A Possible Life (18 page)

What most excited everyone in the field was the idea that they might one day discover the physical basis (or ‘neural substrates’, as they put it) of human consciousness. No one was quite sure what they would do with the information when they found it, but like the unconquered moon before 1969, it was there for the taking.

The breakthrough came with the invention of a scanner that gave detailed images of brain activity. Early scanners had offered information in broad, coloured swirls; but the new SADS (synaptic activity dual spectroscopy) scanner showed what went on in the actual synapse. Chaos, apparently. There was far too much information to be helpful, until a German postdoctoral student called Alois Glockner enlisted the help of a commercial software company to help run the scans at super-slow speed. After many months of studying, he observed something striking: that there was a moment when all the data that a creature gathered from its five senses seemed to cohere with the input from its large internal organs. For a moment what was known as ‘binding’ took place, followed by ‘ignition’: so the creature – be it human, dolphin or crow – had the sensation of being a ‘self’. The moment passed too quickly to be useful; but Glockner saw it, recorded it, and, like all good brain explorers before him, planted his flag on the relevant part. He called it ‘Glockner’s Isthmus’.

In the light of Glockner, Elena’s university appealed for funds
to
buy a SADS scanner. Their plea was answered by a private individual – a woman whose grandfather had made many millions in the world of finance. His bank had been hired by the Italian government in 1998 to find a way of presenting the Italian economy as being ready for the European single currency and had, by sleight of hand, concealed billions of lire’s worth of debt. Perhaps, given what followed, there was a sense of guilt behind the donation of the SADS scanner, but no one in Elena’s department cared about the motive; they blessed the woman who had answered their plea and queued up to use the wondrous machine.

The main part of the mystery remained unanswered. Glockner had illuminated the moment of base-level consciousness; but where in the brain was the additional faculty of self-awareness that had enabled human beings to write, record, plan, compose, explore and become aware that they were human? This question was soon the focus of every university department and every hospital lucky enough to have a SADS scanner.

Elena’s researches came to a halt when she returned one summer evening to find her mother dead on the bathroom floor. At the age of fifty-three Fulvia had succumbed to the heart weakness that had carried off her mother and her grandmother.

My God, thought Elena as she sat on the side of the bed waiting for the ambulance, to think that as a child I used to long for solitude … And now my father, Bruno and my mother … gone.

The undertakers arranged for a cremation in Mantua, but an impulse made Elena take the ashes back to the village where she had been brought up. She found Roberto’s grave, borrowed a spade from her old classmate Jacopo and dug a hole large enough for the wooden container. She tried not to think about what was inside. She imagined the crematorium was not too fussy about which ashes went into which urn; the contents could equally be a makeweight of flour, other people, or sand.

As she knelt on the damp grass, Elena looked down at the small box. The atoms that had made her mother had existed since the start of time, and in the great economy of the universe would be recombined for further use, she told herself – wishing at the same time she might sometimes be spared the starkness of such knowledge. Her only hope was that for Fulvia this was a proper ending, a satisfactory termination and release. If science was correct and there was only everlasting matter in the brain, then proper death – eternal extinction of the individual – was hard to come by.

Perhaps, thought Elena, standing up, wiping her eyes on the backs of her hands, the difference between individuals was equally unclear. If not just the brain but the quirks that made the individual were composed of recycled matter only, it was hard to be sure where the edges of one such being ended and another person began.

She stood, straightened her spine and sniffed. She walked back along the road that led past the farm where she had grown up. A chained dog leapt up and barked as she passed the gate. There was a light on in the kitchen, but she did not let her eyes stray from the path that led from the farmhouse and up into the hills beyond it.

Elena had no clear plan in mind, though she was aware of a desire to have contact with her past. Her footsteps took her where they had led her so many times before, and soon she was at the site of a ruined hut, its corrugated-iron roof torn off and its drainage run smashed by large white stones.

In the mud she could make out the head of a blue-painted plaster Madonna, its broken gaze still threatening. It would have made more sense to her if there had been no trace left of what had surely been another life, different from the one she now inhabited. For all that she accepted with gratitude the shape of her childish self, she felt nothing in common with the little girl who had strained
her
lungs to bursting point to bring Emilio Rizzo across the finishing line.

On her return to Mantua, Elena found a letter from a woman called Beatrice Rossi, a Roman who specialised in the brains of dogs. Dr Rossi had read a paper of Elena’s and wondered if she would like to meet.

Elena knew of Rossi by reputation, and it was not a good one. Beatrice Rossi was puzzled by the idea of dog memory. She noticed that when a mongrel puppy called Magda slept, she seemed to have dreams that agitated her. Since Magda had never left the laboratory, however, she must be having access to some genetic or race memory of events. Rossi reasoned that if she could trick the dog’s brain into thinking it was asleep while it was actually awake, she might be able to observe a very superior dog in action – a super-dog with access to some sort of collective unconscious. Early indications were encouraging, and in her excitement Dr Rossi made exaggerated claims. Magda’s enhanced awareness would be nothing like that of humans. It would be as elevated, yet canine; ‘And this’, she wrote, ‘is what Wittgenstein meant when he said that if a lion could speak, we would not understand him.’

In the final experiment her team injected a carefully prepared solution, going into the dog’s brain via the eye socket, like the old asylum lobotomisers. Five researchers held their breath, like astronomers waiting for a new planet to float into their view. Magda ran around a bit, barked twice then fell into a profound sleep from which she was only roused some hours later by the sound of her biscuit tin being shaken.

The problem was not that the experiments had failed, but they had cost the impoverished Roman taxpayer a large sum of money. Dr Rossi had thought it wise to disappear for some time to Grosseto on the Tuscan coast.

Grieving, lonely and desperate, Elena overcame her scruples and bought a ticket to Grosseto. She went to the given address and rang bell D on a house that overlooked the sea. Having read only learned articles by Beatrice Rossi, she expected a grey-haired, bespectacled academic. When the door of the apartment opened she was surprised to see a handsome woman of about forty with dark hair cut just above the shoulder, dressed in black boots, navy skirt and tobacco-coloured cashmere sweater. Elena also noticed red lipstick as Dr Rossi smiled her welcome and rebuked the dogs, introduced as Mario, Magda and Coco, who greeted the newcomer.

They went for a walk along the beach under the high grey cloud, with Magda, the dog who had failed to reveal the divine secrets, trotting through the shallows of the sea with the others in her wake. It was a cold spring day and Elena found her city coat was hardly warm enough to keep out the wind.

After the day of the burial, she had shed no more tears for her mother; but the loss had made her weary. Every dry-eyed step in the sand was an effort when her body cried out for rest. She felt loss like a weight across her shoulders, as though that high, indifferent sky were bearing down on her. She looked out to the grey sea, through the grey invisible winds, as though she might see in them the shadow of her parents or of the one living man who could bring her peace. She saw only empty air and the nerveless agitation of the waves; she felt absence not as a void but as a force.

‘So I’ve read your papers,’ Beatrice Rossi was saying, ‘and I think we could work together. What I like is your impatience.’

‘Not very scientific, I’m afraid.’

‘Which of the old theories irritates you most?’ said Beatrice Rossi.

Elena was glad to hear flippancy for once. ‘The idea of the self as a “necessary fiction”,’ she said. ‘That electrochemical activity
in
the brain has generated this clown, this self-delusion, which natural selection has then favoured.’

Beatrice Rossi laughed. ‘Yes, that’s annoying.’

‘There are plenty more,’ said Elena.

The wind whipped Dr Rossi’s hair back from her face. ‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘What about the point-and-click theory? That we are like early home computers. That the self is like the icon of the trash can – a false cartoon representation of the real work done on the hard drive.’

Elena found herself warming to this woman, even while an academic part of her urged caution. They walked on till it began to grow dark, sharing their frustration that even the SADS scanner had not been able to provide the solutions it had promised.

‘Stay for dinner,’ said Dr Rossi. ‘There’s a good restaurant five minutes from my flat. Do you like fish? We’ll drink wine and you can stay the night if you don’t mind being woken by the dogs.’

In the end, Elena stayed three days with her new friend. Dr Rossi was affectionate; she called her ‘darling’; she made her laugh.

When she returned to Mantua there was a handwritten message on paper waiting for her at the university.

‘I was sorry to hear about your mother. I’ve been abroad. A lot has happened. I will be in touch with you again, if you allow me. My screen ID is below. Bruno.’

Elena was thirty-two years old before Bruno felt ready finally to meet again.

Bruno had use of a small house in the Sabine Hills, he said, about an hour and a half from Rome; they agreed a date, and in a sultry August, during the summer vacation from her university, Elena took the train south.

An hour after her arrival in Rome, the electric taxi turned off
the
main road to Rieti and began to take her up through hills that seemed untouched by the events of the last hundred years. Never having had much in the first place, they had had little to lose – these villages each with its dusty square, single food shop and narrow main street edged by tiny houses and tubs of dry geraniums.

The car was running along a ridge from which they could see nothing but green, wood-covered slopes and the foothills of the Apennines. Elena wondered if she would recognise Bruno after all this time. He might be bald or prematurely grey. He might have become a businessman, complacent, easy-going, bland; he could have become embittered – an outsider with a sense of grievance. Even if he was unaltered, was she herself the person who had loved him once? If we change, can love exist outside us? Is such continuing love the embodiment of our former selves?

One of his recent messages had told her in a factual way that he had married a woman called Lucia, that they lived in Zurich and had a daughter called Caterina. Elena felt no happiness for him in his married state, yet neither did she feel downcast. Whatever his feelings for this Lucia, they seemed irrelevant to what she and Bruno had known; his other family was beside the point.

As they came into the village, she felt her mouth go dry. She was scared he might be different. No: she wanted him to be changed – so it would be easier to live without him; she wanted him to have descended into the run of the middling people she saw each day, dealt with politely and cared nothing for.

Alas, that wasn’t true either, she admitted to herself. She didn’t care what pain the unaltered man would bring her: so long as he was all that she remembered, then her life was still a flame – not a chain of days, but a chance of glory.

The car turned between two buildings, up over ruts and potholes, the rubber tyres popping and grinding as they rose to a hilltop where there stood a modest rectangular house, tile-roofed,
alone
. Elena paid the taxi and made her way forward slowly, dragging her case over sharp white stones. The door of the house was locked and there was no bell or knocker; so, leaving her case, she walked round to the other side, where the valley was spread out beyond an olive grove. And there on the terrace she saw him, the intruder, standing, braced, waiting for her.

She stopped for a moment to compose herself. He was wearing a Panama hat and he had a beard, but she knew every contour of his body, the smallest inflection of his stance – his head to one side, the large hands hanging loose, then turned palm-out to welcome her.

He pushed back his hat a little so she could see him. Beneath the beard his face broke into a lopsided smile, pulling at his left eye, revealing the twisted incisor.

As she went towards him, she stumbled, so he had to step forward and catch her.

He lifted her and held her tightly to his chest. Upright again on her own feet, Elena pressed her face to his shoulder.

There was a maid called Silvia, a young woman from the village with a child who clung to her leg as she prepared dinner. The noise of clashing pans rose through the house.

Bruno showed Elena to a bedroom where she unpacked and tried to regain control of herself. She washed her face in the bathroom, applied some make-up to her eyes and managed an uncertain smile.

She left the room with automatic steps, went quickly down the stairs and out on to the terrace, where Bruno was waiting, now hatless, in clean clothes. He looked bedraggled from the shower, almost as he had looked the first day he stepped in with Roberto from the rain.

He handed Elena a glass of cold wine and poured one for himself.