He was silent.
I waited.
After a while I said: Go on.
— Yes, sir, he said.
— Did Mr Pavone say anything more about silence? I asked him.
— I can’t remember, he said.
— All right, I said. Tell me: were the quartet already there when you arrived?
— Yes, sir.
— And they never talked to you?
— Sometimes Mr Silone would stop on the stairs and we would have a chat.
— What about?
— Many things.
— Like what?
— Many things.
— What sort of things?
— Often about football. We were both supporters of Lazio.
— I see. And why did they eventually leave?
— I think Mr Pavone no longer required them.
— It is not that they quarrelled?
— I could not say, sir. He said to me: One day there will be a quartet that will be able to play my music for string quartet. By then I will be long dead. Je serai mort depuis longtemps, Massimo, he said.
— He often spoke to you in French?
— When there was something he had been thinking about for a long time he often said it in Italian first and then in French. French was once the language of the aristocracy, he said to me. From Moscow to Paris the aristocracy of Europe spoke in French. It was the lingua franca, Massimo, he said to me. Now that there is no longer an aristocracy everybody speaks in English, the language of money. English is not a language, Massimo, he said to me, it is a hybrid. It is made up of a bit of Latin and a bit of Celtic and a bit of German and a little bit of Norse and some French and a little bit of Hindi and Arabic and Dutch and much else besides.
— Who else occupied the flat in your time with Mr Pavone?
— After the quartet, a cellist. A lady. Very correct.
— Did Mr Pavone entertain at all?
— No. He said to me: When I was young, Massimo, I thought music and social life could mix, but after a certain age you realise that music is music and life is life.
— So he lived a solitary existence?
— Occasionally he would go out to dinner with friends. I would order a taxi for him and give the driver the address. Mr Pavone had many friends among the aristocracy and in the film and theatre world. I would rather speak to a landowner who wishes to talk only about his pigs and his olive trees, or even to a self-satisfied and pompous actor, than to a musician, he said. I do not need musicians, Massimo, he said to me. I have quite enough of them in my bathroom when I look in the mirror. When I go out, he said, it is to escape from music and musicians, not to subject myself to their vanity and paranoia. The vanity and paranoia of musicians, Massimo, he said to me, is beyond belief. Each of them thinks he is the centre of the universe, he said, each of them thinks that if only the world was prepared to listen to his music all its problems would be solved. Each of them thinks his colleagues and rivals are worth nothing and less than nothing and take up space which he would better fill himself. My wife, he said, thought of herself as a generous person, she thought of herself as an understanding person, but she was neither generous nor understanding. The only person she understood was herself and her needs.
— He was in love with his wife?
— I do not know. He said to me once: When you are young you meet a beautiful woman and want to sleep with her and so you persuade yourself that you are in love with her. But you are not in love with her. You are in love with yourself and your possibilities. And she is in love with herself and her own possibilities. The two are quite different, Massimo, he said. If my wife had not left me in 1945, he said, I would still be married to her today and I would have done absolutely nothing with my life. When she left me, he said, I wanted to kill myself. I had lost my way in music and I had lost my way in love. When she left me I had to start all over again from the beginning.
— And what became of her?
— He did not say. He only talked of her leaving him. When a woman you love leaves you, Massimo, he said, it is as though the world itself had left you. For a while you feel as though there is no world left for you to live in. When she left me, he said, I couldn’t go into my study, I couldn’t look at my scores. I was afraid to go out and I was afraid to stay at home. Afraid of what? Of my thoughts. Of the intensity of my feelings for her. Everything I did and everything I had done disgusted me. If I had not gone to Nepal in 1949 I would have been dead within a year, he said. Instead, I was reborn.
— He said that? Instead, I was reborn?
— I think so, yes.
— You cannot remember exactly?
— Yes. He said that.
— What did he say about that time?
— He said he was afraid to go out.
— Yes. You told me that.
— Yes, sir.
— How did they meet?
— It was when he was in England, as a young man, at the Court of St James, he said.
— What is the Court of St James?
— I do not know, sir.
— All right. Go on.
— When I had had enough of Monte Carlo, he said, I decided to go to England, to spend a little time in London, he said. I had an introduction to the English composer Lord Berners, he said, and through him I met the cream of the English aristocracy.
— What did he mean, the cream of the English aristocracy?
— I do not know.
— All right. Go on.
— I met the cream of the English aristocracy, he said. You must understand, Massimo, he said, that the European aristocracy is all interrelated, but that a German aristocrat is very different from a French aristocrat and a French aristocrat is very different from an English aristocrat. The French aristocracy was largely destroyed by the French Revolution, he said, and in its place a new aristocracy was created which is not an aristocracy at all but a jumped-up bourgeoisie which gives itself airs. Lord Berners, he said, could trace his family back to the Norman Conquest. He was a man after my own heart. He was a man who did not give a fig for what other people thought. It is a pity, he said, that he was not a serious composer, but then the English have never been serious about anything. That is their charm but also their weakness. There is only one thing the English care about, and that is money, he said. But not the aristocracy. Since they have money they are not interested in it. Lord Berners was an accomplished comic writer, he said, a better writer than Ronald Firbank, in my view, but as a composer he was a lightweight. The English have not had a major composer since Purcell, he said, and to think they once led the way in the art of composition. To think that they once produced the likes of Dunstable and Byrd and Tallis, to say nothing of Dowland and of the anonymous composers of the Eton Choirbook and the Old Hall Manuscript. They have been ruined by the Industrial Revolution, he said, and by the spirit of Protestantism. Also by the Germanic cast of their minds. They have an indigestible cake, he said, called a lardy cake, and their leading modern composers, so-called, Sir Edward Elgar and Sir Ralph Vaughan Williams, are the musical equivalents of this cake. Even when you get a refined musician like Benjamin Britten, he said, he cannot escape the terrible English sentimentality when he composes, though that is blessedly absent when he plays the piano, which he does to very good effect. He is not a gorilla of the piano, but he is, let us say, a gazelle of the piano, and that is no mean thing.