A Possible Life

by Sebastian Faulks

  After the storm that surrounded the publication of her and Beatrice Rossi’s paper had finally died down, Elena had time to think a little more about her own life – her own short time as a possessor of this mutant link – and how she ought to spend it.

  This meant Bruno. For the next two years, they continued to meet at the house in the Sabine Hills whenever they could. As they sat one day looking down over the olive grove into the valley below, Elena asked if she could read the new story he had written.

  ‘I don’t think you’ll like it,’ he said.

  ‘I might. I’ve liked other ones.’

  ‘I got the idea from Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell,’ said Bruno. ‘At one point Julia, the main female character, mentions that she lost her virginity at the age of sixteen to a Party member who was later arrested. I liked the way this man was of no importance in Orwell’s story, but central to his own.’

  ‘I see,’ said Elena. ‘So it’s this man’s story?’

  ‘Yes. He’s a rogue, he doesn’t believe in the Party. He’s a hero, yet he’s just a footnote in Winston Smith’s life.’

  Elena let his choice of words settle. ‘And me? Am I a footnote in your life?’

  ‘No. You’re the heroine.’

  ‘That’s an old-fashioned word.’

  ‘But the trouble with me,’ said Bruno, ‘is that I have more than one story. You’re the main character in this one. In the hills here. And here.’ He put his hand against his head.

  ‘And in your childhood?’ said Elena.

  ‘No. I was the main character in that. And then Roberto. And then you.’

  ‘And would you like to know where you stand with me?’ said Elena.

  ‘I’m afraid to hear,’ said Bruno. ‘In my experience women are absolutists. They’re liable to blame you for things that happened before you met and for things you can’t change. Even for their own mistakes.’

  ‘I never imagined you were so defensive,’ Elena said.

  Bruno was ready. ‘On the one hand I see this abstract force, this flame, this life-changing thing between us. And on the other I see the material circumstances of living – the arrangements, places, flats, people, jobs. And I just think how can we best accommodate the two: the flame and the facts. The flame always comes first. We can bend the facts to accommodate it. But you …’

  He waved his arm.

  ‘I what?’ said Elena.

  ‘If you can’t have all you want rolled up into one place, one ideal existence, you’d be prepared to throw out the best part. Out of petulance.’

  ‘I would never do that,’ said Elena. ‘Never.’ At the same time she felt a kind of panic at the otherness of Bruno.

  At the age of thirty-six, Elena was preoccupied with the thought of children. While she knew she had another decade of fertility there were good reasons for being a younger mother. She had never felt the urge described by many women – as though reproduction were their deepest need. Perhaps it was because she had been an only child, she thought, or because the prevailing state of childhood – powerless dependence – had not appealed to her.

  What had become clear was that if she were ever to have a child, she would like Bruno to be its father. She loved him more than she could ever love another man, so the idea of fusing her cells with his was a logical intimacy. There was also an urge less scientific. The pain of her relationship with Bruno lay in separation – not just in times and distances but sometimes, she felt, in the very fact that they were different beings. Even together they were apart. Their child would never suffer from this sense of being sundered.

  In her laboratory, she smiled at such a fancy; but at home at night, glancing now and then at her screen to see if he had thought about her, it did not seem fantastic, it seemed true.

  It was autumn when they next met – autumn with a hazy sun whose warmth and light seemed at odds with the smell of the damp chestnut leaves underfoot. It was a half-season, one that Elena remembered well from the woods above her village.

  After they had eaten on the terrace and Silvia the maid had gone home with her daughter, it became suddenly cold. They went inside and Bruno made a fire from olive wood in the stone-floored fireplace. They sat in chairs on either side with their feet resting on a low, padded table in between.

  ‘I’ve been thinking about children,’ Elena said. ‘Do you like being a father?’

  ‘Yes. I was never a brother or son, so I don’t know about that. But I think father is the role I would anyway like best.’

  ‘And do you think we should have a child, Bruno? You and I? I’m still a good age for it. And it would be something for us to share.’

  ‘A souvenir of—’

  ‘No, not a backward look. A future. Something indisputable and together after all the time apart.’

  Bruno stood up and turned so he was facing out of the window. ‘I doubt whether Lucia would like it,’ he said.

  ‘She would never know. She doesn’t know about this, does she?’ said Elena, gesturing round them.

  ‘No. But Caterina, she wouldn’t—’

  ‘I’m not the kind of person to turn up on the doorstep of your house with a babe in arms. I have enough money to look after a child well. I have no desire to break up your other family.’

  Bruno turned back to face Elena and sat down again opposite her. ‘Let me tell you what I did when I left you,’ he said.

  Elena fell silent.

  ‘After my time in the army, I went back to Slovenia to try to find out more about my childhood. I found the orphanage in Trieste and they showed me their records. I had been there only nine months when Roberto took me away. I was recorded under the number Two Hundred and Thirty-Seven, Male, and the name Duranti was added later. He had visited several times to fill in forms and be questioned about his suitability to foster me. I was twelve years old and I remembered coming from another place – near Maribor, a big city in the north. The orphanage in Trieste gave me the address and I went there too. It was this orphanage in Maribor that I remembered so well. A huge building in a park with long corridors. It was like time falling away beneath my feet. Nothing had changed, it was still full of children. I felt they might lock the door and keep me there. And in some strange way I felt it was my fate, that I deserved it.’

  In his agitation, Bruno had stood up again. ‘I spoke to people in the office and they let me see their records. It was all quite easy. The only trouble was, I didn’t know my name. I didn’t have one – though I had a vague idea that people called me Joe. Luckily the Maribor institution kept photographs, and after ten minutes or so we found me. I had arrived at the age of six. But they had no record of where I’d come from.’

  ‘Isn’t that unusual?’ Elena had not moved from her seat.

  ‘No. It was a time when some records were still kept on paper and would get lost or purged.’

  ‘So the first six years of your life are a mystery?’

  ‘I tried to find out about that camp I told you about.’ He touched his lower back. ‘I really wanted to know more, but I didn’t have time, I had to work, so I hired a data expert I’d met in the army to help me. To cut a long story short, he found a trail. He also found my mother. And do you know where she was from? Trieste.’

  ‘We’re going round in circles,’ said Elena.

  ‘Not any more. My mother was Italian. She was not married and she gave me up for adoption because she couldn’t afford to look after me. I wasn’t really an orphan. Very few of us were. We were just the rejects.’

  ‘And this place where you were badly treated?’

  ‘It was in Ljubljana. I left just before my fifth birthday.’

  ‘You poor boy,’ said Elena.

  ‘I am not that boy any more. But I don’t want to be the father of your child, Elena. It would be too much for me. I don’t know how to love someone properly. I never learned. I had no normal connections till I came to your family, and even then they were not really “normal”. And what I might feel for our child
is too much to contemplate.’

  ‘But Lucia, she—’

  ‘I don’t love Lucia.’

  ‘And your daughter?’

  ‘I struggle to feel what I should. But with you … It would be different. And it would be too much. And there’s another reason, Elena. I tried once to tell you before. But I failed. It was my fault.’

  ‘What is it?’ said Elena with a tightening dread.

  ‘Eventually my army friend found and sent me a copy of my registration from when my mother had first left me in Trieste. Under the father’s details, it had: “Name: Unknown. Occupation: Boatbuilder.”’

  ‘Like Roberto.’

  ‘Yes. Very like Roberto.’

  There was a silence.

  ‘My God,’ said Elena. ‘You don’t think …’

  ‘Yes. I think Roberto was my father and that when he heard some girl had become pregnant and then disposed of the unwanted child, he tried to track me down. It took years to find me in Maribor and he couldn’t—’

  ‘Oh, God.’

  ‘But he must have kept trying, and eventually—’

  ‘Oh, Bruno.’

  ‘He had me brought back to Trieste while he was filling in the forms to adopt me. I don’t know for sure. There are many boat-builders passing through Trieste. But …’

  Elena stared at the floor for a long time. Not since the day of Roberto’s death had she felt herself so displaced. And as on that day, she could sense how long it would take her to adjust.

  She felt Bruno’s eyes scorching her lowered head. Many things – some that she was not even conscious of having been puzzled by – seemed to have become clear.

  ‘I think you’re right,’ she said at last, looking up.

  ‘I know we could easily have found out by a DNA test.’

  ‘But what on earth would have been the point?’ said Elena.

  Bruno took a step forward. ‘I should have told you before, Elena. That first night, I began to, and you said, “Ssh.” I told myself that perhaps you suspected, perhaps deep down you already knew.’

  Elena stood. She put her hands on his shoulders as they faced one another in front of the fire.

  She looked hard into his eyes for what she knew might be the last time. She sighed. ‘No,’ she said. ‘You did the right thing. Without you I would have been nothing. Less than nothing.’

  A year later, Elena became director of the Institute for Human Research, and in her inaugural address touched on areas where the implications of the Rossi–Duranti Loop were still being worked out. These were many and unexpected.

  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 c
oncert 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.