— What did he say about Monte Carlo?
— He said to me: At sixteen, Massimo, I had had enough of being a child. I had had an old-fashioned education of Latin, chess and fencing, and been given plenty of free time to develop my interests, I had learned all the essentials of sex from my cousin Lara and from the serving-girls, but now I wanted to stretch my wings. He said that he went to stay with a cousin of his in Monte Carlo and there he learned to play bridge and to gamble in the casino and to dance. Monte Carlo at the time, he said, was the haunt of the most elegant men in the world. Theo Rossi di Montelera was commonly regarded as the most elegant, he said, but to my mind a Frenchman, Guy de la Lagardière was even more elegant. The most elegant of all, however, was Prince Yusupof, who was said to have organised the murder of Rasputin. His was not so much a sartorial elegance, as an elegance of posture and movement. It was not the elegance of Fred Astaire, no, that was something quite different. Yusupof, he said, made one think of those long-haired Russian greyhounds whose every step evokes a spontaneous beauty and an unsurpassable elegance. It was in Monte Carlo, he said, that I found I had a talent for dancing, he told me, and also for writing waltzes and other dances of the time. I was soon in demand as a partner for many beautiful women, he said, and hostesses began to ask me to compose music for the bands that played at their houses. I sometimes played the piano at these soirées, he said, and partnered some of the older ladies at bridge. I seem to have needed very little sleep in those days, he said, because when the night was done and the others went home to their beds I stayed at the piano and wrote my music, and even when I went to bed, he said, it was rarely by myself, and as you know, Massimo, there is nothing less conducive to sleep than sharing your bed with someone. Soon, he said, I abandoned my cousin, much to his annoyance, and found a flat of my own, a beautiful flat, like all the flats of Monte Carlo, with a beautiful view of the sea and the mountains. I should have learned from that time, Massimo, he said to me as we were driving one day, after he had had his first stroke, I should have learned that the secret of writing music is not thinking but feeling happy and feeling full. When you are full of the smells and sounds of the world, he said, when you are full of passion for a beautiful woman, music is an overflow, and that is a guarantee of authenticity. What I wrote then was not worth a bean, he said, and no one ever imagined it was, but it had a natural quality which I then lost for thirty years and only rediscovered on my return from Nepal in 1949. This is a quality which cannot be learned, Massimo, he said, it is there or it is not there. When I subsequently went on my ethnographical trips to West Africa, he said, I immediately sensed that the most striking quality of the art I found there was not its abstraction or its primitiveness or even its beauty, but its authenticity: you had the feeling that it had to be like this and no other way. When I went to the territory of the Ife with Daniel Bernstein, who had been a pupil of Frobenius, he said, I felt that I had entered a world of which I had often dreamed but which Europe had been unable to provide for me. The bronze heads of the Ife and of course of the Benin region are now famous the world over, he said, but in those days they were only just beginning to be known. Frobenius was so struck by what he took to be the classicism of these heads, he said, that he posited a historical link with ancient Greece, ridiculous of course, the Ife and Benin heads have a warmth and a humanity, a grace and a graciousness that is quite missing from classical Greek heads. The most remarkable sculptures of the Ife, though, he said, the memory of which has never left me in the course of my life, are the stone sculptures found in the groves or religious sanctuaries that are dotted about the periphery of the city of Ife. There are remarkable standing figures, such as the one called the Gatekeeper, a hideous dwarfish creature who guards one of the groves and to whom the people still brought offerings when I was last there in 1932 and perhaps they still do today. But for me, he said, in the first expedition I undertook with my dear friend Daniel Bernstein in 1926, for me the most overwhelming object was a granite slab some two metres high by forty centimetres broad and about ten centimetres thick, with five holes drilled into its upper half, and which ethnologists have called the Shield. Why that should have made such an impression on me is difficult to understand, he said, but I felt the moment I saw it as though I was standing at the confluence of all the waters of the world, I felt an immense pressure on all sides, which was keeping me upright and keeping me stable, but only because the pressure was so evenly distributed. I have often thought of that moment, he said, I felt it again when I heard the great trumpets being sounded during my trip to Nepal, and of course I have felt it when composing the music I have written since that time. You feel, he said, as if at every moment you are going either to be crushed or swept away, but you also feel as if you are in touch with the secret pulse of the universe. It is an extraordinary sensation, he said, a compressing into the moment of everything that has ever been and ever will be. It is this that I look for in each sound I imagine, he said, it is this that is at the heart of every note.
I waited for him to go on, but when he remained silent I said: Go on.
— No, he said.
— You are tired? I asked him.
— No, he said.
— If you are tired we can take a break.
— No, I am not tired, he said.
— Then why do you not go on?
— I am remembering Mr Pavone, he said.
— Remembering what about him?
— Just remembering him.
I waited a while. Then I asked him again: Shall we take a break?
— No, he said. I waited.
— In a minute I will go on, he said. I waited again. Then I said: How did he meet Mr Bernstein?
— He met him in Monte Carlo, he said. The four years he spent there, Mr Pavone told me, from the ages of sixteen to twenty, were among the happiest of his life. I was young, he said. I was handsome. I was rich. I was talented and I was carefree. I spent my days playing tennis and sailing and swimming, and my nights dancing with beautiful women. What more can one ask for at that age? I was as happy as I would ever be, but at the same time I already understood that happiness is not enough. The human being who no longer needs to spend his days hunting for food, he said, or to spend his days earning enough to pay for the food he needs, wants something more in his life than happiness. Or perhaps it was me, he said, for my cousin Tarquinio did not seem to be driven by the same need. Tarquinio believed that there was no reason why the life he was living in Monte Carlo should not last for ever. In Rome, he said to me, that idiot Mussolini is trying to whip the Italian people into hysteria, but here in Monte Carlo we can ignore him and his rallies, we can live as God meant us to live. By this he meant eating as much as he could and sleeping with as many beautiful women as he could, without taking any thought for the fact that these two things do not run in parallel lines and that while a well-fed youth might appeal to women, especially if he has a lot of money, an obese middle-aged man, even if wealthy, would appeal only to the kind of woman he would not really want to be with. As for me, he said, there was never any danger that I would grow obese, partly because neither of my parents is obese, and partly because I danced so much and played so much tennis and went for such long hikes in the Alps that I was unlikely to put on any weight, no matter how much I ate, and I have never been a big eater. Writing music and sleeping with beautiful women and, when I was young, dancing and playing tennis, those were the things I was passionate about, not eating or sleeping. I have never needed much food or much sleep, he said, which is a blessing, because some of my best musical ideas have come at night when walking through the streets of Rome. Cities, he said, should be walked through at night, that is when you become aware of the soul of a city, and Rome is the quintessential city. The conversations you have in a city at night, with passing strangers and the people you meet in all-night bars far surpass the conversations you have during the day. During the day everyone is busy, everyone is going about his or her business, he said, but at night it is as though the notion of ends disappears and each moment is valued in and for itself. Everyone who walks through a city at night walks in the present, he said, while everyone who walks through a city during the day walks in the past or the future. The very buildings of a city seem to return with a sigh to the present moment when night falls, he said, especially if there is a full moon. Nowadays, when the howl of police sirens destroys the calm, it is sometimes difficult to remain in the present, even at night. Police sirens cannot help but remind you of the past and the future, cannot help tearing you away from the present. Varèse, who was a very great composer, he said, imagined that he was being modern by introducing a police siren into his works, but all that did was date his works and limit their interest. It is quite incredible, he said, how many artists have been ruined by half-baked ideas about what will make them modern. Varèse was one of the most uncompromising composers who ever lived, he said, and yet his works are frequently ruined by naive ideas about what it means to be modern. That can never be said of Stravinsky, he said. I stole shamelessly from Stravinsky, he said, in the fourteenth of my Canti. For the vocal part I borrowed directly from Stravinsky’s writing for the voice in Les Noces, arguably the greatest work he ever wrote. But then Stravinsky stole shamelessly from Pergolesi and from Handel and from many others. It is only timid souls who are afraid to steal. Henri Michaux, he said, whom I got to know when I was living in Paris in the years before and after the war, said to me one day: All artists are cannibals, and the bigger the artist the bigger the cannibal. Michaux it was who encouraged me to write poetry in French. It is always important to try one’s hand at different arts, Michaux said. I am a writer but I also draw and paint. Why? Because there is an immediacy about drawing and painting that you cannot get when you use words. Words and sentences have been used since time immemorial, he said, but when I put my pencil on the page I can let it roam where it will, I can let it surprise me, I can let it do things no one has ever done before. Perhaps, he said, you are driven to write poetry as well as to compose for a reason you do not understand yourself. But if you are driven then you should let yourself go. Michaux encouraged me and Jouve found me a publisher, he said.