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a position to say with any confidence.’
    ‘What do you think of Hesse, for example?’
    ‘Hesse was Swiss,’ I said.
    ‘No, no,’ my host corrected, ‘he was German; he only took Swiss citizenship in 1921.’
    ‘But he died Swiss,’ I insisted.
    ‘You haven’t told me what you think of him yet,’ chided my host in a soft voice.
    For the first time I sensed a strong feeling of irritation growing inside me. That heavy, dark, close room with its bronze busts along the walls and glass-covered bookcases; that pedantic,
presumptuous Indian, manipulating the conversation as he chose; his manner, somewhere between the condescending and the crafty: all this was making me uneasy and that uneasiness was rapidly turning
into anger, I could feel it. I had come here for quite other reasons and he had coolly ignored them, indifferent to the urgency which he must have appreciated from my phone calls and my note. And
he was subjecting me to idiotic questions about Hermann Hesse. I felt I was being taken for a ride.
    ‘Are you familiar with
rosolio
?’ I asked him. ‘Have you ever tried it?’
    ‘I don’t think so,’ he said, ‘what is it?’
    ‘It’s an Italian liqueur, it’s rare now. They drank it in the bourgeois salons of the nineteenth century – a sweet, sticky liqueur. Hermann Hesse makes me think of
rosolio.
When I get back to Italy I’ll send you a bottle, if it’s still to be found, that is.’
    He looked at me, uncertain as to whether this was ingenuousness or insolence. Naturally it was insolence: that was not what I thought of Hesse.
    ‘I don’t think I’d like it,’ he said drily. ‘I don’t drink, and what’s more I detest sweet things.’ He folded his napkin and said: ‘Shall we
make ourselves comfortable for tea?’
    We moved to the armchairs near the bookcase and the servant came in with a tray as if he’d been waiting behind the curtain. ‘Sugar?’ my host asked, pouring tea into my cup.
    ‘No, thanks,’ I answered, ‘I don’t like sweet things either.’
    There followed a long and embarrassing silence. My host sat with his eyes closed, quite still; for a moment I thought he might have dozed off. I tried to work out his age, without success. He
had an old but very smooth face. I noticed that he wore lace-up sandals on bare feet.
    ‘Are you a gnostic?’ he asked suddenly, still keeping his eyes closed.
    ‘I don’t think so,’ I said. And then added: ‘No, I’m not, just a little curious.’
    He opened his eyes and gave me a sly or ironic look: ‘And how far has your curiosity taken you?’
    ‘Swedenborg,’ I said, ‘Schelling, Annie Besant: something of everybody.’ He seemed interested and I explained: ‘I came to some of them in roundabout ways, Annie
Besant, for example. She was translated by Fernando Pessoa, a great Portuguese poet. He died in obscurity in 1935.’
    ‘Pessoa,’ he said, ‘of course.’
    ‘You know him?’ I asked.
    ‘A little,’ he said. ‘The way you know the others.’
    ‘Pessoa said he was a gnostic,’ I said. ‘He was a Rosicrucian. He wrote a series of esoteric poems called
Passos da Cruz
.’
    ‘I’ve never read them,’ said my host, ‘but I know something of his life.’
    ‘Do you know what his last words were?’
    ‘No,’ he said. ‘What were they?’
    ‘Give me my glasses,’ I said. ‘He was very shortsighted and he wanted to enter the other world with his glasses on.’
    My host smiled and said nothing.
    ‘A few minutes before that he wrote a note in English: he often used English in his personal notes – it was his second language – he had grown up in South Africa. I managed to
photocopy that note; the writing was very uncertain of course. Pessoa was in agony, but it is legible. You want me to tell you what it said?’
    My host moved his head back and forth, as Indians do when they nod.
    ‘I know not what tomorrow will bring.’
    ‘What strange English,’ he said.
    ‘Right,’ I said, ‘what strange