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

a knob with a polite message in Gothic script: “In an emergency, ring at any hour.” When I press the knob, Sunday chimes, invisible, slice through the muggy air. I ring again. The bishop must be making a pastoral visit, or he’s gone on vacation; or he, too, has decamped with all his acolytes and the faithful, like the others, like everyone. Like the custodians of the law. Up ahead on theater row I see the police station. I enter, walk through every room on two floors, from the guard post to the phone bank. Not a soul. On the corner near the customs house there’s a woman’s umbrella, upside down and open on the pavement, and a purse. A taxi stands by the sidewalk in front of a smallish house. I pick up the purse, and there’s a checkbook in it, and a genuine pocket watch, an old one, the hands stopped at 2, inscribed with the words “To Meggy Weiss Lo Surdo, happy hours”: Lovely Meggy, returning late from an evening with friends (or friend, male); she’s about to swing through the gate when something suddenly obliges her to dash off, leaving all the worldly goods she has on her person in that handbag.

The humble taxi driver also heard that urgent, compelling, quite impartial call. And he, too, has obeyed, leaving behind his most precious possession, his automobile.

•

I don’t like Chrysopolis8 much, in fact I can’t stand it. For me it is the Biblical antitype9, the triumphant consummation of everything I scorn, the epitome of all I detest in this world, my negative caput mundi.10 My fuga saeculi, my flight from this world, was even then an escape from this place, the precise material expression of our century. Even the fact I’m looking at it now feels implausible, dispiriting.

Chrysopolis is empty. On the streets, in the squares, on the quays, and in the center, it is as calm and orderly as it must have been that night at two AM, but empty. How many were there? Four hundred thousand, four hundred twenty thousand. In any event, they were.

I’ve come in search of just a few thousand of the departed. Those who live in my valley. But here I find a mega-exodus, a desertion en masse. This thing (unthinkable) surprised people in their sleep here too. Night’s suspension of collective life has simply been prolonged—indefinitely. Although I continue to imagine they have fled, in truth they haven’t fled anywhere, just as they didn’t at Pompeii. Nor have they been reduced to ashes, as they were at Hiroshima. They’ve gone in some other fashion. Been abducted. Snatched, seized, dragged out of their houses and other places. Out of their bodies, even.

No, not out of their bodies, apparently. The June showers are coming down, but Chrysopolis reveals no trace of bodies. What’s left is, yes, bodily, but not organic. Scraps of litter on the streets, stubs of movie tickets, empty cigarette packets; neon signs, still lit, jets of water rising from fountains, cars, rows of them below the apartment buildings and along the avenues in the park. The Golden City is intact. The escapees (or whatever forces made them leave) took nothing with them. The tables outside Café Odeon met with no violence, and neither did the Jugendstil façade. The gleaming windows, behind which, a thousand years ago, Trotsky sat with his wife, and Lenin, are also intact.

There are other remains, too, organic and alive but not human. The geometry of tulips in front of the Hôtel Esplanade, acacia trees bending under the weight of their blossoms. The celebrated jasmine, or gymnosperm, that surges out of Baron Aaron’s villa right in the center. Crows on the façade of the National Theater; cats, hordes of them, on the steps of the Crédit Financier or the Diskonto.

Beneath those monuments to Mitteleuropean finance—no, to Continental finance—the cats pursue one another. They mate, howling perversely. And not just cats. In front of the gates of the powerful Bankers’ Association (in my day they used to say they were solid gold, those gates) I saw guano stains, and thought they were due to pigeons. It was a hen. Pecking at a heap of sodden leaves, and I have to admit the sight of it was traumatizing. A hen. The four horses of the Apocalypse staggering over that patch of asphalt wouldn’t have startled me more.

And now, the return trip. No expert driver, I’m bearing down on the accelerator in fear and fury. Forty kilometers across the plain, I’ve counted a dozen cars that have run off the road. I stop at the point where, on the way here, I saw a bus wrecked against a concrete retaining wall. The bus is twisted, seats and windows smashed to pieces, but there are no traces of damage to the occupants. A crazy thought comes to me: when the vehicle crashed, there weren’t any passengers in it, not one, not even the driver. Back then, car accidents took lives; here, it’s the taking of the life (the subtraction, the elimination) that causes the accident. The sole victim is the automobile. Further on, a mail truck lies in a field, wheels in the air, mail sacks marked “Valuables, Registered” spilling from the doors. Beside the driver’s seat, a gun; a gendarme was escorting the delivery. He’s gone too, but the valuables, registered, that are now spread out over the grass are in no danger. On that same field, upright and motionless, is an electric locomotive, derailed from the tracks that run parallel to the road. The rest of the train is still in place on the tracks. I remember when I was a kid the farmers around here used to call railroad cars “gray cows.” The gray cows now graze peacefully; the kilowatts, like the horsepower, have returned to nature. Untamed.

Now the plain comes to an end, and the mountains begin to close in around me. Switchback by switchback I ascend to the kingdom of the oaks and the beech,