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

past the chestnuts with their huge domes, until I meet the tall, slim species, treetops lost in the fog. My real family—and my only one. I’ve rejoiced in them before. For a moment I’m invaded with the usual pleasure, a physical sensation, felt in the breath and the blood. This is my country: houses of dark wood, red shutters framed in white, the sweet-smelling, reviving evening air. But my valley—I’m on my way up it now—is deserted, the houses are dark. I can switch off the headlights, I won’t meet anyone on the road, and no one will have to pull over to let me pass. I won’t meet a face, won’t hear a voice.

And that seems unfair, cruel, to me. In the city I was just a spectator. Here I must live.

Where have they gone. Why have they gone.

•

I’ve sung the praises of these mountain people before, people who didn’t consider emigrating (unlike those in other, nearby valleys), who were stubbornly loyal to their villages, almost biologically attached, back when the mountain was no industrial plant, and snow no precious raw material. When the tourist gold mine opened, it wasn’t these people who prospected, but the residents of the plain who came up here to build hotels and houses and rail lines, and then cable cars and ski lifts. The natives cling to the margins; toward these new guests they display an ironic pity that stiffens in winter when the slalom worshipers arrive. One time I wrote: They come struggling by with their animals and their pack baskets under the bright lights of the Victoria and the Bellevue, past the swimming pools and the mini-golf course, and in their eyes is the same tedium, the same resignation that the people of the pagus in Constantine’s day showed before the basilicas of the new Christian religion.

But my appreciation of them now seems quite undeserved. They, too, have vanished. I don’t believe they were swept away by some unnatural force. Like the citizens of Chrysopolis they simply succumbed to collective madness, although they should have been immunized against it. Or they followed an order they should have disobeyed. They were complicit, because there is no force, no authority, that could have obliged them.

Permit me a slim hope, something held out by my “shepherds,” at least them. Frederica and Giovanni. They’ve always offered their attentive, brusque, but maybe nonetheless affectionate concern not only to their cows and goats, but to me. Will I find them up there scowling at the door, waiting? I haven’t seen them for days. Yesterday I had to open the barn and let the starving animals go free.

Widmad is lifeless. The flags lined up on the terrace at the Kursaal stupidly salute only me. So too the geraniums spilling out of the boxes at City Hall and the streetlight winking at the corner of the market square. The lights and the chalky facades of the great hotels reflected on the wet asphalt shine for me alone.

I leave the car in the middle of the street; it won’t bother anyone. Once the engine is silenced, I am even more alone, I who detest that noise.

I begin walking home.

It’s a fifty-minute climb up a narrow path through the spruce and larches in a silence that only a few days ago thrilled me. Going forward is a struggle. I’m tired. I listen, keep an eye out. I’m afraid.

2

A DOG is following me, a spaniel with that mossy, musky smell that pedigreed dogs have when it rains. Trailing a leash, desperate. Famished, probably, like Frederica and Giovanni’s animals. After a short while I lose sight of him. Next to the Hôtel Zemmi cable car stop, the road divides in several trails, and I read for the thousandth time the wooden signs in red, yellow, and green that indicate the different mountain routes. I take the steepest one, my trail: for four years now this has been my path to privilege, that of living above and away, living alone. But now I’m afraid.

Some days later, I am remembering that fear.

It was not, at first, a nervous collapse—anxiety, terror—so much as deep, considered horror, fed and abetted by my critical faculties, which would ordinarily fight fear. That, or my violated common sense. It was a thinking, reasoning fear, lucidly recapitulating the situation, quite capable of facing the situation. The panic came later.

I remember, and try to understand. The Inexplicable is not the unknown, not the attractive mystery (attractive because it’s good enough to stay a decent distance away from us?). No, the Inexplicable is something else, something that when it is overwhelming and persistent saps a person’s life energy. My response to the absurd was physical, animal, natural; unable to wish it away, I perceived it as an immediate, overwhelming act of aggression, and froze. It was an atavistic response; a helpless beast does the same thing, freezes.

That evening, that night, the next day, I was sunk in utter inertia. I felt no impulse to flee, the trauma I’d endured was expressed in paralysis. Locked in my four rooms with doors and windows barred (at one point I’d decided to barricade myself in) I waited for it to arrive and strike me. Finish me off, seeing that my turn was coming soon. I was condemned; beyond my walls, everything was submerged in a death fluid and I was immersed in it, a diving bell at the bottom of the sea. By osmosis, that fluid would creep through the walls. My anxiety was conscious and focused, not frenetic, and I was present to myself. At one point, my mind clear of hallucinations, I coolly listened for the suspect rustling of gigantic bestial creatures lurking outside the house (ancient sauropods or Cretaceous lizards). I was able to be somewhat active; the psychological collapse didn’t block me completely. On the second day I sat down at the typewriter, planning to copy out notes for the revision of a book, which an editor had been waiting for since