Elle ne me quittera jamais. I will leave her, Massimo, he said, but she will never leave me. When you are alive, Massimo, he said, you are a person. When you are dead you are a piece of meat. If it amuses them to make a fuss over a piece of meat, he said, then that is their prerogative. Why should I deny them? I do not want to leave my body to science, he said. I want to leave it to my family to do with as they like. My father is buried in the family vault, Massimo, he said, though he was a freethinker. My mother likewise. If they want to bury me there beside them, let them do so. If they want to cut me into little pieces and throw me into the Tiber, then that too is all right by me. What was good enough for Orpheus is good enough for me, he said. Sometimes he spoke so low that I had to bend over his bed to hear him. Even then I did not always understand what he said. He was not talking to me but to himself. Or perhaps to some imaginary person. But he was very clear that I should not take, even as a memento, anything from his wardrobe. All that has to be burned, he said. He had always been superstitious. When the barber came to cut his hair he always insisted that every last hair should be gathered up from the floor and burned. When he cut his nails he always made sure the cuttings were swept up and disposed of. If a black cat crossed the road he would not go on. Turn the car, Massimo, he would say. There is nothing for it but to go home. If I suggested an alternative route he would pretend to consider it and then say he was really too tired, it had not been a good idea to set out in the first place and he only wanted to return. If he saw a new moon through the car window he would say: It is a bad sign, Massimo, a very bad sign. Who knows what disaster is about to befall me? If I made the mistake of pointing out, after a few days, that no disaster had struck, he would say, Patience, Massimo, patience. Ill fortune is often slow to arrive, but, believe me, arrive it will. Storms terrified him. I found him one day, when I came up to take my orders and thunder was cracking right overhead as if the gods were moving house, and the lightning seemed to be streaking straight down to the Forum, I found him hiding under the table, the round table by the armchair. I pretended I had not seen him and after looking round the room went on my way. But I made sure after that not to take him out for a drive if storms were forecast, even if it was bright sunshine. I would explain that something had gone wrong with the car and it would not be fit for the roads in time. When his dear friend Henri Michaux died, his funeral took place in driving rain, the thunder rumbled overhead. I knew what an effort it was for him to turn out, but he did not say a word. It was only later, as we were driving back to Rome, that he said to me: Did you hear the thunder, Massimo? Even the gods were angry that Henri had died. I will write a piece in his memory, he said. I do not know what form it will take but I know that I will write something. Writing will be better than crying, he said. It will be better than feeling his absence all the time like a wound in my body. Writing it will allow me to live with him and talk to him, even though he is no longer there. I knew a great many people in Paris in those years before and after the war, he said to me, some, like René Daumal, remarkable, others, like Jean-Paul Sartre and Mme Pierre Jean Jouve, frightful. I had friends among the clochards on the banks of the Seine and I had friends among the poets, I even had friends among the upper echelons of the Church and would frequently dine with industrialists and bankers. It always amazed me, he said, that the poets only knew other poets and the bankers other bankers. We must mingle with all and sundry, Massimo, he said, that is the only way to live. It was René Daumal who first suggested I go to India, who first drew my attention to the mystical traditions of India and Tibet. He was a very remarkable man. But he was not a friend in the way Henri was a friend. I have had three real friends in my life, he said. There was Daniel Bernstein, when I was young, with whom I went climbing in the Alps and then to West Africa and to Egypt. He died of TB in 1937, which saved him from witnessing the destruction of his entire family in the following years. There was Henri Michaux. And there was another, whom I have forgotten. I have of course had many close and valuable relationships with those who performed my music, with a very few composers, with Tucci, who was another remarkable man, and Fosco Maraini. And then there were the Nepalese guides, he said, men of few words and deep faith. Meeting them and being in their company day and night for several months was almost as important for me as seeing their extraordinary country and hearing their music. There is no music like it, Massimo, he said to me, experiencing their music made me realise with a renewed force what little weight sound has for composers in our Western tradition. Sound can be beautiful, it can be loud, it can be soft, it can be abrasive, but it lacks weight, Massimo, sound in our Western tradition lacks weight. Even Bach, he said, who loved a beautiful melody and whose mind could solve the most abstruse musical and mathematical conundrums, even he could not help but take sound itself too lightly. He could not help it, he said, he was a man of his time. Only in Gregorian chant, he said, can you hear something of the density in each sound that you will hear in a Nepalese Buddhist temple. But only in the solemn trumpets in a Nepalese temple, high up in the mountains, do you really come close to the core of sound, the molten lava that lies boiling away in every sound as it does in the recesses of the earth. No wonder the temple musicians must train for years, not just musically but spiritually, before they dare to let loose on those trumpets. If you are not prepared, not spiritually and mentally prepared, Massimo, he said, you will be annihilated. Annihilated. It is the same with everything. If you are not prepared you are annihilated. Not physically, of course, though physical annihilation is always a possibility, but spiritually and mentally. Most of those you see walking around you every day. Massimo, he said, have been annihilated in this way. They have been lobotomised. They have been castrated. By their parents. By their schooling, By their wives. By their friends. By their employers. That is the world we live in, Massimo, he said. We have to recognise it and then to rise above it. It is our duty to ourselves in the first place, but also to the world which brought us forth, as we are, ourselves and no one else. When we die, Massimo, he said, and St Peter asks us what we have to say for ourselves, all we need to say is that we have been ourselves and no one else. If you are truly yourself, he said, you will speak for everyone. If you are not yourself you cannot blow that trumpet, Massimo, he said. That trumpet will defeat you. That is why it requires years and years of training, to empty yourself out, to purify yourself, until you are ready to blow the trumpet. When I am gone, he said, if you chance to listen to my music, it will perhaps give you a hint of what I am talking about. My Foundation will keep my works in print and make sure they are performed and recorded, he said. It is Federico’s brainchild. I have no interest in it. In the old days, Massimo, he said, they built chantry chapels and paid for monks to say prayers there in perpetuity, so that their souls could be eased through the difficult journey of Purgatory. Nowadays they set up Foundations so as to keep their memories alive and their noses visible in the world. I do not want my memory to be kept alive, he said, but I am too tired to fight them. I know that my music will survive as long as music is performed, and that is enough for me. Or perhaps it will not. Who is to say, Massimo? What my trip to Nepal taught me, he said, is that we have to live in the present, difficult as that is. They closed the streets for the funeral, you should have seen the procession, sir, all those cardinals and judges and the rest of them and the Sicilian nobles he despised and all the people he knew, for a man who prided himself on his isolation from the world he had made friends with a great many people, maybe on his walks through Rome at night he befriended them, gypsies and black people and Indians and all sorts, I did not know there were so many different races living in Rome. It is among the outcasts and the reviled, he said, that you will most often find true spirituality. He despised the new Sicilian nobles. They are all bankers or ne’er-do-wells, he said. They think the world owes them a living just because they are born into a noble family. The best of them are simple, the result of too much inbreeding over the centuries, and the worst are crooks who should be behind bars, and many of them are. They are no better than the Mafia, he said, and often they actually are the Mafia. This country cannot be cleaned up, Massimo, he said. It is corrupt through and through and it does not have the will to change itself and to make a clean sweep of it. That does not stop me loving it, and especially this city of Rome, he said. I could have lived anywhere but I chose to live here in Rome, he said. For here we are truly at the centre of the earth, at the meeting-place of east and west, north and south. Do you know what they say about Naples? he said to me one day. We were driving out into the Campagna in the evening and not going anywhere in particular, as he liked to do sometimes to help him think about his music. They say, he said, that Naples is the only Third World city without a European quarter. Rome will never turn into that, he said. Naples and Rome are as different as chalk and cheese. Sometimes he sat beside me without talking for the whole drive. I don’t believe he was thinking about his music any more. Sometimes he was just dozing. The windows were shut and the air conditioning was on, it was too hot even at that time of day to open the windows. He did not bother to direct me, to tell me where he wanted to go. I kept to the quiet roads, the smaller roads, through villages and fields. Sometimes he made me stop and would get out to relieve himself or just to stand at the edge of a field and listen to the cicadas. They were singing before mankind ever came on the scene, he said, and they will go on singing long after we have all passed away. I sat in the car with the door open and sometimes he stood there for half an hour at a time, leaning on his stick and just looking across the fields. He stayed in Rome throughout the summer, August in Rome is the best month, Massimo, he said. The locals flee to the hills and the sea, the tourists avoid it. It is a city emptied of people, emptied of its traffic. I have always done my best work in the summer, he said, I have always found the summer conducive to good work. Sometimes he would ask me to get out of the car and walk a few steps with him. He would walk a little and then sit down at the edge of a wood or a field. He would hold out his hand and stick out a finger. Listen, Massimo, he would say. Listen to the sound the air makes as it comes into contact with my hand. Do you hear it, Massimo? he would say, and if I said no sometimes he would get angry and shout and tell me that I needed to have my ears cleaned, that they were full of Roman filth. So I usually said yes, that I could hear it, even when I couldn’t. What sound does it make, Massimo? he would say, and I would say: Like a wave, and that would please him. Yes, he would say, there are waves everywhere, not just in the sea, there are waves of sound and waves of light. The idea of the wave, he said to me once, as we were driving again, is the idea of life itself. That is what Heraclitus meant, he said, when he said that when I step into a river I do not step into the river and it is not me that steps into it. To write music that is and is not static, that is and is not in motion, that both sounds and is silent, that goes inwards and that goes backwards and that does not go anywhere at all, that is the idea, he said, that is what I have tried to do for the past thirty years. I did not wish to write music that was profound, he said. I did not wish to write music that was beautiful. I did not wish to write music that would make audiences clap and agents come rushing up to me to sign me up to go to this festival or that festival. I wanted to write music that was true. True to our earth. True to our planet. And if it is true it will be frightening. It does not have to be loud to be frightening, he said. When I used a double bass and the voice, that was frightening enough. People have told me that when they heard my