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

my intentions firm, if vague (very vague). Yes, what distinguishes this psychological retreat of mine is its sincerity. I’ve returned to perfect naïveté.

In a different moment, I imagined that very soon men of every race and place must join in solidarity (something I called socialidarity or socio-solidarity, quite different from humanitarianism or charity), imposed on the Planet of the Economy by ever-shrinking space, bringing to an end all the empty sermonizing on love and peace based on mystical beliefs and tablets of the law. That was many years ago and I was duly disappointed. Anyway, no socialidarity would have been enough to make me accept Chrysopolis. And why therefore do I accept it now? Is this just unwitting self-coercion, or if not unwitting, unwarranted? In practice, gratuitous? The crazy drift of the paper boat come to Chrysopolis to sink.

I’m out of the rain now, under the portico of the stock market, and I take off my jacket to wring it out. The doves and the crows that were milling around underfoot rise up squawking. Crows, or rather the larger ones, ravens, Corvus corax, ill-omened birds of the battlefield.51 Someone once said the stock market would be humanity’s last battlefield. The birds, however, are fraternizing. Never seen anything like it.

When and how did I decide to leave Widmad, the place where, after spending a whole lifetime in Chrysopolis, I had gone to detach myself deliberately—and not in cowardly escape, or merely to enjoy a comfortable retirement, clean air, and meditative silence? Doubtless I was thinking of Karpinsky. His message, the “not here.”

If it was his initiative, though, it means Karpinsky stands against all moral judgment, all material truth. Judgment, it is clear, even in the most disinterested conscience, implies condemning something, someone. There is no morality and no justice that doesn’t judge and doesn’t condemn. He doesn’t say: You are wrong to judge Chrysopolis and what it embodies in a certain way. If anything, he makes me feel I must transcend, disavow. Myself. An ascetic tour de force, a high-wire act. Self-disavowal has always seemed to me a kind of spiritualistic freak show.

I have no concrete proof this initiative of mine is directed by Karpinsky. I know he cannot come to me, but the reasons he doesn’t don’t lie in him. I see his hand in this, thoughtful and diplomatic. He’s worked on me to bring me to his level, using his deep knowledge of me. He effected the raptus with a series of subtle suggestions.

This is what he wanted to obtain (for me, that is, for my own good, something so secret that I hadn’t the slightest suspicion of it), it’s what he wanted, and he obtained it. I’ve said my last farewell to Widmad. I’ll never see the Malga Ross again.

•

If I were dead, there’s just one place I’d like to be buried: at the Malga Ross. Fattening the pinched and scrawny heather and juniper that so kindly received me as a boy, and afterwards. Once it happened, I don’t remember how, that I spoke to Giovanni about that wish. For some reason the memory now comes back to me, bringing his distant smile.

Giovanni made up his mind I was “a bit strange.” He shook his head.

“Getting yourself buried in the mountains, in the middle of all those rocks. No, you can’t do that, you’re not a dog. The regulations forbid it.”

“It’s obvious you served in the gendarmerie, Giovanni. Alive or dead, regulations come first.”

Frederica, from the window of my house: “Don’t pay any attention to him. It can be done, if that’s what you really want. It can be done soon enough.”

“Well, I can’t guarantee you it will be so very soon.”

“A hundred years from now, Giovanni and I won’t be here to help you. So if it matters to you, try to get there before we do. How much do you weigh, sir?”

“Over eighty kilos.”

“When the time comes, we’ll put two forty-kilo bags of sand in the casket. And send it down to town in peace. You, instead, we’ll carry up on a mule, and we’ll dig a big hole at the place you’ve marked out for us, and no one will be the wiser.”

She wasn’t shy, Frederica. I don’t think I ever earned a great deal of her affection, but she was always honest with me. Thinking back on it, I’m nostalgic for her, for those days, for my easy life with them, comfortable, safe. Sweet. Giovanni must have been feeling a certain sympathy for me that day.

“But why do you think about dying? You’re still young. Doesn’t this sun of ours make you feel happy today?”

It was a bright blue day, I remember it, even though the world of us three was completely encircled by the greenish-black fir trees, just barely lit up by the sun glinting off the Karessa glacier, that northern slope they called the Himalayan face at Widmad. But Giovanni gave me too much credit. I wasn’t thinking about dying. I exempted myself even then.

20

AND NOW, if it should happen (if it should be granted to me) where do I want my bones to lie? In the parterre planted with English rye grass in front of the Hôtel Esplanade?

There’s a more immediate residential question I’ve had to face, however. I’d happily have made my home at Teklon, the airport. But Teklon was too emotional a choice, too much inspired by feelings and instinct, while I must be obedient, I must submit. I considered the offices of my former newspaper, and the little villa belonging to Meggy Weiss Lo Surdo. As it happens, the capital reserves of the capital are all mine now. All 25,000 of its dwellings are at my disposal.

I decided, with a certain reluctant consistency, on the restaurant at the Bourse. I sleep or doze, or muse (I muse) on a sofa near a window that faces onto the place de l’opulence. The locus of that eternity that was always my destiny. The market of markets elevates, not unlawfully (it