Ironic, contemplative, psychologically astute, Dissipatio is sometimes wry and even funny, but also quite a tragic portrait of a man so solitary that even when the others were alive he behaved like the last man on earth. At the end of the book he’s no longer living in time (history), but Nature is, which consoles him:
So here I sit here on a bench on 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.
The stony palaces and dry asphalt of Chrysopolis will disappear as plants and trees grow. In this strange eternity, life is abundant.
•
In 1974, just a year after Morselli died, the Milanese publishing house Adelphi began to issue his novels, one by one, to considerable acclaim. His friend Maria Bruna Bassi was instrumental in getting them considered, and Giuseppe Pontiggia, the reader for Adelphi, recommended they be published. What could have changed, that novels of no interest in 1973 were suddenly hailed by critics as fresh and exciting in 1974?
Perhaps it’s worth considering that, with hindsight, 1973 is often seen as the end of an era: the end of the broad prosperity and expansion across the West that followed World War II. It was the year OPEC oil prices skyrocketed. The gold / dollar standard had recently come to an end. The American war in Vietnam ceased with the Paris Peace Accords but the accumulated costs, moral and monetary, were just beginning to be felt. The US intervention had sowed anger, discredit, and disillusion, and not just at home, but around the world.
Morselli, who followed current affairs and “futurist” thinkers among many other things, and who belonged to the environmental and cultural heritage association Italia Nostra, had been brooding about the damage done to the human soul and the natural environment by runaway economic growth and lack of care for the planet. He also seemed to perceive that history was moving on, and may have sensed that the expansive, hopeful mood that had followed the war in Europe and across the Atlantic had run its course.
A new era was beginning, as yet only dimly perceived. It was one of those times when new voices can be heard, and Morselli’s magnificent speculative histories at last found their moment to emerge. The years have if anything rendered Dissipatio H.G.’s melancholy assessment of human achievement on this earth more haunting.
—FREDERIKA RANDALL
DISSIPATIO H.G.
1
THE AUDIO-visual debris keeps me company. It’s the most immediate remains of what has been left to me of them. Two dispatches are purely verbal, from radio broadcasts I suppose. One reports the failed hijacking and consummated rape of a girl on an Olympic Airways flight, and the other, in English, might be from the not very trustworthy Voice of Europe: “Here’s a favorite Polish joke: ‘The state pretends to pay us, we pretend to work.’” And two images: a bottle with a crown and red letters in the foreground spelling out Seagram’s Canadian Whisky, and through the lens of my binoculars, the white-lined quadrant of the tennis court behind the Hôtel Belvedere. My automatic memory contains no more. These recollections float by, nebulous, insistent.
It’s debris that amounts to little. Relics, by now. Half a month has passed since that night; half a century, I could equally say. First reaction, an extended panic. And then, but quickly brushed away, incredulity, and then fear again. Now, habituation. Resignation? I’d say acquiescence, actually. With intervals of lofty hilarity and fierce solace.
I’m leaving the offices of the newspaper. I worked there when I was younger, and today I returned and walked all around, to check on something. And I was right; the linotype machines were still going through their crazy motions, the skeletal arms somehow continuing to rise and fall. When they disappeared (at two in the morning) this was where production stood: linotypists composing in the print room, editors finishing off the last stories upstairs, press not yet rolling. The wire service flashes, frozen on the teletype machines. I didn’t bother to read them but I could see they were interrupted. Transmission had broken off at the other end, while here everything was normal. In its special stall, the IBM with its red lights lit. In fact, all the lights are still burning in the office, and in the secretary’s room—that would be Miss Manàas as always—a little fan continues to hum on her desk. She’d been writing and the pen lies across the page, as if fallen from her hand. But the chair remains upright. It hasn’t even been pushed back from the desk. As if she had vaporized; how did she manage that?
My properly secular newspaper has its offices (had) across from the Lutheran bishop’s seat. In my day the bishop was Burg, a little fellow I knew only by sight but who, whenever we crossed paths, always took the trouble to say hello first. The episcopal seat, in an Austrian rococo palace, is empty today. In a small niche on the corner of the building, I see 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 n
othing 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, 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 ha
d been waiting for since last year. (Quite grotesquely, that book would rescue me from a nightmare on the third day.) I sat before the typewriter all afternoon, never touching it. The clickety-clack of the keys would have upset me. Either that, or some superstition wouldn’t allow me to break the silence. I reheated the coffee on tiptoe in the kitchen. The rain was pattering hard on the cobblestones outside, but I felt I must make no sound. Like them, I must be dead. My bodily functions were normal: I ate with appetite, even voraciously; the horror was ongoing, without intervals, so I shuddered as I ate, in time with my chewing. I slept, dreamlessly, strange to say. Smoked the odd pipe, drank the usual brandy. Urinated more often than usual; it’s a well-known fact that fear excites the excretory system. Even when fear becomes one with the person, as was happening to me.
Dissipatio H.G. Page 2
