Where My Heart Used to Beat

by Sebastian Faulks

  “Thank God.”

  “Cigarette?”

  “Thank you.”

  “I’d better not give you a drink. But do you mind if I have one?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Robert, I’m sorry to have to tell you this. But you chaps in B Company took a bit of a pasting yesterday. Including Roland Swann. They brought him back here last night. He died of his wounds this morning.”

  “Dear God. I’m sorry.”

  “Yes, he was a good man. Clumsy as they come—it’s a wonder he didn’t shoot himself by accident—but a great spirit.”

  “The men liked him.”

  “I know. We’re on our uppers now,” said Varian. “Only the Four Just Men left.”

  “How are Passmore and Pears?”

  “On the mend. But it’ll take a while.”

  “Do you want me to take over from Swann?”

  “No. I’ve put Dinger Bell in charge. You need a break. We’ll find a good job for you when you’re fit.”

  I didn’t mind being passed over. “I can be your adjutant again.”

  “Let’s see how it goes,” said Varian. “I’m going up to our forward trenches at six, and I’ll leave you with Private Winter. He’s been worried.”

  “I don’t suppose you could read me a bit more of that diary?”

  Varian laughed. “I was only doing it to practice my Italian accent. Take my mind off things. It was in your haversack when they pulled you in.”

  “Yes, we found it in the Dormitory.”

  I found myself beginning to fall asleep again. I wanted to go back into the world of the Italian girl, a life better than mine. “Please read a bit more,” I said. “I find it … inspiring.”

  There was the sound of a throat being cleared, then: “It’s my turn to cook dinner, and I am going to make a sauce with wild garlic I found in the marsh. I’m so excited about the wedding that I don’t think I’ll sleep. Maybe Papa will let me have some wine…”

  * * *

  IT WAS EARLY evening on Pereira’s island when I finished this account. I was exhausted as much by my host’s unflagging attention as by the physical exertion of speaking for so long.

  “And that was the end of your Italian campaign?” he said.

  “No. There was more to come.”

  We sat back and listened to the island noises.

  “A pistol wound,” said Pereira. “That’s unusual, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “I seldom fired mine. I felt it was more a badge of rank, an officer privilege.”

  “If you fired it from close range, it could do a lot of damage.”

  “And was this—”

  “Very close. For many years I couldn’t lift my right arm above the horizontal.”

  “I expect you’d like a rest now,” said Pereira. “Shall I ask Paulette to take some tea up to your room?”

  “Thank you. Would you mind asking her to make sure the kettle boils? And could I have a little milk?”

  After the tea, I slept on my bed with the window open and a light breeze coming in. When I awoke, I had a bath and changed and, seeing it was after seven, went down to the library for a drink. I helped myself from the sideboard, where the ice bucket was full and the array of bottles welcoming. I felt surprisingly invigorated.

  Over dinner, Pereira said, “I expect you find it difficult. Talking about yourself.”

  “I’m certainly not used to it.”

  He smiled. “Do you know, Dr. Hendricks, that in forty years of practice no patient ever asked me a single personal question. When you asked me to talk about my work and family it made me feel a little…”

  “Queasy?”

  “Yes. Self-indulgent.”

  “Me too. But I’ve pushed on.”

  “Thank you. There’s a lot more I’d like to ask you. But perhaps we should talk on a less personal note.”

  “What sort of note?”

  “Let’s leave it till after dinner.”

  In the library, an hour later, we sat down opposite each other with a small table containing brandy and water between us. For the first time, I noticed a chessboard in the window and for a moment feared the old man might want to test me further in some symbolic battle of wits. I had never been any good at chess. I could plan twenty moves ahead, no problem, but always failed to notice what was under my nose; it was mortifying to see the incredulity on the face of my opponent as his pawn collected my queen.

  “I had the strong impression from your book,” said Pereira, as he filled my brandy glass, “that you think the twentieth century has been a catastrophe.”

  “Undoubtedly,” I said. “Or perhaps, more accurately, a delusion. Maybe we will emerge from it one day and will recognize it as a psychotic episode that we will learn to put behind us. But from where we are now, there seems no end to it.”

  The doors onto the verandah were open, and we could hear the chatter of crickets outside as well as a persistent owl.

  “Is the problem in the individual, do you think, or in the societies he makes?” said the old man, sitting upright his chair, his head to one side.

  “Both. The structures we make are a function of our botched nature. But I feel that at some stage these governments and armies take on a life of their own that you can’t relate to human failings. Apartheid in South Africa, for instance, seems self-perpetuating. I don’t imagine that the Boer thug with his sjambok really believes that it’s right to beat a black man. I don’t think he reasons that he’s entitled to thrash a ‘lesser’ human. He’s just a cell in a diseased body.”

  “No, no.” Pereira was surprisingly dismissive. “There’s surely a conscious effort to do the wrong thing. For instance, in the Soviet Union there’s a policy to mislead the population, to tell them lies about the country’s wealth and harvests and to withhold truths about life in the West. The Politburo finds it easier to run a country that’s in a state of fear, so they lie to maintain the status quo—however much they’d all be better off without it.”

  “What’s happened there,” I said, “is that the apparatus of the state has consumed the ability of the individual to think for himself. It’s the same process as in a religion. A devout Christian or Muslim doesn’t abandon his faith when times are hard. He clings to it more tightly. So the Soviet leaders embrace an idea of communism. It’s their only answer.”

  “I doubt it,” said Pereira. “There are individual men in the Kremlin or the Lubyanka who daily make a choice to lie, to persecute, and to imprison. Knowingly.”

  “I suppose they tell themselves that a small injustice is tolerable for the greater good,” I said. “They don’t believe that an individual life has significance. That someone should be executed or sent to a gulag means nothing to them because the logic of numbers tells them that one man’s life is not important.”

  A degree of rancor had somehow entered the exchange, which was odd, since Pereira’s manner to this point in my stay had been that of someone seeking a favor.

  “Surely not,” he was saying. “High up in a building in Moscow a man is wrestling with his conscience, with the ideas of kindness and democracy. Pushkin and Chekhov have their heirs. To think otherwise is to view Russians as lesser humans. It’s a form of racial slur—no better than your South African policeman and his victim in the township.”

  “What’s interesting,” I said, “is how the century made it possible for educated Europeans—people who had given birth to the Renaissance and the Enlightenment—to come to think that individual life is without intrinsic value. No one would have thought that in 1887.”

  “The year of my birth.”

  “I know. I looked it up.”

  At last there was a pause. Pereira looked at me skeptically. “And when did this volte-face take place, do you suppose?”

  I helped myself to more brandy.

  “You know quite well when it took place,” I said. “Between 1914 and 1918. The survivors who trailed home were different from the nineteenth-c
entury men who had first gone out. There was probably a day, a single hour, a moment—in 1915, shall we say, at Second Ypres when the gas was first released, or maybe at the Somme offensive the following July. Or perhaps it was at Verdun—yes, probably at Verdun, in the tunnels of Fort Douaumont. A Frenchman—maybe a German—staggered out from the charnel house at sunset, chest deep in gore … In his heart he had a new and terrible knowledge. That we were not what we had thought we were—superior to other living creatures. No. We were the lowest being on earth.”

  “Is that really what you think?”

  “The legacy of those four years is that they legitimized contempt for individual life. You see the results in purges, pogroms, holocausts—in the tens of millions of European corpses that the century has added to the ten million dead of its first war.”

  I finished the brandy and put the glass back on the table.

  Pereira was still unwilling to concede what he must have known was true. He said, “Is this part of your ‘botched nature’ theory?”

  “Yes. Homo sapiens is a freak, the result of catastrophe in natural selection. To outfight the others at the watercourse, we didn’t need to acquire the curse of self-awareness. Or to write all of Mozart.”

  “It sounds to me as though you’ve gone under the spell of religion. It’s as though you think we’re ‘fallen’ creatures or some such nonsense.”

  “But the Bible and science say the same thing. One is a version of the other. Think of the book of Genesis. The acquisition by Adam and Eve of the knowledge of good and evil and the exile from the Garden of Eden is an account in parable form of the terrible mutation that befell our ancestors: the gaining of consciousness, the leap of awareness that cursed all humans, making us aware of our coming death and burdening us with abilities that few of us can use and none of us needs. Genesis, genetics—take your pick. The same word, the same meaning.”

  “It was certainly a leap,” said Pereira.

  “A leap into an unnecessary dimension. A leap we didn’t need. And furthermore, this unique, human-defining sense of having a self turns out to be a fiction anyway.”

  “Possibly.”

  “The thing that makes us different is a neural tick, a freak ability to connect at will a moment of physical self-awareness to the site of episodic memory. That is the miracle of our conscious humanity. A mutation that gave rise to an illusion.”

  “But it gave us advantages over our not conscious predecessors, advantages that our new faculties enabled us to remember and pass on.”

  “Of course,” I said. “That’s how brute natural selection works. The self-delusion was helpful, or it wouldn’t have been passed on. Eating its mate works for the mantis. That doesn’t mean it’s a ‘good’ thing. I would trade all Beethoven for the happy ignorance in which my pre-sapiens forebears lived. In that way I would still be part of the natural world, not an interloper marked with the brand of Cain.”

  We both listened for a moment to the sounds of the night through the open French doors. My heart was beating uncomfortably.

  “It must be difficult living with such pessimism,” said Pereira.

  “It isn’t pessimism,” I said. “I’ve drawn logical conclusions from the past, from what we all know has already taken place. I have no expectations of tomorrow, hopeful or not.”

  “But you still believe the defining quality of human beings is a piece of neural tissue?”

  “Of course. I suppose it might not be a static cell or group of neurons; it could be a dynamic function, an electrical or chemical activity.”

  “But it still has a physical existence.”

  “Yes. The illusions, delusions, the abstractions of art and lunacy—things as bodiless and dreamlike as you can wish—they all spring from a few cells that were rearranged by a mistake but remain physical cells. With mass.”

  “That I grant you. The paradox of psychiatry,” said Pereira, a little more warmly. “Something may look like a thought or feel like an experience but may be a function of matter … Which you wrote about so memorably in your book, if I may say so.”

  I didn’t answer. I had no wish to build anything on The Chosen Few.

  Pereira looked tired but, perhaps scenting an advantage, was reluctant to give up. “Don’t you find it difficult to live with such an attitude?” he said. “Doesn’t it make you self-centered?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I live for myself now. I made my effort to reach out to my fellow creatures. I did my best for altruism. I gave it years.”

  “I remember the moving passages in your book where—”

  “But that was all a terrible mistake. It was unscientific.”

  “Is that why you’re bitter?”

  “No. I’m bitter because I belong to a failed species, a disastrous mutation. I’m going to bed now. Good night.”

  I rose and went unsteadily to the door.

  SEVEN

  In the account of my war experiences, I had come to the critical moment. How much of it I wanted to share with Pereira I wasn’t sure, and in any case, I thought, he might be less inclined to listen after the abrasive tone of our words the night before.

  To my surprise, he was all civility when he came in from the garden as I was finishing breakfast.

  “Good morning, Dr. Hendricks. Just to let you know, I’ve arranged for a boat at eight tomorrow morning, which should give you time enough to get to the airport. But I hope this won’t be your last visit to the island. I feel we have more to discuss before we can come to a decision about the task in hand.”

  “Undoubtedly. I’ve talked far too much about myself and haven’t found out enough about your work or what the position of executor entails.”

  “Forgive me,” said Pereira. “I’m aware that I’ve been selfish in my curiosity. I’m quite happy to reciprocate—to answer any questions you may have. But I think it will require a second visit.”

  “I’ve enjoyed my stay. Thank you.”

  “Before you leave, I should like to hear about the remainder of your time in Italy. If that’s not an imposition?”

  And so it was that we went down to the end of the lawn and sat together on a bench among the umbrella pines, looking out to sea.

  * * *

  DONALD SIDWELL, RECOVERING from his own wound, joined me on leave in the summer of 1944. In the second week, we drove down the coast in a car we had borrowed to a fishing village beside the Tyrrhenian Sea. We each had the regulation batman, or servant, with us. Donald’s was Private Onions, and mine was still Private Winter—a tall, lugubrious man who looked after me like a nanny. Neither he nor Onions could swim, so we left them to their beer under the awning of a café while we walked over the sand and down to the water. There was no one else on the beach.

  A couple of skiffs were moored to a raised wooden jetty that stuck out over the shallows. The water beneath it was just deep enough to allow for a dive from the end of the platform. We had been at it for a few minutes, daring each other to run back further or to make a steeper entry, when we noticed a group of three women coming over the sand. One was about forty, dressed in a striped robe and a wide straw hat, both of which she discarded on the beach; the other two were nearer my age and wore only bathing costumes. They waved to us as they waded, all three, into the warm, clear water and ducked under the waves. Unlike English girls, they didn’t push their hair under rubber caps but let it stream wet down their backs. About fifty yards out to sea was a floating platform, where they hauled themselves up and lay in the sun to dry. Donald and I did some more diving for their benefit, though my shoulder was beginning to hurt.

  “Shouldn’t we go and join the ladies?” said Donald, preparing to dive.

  “I didn’t know the opposite sex was one of your enthusiasms.”

  “Oh, yes. Near the top of the list, between J. S. Bach and the Hillman Wizard.”

  “The what?”

  “A little six-cylinder convertible I once had.”

  “Can you speak Italian?”

 
“A bit,” said Donald, blinking. “I was sent to study in Rome for three months after school. And you?”

  “I can understand if they speak slowly. Preferably with an English accent. But I could try some Latin. Horace, perhaps.”

  “Isn’t he rude?”

  We dived in and swam out to the floating platform, where we clung onto the edge and introduced ourselves. The older woman was American. Her name was Lily Greenslade, and she came from Connecticut. She had volunteered for war work with the Red Cross and had been sent to Naples before being moved to our town along the coast. The other two were sisters: Magda and Luisa. I was too intrigued by the way they looked to take in exactly what they were doing in the south, though I understood that they came from Genoa. Magda in any other company would have been striking, but she was heavier in the thigh than her sister and the hair beneath her armpits was thick, whereas Luisa’s was fine, like a boy’s first moustache. They were both black-haired with the beauty of the Ligurian coast and looked at ease in their near-nakedness. All the Italian women we had met on leave had been uninhibited. At first I didn’t know if that was the national character or if war had made reticence absurd. Later, I was told that two-thirds of the female population in the south of this pulverized country was available for money. It was hard to believe that either sister had had to resort to such things, but for that moment I didn’t care.

  “I was telling them you were a hero,” said Donald, who had been speaking Italian. “Show them your wound.”

  He pointed to the scar on my shoulder, which looked insignificant in the bright sunlight. Donald had been more badly wounded than I had, but all mention of it was forbidden.

  “Niente,” I said. It’s nothing.

  Magda asked how we had managed to defeat Kesselring, the master of southern Italy. I told them in English that Donald had single-handedly driven the Generalfeldmarschall back to Florence, kicking him repeatedly in the breeches as he went. Lily translated and Magda laughed, but I could see that Luisa, while for some reason pretending not to, had already understood. She smiled and looked away.