Gabriel Josipovici
Infinity: The Story of a Moment
To Jonathan Harvey
Acknowledgement
An extract from this work was first published in issue 34 of The Reader (Summer 2009).
Infinity: The Story of a Moment
I asked him first how he had come to work for Mr Pavone.
— I heard he was looking for someone, he said.
— How did you hear?
— One hears.
— You had been in service before?
— To tell you the truth, sir, I was out of work. I had been working for my brother-in-law, but that had come to an end. I presented –
— Why had it come to an end?
— These things happen, sir.
— Of course. What were you doing for your brother-in-law?
— You asked me to talk about Mr Pavone.
— Of course. Please go on.
— I presented myself to Mr Pavone but he told me the post had already been filled. He took my number, though, and several days later he called me and asked me to come and see him.
— It was then he offered you the job?
— Yes, sir.
— What was your impression of Mr Pavone?
— In what sense?
— How did he strike you?
— Strike me?
— When you first met him, yes.
— As you know, sir, Mr Pavone was not your ordinary sort of gentleman. First of all he was Sicilian, you understand? And Sicilian gentlemen, Sicilian nobles, for Mr Pavone was a nobleman, the descendent of a very noble family, you know, sir, Sicilian nobles are a breed apart. And then he was an artist. You know that artists are called by God, and, if I may say so, are His servants as much as the Pope himself. But, above all, he was himself.
— What do you mean, he was himself?
— He was himself. That is all I can say.
— But isn’t each of us himself?
— No sir, if I may say so, sir. Not in that way.
— In what way?
— He was a singular gentleman.
— In what way was he singular?
— In every way.
— Can you give me an example?
— In every way. I had never met and I have never met in my whole life, and, as you can see, sir, I am no longer young, a gentleman like him.
— Was it his appearance that was unusual or something else?
— Not unusual, sir. No. Not unusual.
— But you said singular.
— Singular, sir, but not unusual.
— Explain what you mean by that.
— You would have had to know him, sir, to understand.
— But I did not know him. That is why I am asking you.
— Yes, sir.
— Go on.
— How do you wish me to go on?
— Describe him.
— He was very tall and thin, at least he gave the impression of being very tall, though to tell the truth he was not above medium height, perhaps even a little less, with an aquiline nose and, in those days, when I first went to work for him, black hair, so black it was almost blue, if you know what I mean, sir. The kind of black that could, in certain lights, be blue.
— Go on.
— All of us Italians have black hair, except of course for those who are blond, but Sicilians have blacker hair than most, if you know what I mean, sir.
— Yes, I understand. Now go on.
— Yes, sir. He always dressed very expensively. He had over a hundred suits in his cupboards, it was up to me to see that the moths did not get at them and that they remained clean and fresh, for he might at any moment of the day or night, for he sometimes worked through the night and sometimes he would spend the night walking through the streets of Rome, decide to put one of them on. It was up to me to see that they were always ready to be put on, so that if he had worn one once I would have to make sure it was cleaned and pressed before it was put back in the cupboard, in case he wanted to take it out again soon. And it was the same with his shirts. He told me that when he was living in Vienna in the 1930s, when he was studying composition with Walter Scheler, he always sent his suits to London to be dry-cleaned, and his shirts too, to be washed and pressed. Only London, he said, has the requisite standards of cleaning and pressing, only the English upper classes know what it means to have a properly pressed suit of clothes. Of course, he said, that is no longer the case. Nowadays the English upper classes are on the run, he said, they are being hunted down one by one. In England the hunting of wild animals is being abolished little by little, he said, but the hunting of the English aristocracy is being pursued with ever greater ferocity. The English were once the most civilised people in the world, he said, but they are now among the most barbaric. The French are the only civilised people left, he said. They are resisting the barbarism of America, the barbarism of the New World, but they will not be able to resist for ever. Soon nobody will know what the word civilisation means. We must turn away from the world, as the Hindu sages have long known, he said, because the world will never be able to live up to our idea of what the world should be. We must practise every day, he said, every day, Massimo, in order to eradicate our desire to make the world a better and more civilised place, we must learn to accept that it will only ever be a worse and less civilised place. Soon, he said, even the memory of past civilisation will have disappeared, not in your lifetime, Massimo, he said, and certainly not in mine, but very soon, very soon. We have reached the end of the Neolithic period, Massimo, he said. It is only now that we have reached the end of the Neolithic. Your children, Massimo, he said, will no longer know that milk is produced by cows, they will not even know what a cow is. They will only know what a self-service supermarket is, which is the place where they can buy milk. So we are entering a new era, he said. After the end of the Neolithic we have come to the era of the Synthetic. No one will know what a stone is any more, no one will know what a tree is, no one will know what a flower is, no one will know the mathematical symbol for infinity. But why should we care? My task is to write music and your task is to make sure that my shirts and my suits are cleaned and ironed according to the highest standards that still prevail. I do not say according to the highest standards, he said, but according to the highest standards that still prevail. Do you see the difference, Massimo? he asked me. Because if you do not see the difference there is no point in my employing you.
— And did you see the difference?
— I told him that although I did not see the difference I was sure that in time I would come to do so.
— And was he pleased with your answer?
— That is all I can expect, he said. That is all I can expect. You must understand, sir, that although Mr Pavone could appear fierce and even overbearing, he had a warm heart. I understood that at once. And that is why I answered him as I did. I do not really see the difference, I said, but I am sure that if I remain in your employment I will in time come to learn the difference. That is all I can expect you to answer, he said, and he showed me the cupboards with his clothes and with his shoes and with his ties, he had thousands of ties, tens of thousands perhaps. Annamaria will tell you where you are to take them to be cleaned, he said. Once upon a time I sent them to England to be cleaned, but now what would be the use? They would be cleaned there as badly as anywhere else, so there is no point in sending them abroad. It is just as simple to send them out here in Rome, he said, where you can keep an eye on them and make sure they are done as well as can be expected. As far as shoes are concerned, he said, we Italians have always been the best. The cobblers of Florence are unsurpassed in the design and the making of sh
oes. They have for generations been making shoes for the wealthy and the discerning, he said. That is a fact. No one disputes that. He had many hundreds of pairs of shoes, he showed them all to me. You are in charge of my shoes, Massimo, as well as the rest of my clothes, he said. You must make sure they are clean at all times and that the soles are replaced as soon as they show any signs of wear and tear. Nobody can work in dirty clothes, he said, or with shoes full of holes or with the heels of one shoe worn away more than the heels of the other. Think of what this would do to the work, he said. If you got up to take a drink of water or to fulfil a need of nature and one heel was lower than the other, causing you to limp as you crossed the room, think what this would do to the music. Think how, when you returned to your desk, that limp would be lodged in your body and would emerge in the music you were writing. We do not want music that limps, he said. We want music that stands foursquare on the ground. We want music that dances, not music that creeps and music that hobbles. We had enough of that sort of music with Wagner and with Mahler and with all those other limping Germans with their obsession with mountains and lakes. Do you know why they were obsessed with mountains and lakes, Massimo? he said. It was because their souls were tubercular. Even if their legs were pure their souls were contaminated, he said. Those of us who are free from the German disease, he said, find it perfectly tolerable, indeed, more than tolerable, to live in the midst of a city like Rome and not to see a mountain or a lake from one year’s end to the other. Only those whose souls are tubercular need to prove themselves by spending their days in the mountains, need to write about flowers and streams and the rest of it until all the flowers and streams and mountains in the world rise up and shout: Enough! Leave us alone! German composers have been so busy airing their souls, he said, that they forgot to air their clothes. I am not talking about the clothes of a Beethoven, he said, which he did not change from one week’s end to the other and in which he would often sleep, nor am I thinking about the clothes of poor madmen like Schumann and Wolf, who vomited over their clothes and shat in their pants, I am talking about the stinking clothes of respectable bourgeois like Brahms and Strauss, undershirts and shirts and waistcoats and jackets and coats and ties and scarves and gloves and hats, all musty, all mouldy, with the musty mouldy smell of the German middle classes, the smell of sweat and scent and tobacco and uprightness and gloom. It is a rule of art, Massimo, he said, that if the work is going to be clean then the clothes must be clean. That was the trouble with my wife, he said. She was a beautiful woman but she was a slut. She washed her body and she bought expensive clothes but she did not essentially care for her clothes. If they were dirty she bought others, it was an excuse to buy others. She rubbed her body with unguents and washed herself in milk when that was the fashion, but essentially she was dirty. Do you know the difference, Massimo, he said, between the essential and the contingent? Because if you do not there is no point in your coming to work for me. It is all a question of refinement, he said. The Sicilian aristocracy is essentially refined, he said, but the bulk of the European aristocracy has remained stuck to its plebeian roots. My wife could trace her family back to Richard Lionheart, he said, but it was a family that had its roots in the pigsties of central Europe and that had inherited neither the qualities of the bourgeoisie nor those of the real aristocracy. Only in the East, he said, are people naturally gracious, naturally graceful, naturally clean. In the East, he said, a man will scoop up the rice in his bowl with his hand and that hand will be cleaner than if he had eaten with a knife and fork and wiped his hands on a napkin made of the finest linen. A man will crouch down and defecate in a corner of a public square, he said, and wipe his bottom with his hand and his hand will be cleaner than if he sat on a lavatory in his house with the door locked and a nice bouquet on the shelf to fill the cubicle with the scent of flowers and wiped his bottom with soft toilet paper and washed his hands afterwards with warm water and scented soap. Cleanliness is a habit of mind, Massimo, he said to me, it is a product of a way of life. It cannot be imposed piecemeal as we do in the West, where we do everything piecemeal. We have hot and cold water coming out of taps to wash with and gas and electric stoves to cook with and banks to keep our money in and lawyers to deal with our legal problems and accountants to deal with our tax problems and we have shops of every kind to satisfy every possible whim and every possible desire, but we have no centre and no core, everything remains separate from everything else and when we have spent a lifetime satisfying this whim and that whim, this desire and that desire and buying this that and the other we die as empty and stupid as the day we were born, if not emptier and stupider, but the desires live on as though they had a life of their own, he said, and so of course do the outlets to satisfy or rather to partially satisfy these desires, they have settled on the West and are strangling it to death. Do you know what a roller is, Massimo? he asked me. A roller is someone who goes on a pilgrimage, often of many thousands of miles, through swamp and desert, through cities and over mountains, and he does not run and he does not walk but he rolls. I met many such rollers when I was in India and Nepal, he said. It did not matter to them how long it took to reach their destination. It did not matter if it took them a year or five years or a whole lifetime. They took the cloth from around their shoulders and held it in their hands stretched out above their heads as they rolled to stop themselves falling into ditches. It gave them equilibrium. Equilibrium, Massimo, he said, is the essential condition for rolling. Without equilibrium you keep ending up in the ditch and you never advance at all. But once you find equilibrium, he said, you can roll for many miles every day. Try it, Massimo, he said. Try it in your spare time. You will discover that it is almost impossible to roll in a straight line. That is the reason for the cloth, Massimo, he said, by holding a cloth above your head stretched between both hands you can manage to roll in a straight line, or in an almost straight line, though the bruising to your elbows and upper arms has to be seen to be believed. Sometimes the bruising and the cuts to the arms and to the legs and to the body as well is so bad and the wounds become so infected that they have to stop, sometimes for months on end, in order to recover. But they always go on, Massimo, he said, they always go on. Usually, he said they have a man walking ahead of them, whose task is to sweep the ground ahead of them to remove the roughest stones and also to remove the ants and worms and other insects, for it would never do to trample on an ant or a worm while rolling. An ant or a worm, he said, are as worthy of life as any human being. The essential thing to understand is that what gives your life its special quality, without which you are nothing, is the recognition that you are worth as much or as little as any ant or worm. Once you have understood that, Massimo, he said, all the rest follows. To roll for thousands of miles through swamp and desert, through cities and over mountains and to trample and crush to death spiders and ants and beetles and gnats on the way is worse than not to go on pilgrimage at all, so a man goes before you, whether it is in swamp or desert, in the city or over the mountain, and he sweeps the ground clear of any living thing and you roll behind him, minute after minute and hour after hour and day after day and month after month and year after year, and in the end you reach your goal, you reach the goal of your pilgrimage, which is the shrine of the holy man. I met many such rollers in my brief stay in India and Nepal, he said, and I have to say they made a vivid impression on me.
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.
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