Infinity: The Story of a Moment

by Gabriel Josipovici

  — No, he said.

  — If you are tired we can take a break.

  — No, I am not tired, he said.

  — Then why do you not go on?

  — I am remembering Mr Pavone, he said.

  — Remembering what about him?

  — Just remembering him.

  I waited a while. Then I asked him again: Shall we take a break?

  — No, he said. I waited.

  — In a minute I will go on, he said. I waited again. Then I said: How did he meet Mr Bernstein?

  — He met him in Monte Carlo, he said. The four years he spent there, Mr Pavone told me, from the ages of sixteen to twenty, were among the happiest of his life. I was young, he said. I was handsome. I was rich. I was talented and I was carefree. I spent my days playing tennis and sailing and swimming, and my nights dancing with beautiful women. What more can one ask for at that age? I was as happy as I would ever be, but at the same time I already understood that happiness is not enough. The human being who no longer needs to spend his days hunting for food, he said, or to spend his days earning enough to pay for the food he needs, wants something more in his life than happiness. Or perhaps it was me, he said, for my cousin Tarquinio did not seem to be driven by the same need. Tarquinio believed that there was no reason why the life he was living in Monte Carlo should not last for ever. In Rome, he said to me, that idiot Mussolini is trying to whip the Italian people into hysteria, but here in Monte Carlo we can ignore him and his rallies, we can live as God meant us to live. By this he meant eating as much as he could and sleeping with as many beautiful women as he could, without taking any thought for the fact that these two things do not run in parallel lines and that while a well-fed youth might appeal to women, especially if he has a lot of money, an obese middle-aged man, even if wealthy, would appeal only to the kind of woman he would not really want to be with. As for me, he said, there was never any danger that I would grow obese, partly because neither of my parents is obese, and partly because I danced so much and played so much tennis and went for such long hikes in the Alps that I was unlikely to put on any weight, no matter how much I ate, and I have never been a big eater. Writing music and sleeping with beautiful women and, when I was young, dancing and playing tennis, those were the things I was passionate about, not eating or sleeping. I have never needed much food or much sleep, he said, which is a blessing, because some of my best musical ideas have come at night when walking through the streets of Rome. Cities, he said, should be walked through at night, that is when you become aware of the soul of a city, and Rome is the quintessential city. The conversations you have in a city at night, with passing strangers and the people you meet in all-night bars far surpass the conversations you have during the day. During the day everyone is busy, everyone is going about his or her business, he said, but at night it is as though the notion of ends disappears and each moment is valued in and for itself. Everyone who walks through a city at night walks in the present, he said, while everyone who walks through a city during the day walks in the past or the future. The very buildings of a city seem to return with a sigh to the present moment when night falls, he said, especially if there is a full moon. Nowadays, when the howl of police sirens destroys the calm, it is sometimes difficult to remain in the present, even at night. Police sirens cannot help but remind you of the past and the future, cannot help tearing you away from the present. Varèse, who was a very great composer, he said, imagined that he was being modern by introducing a police siren into his works, but all that did was date his works and limit their interest. It is quite incredible, he said, how many artists have been ruined by half-baked ideas about what will make them modern. Varèse was one of the most uncompromising composers who ever lived, he said, and yet his works are frequently ruined by naive ideas about what it means to be modern. That can never be said of Stravinsky, he said. I stole shamelessly from Stravinsky, he said, in the fourteenth of my Canti. For the vocal part I borrowed directly from Stravinsky’s writing for the voice in Les Noces, arguably the greatest work he ever wrote. But then Stravinsky stole shamelessly from Pergolesi and from Handel and from many others. It is only timid souls who are afraid to steal. Henri Michaux, he said, whom I got to know when I was living in Paris in the years before and after the war, said to me one day: All artists are cannibals, and the bigger the artist the bigger the cannibal. Michaux it was who encouraged me to write poetry in French. It is always important to try one’s hand at different arts, Michaux said. I am a writer but I also draw and paint. Why? Because there is an immediacy about drawing and painting that you cannot get when you use words. Words and sentences have been used since time immemorial, he said, but when I put my pencil on the page I can let it roam where it will, I can let it surprise me, I can let it do things no one has ever done before. Perhaps, he said, you are driven to write poetry as well as to compose for a reason you do not understand yourself. But if you are driven then you should let yourself go. Michaux encouraged me and Jouve found me a publisher, he said.

  — Did he ever recite his own poetry to you?

  — No, sir, not that I can remember.

  — Did he talk much about it?

  — No, sir.

  — Did he not think of himself as a poet as well as a composer?

  — I do not know, sir.

  — Did you get the impression when you knew him that he still wrote poetry?

  — No, sir.

  — He thought of himself only as a composer?

  — He did not think of himself as a composer, sir. More as a conduit for sound. If anyone ever calls me maestro in your hearing, Massimo, he said to me, I give you full permission to take that person by the scruff of the neck and show them the door. Here in Italy, he said, as well as in France and Germany, the culture of authority and deference has never gone away. Just as a courtier, Massimo, he said to me one day as we drove to Orvieto, just as a courtier hopes to get in his master’s good books by calling him Sire and Your Majesty all the time, so these little mini-courtiers who haunt the corridors of the concert halls and opera houses think you will grant them favours if they call you maestro. A cook is a maestro, Massimo, he said to me. A conductor is a maestro. But is a composer a master? What is he a master of? The art of composition, Massimo, he said to me, is the art of submitting, not of mastering, it is the art of listening, not of speaking, it is the art of letting go, not of holding on. In this house, Massimo, he said, I am the master because I pay the wages, but at my desk what am I? Nothing. That devil Scheler tried to make a master out of me in Vienna, he said. He tried to make me master the art of composition, as he put it. He wanted me to be able to explain to him why every note was where it was and not in some other place. He wanted me to master the notes, to become a little Meistersinger of Vienna. But I could not master the notes. Even then I felt it was the notes that were mastering me. It was a cold day in early April. He wanted to go to Orvieto to study the images on the columns of the cathedral there. Those columns are among the wonders of the world, Massimo, he said to me, and no one goes to see them, while everyone goes to gawp at the grotesque homoeroticism of Michelangelo’s ceiling in the Sistine Chapel. And why do they do that? Only because they have been told it is a masterpiece. Do they know what a masterpiece is? Do they realise that works of art are no more masterpieces than your mother, Massimo, is a masterpiece? No. Sheep, Massimo, sheep, he said. Sheep without the innocence of sheep. Sheep without the kindly disposition of sheep. That is the kind of sheep they are, Massimo, he said to me. How many people does one meet in one’s life who do anything other than follow the leader? Three, he said. I perhaps met three in my lifetime. There was Daniel Bernstein, with whom I went to West Africa and to Egypt. There was Henry Michaux. And there is Matthaeus, whom I see occasionally here in Rome, a man of independent spirit and independent mind. That is all, he said. Three in seventy years. Less than one for every twenty years. What does that say about the human race, Massimo, he said, what does that tell us about our brothers an
d sisters, so-called? But it has always been like that, he said. Nothing new. When you look back at the history of the world, Massimo, he said to me, what you see is the history of sheep. Of madmen leading sheep and sheep following madmen. Nothing else. I at least can say that I have not been a sheep, Massimo, he said. And that I owe largely to my parents, who gave me the opportunity to develop the way I wanted and to find out what my true path was. And to my chance meeting with Daniel Bernstein in Switzerland, he said. To our chance meeting on the top of a mountain, when I was at an impressionable age. Our trip to West Africa in 1925, he said, was the making of me. To be in the presence of a man like Daniel, he said, was to learn what it means to be a free spirit. He made us leave the car at the bottom of the hill and walk up to the cathedral. The motorcar is a wonderful invention, Massimo, he said, but we must make the effort to approach a building such as a cathedral in the right spirit. I understood the nature of our patrimony, Massimo, he said, when I was shown round the temples of India and Nepal. There I observed a relationship to the space of the building on the part of the worshippers that was once the norm in Europe but has since been forgotten. A temple or a cathedral, Massimo, he said to me, is more than the building you see before you. It is the centre of a sacred space which spreads far beyond the precincts of the temple or the cathedral as such. The approach to such a space is itself a rich experience, he said, for it is the approach to a presence, the presence of the saint or holy man towards whom you are travelling. Even today, he said, when they fill our churches and cathedrals with ghastly so-called religious music beamed out of invisible loudspeakers, even today these buildings have a power over us. Varèse always said that to understand his music you had to understand that he had grown up in the shadow of that great building, the Abbey of Tournus. I myself am fortunate that I only grew up in the vicinity of the little chapel that formed part of our property and that my free-thinking parents treated it as a likeable anachronism. Churches are a wonder, Massimo, he said, but the Church is an unmitigated disaster, as are all large bureaucracies, whether it be those of the ancient Egyptians or the Aztecs or the Soviets or any other empire. It is they who foster the spirit of subservience, it is they who turn us all into sheep. But they cannot be blamed for everything, because after all it is the sheep who instituted the empires and the bureaucracies. In the Book of Samuel, Massimo, he said to me, which as a good Catholic you have never read, in the Book of Samuel the prophet Samuel pleads with the Israelites not to choose a king to rule over them, but they are sheep, Massimo, he said, they are sheep and they want to be like other sheep. Give us a king, they say. Give us a king. And they will not rest till they have one. That is what these Zionists want to set up again, Daniel said to me as we walked round the sacred groves of Ife, they are tired of living without a king and country of their own, which is what has made them what they are, and now they want a country and a bureaucracy and a military and all the other trappings of nationhood. The sacred groves of Ife, he said, were just about as far as one could get from the ballrooms and casinos of Monte Carlo, but for a while in the 20s I moved happily between them. When I was dancing and gambling and playing bridge and tennis in Monte Carlo, he said, I was longing for the sacred groves of Ife, and when I was in West Africa what kept me going in the heat and the endless rain was the thought that I would soon be getting back to my flat in Monte Carlo, to my crisp white sheets and hot water and to all the women who were only too happy to come into my bed. That is how it is, Massimo, he said to me, when you are young you are a butterfly, you flit from flower to flower, and that is as it should be, because unless you do so you will not know what flower it is you eventually want to alight on. The cathedral of Orvieto rises high above the town and of course once you are up there you have a spectacular view of the surrounding countryside. I do not want you to look at the scenery, Massimo, he said to me, I want you to concentrate on the pillars of the west front, where we are standing. There are four of them and on them you will see what is perhaps the greatest sculptural masterpiece of the Italian Middle Ages. Yet we are alone here, he said, while the sheep lie on their backs on their benches gazing up at the monstrosity that is the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. That is what we have to put up with, Massimo, he said to me, that is the idiocy of our fellow citizens and of our fellow human beings. No matter. We are here. I am no longer young, Massimo, he said, it costs me an effort to get up here, but get up here I have, and this is my reward. The entire history of the world according to the medieval Christian viewpoint, from its creation to the Last Judgement, carved in stone and still almost as perfect as when it was first made, the fronds of the Tree of Jesse as fresh as any tree in spring, the folds of our Lord’s cloak as loose and flowing as you will see in any Arab street. What brings us close to tears, Massimo, he said, is the total selflessness of these artists. They were not interested in showing off their noses, he said, and they were not interested in giving interviews and attending festivals. No, he said, they were interested in reaching down into the heart of the mystery and bringing it out into the light of day, undefiled, still mysterious. And because of that, he said, they survive, because of that they fill us with wonder. Wonder, Massimo, he said, without wonder life is nothing. Without wonder we are ants. Everything about us is a cause for wonder, Massimo, he said. A woman. Her elbow. Her wrist. A tree. Its leaves. Its smell. A sound. A memory. And the person who can help us to wonder is the artist. That is why the artist is sacred, he said. L’artiste est sacré et l’a toujours été. I can hear him saying it: L’artiste est sacré, Massimo, et l’a toujours été. Among the Ife he said, everyone has his allotted task, but the most sacred task is that of the witchdoctor. What you must realise, Daniel said to me, he said, is that these people bathe in the waters of the sacred. When Frobenius came here he could not believe that a so-called primitive people could carve heads like that. What Frobenius did not realise, he said, was that we are the primitives, we are the barbarians. Classical Athens was a disaster for the West, he said. And classical Rome even more so. It turned us all into barbarians, he said. It removed us from the sacred and so cut us off from our roots. Plato was a disaster, he said. Pericles was a disaster. Cicero was a disaster. Caesar was a disaster. All of them disasters. However hot it was, however heavy the rains, he said, Daniel always seemed to have a fresh shirt on, he always looked cool and as though he had come straight from the barber’s. As a Sicilian, he said, I thought I would be able to cope with the heat, but it is the combination of heat and damp which is so difficult to cope with in West Africa. On our first trip I was ill for seventeen of the twenty-nine days we were there, he said. I had not learned, as Daniel instinctively knew, how to reset my spiritual clock to these alien conditions. I learned a lesson, Massimo, he said, a lesson which has stood me in good stead ever since. It is the spiritual clock inside you which is important, not the physical conditions outside you. A man who knows how to set his spiritual clock, Massimo, he said, is a man who can deal with the world. He is a man who can make the most of his potential. I must have known this, Massimo, he said to me that day as we sat in a café after visiting the cathedral, I must have known this but in the excitement of youth I had forgotten it. Daniel and the Ife helped me to remember it. His face was grey, as it often was in those days, from his exertions, first in climbing up to the cathedral and then in talking in so impassioned a way about the sculptures on the pillars of the façade. Sometimes when he drank a glass of water I watched his cheeks sink inwards so that it seemed as if his face was all bone, but I took care not to let him see me looking, he would not have liked it. Once, it was towards the end, I found him lying on the floor of the living room. I helped him to a chair but he did not seem to know where he was. I asked him if he was all right but he just stared at me. I did not know what to do. I asked him if I should call a doctor, but he just went on staring at me. I was beside myself. I did not want to ring for Annamaria because I felt he would prefer to be seen in this state by as few people as possible. But on the other hand I thou
ght perhaps something irrevocable had happened and he needed to be taken to hospital as quickly as possible. Then, as I was thinking all these contradictory thoughts, he suddenly said, without moving, thank you, Massimo, a glass of water please. I ran to get it for him and by the time I had come back he had straightened his clothes and was sitting in a more natural position. Sit down, Massimo, he said, when he had drunk a little. I asked him where he would like me to sit, I had not sat in his salotto before. He motioned me to a chair opposite him. Why is it, Massimo, he said to me, that men are so ashamed of being seen to be vulnerable? It is not as if others do not know it, since we all come down to the same thing in the end. What was my overriding feeling when Arabella left me? It was shame. I was so ashamed I could not be alone by myself and I could not bear to see anyone. In earlier days, he said, when she had left me in London and in Paris, I had gone after her to drag her back, to make her realise the folly of her ways. But this time I knew it was final. And I never saw her or heard from her again, he said, sitting on the upright chair in his salotto. After she left me in Switzerland in 1945, just after the war ended, he said, as if she had been waiting for the war to end to make her escape, after she left me, he said, it was as if she had never been, but she left me in a state of profound shame. I thought of that, Massimo, he said, when I opened my eyes just now and saw you looking at me with fear in your eyes. I knew I should never have been in this position, I should never have subjected you to this fear. But it happened. I don’t know how it happened, but it happened. One minute I was standing up, I was crossing the room, my mind was busy on important things, and the next I was opening my eyes and seeing you standing there looking at me with undisguised terror. Our mothers help us to stand upright, Massimo, he said, and then they help us to walk. But one day, when our mothers are gone, we find we can no longer stand up. We can no longer walk. One moment we are in full possession of our faculties, we are walking across the carpet of our room, thinking deep thoughts, and the next we are being picked up off the floor by our manservant. What is so shameful about that? he said. It will happen to all of us unless by great good fortune we are run over by a car instead, or kicked in the head by a horse, when we are in the prime of life. The road to the final end is a long one these days, Massimo, he said, with the advances in medicine and the advances in drugs and all the rest of it. It is a road paved with shame, Massimo, he said, especially for someone who is as proud as I am. But it is a road I have to travel and I should get used to it, shouldn’t I? You are silent, Massimo, he said. You do not know what to say. And the truth is that there is nothing to say. When we lose control of ourselves, Massimo, he said, we are ashamed even in front of our mothers. How much more ashamed will we be in front of strangers. And yet, Massimo, if someone like me, who prides himself on his realism and on his openness to experience, who, it is no exaggeration to say, spends the greater part of his days and nights opening himself to the experience of the Other, if someone like that cannot accept that what age will bring with it is a loss of control, leading inevitably to a state akin to that of earliest childhood, of babyhood even, if I cannot accept that, who can accept it? Go, Massimo, he said, and say nothing of what has happened to Annamaria or to anyone else. Of course I did what he said and neither of us ever referred to that episode again, but these things have an effect on one, you understand, sir. Our relationship was never quite the same again, if you know what I mean.