Levels of Life by Julian Barnes

my new social realism.
     
    I went to a London cinema for a direct broadcast from New York of Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice . Beforehand, I did my homework, listening through to the piece, libretto in hand. And I thought: this can’t possibly work. A man’s wife dies, and his lamentation so moves the gods that they grant him permission to go down into the Underworld, find her, and bring her back. One condition, however, is applied: he must not look her in the face until they are back on earth, or she will be lost to him for ever. Whereupon, as he is leading her out of the Underworld, she persuades him to look back at her; whereupon she dies; whereupon he laments her again, even more affectingly, and draws his sword to commit suicide; whereupon the God of Love, disarmed by this display of uxoriousness, restores Euridice to life. Oh, come off it, really . It wasn’t the presence or the actions of the gods – those I could easily credit; it was the fact that no one in his senses would turn and look at Euridice, knowing what the consequence would be. And if that wasn’t enough, the role of Orfeo, originally a castrato or countertenor but nowadays a trouser role, was to be taken in this production by a bulky contralto. Yet I had quite underestimated Orfeo , the opera most immaculately targeted at the griefstruck; and in that cinema the miraculous trickery of art happened again. Of course Orfeo would turn to look at the pleading Euridice – how could he not? Because, while ‘no one in his senses’ would do so, he is quite out of his senses with love and grief and hope. You lose the world for a glance? Of course you do. That is what the world is for: to lose under the right circumstances. How could anyone hold to their vow with Euridice’s voice at their back?
     
    The gods impose terms and conditions on Orfeo when he goes down into the Underworld; he must agree to the deal. Death often brings out the bargainer in us. How many times have you read in books, or seen in films, or heard in the general narrative of life, about someone promising God – or whoever might be Up There – to behave in such-and-such a way if only He will spare them, or the one they love, or both of them? When it came to my turn – in those dread-filled thirty-seven days – I was never tempted to bargain because there was and is no one in my cosmos to bargain with. Would I give all my books for her life? Would I give my own life for hers? Facile to say yes: such questions were rhetorical, hypothetical, operatic. ‘Why?’ the child asks, ‘ why? ’ The unyielding parent answers simply, ‘Because.’ So, as I drove towards that railway bridge, I would doggedly repeat, ‘It’s just the universe doing its stuff.’ I said it to avoid being led astray by vain hopes and meaningless diversions.
     
    I told one of the few Christians I know that she was seriously ill. He replied that he would pray for her. I didn’t object, but shockingly soon found myself informing him, not without bitterness, that his god didn’t seem to have been very effective. He replied, ‘Have you ever considered that she might have suffered more?’ Ah, I thought, so that’s the best your pale Galilean and his dad can do.
     
    And that bridge I passed under was in the meantime coming to represent more than just a bridge. It had been built to carry the Eurostar into its new London terminus at St Pancras. The switch from Waterloo was more convenient, and I had often imagined us going on it together, to Paris, Brussels and beyond. But somehow, we never did, and now never would. And so this unoffending bridge came to stand for part of our lost future, for all the spurts and segments and divagations of life that we would now never share; but also for things undone in the past – for promises unkept, for carelessness and unkindness, times of falling short. I came to hate and fear that bridge, though never changed my route.
     
    A year or so later, I saw Orfeo again, this time