— 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 dead 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