Levels of Life by Julian Barnes Page A

live, and in modern dress. The production began, atypically, by staging the death of Euridice. There is a cocktail party; all are having fun; we deduce that she is the cynosure in the red frock. Suddenly, she collapses to the floor. The guests surround her, Orfeo kneels to attend her, but she is losing height, fatally, falling slowly through a trapdoor in the boards. He clutches at her, trying to hold her back, but she slips away, out of his fingers and out of her frock, so that he is left on stage grasping just a swathe of emptied cloth.
     
    In modern dress, the opera still worked its magic trick. And yet, in modern dress ourselves, we cannot be Orfeo, or Euridice. We have lost the old metaphors, and must find new ones. We can’t go down as he went down. So we must go down in a different way, bring her back in a different way. We can still go down in dreams. And we can go down in memory.
     
    At first, improbably (but then where has probability gone in all of this?), dreams are more reliable, more secure, than memory. In dreams she arrives looking and acting very like herself. I always know it is her – she is calm, and amused, and happy, and sexy, and so, as a result, am I. The dream falls swiftly and regularly into a pattern. We are together, she is clearly in good health, so I think – or rather, since this is a dream, I know – that either she has been misdiagnosed, or she has made a miraculous recovery, or (at the very least) that death has somehow been postponed for several years and our life together can continue. This illusion lasts for a while. But then I think – or rather, since this is a dream, I know – that I must be inside a dream because, actually, she is dead. I wake happy at having had the illusion, yet dismayed at how truth has ended it; so I never try to re-enter that dream again.
    Some nights, after turning out the light, I remind her that she hasn’t been in my dreams recently, and often she responds by coming to me (or rather, ‘she’ ‘responds’ by coming – I never think for a moment that all this is other than self-generated). Sometimes in these dreams we kiss; always there is a kind of laughing lightness to the scenario. She never reproaches or rebukes me, or makes me feel guilty or neglectful (though since I regard these dreams as self-generated, then I must also regard them as self-serving, even self-satisfied). Perhaps the dreams are as they are because there is enough regret and self-reproach in real, lived time. But they are always a source of comfort.
     
    The more so because when I seek to go down in memory, I fail. For a long time I cannot remember back before the start of the year in which she died. All I can do is January to October: three weeks in Chile and Argentina, with my sixty-second birthday spent in a high forest of monkey-puzzle trees, full of cavorting Magellanic woodpeckers. Then normal life again, before a walking holiday in Sicily, and some of our last joint memories: giant fennel and a hillside of wild flowers, an Antonello da Messina and a stuffed porcupine, a fishing town filled with the putt-putt celebrants of World Vespa Weekend. But then, on our return, apprehension, rising fear, the sudden crash. I remember every detail of her decline, her time in hospital, return home, dying, burial. But I cannot get back beyond that January; my memory seems burnt away. A widowed colleague of hers assures me that this is not unusual, that my memories will return, but there are few certainties left in my life, and nothing follows a pattern, so I am sceptical. Why should anything happen when everything has happened? And so it feels as if she is slipping away from me a second time: first I lose her in the present, then I lose her in the past. Memory – the mind’s photographic archive – is failing.
     
    And this is where the Silent Ones cause further offence. They do not understand (how could they?) that they have a new function in your life. You need your friends not