A Possible Life (20 page)

‘He’s a bit of a monster,’ she told Elena that night. ‘How often in an hour are you really self-aware, do you suppose? I mean, you drive a car and play the piano while thinking about something else … But really self-aware as only humans can be?’

‘Maybe three or four times an hour?’ said Elena. ‘For a few seconds each time. Then I relapse into a sort of half-asleep, screen-saver condition.’

‘This man is “on” permanently,’ said Beatrice. ‘The pressure on his brain is making him the most
sapiens Homo
who ever lived.’

During the first scan, Beatrice Rossi not only observed, but directed. Under questioning from the Greek technicians, she was obliged to reveal her identity and then, at the delighted patient’s insistence, to take control of the process.

They scanned him for three days. The two women, Beatrice and Elena, made quite a pair as they arrived each morning at the clinic. Down the corridor they would walk together towards the scanning room, while staff, journalists and patients parted before them: Beatrice Rossi with her white lab coat flying open to reveal caramel skirt and black boots and Elena Duranti, the mousy sidekick, in her woollen trousers and glasses, padding along beside her.

On the fourth day they discovered the truth. The defining quality of human consciousness, the thing that had given the world Leonardo, Mozart, Shakespeare and had made humans little lower
than
the angels, was not an entity, but a connection. It was an open loop that ran between Glockner’s Isthmus and the site of episodic memory. It was a link between two pre-existent faculties. It was fragile; it was, in evolutionary terms, very young – aged in the low tens of thousands of years. Through its speed-of-light pathway, the isthmus sensation of selfhood was retuned, refined and enriched by memory. The impingement of the iron rod had set the Kebab Man’s loop to permanently ‘open’; it had compromised his ability to lapse into normal or ‘screen-saver’ consciousness, the state in which humans happily perform for most of their waking hours.

For millions of years, the phenomenon of Glockner’s brief neural unity had existed side by side with the faculty of autobiographical memory – but in isolation, like France and England before the invention of the boat. Then a mistake – a mutation in a single cell division in a single individual some tens of thousands of years back – had established a link. It was genetically the most successful mutation of all time because the endowment of self-awareness – particularly a voluntary self-awareness – allowed its possessors to infer thought processes in others and to predict what they were going to do; it let them empathise, guess, anticipate, manipulate, out-think, out-fight – and, where necessary, co-operate.

Drs Rossi and Duranti left the clinic in Athens to prepare their findings for publication. The following week, surgeons successfully removed the iron bar from the Kebab Man’s brain, and he regained the ability to lapse at will into a normal and less demanding state of consciousness.

Elena and Beatrice sat on the runway, ready to take off for Rome.

‘It seems almost an anticlimax,’ said Beatrice Rossi, fastening her seat belt.

‘I know,’ said Elena. ‘I know. But the fun will come when everyone works out what it means for their own disciplines.’

Over the Adriatic they toasted their discovery of why humans are as they are with Prosecco from plastic glasses.

‘You’re famous!’ wrote Bruno to Elena. ‘All those afternoons in your little hut. All those nights in your room reading! I am very proud.’

Elena was offered the post of deputy director at the Institute for Human Research in Turin, with the promise that she would accede to the top job in due course. She was pleased to have a position that enabled her to carry on with the work that fascinated her and to have enough money for a comfortable apartment in a pleasant section of the city. She wished only that the good fortune had come a little earlier in her life, when she might have shared it with her parents.

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.