Now, it is saying, and eternity. If you can hear the now, he said, you can hear eternity. That is what I have tried to do, he said, to write a music of now which would be a music of eternity. Then he was silent for a long time. Then he said: Take me home, Massimo. I wanted to hear the cicadas for one last time and now I have heard them. I gathered him up in his blanket. Though he gave the impression in his prime of being such a tall man, he was in actual fact of average height, and at the end he weighed very little. He did not move and he did not speak. All the way home I sensed that the end was near but I did not want to think about it. Annamaria had made a soup but he would not touch it. Take me to bed, he said to me. Take me to bed and put out the light and then leave me. When I laid him down he said to me: When I was a child the kitchen girls put me to bed. I felt at ease with them as I never felt with my mother. I am telling you so much that you do not understand, Massimo, he said. But it does me good to talk. Sometimes I did not catch what he was saying, he spoke very low, and though I bent towards him I could not always distinguish the words. Also, since his stroke, he sometimes spoke in a blurred way. And sometimes the breath in his throat was louder than any of the words he spoke, if you know what I mean, sir. Sometimes he became angry if I or someone else did not understand him, he would scream and talk faster and that made it even more difficult. Then he would bang the door of his room and bang the windows and we would hear him walking up and down, up and down. The Arditti Quartet were working with him on a recording of all his quartets and sometimes he shouted at them because they did not understand what he said. It was difficult for everybody, but most of all for Mr Pavone himself, of course. Then there were times when he spoke quite clearly. Low but quite clearly. He would ask me to drive him out just as in the old days and often he would talk. I had the misfortune to be born in the early years of the century, Massimo, he said, so that I can consider myself a child of the century. You were born in the middle of the century, so that you will have the chance to live in two centuries, but I am stuck with this one. Has there ever been a worse century, Massimo? he said. One in which more planned and premeditated murder and destruction has ever taken place? Human beings are always keen to kill and destroy each other, he said, but they have never had the means to do so in such numbers until this century. And yet in the midst of all this carnage I have led a charmed life, he said. I have done what I wanted to do and also what I had to do. I have lived daily and even hourly with my beloved music, he said, and I have explored its secrets and been touched by its beneficent power. I sometimes ask myself what would have happened to me if I had not gone to Nepal when I did, he said, but then I have realised that everything in my life had led up to that decision. I went when I did because that was when I was ready to go. I did not go before because before I was not ready. It is as simple as that, Massimo, he said. After my trip, he said, everything fell into place. Instead of fighting the darkness I settled down in the darkness. Instead of trying to rise above the body, as that idiot Scheler had tried to get me to do, I settled down inside my body. When I came back from Nepal and shut myself up in the house here in Rome, he said, I knew that I had ceased to play. I knew that I did not have a long time and that there was so much to do, so much to accomplish. I have been blessed, Massimo, he said, blessed. I found a way to stop playing at being an artist, I found a way to return to myself and to leave myself behind in my work. Mr Salvatore called me after the funeral and said to me: The Count has made provision for you in his will, Massimo, but if you would like to work for the Foundation, I am sure we would be able to find a niche for you. I told him I was not interested in working for the Foundation. I understand, Massimo, he said. You would like to spread your wings. I told him that, having worked for Mr Pavone for all these years I could not bear to stay in his house when he was no longer there. It is his music we have to think about, he said. It is his music he would have wanted us to think about, not himself. I told him I appreciated that but I was not someone who understood about music. I had been hired to look after Mr Pavone and his clothes and to drive him. You know how it is, sir. If you should ever change your mind, Massimo, he said, just give me a ring. We could use someone like you, Massimo, he said. The Count always spoke highly of you, he said. Despite that early incident concerning Miss Mauss, he always spoke highly of you. I asked him what he meant but he only said, you know what I am talking about, Massimo. Nothing was ever proved, I said. You are quite right, Massimo, he said. Besides, this is not the moment to rake over these old embers. So I have not returned, sir, I took my things and left the house for ever. That is what Mr Pavone would have wanted. When I am gone you will still have much of your life left to live, Massimo, he said. I shall make sure you are well provided for, but after that you are on your own. When Arabella left for the last time, at the end of the war, he said, I sat in my room for twenty-four hours and I did not move. Then I tried to live in Paris again. I could not bear to remain in Switzerland or to return to Rome. I wanted a change. And I had many friends in Paris. First I stayed with Henri Michaux and with Ronaldo, his cat. His wife had died after a long illness and he was inconsolable, so he was not a very good companion, but Ronaldo was a great comfort to me. A great comfort. He was a character. Much more intelligent than his master. Not as good a poet and painter, but much more intelligent. I wonder how different my life would have been had I lived with a cat, he said. Ronaldo had six toes on three of his four feet and seven on one, and he spent a great deal of time licking and cleaning them. The flat was filthy, Michaux refused to have anyone come in to clean it, but Ronaldo was a little island of cleanliness in an ocean of filth. It was only Ronaldo’s presence that kept me from moving, he said. In the end I did move, and though I called on Henri almost every day and spent many hours with Ronaldo, it was no longer the same thing. If only human beings were as self-contained and undemanding as cats, Massimo, he said, marriage would be a much more successful institution. But human beings are not self-contained. Women in particular need constant reassurance. I lived for several months with a beautiful young woman in Monte Carlo, he said. She was a gifted singer but she had no self-confidence. She wanted to be told all the time that she was a great singer, and also that she was a beautiful woman. How many beautiful women have been great singers or great painters or great writers, Massimo? When you are beautiful you do not need to make the effort, everything is given to you, yet without great effort you cannot become great at anything. But when we are young we want everything. We want to be beautiful and a great singer, beautiful and a great artist. It is folly, Massimo, folly. Finally she said to me: You do not appreciate my art, Tancredo. You have no real desire for me. You do not really love me. I am a token, she said. A beautiful bird you are happy to have trapped. Let me tell you, Tancredo, she said, I am stifling here. Stifling. It was a relief when she was gone, Massimo, he said. A great relief. Whereas Ronaldo rolled over on his back and purred when I stroked his stomach, and when he had had enough he simply got to his feet and moved away. We have to return to the simplicity and the immediacy of animals, Massimo, he said. Our art has to be able to stand up and walk away if it wants to. Or lie down and allow its stomach to be tickled. It was perhaps Ronaldo who prepared me for Nepal, he said. I did not realise it at the time, but afterwards I understood. I understood too that he had come into my life at a particular moment and that it would never do to try and replicate the experience here in Rome. Everything is changing, Massimo, he said. The Neolithic age is coming to an end. What we called civilisation is coming to an end. Composers go on composing and posing for photographers in their studies and appearing at festivals, but it is all coming to an end. Everybody thinks that with a few bombs they can manage to change the world, but what they don’t realise is that the world is changing, whether they like it or not. Soon Communism and also capitalism will collapse, Massimo, they will implode because of the contradictions in the system. I am fortunate that I was able to work as I did, he said, between the end of the world wars and the end of civilisation. It has been a period of calm, Massimo, he said. A period of relative calm. At least for us in the West. The people of Tibet have been hounded out of their country and brutalised, he said, and the pygmies of central Africa have been more or less wiped out. Age-old cultures are disappearing every day. Whole languages are disappearing every day. They now have exhibitions of the art of Benin in the most prestigious museums in the world, in New York, in London, in Paris, but the art of the Ife and of Benin is disappearing. We were the fortunate ones, Massimo, he said to me. We were able to go to Benin and also to Nepal and to see the living art and the living culture, but of course the fact that we could go was also the sign that these cultures were coming to an end. Africa is full of anthropological museums, he said, and that is the sign that Africa has died. A living culture has turned into a dead culture. This happened in Europe in the Renaisssance, he said. A few monks go on singing the Gregorian chant, he said, but the tradition is no longer alive. It is up to each of us to find that which is alive in each tradition, and to breathe new life into it. I have no illusions such as Schoenberg had that I have in any way advanced the cause of music. But that is not the point. That was never the point, Massimo, he said. When you are in touch with sound, with the innermost heart of sound, then such notions as art and music, advance and decline, past and future, good and bad, beautiful and ugly cease to make sense. It becomes a question of being open, Massimo, of listening, and of daring. I learned to fear nothing on my parents’ estate all those years ago, Massimo, he said. I learned it climbing trees and making love to the servant girls deep down inside their giant beds in which five of them slept together. I learned it when I was allowed to attack the pianos that filled the house as they needed to be attacked, head on, banging the lid, running my hands through their insides and listening to the noise it made, just as I pushed my hands into all the available orifices of the serving girls and listened, deep down under the blankets, to their sighs and their moans. There must be no fear, Massimo, he said, no fear in the face of life and no fear in the face of death. We sat in the car looking out at the landscape, it was cold, he did not want to get out, often I could not hear what he said, but he went on talking, paying no attention to me, looking out, the sky was grey, there was even snow in the air, when he stopped I did not know if he wanted me to drive on, I stayed as still as I could, he was so used to me it was as if he was alone, I could make out a few words, Monte Carlo, Ronaldo, Jouve, Kang Shi, something like that, once after he had been silent for a long time I asked him if he wanted me to drive him home, I was afraid he would catch cold, with the engine off the car was like a fridge, he didn’t reply, his lips were blue, finally I started the car and he said nothing and while I drove he said nothing. I was thinking of our other drives, over the years, mainly in the summer and spring, I was thinking of how many more hours I had spent with him in the car than in any other situation, I would never have imagined it when I first went to work for him but that is how it turned out, we never know what will happen, we can never predict. I thought, when he is gone I will remember sitting in the car with him better than I remember anything else and I thought I would often dream after he was gone that he was sitting beside me in the big car and I was driving him through the Roman Campagna and if I didn’t dream, I thought, then I would certainly think it, especially every time I drove a car, it would certainly be there in my head the way things stay in your head and then I thought, I suppose when I too am gone it will not be in anybody’s head, but that will not matter, as Mr Pavone always said, it is the music that matters, Massimo, not you and me but the music, on the other hand you have to ask yourself where the music would have been if Mr Pavone had not been there to compose it, you have to ask yourself that, yes, sir, you have to ask yourself that.