Avec une grande tendresse. Then: L’appel de l’ésprit, l’homme se réveille. The final movement: Libération, catharsis. But of course I am not Beethoven, he said, nor do I want to be. So I treat all four instruments as one, a giant instrument of sixteen strings. Only the Ardittis play it as it should be played, he said, as at once the most personal and the most impersonal of all my works. I had to help him down the steps, since his fall he had lost confidence in his legs, but he still wanted to see things and he still walked by himself in the streets of Rome at night when he could not sleep and he could not work. There is something about walking in a city in the middle of the night, he said, not in the districts where the bars and nightclubs stay open all night, where the prostitutes walk the streets, but in the residential districts, where every good citizen has gone to sleep, there is something about that, he said, about padding through those quiet residential streets, that I find conducive both to peace of mind and to the emergence of compositional ideas. Perhaps it is because you are in a sense both there and not there, you are already your own ghost, he said, when I am gone I will probably still walk the streets of Rome at night as I have always done, but in a spirit of peace, not of frustration and anguish, as poor benighted Christians think, who worry about holding their dead down in their graves and imagine that if they walk the streets after they are dead and buried it is because they are restless and unappeased. I am not restless when I walk the streets at night, he said. I am never less restless than in those hours. We were standing in the dark in one of the Etruscan tombs. The Etruscans loved silence, he said, and they loved the dark. So it is not surprising that the Romans condemned them to silence and to darkness. The Romans were the most unimaginative people who ever lived, he said. Thank God I am a Sicilian and not a Roman. If I had been a Roman I would never have achieved anything, he said. Everything that is wrong with the human race, he said, can be found in the Romans. They were petty. They were pedantic. They were mean. They were bureaucratic. They were vain. They were bloodthirsty. They were cruel. The Roman roads were straight, he said. The Romans prided themselves on their straight roads. But who wants a straight road? The Romans substituted the straight line for the circle and the spiral, he said. For the Celtic circle and the Celtic spiral they substituted the straight line. And because the Roman road brought peace and prosperity, because along the Roman road other peoples could be subjugated and their wealth taken away, all those who followed the Romans tried to ape the Roman ways. They abandoned the circle and the spiral and became obsessed with the straight line. What is the landing on the moon but the Roman road? What is America but the Roman road? What is the dream of living to a hundred but the Roman road? Capitalism is the Roman road, he said. Communism is the Roman road, and Fascism was the Roman road. One of the joys of travelling in Nepal, he said, and it was one of the joys of travelling in West Africa in my youth, was that there were no Roman roads. The roads led from village to village, and from village to temple. What is the shape of a Buddhist shrine, Massimo? he said. Circular. Darkness is circular, he said. Just as light is circular and each sound is circular. And not circular in two dimensions but in three or four or five, and a circle in four dimensions is a spiral. And what is a spiral but a figure of eight? And what is the sign for infinity but a figure of eight lying on its side? Not only is each of my works a sphere, he said as we stood in the dark of the tomb at Cerveteri, but each moment in each work is a sphere. Those who are willing to listen to my music, he said, learn to listen to all sound. They learn to listen to the reverberations of a sound, to its inner heart. My wife left me in 1945, Massimo, he said to me. One day she was there and the next she was gone. But my other bride, sound, has never left me. Sometimes I have left her. I have been too distracted, too superficial, too frail to stay with her and be her spouse. But she has never left me. Never, Massimo. And she will never leave me.