a young woman in white lay dead in diagonal evening light that sloped down through the towering space of the Duomo Santa Maria del Fiore the young bride had died at noon the priest hurried through the business the body was trundled to a chapel of rest for a final night above ground in the vertiginous candlelight the professionals mumbled that which is mumbled & slopped as much wet wax about as they decently could to be harvested immediately by raggamuffins & then reused at the expense of the next family to be mugged by grief & loss I stood in moving shadows at the entrance to the resting place & was invited in by a local with his hand held out I followed him in to the otherwise deserted space where he lifted her head with its black hair & sad smile & intolerable beauty: È bella he grinned while letting her head thump back down on the table
2
the echo of the thud seemed absolute profanity I froze like a statue of brutality then melted & knelt with her dead hand against my mouth my guide still grinning my heart imagined a young husband suddenly appearing & misunderstanding this gothic tableau perhaps he would have deserved it where was he how could he be elsewhere & I dreamt goodbye to her in Italian forgive the strange intimacy these stranger's tears on the pale hand of death that can't take love or my religion the arc of art I left for another world
3
In Milan I went to the opera but the whole audience was eating drinking chatting picking each other up playing cards & facing the wrong way so I couldn't hear a note of Donizetti music for the Italians seems to be yet another kind of olive oil something nice to drizzle on your elevenses or whatever else is due to be licked or inserted in the next half hour a tickle on the cymbal a grope on the cello a pounding in the background on the big bass drum it's all too voluptuous & Italian for we French
4
all roads lead away from Rome one way or another & I went home a good six months early I moved into Harriet's old flat only to find she'd been back & was still in Paris as I prepared for my concert she was back on the Paris stage in Shakespeare that was no longer this month's flavour slowly sucked downwards by debt her spirits fell then so did she she suffered a double fracture & married me
5
one benefit concert featured both Liszt & Chopin yet still the cave of debt stayed dark she brought her list of creditors & I my anger & the gristly business of concert planning & self-promotion we were ground together like black & white pepper I conducted & felt a yawning chasm behind which echoed nothing but my pulse knocking
6
the micro-politics of the petty minded almost showed the road to ruin but you tunnel forwards like a mole till one night the hall explodes with praise & light & Paganini pumping your arm insisting on a commission
a work for orchestra & viola to be played by the master himself
7
I decided the viola would be me walking through Abruzzo like the lines of Byron treading on through mists & frustration hangover longing mind diseased with its own beauty & jagged aspirations & yearning to cast off definitively still I began to call in notes from all over the memory of being borne upon that landscape I allowed them to settle above the magnet of my heart let these describe the indescribable
8
Paganini already dying gave me a year's pay for nothing so I could compose for seven months I lived in Romeo & Juliet to give back what I could to Shakespeare Paganini & Harriet I hear it now the introduction & adagio Queen Mab the haunted voice of Friar Laurence 'tis an ill cook that cannot lick his own finger if much of what you've made or done doesn't move you deeply it may be time to change your life
9
Spontini once told me after hearing my Requiem you know you are wrong to moan about Rome without Michaelangelo's Last Judgement you never could have imagined your Requiem actually the picture disappointed me I saw all the torments & paraphernalia of hell but nothing that could help me see humanity assembled for one final bow
