Free Levels of Life by Julian Barnes Page B

grief?
    And there are still new, one-off pains for which you are quite unprepared, and unprotected against. Like sitting round a table with your seven-year-old great-niece while she amuses the company with her new game of Odd Man Out. So-and-so is the odd man/woman out because of blue eyes/brown jacket/goldfish ownership, and so on. Then, from nowhere, except from childlike logic: ‘Julian’s the odd one out because he’s the only person whose wife is dead.’
     
    It took a while, but I remember the moment – or rather, the suddenly arriving argument – which made it less likely that I would kill myself. I realised that, insofar as she was alive at all, she was alive in my memory. Of course, she remained powerfully in other people’s minds as well; but I was her principal rememberer. If she was anywhere, she was within me, internalised. This was normal. And it was equally normal – and irrefutable – that I could not kill myself because then I would also be killing her. She would die a second time, my lustrous memories of her fading as the bathwater turned red. So it was, in the end (or, at least, for the time being), simply decided. As was the broader, but related question: how am I to live? I must live as she would have wanted me to.
     
    After a few months, I began to brave public places and go out to a play, a concert, an opera. But I found that I had developed a terror of the foyer. Not of the space itself, but of what it contained: cheerful, expectant, normal people looking forward to enjoying themselves. I couldn’t bear the noise and the look of placid normality: just more busloads of people indifferent to my wife’s dying. Friends were obliged to meet me outside the theatre and conduct me, like a child, to my seat. Once there, I felt safe; and when the lights went down, safer.
     
    The first play I was taken to was Oedipus ; the first opera, Strauss’s Elektra . But as I sat through these harshest of tragedies, in which the gods inflict intolerable punishment for human offence, I didn’t feel myself transported to a distant, antique culture where terror and pity reigned. I felt instead that Oedipus and Elektra were coming to me, to my land, to the new geography I now inhabited. And, quite unexpectedly, I fell into a love of opera. For most of my life it had seemed one of the least comprehensible art forms. I didn’t really understand what was going on (despite the diligent reading of plot summaries); I was prejudiced against those dinner-jacketed picnickers who seemed to own the genre; but most of all, I couldn’t make the necessary imaginative leap. Operas felt like deeply implausible and badly constructed plays, with characters yelling in one another’s faces simultaneously. The initial problem – that of comprehension – was fixed by the introduction of surtitles. But now, in the darkness of an auditorium and the darkness of grief, the form’s implausibility suddenly dissolved. Now it seemed quite natural for people to stand onstage and sing at one another, because song was a more primal means of communication than the spoken word – both higher and deeper. In Verdi’s Don Carlo the hero has scarcely met his French princess in the Forest of Fontainebleau before he is on his knees singing, ‘My name is Carlo and I love you.’ Yes , I thought, that’s right, that’s how life is and should be, let’s concentrate on the essentials. Of course, opera has plot – and I was already anticipating all those unknown stories I was about to discover – but its main function is to deliver the characters as swiftly as possible to the point where they can sing of their deepest emotions. Opera cuts to the chase – as death does. So now, contented indifference before Middlesbrough against Slovan Bratislava coexisted with a craving for an art in which violent, overwhelming, hysterical and destructive emotion was the norm; an art which seeks, more obviously than any other form, to break your heart. Here was