He was silent.
— Go on, I said.
— Yes, sir, he said.
I waited.
Finally I said: What else did he say about the Swiss sanatoria?
— Switzerland, he said to me once, is not as dull as people make it out to be. There is more to Switzerland than cheese and sanatoria and mountains, he said. There are more drunks and there are more suicides in Swizerland than in any other European country. And there are more madmen per head of the population than in any other European country. I met some remarkable individuals, he said, both inside the sanatoria and outside. I met some remarkable mad billiard-players, with whom I played billiards for hours at a time in the sanatoria. We had no cues, we had to use our hands, our arms and our hands. We played for hours at a time. Sometimes we had no balls either, because of the war there were shortages even in Switzerland. Shortage of billiard cues and even of billiard balls. What went on in these sanatoria, I can’t tell you, he said. The patients with each other. The doctors and nurses with each other. The doctors and nurses with the patients. Such goings-on. In these sanatoria one could do anything. So long as one did not talk about the war. Everybody had to pretend there was no war. It was enough to drive you mad. Whenever I could I played the piano. Just one note. Always one note. He’s madder than the rest, they said. But it’s by playing one note over and over again that you get to the heart of that note. I didn’t realise it then, I accepted what they said, that I was madder than the rest, although a part of me was always aware that I was not mad at all. In the end, he said, I could not stand those sanatoria any more and I got out. I rejoined Arabella in our flat in Geneva and I spent the day looking out of the window at the lake and waiting for the war to end. Arabella too was waiting for it to end. As soon as it ended she disappeared again. A friend offered to try and find out where she had gone, but I no longer wanted to know. From that day to this, Massimo, he said, I have not heard from her, nor have I made any attempt to find her. It is as if she had never existed, he said. Never existed. For a while I wondered if there would be any news of her but there was none. She had been swallowed up into thin air, he said. Into thin air.
He was silent for a long time. I let him be. Then I said: Go on.
— How? he said.
— What happened after she left?
— I knew I could not stay in Geneva any more, he said, sitting in my flat by the lake and playing that one note over and over again. I felt that I had reached a turning point in my life, but I did not know what it was. We were driving to San Felice, he liked to have lunch in the Circeo Park Hotel, looking out over the sea. So I left Geneva and settled in Paris again, he said, I already knew many of the writers and artists there. The Surrealists. Ponge. Giacometti. Sartre. Above all Michaux. Michaux was a lovely man. When his wife died he began to draw and paint. I wanted to escape from words, he said. I wanted to escape from the control of words. I wanted my hand to lead me, my pencil to lead me. Later he took mescalin and painted what he saw when he was high on mescalin, but in those days he was still mourning his wife. In Paris a funny thing happened to me, Mr Pavone said. I held my hand up to my face and I could not recognise it. Not only did I not see that it was a hand, I did not know that it belonged to me. I wanted to cry all the time but not a tear would drop.
Pas une larme, Massimo, he said. Pas une larme. I was at work on a huge orchestral piece, still in the serial style I thought was necessary for any serious composition. It was called The Eternal Silence of Those Infinite Spaces. My body was screaming at me to stop but my will forced me to go on. My shoulder was paralysed. I had to get someone to help with the copying of the score. Every day when I woke up all I wanted was to stay in bed, to cover my face with the blankets and shut out the day. But I forced myself to get up. I forced myself to sit at my desk. I forced myself to complete The Eternal Silence of Those Infinite Spaces. And finally it was done. Monteux was to conduct it. I wanted to run away but conventions are conventions, Massimo, he said, and so I forced myself into my black tie and I took a taxi to the Salle Pleyel. But I could not go into the hall. I rushed to the lavatory and was sick. Afterwards I lay on the floor to try and recover. Strains of music came to my ears. My music. It made me feel sick. Then suddenly the door was flung open and someone was looking at me. He began to shout: There’s a dead man here! There’s a dead man here! I got up at once and motioned to him to be quiet. Then I heard the last chords and the sound of clapping, so I pushed him aside and ran to the auditorium and slipped in, walked slowly forward as if from the back and climbed onto the podium and embraced Monteux and the leader and clapped the orchestra and took my bow. After that I asked them to get me a taxi and went straight back to my room and did not move from my bed for three weeks. Jouve suggested I become one of his wife’s patients but I would sooner have been treated by a baboon than by that woman. He thought he could add to the slave population, Massimo, he said to me that day as we drove to the Circeo Park Hotel where he had reserved a table for us on the terrace, overlooking the sea. He thought that by helping me to get my poems published in French he had found his wife another slave. That was when I made up my mind to go to Nepal, he said. I went to Nepal to flee the threat of slavery to Mme Pierre Jean Jouve, but it turned out that Nepal was my destiny, as deafness had been the destiny of Beethoven. Nepal was my destiny and my salvation, Massimo, he said. When Tucci invited me to join his expedition I did not hesitate for a moment, he said. Everything about those four months was extraordinary, he said. It was as if I had been put into one of those washing machines, not a day went by when I was not pummelled and whirled around by forces greater than myself. I did not know what was happening to me, Massimo, he said, as we sat on the terrace overlooking the sea and had one of those meals for which the Circeo Park Hotel is famous. I did not know what was happening but I clung on, he said. Perhaps a caterpillar feels like this as it begins to turn into a butterfly, he said. As I stood in the courtyards of the temples and heard the enormous trumpets blaring out I felt the walls of my being crumble and I did not know if I would come out of it alive or if I would give up the ghost there in Nepal and disappear for ever. I knew only that I had to cling on, Massimo, he said. The Circeo Park Hotel is renowned for its fish and Mr Pavone was a great eater of fish. The walls of my inner being, Massimo, he said, as he dissected his fish, and also the walls of my outer being. I felt like a molten lump of metal being beaten into shape by some mighty force, he said. The heat was intense, Massimo, he said. The beating was beyond my endurance. Something new was being forged, Massimo he said. Far beyond endurance. But I knew it was my destiny, he said, so I rejoiced at the same time as I despaired of ever getting out of there alive. Here I was, on the cusp of the lowlands and the highlands, for Nepal is the bridge between the two, between the arable fields to the south and the arid mountains to the north, here I was, being heated till I began to melt and then being beaten into a new shape, he said. The hills were full of blossom, he said, and the monkeys darted from tree to tree, and everywhere you went you heard the sound of chanting. Of chanting, Massimo, he said, not singing. Do you know the difference between singing and chanting, Massimo? he said. Because if you do not you cannot hope to understand my music. To sing is to begin at the beginning and to go on to the end and then to stop. To chant is to align yourself with the rhythms of the universe. Singing goes somewhere, he said, chant is already there. Singing is for young ladies, Massimo, he said, and for the preening divas of the opera house. Chanting is for monks. When you begin to chant, Massimo, he said, you are taken over by a force greater than any you have ever known. It runs through you from the tip of your toe to the top of your head. Your whole body tingles, Massimo, he said, your chest heaves, you are no longer yourself, you are part of the chanting. One can become addicted to chanting, Massimo, he said, as one can become addicted to drink or to drugs. After a certain time the body cannot do without it. The only difference is that chanting cannot kill you as drink and drugs can. After lunch we took a little walk along the sea, in the great gardens of the hotel. He had fallen silent. And in the car on the way back to Rome he did not utter a word. I do not know whether this was out of tiredness or because he was thinking. He would often be silent for the whole of our drives, I knew he was thinking about his music. He found, he told me, as he grew older, that going out for a drive was a good way to resolve a musical problem. No problem without a solution, Massimo, he said. But the problem may of course have been wrongly posed in the first place. That was the trouble with Schoenberg and Scheler and his other disciples. They thought they had found the solution, but it was the solution to the wrong problem. When I came back from Nepal, he said, I sat down at the piano in my house here and I played the same note, over and over again, hour after hour and day after day, just as I had done in Switzerland. But the difference was this, Massimo, he said to me. I no longer felt this to be an admission of defeat. On the contrary, he said, I understood it was a sign of triumph. I played that one note and as I played I listened. I listened and I understood. At that moment a new kind of music was born. The first piece I called