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 …’
Everything she does seems heavy with loss. Often, her voice seems to have an echo, as though she is speaking into emptiness. The lines of her desk and screen suggest, by their rectangular edges, the absence of the human, of the random. There is nothing fissile in the room, nothing unknowable. At lunchtime she avoids anything that might perturb her heart. She takes pumpkin-seed oil on her avocado salad and eats fresh orange and banana slices with a handful of grains. Dear me, she thinks, I’m like some witless hominid plodding over the Serengeti.
She asks herself if this denial means she really wants to live. Why should she wish to prolong the time allotted to her, to check the coil of death unwinding in her genes? Perhaps, she thinks, as she sits back at her desk, she does not mind being unhappy. The idea that humans can capture a mere mood – ‘happiness’ – and somehow preserve it seems absurd. As an aim for a life, it is not only doomed but infantile. Yet she would prefer to carry on – living what she thinks of as a death-in-life – than not to live at all.
When she returns to her apartment in the evening, lies down on the deep brown sofa with a glass of Tuscan wine and watches the telescreen slide up from the floor, Elena admits that after a lifetime of scientific research she understands nothing at all.
She will watch an old film from 2029 – a story of other people running round, falling in love, chasing one another, making jokes. She drinks more of the wine from Montalcino. Then she closes her eyes and sinks deeper into the cushions. She
is filled with memories of places she has never been – of a monastery in France with cloisters and a tolling bell; of a cabin up in the hills of California where there is music; of a house in England with smooth green lawns where boys play a strange game with sticks and a red ball.
She wonders if, when she awakes, she will feel as mystified as she feels now; or whether the hard edges of fact, of history, of her own past – of every cell that makes her what she is – are in truth as flexible as time itself.
PART IV – A DOOR INTO HEAVEN
1822
JEANNE WAS SAID to be the most ignorant person in the Limousin village where she had lived most of her life.
The house she lived in belonged to Monsieur and Madame Lagarde; she had been there since she was a young woman, though no one had known her exact age when she arrived. The place was built of local stone with a tile roof and grey shutters; it stood on a bend where the road began to go uphill. On one side there was a path that led down to a few remote houses and then to the river where the local youths went to fish; on the other side there was an orchard that fell to a deep ditch as the road curved and carried on downhill.
The village was spread out, having started life as no more than a farm with some outbuildings and cottages; it was only in the last fifty years that it had gained an inn for coaches, a baker’s and then a weekly market. With them had come some newer houses further down the hill, and these had been built round a square with cobbles. The Lagardes’ house was of the ‘old’ village and the rooms inside were panelled with dark oak; they were connected by dingy corridors and single steps of stone to allow for its different levels.
Jeanne’s room was on the ground floor at the back, overlooking the fields. It had a grey stone chimneypiece and a wooden prie-dieu as well as the bed, washstand and cupboard. The cost of logs for burning in the fireplace was taken from her wages, though there was no shortage of wood in the oak-covered countryside. Her job in the house was to clean and cook and look after the place as well as an old woman could; for mending fences or heavier work Monsieur Lagarde reluctantly brought in Faucher, the local handyman.
Lagarde himself had been bedridden for ten years following a stroke. He spent most of his time looking at his accounts and working out ways of making his savings go further. His wife brought him books, papers and pens each morning with his bowl of coffee and some bread and butter. The Lagarde family came from Ussel and had once owned several farms, but had lost most of its money during the Revolution. While he was little more than a second-generation bourgeois, Lagarde had cultivated a dislike of the ‘rabble’ – a term that for him took in anyone from a tax collector to the new mayor, and always included the village youth.
Partly as a compensation for his family’s loss of property, Monsieur Lagarde had as a newly married man turned himself into a philosopher. He had boxes full of books delivered from sales in Limoges and Brive with impressive titles such as On the Understanding of Human Nature or Essays on the Principles of Reason. The bookcase in the parlour held leather-bound editions of the works of Montaigne, Pascal and Descartes, while in his bedroom there were translations of Seneca and the Greeks. It was thought that he alternated his reading of the philosophers with his work on the family accounts.
Jeanne had never heard the word ‘philosophy’, but always feared that her employer’s careful housekeeping would sooner or later lead to his concluding that he could not afford her. Through decades of thrift she had managed to save a small sum of money, which she kept in the cupboard, but she had no idea where she might live if the family asked her to leave. One day when the mutterings from Lagarde’s room sounded ominous, Jeanne went to find Madame Lagarde and told her that she would be prepared to work for no more than lodging and food; she would become one of the family.
Jeanne’s life had not always been lived on such a low flame. Once she had had the lives of two children in her hands – Clémence and Marcel, the girl and boy born two years apart to Madame Lagarde when she was still in her twenties. The births had both been difficult, and Madame Lagarde had suffered from a sort of madness after each one. She said she felt as though she was falling from a cliff or riding a horse at speed into a stone wall; but she felt this moment of terror all the time. A doctor from Ussel gave her some sedative powders and advised her to hire a nurse or housekeeper to do some of the heavy work.
Monsieur Lagarde looked over the land his family still owned and went to the dairy where six young women were employed as milkmaids. He asked the dairyman about the personal history of each girl and discovered that the small, thickset one called Jeanne was an orphan who had simply arrived one day in search of work. She said she had been walking for four days after leaving a monastery where she had worked as a laundress. She had been at the dairy for three years and it was possible to make her work for nothing more than a bed of straw in the barn, with bread, cheese, milk and apples to eat. Unlike the others, she seemed glad of the work and didn’t make eyes at the men who came to visit. She was also, the dairyman said, astonishingly strong for one so small.
‘Let me speak to her,’ said Lagarde.
He took Jeanne to one side of the farmyard and asked her if she liked children.
Jeanne squinted in suspicion. ‘I don’t know, Monsieur.’
‘Did you have a younger brother? Or a sister?’
‘I don’t know, Monsieur.’
‘What do you mean, you don’t know?’
‘I remember nothing before the orphanage. That’s the first thing I know about.’
‘And did you look after any younger children in this orphanage?’
‘Sometimes. When I was older. On a Sunday.’
This qualification was all that Lagarde seemed to require. ‘I’m going to offer you a position as nursemaid and housekeeper. How much do you think you should be paid?’
‘That’s not for me to say, Monsieur.’ Her accent was so strong that he could barely understand her.
‘I’ll send a horse and cart for your belongings.’
‘That won’t be necessary,’ said the dairyman. ‘All she owns can be put in a bag.’
Monsieur Lagarde gave the dairyman a few coins for his trouble, remounted his horse and told Jeanne to walk behind him. An hour later they arrived at the village house and Jeanne was shown to a room at the back. At this time it had only a bed and a small table with a wooden crucifix.
‘Come down the corridor to the parlour when you’ve unpacked your things,’ said Monsieur Lagarde. ‘You can meet the children, then my wife will instruct you in your duties.’
Jeanne’s bag had a rosary that had been given to her by a nun at the orphanage, a single change of clothes, some grey woollen stockings and a shawl for winter. Finally, there was a plaster Madonna that was so badly chipped that the nuns had been on the point of throwing it away; they disliked its one-eyed, minatory stare, finding it alarming and comic in equal amounts.
She arranged these things on the stone windowsill and knelt down on the floor to say a prayer. Her prayers were always the same. She humbled herself before the Almighty, confessed her sins, thanked Him for His mercy and asked that the next day might bring no more hardship than the last. Sometimes she remembered to add that her final request was to be granted only if it was His will, as well as hers.
* * *
Jeanne was a steady nurse to the children. She was careful of their small bodies and aware of their social standing, but when it came to giving them instructions she knew no way but firmness. They profited from her certainty more than from their parents’ vague ambitions. By the time they reached the age of eight and six, Clémence and Marcel were frightened of Jeanne, but they also laughed at her coarse voice and her face with its watery, short-sighted eyes. They feared her stern sayings, such as ‘Tell the truth and shame the Devil’, but noticed that the way she pronounced certain words showed she did not know what they really meant.
Clémence was a diffident girl who cried easily and hated the darkness on the crooked stair when s
he took her candle up to bed. She seemed always to be cold and had an exaggerated fear of insects; she was in fact scared of all animals, including dogs and horses, though this was so inconvenient for a country girl that she tried to conceal it.
Jeanne knew that her own upbringing had been unusual but presumed that the lessons she had learned from it would apply to any child. So Clémence and Marcel were scrubbed in cold water morning and night and made to say their prayers; they never ate until everyone was seated and never spoke unless addressed. As for their lessons, Jeanne, who could not read, was happy to see them go off to school in the next village.
She had never met either of her own parents and was told by the nuns that they were dead. One lesson had burned itself into her mind: that a child’s happiness depends on the goodwill of strangers – in her case, Sister Thérèse, who supervised the cold dormitory where she had slept; and in the case of Clémence and Marcel, it depended on her.
Marcel was a simpler case than Clémence. While his sister was always struggling to make her natural inclinations bend to what the world required of her, Marcel had a temperament that fitted him for living. Cold water made him laugh, prayers made him hopeful and food made him content. He liked to ride the pony his father had given him, and the long walk to school each day was a chance to play games with the other children who journeyed to the next village. He was no scholar, but learned the essentials with only the occasional rap over the knuckles from the schoolmaster.
When she brushed Clémence’s hair at night, Jeanne was touched by an emotion she did not understand. ‘There, there, Ninou,’ she used to whisper as she brushed, ‘there, there.’ She recognised it as a virtuous feeling, however; it made her want to protect the child from whatever lay ahead. What she felt for Marcel was fiercer. She had an urge to squeeze his shoulders in her arms and kiss the brown curls of his head. But she never allowed herself such liberties, and when they were safely in bed she took a candle to light her way downstairs, pausing at the parlour door to tell Monsieur and Madame Lagarde that the children were asleep.
A Possible Life Page 17