Dissipatio H.G. by Guido Morselli (smart ebook reader .TXT) 📕

and any other person, grammatical or existential, has necessarily been my person. There is no longer anything but the I, and the I is no one but me. I am the I.

Monday, June 3, morning: Frederica and Giovanni don’t show up, and I get it in my head (it hurts, incidentally; under the bandage the wound throbs, it must be infected) that they’ve gone to the Monday market down in Widmad. I’ll find them there.

Three massifs, each taller than 4,000 meters, stand above the narrow basin that is Widmad; the village sits in the center, and the market at the center of the village. On a clear day, looking up from the old piazza, it hurts to raise your eyes: those looming glaciers are blinding. The other day there was nothing but fog in the little square. The mountains were hidden, the stall owners and the shoppers were invisible too. In the streets and in the houses, shops, and hotels, at the station and the post office, locals and visitors, men, women, and children were nowhere to be seen. An abandoned village, emptied out abruptly of everyone. Emptied in the same way and to the same degree as the nearby village of Lewrosen: no remains and no clues why. There’s a keen (you might say, or ironic) absence of explanations. A notice in a shop window catches my eye. The village band plans to ride the cable car at Mountàsc and perform what will be the highest-elevation concert in Europe, at 2,950 meters. The public is invited to enjoy the event “in that enchanting stage set where the snow is eternal.” The “show” will take place next Sunday, June 9.

In Widmad I go into the Hôtel Zemmi. (Zemmi is the name of our creek and of the entire valley.) Not a large hotel but an elegant or at least charming one, and never overcrowded, it is a favorite here of the German clientele, with a chef whose substantial, though not outstanding, meals I like, and a new covered swimming pool; the owner, a German named Kaiser, had invited me to the pool’s opening some months back. In Kaiser’s office on the ground floor next to the stairs, I recognize his leather jacket and sunglasses on the desk. I climb the stairs to the first floor and look into one of the rooms. The bed’s unmade, on the bedside table a lamp shines, lighting up a book and a wristwatch. A woman’s watch, and the book, in fact, is by Simone de Beauvoir. The reader’s not there. Leaving the Zemmi, I stop by to ring the bell at my friend Mylius’s house; he, too, is a German, from Göttingen, a professor emeritus, the one who sent me the greetings. No one comes to the door. In Lewrosen there’s a boarding school for some twenty or thirty kids; it’s open and I walk through from the first to the last room. In the dormitory next to every bunk are the shoes and clothes of each occupant, laid out with soldierly precision and disturbed by nothing and no one. Here, the lights are off, not a voice, not a footstep.

I don’t persist in my search. I sit on a bench on the main street of Lewrosen and listen to the silence. Which isn’t total, and therefore not frightening. A drainpipe behind me is dripping very slowly; the church carillon gracefully marks the quarter hour and the half; a metal box counts the solitary minutes as a switch flashes, connected to the traffic light at the intersection, which is working, in fact. And yet the silence weighs on me, and I perceive it with a sense that isn’t auditory, but perhaps emotional, perhaps thoughtful and reasoning. What produces silence is its opposite, is finally the human presence, whether welcome or not, and its absence. There are no substitutes for those two factors.

And the silence of human absence, I understand, is a silence that doesn’t flow. It accumulates.

I have a plan. These people left, I say to myself. They didn’t melt. Lower down in the valley, someone will have seen them go by, someone will know something, will explain this to me. So I must follow the road. There’s only the one, it continues north toward the plain. A means of transport must be found.

And so here I am in the Lewrosen public garage looking for a car, the only means of transport available. I don’t like cars, I’ve never owned one, but I’ve occasionally driven a certain inexpensive German make, which suits me on account of its spartan simplicity and rugged fenders. There are a number of them in the garage still running; I take the one closest to me and drive away without much trouble. The road is if anything too empty, and I know every turn of the way. I head downhill and stop at Claus. There’s a nursing home for old people there; Mylius, whose ninety-year-old mother is a resident, told me about it. I stop and walk around the home as I did at the school in Lewrosen, room by room, from the dining hall to the infirmary. After the nursing home, I scour the fire station, which is nearby, for firefighters, affectionately called the valley pumpers.

•

I was trying to come to terms with the situation, and especially my own, without excessive alarm and without drawing fanciful conclusions. This is not the Antarctic, it’s a narrow valley floor on which four thousand people are squeezed together. Even if they were playing hide-and-seek, even if they’d been maliciously smuggled away, someone would reveal themselves in the end.

But nobody let themselves be seen. I was tired of inspecting hotels, hospitals, schools, and fire stations. The spirit of my search had been fairly optimistic until I reached Claus, but discouragement was creeping in, and an ugly rancor. I kept going, making no further stops; at noon I reached the highway and by one PM Chrysopolis was coming into sight: the place where I’ve