A Possible Life

by Sebastian Faulks

  Roberto occasionally looked down at the solemn boy and smiled. He seemed to enjoy Bruno’s company almost as much as Elena’s.

  ‘My God, you look alike,’ said Fulvia one day when she brought in some drinks and saw them standing side by side. Both of them looked pleased.

  There was a commotion one day at school. A boy called Alfredo ran squealing from the B-stream building with blood pouring from his nose. Elena was watching from her side of the school and, with a mixture of amusement and horror, saw Bruno being marched out by the teacher. It seemed that a group of boys had been taunting him about being an orphan, and had called him, among other things, a pirate and a ‘Slovene peasant’; they had suggested an improper relationship with his ‘sister’, Elena. It was this last idea, so comically far from reality, that had proved too much for him.

  As the bus approached the school that winter afternoon, its headlights bending down the industrial landscape, Elena saw the misery in Bruno’s eyes and feared what might happen if he gave way again to anger. She pushed into the crowd.

  ‘Come here,’ she said, grabbing his arm. They were the first words she had spoken to him. She shoved him ahead of her on to the bus, into a seat against the window, and placed herself next to him on the aisle, a thin barricade.

  It was dark as they left the commercial warehouse zone and found the country roads. When they were nearly back at their village, Bruno said, ‘Can I come with you one day to the woods?’

  Elena did not answer, looking at him with distaste; but one Sunday, in a rare moment of feeling sated by her own company, she said, ‘You can come for half an hour. Now.’

  ‘Do you have a cave?’ he said, running to keep up in case she changed her mind. ‘A hideout?’

  It was the first time she had seen him smile, and she noticed that he had a twisted tooth on the left side of his mouth.

  ‘Maybe,’ she said.

  She let him ride her bicycle. He was almost as fast as Emilio Rizzo, and, with a pang, Elena knew the long era of her secret games was over.

  ‘It’s unusual to find one of these in a wood,’ Bruno said, picking up what looked to Elena like a common daffodil.

  ‘How do you know about flowers?’

  Bruno shook his head, unwilling to talk about his past. ‘Do you believe in God?’ he said.

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ said Elena.

  ‘I do,’ said Bruno. ‘I believe in several gods.’

  ‘Like an ancient Roman? Like a pagan?’

  ‘It’s better than believing in just one.’

  ‘And what do your little gods do?’

  ‘There’s one who’s in charge of the dead. There’s a god of luck, the most important one. There are lots of others. Maybe there’s a god of love.’

  Elena stifled a laugh.

  ‘Let me ride the bike again,’ said Bruno. ‘Time me round the course.’

  ‘I have to get the stop-watch.’

  ‘From your secret place? I won’t look.’

  Bruno broke the course record, though Elena didn’t tell him so. He offered to time her in return, but she was reluctant to come second. She suggested they go into the forest where the wild boar were still hunted.

  ‘If one of them charges you,’ she said, ‘you have to wait till the last second, then jump to one side like this. The boar run fast but they can’t change direction.’

  ‘I’ll remember that,’ said Bruno.

  After a few minutes and no sign of a boar, he said, ‘Did your parents want another child?’

  ‘I’ve never asked. I was happy with things as they were.’

  ‘Now I’ve spoiled your life.’

  Elena stopped walking and looked back into Bruno’s expressionless eyes. ‘It can’t be helped,’ she said.

  Bruno did not flinch. He said, ‘When I used to lie down to sleep at night in the orphanage I felt as though I was the only living thing in the world. I felt I could howl in the darkness and no one would hear. Do you feel like that when you lie down and close your eyes? As though you’re dying?’

  ‘No,’ said Elena. ‘I have my thoughts. I have company in my head. Sometimes I can order my dreams.’

  ‘You’re a very strange girl.’

  No one had ever spoken to Elena in this way before. ‘Let’s go back,’ she said.

  ‘No. Don’t be frightened. We can stay out here. Talk to me. Talk to me, Elena.’

  He hadn’t used her name before and she thought it sounded outlandish on his foreign tongue.

  Elena’s decision was based on little more than curiosity, though even then she knew it might have long consequences.

  ‘Go on, then,’ she said.

  Talking to Bruno confirmed Elena’s belief that there had been no one worth talking to before. Her life changed. At school, she remained aloof from her classmates and worked hard. Jacopo, Bella and the rest of them stopped making any effort to include her in their circle; at break time, since she couldn’t join Bruno in his playground, she stayed in the classroom and did that night’s homework in advance while he stood at the wire fence staring out towards her building like a starved prisoner. When the bell rang at four, the first one of them on to the bus reserved a seat for the other. After a time the other children didn’t bother to ask if it was free; eventually they stopped chanting ‘incest’ and ‘pervert’.

  Bruno was the first person of her own age whose company had not annoyed Elena; but she was cautious about sharing her privacy, and at first gave out her secrets meanly, one at a time. When she did so, Bruno didn’t laugh or mock her; he seemed to think her universe quite logical. There was joy, she found eventually, in sharing her intimate thoughts; her fantasies were not diminished but enhanced by having someone else who could participate in them, and the breaching of her wall of solitude was less painful than she had imagined.

  ‘It’s extraordinary, isn’t it?’ said Fulvia to Roberto. ‘I thought she’d never speak to the poor lad and now she can’t bear to let him out of her sight.’

  ‘It’s as though the rest of us don’t exist.’ Roberto sighed. ‘I miss my little girl.’

  As a child, Bruno had somewhere learned to ride a horse and he persuaded Roberto to ask a neighbour if they could have the use of two ponies. Within a few days, Elena could ride well enough to canter beside him. They left her hut behind, and rode out beyond the boar forest, to a ridge where no tyre track or hoofprint had broken the ground. They made a base beside the ruined stump of an oak tree. It didn’t seem necessary to construct a shelter or bring up their belongings; it was enough to be on this hill with its white stones, with the call of the crows above. They sat in silence, looking back over the woods towards Mantua, which was just visible across the plain.

  They imagined all the people in their factories, at their work, in shops and streets and flats with laundry hanging out and food cooking for the evening, willing the office clock to run down and release them. They thought how strange it was that they would never know these people and wondered if their lives were as real or as urgent as their own.

  On the ridge, they were detached from the anonymity of the world – embodied for them by the chimneys, towers and smoking outlines of the view. Elena’s heart might be pounding from the ride and her mind might be beating with thoughts, but the solid earth and purple wildflowers were part of a harder reality, and their indifference to her puffing lungs was a consolation.

  Back at the farm Elena allowed Bruno entrance to her room, a privilege denied even to her mother. Here they talked about people they knew, or had seen in films. Bruno seemed able to invent stories and people at will. He gave Elena accounts of the imagined home lives of the teachers that made her ache from laughing. He constructed a life for the driver who delivered food in one of the huge electric wagons despatched from the industrial zone outside Mantua; it included a spell in the French Foreign Legion and five years in prison. Bruno gave him a violent wife and beautiful twin daughters with ideas above their station.

  Elena didn’t try to match Bruno
’s invention, preferring the wonder of the real world. She explained to him some of the awe she had felt on discovering how humans had evolved; the puzzle of how and why they had developed a sense of self-awareness and had become burdened with the foreknowledge of their own death – a weight no other creature had to bear.

  ‘But wasn’t that original sin?’ said Bruno. ‘Wasn’t that the curse that God put on Adam and Eve?’

  ‘I don’t know. I haven’t read the Bible.’

  ‘How can you not know the Bible?’

  Elena laughed. ‘It’s just stories, isn’t it? I’d rather deal with the real world. It’s so intricate and beautiful.’

  ‘We weren’t given a choice in the orphanage. Hearing the Bible stories was the best part of the day.’

  ‘There are more scientific explanations for things now,’ said Elena. ‘Scanners are very advanced.’

  One day Bruno suddenly pulled off his shirt and said, ‘Look.’

  Elena climbed off her bed and crossed the room. Bruno turned round and showed her his back. There were scars – large, raised weals that ran across his back, from one side of his ribcage to the other.

  Without thinking, Elena reached out and touched one with the tip of her finger. ‘Does it hurt?’

  ‘No. Not now.’

  ‘Who did it?’

  ‘Some people.’

  ‘At the orphanage?’

  ‘No. Before that. But I don’t remember where. There was a long journey by train.’

  He turned to face her, taking her hand away, but holding it between his own. ‘Never tell your parents. Promise.’

  ‘I promise,’ said Elena.

  Her eyes were full of tears, but Bruno was smiling faintly, as though showing her his scars was a repayment for the way Elena had shared her private world with him. He carefully tucked his shirt back beneath his belt.

  Sometimes it seemed to Elena that her thoughts were not fully validated until she had shared them with Bruno. His sharp edges helped reshape her; the friends she’d never had shone out of his alarming eyes.

  Roberto and Fulvia’s village had once been prosperous from maize and tobacco, but it suffered more than most in the Great Slump. Local agriculture reverted to smallholdings and self-sufficiency; the village came to be no more than a dormitory for people who worked in the city. By the time Elena and Bruno were seventeen, Italy was almost as it had been in the early twentieth century. Money was concentrated in few places, mostly in the north; private enterprise continued to find funds for scientific research at postgraduate level and successive governments to provide elementary teaching for children, but there was not much in between.

  Bruno had started to read a good deal of history at school, where he had been moved into the A stream. It frustrated him that Elena seemed so unaware of the twisted shape of the society they lived in. He explained to her how financial institutions had all but bankrupted the developed world; she understood, but couldn’t see what she was meant to do about it. She had one life to live. And surely every human being in history had been born into a world that was in some way peculiar: blown out of shape by cataclysm. After all, she told Bruno, the planet Earth only existed because of a galactic explosion at the start of time. ‘You’re such a scientist,’ he said in despair.

  Then one summer evening, when Elena and Bruno were sitting by their oak stump, she had a message on her screen: ‘Come home at once. Emergency.’ They rode their horses back to the neighbour’s farm and ran home to find Elena’s father being carried out of the house by ambulance men with a blanket over his face. He had suffered a stroke; it need not have been fatal, and a few years earlier would not have been; but the district’s solitary ambulance was on another call, and when they finally got there it was too late.

  Elena sat down in the kitchen. My father is dead. He who only a few minutes ago was living. The rest of time, she thought, starts now.

  She went out into the stony field, knelt and lowered her face between her knees. She picked up handfuls of soil and let them trickle from her fingers on to her bowed head. She had been snatched up violently and did not recognise the place where she had been put down. She lifted up her eyes to the hills, as though some help might be there; but all she sensed was how long it would take to realign herself to this new world.

  Bruno was furious. His protector had been taken from him by the bastard god of luck who had once more shat on his life. He disappeared from the house to be alone with his anger.

  The days that followed were so full of things to do that Elena had no time to grieve. It was more than a week before she and Bruno were able to escape the clotted atmosphere of the house. Up by the oak tree, while the horses cropped the grass, Elena felt again the hard indifference of the earth. This time it was no consolation.

  For the first time, tears came, not squeezed drops, but full drenched sobbing, as Bruno held her in his arms.

  ‘He was so … kind,’ Elena said.

  ‘He was a god,’ said Bruno.

  As they held on to one another, Bruno did what no one had managed for Elena. Drawing on the limits of what he knew, he cobbled together a patchwork of physics, history and wishful thinking – a hypothetical universe in which Roberto lived on, planning such a reunion with his daughter as would make them laugh at the pain of their brief separation. In this version of existence, even as she smiled a little at its improbabilities, Elena was able to hold her father tight.

  Roberto was buried in the village churchyard after a Christian service. Bruno was familiar with the words and the hopes they expressed; Elena was puzzled by the way the priest merely stated a belief in everlasting life without trying to make a case for it. They went to please Fulvia, who, having nowhere else to look, had turned to religion in her time of loss.

  Afterwards, there were the mourners to be comforted and fed in the farmhouse kitchen. Elena took round plates of cake and sweets; Bruno poured cheap fizzing wine. Both longed to be alone and were dismayed when cousins from Verona sat down and made themselves at home, engaging Fulvia in reminiscences of Roberto as a boy.

  A few weeks later, Fulvia told them at dinner she had some news to give them, and something in her voice made Elena glance swiftly at Bruno.

  ‘Children,’ she said, ‘I’ve heard from the bank how much money is left. Roberto put aside enough to pay for one year of tuition for Elena at the university. That money’s in a separate account. For the rest, there’s just a tiny bit we’d saved. We can no longer afford to live here. I’ve asked them to sell the house and the farm. I’m moving to a flat in town. I’ve found work as a cleaner, starting next month. Elena, there’ll be room on the couch for you, but, Bruno, from the end of this term I can no longer be your mother.’

  ‘But, Mama.’ Elena leapt up with her arms outstretched. ‘Bruno’s doing so well. He’s joined the A class. You know how much he reads.’

  ‘I do, I do,’ said Fulvia quickly. ‘He’s an absolute mine of information. I’m sorry, Elenissima. Dear Bruno.’ She put her hand on his wrist.

  ‘I … understand,’ said Bruno, the emotion of the moment making his accent thick again.

  As she watched him struggle with his thoughts, Elena felt a surge of love and panic.

  ‘But what will you do?’ she said.

  ‘Try to find work,’ he said. ‘Like everyone else.’

  In less dire times, Bruno would have been able to finish his studies; but there was no public money any more.

  They rode together one last time to the oak tree on the ridge. The city of Mantua was invisible under heavy cloud.

  ‘Where will you go?’ said Elena.

  Bruno’s eyes were barely visible, his head lowered against the drizzling rain. ‘Probably Trieste,’ he said. ‘I might find work in a boatyard.’

  ‘Stay in Mantua,’ said Elena. ‘There must be something you could do there.’

  ‘What? Rubbish collection?’

  ‘But you’d be near us.’

  ‘No.’

  Elena put her h
and on his arm. ‘But you’ve been happy with us?’

  Bruno breathed in heavily. ‘It was better than the life I had before, but I never thought it would last. All the time I worked and read I didn’t expect it would lead to anything. I read because I was interested. I learned to live in my imagination.’

  Elena stiffened under his coldness. ‘But what about me? I mean, you and me. We’re … friends.’ In a moment of horror she thought she might have imagined it all. Her eyes were fixed on his face.

  Bruno didn’t smile or soften. ‘I didn’t have a friend before, so I didn’t know what it might be like, Elena. And was that it? Was that friendship?’

  ‘It’s more than that.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  Elena flushed. ‘The other girls at school, people who call themselves friends, they gossip and laugh and … Well, they have fun, I’m not denying that. But you can see there’s no real closeness. They don’t feel what we do – that they’re almost the same person.’

  ‘How do you know that Giulia doesn’t have that feeling for Marco?’

  ‘Because they only talk about clothes.’

  ‘And what can you compare me with? You always said you never had a friend before.’

  ‘I didn’t need one. Now I never want to be without you.’

  ‘Is it “love”, then?’ said Bruno. ‘Is that what it is?’

  ‘Of course it is.’ Elena stood up in agitation. ‘You are so perverse, Bruno. Try to be real for once. We’re not in one of your stories. This love won’t come to you again.’

  ‘Is it what you felt for your father?’

  ‘No. It’s different. And it’s more wonderful because it’s with a stranger.’

  Bruno ran his hands through his hair. He looked up at Elena and said, ‘I’ve never felt what I think is meant by joy or happiness, except through you.’