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

seems), into the supernatural. Speculating in stock quotes brings forth metaphysical, maybe even theological speculation. Everything is fatal, mysterious, and acceptable because absurd.

Here in this place, honed and purified, my personal cupio dissolvi, too often postponed, was supposed to play out.

In practice: I suffer from the cold at night. I have nothing but tablecloths for blankets. I lack elementary comforts. I look for, and it makes sense, some marginal compensation at least for these minor punishments. The menu of the day, of the Last Day, Saturday June 1, offered, for le dîner: roti de porc frais Vendôme, fondue Bourguignonne, homard sauce niçoise. None of them light dishes. Many of the merchants, I think unkindly, transitioned to the metaphysical following or while suffering from digestive problems.

I rummaged around in the management offices, finding not the razor and the blankets I needed, but several millions in currency. It was in the briefcase of a bourse trader, and the restaurant manager had put a note on it: “Left here by Mr. . . . Return to him in person only.” Inside the case there was cash in large bills, and stock certificates. And a sheet of paper with writing on it. “People are selling, selling, selling, they submit only orders to sell. There’s talk of an imminent crash, as if this were October 1929. The enclosed sums belong to Mr. and Mrs. . . . They wanted to sell immediately. But it’s Saturday. To hell with hysterical women!”

The man’s prayer (concerning the women), was it realized? In any event, values did crash, and irreversibly. Ils avaient du flair, no doubt about it: they had a knack, those clients. As for the cash and the shares, they belong to me by all rights, for I am the sole heir. With the benefit of inventory. The wastepaper I’ll toss on the street to rot.

Permit me just a nudge of protest. I’ll permit myself; I’ve done my spiritual exercises and continue to do them. Yesterday, stepping off the sidewalk, I tripped on a cocker spaniel pup that had died of hunger or of grief. A tiny little beast. I picked it up carefully, it smelled bad; I opened the night safe outside the Crédit International on the Börsenplatz, and shoved it in.

Then I reprimanded myself. You’re supposed to make peace here, don’t you get it? You didn’t condemn the Thieves and the Prostitutes. Don’t condemn the Merchants.

•

I walk around the city.

Recognizing, with some nostalgia (me, the reactionary) where the extra-party partiprises, the protestarians of extreme protest, went to ground in the mezzanines and at the backs of courtyards. The ghetto quarter on the quays where mistrustful workers from the south were confined. The anarchists, ironically, at home in the parade grounds.

The most radical of these rebellious factions occupied a basement next to the station, and took a vow of childlessness. A garland still hanging, now trailing on the sidewalk, boldly urges: “If you are a man, get sterilized.” The symbols and the manifestos were usually both subversive and modest, they threatened to bring about mostly innocent revolutions.

My Karpinsky might have taken part in them, he might very well have done so. His very being was a virtual, hushed accusation.

But now? I have no hope he’ll step out onto one of the balconies on this alley I’m investigating behind the Hôtel Baur. A faded banner, prophetic, hangs over the street. “Capitalists, it’s all over!”

•

I have no hope. Nonetheless I’ve come to Chrysopolis to see him (my first conscious meeting with him) and I sense that I will. See him, real and present. Upright in his white coat, bloodstains on the chest where they knifed him. Arms open. But head lowered as when, leaning against the window in my room, he would listen to me, his trousers rumpled beneath his doctor’s coat.

He won’t speak. It will be pointless to ask him, as I once did in the clinic, “Are you still keeping me here? Haven’t I recovered?” He won’t come to respond to my uncertainties, or to announce anything. He’ll be the modest, simple person of back then. He’ll simply come to look for me, and he’s already on his way. This is a certainty, not an expectation on my part, and it frees me from all impatience.

So I sit here on a bench along the boulevard, looking at the life that’s unfolding before my eyes in this strange eternity. The air shines with a dense humidity. Rainwater runs off in rivulets (the sewers in the old city must be blocked) that flow together onto the street and deposit, day by day, a thin layer of soil on the asphalt. It’s not much more than a veil of earth, and yet something green is growing on it, not the usual city grass, but wild plants. The market of markets will one day be countryside. With buttercups and chicory in flower.

In my pocket I’m keeping a pack of Gauloises, for him.

TRANSLATOR’S NOTES

Guido Morselli read extensively throughout his life, especially philosophy, aesthetics, and literature, and he was also well informed about psychology, political theory, and various scientific matters. He annotated his books extensively and kept a record of his reading in diaries over nearly forty years, during which there were a few authors he returned to multiple times—Montaigne, Pascal—and others it’s hard to imagine he read more than once (Alvin Toffler). At times he will cite or paraphrase a work or an author in such a personal way that it becomes difficult to identify the passage he has in mind. Sometimes he invented and attributed his invention to a likely source; it was one of the games he played with his notional readers. Below, where the attributions correspond to the sources, quotations come from translations of the original.

INTRODUCTION

1 evaporation, or nebulization: Scholars have generally accepted that Morselli was referring to an actual text. But so far as I’ve been able to determine, it’s an invented reference.

2 annoyingly over-cultivated mind: Morselli’s Diario (Adelphi, e-book, 2014) records his wide reading and thinking for the years 1938–73, and his