He was silent.
— Go on, I said.
— Yes, sir, he said.
I waited.
Finally I said: What else did he say about the Swiss sanatoria?
— Switzerland, he said to me once, is not as dull as people make it out to be. There is more to Switzerland than cheese and sanatoria and mountains, he said. There are more drunks and there are more suicides in Swizerland than in any other European country. And there are more madmen per head of the population than in any other European country. I met some remarkable individuals, he said, both inside the sanatoria and outside. I met some remarkable mad billiard-players, with whom I played billiards for hours at a time in the sanatoria. We had no cues, we had to use our hands, our arms and our hands. We played for hours at a time. Sometimes we had no balls either, because of the war there were shortages even in Switzerland. Shortage of billiard cues and even of billiard balls. What went on in these sanatoria, I can’t tell you, he said. The patients with each other. The doctors and nurses with each other. The doctors and nurses with the patients. Such goings-on. In these sanatoria one could do anything. So long as one did not talk about the war. Everybody had to pretend there was no war. It was enough to drive you mad. Whenever I could I played the piano. Just one note. Always one note. He’s madder than the rest, they said. But it’s by playing one note over and over again that you get to the heart of that note. I didn’t realise it then, I accepted what they said, that I was madder than the rest, although a part of me was always aware that I was not mad at all. In the end, he said, I could not stand those sanatoria any more and I got out. I rejoined Arabella in our flat in Geneva and I spent the day looking out of the window at the lake and waiting for the war to end. Arabella too was waiting for it to end. As soon as it ended she disappeared again. A friend offered to try and find out where she had gone, but I no longer wanted to know. From that day to this, Massimo, he said, I have not heard from her, nor have I made any attempt to find her. It is as if she had never existed, he said. Never existed. For a while I wondered if there would be any news of her but there was none. She had been swallowed up into thin air, he said. Into thin air.
He was silent for a long time. I let him be. Then I said: Go on.
— How? he said.
— What happened after she left?
— I knew I could not stay in Geneva any more, he said, sitting in my flat by the lake and playing that one note over and over again. I felt that I had reached a turning point in my life, but I did not know what it was. We were driving to San Felice, he liked to have lunch in the Circeo Park Hotel, looking out over the sea. So I left Geneva and settled in Paris again, he said, I already knew many of the writers and artists there. The Surrealists. Ponge. Giacometti. Sartre. Above all Michaux. Michaux was a lovely man. When his wife died he began to draw and paint. I wanted to escape from words, he said. I wanted to escape from the control of words. I wanted my hand to lead me, my pencil to lead me. Later he took mescalin and painted what he saw when he was high on mescalin, but in those days he was still mourning his wife. In Paris a funny thing happened to me, Mr Pavone said. I held my hand up to my face and I could not recognise it. Not only did I not see that it was a hand, I did not know that it belonged to me. I wanted to cry all the time but not a tear would drop. Pas une larme, Massimo, he said. Pas une larme. I was at work on a huge orchestral piece, still in the serial style I thought was necessary for any serious composition. It was called The Eternal Silence of Those Infinite Spaces. My body was screaming at me to stop but my will forced me to go on. My shoulder was paralysed. I had to get someone to help with the copying of the score. Every day when I woke up all I wanted was to stay in bed, to cover my face with the blankets and shut out the day. But I forced myself to get up. I forced myself to sit at my desk. I forced myself to complete The Eternal Silence of Those Infinite Spaces. And finally it was done. Monteux was to conduct it. I wanted to run away but conventions are conventions, Massimo, he said, and so I forced myself into my black tie and I took a taxi to the Salle Pleyel. But I could not go into the hall. I rushed to the lavatory and was sick. Afterwards I lay on the floor to try and recover. Strains of music came to my ears. My music. It made me feel sick. Then suddenly the door was flung open and someone was looking at me. He began to shout: There’s a dead man here! There’s a dead man here! I got up at once and motioned to him to be quiet. Then I heard the last chords and the sound of clapping, so I pushed him aside and ran to the auditorium and slipped in, walked slowly forward as if from the back and climbed onto the podium and embraced Monteux and the leader and clapped the orchestra and took my bow. After that I asked them to get me a taxi and went straight back to my room and did not move from my bed for three weeks. Jouve suggested I become one of his wife’s patients but I would sooner have been treated by a baboon than by that woman. He thought he could add to the slave population, Massimo, he said to me that day as we drove to the Circeo Park Hotel where he had reserved a table for us on the terrace, overlooking the sea. He thought that by helping me to get my poems published in French he had found his wife another slave. That was when I made up my mind to go to Nepal, he said. I went to Nepal to flee the threat of slavery to Mme Pierre Jean Jouve, but it turned out that Nepal was my destiny, as deafness had been the destiny of Beethoven. Nepal was my destiny and my salvation, Massimo, he said. When Tucci invited me to join his expedition I did not hesitate for a moment, he said. Everything about those four months was extraordinary, he said. It was as if I had been put into one of those washing machines, not a day went by when I was not pummelled and whirled around by forces greater than myself. I did not know what was happening to me, Massimo, he said, as we sat on the terrace overlooking the sea and had one of those meals for which the Circeo Park Hotel is famous. I did not know what was happening but I clung on, he said. Perhaps a caterpillar feels like this as it begins to turn into a butterfly, he said. As I stood in the courtyards of the temples and heard the enormous trumpets blaring out I felt the walls of my being crumble and I did not know if I would come out of it alive or if I would give up the ghost there in Nepal and disappear for ever. I knew only that I had to cling on, Massimo, he said. The Circeo Park Hotel is renowned for its fish and Mr Pavone was a great eater of fish. The walls of my inner being, Massimo, he said, as he dissected his fish, and also the walls of my outer being. I felt like a molten lump of metal being beaten into shape by some mighty force, he said. The heat was intense, Massimo, he said. The beating was beyond my endurance. Something new was being forged, Massimo he said. Far beyond endurance. But I knew it was my destiny, he said, so I rejoiced at the same time as I despaired of ever getting out of there alive. Here I was, on the cusp of the lowlands and the highlands, for Nepal is the bridge between the two, between the arable fields to the south and the arid mountains to the north, here I was, being heated till I began to melt and then being beaten into a new shape, he said. The hills were full of blossom, he said, and the monkeys darted from tree to tree, and everywhere you went you heard the sound of chanting. Of chanting, Massimo, he said, not singing. Do you know the difference between singing and chanting, Massimo? he said. Because if you do not you cannot hope to understand my music. To sing is to begin at the beginning and to go on to the end and then to stop. To chant is to align yourself with the rhythms of the universe. Singing goes somewhere, he said, chant is already there. Singing is for young ladies, Massimo, he said, and for the preening divas of the opera house. Chanting is for monks. When you begin to chant, Massimo, he said, you are taken over by a force greater than any you have ever known. It runs through you from the tip of your toe to the top of your head. Your whole body tingles, Massimo, he said, your chest heaves, you are no longer yourself, you are part of the chanting. One can become addicted to chanting, Massimo, he said, as one can become addicted to drink or to drugs. After a certain time the body cannot do without it. The only difference is that chanting cannot kill you as drink and drugs can. After lunch we took a little walk along the sea, in
the great gardens of the hotel. He had fallen silent. And in the car on the way back to Rome he did not utter a word. I do not know whether this was out of tiredness or because he was thinking. He would often be silent for the whole of our drives, I knew he was thinking about his music. He found, he told me, as he grew older, that going out for a drive was a good way to resolve a musical problem. No problem without a solution, Massimo, he said. But the problem may of course have been wrongly posed in the first place. That was the trouble with Schoenberg and Scheler and his other disciples. They thought they had found the solution, but it was the solution to the wrong problem. When I came back from Nepal, he said, I sat down at the piano in my house here and I played the same note, over and over again, hour after hour and day after day, just as I had done in Switzerland. But the difference was this, Massimo, he said to me. I no longer felt this to be an admission of defeat. On the contrary, he said, I understood it was a sign of triumph. I played that one note and as I played I listened. I listened and I understood. At that moment a new kind of music was born. The first piece I called Six Sixty-Six. Six Sixty-Six. The same note struck in the same way on the piano six hundred and sixty-six times. It was beautiful, Massimo, he said. Its beauty was an otherworldly beauty. It would either drive you mad or draw you into another dimension. When it was performed later, by Pollini at Dartington, and then at Bregenz, the audience rioted, and walked out. Cage said to me: This is a piece I would like to have written if only I had thought of it. But he was wrong. He could never have written it. I was fond of Cage, he said, he had an inkling of the way of the Buddha, but fatally contaminated by American New Ageism. He never understood my music. If he had written Six Sixty-Six he would have been content with the idea, he would have been indifferent to the sound. Whereas I was not interested in the idea, he said, I was interested in the sound. Suddenly, he said, what had been a barrier between me and what I wanted to say became precisely the thing that I wanted to say. What Nepal taught me, he said, was that what we are striving for is not transcendence but transformation. The world is there to be transformed. The human being is there to be transformed. Not transcended, transformed. When a note is played six hundred and sixty-six times it is transformed. The ear that hears the same note six hundred and sixty-six times is transformed. All my life, he said, I had felt this urge to eat the world because I loved it so much, to eat it and ingest it and make it a part of me. It was the same with women, Massimo, he said to me. Eat and ingest, eat and ingest. But of course you cannot eat the world, Massimo, he said. You cannot eat a woman. And so you fall back, frustrated and despondent, until the urge seizes you again, and again you make the effort and again you fail. But when I came back from Nepal, after I had been hurled about and shaken in the great washing machine of Nepal, he said, I found that all the problems, all the barriers, had fallen away. Instead of striking the same note again and again in frustration, I wrote Six Sixty-Six. The performer of the piece has to take his time. The pacing must be absolutely even. It is intolerable to listen to, he said. It is intolerable to play. Why? Because it is so close to ecstasy. The second piece I wrote, he said, another piano piece, Heraclitus, could not have been mistaken for Cage. The first section had the superscription: ‘What was scattered, gathers; what was gathered, scatters.’ The second: ‘Under the comb, the tangle and the straight path are the same.’ The third: ‘The sun is new, all day.’ Each section lasts less than a minute, he said. But when Pollini played them in Bregenz they had a greater effect on the audience than Mahler’s Song of the Earth. One person had a fit. Another began to take off all her clothes. When I wrote those pieces, he said, I was glacially calm, but I knew I had arrived at last. Instead of being my enemy, with whom I had to fight every inch of the way, as it had seemed when I worked with Scheler in Vienna, he said, music had become my friend, with whom I was happy to spend long hours. A sound is not a step on the way to something else, he said, but it is itself a universe in which we should be happy to set up our dwelling. I, who had never felt at home anywhere, he said, was now made to feel at home by music. In those early years of my return from Nepal, he said, of my resettling in Rome after all those years away, I was drunk with possibility. I could not spend enough hours at my desk, my piano. I would work from early morning far into the night and sometimes I would not go to bed till dawn, and a few hours later I would be back at my desk, at my piano. It was as if the barriers had been broken and the waters were rushing out, sweeping me before them, and it was as much as I could do to keep my head above the water. Some days I did not eat at all, he said, and some nights I did not sleep at all, but I always made sure I was well-dressed and that my clothes were clean and well-pressed. Always. Nor was I in a hurry, he said. When you have entered the world of music, he said, when you are penetrating to the heart of each sound, then time ceases to matter. You are no longer working with time and you are no longer working in time. Each sound in itself, he said. Each passing moment in itself. That is the secret, Massimo, he said. That is the secret. The composer is not a craftsman, Massimo, he said to me. He is not a genius. He is a conduit, a go-between. A postman. That is what he has been chosen for. It is no reflection on his character that he is chosen, it is simply a fact. I was chosen, Massimo, he said to me, and I had to do what I was chosen for, just as you were chosen to help me in my task. Fortunately everything conspired to make that possible, he said. Everything from my upbringing in the great house in Sicily to my years in Monte Carlo, to my meeting with my wife and our many stormy years together in London and Paris and Switzerland, to her leaving me and my despair and my trip with Tucci to Nepal. After his stroke he talked more and more about the shape of his life. We cannot foretell how any of it will turn out, Massimo, he said, but when we look back everything seems fated. Everything seems to have had a purpose. Even the absurdity of being born into a Sicilian noble family, the most ridiculous fate anyone could wish for. Artists have always come from the middle classes, he said. Very few have been aristocrats. Being born into the aristocracy is a terrible handicap, he said. Look at Lord Berners. He was a gifted man who was ruined by his class and his caste. The middle classes are both more ambitious and more hard-working, Massimo, he said, that is why the bulk of artists, from Dante to Shakespeare and from Beethoven to Thomas Mann, have come from that class. The only trouble with the middle class is its tendency to avoid risk. I, on the other hand, have always taken risks. You could say that I love risk. From the beginning I was frightened of nothing, he said. That has always stood me in good stead. I was not afraid to write waltzes for the palm court orchestras of Monte Carlo, and I was not afraid to tell Scheler that I did not feel he had anything to teach me. From the beginning I felt you were wasting my time, Scheler retorted. From the beginning I felt that your damned Italian and Sicilian aristocratic arrogance would never allow you to make the most of your undoubted talents. Your undoubted talents, he said, for he prided himself on his fair-mindedness. It was no use telling him he was barking up the wrong tree, that he was leading his pupils into a dead end, he would not have understood me. We parted if not amicably at least with enormous politeness on both sides, a Sicilian aristocratic politeness on my side and a Viennese Jewish politeness on his. Poor Scheler, he said, he was not fortunate enough to escape to America like his master. His wife was ailing and he stayed, though his friends had found him a post at Buffalo. I heard later that he had been deported and killed, he and his wife and all his family. A cesspit, Massimo, he said. Europe was a cesspit in those years. And the stink has not entirely disappeared. In Italy, at any rate, they still long for a strong man to lead them, a man with an iron chin. We have not seen the end of it, Massimo, he said. When I go to Hungary and Romania to hear my music played I hear about the monstrousness of the gypsies. When I go to Belgrade I hear about the smell left by the Turks and the Bosnians. When I go to Poland I hear about the treachery of the Jews. There’s no end to it, Massimo, he said. No end to it. The best place to be is in your study, he said, making music. I have been fortunate, M
assimo, he said to me, that all I have ever really been interested in is women and music. For while women can hurt you, they also enrich your life. Even my wife enriched my life. I always recognised that, whatever she did to me, and she did terrible damage to me, he said, she nevertheless, on balance, enriched my life. That is why I have no regrets, Massimo, he said to me. He was lying in his bed, very small and very white. He still dyed his hair so that it was as black as it had always been, but his face was very white. He was still writing his music. I had to prop him up. Annamaria could not do it, she was too old and weak herself. I should get rid of her, he said. If I had any common sense I would get rid of her, but she has been with me for so long I do not have the heart. So I propped him up with all these pillows and placed the plank on his knees and he wrote. When he tired of writing he rang the bell and asked me to sit with him. That is when he talked. I have no regrets, he often said that. It would be foolish to have regrets. Besides, what sort of life was it that I gave her? When we married I still went out into the world, he said. I still played the host when she required me to, and presided over the dinner parties that she organised. The trouble was that she had a bourgeois soul, despite her filthy aristocratic ways. At heart she was a bourgeois and I was not, he said. I was an artist. I was only happy when I was writing music or thinking about music. Artists should either be married to adoring women who will put up with anything, like Bach, he said, or they should be married to remarkable women, like Mozart, or they should not be married at all. That was what my wife was trying to say to me when she ran away, he said. At first I did not understand and I went after her and brought her back, first from Oxford and then from New York. But when she finally left me at the end of the war I sensed that was the end. The end of our relationship and the end of my married life. Human beings are such slow learners, Massimo, he said to me. It takes them years and years to learn the simplest things. After that, he said, I knew I was by myself. It is a different thing being by yourself at twenty and being by yourself at forty, he said. At twenty you are by yourself because you have not yet found the right person. But at forty you are by yourself because you have understood that partnering is not for you. That is a terrible discovery to make, he said, but it is also a liberating one. The best thing Arabella did for me was to leave me, he said. In Paris after the war I ran after every woman I came across except for Mme Pierre Jean Jouve, but I could sense that the writing was on the wall. Some of them were so beautiful I was able to forget my destiny for a while in their embrace. Some of them were so intelligent or so kind that I was able to bask for a while in their company and convince myself that they were the partners for me. But I knew that sooner or later I would have to go away. I would have to be shaken up or I would simply wither and die. I had no intention of withering in Paris and dying, he said. There was still too much to do. So I left Paris, I left my dear Henri Michaux, and I went to Nepal with Tucci and Maraini, both remarkable men. Maraini was the photographer, a scholar of Japanese culture as well as of Indian and Tibetan. He had one finger missing from his left hand because during the war in a Japanese prisoner of war camp he had cut it off and cooked it to feed his little daughter. Bartok was another who had a loving wife, he said, but she was not with him in Egypt when I became acquainted with him and with Hindemith at the Congress for World Music which was held there. I had long been interested in that country and Daniel and I spent many happy weeks there before the Congress. At the Congress itself our host was a pupil of Bartok’s, who was living in that country. There is a photo he took of me with Bartok and Mr and Mrs Hindemith and with the great Austrian ethnomusicologist Erich von Hornbostel, with the pyramids in the background. Bartok was the sweetest and gentlest of men, he said, but Hindemith was a typical German, with a typical German wife. It was fashionable in those days to go out into the desert with a group of friends and play at being archaeologists. We would find a mound and start to dig and soon we would find all sorts of ancient Egyptian treasures, brooches in the form of scarabs and little statues of the winged sky-god Nut and other deities of ancient Egypt. When you cleaned the dirt off these you would often find, inscribed in a corner, ‘Made in Germany’. I have never been in the least interested in the monumental aspect of ancient Egypt, he said. It stinks of Empire and reminds me of the monstrosities built by dictators everywhere, by Mussolini in Rome and Hitler in Berlin and Stalin in Moscow and Ceau¸sescu in Bucharest. But some of the birds and farmyard animals depicted in the tombs are remarkable, as is the Coptic and Islamic art of Egypt. The folk traditions, both artistic and musical, of that country are remarkable too, he said. But it was to be many years before I understood what it was about it I found moving and how to relate it to my own music. For I am not interested in incorporating folk rhythms into my music, as Bartok was, or the rhythm of Buddhist or Gregorian chanting, as some composers are today. I am interested in finding through my own work what it is that this work has in common with these traditions. Only in that way can we move forward, he said. Anything else is pastiche and no better than the populist and pretentious work of Prokofiev and Shostakovitch, much beloved of those with a sentimental disposition and tin ears. Sometimes I sat with him for the whole day and he said nothing. He lay there with his eyes closed, but if I tried to creep away he would say: No, Massimo, stay. Sometimes without opening his eyes he would say that he no longer needed me that day. I tried to keep his shoes free from dust and to make sure that his suits and shirts were aired, but he no longer went out and often did not even dress, spending the day in bed in his pyjamas, it was difficult to summon the energy and dispiriting, yes, sir, it was a dispiriting thing to do. Those shoes which had been worn so often, those suits, sometimes I had to sit down in the giant cupboard and cry. Some days though he dressed as carefully as ever and sat at his desk, not for long, but he sat at his desk and at the piano. For almost forty years, Massimo, he said to me, I have tried to reach into the heart of sound, and in that time I have written some very great works, but I still feel that the ultimate mystery is eluding me. It is this which compels me to go on composing, he said. That sensation I first experienced in the mountains and valleys of Nepal, he said, of being thrown into a giant washing machine and tumbling and tossing in waters too violent to resist, not knowing if I was on my head or on my feet, it is that which I still experience every time I sit down to compose. That is what is exciting, Massimo, he said, that is what keeps me going, the sense that I must bring it back intact from Over There, give it a form without distracting from its Otherness, from the chaos and violence at its heart. Chaos and order, he said, chaos and order, that has always been what we artists have had to struggle with. Musicians more than most. My Goat Songs, which I wrote for Yoko Mitani, is the first proper use of the human voice in Western music for a century and a half, he said. There is nothing more ridiculous, Massimo, he said, than trying to set a text to music. Nobody understands the words and the composer is constrained to move from A to B and then from B to C and so on and so forth. That was well and good when the world itself was conceived as moving from Creation to Last Judgement, but it is not well and good if what you want is to enter right into the heart of the world of sound, not pass lightly over it. To set a text that has a meaning, Massimo, he said, is like walking down the road to reach the police station where you will turn yourself in. Nobody wants to walk down the road, he said. They want to dance in the park. They want to lie in the grass. But they have been brainwashed into believing that they want to walk down that road, and why? Because in the police station at the end of the road sits a man in uniform who will put handcuffs on your wrists and tell you what you have done wrong. My Goat Songs by contrast, he said, are designed to return the voice to the body. They do not walk to the police station in order to turn themselves in, and they do not make a virtue out of hissing and spitting and gurgling as these so-called avant-garde composers have learned to do, they have no sense of the sacredness of the body and as a consequence they cannot treat the production of sound inside the body with
the reverence it deserves. We cannot write Gregorian chant, he said and we cannot write Buddhist chant, but we can learn from these chants what it is that needs doing with the voice, he said. I spoke to Yoko, he said, before she began to work on the songs. You have been out with friends, I said to her. You have eaten well. You have eaten too well. You begin to feel a bit funny. You begin to feel your stomach acting in an abnormal way. You listen to it. You are no longer aware of the conversation around you. And suddenly you know you have to run to the toilet. You run, you push open the door, you close it behind you, you bend over the bowl and suddenly it all comes out of you, all that you have eaten and more and more and more, everything is coming out of your mouth, and you don’t care what sounds you are making so long as you can empty your stomach. I said to her, that is the sound I want from you in the second song. And then I said to her: You have been out for the evening with friends. You climb the stairs to your flat. You insert the key in the lock. You open the door and you go in. You turn and you lock the door. And then, as you are going to put on the light, you become aware of someone, there, in the flat, in the dark, waiting for you. You turn. You see him. You begin to scream. That is what I want from you in the fourth song, I said to her. A scream of sheer terror, of sheer panic. Cut short. Then starting again. Then cut short. Then starting again. If you can do that, you can master that song, I said to her. And she did. She has performed my Goat Songs all over the world, and wherever she performs them someone in the audience faints, she is so used to it now that she is disappointed if nobody faints. I do not try to beat out the brains of the audience with noise, like some composers, he said. The secret is to be spare with the noise. Spare with everything you do. Each note is a world, Massimo, each sound a universe. I invented a language for Yoko, he said, a language that would allow her to sing as I envisaged her singing. It was such a relief, Massimo, he said, to write in that language, to put my French poetry and my Italian poetry behind me, to feel that it belonged in a different era, to a different person. It belonged to the era of politeness, the era of the waltz in Monte Carlo, of playing at being an artist in London and Vienna and Paris. When I came back from Nepal and shut myself up in the house here in Rome, he said, I knew that I had ceased to play. I knew that I did not have a long time and that there was so much to do, so much to accomplish. The capacity for chaos is always there, he said. If you do not come at things in the right way you will remain on the surface. But if you do not come at things in the right way there is also the possibility that everything will collapse. The Tantric masters knew what they were doing, Massimo, he said. They knew what they were up to. The principle of Tantra, Massimo, he said, is the principle of the retention of the semen. We must reach as close as we can to the sexual climax, he said, but not allow the accumulated tension to explode, as it does in normal sexual intercourse. It must be recycled, he said, so that we can allow the excitement to circulate, if need be for ever. It is a skill which takes many years to master, he said. Western music from Mozart to Mahler, he said, is nothing but delayed gratification ending in consummation and exhaustion. That is the music of adolescents, Massimo, he said. It is the music of adolescent masturbators. Our music has taken a different direction, he said, it has returned to its ancient roots. It has escaped from the puerile imitation of sexual congress, caress, arousal, delay, frenzy, extinction, which was the pattern of Romantic music and the reason for its enormous popularity among the repressed middle classes of Germany and Austria, who imagined that it was leading them up to an aesthetic heaven. Well, he said, they had their climax twice over, first in the First World War and then in the Second World War. That should have been enough for them. But not at all. Look at their books. Look at the music they flock to listen to in the concert halls, this so-called intellectual elite. Caress, arousal, delay, frenzy, extinction. All the same. No change. The basic lesson of history, Massimo, he said, is that no one ever learns the lessons of history. But because no one ever learns the lessons of history, they do not learn this lesson either. By the end he was very weak, sometimes he thought he had been talking to me but it had only been in his head, or his voice was so low that I could not make out what he was saying. As I told you yesterday, Massimo, he would say, and I did not have the heart to tell him he had said nothing the day before. He did not want to see anybody. His agent, Annibale Giacometti, rang every day. He has two great names, Mr Pavone said when I told him, but he himself is not great. In fact he is a dwarf. Spiritually he is a dwarf. His publisher, Herr Groeneboom, from Universal Editions, also rang every day. They do not want the hen that laid the golden eggs to die, he said when I told him. They are vultures, Massimo, vultures. When I am better, he said to me, I want you to drive me to San Felice for one last meal at the Circeo Park Hotel. My father was a naval officer, Massimo, he said, and I have a longing for the sea. He asked me to read to him the poetry of Montale. His early poetry made a great impression on me, he said. Later he wrote long and soppy poems about love like any other Italian, but his early poems are remarkable. He made me read many poems, ‘Ora sia il tuo passo’, ‘Gloria del disteso mezzogiorno’, ‘Portami il girasole’, and many more. Often he fell asleep as I was reading. He seemed to become very small. He said to me: I will not end my days in a hospital, Massimo, you must make sure that I die here in my house over the Forum. He did not want to see anybody. They will distract me, Massimo, he said, from this, the most important moment of my life. Life is not important, Massimo, he said. What you make of your life is important. And death is important. Just as the most important words in a book are the words of the title, which are written in bigger letters than the rest, so the most important part of life is death, and it is written in bigger letters than the rest of your life. I want to see no one, Massimo, he said. No one. My best hours have been passed alone, Massimo, he said, so why should I at this moment in my life start to see people? But at the funeral there were many people. So many people, sir, you have no idea. His uncle Alessandro, the bishop; his uncle Giacinto, the senator; his cousin Tarquinio, the banker; his cousin Florinda, the actress; his cousin Antonio, the professor; his cousin Giuseppe, the polar explorer; all their wives and their husbands and their children. Also friends and many composers. I do not give a damn for religion, Massimo, he said, but if they want to give me a full Christian burial, that is their right. While I am alive, he said, I belong to myself. When I am dead I will belong to them. I walked with Annamaria at the back. Some of the time I almost had to carry her, she was so frail and crying so much. The dear man, she kept saying, the dear man. Why she said that I do not know. He had often been harsh to her. Especially in the last years, when she could not see so well and she often left marks of dirt on the walls, on the tables. I must sack that woman, he said to me. She is driving me mad with her increasing sloppiness. I must find a good old people’s home for her and put her in it and bring in a younger, stronger woman, a woman who is not half-blind and does not dribble all the time, to look after me. But he never did. He said to me, I am tired, Massimo, tired. I have never been tired in my life, but now I am tired. Perhaps it is time to take a rest. Why are you crying, Massimo? he said, I have provided for you in my will. Do not fear. You are not so young yourself, he said, you probably want a bit of a rest yourself. I have provided for you and for Annamaria. You will burn all the shoes, he said, and all the suits and all the shirts and all the ties. Everything is to be burned, he said. I have provided enough for you not to be tempted to take this little thing or that. My family will deal with the rest, he said, and Federico will set up the Foundation, either here or elsewhere. It is of no importance but Federico is keen for it to be established. What do I care? he said. Let them do what they like. I have always done what I liked, why should they not do what they like when I am no longer there? We were visiting the Etruscan necropolis at Cerveteri, walking down the grassy tracks between the tombs. He walked very slowly, leaning on his stick, he would never lean on me. He said to me: Massimo, the most important thing in life is to know what you wa
nt to do and then to do it. From as far back as I can remember, he said, I have wanted to make music, so the first half of my life was a mixture of frustration, rage, excitement and depression, because I wanted to make music but I did not know what kind of music it was I wanted to make or how to make it. But when I came back from my trip with Tucci to Nepal, he said, all the anger and frustration had gone and I could sit down and work as I had been put into the world to work. Of course there were still moments of frustration, I will not say it was all plain sailing, there were whole days and even weeks or months when I could not see my way forward, he said, but sooner or later I found the way again. Sound is a creative force, Massimo, he said. Sound is immutable and sound itself is a creative force. My string quartets, he said, are the nearest thing to an account of my feelings I wished to give. Because the quartet has always been associated with inwardness, with feeling, he said. The directions of the Third Quartet are very explicit, he said. First: Avec une grande tendresse. Then: L’appel de l’ésprit, l’homme se réveille. The final movement: Libération, catharsis. But of course I am not Beethoven, he said, nor do I want to be. So I treat all four instruments as one, a giant instrument of sixteen strings. Only the Ardittis play it as it should be played, he said, as at once the most personal and the most impersonal of all my works. I had to help him down the steps, since his fall he had lost confidence in his legs, but he still wanted to see things and he still walked by himself in the streets of Rome at night when he could not sleep and he could not work. There is something about walking in a city in the middle of the night, he said, not in the districts where the bars and nightclubs stay open all night, where the prostitutes walk the streets, but in the residential districts, where every good citizen has gone to sleep, there is something about that, he said, about padding through those quiet residential streets, that I find conducive both to peace of mind and to the emergence of compositional ideas. Perhaps it is because you are in a sense both there and not there, you are already your own ghost, he said, when I am gone I will probably still walk the streets of Rome at night as I have always done, but in a spirit of peace, not of frustration and anguish, as poor benighted Christians think, who worry about holding their dead down in their graves and imagine that if they walk the streets after they are dead and buried it is because they are restless and unappeased. I am not restless when I walk the streets at night, he said. I am never less restless than in those hours. We were standing in the dark in one of the Etruscan tombs. The Etruscans loved silence, he said, and they loved the dark. So it is not surprising that the Romans condemned them to silence and to darkness. The Romans were the most unimaginative people who ever lived, he said. Thank God I am a Sicilian and not a Roman. If I had been a Roman I would never have achieved anything, he said. Everything that is wrong with the human race, he said, can be found in the Romans. They were petty. They were pedantic. They were mean. They were bureaucratic. They were vain. They were bloodthirsty. They were cruel. The Roman roads were straight, he said. The Romans prided themselves on their straight roads. But who wants a straight road? The Romans substituted the straight line for the circle and the spiral, he said. For the Celtic circle and the Celtic spiral they substituted the straight line. And because the Roman road brought peace and prosperity, because along the Roman road other peoples could be subjugated and their wealth taken away, all those who followed the Romans tried to ape the Roman ways. They abandoned the circle and the spiral and became obsessed with the straight line. What is the landing on the moon but the Roman road? What is America but the Roman road? What is the dream of living to a hundred but the Roman road? Capitalism is the Roman road, he said. Communism is the Roman road, and Fascism was the Roman road. One of the joys of travelling in Nepal, he said, and it was one of the joys of travelling in West Africa in my youth, was that there were no Roman roads. The roads led from village to village, and from village to temple. What is the shape of a Buddhist shrine, Massimo? he said. Circular. Darkness is circular, he said. Just as light is circular and each sound is circular. And not circular in two dimensions but in three or four or five, and a circle in four dimensions is a spiral. And what is a spiral but a figure of eight? And what is the sign for infinity but a figure of eight lying on its side? Not only is each of my works a sphere, he said as we stood in the dark of the tomb at Cerveteri, but each moment in each work is a sphere. Those who are willing to listen to my music, he said, learn to listen to all sound. They learn to listen to the reverberations of a sound, to its inner heart. My wife left me in 1945, Massimo, he said to me. One day she was there and the next she was gone. But my other bride, sound, has never left me. Sometimes I have left her. I have been too distracted, too superficial, too frail to stay with her and be her spouse. But she has never left me. Never, Massimo. And she will never leave me. Elle ne me quittera jamais. I will leave her, Massimo, he said, but she will never leave me. When you are alive, Massimo, he said, you are a person. When you are dead you are a piece of meat. If it amuses them to make a fuss over a piece of meat, he said, then that is their prerogative. Why should I deny them? I do not want to leave my body to science, he said. I want to leave it to my family to do with as they like. My father is buried in the family vault, Massimo, he said, though he was a freethinker. My mother likewise. If they want to bury me there beside them, let them do so. If they want to cut me into little pieces and throw me into the Tiber, then that too is all right by me. What was good enough for Orpheus is good enough for me, he said. Sometimes he spoke so low that I had to bend over his bed to hear him. Even then I did not always understand what he said. He was not talking to me but to himself. Or perhaps to some imaginary person. But he was very clear that I should not take, even as a memento, anything from his wardrobe. All that has to be burned, he said. He had always been superstitious. When the barber came to cut his hair he always insisted that every last hair should be gathered up from the floor and burned. When he cut his nails he always made sure the cuttings were swept up and disposed of. If a black cat crossed the road he would not go on. Turn the car, Massimo, he would say. There is nothing for it but to go home. If I suggested an alternative route he would pretend to consider it and then say he was really too tired, it had not been a good idea to set out in the first place and he only wanted to return. If he saw a new moon through the car window he would say: It is a bad sign, Massimo, a very bad sign. Who knows what disaster is about to befall me? If I made the mistake of pointing out, after a few days, that no disaster had struck, he would say, Patience, Massimo, patience. Ill fortune is often slow to arrive, but, believe me, arrive it will. Storms terrified him. I found him one day, when I came up to take my orders and thunder was cracking right overhead as if the gods were moving house, and the lightning seemed to be streaking straight down to the Forum, I found him hiding under the table, the round table by the armchair. I pretended I had not seen him and after looking round the room went on my way. But I made sure after that not to take him out for a drive if storms were forecast, even if it was bright sunshine. I would explain that something had gone wrong with the car and it would not be fit for the roads in time. When his dear friend Henri Michaux died, his funeral took place in driving rain, the thunder rumbled overhead. I knew what an effort it was for him to turn out, but he did not say a word. It was only later, as we were driving back to Rome, that he said to me: Did you hear the thunder, Massimo? Even the gods were angry that Henri had died. I will write a piece in his memory, he said. I do not know what form it will take but I know that I will write something. Writing will be better than crying, he said. It will be better than feeling his absence all the time like a wound in my body. Writing it will allow me to live with him and talk to him, even though he is no longer there. I knew a great many people in Paris in those years before and after the war, he said to me, some, like René Daumal, remarkable, others, like Jean-Paul Sartre and Mme Pierre Jean Jouve, frightful. I had friends among the clochards on the banks of the Seine and I had friends among the poets, I even had friends among the
upper echelons of the Church and would frequently dine with industrialists and bankers. It always amazed me, he said, that the poets only knew other poets and the bankers other bankers. We must mingle with all and sundry, Massimo, he said, that is the only way to live. It was René Daumal who first suggested I go to India, who first drew my attention to the mystical traditions of India and Tibet. He was a very remarkable man. But he was not a friend in the way Henri was a friend. I have had three real friends in my life, he said. There was Daniel Bernstein, when I was young, with whom I went climbing in the Alps and then to West Africa and to Egypt. He died of TB in 1937, which saved him from witnessing the destruction of his entire family in the following years. There was Henri Michaux. And there was another, whom I have forgotten. I have of course had many close and valuable relationships with those who performed my music, with a very few composers, with Tucci, who was another remarkable man, and Fosco Maraini. And then there were the Nepalese guides, he said, men of few words and deep faith. Meeting them and being in their company day and night for several months was almost as important for me as seeing their extraordinary country and hearing their music. There is no music like it, Massimo, he said to me, experiencing their music made me realise with a renewed force what little weight sound has for composers in our Western tradition. Sound can be beautiful, it can be loud, it can be soft, it can be abrasive, but it lacks weight, Massimo, sound in our Western tradition lacks weight. Even Bach, he said, who loved a beautiful melody and whose mind could solve the most abstruse musical and mathematical conundrums, even he could not help but take sound itself too lightly. He could not help it, he said, he was a man of his time. Only in Gregorian chant, he said, can you hear something of the density in each sound that you will hear in a Nepalese Buddhist temple. But only in the solemn trumpets in a Nepalese temple, high up in the mountains, do you really come close to the core of sound, the molten lava that lies boiling away in every sound as it does in the recesses of the earth. No wonder the temple musicians must train for years, not just musically but spiritually, before they dare to let loose on those trumpets. If you are not prepared, not spiritually and mentally prepared, Massimo, he said, you will be annihilated. Annihilated. It is the same with everything. If you are not prepared you are annihilated. Not physically, of course, though physical annihilation is always a possibility, but spiritually and mentally. Most of those you see walking around you every day. Massimo, he said, have been annihilated in this way. They have been lobotomised. They have been castrated. By their parents. By their schooling, By their wives. By their friends. By their employers. That is the world we live in, Massimo, he said. We have to recognise it and then to rise above it. It is our duty to ourselves in the first place, but also to the world which brought us forth, as we are, ourselves and no one else. When we die, Massimo, he said, and St Peter asks us what we have to say for ourselves, all we need to say is that we have been ourselves and no one else. If you are truly yourself, he said, you will speak for everyone. If you are not yourself you cannot blow that trumpet, Massimo, he said. That trumpet will defeat you. That is why it requires years and years of training, to empty yourself out, to purify yourself, until you are ready to blow the trumpet. When I am gone, he said, if you chance to listen to my music, it will perhaps give you a hint of what I am talking about. My Foundation will keep my works in print and make sure they are performed and recorded, he said. It is Federico’s brainchild. I have no interest in it. In the old days, Massimo, he said, they built chantry chapels and paid for monks to say prayers there in perpetuity, so that their souls could be eased through the difficult journey of Purgatory. Nowadays they set up Foundations so as to keep their memories alive and their noses visible in the world. I do not want my memory to be kept alive, he said, but I am too tired to fight them. I know that my music will survive as long as music is performed, and that is enough for me. Or perhaps it will not. Who is to say, Massimo? What my trip to Nepal taught me, he said, is that we have to live in the present, difficult as that is. They closed the streets for the funeral, you should have seen the procession, sir, all those cardinals and judges and the rest of them and the Sicilian nobles he despised and all the people he knew, for a man who prided himself on his isolation from the world he had made friends with a great many people, maybe on his walks through Rome at night he befriended them, gypsies and black people and Indians and all sorts, I did not know there were so many different races living in Rome. It is among the outcasts and the reviled, he said, that you will most often find true spirituality. He despised the new Sicilian nobles. They are all bankers or ne’er-do-wells, he said. They think the world owes them a living just because they are born into a noble family. The best of them are simple, the result of too much inbreeding over the centuries, and the worst are crooks who should be behind bars, and many of them are. They are no better than the Mafia, he said, and often they actually are the Mafia. This country cannot be cleaned up, Massimo, he said. It is corrupt through and through and it does not have the will to change itself and to make a clean sweep of it. That does not stop me loving it, and especially this city of Rome, he said. I could have lived anywhere but I chose to live here in Rome, he said. For here we are truly at the centre of the earth, at the meeting-place of east and west, north and south. Do you know what they say about Naples? he said to me one day. We were driving out into the Campagna in the evening and not going anywhere in particular, as he liked to do sometimes to help him think about his music. They say, he said, that Naples is the only Third World city without a European quarter. Rome will never turn into that, he said. Naples and Rome are as different as chalk and cheese. Sometimes he sat beside me without talking for the whole drive. I don’t believe he was thinking about his music any more. Sometimes he was just dozing. The windows were shut and the air conditioning was on, it was too hot even at that time of day to open the windows. He did not bother to direct me, to tell me where he wanted to go. I kept to the quiet roads, the smaller roads, through villages and fields. Sometimes he made me stop and would get out to relieve himself or just to stand at the edge of a field and listen to the cicadas. They were singing before mankind ever came on the scene, he said, and they will go on singing long after we have all passed away. I sat in the car with the door open and sometimes he stood there for half an hour at a time, leaning on his stick and just looking across the fields. He stayed in Rome throughout the summer, August in Rome is the best month, Massimo, he said. The locals flee to the hills and the sea, the tourists avoid it. It is a city emptied of people, emptied of its traffic. I have always done my best work in the summer, he said, I have always found the summer conducive to good work. Sometimes he would ask me to get out of the car and walk a few steps with him. He would walk a little and then sit down at the edge of a wood or a field. He would hold out his hand and stick out a finger. Listen, Massimo, he would say. Listen to the sound the air makes as it comes into contact with my hand. Do you hear it, Massimo? he would say, and if I said no sometimes he would get angry and shout and tell me that I needed to have my ears cleaned, that they were full of Roman filth. So I usually said yes, that I could hear it, even when I couldn’t. What sound does it make, Massimo? he would say, and I would say: Like a wave, and that would please him. Yes, he would say, there are waves everywhere, not just in the sea, there are waves of sound and waves of light. The idea of the wave, he said to me once, as we were driving again, is the idea of life itself. That is what Heraclitus meant, he said, when he said that when I step into a river I do not step into the river and it is not me that steps into it. To write music that is and is not static, that is and is not in motion, that both sounds and is silent, that goes inwards and that goes backwards and that does not go anywhere at all, that is the idea, he said, that is what I have tried to do for the past thirty years. I did not wish to write music that was profound, he said. I did not wish to write music that was beautiful. I did not wish to write music that would make audiences clap and agents come rushing up to me to sign me up to go to this
festival or that festival. I wanted to write music that was true. True to our earth. True to our planet. And if it is true it will be frightening. It does not have to be loud to be frightening, he said. When I used a double bass and the voice, that was frightening enough. People have told me that when they heard my Ongamak, which is what this piece was called, they wanted to run away, they wanted to bury themselves in the earth. The music of the pygmies of central Africa, he said, and the music of the Katchak or Monkey Dance of Bali, and the music of the temples of Nepal and Tibet, these musics do not try to be profound and they do not try to be beautiful, Massimo, he said, they do not try to be anything. They are what they are, Massimo, he said. Ils ne sont que ce qu’ils sont. The world is being swallowed up in superficiality, Massimo, he said to me, and the artists and intellectuals react to this by seeking profundity. When they grow tired of profundity they play ironically with superficiality. But they are wrong on both counts. They should not seek the depths and they should not seek the surfaces, they should seek the truth. We were allowed to pay our last respects, me and Annamaria, he said, the family allowed us to stand in the room where he lay. Annamaria was crying and holding my hand. His cheeks had sunk right in so that the bones were visible, with the skin stretched tight over them. They had not yet shaved him and his chin was covered with a fine white down. I remembered when I had carried him from the car in his blanket to sit at the edge of the forest, on one of our last outings. He weighed hardly anything. You could see the outline of his body under the sheet. I remembered what he had said to me many times: The body is nothing, Massimo, the spirit is all. What is music, Massimo, he said, except the triumph of the spirit? Even sex, he said, even sex is the triumph of the spirit. It is not the triumph of the flesh, he said, it is the triumph of the spirit. I learned this when I first learned about sex, he said, when my little cousin let me pass my hand over her lovely young breast. It was not so much the feel of her breast, he said, the feel of her firm young breast under my hand, as the sense that it was her breast I was touching, a secret part of her I was being allowed to touch. A strange ritual was being enacted, Massimo, he said, a ritual in which a magical union was being cemented. My wife did not understand this, he said. For her sex was sex and that was it, which means that for her it was nothing at all. Music is like a woman, Massimo, he said. You have to woo it and you have to be infinitely patient with it and in the end you have to recognise that you may think you have reached the heart of the sound but it will always elude you. You may hit upon a means of expressing it, but you yourself will never fully grasp what it is you have done. We sat at the edge of the wood. Night was falling but the cicadas were in full voice. I thought perhaps he had gone to sleep. He did sometimes and then I had to wait till he woke up and asked to be taken home. But then he spoke. I could not see his face because of the way he was sitting. Listen to their music, he said. Listen to the throbbing power of it. Where is the Greek or the Italian composer who has responded to this powerful music, which is, after all, there for all to hear? A few Renaissance composers seem to have been interested in cicadas. Stefano Landi wrote a madrigal about a cicada singing as it dies, and Monteverdi made a little joke out of humans imitating cicadas in one of his madrigals, he said, a delightful joke, but a joke nonetheless. But the demonic power of the song of the cicada has remained untapped by musicians. And yet when you listen to it, it is as powerful in its way as anything you will hear coming out of a Buddhist temple in Nepal or Tibet. And what is it saying, Massimo? What is it saying? Now, it is saying, and eternity. If you can hear the now, he said, you can hear eternity. That is what I have tried to do, he said, to write a music of now which would be a music of eternity. Then he was silent for a long time. Then he said: Take me home, Massimo. I wanted to hear the cicadas for one last time and now I have heard them. I gathered him up in his blanket. Though he gave the impression in his prime of being such a tall man, he was in actual fact of average height, and at the end he weighed very little. He did not move and he did not speak. All the way home I sensed that the end was near but I did not want to think about it. Annamaria had made a soup but he would not touch it. Take me to bed, he said to me. Take me to bed and put out the light and then leave me. When I laid him down he said to me: When I was a child the kitchen girls put me to bed. I felt at ease with them as I never felt with my mother. I am telling you so much that you do not understand, Massimo, he said. But it does me good to talk. Sometimes I did not catch what he was saying, he spoke very low, and though I bent towards him I could not always distinguish the words. Also, since his stroke, he sometimes spoke in a blurred way. And sometimes the breath in his throat was louder than any of the words he spoke, if you know what I mean, sir. Sometimes he became angry if I or someone else did not understand him, he would scream and talk faster and that made it even more difficult. Then he would bang the door of his room and bang the windows and we would hear him walking up and down, up and down. The Arditti Quartet were working with him on a recording of all his quartets and sometimes he shouted at them because they did not understand what he said. It was difficult for everybody, but most of all for Mr Pavone himself, of course. Then there were times when he spoke quite clearly. Low but quite clearly. He would ask me to drive him out just as in the old days and often he would talk. I had the misfortune to be born in the early years of the century, Massimo, he said, so that I can consider myself a child of the century. You were born in the middle of the century, so that you will have the chance to live in two centuries, but I am stuck with this one. Has there ever been a worse century, Massimo? he said. One in which more planned and premeditated murder and destruction has ever taken place? Human beings are always keen to kill and destroy each other, he said, but they have never had the means to do so in such numbers until this century. And yet in the midst of all this carnage I have led a charmed life, he said. I have done what I wanted to do and also what I had to do. I have lived daily and even hourly with my beloved music, he said, and I have explored its secrets and been touched by its beneficent power. I sometimes ask myself what would have happened to me if I had not gone to Nepal when I did, he said, but then I have realised that everything in my life had led up to that decision. I went when I did because that was when I was ready to go. I did not go before because before I was not ready. It is as simple as that, Massimo, he said. After my trip, he said, everything fell into place. Instead of fighting the darkness I settled down in the darkness. Instead of trying to rise above the body, as that idiot Scheler had tried to get me to do, I settled down inside my body. When I came back from Nepal and shut myself up in the house here in Rome, he said, I knew that I had ceased to play. I knew that I did not have a long time and that there was so much to do, so much to accomplish. I have been blessed, Massimo, he said, blessed. I found a way to stop playing at being an artist, I found a way to return to myself and to leave myself behind in my work. Mr Salvatore called me after the funeral and said to me: The Count has made provision for you in his will, Massimo, but if you would like to work for the Foundation, I am sure we would be able to find a niche for you. I told him I was not interested in working for the Foundation. I understand, Massimo, he said. You would like to spread your wings. I told him that, having worked for Mr Pavone for all these years I could not bear to stay in his house when he was no longer there. It is his music we have to think about, he said. It is his music he would have wanted us to think about, not himself. I told him I appreciated that but I was not someone who understood about music. I had been hired to look after Mr Pavone and his clothes and to drive him. You know how it is, sir. If you should ever change your mind, Massimo, he said, just give me a ring. We could use someone like you, Massimo, he said. The Count always spoke highly of you, he said. Despite that early incident concerning Miss Mauss, he always spoke highly of you. I asked him what he meant but he only said, you know what I am talking about, Massimo. Nothing was ever proved, I said. You are quite right, Massimo, he said. Besides, this is not the moment to rake over these old embers. S
o I have not returned, sir, I took my things and left the house for ever. That is what Mr Pavone would have wanted. When I am gone you will still have much of your life left to live, Massimo, he said. I shall make sure you are well provided for, but after that you are on your own. When Arabella left for the last time, at the end of the war, he said, I sat in my room for twenty-four hours and I did not move. Then I tried to live in Paris again. I could not bear to remain in Switzerland or to return to Rome. I wanted a change. And I had many friends in Paris. First I stayed with Henri Michaux and with Ronaldo, his cat. His wife had died after a long illness and he was inconsolable, so he was not a very good companion, but Ronaldo was a great comfort to me. A great comfort. He was a character. Much more intelligent than his master. Not as good a poet and painter, but much more intelligent. I wonder how different my life would have been had I lived with a cat, he said. Ronaldo had six toes on three of his four feet and seven on one, and he spent a great deal of time licking and cleaning them. The flat was filthy, Michaux refused to have anyone come in to clean it, but Ronaldo was a little island of cleanliness in an ocean of filth. It was only Ronaldo’s presence that kept me from moving, he said. In the end I did move, and though I called on Henri almost every day and spent many hours with Ronaldo, it was no longer the same thing. If only human beings were as self-contained and undemanding as cats, Massimo, he said, marriage would be a much more successful institution. But human beings are not self-contained. Women in particular need constant reassurance. I lived for several months with a beautiful young woman in Monte Carlo, he said. She was a gifted singer but she had no self-confidence. She wanted to be told all the time that she was a great singer, and also that she was a beautiful woman. How many beautiful women have been great singers or great painters or great writers, Massimo? When you are beautiful you do not need to make the effort, everything is given to you, yet without great effort you cannot become great at anything. But when we are young we want everything. We want to be beautiful and a great singer, beautiful and a great artist. It is folly, Massimo, folly. Finally she said to me: You do not appreciate my art, Tancredo. You have no real desire for me. You do not really love me. I am a token, she said. A beautiful bird you are happy to have trapped. Let me tell you, Tancredo, she said, I am stifling here. Stifling. It was a relief when she was gone, Massimo, he said. A great relief. Whereas Ronaldo rolled over on his back and purred when I stroked his stomach, and when he had had enough he simply got to his feet and moved away. We have to return to the simplicity and the immediacy of animals, Massimo, he said. Our art has to be able to stand up and walk away if it wants to. Or lie down and allow its stomach to be tickled. It was perhaps Ronaldo who prepared me for Nepal, he said. I did not realise it at the time, but afterwards I understood. I understood too that he had come into my life at a particular moment and that it would never do to try and replicate the experience here in Rome. Everything is changing, Massimo, he said. The Neolithic age is coming to an end. What we called civilisation is coming to an end. Composers go on composing and posing for photographers in their studies and appearing at festivals, but it is all coming to an end. Everybody thinks that with a few bombs they can manage to change the world, but what they don’t realise is that the world is changing, whether they like it or not. Soon Communism and also capitalism will collapse, Massimo, they will implode because of the contradictions in the system. I am fortunate that I was able to work as I did, he said, between the end of the world wars and the end of civilisation. It has been a period of calm, Massimo, he said. A period of relative calm. At least for us in the West. The people of Tibet have been hounded out of their country and brutalised, he said, and the pygmies of central Africa have been more or less wiped out. Age-old cultures are disappearing every day. Whole languages are disappearing every day. They now have exhibitions of the art of Benin in the most prestigious museums in the world, in New York, in London, in Paris, but the art of the Ife and of Benin is disappearing. We were the fortunate ones, Massimo, he said to me. We were able to go to Benin and also to Nepal and to see the living art and the living culture, but of course the fact that we could go was also the sign that these cultures were coming to an end. Africa is full of anthropological museums, he said, and that is the sign that Africa has died. A living culture has turned into a dead culture. This happened in Europe in the Renaisssance, he said. A few monks go on singing the Gregorian chant, he said, but the tradition is no longer alive. It is up to each of us to find that which is alive in each tradition, and to breathe new life into it. I have no illusions such as Schoenberg had that I have in any way advanced the cause of music. But that is not the point. That was never the point, Massimo, he said. When you are in touch with sound, with the innermost heart of sound, then such notions as art and music, advance and decline, past and future, good and bad, beautiful and ugly cease to make sense. It becomes a question of being open, Massimo, of listening, and of daring. I learned to fear nothing on my parents’ estate all those years ago, Massimo, he said. I learned it climbing trees and making love to the servant girls deep down inside their giant beds in which five of them slept together. I learned it when I was allowed to attack the pianos that filled the house as they needed to be attacked, head on, banging the lid, running my hands through their insides and listening to the noise it made, just as I pushed my hands into all the available orifices of the serving girls and listened, deep down under the blankets, to their sighs and their moans. There must be no fear, Massimo, he said, no fear in the face of life and no fear in the face of death. We sat in the car looking out at the landscape, it was cold, he did not want to get out, often I could not hear what he said, but he went on talking, paying no attention to me, looking out, the sky was grey, there was even snow in the air, when he stopped I did not know if he wanted me to drive on, I stayed as still as I could, he was so used to me it was as if he was alone, I could make out a few words, Monte Carlo, Ronaldo, Jouve, Kang Shi, something like that, once after he had been silent for a long time I asked him if he wanted me to drive him home, I was afraid he would catch cold, with the engine off the car was like a fridge, he didn’t reply, his lips were blue, finally I started the car and he said nothing and while I drove he said nothing. I was thinking of our other drives, over the years, mainly in the summer and spring, I was thinking of how many more hours I had spent with him in the car than in any other situation, I would never have imagined it when I first went to work for him but that is how it turned out, we never know what will happen, we can never predict. I thought, when he is gone I will remember sitting in the car with him better than I remember anything else and I thought I would often dream after he was gone that he was sitting beside me in the big car and I was driving him through the Roman Campagna and if I didn’t dream, I thought, then I would certainly think it, especially every time I drove a car, it would certainly be there in my head the way things stay in your head and then I thought, I suppose when I too am gone it will not be in anybody’s head, but that will not matter, as Mr Pavone always said, it is the music that matters, Massimo, not you and me but the music, on the other hand you have to ask yourself where the music would have been if Mr Pavone had not been there to compose it, you have to ask yourself that, yes, sir, you have to ask yourself that.
Infinity: The Story of a Moment Page 8