care for her clothes. If they were dirty she bought others, it was an excuse to buy others. She rubbed her body with unguents and washed herself in milk when that was the fashion, but essentially she was dirty. Do you know the difference, Massimo, he said, between the essential and the contingent? Because if you do not there is no point in your coming to work for me. It is all a question of refinement, he said. The Sicilian aristocracy is essentially refined, he said, but the bulk of the European aristocracy has remained stuck to its plebeian roots. My wife could trace her family back to Richard Lionheart, he said, but it was a family that had its roots in the pigsties of central Europe and that had inherited neither the qualities of the bourgeoisie nor those of the real aristocracy. Only in the East, he said, are people naturally gracious, naturally graceful, naturally clean. In the East, he said, a man will scoop up the rice in his bowl with his hand and that hand will be cleaner than if he had eaten with a knife and fork and wiped his hands on a napkin made of the finest linen. A man will crouch down and defecate in a corner of a public square, he said, and wipe his bottom with his hand and his hand will be cleaner than if he sat on a lavatory in his house with the door locked and a nice bouquet on the shelf to fill the cubicle with the scent of flowers and wiped his bottom with soft toilet paper and washed his hands afterwards with warm water and scented soap. Cleanliness is a habit of mind, Massimo, he said to me, it is a product of a way of life. It cannot be imposed piecemeal as we do in the West, where we do everything piecemeal. We have hot and cold water coming out of taps to wash with and gas and electric stoves to cook with and banks to keep our money in and lawyers to deal with our legal problems and accountants to deal with our tax problems and we have shops of every kind to satisfy every possible whim and every possible desire, but we have no centre and no core, everything remains separate from everything else and when we have spent a lifetime satisfying this whim and that whim, this desire and that desire and buying this that and the other we die as empty and stupid as the day we were born, if not emptier and stupider, but the desires live on as though they had a life of their own, he said, and so of course do the outlets to satisfy or rather to partially satisfy these desires, they have settled on the West and are strangling it to death. Do you know what a roller is, Massimo? he asked me. A roller is someone who goes on a pilgrimage, often of many thousands of miles, through swamp and desert, through cities and over mountains, and he does not run and he does not walk but he rolls. I met many such rollers when I was in India and Nepal, he said. It did not matter to them how long it took to reach their destination. It did not matter if it took them a year or five years or a whole lifetime. They took the cloth from around their shoulders and held it in their hands stretched out above their heads as they rolled to stop themselves falling into ditches. It gave them equilibrium. Equilibrium, Massimo, he said, is the essential condition for rolling. Without equilibrium you keep ending up in the ditch and you never advance at all. But once you find equilibrium, he said, you can roll for many miles every day. Try it, Massimo, he said. Try it in your spare time. You will discover that it is almost impossible to roll in a straight line. That is the reason for the cloth, Massimo, he said, by holding a cloth above your head stretched between both hands you can manage to roll in a straight line, or in an almost straight line, though the bruising to your elbows and upper arms has to be seen to be believed. Sometimes the bruising and the cuts to the arms and to the legs and to the body as well is so bad and the wounds become so infected that they have to stop, sometimes for months on end, in order to recover. But they always go on, Massimo, he said, they always go on. Usually, he said they have a man walking ahead of them, whose task is to sweep the ground ahead of them to remove the roughest stones and also to remove the ants and worms and other insects, for it would never do to trample on an ant or a worm while rolling. An ant or a worm, he said, are as worthy of life as any human being. The essential thing to understand is that what gives your life its special quality, without which you are nothing, is the recognition that you are worth as much or as little as any ant or worm. Once you have understood that, Massimo, he said, all the rest follows. To roll for thousands of miles through swamp and desert, through cities and over mountains and to trample and crush to death spiders and ants and beetles and gnats on the way is worse than not to go on pilgrimage at all, so a man goes before you, whether it is in swamp or desert, in the city or over the mountain, and he sweeps the ground clear of any living thing and you roll behind him, minute after minute and hour after hour and day after day and month after month and year after year, and in the end you reach your goal, you reach the goal of your pilgrimage, which is the shrine of the holy man. I met many such rollers in my brief stay in India and Nepal, he said, and I have to say they made a vivid impression on me.