Morning arrives, and the portents are not favorable. I’m still waiting. Camping out as best I can in a chair with sandwiches and beer and the paperbacks I took from the newsstand, in my bones a queasy feeling of sleep repressed, in my nerves tension and worry. But I hold out. Imagining long sequences of hijackings. Simultaneous strikes by the pilots, the customs agents, the barmen, and the newsstand owners. I pretend not to notice that for eighteen hours I have been waiting strictly alone, that the great hall and the various spaces I’ve been walking through are abandoned, as are the bar tables with their layer of thick dust, on which my finger, motivated by the usual fool reflex, traces the letter H, the initial of my ex’s name, over and over.
From Nairobi—I begin to chant—from Cairo, Zagreb, Caracas, Athens. To Paris, Tehran, Montreal, Moscow.
6
NO, I AM not some comic Alceste le Misanthrope.16 I am, on and off, an Anthropophobe, I’m afraid of people, as I am of rats and mosquitoes, afraid of the nuisance and the harm of which they are untiring agents. This is not the only reason, but it’s one of them, why I seek solitude, a solitude (in the modest limits of the possible) that is genuine, i.e., extensive and abiding. But now that they are playing hard to get, or are trying to, anyway, I’m beginning to reevaluate their importance.
Names like Meggy Weiss Lo Surdo, Ahmed Ibn Yussef, and Mark W. Black have a new significance.
I’m about to leave the airport. Next to the stairs I see two suitcases and an olive-green duffel marked with its owner’s name: Sgt. Mark W. Black, 128 Pioneers Sect., Eleventh Army US Forces in Europe. And there, beyond the forlorn suitcases, sits a jeep with assorted American military insignia: white star, bison, tomahawk, etc. The fortuitous encounter with Sergeant Black makes up my mind. Fate has decreed I must make another search and has supplied me with the fuel. Literally: the jeep is carrying two canisters of gasoline, which I use to fill up my tank.
That Eleventh’s base, a stone’s throw from my home, made the papers a few months ago. There was a mutiny by the soldiers of color. (The sergeant wasn’t one of them; Black is as white as I am and he furnished the proof with a photo collection of young black women in scanty clothing, found in his army duffel bag.) The base is over the border of course. My country is the only one in the West not to host the American military within its territory.
It’s one of my home borders, one that I, neither a tourist nor a traveler, often cross. It’s seventy kilometers north of Chrysopolis, ninety from the airport. I drive up, slamming the brakes on sleepily, the gray entry lanes empty, and discover one positive effect of the exodus, or X-Bomb, or Operation House Cleaning: the frontiers are wide open, the great dream of supranational unity has been realized. I merely have to get out of the car and raise the entry bar. Guards and inspections are no longer needed, and in fact there aren’t any, neither on one side nor on the other.
America go home: the usual graffiti accompanies me. Thanks to a No Entry sign I recognize the road that leads to the base, which as it winds down becomes a Sunset Boulevard, with mini-skyscrapers, villas, and semi-detached dwellings, playgrounds and parks, swimming pools, and a bowling alley. Even a few out-of-place palm tufts. The sentry boxes in front of the immense gate contain no sentries (their weapons, yes), probably because of the hour. It’s midday. I walk around the fence, which extends for many kilometers, and find an opening, as expected. Every encampment of every army in the world has its clandestine entry points and the Eleventh’s base has quite a few, including one big enough to admit an automobile. I drive through and explore the village street by street, sundering the deep silence, passing rows of enormous bourgeois Chevrolets lined up neatly along the sidewalks. I coast by office buildings, warehouses, workshops, make a turn—and find other office buildings, other flowerbeds, other warehouses, other Chevrolets, a mirror image that fades into the mist.
Here and there instead of asphalt under my tires, there’s a steel platform as big as a tennis court: these must cover the cellars where the base hides its big guns, its tanks, transport vehicles, missiles. Aboveground, there is nothing to be seen; the base looks more like a factory making thermometers than a fortress full of military machinery. My pacifist amazement is that of the Capuchin friar on a mission to Hong Kong’s red-light district who finds nothing but fans and paper flowers, not one bed or sofa. But curiosity and amazement are merely superficial responses. Deep down, cold confirmation: the base has been evacuated. Not one man is on duty here. A sudden command from the Pentagon has put its guns and flowerbeds off duty. I stop, get out of the car and enter one of the buildings, a low white edifice. It’s a club for the troops; in the entryway, helmets and sub-machine guns hang on a rack.
A patrol has interrupted its rounds to sit in the cafeteria; there are bottles of beer and Coca-Cola on the tables, half-eaten hot dogs, playing cards, and magazines. Piles of trays on side tables, TV sets, a pool table. A calendar on the wall between two windows marks, for my exclusive benefit, the last day the place was occupied, June 1. Since then, no one has torn off the pages, and nobody has given a thought to the parrot either. The unfortunate, foul-smelling mascot lies dead as a doornail in its cage under the flag. America has gone home at last, it seems.
I, too, leave. Drive back up Sunset Boulevard. Head toward the border.
I know my way around these parts, but fog and fatigue plot against me. I take the wrong turn, can’t find the border, and at a certain point the road is blocked by two vans that have run into each other. My headlights illuminate, but don’t deter, the columns of rats that come and go from one of the vehicles, which seems to have been transporting some delicacy they like. The cabins of the two vans are twisted together like “the hair of Medusa” as newspaper accounts of such accidents always say. At least I don’t have to feel bad about the “unlucky drivers.” As of June 2, traffic accidents have been bloodless, just as the American army bases are harmless. I simply turn the car around and go back the way I came. I have no idea where I am heading, and there’s not a living soul who can tell me.
But I’m lucky. After driving at length—twenty or thirty kilometers perhaps—I come to something I recognize: an arch over the road, which narrows into a bridge. A wooden bridge, covered by a pitched wooden roof. I’m certain: This is Tuti’s, Tuti’s village, or town, if you will. In my memory (I haven’t been back here for I don’t know how many years) it’s called Tuti’s. My girlfriend of long ago, named Tuti, still lives here. A teacher or school principal, and certainly still on her own as she was then. The last time she wrote (a postcard) she was living just across the road from the old monastery. I’ll go find her.
The street lights are on. I find the main square with ease; on one side is the Emperor’s Tower where Henri de Luxembourg was kept prisoner. I pass the school where I myself was a prisoner, a schoolboy aged thirteen to sixteen, and recognize the narrow street where my immigrant father had his electrician’s shop, and where he kept us, the family, on the mezzanine above. I enter and walk down the low covered porticos, tip my imaginary hat to the movie theater with its fading Marlon Brandos and Marcello Mastroiannis, coast along the city park with its lawns and linden trees, for me once the immense world of nature. And there on a small knoll is the dark mass of the old monastery, already a military base in my day. Tuti’s house is smaller than I expected, shut up tight; no balconies, no geraniums, more hermetic and sealed than I’d imagined. Even the Eleventh Army’s base is less stingy with its secrets.
In this part of town, it occurs to me just now, the houses have backyards with vegetable plots and gardens that give on to the river. I walk down to the river, and turn back upstream, hoist myself over a gate. Through a darkened passageway, and I’m inside the house. I search for a light switch and find one. A teacher, or principal, forty-seven years old, unmarried, cannot not be within the domestic walls at five in the afternoon on an ordinary Tuesday. And she’s there, I can see the chain inside the front door. “It’s me,” I say, loudly. �
��You weren’t expecting me, were you?”
But I find I’m hungry. In the kitchen I take cheese, wine, and a slice of tarte aux pommes, delicious, from the refrigerator. The bread, however, is already stale. “Excuse me if I serve myself,” I say toward the stairs, mouth full. While I’m eating, I move into the sitting room to explore. Some French novels and textbooks on the sideboard, a vase of wilted flowers, a plush box with dozens of letters and postcards (I look through them, letters from alumni and colleagues, none of the few postcards I sent in reply to hers over the past twenty years), a case with a collection of rocks and minerals, some school records. My postcards, maybe a photo of me clipped from the newspaper, are hidden away. Upstairs, in a locked drawer, isn’t that right, Tuti?
In one corner, the armchair and floor lamp for evening reading sessions. On the wallpaper with its minute figures, some Alpine views and a reproduction of a fresco in the Sistine Chapel. The décor is highly indicative of the inhabitant, her tastes and her profession. No TV; the woman is intelligent and no conformist, except when strictly necessary. I finish my meal. I’ve eaten well.
Now I climb the stairs, slowly. I know she’ll be there, slight, blonde, quiet as ever; I turn on the light at the doorway. And she is there. In some ways there: in the mark of her head on the pillow, and on the still-made bed, covers neatly tucked in, the slight weight of her body visible. I sit down near the bed, near my poor Tuti. The little woman—not my first love, I was already expert in falling in love—of my first climax, to whom I sacrificed (aggressively) my fifteen-year-old virginity. She, older (old and not beautiful in my eyes) was in love, although she was not more expert at it than I. My lust without intimacy, the speed with which I was satisfied, wounded her deeply, this I knew: I was aware of it and pleased. And she, aware and not pleased to see me again—me, so colorless, so changed—does not let herself be seen.
This is not a deathbed. And soon I’ll stretch out on it, familiarly, and will sleep a delicious long sleep, making up for that night wasted at the airport, foolishly waiting. Tuti isn’t dead.
She didn’t get sick and pass away, didn’t suffer the angst, the agony of death. Didn’t leave the town that (for me) takes her name, didn’t leave her home, or her room. And therefore she is here, even if hiding from my senses, my sight. She won’t let me touch her hair, perhaps still blonde. I take off my shoes and my jacket, lie down in my trousers with suspenders. Forgive me, Tuti.
7
AROUND the middle of May, the snow melts at the Malga Ross. I was sprawled out on the grass under the steep rock face, with no company but the skinny larch tree or two that has the nerve to push up at that altitude. A windy morning. The cave of the siphon, June 2, they were still in the future, and I was indulging in my usual pastime: parenthesizing the existence of my fellow humans, imagining myself as the only thinking being in an utterly empty universe. Empty of human beings, that is. Allow me to prettify my interior thoughts with some pedantry: Hegel dreamed of the Real in and for itself; for me the Real was of and for myself, where others take no part, because they don’t exist.
Hegel and the Romantics, it remains unclear why, identified the Real with the Subject, while I prefer to think of it as perfectly objective. But mine, however, exclusively mine.
In that final phase of a fairly perverse thought process, I had managed to persuade myself that I really was alone. Alone in the world. If I’m not mistaken this is called, in philosophical jargon, solipsism: I, the individual, and my vision of things, no other, nothing else. But it wasn’t philosophy that interested me (it never has interested me much). I was living this. I got up from the grass and embraced the larch trees, something I used to do as a boy and for the same reason: to allow myself to be penetrated by their life force. At other times I was convinced I was a Celt, and worshiped those trees the way the Celts worshiped the oak. At yet other times, I was moved by pure enthusiasm.
My enthusiasms, furthermore, were and are genuine; there never was anything literary about them. I never extracted a single sentence from my pangs of solitude, never felt gratified by them. There was no need; the experience was deep and demanded no reflection or communication. Nor did I ever imagine I was the only person to experience such states. In fact, the matter must be very old, for in ancient times a sin for which there is no forgiveness was spoken of.
I didn’t hesitate to involve God in this, either. I even prayed, impiety all too evident, for his kingdom to arrive. Today, outside my house and not far from Frederica and Giovanni’s (empty) one, I thanked him, not just faithlessly but cruelly, for having answered my prayer, as I stood under my open umbrella, handkerchief at my nose, a cold just beginning. Alone at last: wish granted. Meanwhile thinking to myself that I must be crazy not to have some aspirin on hand.
•
Anyone who subscribes to the doctrine of incommunicability would object: you’ve always been alone. False. The whistling noise made by the cabin of the cable car as it sailed insolently close to the tops of the fir trees: it was there and now it’s not. The irruptions of Henriette, my ex; the boys from the school in Widmad out on a Sunday hike; books sent with appeals to review them. The checkup visits by Dr. P., who comes to me if I fail to show up at the clinic where they carry out the prescribed exams.
Having gotten past the siphon, I dive into the Lake of Solitude. And also into the mess that’s accumulating at home. The kitchen sink is clogged; my bed’s become a pigsty. The scales of bourgeois conformity fall off. The dirt grows thicker. There is no one to change my clothes for. The only reason I shave is because the sharp beard hairs bother me at night while I’m sleeping. I’ll keep it up as long as the razor works, and the electricity.
They used to say that thanks to automation, electric power stations could continue operating for months even if there were no workers. That seems to be the case.
In the living quarters of Kaiser, the owner of the Hôtel Zemmi, I found a highly sensitive and precise Japanese radio and spent half a day and most of the night tuning it to every station in Europe. And the world. Beginning with a socialist country and its tireless station that broadcasts twenty-four hours a day. The device works perfectly, every station has its own distinctive bleat, whine, crackle, or whistle. But no voices. Not one bar of music. Not even a jingle from the universal ether.
Relief. Nothing merciless about it, it’s like the expression “At least he’s no longer suffering,” which family members say of some poor fellow who has finally decided to give up the ghost. In the technological age, when the radio universe goes silent, civilization, so-called, must also be suspended, if not extinguished; the Organization, deadly cryptogam spread over five continents, must be dissolved; and the octopus of the Economy must cease to send out its myriad filthy tentacles. At two AM I shut down the sophisticated Japanese receiver and improvised in its presence a eulogy to humans. A requiem to ideology, opium of the people; a requiem to consumerism, their poisoned bread. A requiem to the false credo, “You are the product of Production”; a requiem to the mournful and stupid war cry politique d’abord, politics above all. O people of the earth, exult for me but also for yourselves, or for your surrogate given that you will not profit from this liberation. Not that it comes too late, no. You willed your own slavery, you designed it. The only way it can disappear is if you do.
•
Strictly speaking, the fact that everyone has disappeared is still to be proven. In Greenland or down in the Antipodes, shall we say on the Trobriand Islands, there may still be thinking beings like myself alive. Nevertheless, any survivors would be unable to signal their presence in any way—and as far as I’m concerned, that settles it.
The axioms of communications theory are of no use, I see immediately, things like the medium is the message, although the corollary is unquestionable: no medium, no message. However, not only the means of transmission (news) have come to a halt, but also the means of transport (persons). Supposing that in the Trobriands, or in Huds
on Bay,17 some stubborn tribe has survived. Not only can I not travel to them, they cannot travel to me. We won’t catch sight of each other, won’t meet, won’t annoy one another. They are dead to me, and I to them.
(And do the Trobriands really exist, or did Bronisław Malinowski18 simply deduce them from the twin myths of the Good Savage and the Fortunate Isles? That is, Lévy-Bruhl19 being the sole other who confirms they exist.)
(The two discoverers don’t agree, however, for Malinowski maintains that the Trobrianders are joyously sociable and enjoy a refined poetic sensibility, while Lévy-Bruhl holds they are superstitious and foolish. The illustrious scholars’ discordant duet is to my mind one of the great gems of modern anthropology. Priceless.)
•
Right now I’m following the path below the escarpment along the train tracks. Between Widmad and the outskirts of Lewrosen.
Dissipatio H.G. Page 5
