L’artiste est sacré et l’a toujours été. I can hear him saying it: L’artiste est sacré, Massimo, et l’a toujours été. Among the Ife he said, everyone has his allotted task, but the most sacred task is that of the witchdoctor. What you must realise, Daniel said to me, he said, is that these people bathe in the waters of the sacred. When Frobenius came here he could not believe that a so-called primitive people could carve heads like that. What Frobenius did not realise, he said, was that we are the primitives, we are the barbarians. Classical Athens was a disaster for the West, he said. And classical Rome even more so. It turned us all into barbarians, he said. It removed us from the sacred and so cut us off from our roots. Plato was a disaster, he said. Pericles was a disaster. Cicero was a disaster. Caesar was a disaster. All of them disasters. However hot it was, however heavy the rains, he said, Daniel always seemed to have a fresh shirt on, he always looked cool and as though he had come straight from the barber’s. As a Sicilian, he said, I thought I would be able to cope with the heat, but it is the combination of heat and damp which is so difficult to cope with in West Africa. On our first trip I was ill for seventeen of the twenty-nine days we were there, he said. I had not learned, as Daniel instinctively knew, how to reset my spiritual clock to these alien conditions. I learned a lesson, Massimo, he said, a lesson which has stood me in good stead ever since. It is the spiritual clock inside you which is important, not the physical conditions outside you. A man who knows how to set his spiritual clock, Massimo, he said, is a man who can deal with the world. He is a man who can make the most of his potential. I must have known this, Massimo, he said to me that day as we sat in a café after visiting the cathedral, I must have known this but in the excitement of youth I had forgotten it. Daniel and the Ife helped me to remember it. His face was grey, as it often was in those days, from his exertions, first in climbing up to the cathedral and then in talking in so impassioned a way about the sculptures on the pillars of the façade. Sometimes when he drank a glass of water I watched his cheeks sink inwards so that it seemed as if his face was all bone, but I took care not to let him see me looking, he would not have liked it. Once, it was towards the end, I found him lying on the floor of the living room. I helped him to a chair but he did not seem to know where he was. I asked him if he was all right but he just stared at me. I did not know what to do. I asked him if I should call a doctor, but he just went on staring at me. I was beside myself. I did not want to ring for Annamaria because I felt he would prefer to be seen in this state by as few people as possible. But on the other hand I thought perhaps something irrevocable had happened and he needed to be taken to hospital as quickly as possible. Then, as I was thinking all these contradictory thoughts, he suddenly said, without moving, thank you, Massimo, a glass of water please. I ran to get it for him and by the time I had come back he had straightened his clothes and was sitting in a more natural position. Sit down, Massimo, he said, when he had drunk a little. I asked him where he would like me to sit, I had not sat in his salotto before. He motioned me to a chair opposite him. Why is it, Massimo, he said to me, that men are so ashamed of being seen to be vulnerable? It is not as if others do not know it, since we all come down to the same thing in the end. What was my overriding feeling when Arabella left me? It was shame. I was so ashamed I could not be alone by myself and I could not bear to see anyone. In earlier days, he said, when she had left me in London and in Paris, I had gone after her to drag her back, to make her realise the folly of her ways. But this time I knew it was final. And I never saw her or heard from her again, he said, sitting on the upright chair in his salotto. After she left me in Switzerland in 1945, just after the war ended, he said, as if she had been waiting for the war to end to make her escape, after she left me, he said, it was as if she had never been, but she left me in a state of profound shame. I thought of that, Massimo, he said, when I opened my eyes just now and saw you looking at me with fear in your eyes. I knew I should never have been in this position, I should never have subjected you to this fear. But it happened. I don’t know how it happened, but it happened. One minute I was standing up, I was crossing the room, my mind was busy on important things, and the next I was opening my eyes and seeing you standing there looking at me with undisguised terror. Our mothers help us to stand upright, Massimo, he said, and then they help us to walk. But one day, when our mothers are gone, we find we can no longer stand up. We can no longer walk. One moment we are in full possession of our faculties, we are walking across the carpet of our room, thinking deep thoughts, and the next we are being picked up off the floor by our manservant. What is so shameful about that? he said. It will happen to all of us unless by great good fortune we are run over by a car instead, or kicked in the head by a horse, when we are in the prime of life. The road to the final end is a long one these days, Massimo, he said, with the advances in medicine and the advances in drugs and all the rest of it. It is a road paved with shame, Massimo, he said, especially for someone who is as proud as I am. But it is a road I have to travel and I should get used to it, shouldn’t I? You are silent, Massimo, he said. You do not know what to say. And the truth is that there is nothing to say. When we lose control of ourselves, Massimo, he said, we are ashamed even in front of our mothers. How much more ashamed will we be in front of strangers. And yet, Massimo, if someone like me, who prides himself on his realism and on his openness to experience, who, it is no exaggeration to say, spends the greater part of his days and nights opening himself to the experience of the Other, if someone like that cannot accept that what age will bring with it is a loss of control, leading inevitably to a state akin to that of earliest childhood, of babyhood even, if I cannot accept that, who can accept it? Go, Massimo, he said, and say nothing of what has happened to Annamaria or to anyone else. Of course I did what he said and neither of us ever referred to that episode again, but these things have an effect on one, you understand, sir. Our relationship was never quite the same again, if you know what I mean.