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

bodily cold. I wish I had boiling hot coffee and a wool sweater. To experience nature poetically, perhaps I had need of someone to contend it with, someone I must keep at a distance?

A disheartening thought: nature was beautiful and fearsome, but asocial. It presupposed (in a negative sense) man. I wanted a nature inviolate, but violable.

I wondered: to enjoy it, was it necessary to post No Trespassing signs?

•

The sign, or better, the scroll. The words “They were as you and you will be as they are” painted over a grate on the side of St. Vilcifredo, under the portico. And a fleshy elderly woman dressed in a cheap pink wool dress, who calls to me: “What’s this say? Mister, can you please translate?”

It happened in the early evening of Saturday, June 1. I had gone down to Widmad to see the village for the last time and equip myself with a pocket flashlight to light my way inside the cave of the siphon that night. I was starting out toward home, and the setting sun was sending out oblique, reddish rays that pierced the houses, the square, and the portico of the church, a rare, fatal sunset. I stood and explained to the foreign lady. Around 1650 there had been an epidemic, and a few decades later the church had been built on the spot where a large common grave had been dug. Following Catholic custom, the skulls, hundreds of them, were walled up in a small space that was part of the church but opened out onto the street for the benefit of passersby. “The bones you see, held in by the grate, were once great minds. Remember the scene with Hamlet and the gravediggers?”

According to my plan, I then had seven or eight hours to live. As I excused myself and got away from the lady in pink, I thought it could not have been just a random coincidence. I didn’t dwell on it, though. I believed I had more important things to think about at that moment.

This evening, passing by St. Vilcifredo at the same hour, I catch sight of the grate again. What I can only consider a miracle, a dreadful miracle, has taken place.

14

THE THREE grated windows under the portico have lost their macabre commemorative significance. Now they suggest something else, something worse. They are empty.

And I am still alive. Eyes wide, nerves shattered, I stare at them. In a sort of horrid hypnosis. I, the witness.

•

I manage to break away. At the corner of the street is a garden, where some branches have been severed by the wind beating against the gate. I’m not sure how, but I walk to the gate and pick up a branch, return to the grates, and push it through. As I poke around, disgust floods me. There’s nothing left: death, dry and dusty, has departed. I enter the church and walk around behind the space where the skulls were. Walled up as before, intact.

My gestures appear logical. I act from an impulse that takes the place of reason, and of will. I don’t think, and I don’t speak to myself. I seek no connections or explanations. I’m aware I won’t return home. I’m aware that I have (should have) a desperate longing to hear a (human) voice. Sure enough, I head toward the market square, and find myself, out of some dumb reflex, about to enter a phone booth. The rain coming down sideways on the piazza drives me toward the road to Lewrosen. I climb the stairs of the Hôtel Mayr. I won’t be alone there, I imagine. I won’t be alone?

I sense (and only sense), befuddled, that the night will be long, that I won’t have the courage to go up to one of the rooms, that I’ll be cold, terribly cold, in the vast, empty hall, beneath lights that will not give me reprieve. But I won’t go home, for the love of God, no.

Hmm. “For the love of God.” I ought to sink into solemn horror. Or at least quiver with superstitious awe.

I ought to say, “But therefore—” the theological and technical term that I know and that would justify the announcement about to be absurdly confirmed for me and only me, today, millennia later. For me, here and alive. But I will not say that word. I refuse. My fear cannot be described. It is too great.

•

And too new. No one on earth, in a world convinced it had known every possible fear, knew this one.

I don’t enter but remain standing, resting against the revolving door, my back to the mystery that I allow myself to think I’ve left behind. And wait.

Once again, I resurface from my trance to eat. I find something comestible in one of the ground-floor rooms. To drink, no; I do not drink. I curl up in a chair, covering myself with the long black jacket belonging to Battaglia the porter that was hanging there. I don’t dare to turn off the lights in this corner where I find myself, and they beat down on me violently. Still, I fall into a heavy slumber and wake not long after from a nightmare: in an immense, blazing grotto I am lying flat under two keys crossed over my sternum, crushing it. They are nothing more than the gold keys pinned to the lapel of Battaglia’s jacket, which I had noticed while covering myself. I cannot go back to sleep now. And the night is interminable.

It expands and continues into the day, which enters feebly and late through the glass panes of the door, beyond which a hard rain is falling. But my mental and muscular paresis is complete. I don’t get up from my chair, my bodily functions slow to a halt, I don’t even feel the need to eat, and I have no thoughts. Then night falls again, and somehow I’m able to recognize night because I had feared it and hoped it would not arrive. Sleep comes