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

began to call all over: Frankfurt (West Germany), Brighton (United Kingdom), Bologna (Italy), Boulogne (France), places and people with whom I’d occasionally been in correspondence in the past months and whose telephone numbers I had in my notebook. After that, I began to pick numbers at random from the phone books. I called three belonging to unknown Parisians. No answer, not even there. They, too, were silent. I tried Paris again, dialing Dr. Ahmed Ibn Yussef, 142 boulevard de la Poissonnière. A medical man, a dental surgeon. O sweet luck, what delight: I hear a voice. A graceful female voice (Ahmed’s wife?) tells me: Le Docteur va rentrer ce soir a six heures. Veuiller bien me donner votre numéro ou adresse. Si au contraire vous préférez . . . that’s all. Of course, the allotted ten seconds have expired. I copy down Ahmed’s number and run, I race, to the Hôtel Mayr in front of the Kursaal. From the porter’s desk—he is, or he was, Battaglia, a friend of mine—I call back. I hear the same voice, and I interrupt her right off. “Madame, can you tell me whether things are normal in Paris?” She replies, “The doctor will return at six PM this evening. Please leave your number or address. If instead, you prefer—.” I hang up. It isn’t the dentist’s wife and it’s not his secretary. It’s a recorded message.

My lack of success doesn’t demoralize me. It goads me on: I will go myself, in person, to 142 boulevard de la Poissonnière. Immediately. On the first flight leaving Teklon. If things are normal in Paris, there are still other questions to be answered, of course, but if the events of these days are localized, I can accept them. A sudden trip appeals to me. Running away. A detail I should mention: Although I’ve traveled all over Europe and a good part of the United States, I’ve never been to Paris. I have no money on me, so I ask the absconder Battaglia for a loan. His tips from June 1 are in the drawer at reception, a sum that’s more than enough. I leave a note of explanation for my cash withdrawal, and take off in my little car, which is waiting for me where I left it in the middle of the street three days before.

Teklon is Chrysopolis’s airport, closer to me, coming from the mountains, than it is to the city. I’m there in half an hour. This is one of Europe’s crossroads, an intercontinental jumping-off point. But today it isn’t crowded.

It’s empty. Empty of people. The gates, the corridors, the ticket windows, the customs hall, the baggage claim, the bar, the restaurant (where some years back I waited half a day for an aircraft that turned out to have been hijacked): no one. Should I have foreseen this? I don’t know. However, I’m now in the recovery phase and feel optimistic; consulting one of the many departure boards that are lit up, I see that in the next three hours, a number of planes are arriving and departing from the four corners of the globe. In the space of fifty minutes there are flights to Paris from Zagreb, from Nairobi via Cairo and Rome, and from Athens, as well as a charter “on which some seats may be available.” Here we face paralysis, or the desert, for some unknown reason, but in Nairobi, Cairo, Athens, the world is still in motion. What I’ve been calling, with sociological nonchalance, the D-Bomb (rapid and thorough depopulation) or the R-Bomb (perfect rarefaction) may have gone off at Chrysopolis and environs, but it cannot have affected aircraft traveling over the Mediterranean at 10,000 meters, or across the Sudan.

By now it’s seven PM; I’m still waiting. In the car, I venture out into the airport’s crepuscular enormity. The takeoff runway is unencumbered, but not the landing lanes. A number of planes sit on the tarmac, one practically on top of the other, sideways. Closest to me, and I recognize it because I’ve flown on one, an Aeroflot Tupolev has rolled off the runway, mowing down the grass for quite some distance. Stopped now, nose down, tail section raised to a whitish, uninviting sky it won’t be slicing through again, it seems. However, I’m not ready to concede. This place is by its nature extra-territorial; it belongs to the planetary universe and its infinitely far horizons. Short of some global cataclysm, life must somewhere reveal itself, someone must sooner or later materialize from on high and attempt to dock. The lights flickering on the fuselage will appear and if the fog prevents that, I’ll hear the roar of the engines. I won’t sleep, I’ll stay on sentry, I’ll listen.

And in fact, I didn’t sleep. Long after midnight, sprawled in a chair in the main ticket office, I grew weary of paging through old newspapers and went outside. Once again to the runways, where the whiteness of the lights is vaguely sealike. I made myself walk to the distant hangar area, and went inside one, naïvely astonished at its cathedral dimensions. The lights and the immensity of it were blinding, I sought the shadow under a wing. Tall castles laced with stairs and laden with instruments laid siege to an aircraft body. An official inspection, interrupted suddenly (is that allowed? why?); oil or kerosene is dripping through the landing gears and spreading out in sinister, iridescent pools. I am smoking, and draw back, trembling. The cathedral, supported by a maze of the finest openwork steel struts, is beautiful. The sight invigorates me—technophobia be damned; the structure ennobles its builders, and makes me believe human beings cannot be extinguished—just as the Christians threatened by the Turks at Constantinople would go and look upon their glorious Hagia Sofia, and from those domes and columns draw auspices of salvation.

Morning arrives, and the portents are not favorable. I’m still waiting. Camping out as best I can in a chair with sandwiches and beer and the paperbacks I took