Infinity: The Story of a Moment Read online

  He was silent.

  — Go on, I said.

  — What I mean, sir, is that after that, whenever I was with him, whenever I drove him anywhere or entered his study, not his work study, for no one was allowed to enter that, but his business study, if you understand what I mean, sir, whenever I entered his study to receive his instructions, or saw him come down the stairs to get into the car, I could not help thinking of that day and so in a sense I was seeing two people, if you see what I mean, sir, I was seeing the gentleman I had always known, an aristocrat, a Sicilian aristocrat at that, and I was also seeing the person I had found on the floor and who had opened his eyes and stared at me and did not seem to recognise me. That’s the way it is, sir. Like on the television when you are watching a game of football and somehow something has happened to the set and you see two of everything, so you see forty-four players and two referees and two balls, it was a bit like that with Mr Pavone after I had found him on the floor.

  He stopped.

  I waited for him to resume.

  After a while, since he showed no sign of doing so, I said: Go on.

  — It is hard for me to go on, sir.

  — Do you want to rest?

  — No, sir.

  — All right then, go on.

  — What would you like me to say, sir?

  — Was he aware of a change in your relationship?

  — I cannot tell, sir.

  — Go on.

  — I tried to act as I had always acted, sir. When we stopped for a picnic on one of our drives out into the countryside I made sure I did not fuss around him more than I had previously done. I did not want to embarrass him.

  — Of course. Go on.

  — What do you want me to say, sir?

  — Why did Miss Mauss say she would not go on working in the same house as you? I asked him.

  — I cannot say, sir.

  — Had you and Miss Mauss quarrelled?

  — We had nothing to do with each other.

  — Do you know why she left Mr Pavone’s employment?

  — No, sir.

  — Mr Pavone said nothing to you about it?

  — No, sir.

  — And Annamaria?

  — I don’t understand, sir.

  — She said nothing about it either?

  — I told you, sir, people came and went in Mr Pavone’s employment. It was none of our business.

  — How did you get on personally with Miss Mauss?

  — We had nothing to do with each other.

  — All right. Go on.

  — About what, sir?

  — What else did Mr Pavone say about Monte Carlo and his time there?

  — He said that by 1927, when he was twenty-two, he had had enough of it. He had met Daniel Bernstein by then, he said. With Daniel, he said, I went walking in the Swiss Alps. I had my fill of mountains in those years, he said. I do not have a German or an Austrian soul and for me the mountains are a source of pleasure pure and simple, not a gateway to the world of the spirit. Bach did not go to the mountains, he said. Mozart did not go to the mountains. Listen to their music. It dances. It sings. And then listen to the music of a dedicated mountain-goer like Mahler and you see what a disaster for music mountains have been. That music neither sings nor dances, it crawls on its belly and imagines it is rising to the stars. The mountains of Nepal and Tibet, he said, are something else. Nobody in the mountains of Nepal or Tibet has the slightest interest in mountains. In fact they are terrified of mountains. On every high pass, he said, you will see a cairn with messages on it to keep away the evil spirits of the mountains. Ascetics will sit down and chant, tapping on their drums, when they are about to cross a high pass, he said, so as to keep the evil powers at bay. In 1927, he said, I went with Daniel to West Africa, to the kingdom of the Ife. His great friend, Oba Adesoji Aderemi, was the Ooni or headman of Ife at that time. Frobenius had been there a few years earlier and excavated a number of sites, but the Ooni was keen to show us not only the past but the present of his kingdom. He showed us the Ore Grove on the outskirts of the city, an ancient sacred site still used then as a place of worship. There is a mysterious figure standing there, he said, his features rubbed away by time, his hands clasped round his stomach, protecting a sort of pouch which hangs there. Some say he is a dwarf who represents the hunter deity, others that he is Ore’s servant. Ore, he said, was said to beckon visitors from a distance with laughter and spontaneous joy. If any visitor responded in the same way, however, his facial features, it was said, would remain permanently fixed in a contorted grimace. That, he said, is the negation of the human, it is the embodiment of evil. Think, Massimo, of the newborn baby, he said. He learns to smile by seeing his mother smile, he learns to laugh by seeing his mother laugh. He learns that he has laughter inside him because he sees it in the face of a loved and trusted being who is always with him. This figure is a denial of all that. What is it trying to tell, Massimo? he said. What is it trying to tell us? Next to it, as you enter the grove, are two stone slabs, vaguely fish-like in form. One is said to be a mudfish. These fish, he said, using their secondary lung system, bury themselves in mud during the dry season and appear to be reborn when the rains come and the waters rise. For that reason, Massimo, he said to me, the mudfish is a sacrificial offering among the Yoruba of Ife, greatly prized for its name, aja ajabo, which means ‘a fish that fights for its life’. The other slab is said to represent the crocodile. Crocodiles are regarded by the Yoruba as warriors of the water and are said to be messengers of the gods of the lagoons. The crocodile, the Ooni explained to us, represents the time when the world was all water. The greatest stone carving of Ore, he said, is one I have already talked to you about before, Massimo, because it made such an impression on me. It is the granite obelisk, standing almost two and a half meters high, with five holes bored into it running from near the middle to the top. In that block of granite we find a miracle taking place, he said. For what we have here is pure stone, primal matter, which has been touched, but only touched, by the human. In the normal course of things, Massimo, he said, for the human to leave a trace upon the earth is to civilise it, and thus to weaken it. But the marks of the human, in this case, he said, the cutting of this massive block of granite and the boring into it of five holes, is so minimal, and has been carried out with so much respect for the materiality of the stone, that it takes nothing away from its primal power. Quite the reverse. It is almost as though the making of these marks, which do not show the sign of the human hand of course, which might almost be created by nature herself, almost but not quite, have, paradoxically, only reinforced the inhuman, telluric quality of the granite. Our civilisation could not have done this, Massimo, he said. Only a civilisation which instinctively understood the authority of the telluric could have produced something as awesome as this.

  — What did he mean by the telluric? I asked him.

  — I do not know, sir, he said. That was what Mr Pavone said.

  — All right, I said. Go on.

  — That block of granite, Massimo, he said to me, was like a call to arms. For the first time since as a child I had attacked the piano with all my energy and with my whole body, I felt the stirrings of something deep within me. I did not know what to do with these stirrings, he said. I did not know how to respond to them. But the sense of that so-called Shield of Ore and the excitement, the confusion, it caused inside me, I never forgot. Je n’ai jamais oublié le bouleversement que la vue de cet objet a produit en moi, Massimo. Jamais. It was to be another twenty-five years before I knew what to do with that feeling, he said, but it was there, and it made me abandon first Monte Carlo and its waltzes, then London and its glittering society, and drove me eventually to Scheler in Vienna. But that was a false start, he said to me. We were inspecting his shoes. This happened once a year, when he gave away to charity those shoes he no longer wished to wear. I picked them up and put them in a large box as he pointed his stick. That was a false start, Massimo, he said. A de
ad end. I had to go back to the beginning and start all over again, and I would never have got started in the right direction had it not been for my trip with Tucci to Nepal in 1949, he said. When I went to Nepal, he said, I had long forgotten the Shield of Ore, he said, but in Nepal I remembered it again. It has been the lodestar of my life, he said. It is not too much to say that it has been the lodestar of my life. Some of the shoes he had not worn even once, others he had worn so much that there was no life left in them whatever. I could tell the pain it caused him when he would point to one such pair and say: That one, Massimo, and I would take them up and put them in the box. But he showed no emotion. Mr Pavone was not someone who showed emotion. That one, Massimo, he said. And that one. And that one. It was the same with the shirts and the ties and even the suits, but he was less attached to those than to his shoes. A good bed, Massimo, he would say, and a good pair of shoes, that is all a man needs. Not that he was not concerned with his shirts and his ties and his suits. We must present ourselves to the god of music, he would say, as to any other god, dressed in the best possible way. Any sloppiness in dress, Massimo, he would say, will be reflected in sloppiness of composition. I will not tolerate sloppiness, Massimo, he would say, in you or in anyone who works for me, just as I will not tolerate sloppiness in anyone who plays my music. My wife, Massimo, he would say, was one of the most beautiful women in the world and she was always immaculately dressed. But in her soul she was a slut. It took me a long time to accept that, he said, but it’s the truth, and the day comes when we have to face the truth, no matter how uncomfortable. She bathed in milk when that was the fashion, he said, gallons and gallons of milk, she filled her bath to overflowing, she wallowed in it and let it soak into her skin. And she did indeed have the most silken skin, Massimo, he said. I would have given a great deal to touch that skin, to stroke that skin, as would any man, he said. And indeed I did give a great deal. I gave my life. A mistake, Massimo, he said, but I have no regrets. To regret, Massimo, he said, is to admit that one should have acted differently. But at the time the choice did not present itself. The wedding took place in Buckingham Palace, he said, for she was a niece of the Queen of England. There is no more depressing building, Massimo, he said to me, than Buckingham Palace. It is grey outside and it is grey inside. It is filled with the most atrocious furniture. Even the paintings on the walls, which include some of the world’s greatest masterpieces, are badly hung and difficult to see. But that doesn’t matter because nobody who lives or works in Buckingham Palace wants to see them. They have always been there, as far as they are concerned, and they will always be there. If one of them were to go missing there would be an almighty fuss, but only because walls need to have paintings, and the bigger the wall the bigger the painting. Kings have always had the most atrocious taste, Massimo, he said, the only people with worst taste than kings are tyrants and dictators. I did not want to be married in Buckingham Palace, he said, I did not want to eat those cucumber sandwiches for which Buckingham Palace is famous, but it was what my wife wanted and when we are in love, Massimo, we do the most absurd things to please the loved one. He pointed with his stick and I put another pair of shoes in the box. The first time she left me, Massimo, he said, I found her in Oxford, staying with an uncle of hers, a clergyman, who was attached to one of the colleges there. He was a papyrologist. He offered me a glass of sherry, but I declined. Pack your bags, I said to her, the car is waiting outside. The papyrologist suggested we sit down and talk, but there was nothing to talk about. In the car on the way back to London she cried and begged me to forgive her. She had a way of crying silently, her body shaking and tears streaming down her face but not a sound coming out of her. It wrung my heart, Massimo, he said, to witness her when the crying fit was really upon her. But as soon as we returned to London the old quarrels broke out again. She accused me of not loving her in the manner in which she obscurely felt she deserved to be loved. I paid no attention to all this and for a while we carried on as before. I was writing poetry in Italian and playing Couperin on the harpsichord. I had discovered the poems of Belli, that nineteenth-century Roman poet who wrote the most witty and scabrous poems in the Roman dialect. I toyed with the idea of writing a comic opera on the Phèdre of Racine, set in Rome in the nineteenth century and with the characters speaking romagnolo and the music consisting of popular tunes of the 1920s. I played polo with the English aristocracy and with the jumped-up sons of brewers. To tell you the truth, Massimo, he said, as he motioned with his stick and I picked up another pair of shoes and added them to the pile in the box, I was bored. Unhappy and bored. I arranged to have my opera put on, but the English musical establishment, the most conservative musical establishment in the world, turned up their noses at it. All apart from the Sitwells and Lord Berners. It was then I decided to go to Vienna and seek out Schoenberg or one of his pupils. I was tired of frivolity, Massimo, he said. I was twenty-six years old and I needed to go down into the heart of music, to find something that was more than glitter and cynical humour. Over my dead body, my wife said. She was a dreadful linguist, like all the English, and the thought of living in Vienna terrified her. Besides, she had a stream of lovers or perhaps they were only admirers. I do not think she was interested enough in sex to have a stream of lovers, so it was probably a stream of admirers, whom she would have been loath to leave. So I went on my own. I found a flat next door to the opera house and I set about finding the best teacher I could. Arabella wrote me a letter a week, sheet after sheet in her childish hand, telling me about all the balls and race meetings she had been to and sailing at cows and cricket with the lords and shooting in the Highlands on weekends in this grand house and that, with this lover or admirer or that. Thursday mornings, that was the day these letters arrived, these extraordinary missives, which seemed to have been written by someone who had never heard of censorship or revision, she wrote in exactly the same way of her premenstrual pains, she had always been given to premenstrual pains, as of her dinner parties, of her constipation as of the golden down on the arm of the latest young man to fall in love with her. It would take me a week to read through these letters. I had only just got to the end of one when the next one arrived. What I felt was that she was living for both of us and so I could take a break from living and concentrate on music. But Scheler was a big disappointment. At first I thought it was my fault, he said, then I thought that perhaps I had chosen the wrong teacher, but the more I talked to the musicians of Vienna the more I realised they were all infected with this intellectual disease. They were all obsessed with reason and analysis, with words like Necessity and Truth. The best of them, like Schoenberg and Berg, used this as a way of harnessing their hysterical emotion. Because they were all hysterics. Jewish hysterics. Even when they were not Jews, like Webern, who was the best of them, they were infected with the Jewish hysteria. At the same time the papers were like buckets full of excrement, Massimo, he said, you have no idea of the way Jews were vilified in a so-called centre of world civilisation like Vienna, it was not surprising they felt they needed to retreat into Reason and Science. Only that which was reasonable and that which was scientific would release them from the smells that came up from the sewers of Vienna. It was not a place to be, Massimo, he said, if you were Italian, if you were Sicilian. Arabella had been right not to wish to come with me, Massimo, he said. When Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933 it got even worse. I did not want to have anything to do with people like Scheler and even with Schoenberg, he said, I did not want to have anything to do with Viennese intellectuals and artists, all suicides, actual and potential, and I did not want to have anything to do with Hitler and his Viennese disciples or with Mussolini and his thugs. So I returned to London. But London no longer satisfied me, he said. The Court of St James no longer satisfied me. Oysters at Wheeler’s and weekends in the country no longer satisfied me. I decided to settle in Paris, still a civilised city in the midst of all this excrement. But before we could move Arabella disappeared again. I made enquiries
and found that she had taken herself off to New York. In these situations, Massimo, he said, it is essential to act decisively. I took the next boat for New York. I had a loaded pistol in my pocket. I am not sure whether I intended to shoot her or to shoot myself in front of her. In the event I tracked her down to a hotel in Greenwich Village and sat there in the bar drinking and waiting for her to come in. After a long time a man came up to me and asked if I was the Italian lord. I said yes. A lady would like to see you, he said. What kind of a lady? I asked. A lady, he said, and gave me the key to a room. I went upstairs. I had the gun in the pocket of my jacket and I kept one hand on it. With the other I inserted the key the man had given me into the lock. It was very quiet in the hotel, four o’clock in the afternoon. The door to the bedroom was open and I walked across the thick carpet and stood in the doorway. The curtains were drawn, but there was just enough light to see by. She was lying on the bed with her face to the wall. I stood for a long time by the door, looking. Finally I walked across and sat down on the bed beside her. Neither of us said a word. A long time passed. It grew dark but we stayed on like that. Then she turned over and opened her eyes and looked at me. She had eyes like no one else, Massimo, he said. Violet eyes. Like no one else. The return journey across the Atlantic was our veritable honeymoon, Massimo, he said. We were closer then than at any other time. Closer than we would ever be again. So we moved to Paris and I met Jouve and Eluard and Michaux and all the rest of them and began to write poetry in French. But I was lost, Massimo, he said, lost. I didn’t want to spend my life writing waltzes of the kind I had written in Monte Carlo, amusing as those had been to write, and I didn’t want to write the sorts of serial compositions Scheler had been trying to get me to write. But beyond that I knew nothing. And then things got very bad in Europe. It was impossible to stay in Paris and there was no question of moving back to Rome, so we went to Switzerland, three days before the war broke out. At least in Switzerland you could leave the shouting behind and try to lead a civilised life. But you cannot lead a civilised life when you know what is happening all around you. You can take walks in the mountains and breathe in the good air, but you cannot shut out reality. Had I been able to write music I might have done so, he said. But I could no longer write. I sat at my piano and I played the same note, over and over again, hour after hour, the same note. Arabella begged me to stop but I could not leave the piano alone and I could not play anything except that one note. So in order to spare her I signed myself in to a sanatorium. My health was very bad anyway, and I thought, Europe is a madhouse, so the only way to stay sane is to enter a madhouse. Because these Swiss sanatoria are all madhouses, Massimo, he said. Believe me, he said, I tried dozens of them. All madhouses. The doctors are mad and the nurses are mad and the patients are mad. In one of them I led a revolt of the patients against the management. We were being treated like vermin even though we were paying through the nose, and I decided a stand must be taken. We took the senior doctor hostage, a madman called Schweinsteiger, and we locked him in a dark room until the management acceded to our requests. In another I organised a music festival, he said. I formed a choir and I taught them how to make various animal sounds and we put all those together and a rather interesting piece of music emerged. We all enjoyed ourselves thoroughly and the patients who took part immediately got better, but when we performed it in public for the other patients and the doctors and nurses they booed us so loudly we had to stop. However, all the performers discharged themselves the next day, their symptoms had entirely disappeared. I stayed on because I preferred to be inside than outside, but everyone blamed me for the concert and the management blamed me for persuading the performers that they were cured. It was then I realised, Massimo, he said, that there is no such thing as informed listening to music, there is only prejudice and the absence of prejudice. Why are the sounds of twenty-eight animals all barking and braying and mooing and hooting in concert any less beautiful than Bach’s B Minor Mass or the last movement of the Ninth Symphony? Tell me that, Massimo, he said, tell me that and I will give you a doctorate in music.