It went on for two days, no more, and not even full days, before the crisis resolved things. As to how it felt: it was a taste of eternity.
•
And yet, the Inexplicable came about because of me. Or anyway, the events coincided, at the beginning, with a strictly private thing of mine. A conjunction, a correlation, I dare say—not mere chance.
That fanciful night between June 1 and June 2. The night when it was decided that I would commit suicide.
Why.
Because the negative outweighed the positive. On my scales. By seventy percent. Was that a banal motive? I’m not sure.
•
So far as precise estimates go, I confess my psychic life is poor. Also simple, elementary. Someone’s said to be “a born accountant”: I must confess I don’t recognize the unconscious frustrations and visceral pains, the festering evils that afflict modern man. A colleague accused me of reductive criticism. I was forever insisting (everything’s already been said but nobody’s listening, so it has to be constantly restated)11 that the interior monologue, typical of contemporary literature, that gives vent to unconscious sorrows and visceral suffering in capillary inspections of the self and false encounters with the other, is proof that we haven’t moved beyond the psychologism of that sub-feeling and sub-thinking that was already artificial (and dull) a century ago. However, anyone looking into my case would certainly not make the mistake of psychologism. He would have to be reductive, no way around it.
I decided to kill myself in the first place because I was the victim of a kind of mafia. And there’s no escaping the mafia, I knew.
It began with an illness. Bodily, not mental; real, not imaginary; somewhat chronic. One of those illnesses that allow you to go on living, and when treated with a certain amount of humanity, to be cured. And in practice, I was on my way to being cured. The doctor at Chrysopolis who was supposed to be taking care of me instead sent me to a specialist, and the specialist to a radiologist, and he ordered a second specialist, and he a second radiologist, and he prescribed some tests (only eleven, Wasserman to ESR) to be done at a clinic in Chrysopolis, after which I was advised to undergo a series of diagnostic procedures, then sent to another specialist (#3) by another radiologist (also #3). And so it went, in pairs, or rather threes, (specialist, radiologist, clinic with lab for exams, brief inpatient stay) expanding exponentially to total, a few weeks ago, twelve specialists, twelve radiologists, thirty-three sets of blood tests, and twenty-seven series of diagnostic procedures over a period of two years and eight months. An experience familiar to millions of victims like myself taken in by the “early detection” racket. A racket that’s part of the System (in the Marcusian sense)12 and thus is benevolently considered by the sociologists (it goes unmentioned, uncondemned) but which meets in every way the criteria of mafia extortion. The initial illness is not serious, but could become so, and therefore “we must keep an eye on it” via frequent medical interventions to ascertain “in a diagnostic setting” whether there has been possible degeneration. But, wonders the subject (passive), what’s the purpose when, should “possible degeneration” manifest itself, it is incurable, and will go untreated? Every three months you force me to await the verdict: “Has it appeared, or hasn’t it?” What’s the purpose when, if it has “appeared,” the death agony will be slow and certain, conscious, and unavoidable?
The purpose, patently, is not so much the money, counted in the hundreds of thousands, but the power. The subjugation of throngs of men and women to a class. Or a clan, or a corporazione. I don’t wish to be dramatic, but to my mind, capitalist exploitation, boss over worker, is pretty much an amusing parlor game next to this other forced subservience. And since escape is impossible, the attendant blackmail is bound to be the most vicious and entrapping.
It’s an industry built on the soundest of economic bases. It’s not exposed to market downturn. Within the group, its members practice strict solidarity. It has no competition from outside. No crises for them.
For us, for me, yes: in my case the crisis was one of disgust. Disgust with myself. There were mornings when I tried not to see myself in the mirror as I stood shaving.
When a person leaps over the balcony or throws himself under a train, some driving psychic mechanism is at work, obviously, but on its own, it’s not sufficient. There must be a trigger, said old Durkheim, and the fellow was not devoid of acumen.
Returning to my own case, what comes to mind is this: last autumn I found—a couple of hundred paces from my mountain retreat (1,395 meters above sea level)—some numbered stakes in the ground. They gave me a fever. Literally. A frenetic investigation, consultations with friends who knew something, friends in Chrysopolis. I call it the Golden City but it is above all the country’s operative hub where decisions are made, especially opprobrious decisions. The news was deadly. A despicable “anonymous” company, Euro-Autoroute SA, according to rumor owned by two powerful local entrepreneurs, had plans to build a Le Havre–Athens continental motorway. Where this artery crossed the mountains it would “impact” Widmad Lewrosen. There would be a huge tunnel that let out in the upper valley and assorted “creative solutions” would be built, among them a “daring” viaduct in reinforced concrete over the Zemmi (my Zemmi), as well as a cloverleaf and entrance ramps. And a motel.
As Durkheim might say, there’s your trigger. Slow-acting. The winter went by, then spring, which comes late up here and exquisitely, began to arrive. It was mournful for me, with those red and white stakes under my nose. My decision grew firm, and though I lingered over the details in a self-satisfied and somewhat comic way, I was quite calm and certain about it.
I would be gone, leaving no trace. That point seemed essential to me. People, if they did look into it, must come to the conclusion I was permanently missing. Or better, mysteriously annihilated, dissolved into nothing.
The good Giovanni, my neighbor, caretaker, shepherd, husband of my housekeeper Frederica, suggested the place without intending to. He knew about a certain cave, up on the spurs of Karessa, a cave discovered by him and explored by speleologists (specologists? I’m not altogether sure what they’re called) on further visits. As for the date that I chose, between June 1 and 2, there was a specific reason for it: I was born on June 2 at midday, and I didn’t want to turn forty. A point of passage, forty, when maturity begins to decline toward old age. I wanted to be off while I was still thirty-nine, if only technically.
•
At twelve thirty, having eaten nothing, I started out, creeping past the house of my shepherds on tiptoe. But Giovanni was there, in the doorway: “What are you doing up at this hour?” He’d just come from the barn. A goat had gotten untied and was bothering the other animals, they were making noise. “You must help me build a shed for the goats. Goats and cows don’t get along.”
I said nothing in reply, but took the path that runs beside our meadows and then heads into the shadows of the fir trees. A downward spiral (I thought to myself, walking). You’ve always taken downhill slopes in your life (I thought); the last one will be straight down. Your life will come to an end in a narrow rocky channel. It was more an academic consideration than a practical one, just then. But I was as light and dry as a pumice stone, and the image of a fine channel into which my existential curve would slip pleased me. I had no regrets, for everything was used up; no uncertainties, for everything was planned, and my habitus, my nature, as a facilitator, obviated the need for courage.
In reality I didn’t have to descend at all, I had to climb. The cave opening is at 1,600 meters and the path led sharply up to it. I was winded when I got there, but otherwise fine. I recognized the opening immediately although I’d never seen it before. I lit, and then immediately extinguished my flashlight, which I didn’t need (being a nictalope,13 equipped with night vision), and walked comfortably; there were no stalactites, no bats (as I’d feared), and the ground was flat and just slightly slippery. By twelve fif
ty I was at the edge of the well, a large oval pit with standing water down below. Giovanni’s description had been meticulous: the well was shaped somewhat like an S on its side; after a short stretch downhill, it rose for a couple of meters and then there was another bend (a natural siphon that trapped the water). From there it was a dozen meters straight down to a sealed lake, Lake of Solitude it’s called, that doesn’t communicate with the outside. I only had to let myself down into the well, hold my breath and swim past the siphon, then fall. Straight up or head first, my choice. Into the lake. Three or four minutes later, I’d drown.
On the edge of the well, feet dangling in the dark, I allowed myself a sip of brandy. I had brought half a bottle with me. At a quarter past midnight,14 if I pushed off still seated, I’d be down there quickly, a couple of strokes to the siphon, then the final jump. But at thirty past by my watch I was still there. Contemplating. I was contemplating Spanish brandy, and the fact that my Spanish brandy was every bit as good as the French product. Why was that? Because, yes, it made sense, if you distill wines with a high sugar content (those that come from the south) the result can only be superior. Those French Premier Bois are made with varieties that ripen under a miserly sun. Any advantage lent by aging in the famous oak barrels of the Charente is neutralized by that fact. Now it was twenty to one, and I’d come to a conclusion: The glory enjoyed by French cognac was due to the collective power of suggestion, admittedly a power that’s been working for centuries. Either that, or it was just one of those phony miracles effected by advertising.
No. For me, there was nothing humorous about these ruminations on distilling. (And note that no further sips from the bottle succeeded the first.)
Nor did my thoughts disguise some deep angst. Although I wasn’t in a particularly introspective mood, I felt clearheaded and calm. And well, strangely, unshakably well. On that unexpected note came what followed. I didn’t act, I was acted upon by organic logic, that is: some eighty-five kilograms of living substance just didn’t obey. Aware, in its way, of the rule that to die is to be materially transformed, the matter simply refused to budge.
By a quarter to one I was already on my way back out of the cave. Still inside, I hit my head hard on 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 one passerby, not one car on the move. The first aid station was empty, so were the garages and the hotels. I thought I understood: Thanksgiving. June 2 is the national Day of Thanksgiving, a holiday devoted to fasting and prayer, when you neither buy nor sell, go neither on a hike nor to the football stadium, when the cafés and restaurants are closed, and my most pious compatriots (convinced they are the elect among us) remunerate Providence with that grace that so favors them. And they aren’t meant to worry about their neighbor’s troubles, so the injured in that upturned car will be waiting until tomorrow.
But newspapers do come out on Thanksgiving. The newsstand next to the station is closed, and so i
s the station, although it is lit up as if it were night. It’s empty, silent; there are no travelers and no rail workers. I sat on a platform and remained there waiting the rest of the morning. I didn’t see a single train. Were they on strike?
Come on. In the history books they say that even long ago during the Great Strike of 1919, the trains were running. Not only are we pious, we are a people of irreproachable services, a society in which labor peace is never disturbed, and the question is whether this is due to worker satisfaction and means the workers feel gratefully affectionate toward the system, with which they zealously cooperate. As for myself, an intellectual, unreceptive monad without obligations, the matter didn’t interest me; I instead paid tacit homage to the bourgeois bonhomie (so egotistical, so optimistic, so sturdily nationalistic) that sees a clear blue Alpine lake where another would diagnose a social swamp. Railroads are not highways; they don’t destroy the landscape, and that satisfies me.
Once they would have called me qualunquista, thirty years ago, a démobilisateur.15 Such labels are now out of fashion, luckily.
Truth is, and every tourist brochure will tell you so, our trains, from the day they were built, have never stopped running. This shutdown, and the absence of any staff in an important station like Widmad-Lewrosen, seemed very strange, but there was something else no less strange: when I passed by the Trinity Protestant Church, I gave the door a push and found it was locked up tight. I did the same at the Catholic church of St. Vilcifredo. It was open, but empty.
I was tired now, and after the night I’d had, I had a right to be, so I stopped knocking on doors. I took the path back up the mountain in thick fog, about a fifty-minute walk. Whether I wanted to or not, I must go home and—after this interval devoted to others—pick up the conversation with myself.
When you’ve been through something as deeply personal as I had that night, would picking up be painful, exhausting? Above all boring, I’d say.
Dissipatio H.G. Page 3
