He was silent.
After a while I said: Go on.
— Yes sir, he said. How would you like me to go on?
— In any way you wish, I said.
— Yes sir, he said, but he did not go on.
— Did he often speak about his wife? I finally asked.
— Not often, he said, but sometimes. When I got to know him better, when he began to take me into his confidence.
— What did he say?
— He said she was the most beautiful woman he had ever met. Beauty is not to be despised, Massimo, he said. Though it is a gift like any other and has not been earned, it is nevertheless a gift, and as such should be celebrated. He had met many beautiful women, he said, and he had had affairs with quite a few of them. It is always a disaster, he said, but it should never be a cause for regret. Beauty is a gift, he said, but it is also a curse. It is a curse on the person who is the beneficiary of that gift and it is a curse on whoever comes into contact with them. Because the person who is beautiful does not know where that gift came from and cannot relate it to herself. So she sees herself in the mirror and she falls in love with herself, but she does not know who this person is that she has fallen in love with and she spends her life trying to find out. She hopes that the men who come under her spell will be able to reveal this to her, and when she finds that they are as much in the dark about it as she is herself she grows angry and disappointed and looks for another man to explain it to her. But the men are attracted to her beauty precisely because it is inexplicable and beyond reason. They are like moths around a flame and sooner or later they fly too near and then the flame catches them and they shrivel up and die. That is why beautiful women are always tense, he said, and why they are always capricious and changeable. They do not know their own minds, he said. They try to live with this beauty and they cannot. They cannot live with it and they cannot ignore it, so they live in perpetual puzzlement and frustration, making little darts into the world in the hope of catching it unawares, but finding only that they have been disappointed once again. The first beautiful woman I fell in love with, Massimo, he said, was my cousin Lara. I watched her little breasts bud and then grow and I would willingly have given my life to see her naked and to pass my hand over them. But I did not need to give my life, he said, she was only too willing to show them to me and to let me pass my hand over them for nothing. I thought I had reached heaven, he said, but she soon found that my caresses did not give her what she thought she was looking for and the next time I touched her she slapped my face. I should have learned my lesson then, Massimo, he said, but it was to take me another thirty years and many more such pains and disappointments before I finally did so.
He was silent.
— Go on, I said.
— Yes sir, he said.
Since he still seemed disinclined to do so I asked him: Did he often speak to you like that?
— Like what, sir?
— About such… intimate things.
— Not at the beginning, of course, he said, but later on, when he understood how reliable I was and how much I admired and respected him. Then he would talk to me about everything under the sun. Especially when we went out driving into the Campagna. Even about music, though he knew I was quite ignorant on the subject.
— What did he say?
— About what?
— About music.
— He talked. You know how it is, sir.
— But I am asking you.
— About music?
— Yes.
— Each sound is a sphere, he said. It is a sphere, Massimo, and every sphere has a centre. The centre of the sound is the heart of the sound. One must always strive to reach the heart of the sound, he said. If one can reach that one is a true musician. Otherwise one is an artisan. To be an artisan is perfectly respectable, Massimo, he said. Even to be an artisan of music is respectable. But it must not be confused with being a musician. A musician is not an artisan, he said. He is an intermediary. That is a completely different thing. It entails a completely different way of understanding music and a completely different way of understanding ourselves. A completely different way. If you do not know the difference between a craft and a calling, he said, you do not know what it means to be an artist. Today, he said, very few people know what it means to be an artist. Very few artists know what it means to be an artist. They want to have their photographs taken in order to show off their noses. But we all have noses, he said, and few people are artists. True artists. They want to show off their profiles and tell the newspapers how wonderful they are. But they are not wonderful, they are only human beings and they are worse than most human beings because they are prostituting their gifts. That’s what he said. Prostituting their gifts. If they had any gifts in the first place, he said. Most of the time they have no gifts at all but only the desire to show off their profiles and to talk to the newspapers. The art is incidental, he said, what is important is to show off your nose and talk to the papers. To tell them what your ideas are and why you are so special. That is what the newspapers want, he said. They want to take photographs of their profiles and to hear how special they are. They want to hear about how much you feel and what happened to you in your childhood. They want to hear about your political views and your views of the Church. If your nose is not the right sort of nose you can forget the newspapers, he said. You can forget the festivals. You can forget the commissions. You can forget the recording companies. I have never wanted to have my nose photographed, he said. My nose is handsomer and more distinguished than most of theirs, he said. It is a Sicilian nose. An aristocratic nose. But it is not for the papers, he said. It is not for the publicity brochures. It is solely for me, so as to enable me to breathe and to work. A musician is primarily a worker, he said. He is not a clothes horse. He is not a politician. He is not a philosopher. He is not a lover. He is a worker. I have hired you, Massimo, he said, to get my travel tickets when I want to go somewhere or to drive me out into the countryside when I need to escape the town. But above all I need someone to keep the newspaper reporters and the photographers from my door. You cannot imagine, he said, the degree of laziness, venality and mendacity of these journalists. Not so long ago, he said, when I attended the premiere of a work of mine in Paris, all the journalists could say was: ‘Mr Pavone does not do things by halves, not only does he write an entire work on one note, but he sleeps not in a bed but in a cupboard.’ Can you imagine, Massimo? he said, not in a bed but in a cupboard. What had happened, he said, was this. He was installed in one of the best hotels in Paris, the Raphael. Unfortunately his room was situated not far from the lifts, so that the first night he hardly got any sleep at all. The next day, after he had complained, they gave him another room. Not just another room, he said to me, but the best room, nothing less than the royal suite. The bed alone, he said, was the size of most hotel rooms, and had a pair of steps next to it so as to help you climb into it. After a long day of rehearsals and seeing friends, he retired to his room, utterly exhausted. But no sooner had I climbed the steps and crawled into the bed and put out the light, he said, than I became aware of a humming noise filling the room. At first I tried to ignore it, he said, but it grew so insistent that I had no option but to turn on the light and descend the steps and see if I could locate the source of the noise. And indeed I did, he said, it emanated from a pipe which was located about a metre beneath my window. I shut the window tight, he said, and drew the curtains, and tried to go to sleep, but though for a while I thought I had managed to shut out the noise it was soon filling my ears again. I got up and went into the bathroom, where I found some cotton wool, which I stuffed into my ears. Once again I climbed the steps and snuggled down deep under my eiderdown, hoping that at last I would be able to sleep. But even there the noise found me out, and soon I was wide awake, my heart pounding dangerously in my chest. I determined not to panic, however, he said, so I put on the light again and surveyed my surroundings. Against the wall opposite the window stood an enormous cupboard, the kind used for storing bedsheets and blankets. I opened it and indeed it was full of sheets and blankets. I took some of them out and lay down on the rest. I found I could stretch out, so I returned to the bed, collected my pillow and eiderdown and settled down in the cupboard for the night. However, though with the cupboard door shut I could no longer hear the offending hum, it was also unbearably stuffy, so that I had to keep opening the door to let in some air and then closing it again to shut out the noise. You can imagine what kind of a night I had, he said. However, buoyed up by the thought of the performance, the next day I leapt out of my improvised bed and hurried down to breakfast. The chambermaid must have come in, discovered my pillow and eiderdown in the cupboard, guessed that my bed had not been slept in and alerted the papers. The only thing they could find to say about me was that I wrote music on one note and slept in cupboards. These people are monsters, Massimo, he said. They must be kept out at all costs. That is why I hired someone like you, he said, someone who has no trouble lifting the rear ends of cars to look underneath them, to inspect their rear parts, so to speak. What a musician needs is peace and time, he said, peace and time, inner peace and inner time. He needs quiet and he needs to be alone. If someone does not like to be alone he should not become an artist, he said. Today writing music is incidental to the life of a musician. Writing music is a necessary evil, undertaken solely in order to generate the photographs and the interviews and the dinners and the invitations to festivals. Every musician will tell you, Massimo, he said, that he lives only for his music, but that is not true. If he believes that, he is only fooling himself. He lives to get his nose in the newspapers and to be applauded and worshipped wherever he goes. That is worse than cleaning the gutters, he said. A real musician, Massimo, he said, should be able to clean the gutters, he should be able to fight in the trenches, he should be able to work in an office or a hospital, because he has made a space for solitude inside himself where the music will be written.