It’s not just the aggressive unresolved problems, but siege by small beloved things. Small, clinging family things, objects that grab you, each one with its modest, tenacious prehensile charm. A photograph you took and framed, of April snow on the roof, the little imitation Bokhara rug you bought yourself for Christmas, your typewriter with a sheet of paper springing from the platen. The acetylene hunting lamp you don’t need but which looks perfect in the entryway, lit up bright red; the LP of Albinoni’s piano sonata. Each one of them with its heartrending appeal, its insidious allure, would like to draw you in, bind you, and is astonished that you were thinking . . . that you tried to . . . that you came back, they say . . . if you’re still here, however, it’s also because of us. And maybe they even know it’s not true, but they have to pretend to be delighted. The truth is, a man who draws back from killing himself does so (and Durkheim didn’t see this) under the illusion that there is a third way, but in fact tertium non datur—there is no third possibility: it’s either a leap into the siphon or a dive back into daily life, where the rhythm of everything has stayed exactly as it was and you must hasten to make up for the progress lost. In seven days, in view of the final solution, I haven’t wound the clock or read the papers; it has been seven days since I took a bath, did the household accounts, opened the mail. The mail. Ball and chain, consummate emblem of routine. Proof positive the world exists. Mail announcing meetings, exhibits, and conferences, petty advertising, bimonthly tax statements (June–July), the insurance company with a printed greeting card: “Tomorrow you’ll be 40. Our best wishes and some friendly advice, do consider . . .”
Ah, the persecution of those recurrent wishes, for my birthday this time. My exclamatory friend Professor Mylius writes, “You’re about to embark on a second childhood, lucky fellow. Not without a little envy, I’d like to reiterate my warmest feelings of friendship.” Henriette, for her part: “Sunday June 2 is your day, and I’ll be there. Later on, in the early evening, but if you wish I’ll stay over until Monday.” She didn’t show up, actually. A cold, the fog, the trip all the way from Chrysopolis up here. “You would hole up at 1,400 meters.” Henrietta is my ex. I would describe her, with Flaubert in mind, as a sentimental miseducation. Having dutifully taken my bath, I pick up the notebook left by Frederica in the kitchen. Magazine, x francs; linens, x francs; one new floor mop; four liters milk; eggs, half a dozen.
4
HERE CONCLUDES the external report on the Event, and the internal one opens. But you won’t find me indulging in personal confessions because by now my personal story is history, the history of Mankind. I’m now Mankind, I’m Society (with the capital M and the capital S). I wouldn’t be exaggerating if I spoke of myself in the third person: “Mankind said this, did that.” Because as of June 2, the third person and any other person, grammatical or existential, has necessarily been my person. There is no longer anything but the I, and the I is no one but me. I am the I.
Monday, June 3, morning: Frederica and Giovanni don’t show up, and I get it in my head (it hurts, incidentally; under the bandage the wound throbs, it must be infected) that they’ve gone to the Monday market down in Widmad. I’ll find them there.
Three massifs, each taller than 4,000 meters, stand above the narrow basin that is Widmad; the village sits in the center, and the market at the center of the village. On a clear day, looking up from the old piazza, it hurts to raise your eyes: those looming glaciers are blinding. The other day there was nothing but fog in the little square. The mountains were hidden, the stall owners and the shoppers were invisible too. In the streets and in the houses, shops, and hotels, at the station and the post office, locals and visitors, men, women, and children were nowhere to be seen. An abandoned village, emptied out abruptly of everyone. Emptied in the same way and to the same degree as the nearby village of Lewrosen: no remains and no clues why. There’s a keen (you might say, or ironic) absence of explanations. A notice in a shop window catches my eye. The village band plans to ride the cable car at Mountàsc and perform what will be the highest-elevation concert in Europe, at 2,950 meters. The public is invited to enjoy the event “in that enchanting stage set where the snow is eternal.” The “show” will take place next Sunday, June 9.
In Widmad I go into the Hôtel Zemmi. (Zemmi is the name of our creek and of the entire valley.) Not a large hotel but an elegant or at least charming one, and never overcrowded, it is a favorite here of the German clientele, with a chef whose substantial, though not outstanding, meals I like, and a new covered swimming pool; the owner, a German named Kaiser, had invited me to the pool’s opening some months back. In Kaiser’s office on the ground floor next to the stairs, I recognize his leather jacket and sunglasses on the desk. I climb the stairs to the first floor and look into one of the rooms. The bed’s unmade, on the bedside table a lamp shines, lighting up a book and a wristwatch. A woman’s watch, and the book, in fact, is by Simone de Beauvoir. The reader’s not there. Leaving the Zemmi, I stop by to ring the bell at my friend Mylius’s house; he, too, is a German, from Göttingen, a professor emeritus, the one who sent me the greetings. No one comes to the door. In Lewrosen there’s a boarding school for some twenty or thirty kids; it’s open and I walk through from the first to the last room. In the dormitory next to every bunk are the shoes and clothes of each occupant, laid out with soldierly precision and disturbed by nothing and no one. Here, the lights are off, not a voice, not a footstep.
I don’t persist in my search. I sit on a bench on the main street of Lewrosen and listen to the silence. Which isn’t total, and therefore not frightening. A drainpipe behind me is dripping very slowly; the church carillon gracefully marks the quarter hour and the half; a metal box counts the solitary minutes as a switch flashes, connected to the traffic light at the intersection, which is working, in fact. And yet the silence weighs on me, and I perceive it with a sense that isn’t auditory, but perhaps emotional, perhaps thoughtful and reasoning. What produces silence is its opposite, is finally the human presence, whether welcome or not, and its absence. There are no substitutes for those two factors.
And the silence of human absence, I understand, is a silence that doesn’t flow. It accumulates.
I have a plan. These people left, I say to myself. They didn’t melt. Lower down in the valley, someone will have seen them go by, someone will know something, will explain this to me. So I must follow the road. There’s only the one, it continues north toward the plain. A means of transport must be found.
And so here I am in the Lewrosen public garage looking for a car, the only means of transport available. I don’t like cars, I’ve never owned one, but I’ve occasionally driven a certain inexpensive German make, which suits me on account of its spartan simplicity and rugged fenders. There are a number of them in the garage still running; I take the one closest to me and drive away without much trouble. The road is if anything too empty, and I know every turn of the way. I head downhill and stop at Claus. There’s a nursing home for old people there; Mylius, whose ninety-year-old mother is a resident, told me about it. I stop and walk around the home as I did at the school in Lewrosen, room by room, from the dining hall to the infirmary. After the nursing home, I scour the fire station, which is nearby, for firefighters, affectionately called the valley pumpers.
•
I was trying to come to terms with the situation, and especially my own, without excessive alarm and without drawing fanciful conclusions. This is not the Antarctic, it’s a narrow valley floor on which four thousand people are squeezed together. Even if they were playing hide-and-seek, even if they’d been maliciously smuggled away, someone would reveal themselves in the end.
But nobody let themselves be seen. I was tired of inspecting hotels, hospitals, schools, and fire stations. The spirit of my search had been fairly optimistic until I reached Claus, but discouragement was creeping in, and an ugly rancor. I kept going, making no further stops; at noon I reached the highway and by one PM Chr
ysopolis was coming into sight: the place where I’ve lived the longest and which I resolutely detest, the city for which I feel the most heated contempt. Today I’m relieved to see it again.
They wouldn’t be my people, but I would find people there. It was a large city, though it wasn’t the physical size of the place that reassured me. Its 400,000 merchants make Chrysopolis as positive as positivity itself, amenable to anything at all, apart from miracles. The gold ballast coined in the sacristies of its sixty banks cannot levitate into the realm of the miraculous, not even into the realm of the unexpected. The highest concentration of known wealth in the world is here, matter so concrete that it’s impervious to any evil and remains unaffected by heavenly grace or punishment. Its roots tap into the capital’s aeternum, reality at its utmost.
Returning here (it had been six months since my last visit) after that dream that began on the brink of the siphon, I “made land” and was once again in contact with the solid world. The mystery of my valley, abruptly depopulated, would rapidly be resolved. Risibly. In fact, it would make sense not to mention it, it would be enough to get a person committed. In the Market City, hospitals are strangely numerous. And full.
But whom would I speak to, if I found no signs of life? Everything from the outskirts to the center was shut down, silent, empty. Everything was untouched and in order, but immobile and out of time, because it is humans who lend time to things, and no humans were in sight. Not even one.
I parked the car right on the Börsenplatz, and since I was hungry I gulped down some hot chocolate and biscuits from a machine. Then I waited until three PM, when after-hours trading begins, that is, when the sanctuary celebrates the high mass of the closing of the bids, and the real thing, reserved to the inner circle, takes place, the Rothschild Hour as one of our leading traders calls it, when the financial destiny of Europe and most of the West is decided. But the house of worship is dark, it remains shut. Dead, like the columns of Baalbek.
The city, intact although just abandoned, is already archeology. They left no decipherable message. Instead, they left all their things. Made off in great haste with no thought for what was left behind: their treasure.
I went to see the offices of my newspaper. I worked there until quite recently as an occasional contributor. Although under no illusion I’d find someone, I felt the need to supply myself with confirmation. A newspaper is a witness, not just a collection bin of news items. A newspaper cannot desert its post, it must be the conscience reflected by events, and it cannot evade this duty on impulse, even a collective or universal impulse. As long as it lives, it is there, taking notice. As long as it lives.
And it was still, in some way, alive, in the senseless arm-waving of the linotype machines. I said I couldn’t erase the image of that gesture. It’s true. Even now I see those poor automatons jerking about, prisoners of their own mechanical fidelity.
5
I’VE TOLD you the rest, delivered my autopsy on the corpse of the city, still warm; related my return to Widmad: the days of extended fear, a fever that wearied the nerves and frustrated an ignominious fantasy life. Days and nights to write off as a plunge into the subhuman, into abject, shameless misery.
Ironically it was a clownish incident that cured me (temporarily). Like something out of an old farce.
In my house there’s a storeroom that faces onto the woods, where the door is always partly ajar. Venturing in there to get an armful of wood for the stove, I found one of Giovanni’s cows. The cow, animal bibliophagum, was eating my Psychology of the Conscious Mind, softbound copies with a green cover, a package of thirty or so sent by my publisher to distribute to friends—they were on a shelf. She was munching on them quite happily, a greenish mush dripping off one hairy lip onto the floor, which was scattered with clumps of wet pages. My laughter was edged with hysteria, but it relieved me. The fearful paralysis dissolved in grateful tenderness. I patted that beast, feeding quite unmetaphorically on my paperbound thoughts made words. I’d get them back tomorrow, supposing I succeeded in milking her, my ideas finally remunerative.
The next day I went down the path to Widmad on legs that were not too shaky. I went there with a plausible, if obvious plan: to telephone the world. There must be—must survive—a world beyond my valley and beyond the Golden City.
At two in the afternoon, Widmad is slicked with rain, geraniums flowering under red and green roofs. It looks unnatural, but as always, excessively perfect, like an advertising brochure. In the cemeterial hush, there’s not even the tiniest note of decay. An outbuilding of the Kursaal hosts an art exhibit. Behavior-Art, I’d gone to the opening, and it was what I’d expected. The Spanish artist Luis Lugán was showing bathtub faucets which, when you opened them, emitted electronic music by Krzysztof Penderecki, Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima for fifty-two string instruments. Cardenet, a Frenchman, had two young women (live ones, you know) drinking an aperitif on a transparent slab suspended three meters above the floor. The women (who are no longer there) wore no panties. Artist Jean Le Gac displayed an automobile with the doors open and the two left tires flat. Mattiaci, Italian: a composition titled Space, a glass table with a telephone on top “connected to the whole of Europe” and phone books from “the whole of Europe.” A viewer could speak to anyone he or she wished for ten seconds, paying off-peak rates. Yes, this communicative work of art was just what I needed.
To be certain the phone was working I once again dialed The Exact Time. I was given the time, and then began to call all over: Frankfurt (West Germany), Brighton (United Kingdom), Bologna (Italy), Boulogne (France), places and people with whom I’d occasionally been in correspondence in the past months and whose telephone numbers I had in my notebook. After that, I began to pick numbers at random from the phone books. I called three belonging to unknown Parisians. No answer, not even there. They, too, were silent. I tried Paris again, dialing Dr. Ahmed Ibn Yussef, 142 boulevard de la Poissonnière. A medical man, a dental surgeon. O sweet luck, what delight: I hear a voice. A graceful female voice (Ahmed’s wife?) tells me: Le Docteur va rentrer ce soir a six heures. Veuiller bien me donner votre numéro ou adresse. Si au contraire vous préférez . . . that’s all. Of course, the allotted ten seconds have expired. I copy down Ahmed’s number and run, I race, to the Hôtel Mayr in front of the Kursaal. From the porter’s desk—he is, or he was, Battaglia, a friend of mine—I call back. I hear the same voice, and I interrupt her right off. “Madame, can you tell me whether things are normal in Paris?” She replies, “The doctor will return at six PM this evening. Please leave your number or address. If instead, you prefer—.” I hang up. It isn’t the dentist’s wife and it’s not his secretary. It’s a recorded message.
My lack of success doesn’t demoralize me. It goads me on: I will go myself, in person, to 142 boulevard de la Poissonnière. Immediately. On the first flight leaving Teklon. If things are normal in Paris, there are still other questions to be answered, of course, but if the events of these days are localized, I can accept them. A sudden trip appeals to me. Running away. A detail I should mention: Although I’ve traveled all over Europe and a good part of the United States, I’ve never been to Paris. I have no money on me, so I ask the absconder Battaglia for a loan. His tips from June 1 are in the drawer at reception, a sum that’s more than enough. I leave a note of explanation for my cash withdrawal, and take off in my little car, which is waiting for me where I left it in the middle of the street three days before.
Teklon is Chrysopolis’s airport, closer to me, coming from the mountains, than it is to the city. I’m there in half an hour. This is one of Europe’s crossroads, an intercontinental jumping-off point. But today it isn’t crowded.
It’s empty. Empty of people. The gates, the corridors, the ticket windows, the customs hall, the baggage claim, the bar, the restaurant (where some years back I waited half a day for an aircraft that turned out to have been hijacked): no one. Should I have foreseen this? I don’
t know. However, I’m now in the recovery phase and feel optimistic; consulting one of the many departure boards that are lit up, I see that in the next three hours, a number of planes are arriving and departing from the four corners of the globe. In the space of fifty minutes there are flights to Paris from Zagreb, from Nairobi via Cairo and Rome, and from Athens, as well as a charter “on which some seats may be available.” Here we face paralysis, or the desert, for some unknown reason, but in Nairobi, Cairo, Athens, the world is still in motion. What I’ve been calling, with sociological nonchalance, the D-Bomb (rapid and thorough depopulation) or the R-Bomb (perfect rarefaction) may have gone off at Chrysopolis and environs, but it cannot have affected aircraft traveling over the Mediterranean at 10,000 meters, or across the Sudan.
By now it’s seven PM; I’m still waiting. In the car, I venture out into the airport’s crepuscular enormity. The takeoff runway is unencumbered, but not the landing lanes. A number of planes sit on the tarmac, one practically on top of the other, sideways. Closest to me, and I recognize it because I’ve flown on one, an Aeroflot Tupolev has rolled off the runway, mowing down the grass for quite some distance. Stopped now, nose down, tail section raised to a whitish, uninviting sky it won’t be slicing through again, it seems. However, I’m not ready to concede. This place is by its nature extra-territorial; it belongs to the planetary universe and its infinitely far horizons. Short of some global cataclysm, life must somewhere reveal itself, someone must sooner or later materialize from on high and attempt to dock. The lights flickering on the fuselage will appear and if the fog prevents that, I’ll hear the roar of the engines. I won’t sleep, I’ll stay on sentry, I’ll listen.
And in fact, I didn’t sleep. Long after midnight, sprawled in a chair in the main ticket office, I grew weary of paging through old newspapers and went outside. Once again to the runways, where the whiteness of the lights is vaguely sealike. I made myself walk to the distant hangar area, and went inside one, naïvely astonished at its cathedral dimensions. The lights and the immensity of it were blinding, I sought the shadow under a wing. Tall castles laced with stairs and laden with instruments laid siege to an aircraft body. An official inspection, interrupted suddenly (is that allowed? why?); oil or kerosene is dripping through the landing gears and spreading out in sinister, iridescent pools. I am smoking, and draw back, trembling. The cathedral, supported by a maze of the finest openwork steel struts, is beautiful. The sight invigorates me—technophobia be damned; the structure ennobles its builders, and makes me believe human beings cannot be extinguished—just as the Christians threatened by the Turks at Constantinople would go and look upon their glorious Hagia Sofia, and from those domes and columns draw auspices of salvation.
Dissipatio H.G. Page 4
