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

lived the longest and which I resolutely detest, the city for which I feel the most heated contempt. Today I’m relieved to see it again.

They wouldn’t be my people, but I would find people there. It was a large city, though it wasn’t the physical size of the place that reassured me. Its 400,000 merchants make Chrysopolis as positive as positivity itself, amenable to anything at all, apart from miracles. The gold ballast coined in the sacristies of its sixty banks cannot levitate into the realm of the miraculous, not even into the realm of the unexpected. The highest concentration of known wealth in the world is here, matter so concrete that it’s impervious to any evil and remains unaffected by heavenly grace or punishment. Its roots tap into the capital’s aeternum, reality at its utmost.

Returning here (it had been six months since my last visit) after that dream that began on the brink of the siphon, I “made land” and was once again in contact with the solid world. The mystery of my valley, abruptly depopulated, would rapidly be resolved. Risibly. In fact, it would make sense not to mention it, it would be enough to get a person committed. In the Market City, hospitals are strangely numerous. And full.

But whom would I speak to, if I found no signs of life? Everything from the outskirts to the center was shut down, silent, empty. Everything was untouched and in order, but immobile and out of time, because it is humans who lend time to things, and no humans were in sight. Not even one.

I parked the car right on the Börsenplatz, and since I was hungry I gulped down some hot chocolate and biscuits from a machine. Then I waited until three PM, when after-hours trading begins, that is, when the sanctuary celebrates the high mass of the closing of the bids, and the real thing, reserved to the inner circle, takes place, the Rothschild Hour as one of our leading traders calls it, when the financial destiny of Europe and most of the West is decided. But the house of worship is dark, it remains shut. Dead, like the columns of Baalbek.

The city, intact although just abandoned, is already archeology. They left no decipherable message. Instead, they left all their things. Made off in great haste with no thought for what was left behind: their treasure.

I went to see the offices of my newspaper. I worked there until quite recently as an occasional contributor. Although under no illusion I’d find someone, I felt the need to supply myself with confirmation. A newspaper is a witness, not just a collection bin of news items. A newspaper cannot desert its post, it must be the conscience reflected by events, and it cannot evade this duty on impulse, even a collective or universal impulse. As long as it lives, it is there, taking notice. As long as it lives.

And it was still, in some way, alive, in the senseless arm-waving of the linotype machines. I said I couldn’t erase the image of that gesture. It’s true. Even now I see those poor automatons jerking about, prisoners of their own mechanical fidelity.

5

I’VE TOLD you the rest, delivered my autopsy on the corpse of the city, still warm; related my return to Widmad: the days of extended fear, a fever that wearied the nerves and frustrated an ignominious fantasy life. Days and nights to write off as a plunge into the subhuman, into abject, shameless misery.

Ironically it was a clownish incident that cured me (temporarily). Like something out of an old farce.

In my house there’s a storeroom that faces onto the woods, where the door is always partly ajar. Venturing in there to get an armful of wood for the stove, I found one of Giovanni’s cows. The cow, animal bibliophagum, was eating my Psychology of the Conscious Mind, softbound copies with a green cover, a package of thirty or so sent by my publisher to distribute to friends—they were on a shelf. She was munching on them quite happily, a greenish mush dripping off one hairy lip onto the floor, which was scattered with clumps of wet pages. My laughter was edged with hysteria, but it relieved me. The fearful paralysis dissolved in grateful tenderness. I patted that beast, feeding quite unmetaphorically on my paperbound thoughts made words. I’d get them back tomorrow, supposing I succeeded in milking her, my ideas finally remunerative.

The next day I went down the path to Widmad on legs that were not too shaky. I went there with a plausible, if obvious plan: to telephone the world. There must be—must survive—a world beyond my valley and beyond the Golden City.

At two in the afternoon, Widmad is slicked with rain, geraniums flowering under red and green roofs. It looks unnatural, but as always, excessively perfect, like an advertising brochure. In the cemeterial hush, there’s not even the tiniest note of decay. An outbuilding of the Kursaal hosts an art exhibit. Behavior-Art, I’d gone to the opening, and it was what I’d expected. The Spanish artist Luis Lugán was showing bathtub faucets which, when you opened them, emitted electronic music by Krzysztof Penderecki, Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima for fifty-two string instruments. Cardenet, a Frenchman, had two young women (live ones, you know) drinking an aperitif on a transparent slab suspended three meters above the floor. The women (who are no longer there) wore no panties. Artist Jean Le Gac displayed an automobile with the doors open and the two left tires flat. Mattiaci, Italian: a composition titled Space, a glass table with a telephone on top “connected to the whole of Europe” and phone books from “the whole of Europe.” A viewer could speak to anyone he or she wished for ten seconds, paying off-peak rates. Yes, this communicative work of art was just what I needed.

To be certain the phone was working I once again dialed The Exact Time. I was given the time, and then