A Possible Life (21 page)

One of the more amusing was in literature, where a Paris literary critic called Jean Guichard pointed out that readers who had struggled with Proust’s long novel
À la recherche du temps perdu
could now see that the book’s underlying premise – that experience was not fully lived without the faculty of imaginative recollection, or memory, being present – was a description of the function of the Rossi–Duranti Loop 150 years
avant la lettre
.

In clinical psychology there were implications for autism; in art history there was new light thrown on primitive painting, where it seemed that the caves at Chauvet and Altamira, far from proving humans had been ‘human’ earlier than had previously been believed, proved by carbon dating the exact opposite: that they could paint impressively before the key mutation. Like Darwin’s big idea two hundred years before, the Loop was in itself quite simple; the fun was to be had in its ramifications.

Elena and her team had been able to show that it was ‘neurodevelopmental’. In other words, it took time to get going: the circuitry was completed at the age of about five and continued to strengthen as the individual grew, up to the age of sixty or more.
That
was why older people were happier and wiser and calmer. The puzzle of babies – so human to the loving parent’s eye, yet obviously not quite ‘all there’ – was also solved: the entrance to the Loop was like a hymen and was not open until the chemical activity of memories accumulated sufficiently to break it; the critical mass of memory needed was acquired after 58 to 62 months of living. A new scanner was able to show the moment of rupture in a five-year-old’s brain.

The last objection to the theory was to the on/off nature of the link. If the iron bar had deprived the Kebab Man of the ability to switch off, did the normal brain not need an agency to switch on? Elena showed that the objection was unscientific. It did not need a ‘soul’ to make the motor neurones in the brain instruct the hand to scratch the head. The entire transaction was between pieces of matter. Why were connections between brain cells any different? Merely to ask the question was the mark of a seventeenth-century, dualist turn of mind. The idea of the ‘soul’ was dead, killed by the Loop; likewise the idea of self. Educated humans knew that they were merely matter that coheres for a millisecond, falls apart and is infinitely reused. On this defiant note, Elena collected her notes and left the platform to resigned applause.

There was a party after the lecture, at which journalists mingled with people from the institute and guests from European universities. Relieved to have delivered her talk successfully, Elena drank more wine than usual. To clear her head, she decided to walk for a while before taking the tram.

She had received honours from many institutions and it embarrassed her that it was she, more than Beatrice Rossi, who was chosen to receive medals and doctorates, bouquets and grand conference hotel rooms. The world had decided that the mousy one was the brains and the glamorous one the free-riding opportunist. Nothing that Elena could say about her colleague’s
dominant
role would change the popular need to see things in the bright light of received ideas. In Europe, during Elena’s lifetime, governments and unions, currencies and treaties, had come and gone with disorientating speed, but certain popular superstitions, she supposed, would never change.

It was not just in the province of harmless journalistic clichés, however, that the world seemed reluctant to take on new ideas. Elena knew that most educated people ‘accepted’ the implications of the Loop without quite – in a true and personal sense – believing them. The number of those who adhered to the established religions had dwindled, but cults of the mystical and the irrational attracted new members. Even for the minority who were strong enough to take on all the philosophical implications, the daily questions persisted. Knowing one was comprised of recycled matter only and that selfhood was a delusion did not take away the aching of the heart.

And the odd thing was, Elena now admitted, slightly drunk as she walked through the darkness of a warm spring evening, her lecture notes clasped in her hand, that she herself was one of those who carried on as though the work she had published did not exist. She knew it to be truthful, valid and endlessly provable, but she didn’t allow the implications to affect the way she lived.

Back in her flat, she kicked off her shoes, made the large screen rise from its housing and chose an old film to watch. Then with a final glass of wine, she washed down a tablet of Elysiax. Synthesised under government licence, Elysiax combined the effects of THC, the active ingredient of cannabis, with that of MDMA, the basis of the old dance drug Ecstasy. It was available in different proportions of the two ingredients; Elena’s preference was for the green, THC-dominant, tablet. She liked the marijuana sense of wonder and found the euphoric boost of MDMA prevented her from shaking her awed head
too
long over the sound of a six-string guitar, like a Laurel Canyon groupie in 1968.

She stretched out on the couch and closed her eyes.

Before Bruno she had had one lover, a fellow teacher in Mantua called Andrea. Fifteen years older than Elena, he was a large man with tweed jackets, a disagreeable wife and three children. She enjoyed his company and looked forward to the evenings when he came to the flat where she lived alone after Fulvia’s death. But when he was away at a conference or with his family she hardly thought of him at all.

After she stopped seeing Bruno, she had had one more lover. Carlo was a musician in an orchestra in Turin, and she had met him at the opening of a new concert hall. He was handsome – much more so than Andrea – but reluctant. Having sex with him was unpredictable; he sometimes seemed aggressive, sometimes ashamed, and Elena had to coax him into talking afterwards. One day as they were lying naked on her bed, she began to laugh at the indignity of what they had just done. Carlo was at first affronted, then relieved. He put on his clothes and they became friends. It was a relief to Elena not to have to show her body with all its intimate folds to this violinist any more. Later, he visited her from Rome with his boyfriend.

That left Bruno. Making love to him had not seemed a separate act, but an extension of intimacy. How oddly well they seemed to fit together, she sometimes thought. He must have been a head taller than she was, yet when they danced, as he liked to do, her body slotted into his as though designed: her head rested comfortably on his shoulder while something of him swelled against her hip. In bed they were like a jigsaw where every piece fitted first time: not much of a puzzle, but a reliable delight.

To live, as now she did, without the fearful joy of communion with another person was not a decision that Elena had taken; it was
an
imposed state of affairs to which she had adjusted. Every day she relived the first evening at the house in the Sabine Hills. She remembered that even in the instant of her rapture she had told herself that she was not required to go along with it; that no one was compelling her to lay her innermost being, naked, against another self.

She saw Bruno only once more after he had revealed his suspicions about Roberto. It was three years later and, at her invitation, he came to visit her in Turin, to get a sense of her life, her work and where she lived – her soundproofed modern apartment, large, well furnished, with its high windows that overlooked the river Po, swollen and olive-coloured in the evening light.

They had dinner in a restaurant, then returned to talk further in her flat. It became clear to Elena as the evening went on that Bruno was looking for her forgiveness. He was direct, as ever, in the way he went about it.

Standing in front of her large fireplace with its marble surround, he said, ‘That first night in the hills. I should never have let you … I persuaded myself that you knew, or at least suspected, that we shared a father. It was wrong of me, Elena, and I’m sorry. It’s brought only sorrow.’

‘You could have told me then. You could have spelled it out.’

‘I loved you so much. I was desperate for the old closeness, the old warmth.’

‘But you chose a new version.’

Bruno frowned and shook his head. ‘When the moment came, I was weak. I acknowledge that. Try to imagine what it’s like every day to wake up knowing that you’ve been rejected in the first and simplest relationship of your life. Your mother has disowned you. Every morning you begin at a disadvantage. It’s like having fingers missing. For a second after waking you’re like everyone else. Then you remember.’

‘My dear Bruno, it was only a matter of money. It was not that
she
knew you, then decided that she didn’t want you. She would have loved you if she’d known you.’

‘It was only money the first time and it was only money the second time – when your mother also rejected me. The underlying reason doesn’t really matter. It’s the action and the emotion it causes. It means that you’re forever vulnerable. Fearing abandonment. More than that – knowing that you’re already rejected.’

‘I’m sorry for you, Bruno. I’m sorry in more ways than you can perhaps imagine. Most of all I’m sad that some pall seems to have been cast over that friendship we had as children. Which was so wonderful to me.’

‘And me.’

‘But when it came to it, you could have been more rational. You could have spared us both.’

‘Ah, but that’s always been your way, Elena. Rational. The scientific path. You’ve taken it to its logical – its rational – conclusion. You’ve proved that we don’t really exist. That we’re nothing more than a table or a chair. That human beings contain nothing of value. So in your world none of this matters, does it?’

Elena lowered her eyes to the floor. ‘I don’t think that’s what Beatrice and I proved.’

Unable to bear the weight of his guilt, Bruno began to attack her. He told her she had brought despair to millions. He became voluble, inflamed.

Watching him gesticulate, she saw his full weakness for the first time. She understood that this Bruno was not the boy who had ignited her own ability to respond to other human beings and was no longer the man she had loved with such hopeless passion. He was changed; he had become a different man.

* * *

Elena Duranti – now aged forty-nine, so at a dangerous age for females in her family – awakes each day with the sun slanting through the blind into her comfortable bedroom at the end of the corridor that leads from the front door of her well-maintained apartment. By the bed is a photograph of her mother, Fulvia, as a young woman; one of Roberto at his workbench; and one of herself with Bruno on a bridge in Venice taken fifteen years ago. Next to the pictures are her glasses and two bottles of pills: one that helps rock her off to sleep and one that stimulates the growth of tissue in the joints and spares her the stabbing of arthritis. The bathroom tiles are warm, the shower water is already at the optimum temperature, and while she stands surrounded by its soothing jets, she sucks a pastille that is all she needs for oral hygiene.

Clothes, which as a girl she regarded as a way of keeping out the cold, have come to mean more to her; she picks out dark trousers, shoes and soft woollen sweaters with something like pleasure as the smell of coffee drifts in from the kitchen. Then comes the descent in the lift, the blast of air from the city as she steps out on the pavement and her body moves off in automatic motion to the solar-tram stop.

Usually she is able to avoid introspection, training her eyes on the dark river and the bridges over it, on the people surging out from the subway and the bent trees along the embankment. When she gives way to reflection, she thinks only this: what luck that I, a farm girl, should have had a brain that was adept at making connections and retaining fact. How lucky, too, that my personality was such that I shrank from others and had time to cultivate the advantages my synapses had given me.

At other times, she is less sanguine. This is the lonely fate I have deserved, she thinks. For my childhood pride. Being bored by the other children at school, mistakenly thinking I was in some way above them. Shyness, arrogance – what was the difference?

Once, after her final parting with Bruno, she went back to their oak tree to see if she could find what she had been as a child. The earth was still unmarked and there were still crows in the air above; the city had sprawled a little further across the plain. She sat for almost an hour, looking for relief or enlightenment, but saw only that the white stones and the coarse grass had always known that they would long outlive her passion; they were neither indifferent, nor a consolation: they were simply a rebuke to the shortness of her life.

She had known as a child that old buildings had been there for hundreds of years; that, after all, was why people went to look at them and wonder at the ancient Romans who had trod there. Yet an absurd part of her had imagined she would in some way outlast the landscape and the man-made buildings. She found it humiliating now to recognise that she was after all one of nameless millions whom even the cheap shops on the ring road would comfortably survive and at whose vanished anonymity future tourists would gawp.

There is a
caffè
near the Piazza Rivoli where she looks in every morning as she changes trams. In the fragrant, wood-panelled room there are always the same people: Matteo, the proprietor, grey-haired and florid; Giuseppe from the clothes shop; and Ornella, the sly, dark girl from the lawyers’ office. Others come and go, standing at the bar to gulp down coffee, touching their wrists against the payment reader, then dashing out. Elena likes to sit for ten minutes in the smell of roasted coffee and fresh pastry that takes her back to her childhood – or to some other time when life seemed more possible. The
caffè
has newspapers, printed out in a back room on recycled pulp; they don’t have the delicate feel that she remembers from long ago, but they are convenient to read.

Looking through the tram window each morning as it goes up
the
Corso Francia towards the Human Research Centre, Elena thinks: this is what I am, and it’s a reasonable thing to be. There is no cause for sadness here; this is simply what it feels like to be alive. Often, she finds herself remembering the last line of Bruno’s story, ‘Another Life’: ‘I start to make my long way back to the place of my undoing …’