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

a protruding rock. It was a powerful blow, and it stunned me, and just then a great peal of thunder shook the valley, which was as black as the cavern I was emerging from. It was the season’s first thunderstorm.

Perhaps because I was still dazed after hitting my head, I took the wrong path back. After descending the mountain for an hour I found myself not at home but in front of a kiosk where in summer they sell water and drinks to hikers. It was of course closed, but there was a phone booth outside. I thought, why not use it?

3

I CALLED 3-3-3, A Friend in Need. Am I being ironic? Not at all. Our society’s good Samaritanism, its hypocritical offers of help to the very people society tosses out, these were just the sort of homilies that under the circumstances, I could do without. Mine was merely a dull curiosity, a wish to hear a sleepy voice (“My friend, it’s all right, you can tell me”) and then hang up. And a wish to get out of the weather, for a gelid rain was pouring down. But 3-3-3 did not pick up. Maybe the line was down? I dialed 1-1, The Exact Time, and it cluck-clucked, “It is two o’clock and zero minutes. It is two o’clock and zero minutes. . . .”

Zero. I climbed the path toward home—that is, I pulled back from the narrow channel’s grip. No recriminations, no accusations of cowardice, just annoyance on my part. Anyone who has lived through such a deferment (a sentence commuted is what I call it, after two previous experiences) will not be surprised.

On the bed, still dressed, all but frozen from my feet to my ears, I thought about the siphon and the channel, and they didn’t seem to me quite as lugubrious as they actually were. Specious, vaguely theatrical, maybe. But the ultimate solution, neat and clean and simple, was right at hand. I went to get her, my black-eyed girl, and lay back on the bed with her. I pressed my mouth to hers at length.

I invited her with my finger, once. But not vigorously enough. Then a second time, my mouth still pressed to hers. But a third time, no, because suddenly the shadows enveloped me. And stillness.

•

I had fallen asleep, a mortal sleep. And a noisy one—as morning came I was snoring so loudly the window panes were shaking. I ought to explain that I have a device that tape-records any sounds I emit while sleeping. And those recordings have offered me discoveries quite a bit more valuable than Freudian oneiromancy: a fine selection of moaning, laughing, exclaiming, cursing, begging, praying, all material of considerable interest.

(I must explain this, I thought. But to whom? No one, clearly. I don’t subscribe to this idea that everything one expresses, no matter how private, is a form of communication. That “I must explain” presumes no one and nothing. Addressed to myself, it’s a useful tautology. It keeps me company.)

By nine AM I was awake; I pushed aside the black-eyed girl, still in my bed, chilly and useless. On my pillow was a clot of dried blood. I touched my head: my hair was sticky with blood. It was the blow to my head I’d sustained while leaving the cavern. It didn’t seem to be serious. I warmed some food for breakfast and ate with revenant hunger. Sitting in front of the kitchen window, I gulped down my coffee and milk, bread and butter, jam and honey, and scoured the valley with my eyes. From the telephone booth I had seen, in the distance, on the other side, two beacons lighting up the night—still, vertical, pointing toward the heavens.

My vision is perfect. It was raining hard, but from the kitchen window I could make out a dark object hidden behind the larch trees quite some way down the slope under the roadway that runs up to the Malga Ross. I could even see that it was a car, fallen, I imagined, from the narrow road above and perched vertically on its back wheels, radiator up. It’s an uninhabited place, and people rarely drive along that road; there could be someone in that car, someone who’d been hurt and couldn’t move. Therefore, I thought, I must go. I went out, following a trail that goes down to the creek and then comes up the other side. Carrying an umbrella and a walking stick with a metal ferrule in case I needed to break open the car windows. Venturing out was probably my reply to the hypocrites of 3-3-3. Or maybe I was planning to make a fresh start, based on generosity. (To return to the living, as it were.) Twenty minutes later I was at the creek and my good intentions had fizzled out, if indeed I’d ever had them. Our creek is one of those that swells a lot; after an hour of rain it was deep and roaring loudly, and I had to cross it. There’s no bridge, I’d have to jump from rock to rock and then scramble up a steep bank. Furthermore, I was alone, and if I did find someone injured, how would I look after them? I’d have to go down to the village in search of help. Well then, I might as well go right away.

I went back to the house to change; the mud was up to my knees. I had a hot coffee, and set out again, intending to alert the gendarmes who are posted right at the edge of the village on the road from the Malga Ross. There are two and I know them: Sergeant Rabost is always friendly when we meet and tells me, “We’re bachelor brothers, but you’re a volunteer and we’re not.” By ten AM I was at their chalet. I found neither and kept going toward Widmad. I found no one. The shop windows were lit, the street lamps too (because of the fog?), but there wasn’t