What it Means to be Human

Too much freedom

The disparity in our lifestyles didn’t stop Andrea from continuing to court me for my friendship. He would invite me out for couscous royale or fillet steak at his expense. He even proposed that I join him on a business trip to Italy. My dual role would be to share the driving and keep him company.

I was far from sure about accepting. That friendship never was quite mutual. I had had my doubts about him from the start. Why did he want to meet in public? What was this notion, exactly, about me being his partner? All I had done was to advertise English lessons in the local classifieds. Out of nowhere loomed this swarthy Sicilian who seemed less interested in learning English than in coercing me into a business scheme. His approach was at best misjudged. At worst, it was sinister. What was his agenda? I wasn’t just doubtful; I was also scared. He exuded a dark Mediterranean roughness like that of a Minotaur. With my half-a-degree in English literature, I had only the flimsiest defence. He was unambiguously a man, while at twenty-one I was essentially a boy. It was like the meeting of Innocence and Experience.

In the end, I agreed to go to Italy with Andrea for the feeble reason that I had nothing better to do. When Simone went off to work, I was left to potter around the apartment or mooch about the farmers’ market. Apart from a smattering of translation work, there were just my ‘little English lessons’, as Andrea would disparagingly call them – and not so many of those, frankly. So I was free.

Too free, perhaps, like I had been at Oxford, when I had only to show my face once a week. Because freedom implies the absence of responsibility, it’s a close cousin of rootlessness. Pure freedom is bad freedom, in other words. Good freedom comes about when we securely belong. Think of children playing in the garden while their parents make Sunday lunch. The children are all the more free because they are invisibly tethered to the kitchen. It’s the feeling of being safely held which, paradoxically, releases them to play.

In my case, there was barely a tether at all. My parents never tried to talk me out of leaving Oxford. After my departure for France, I heard not a peep from them until I dropped the bombshell of Simone’s pregnancy. Up to that point, they were content to keep paying out the rope that might have kept me connected, and I was content to keep pulling away. It was all slack. That gave me a strong sense of the arbitrariness of life, of how easy it is to turn onto new paths when there’s no firm set of expectations. It lay behind my later decision to make what was, to many people, the bizarre switch from academia to management consultancy. There was never enough glue sticking me to my own track, whatever that was, never any chance of getting stuck in a rut.fn3 The surface over which I moved was as smooth as marble. Freedom and arbitrariness went together. I could slide in any direction.

Red voice, green voice

That trip to Italy in the spring of 1987 began innocuously enough. Andrea and I would take turns at the wheel of his white Audi as we cruised along the Côte d’Azur, while he talked with gusto about sex. He described the positions he favoured for fucking his wife, pausing every now and then to enquire unsuccessfully as to my own proclivities. ‘Tu es bien,’ he remarked with sorrow.

Andrea’s concupiscence extended to food. He recommended consuming not just the flesh but also the eyes of grilled fish, and sucked the whitened discs from a sea bream. At another restaurant, he returned to his seat having already settled the bill for our five courses – antipasti, pasta, primi, secondi, dolce – so that he could enjoy a second dessert from the trolley, an oozing millefeuille which he had failed to spot the first time round. He also taught me his method for eating pizza: cut into triangles, roll a triangle up starting with the tip, stab with a fork, then eat from one end, like a wrap.

So far, so good. My doubts on agreeing to the road trip had climbed out of the front seat of my mind and into the back. But they were still in the car. I would describe these doubts as the ‘red voice’ in my head. If doubt is proactive uncertainty, that is what the red voice was. It said, ‘Danger! You are out of your depth!’ However, the red voice had competition in the form of a green voice. The green voice was saying, ‘It will be fine. Don’t be a wimp. It could be an adventure. You’ve never been to Italy before. What’s the worst that could happen?’

Whenever we strike a deal or make an agreement with somebody, we hear these competing red and green voices. The problem arises when we allow the red voice to become stifled. Nearly all difficulties in human affairs stem from poor contracting, that is, when expectations are not surfaced at the outset of whatever the joint effort might be. To take an everyday example that would later happen to me:

Two couples go out for dinner together for the first time. Couple A declare that they are not drinking alcohol that night, and order tap water. During the course of the evening Couple B consume two bottles of wine. The bill arrives and Couple B pay half the total amount. Couple A pay their half, but they resent doing so. Couple A thought that in announcing that they wouldn’t have wine, they had implicitly entered into a verbal contract with Couple B over the division of the bill. But in the social nervousness at the beginning of the meal, that contract wasn’t made explicit. The two couples do not go out for dinner again.

In other words, the red voice warns us that the contract has residual ambiguities in it, like undissolved stones that sink to the bottom of a liquid. To mix my metaphors, these stones become the eggs from which poor decisions hatch.

What made me turn the volume down on my red voice was that lack of meaningful work, and a corresponding need to fill it. The mental picture of life in Perpignan that I had painted before leaving Croydon did not feature me as a house husband. A sojourn in the aftershave-drenched company of Andrea’s machismo would help to chase away any perceived effeminacy on my part.

In other words, my self-esteem had dropped to a point at which I was more likely to agree to things that I might otherwise have rejected. That’s the real danger with low self-esteem: it can draw us into making bad decisions. That sense of my life’s arbitrariness, of my being able to slide in any direction, wasn’t just about autonomy. It indicated that my life wasn’t worth securing.

It was when Andrea and I reached Parma that the atmosphere soured. There had been an intimation of trouble when we crossed the border. Before waving us on, the Italian police had taken a long look at our Palermo licence plates. On our way to the Bologna shoe fair, Andrea and I had checked into a hotel for the night; we shared a room with two single beds. Barely a minute later, the bedroom door was busted open by the cops. They must have been following us all the way from Ventimiglia. It was my second raid in a month. The Armani-wearing carabinieri went through our suitcases. They frogmarched us down to the Audi where Andrea was forced to display his wares. There were just the shoes, as he had protested. That didn’t satisfy the police. They lifted the carpets, unscrewed the radio and removed the door panels, questioning Andrea all the while.

They had questions for me too. I was an English student dropout working without a visa in France on a business trip to Italy with a person of interest from Sicily. If those weren’t quite grounds for arrest, they were certainly cause for suspicion. My Italian wasn’t up to following him, but somehow Andrea managed to blarney his way out of it. The police grudgingly withdrew.

The next day, it all came out. Andrea didn’t fess up as such, but he did let me ask questions to which he would supply yes or no answers. Was he laundering money through shoe sales? He nodded. Was it for the Mob? Another nod. The Bologna shoe fair would enable him to close a number of deals, after which he was to report back to his bosses in Milan. Personally, he wanted out. His own brother had been shot down in a helicopter by his mafiosi friends, and Andrea had lost his stomach for it.

A part of Andrea’s befriending me, it seemed, was a genuine desire to live a more reputable life. Perhaps that is what he had associated with the Oxford brand. Where I was innocent enough to believe that all experience was good, he, the figure of experience, was hankering after some innocence. He would use this innocence like a cleaning product for wiping his slate: Innocence™. Like the good Catholic that he was, he had an overdeveloped faculty of guilt along with an exaggerated longing for atonement.

We stopped in Milan on the way back, as ordered. Andrea went for his meeting in an anonymous office block, leaving me in the car. Knowing what I by then knew, my wait was tense. What if one of them saw me? Andrea came back half an hour later with new instructions. He was to move his family back to Sicily. After the return drive to Perpignan, I never saw him again.

I arrived home to find Simone in a state. We had been burgled. They took everything, even jeans. My beloved cassette player was gone. In order to unlock the front door from the inside, the bastard had punched a hole through the glass panel next to it, cutting his hand. There was blood everywhere. We were now in 1987, at the high tide of the hysteria around HIV. Would we get infected?

The robbery had a further disquieting aspect. Our apartment was locked and on the first floor. Accessing it required the main door of the building to be breached, as well as that of the apartment itself. Simone herself had been away while I was with Andrea, visiting friends in Provence. We couldn’t help wondering whether our Moroccan neighbours were the culprits. Maybe we were being as racist as the immigration police, but who else would have known that we were both away? Apart from Andrea, that is.

The dream

I had arrived in Perpignan with Simone on New Year’s Eve, 1986. Simone had been back home for Christmas to visit her parents, and had scooped me up for the return leg. The coach journey from Victoria station took a gruelling twenty-four hours. We pulled into Perpignan’s central square just as the restaurants were closing and the floors being swept.

That first night, I had a dream in which I was the father of three daughters. There was little narrative, more a single tableau for me to behold: the three girls and me, as if I were being shown a photograph.

It was rare for me to dream, or at least to remember a dream. Maybe what provoked it was the combination of the travelling, the unfamiliar bed, the first night spent with Simone, and the apprehension induced by having taken this leap into the unknown of another country. More unusual, however, was the fact that the dream featured a family. Of all the fantasies regarding my future that I nurtured at the age of twenty-one, none included children. The very word ‘family’ freaked me out. It brought up visions of The Waltons and other cheesy Americana. The concept of the nuclear family rankled, as it diminished alternative ways of life. Family was so mammalian: whither had our human faculties disappeared in this guileless mimicry of the animal world? With a young man’s single-mindedness, I also thought that having a family would attenuate my heroic purpose in life. Not that I had one.

What was stoking all this aversion? That lack of tethering to my birth family, no doubt. It was as if, growing up, a centrifugal force had whirred in the house, like the drum in a washing machine, spinning my parents and sisters into different corners. Not to mention the central fact of my father’s decline. For me, belonging to a family meant living in a micro-culture that had failed to coalesce around anything much, save for that heart of darkness.

In short, dreaming about having a family should have made me anxious. In fact, it felt benign. By the time I dreamt the dream, on the first morning of 1987, Simone was pregnant.

C’est une fille

It was another three months before we knew. Since we were using birth control, it was a while before it crossed our minds, but eventually Simone went to the doctor. When she came home with the news, I sat on the bed and buried my face in my hands. Here is some of what I thought and felt:

A few weeks later, Simone went back to the doctor for a scan. This time I accompanied her. Given we were in France, where eating rare red meat was the norm, he warned us about toxoplasmosis, a blood disease carried by undercooked food, and the dangers it held for pregnant women. Simone and I later laughed at how typically French the whole thing was. Other than that, all was routine. The doctor performed the scan. To me, the fuzzy black and white image was as indecipherable as a galaxy. The foetus lay inches beneath the skin yet seemed as remote as an astronaut blurred by cosmic sleet. When we asked about the gender, the doctor suavely replied, ‘À mon avis, c’est une fille.’ ‘In my opinion, it’s a girl.’ Sweet Pea was frolicking like a seahorse in her amniotic bath.

Secret motives

The pregnancy came out of the blue. We hadn’t planned it, we were using contraception and, for the purposes of bringing up baby, our circumstances were far from ideal. Simone was on a fixed-term contract; I was on no contract at all. Neither of us had a home or a job in the UK to go back to. We’d been together a few short months, and were a long way from committing to each other as life partners. My desire to start a family was zero. To the extent that I had plans, they were as self-oriented as any twenty-one-year-old’s plans would be. What’s more, the model of fatherhood that I held in my mind was shaped by my own father, Colin. If that was what fatherhood looked like, then thanks but no thanks.

So there were more than a few enemies that the pregnancy needed to defeat. On paper, it shouldn’t have won. But despite all those forces lined up in opposition, maybe a part of me wanted what shouldn’t have happened to happen – to say nothing of Simone’s own unconscious motives. Was I surreptitiously on the lookout for a chance to become the father whom I wished I had had? It was more than not wanting to be his son. That agenda I was already enacting. On my eighteenth birthday I had declared that I would no longer address my father as ‘Daddy’ (so babyish!), but by his first name, ‘Colin’. It felt awkward but I was militant – in the way that a young boy is militant when he runs away from home with a knapsack and a bag of crisps.

Was I now going one step further, by wresting the role of father from Daddy? I did take the first opportunity available: conception occurred within hours of being dropped off from the coach. It was as if I had seen a way to reinstate the figure of thrusting fatherhood which, with Colin’s demise, had been swiped away. I was young and healthy, with all my life ahead. If he couldn’t do it, then I would. Rather than observing his position as if through binoculars, I would commandeer it. I would lift from Colin the burden of being a father himself, freeing him to slay his own demons and return to vigour.

Who knows. Beneath our stated intentions, the layers ladder down like strata on a cliff face. I would group these layers into four, as in the triangle below:

1 We all have a top layer of selfish interests. I was concerned that my own life should go well, without having a baby to worry about.

2 At the next layer down, I was heeding an unconscious call to repair the damage in my family system (hence the ‘systemic’ label). This I would do by pumping life back into the punctured figure of the father, substituting myself for Colin.

3 Beneath layer two sits that level of motivation which keeps us in line with our society’s expectations. Largely without thinking, we will adopt prevailing norms, seeking not to stand out. It takes effort to be different: fitting in is so much easier. Hence the dominance of that nuclear family. On our arrival in France, the government was just launching an initiative to drive up the birth rate. Billboards displayed pictures of cherubic babies, accompanied by cheeky captions inviting the population to go forth and multiply.

4 At the deepest level, our motivations are bestowed on us by the species as a whole. The species is fixated on its own survival. We need life to go on, even if not all of us will serve as its agents.

The further down the triangle we go, the less conscious our motivations become. That doesn’t mean they lose power. On the contrary, we find ourselves subject to increasingly puissant forces. By the time we touch the ground floor that marks the species level, we are unlikely to be aware of any ‘motivation’ at all. Few of us will have children for the sake of preserving the species. But the fact that our minds won’t register the needs of the species – except in an abstract way – doesn’t mean that our bodies aren’t teeming with those needs. That’s the life force at work. Whatever else we might be, we are vehicles of life and its indefatigable drive to keep driving. Some of us create children; none of us created life. Although we can suppress life through contraception, abortion, and even acts of killing, we are only holding back a force that is stronger than we are.

Up to a point, this force fits with what the nineteenth-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer refers to as ‘will’. For Schopenhauer, ‘will’ is a striving in all things – animal, plant and mineral – to continue being themselves. It has an invisible but surging energy. Schopenhauer doesn’t focus on the transferring of this presence from one generation to the next, yet the quality of ‘will’ that he describes seems close to what I mean by ‘life force’. It is that which compels all things to be what they are. It also stops them, for as long as they exist, from becoming nothing. Human beings are no less subject to this law than are the animal and plant kingdoms, and even the realm of the inanimate. If my guiding question for this book is ‘What does it mean to be a human being?’, then one answer is that human beings, like everything else, are saturated with will.

The future of the past

Each one of us represents a bet placed by the species in the interests of multiplying itself. Not all the bets will come off: that’s what makes them bets. And yet every one of us is living proof of a bet that did. We leave behind a cloud of countless lives that never came to be, like a trillion soap bubbles popping in the air. We, the few, got life. They, the many, did not. For as long as we are alive, we keep life itself alive. That is perhaps the deepest vocation that we can follow. Without our lives to bear it like a flame, human life itself would expire. Say we achieve little success personally; or fail to love our family as much as we could; or make a negligible contribution to society. Nevertheless we will have kept life alive, and that is not nothing.

As far as furthering the human race is concerned, the brute fact is that those of us without children represent an end-stop. But we can look down the telescope the other way. To be here implies having come from somewhere. The life force has flowed into everyone, regardless of whether it flows out into the next generation. We are ancestral creatures one and all. Typically, we will look back as far as our grandparents or great-grandparents; we will hold three or four generations in mind. Our ancestors are active in us from roughly a hundred years back. They animate our memories even if they no longer move in the world. They enjoy an afterlife during which their name, whenever it is recalled, will swivel like a weathervane in the minds of those who survive them. In this sense, our ancestors don’t finally die until the fourth or fifth generation after them has arrived.

That sounds like a stretch, although in ancestral terms it’s nary a dot on the timeline. Our ancestors extend back for hundreds if not thousands of generations. There isn’t one of us who is not descended from real people who lived in the eighteenth century, the eleventh, the fifth. We have hind-parents from the time of Muhammad, Jesus, Buddha, the Pharaohs, the builders of Stonehenge and before. Hind-parents are people who lived at the same time as those iconic figures, and who placed their children on a serpentine line that eventually found its way to us. Before they were people, they were apes; before they were apes, they were birds; before they were birds, they were fish; and so on, back to the flickering origin of life itself. Thanks to the DNA that was passed down, we hold that line in our bodies. We are the past from which we have come.

The majority that do have children are prolonging the being of their remotest ancestors. It works like an ancient yeast, this thing called ‘being’, a germ with the miraculous power of regeneration. Not that this wonder-culture is any vaccine against death. Even as our children keep a trace of us going, we die. Their arrival signals our departure, no matter how drawn out. Obviously, people without children are mortal too. It’s just that, with an extra generational layer beneath them, parents may find their mortality more clearly framed. The clock doesn’t tick any faster for parents than for non-parents, but perhaps it ticks louder.