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.