Where My Heart Used to Beat

  Her name was Anna. She had chocolate-colored hair cut just short of the shoulder and pale lips, full, as though edged by a sculptor’s knife in clay. She wore a wool skirt and leather boots up to the knee. I guessed she was about thirty-eight. There was something resigned about her manner, but it didn’t look like weariness; it seemed that her mind was simply elsewhere.

  We walked along by the river for a few minutes, and she asked me what I was doing in her city. I told her I was there to write a book.

  “There are many writers here,” she said.

  “That’s encouraging.”

  “It’s a place full of stories.”

  “Mine’s not a story; it’s about real life. What’s wrong with us.”

  “All of us?”

  “In a way.”

  She opened an outer door, and we went over a courtyard, then up a flight of stone steps.

  “How long do you want the room?” said Anna.

  “However long it takes to write the book. Perhaps three months.”

  She shrugged. “I don’t like this place. And the woman who owns it, the … how do you say?”

  “The landlady?”

  “Yes, she is a bitch. Is that the right word?”

  “If you say so.”

  Anna put her head to one side and looked me up and down.

  “What’s in there?” She pointed.

  “My typewriter.”

  “It’s small.”

  “It’s portable. I didn’t want to carry something heavy.”

  “You know how to type?”

  “Badly. With just two or three fingers.”

  I wondered what it would take to make this woman smile.

  She looked round the room. It was a lifeless place, not altogether bad for writing; at least there would be no distractions.

  “I know a better house for you,” said Anna, glancing down at the papers in her hand. “Come.”

  We re-crossed the courtyard and went down a side street where the river had been diverted into a network of canals. Anna walked ahead without looking back. Eventually we came to a narrow door with flaking green paint, and she fumbled in her pockets for the keys.

  There was a dark hallway and a wooden staircase. At the top, she unlocked a door to a room that was surprisingly large, with floorboards of polished chestnut, a desk that overlooked the canal, a wooden sleigh bed in one corner, and a kitchen area behind a curtain with a sink and a gas ring.

  “Here you have no … landlady. You have to clean and cook for yourself. The bathroom is downstairs, but no one else uses it.”

  I looked at the threadbare rug on the floor. There was no radiator, but there was a heating pipe along one wall. The fireplace had some coal ashes. A small oil painting showed a peasant woman hurrying up some outdoor steps; she was seen from behind, and the yellowish light made the scene look Mediterranean. It could have passed for an alley in Pozzuoli.

  “I’ll take it. When can I move in?”

  For a moment I thought she was going to smile, but it was no more than a twitch.

  “Now, if you want. You can come and sign the papers in the office tomorrow.”

  “Just like that? You trust me to come back?”

  “Of course. Give me your passport if you like. I give it back tomorrow when you leave some money for rent.”

  “Is there a shop to buy food?”

  “Yes. Jacob’s on the next corner, and there’s a restaurant just down the street. Ask for the beef with pickled cucumber salad.”

  She handed me the keys and left. As I heard her footsteps on the bare steps I had a moment of panic. But I had been in so many rooms like this that I knew unpacking and filling the shelves would settle any qualms.

  My case held a spare pair of strong shoes, two sweaters, and some prescription pills; essential books and journals in English took up most of the remaining space. The rest of what I needed, socks and so on, I could buy anywhere.

  Jacob’s turned out to be a cavernous delicatessen with shelves of dark wood. The man behind the counter wore overalls and had a pencil behind his ear; it seemed you had to tell him what you wanted so he could go and fetch it. As well as being cumbersome, this gave me language problems. In the end, we had to walk round together with me pointing. The result was good, though, with some slices from a large ham folded in greaseproof paper, bread, mustard, oranges, and various unfamiliar tins.

  The next day I went back to the tourist office and paid a month’s rent; the man in the hat gave me back my passport. Anna was not there. With a bit of mime, I managed to find out where I could buy typing paper and set off with a map.

  After a few minutes I found myself in the cobbled main square, a cathedral on one side, colonnades on two others, a fountain and a brass statue of a knight on horseback. He was doubtless Charles or Philip or Frederick, the Bold or the Last or the Dauntless; but he reminded me of the Master of Foxhounds in the village where I’d grown up: a man whose seat on a horse didn’t match his enthusiasm for the sport. I ordered coffee in a bar and watched.

  I’d been alone so long that solitude wasn’t “second nature” to me; it was first nature. It was no more than an enactment of the condition of being human, so why should I be bothered by it? Once, when trying to console a bereaved father, Albert Einstein wrote: “A human being is a part of the whole, called by us ‘Universe’ a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts, and feelings as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”

  Apparently, Einstein wrote quite often to admirers who had asked his philosophical advice. This career sideline may have surprised him, but I think it probably made a welcome change from physics. I liked the idea he expressed here, though I had always tripped up on the word optical; it seemed such an odd mistake for a scientist. Perhaps there had been a lapse in translation.

  Looking round the square, I tried to free myself from the delusion of my separateness and to embrace, so to speak, the living creatures I saw. I found this easier with birds and dogs than with humans. The pigeon waiting on the pavement by the café for the crumbs to fall, the sparrows on the fountain rim: I had a feeling for their skeletons and plumage, their ignorance of self; I was happy to be part of that creation. At the next table were two lapdogs whose indulged snuffling was all right by me. I felt sorry for them because they seemed to be so conditioned by petting and rewards—they had none of the comic dignity of larger dogs, but even these little beasts had ribs and pounding hearts.

  As for the people … I felt pity for the old on their accelerating downhill slope towards extinction; I felt anxiety on behalf of the young. Couples seemed an alien species. I disliked the sexual element in the way I looked at all the females: speculating, weighing up each one, whether they were fourteen or seventy. I wanted either to have made love to all of them or to none at all. What I most disliked was the sense of having missed and failed, of having been unlucky, thus alone. I did feel a little sympathy for all these humans in the way Einstein perhaps had meant, as I saw them imprisoned in the fiction of their “individuality.” But this vague fellowship was edged with contempt for a species whose very claim to difference, to fame, was apparently deluded. My sympathy could certainly not be stretched to form a “circle of compassion.”

  * * *

  I DIDN’T ALWAYS think like this.

  On Saturday I went to a flea market by the north gate of the city. It had started to grow cold, and I was wearing both sweaters beneath my jacket. The market was in a former warehouse, but there were stalls that had spilled out along the sides of the canal. Inside there was a collection of glass lamp shades and broken vacuum cleaners and gateleg tables with burn or water marks. I wondered what it would be like to be
strolling through the junk with someone else.

  I went out and sat on the wall above the canal. I lit a cigarette and watched a couple with a tableful of chipped crockery trying to make a sale to a man in an expensive overcoat. The male hawker looked like a Polish hangman with grooves for lines in his haggard, hopeless face; his wife was fat for one so poor, indignant, and pushy, her red cheeks wrapped tight in a head scarf.

  Further down the waterside, someone put a record on a windup gramophone, and the brass of New Orleans jazz clanged up in the cold air.

  At that moment, with the clarinet wheedling, it occurred to me for the first time that in the end everything might not be all right.

  Throughout my life I had thought that if I could get through this section of it, then the pattern of a destiny would reveal itself. I suppose I must have absorbed some idea of just deserts or of being looked after by a kindly providence—probably from my mother or at the village Sunday school.

  The cities I had seen—Tunis, Colombo, and Jerusalem as well as Venice, Bruges, Vienna, all the rest—had never let me glimpse this promised future. I had scraped their walls with my eyes, wondering what they hid; I’d gazed up at attic casements high above department stores, having learned that to look upward was the only way to see. I’d peered through the steamy glass of bars and over the brass rails and half curtains in restaurant windows. I’d seen the world of others but never found a place in it; I’d walked on over the pavements, bewildered by the choice, not able to select for fear of missing what was meant for me.

  The solitary childhood, the adolescence with the Bible and the classical grammars—all those things had clearly been transitions, steps towards. Becoming grown up had brought war, though here too I convinced myself that … well: once home from Dunkirk, once back in action, once out of North Africa, once recovered from my wounds, once … Still I believed that if I kept the faith, the pattern would reveal itself.

  After the war, my best hope had been to “lose” myself in work; by indirections, as old Polonius had advised, I would find directions out. Then during the years in that tunnel of research, in the back wards of the human spirit, perhaps a little superstition had pushed me on: I was being “good”; I was working for the sake of my fellow creatures in their suffering, which almost no one else had understood. Perhaps unconsciously I’d believed that God was watching. I think I hoped this intense labor would also be a stage, after which … after which, surely.

  I’d decided to “lose myself,” and myself was what I’d lost—in all those consultations, refractory wards, and soiled clothes. And the likelihood, I saw now for the first time, was that my life would always be a chain of transitions, with no design to be revealed. The only “after which” that there would ever be was the one that I was in: another foreign city in which to be alone.

  * * *

  ON MONDAY I began to write the book, which I’d decided to call The Chosen Few. I had bought a packet of paper from the stationer’s shop, and I wound the first sheet into the typewriter. Two days later, two days of walking round the room, over the polished floorboards, retreating, making notes in pencil, I typed the first word. It was “It.”

  Nothing had prepared me for the physical labor of writing a book. The medical papers I’d written had been not much longer than student essays, but to be a book this thing could not be less than—well, to judge by others on the shelf—seventy-five or eighty thousand words. It seemed an unreachable number, however much I reminded myself that the longest journey began with a single step. Did my fingers have the strength to smash down the keys more than half a million times? Were the muscles in my lower back strong enough to hold me upright through the weeks?

  I set the typewriter for the maximum space between lines to allow for handwritten corrections. I estimated that if I typed three pages a day I could finish in ninety days—roughly the three months I’d agreed to rent the room. I worked each morning, went out, walked, then worked again from about five till dinnertime. At night I read. Very slowly, I began to make progress: the pile of blank sheets dwindled; the pile of typed ones grew. It was like building a wall, brick by brick.

  * * *

  THERE WAS A part of my private work that I was unable to incorporate into the book, though it had a bearing on the way I saw the world and on what I thought about Luisa.

  While I was working in Birmingham, some research began to focus on the then new topic of drug dependency. As a reward for my long winters on the chronic wards, I was allowed to go on a six-month attachment to a research institute in Edinburgh where they were, with the limited means then available, trying to establish what was going on in the brains of those addicted to heroin. The theory was that the prefrontal cortex, or what in lay terms you might call the seat of reason and behavior control, pretty much shut down, while at the same time there was a large increase in levels of dopamine—the chemical that gives pleasure and the desire to repeat it.

  This theory was hardly surprising, but it reminded me of something else: the physiology of sex, to which it could equally have applied. It also made me wonder whether the feeling of love or being “in love” might be capable of such explanation. I had been struck by similarities between my own thought patterns where Luisa was concerned and those of patients suffering from what was once called “monomania” and was later renamed “obsessive-compulsive disorder.” I proposed to my Scottish colleagues to examine serotonin levels in volunteers from both groups of people, but time and money were against us.

  There was no doubt that being “in love” gave rise to brain changes; the question, as with Diego’s voices, was whether they were healthy or morbid. It seldom takes long for brain science to move into metaphysics, and pending the arrival of more powerful scanners, equipment that might give an answer at the submicroscopic level, I was left merely to ponder the strange status we humans had conferred on the idea of “love.”

  It was the only emotion we granted the power to change our lives; no other feeling—if by “feeling” we meant the release of unruly chemicals in the brain—was allowed to sit in judgment beside our reason and our intellect. No sane person would make a life-altering decision on the basis of envy, rage, or despair; but we were happy to let the biggest choices of our lives be determined by the emotion of “love.”

  We were, moreover, proud of it: society applauded and gave tax incentives to those who married, bred, worked, and died by the dictates of this particular rush of dopamine. It was all so very strange, I thought; though the comfort I took from it was to persuade myself that the agonies I felt for Luisa were no more than the side effects of neurotransmitters that had serially misfired.

  Unable to fit these thoughts into the scheme of the book, I had, shortly before leaving for my sabbatical, submitted an article on this topic to the magazine that had been kind enough to publish me before. To my surprise they ran it in full, under a headline that used a then voguish expression: “Love: The Human Category Error.” For some time afterwards I would get telephone calls from magazines or radio programs in search of a clockwork rationalist who would reduce all human life to a synaptic event. I grew tired of explaining that that was not my entire worldview.

  * * *

  MOST DAYS WHILE I was writing The Chosen Few I had lunch at the Brasserie Felix, a place I’d discovered in a square about fifteen minutes’ walk away. They didn’t mind what time you arrived, there was always a dish of the day—cured salmon and dill, or sausages with herbs. I drank the local beer, which was dark and still.

  One afternoon I saw Anna from the tourist office walking past and on instinct raised my arm. She stopped and peered through the glass. I beckoned her inside, where she allowed me to buy her some hot chocolate. Her face looked pale, and there were dark smudges beneath the eyes. She asked how my book was going.

  “It’s going. I’m typing.”

  “Do you know each day what you’re going to write?”

  “Sometimes,” I said. “If there’s a particular story I want to tell or an
idea I want to correct.”

  “To correct?”

  “Yes. My book points out that much of what we think we know in my field is probably wrong.”

  She didn’t ask what my “field” was. She stirred her drink, then turned the handle away from her and lifted the cup in both palms.

  “And other times?” she said.

  “At other times I sit and wait. If nothing comes, I’ve discovered that it’s better just to write something—anything. You can always tear up the piece of paper and throw it away, but if you don’t begin, then nothing comes. You have to submit.”

  “I see.”

  She looked out of the window. She always seemed to be searching for something distant.

  “Were you born here?” I said.

  “Me? No. I came to live here about five years ago.”

  I wanted to ask more, but her manner was discouraging.

  “What are you doing this afternoon?” I said.

  “I’m going to look at some properties we may put on our list.”

  “Where?”

  “Various parts of the city.”

  “Are you walking?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can I come with you?”

  I hadn’t intended to ask; the words fell out of my mouth.

  Still unsmiling, Anna said, “If you like. But I must leave now.”

  I paid and followed her out onto the cold street. She strode ahead at such a pace that I struggled to keep up. The first stop was a flat in a gray tenement. The lift was broken, and it was a long walk up to the fourth floor. Anna told me the apartment belonged to an old couple who were going to live in a home in the suburbs but needed the income from letting.

  They looked ready for retirement. The old man chirped away like a caged bird as Anna inspected the flat. There was something pleading in his manner, though I had no idea what he was saying. His wife banged cups and plates in the small kitchen. They pressed black tea on us, and cakes that made a lot of crumbs.

  Afterwards, Anna explained that she had told them they needed to repaint it and to fix the hot water system. We saw three more places that afternoon.