never had shone out of his alarming eyes.

Roberto and Fulvia’s village had once been prosperous from maize and tobacco, but it suffered more than most in the Great Slump. Local agriculture reverted to smallholdings and self-sufficiency; the village came to be no more than a dormitory for people who worked in the city. By the time Elena and Bruno were seventeen, Italy was almost as it had been in the early twentieth century. Money was concentrated in few places, mostly in the north; private enterprise continued to find funds for scientific research at postgraduate level and successive governments to provide elementary teaching for children, but there was not much in between.

Bruno had started to read a good deal of history at school, where he had been moved into the A stream. It frustrated him that Elena seemed so unaware of the twisted shape of the society they lived in. He explained to her how financial institutions had all but bankrupted the developed world; she understood, but couldn’t see what she was meant to do about it. She had one life to live. And surely every human being in history had been born into a world that was in some way peculiar: blown out of shape by cataclysm. After all, she told Bruno, the planet Earth only existed because of a galactic explosion at the start of time. ‘You’re such a scientist,’ he said in despair.

Then one summer evening, when Elena and Bruno were sitting by their oak stump, she had a message on her screen: ‘Come home at once. Emergency.’ They rode their horses back to the
neighbour’s
farm and ran home to find Elena’s father being carried out of the house by ambulance men with a blanket over his face. He had suffered a stroke; it need not have been fatal, and a few years earlier would not have been; but the district’s solitary ambulance was on another call, and when they finally got there it was too late.

Elena sat down in the kitchen. My father is dead. He who only a few minutes ago was living. The rest of time, she thought, starts now.

She went out into the stony field, knelt and lowered her face between her knees. She picked up handfuls of soil and let them trickle from her fingers on to her bowed head. She had been snatched up violently and did not recognise the place where she had been put down. She lifted up her eyes to the hills, as though some help might be there; but all she sensed was how long it would take to realign herself to this new world.

Bruno was furious. His protector had been taken from him by the bastard god of luck who had once more shat on his life. He disappeared from the house to be alone with his anger.

The days that followed were so full of things to do that Elena had no time to grieve. It was more than a week before she and Bruno were able to escape the clotted atmosphere of the house. Up by the oak tree, while the horses cropped the grass, Elena felt again the hard indifference of the earth. This time it was no consolation.

For the first time, tears came, not squeezed drops, but full drenched sobbing, as Bruno held her in his arms.

‘He was so …
kind
,’ Elena said.

‘He was a god,’ said Bruno.

As they held on to one another, Bruno did what no one had managed for Elena. Drawing on the limits of what he knew, he cobbled together a patchwork of physics, history and wishful
thinking
– a hypothetical universe in which Roberto lived on, planning such a reunion with his daughter as would make them laugh at the pain of their brief separation. In this version of existence, even as she smiled a little at its improbabilities, Elena was able to hold her father tight.

Roberto was buried in the village churchyard after a Christian service. Bruno was familiar with the words and the hopes they expressed; Elena was puzzled by the way the priest merely stated a belief in everlasting life without trying to make a case for it. They went to please Fulvia, who, having nowhere else to look, had turned to religion in her time of loss.

Afterwards, there were the mourners to be comforted and fed in the farmhouse kitchen. Elena took round plates of cake and sweets; Bruno poured cheap fizzing wine. Both longed to be alone and were dismayed when cousins from Verona sat down and made themselves at home, engaging Fulvia in reminiscences of Roberto as a boy.

A few weeks later, Fulvia told them at dinner she had some news to give them, and something in her voice made Elena glance swiftly at Bruno.

‘Children,’ she said, ‘I’ve heard from the bank how much money is left. Roberto put aside enough to pay for one year of tuition for Elena at the university. That money’s in a separate account. For the rest, there’s just a tiny bit we’d saved. We can no longer afford to live here. I’ve asked them to sell the house and the farm. I’m moving to a flat in town. I’ve found work as a cleaner, starting next month. Elena, there’ll be room on the couch for you, but, Bruno, from the end of this term I can no longer be your mother.’

‘But, Mama.’ Elena leapt up with her arms outstretched. ‘Bruno’s doing so well. He’s joined the A class. You know how much he reads.’

‘I do, I do,’ said Fulvia quickly. ‘He’s an absolute mine of information. I’m sorry, Elenissima. Dear Bruno.’ She put her hand on his wrist.

‘I … understand,’ said Bruno, the emotion of the moment making his accent thick again.

As she watched him struggle with his thoughts, Elena felt a surge of love and panic.

‘But what will you do?’ she said.

‘Try to find work,’ he said. ‘Like everyone else.’

In less dire times, Bruno would have been able to finish his studies; but there was no public money any more.

They rode together one last time to the oak tree on the ridge. The city of Mantua was invisible under heavy cloud.

‘Where will you go?’ said Elena.

Bruno’s eyes were barely visible, his head lowered against the drizzling rain. ‘Probably Trieste,’ he said. ‘I might find work in a boatyard.’

‘Stay in Mantua,’ said Elena. ‘There must be something you could do there.’

‘What? Rubbish collection?’

‘But you’d be near us.’

‘No.’

Elena put her hand on his arm. ‘But you’ve been happy with us?’

Bruno breathed in heavily. ‘It was better than the life I had before, but I never thought it would last. All the time I worked and read I didn’t expect it would lead to anything. I read because I was interested. I learned to live in my imagination.’

Elena stiffened under his coldness. ‘But what about me? I mean, you and me. We’re … friends.’ In a moment of horror she thought she might have imagined it all. Her eyes were fixed on his face.

Bruno didn’t smile or soften. ‘I didn’t have a friend before, so
I
didn’t know what it might be like, Elena. And was that it? Was that friendship?’

‘It’s more than that.’

‘How do you know?’

Elena flushed. ‘The other girls at school, people who call themselves friends, they gossip and laugh and … Well, they have fun, I’m not denying that. But you can see there’s no real closeness. They don’t feel what we do – that they’re almost the same person.’

‘How do you know that Giulia doesn’t have that feeling for Marco?’

‘Because they only talk about clothes.’

‘And what can you compare me with? You always said you never had a friend before.’

‘I didn’t need one. Now I never want to be without you.’

‘Is it “love”, then?’ said Bruno. ‘Is that what it is?’

‘Of course it is.’ Elena stood up in agitation. ‘You are so perverse, Bruno. Try to be real for once. We’re not in one of your stories. This love won’t come to you again.’

‘Is it what you felt for your father?’

‘No. It’s different. And it’s more wonderful because it’s with a stranger.’

Bruno ran his hands through his hair. He looked up at Elena and said, ‘I’ve never felt what I think is meant by joy or happiness, except through you.’

‘Thank you. You can stop there. That’s what I wanted you to say.’

But he went on, ‘Perhaps when I was young – in that camp and then the orphanage – my means of feeling these things was … burned away. Sometimes when I’ve seen the light in your eyes, when you’re laughing, I’ve felt it then. But I don’t know whether it’s your happiness or mine. And I think perhaps that makes me sick.’

‘No, no, that’s what I feel,’ said Elena with a cry, sitting down beside him, gripping his wrist in her hands. ‘If that’s sick, then we’re both ill. That’s what I love about you, Bruno. I can take joy in a creature … in a person who’s not me!’

She threw herself into his arms and he held her against his chest. He stroked her hair. ‘But how can that be?’ he said.

‘I don’t know. It’s just the way it is. And if you leave you’ll take away my only chance.’

They sat on the ground for a long time, indifferent to the rain. Elena burrowed close under Bruno’s coat, feeling his heart against her breast. Self-awareness told her time was passing; then she held him tighter and for a moment could forget.

For Elena, life without Bruno was much like life before Bruno: solitary. The difference was that by now she had made her antisocial oddity into a socially acceptable career. Her teachers had no doubt that she could make a life in research; she was the most advanced student they had ever had at the local school. She needed no urging and very little guidance from them; her knowledge already exceeded theirs in all areas of biology. The university tutors allowed her into the second year at college, since her written work, submitted with her application for finance, had already covered the first-year syllabus. This meant that with the money Roberto had left, there was only one year’s worth of fees to find, and such was the promise of Elena’s work that the regional board agreed to lend the sum in full.

It all seemed so unlikely to Fulvia, as she went off in the late afternoon to her office-cleaning job. Why on earth was her little girl so good at something – anything? But it was also a relief. She watched Elena carefully to see if she was strained or unhappy, but there was never any sign of it; this complicated work came naturally to her and she was perhaps, thought Fulvia, one of those rare people who just find a niche that fits their shape.

Their apartment in the city was on the third floor of a modern block where the bass notes of the neighbours’ entertainments boomed through the wall. Elena slept on the living-room couch, which opened up to make a fairly comfortable bed. She stayed late at the university library in the evenings; she timed her return to coincide with Fulvia’s at about ten, when they would share some pasta with beans and talk about the day.

After Fulvia had gone to bed, Elena used her screen to search for signs of Bruno. He might have changed his name, she thought; he had always been reluctant to accept that he was a Duranti, feeling it was arrogant to claim kinship with Roberto in this way. Elena sent messages to him, but he never replied; perhaps he had also changed his ID. She felt sure that he was angry, that a sense of his small gods always ready to ruin his life had prevented him from viewing the love he felt for her as real. It was as though he thought it better not to let the feeling near him.

She loved him, but he was not there. His absence was a wound that never ceased to seep and throb. It was absurd, she told herself. What mattered was the love they felt; whether or not they were in the same room was of no significance. It would not be long before, as physical mass, they were both decomposing underground; so what did it matter if meanwhile their bodies were in different places? How could that possibly be important?

So much did she rely on her rational brain to guide her life that she was angry when it failed her now, when no process of reason could stop her wound from aching.

When Elena graduated, she joined her university’s last remaining research programme, but needed work to pay for dinner and rent. She managed to find a job at the warehouse that despatched food wagons to outlying areas; she had to reconcile the orders and the loads, make sure they added up. She wondered what fantasy
Bruno
might invent about her private life: a short one, probably. When her doctorate was complete, she was offered a teaching post in the department of neuroscience; the pay was hardly better than in the food depot, but the work excited her. She thought of Bruno all the time, there was never a moment when he was not in her mind; but she was able to have other thoughts, to keep him at the edge of her awareness. If she felt him spreading out to occupy a larger or more painful space, she renewed her concentration on the work at hand. In an odd way, it helped.