Infinity: The Story of a Moment Read online

  — Did he speak to you about his visit to India and Nepal?

  — He said: I only spent five months in India and Nepal. I went with the expedition of the great Buddhologist Giuseppe Tucci, he said, and they were the most important few months of my life. I was interested in transcendence then, he said. There are many roads to transcendence, he said. There is the way of Indian mysticism, the way of Chinese mysticism, the way of Nepalese and Tibetan Buddhism, the way of Sufism, the way of Zen, the way of the Desert Fathers, the way of the Irish monks, the way of St John of the Cross, and of course there is the way of art. That is a very great way, Massimo, he said. Une grande voie. Une très grande voie. When he was excited Mr Pavone would lapse into French, one reason I believe why he liked talking to me was because of the time I had spent in France and my ability to understand the language. Une très très grande voie, Massimo, he said. And music is the most direct of all the ways of art, he said. It goes directly to the heart and directly to the body. Music became too conscious at the beginning of the twentieth century, he said, it was necessary to return it to its roots in the unconscious. Some people call this inspiration, a grand name for a simple thing. The root of the word inspiration is breath, he said, and all music is made of breath. If I have given anything to music, he said, it is that I have given music back its awareness of the importance of breathing, of breath. Ruach, it is called in Hebrew, and with this ruach God created the world and with this ruach God created Adam, and it is this ruach that makes us live and also makes us spiritual beings.

  He stopped. I waited for him to go on, but when it became clear that he was not going to, I said: Go on.

  — I can’t remember, he said.

  — What can’t you remember?

  — Anything.

  — Anything?

  — What else he said about this.

  — It doesn’t matter. Talk about something else.

  — Yes, sir, he said.

  I waited.

  Finally I said: Well?

  — What would you like me to talk about, sir? he asked.

  — What did he feel about living here in Rome?

  — He said to me one day: Massimo, this is Rome. Rome is the boundary between East and West. South of Rome the East starts, and north of Rome is where the West starts. This borderline runs exactly over the Forum Romanum. This is where my house is, and this explains my life and my music.

  — So he felt himself to be a Roman?

  — He said to me: Massimo, I am a Sicilian, which means I am a stranger everywhere on earth. Sicily has rejected me, he said, and nowhere else has welcomed me as Dante, when he was exiled by his native city of Florence, was welcomed by Can Grande della Scala, the ruler of Ravenna. Fortunately, he said, I have always had enough money to live wherever I wanted. I lived in Monte Carlo when I was young and I was a popular figure at the balls and in the casinos and bridge clubs of the Côte d’Azur. I lived in London after that and was a frequent visitor at the Court of St James. I lived in Vienna when I was studying with Scheler and frequented all the café-houses of the city. I lived in Switzerland during the war and got to know the sanatoria of that country better than anyone else, and the neurasthenics and madmen and lung cases who inhabited them. I lived in Paris after that and got to know the artists who at that time crawled all over the city. I was equally friendly with the tramps who slept by the Seine and with the Rothschilds in their grand houses on the Isle and in Neuilly. I have always loved extremes, he said. I am a man who is drawn to extremes. I can as easily wear a top hat at Ascot as a béret basque among the fishermen of Brittany or at the artists’ ball in Montmartre. My biography, he said, could be written through the hats I have worn, the tennis caps in Monte Carlo and the pilgrim hats in Nepal, the grey top hats at Ascot and the black top hats for the premieres of Lord Berners’ ballets, the colonial hats in the tropics and the Arab headdress in Egypt. Paris at the time, he said, was full of writers and poets. Pierre Jean Jouve, for instance. He was like the Eiger, like the north face of the Eiger. He had a head, I won’t say like a pear, no, he had a head like a needle, a rock. No one else had such an intelligence, such sharpness. The way he spoke. And his translations of Shakespeare, such sharpness, such an instinct for the right word. Otherwise, intolerable, he said. An absolutely intolerable man. Only his wife could put up with him. His wife and all her patients. She had a large group of patients, because she was a psychoanalyst. Her patients were like a band of slaves. She made them run errands for her. She made them clean the house for her. She made them cook for her. In return she healed them. But they were all of them slaves. But Jouve had his good points, he said. The best was the fact that he got my poems published. He decided that my poems were worthy of being published. You can imagine, an Italian writing poetry in French. An Italian who has the temerity to write poetry in French. But he found some merit in them and he got them published. And there were many others, of course, before and after the war. Leiris. De Mondiargues. Soupault. Michaux was the one I was closest to, he said. Michaux was my closest friend, the closest thing I had to a friend. Michaux and his cat Ronaldo.

  He stopped.

  — Go on, I said.

  — I cannot remember what was I saying, sir, he said.

  — Michaux and his cat.

  — Yes, thank you, sir. The trouble was, he said, I did not want to live in any of those places. I did not want to live in Monte Carlo or in London or in Vienna or in Switzerland or in Paris. I felt that the earth in those places rose up and rejected me. I tried to make a place for myself on this earth, he said. I married and had a beautiful house and entertained glamorous visitors. But all the time I felt the earth rising and pushing me away. Away, it said. Away. But away where? A man is born on this earth and if the earth rejects him where is he to go? To the moon perhaps? Or to Mars? But it will be the same there. The earth will rise up and reject you there because there is no longer a place for you in the universe. That is why I went to Nepal, he said. I am not a native of that region, and it would be foolish of me to imagine I could ever become one. But what my short trip to India and Nepal taught me is that it is possible to live with that rejection. You have to turn to your inner ear. You have to find a space within yourself. You have to make your music in that inner space. You have to furnish that inner space with enough furniture to live in a modicum of comfort. You have to have a table to eat off and a table to work at and a piano to work with and a bed to sleep in. You have to have a lavatory to shit in and a shower to wash under. Apart from that you need nothing. When I understood that, Massimo, he said to me, I was able to come home to my house here in Rome and settle down and work in peace. Until then I had been running round in circles, Massimo, he said. After that I was able to work in peace. Before that I had run after women and I had run after music and I had published poems and run after editors. After that I was able to sit at my piano and at my worktable in my house here in Rome and begin the work of my life. I do not regret the past, Massimo, he said. It is a mistake to regret the past because there is nothing we can do about it. It is the past and there is the end of it. If I had not run after women and music and all the rest of it perhaps I would never have been driven to join Tucci on his expedition to Nepal, he said. Perhaps I would never have been ready to listen to my inner ear. Once, he said, here in Rome, I met an old man. He was measuring some walls with a measuring rod. I was rather surprised since there are a lot of other devices to measure walls and distances with these days, as I said to him. There’s nothing like handiwork, he said. I agreed with that. I said: I suppose you must know these walls and houses very well? As he turned I noticed that he had a small grey beard and very penetrating eyes. Yes, he said, I knew them before I started measuring them and now I don’t know them any more. And then I realised he looked like Lao Tse.

  — Like who?

  — Lao Tse. Or something like that, sir.

  — I see. And what did he say, this Lao Tse?

  — That’s all he said.

  — Th
at’s all?

  — Yes, sir. That’s all Mr Pavone said he said, sir.

  — I see. Go on.

  — Yes, sir. How would you like me to go on?

  — Go on with what you were saying.

  — That’s all. Mr Pavone didn’t say anything more about him.

  — Not subsequently?

  — Not that I can remember, sir.

  — I see. Tell me what your duties were in the house.

  — Annamaria did the cooking and the washing. I looked after Mr Pavone’s clothes and did other things like ordering his train and plane tickets and I ordered taxis for him when he needed them in Rome and of course I drove him when he wanted to be driven out into the Campagna.

  — Who else did he employ?

  — There was Annamaria and myself for the house. And, for his music, and to help him with the secretarial work and so on first he had Manfred Holthausen to do that. Then he had Yehuda Mazor. Then he had April Mauss. Then he had Alessandro Bonfiglioli. Finally, Sebastiano Testoro.

  — Why so many?

  — Mr Pavone had exacting standards, sir. He wanted his manuscripts just so. He told me: My scores are the record of my life. Some people write War and Peace, he said, I write Akrita and Ruach. Tolstoy’s family preserved his manuscripts as holy relics. I do not have a family and I am not interested in holy relics, but I intend to leave all my manuscripts to the Foundation I have set up, the Fondazione Tancredo Pavone, here in Rome, and I intend everything to be in order when I die. There is nothing more depressing, he said, than to try and bring order to the chaos left by the deceased. There is nothing more depressing than going through the wardrobes of the deceased and sorting out the clothes that should go to the family and those that can be given to charity and those that should be thrown away. There is nothing more depressing than sorting through trunkloads of old letters and papers in the vain hope that something of interest will turn up. No, he said. Everybody owes it to their executors to leave everything as well-organised as possible. I have kept all the letters sent to me in separate files under the names of the correspondents, he said, and these are arranged alphabetically in three large trunks in the attic, trunks to which I add periodically. I have had a catalogue made of all my books, he said, and designated which of them should remain in the Fondazione Tancredo Pavone and which should be sold and which should be given away. In all this, he said, Federico has been invaluable. He will be in charge of the Fondazione when I die. Order, he said. Order and hard work. Those are the keys. Of course, he said, without a radical reorientation of the self such as I underwent in Nepal, neither order nor hard work would be of any use at all. They would be a mockery, he said. An insult. But, given such a reorientation, only order and hard work will yield results. And if I work hard, he said, why should not those I pay to work for me work hard as well? He said that if they worked for him they should be dedicated to his music. If they are not dedicated to my music they are of no use to me, he said. If they are not dedicated to my music I might just as well employ a donkey, he said.

  — He quarrelled with them?

  — I would not say quarrelled. Mr Pavone was an aristocrat. He did not raise his voice. But if he felt they were not dedicated to his music he locked the door against them.

  — Locked the door?

  — At first they thought they had taken the wrong key, and they rang the bell, but when nobody answered they went away and telephoned. But I had instructions. When they came again and banged on the door I had to tell them that their service was terminated. I had to pack away their belongings and to give it to them without letting them into the house. That is when my size became an advantage. They asked to speak to Mr Pavone, of course, but he would not speak to them. Instead, he instructed me to tell them he had terminated their contracts. Of course this led to much abuse. But that was part of my job. They wrote him letters and Mr Holthausen even got his lawyers to write and threaten him, but he did not reply to their letters and nothing happened.

  — But while they were working for him he treated them as friends?

  — He was always correct with them.

  — Meaning what?

  — He was not a man who cared for intimacy.

  — What kind of work did they do for him?

  — I am not a musician. I cannot say.

  — It has been said that they wrote the music he passed off as his own. What do you have to say to that?

  — I am not a musician.

  — But you know that he has been accused of making use of someone else’s work.

  — They have said that?

  — It has been said.

  — I wouldn’t know, sir. I am not a musician.

  — But he talked to you about his music.

  — When we were driving. Late in his life. Then he would talk to me. About everything. About his childhood. About his marriage. About his friendships. Even about music. Really it was himself he talked to, sir, if you know what I mean. I was driving the car. He talked to me but I think he was really talking to himself.

  — What did he say about his childhood?

  — Oh, many things.

  — Tell me some of the things.

  — As you know, sir, he spent his childhood first in La Spezia, where his father, a naval officer, was stationed. But also in the family house in Sicily.

  — What did he say about those years?

  — He said that he began to improvise at the piano at the age of three. I would rush upon any piano that happened to be around, he said to me, and I would beat it with my fists and kick it with my feet. But no one ever said to me: What are you doing? You will break the piano. No. Everyone was astonished, but they never told me to stop, he said. I am eternally grateful to them for that. All through my life, he said, I have rushed upon everything, music and poetry, women and food, with my fists and my feet flailing out, but no one ever told me to hang back. It is to that I owe my musicianship, he said, which is better than that of anyone in the world because it is an uninhibited musicianship. Those composers who have learned how to write down notes and to compose complicated counterpoint and all the rest of it have been robbed of their patrimony, he said, which is the patrimony of hands and feet. On les a privés de leur patrimoine, Massimo, he said, qui est le patrimoine des mains et des pieds. We should attack everything in life as if it was a mortal enemy and a lover, as if it was both of those at once, a mortal enemy and a lover. Only Kleist understood this, he said, because he was an aristocrat and an officer. In the Penthiselea of Kleist, he said, which that old woman Goethe could not stomach because it gave him the shivers, the Amazon queen kills Achilles and then eats him because her love for him is too great for anything less, and in the end Kleist killed himself because his mouth was too small for the bites he wanted to take out of life. He killed himself, he said, in order to widen his mouth. If he had had the chance, as I had, to go to Nepal, he said, he would not have killed himself, he would have understood that there is an inner mouth which is bigger than any human mouth and that with that inner mouth we can bite off as much of the world as we want. My parents, he said, always let me do what I wanted. They did not try to send me to school or give me lessons of any sort which would have ruined my life before it had even begun, as it has ruined the lives of the majority of the civilised world, so called. In that way they laid the foundations for my music. Can anyone ask more of parents? he said. If I wanted to climb a tree, I climbed a tree. If I wanted to spend sixteen days and nights in the library, I spent sixteen days and nights in the library. They did this because my father was too busy with his naval duties and my mother was too busy with her dresses and her hair. Most of the time they forgot that I existed and it was only thanks to the servants that I survived. But that is better than being ordered about every hour of the day and made to do this and that and the other thing. Sometimes the serving girls took me into their beds and that is how I learned about women and sex, he said, without anxiety and without guilt, exactly in the way it should be. They made
me realise that in addition to hands and feet we have sexual organs and that these sexual organs have been given us not only to reproduce but as a gateway to the feelings of the entire body, as the entrance way to pleasure. It would be better, he said, if those composers who live only to have their noses photographed for the papers had their sexual organs photographed instead, if instead of posing in front of the Forum and the Tower of Pisa and St Mark’s in Venice and looking wise in their studies, they invited photographers into their bedrooms and bared their members. Then it would be obvious, he said, that there is absolutely no difference between a composer and a chimpanzee, except that a chimpanzee can scratch where a composer can’t.

  — Every child should be an only child, he said, there should be a law, as there is in China, against having more than one child. All the psychological harm inflicted on humanity, he said, has been inflicted not by fathers and mothers but by brothers and sisters. Freud never understood this, he said, obsessed as he was with fathers and mothers, but the truth is that it is brothers and sisters who do the most harm. In my time as an invalid in Swiss sanatoria, he said, I had the opportunity to observe the neurasthenic and the mad at close quarters, and you will not believe how often the cause of their illness was not a father or a mother but a brother or a sister. A child who has a brother or a sister can never be alone, and to be alone is the supreme joy of childhood as it is of adulthood. Give me the man who likes to be alone, Massimo, he said, and I will give you a happy and contented man. Every child should be allowed to develop as he wishes, he said. First, he said, I attacked every piano I came across with my fists and my feet. I banged the lids down and I caressed the strings and I used my elbows to smother the keys. The piano was my first love, he said. I found I could make it bring forth all the sounds I wanted and many that I had never dreamed of. It was lucky, he said, that the houses we lived in were so large, because even with all the doors shut I made an almighty din. I wanted nothing to do with the drawing-room sounds the piano brought forth when my parents invited the noted pianists and singers of the day to play and to sing, he said. I hated those pianists and those singers from the bottom of my heart. I hated the sounds they made and I hated the airs they gave themselves. It took two world wars to cleanse the world of such sounds and such airs, he said. And even today there are fools who invite pianists and singers into their homes to reproduce those sounds and those airs. They should be lined up against the walls of their drawing room and shot, he said, as should the pianists and singers they invite. The piano is a universe, Massimo, he said, it is not a world, it is not a country, and it is certainly not a drawing room, it is a universe. Observe the piano if you will, Massimo, he said, and see what it consists of. Look at the oddity of its shape and the variety of its surfaces. The piano is not an instrument for young ladies, Massimo, he said, it is an instrument for gorillas. Only a gorilla has the strength to attack a piano as it should be attacked, he said, only a gorilla has the uninhibited energy to challenge the piano as it should be challenged. It was when I realised this, he said, that I made a point of going to Africa to study the gorilla. When you see the chest and the brow of a gorilla, he said, you realise what a puny being man is. Liszt was a gorilla of the piano, he said. Scriabin was a gorilla of the piano. Rachmaninov was a gorilla of the piano. But the first and greatest gorilla of the piano was Beethoven, he said. Beethoven understood, he said, that the first attribute of the composer is deafness. All his life, he said Beethoven marched towards deafness as though towards his destiny. Between 1930 and 1945, he said, I wrote fourteen works for the piano, but by then I had been destroyed, first by Scheler in Vienna and then by my wife. It was only in 1951 that I returned to the piano, he said, and wrote seven works which came close to doing justice to the nature of the instrument. The culmination of this work was Stepping into the Clouds for four pianos, which was finished on 31 December 1955. Then I stopped. The piano no longer interested me. I still have my pianos, he said, and I still sometimes sit down at the piano, but I have exhausted the possibilities of the instrument. I have nothing more to say with it, he said, and it has nothing more to say to me.