Today a problem presented itself: to recover, out of this confusion of times, a credible temporal dimension. Recover it or confirm it; in truth I wasn’t completely oblivious and an instinct told me that two whole weeks, at the least, have gone by since the Event. Well, the problem was resolved in the simplest way, by means of chrono-cheese.
There’s a certain type of white, buttery imported cheese (a bit like Neufchâtel) that I like a lot when it’s fresh, and often eat. I was at the Mayr to do my “shopping,” that is, to replenish supplies. As I passed by the dumbwaiter in the kitchen, I caught a whiff of a sharp, disagreeable odor. When I opened the door I found a large tray of cheeses, among them that imported one I like. Covered by a layer of mold. Long, thick greenish filaments, real vegetation. I plunge my finger in and find the mold is a couple of centimeters deep. As I’m something of an expert on cheeses, I conclude that a layer of mold like that needed fifteen days at least to form. This is no laughing matter. Chrono-cheese is no less empirical than carbon-dating. And no more a matter of opinion.
I believe my estimate of the time that has passed is pretty accurate. It’s important because the probability that the Event is reversible diminishes with the days that go by. The “dear ones who’ve vanished” become each day, with more certainty, the “dear departed.”
The social machinery was able to grind tirelessly, indefinitely, so long as it never stopped even for an instant. Uninterrupted continuity—or immediate decomposition. According to that logic, it’s unlikely it can now resume work. But I wonder, can I depend on that?
•
The Mayr’s kitchen and nearby rooms have more surprises in store.
At Widmad, as at Lewrosen, I feed the dogs, which are locked inside the gates of the gardens and starving. From the mansard window of an attic room at the Mayr comes a whimpering lament. I go up to the room and find a large dog prisoner there, no signs of rabies, no fear of water. The animal had drunk a little from the sink and was hungry; the packet of biscuits found in a drawer that had kept it alive had been devoured right down to the paper wrapping. I opened the door but the dog didn’t move. Its owner hadn’t gone out, and the dog figured he was still there and refused to leave him.
From some of the clothing hanging on the coat rack, the owner appeared to have been a cook at the hotel. On the night of the Event, he had been sitting at a desk, writing. A foreigner, he was writing in his own language, which I’m pretty familiar with. It was a page from a diary, or a testament of some kind, and I copied it out because it was worth keeping:
Saturday, June 1, 11:50 PM
For the last time I think of my wife, and I beg her to forgive my wrongs just as I forgive hers and put them aside. I would try to warn her if I had any time left. (But in any case, she wouldn’t believe me.) The supreme moment has come for her, for me, for all men, and we shall not see the sun rise tomorrow. My impressions, therefore, were not mistaken. Through the open window I can see the sky, mortal and black, and a wind as hot as human breath brushes me, a wind that never blew on this earth before.
On the night of June 2, there was indeed a hot wind from the north but it was merely the one we call the foehn. The cook, who didn’t know these mountains, must have thought it strange.
Humanity is not responsible, not guilty: we submit to our fate. We love death. The death of others, and what’s more, in these precipitous times and without knowing it, our own. But this is no suicidal rapture, nor the death instinct posited by psychology. In reality, man is passive. It is death that acts, summoning man. Death’s roll call cannot go unanswered. Pleased that we consent, silently but unanimously, It will come to take us tonight, sparing us the agony and the anguish of dying. This final chapter, for many or for all of us, will resolve insoluble problems, it will be the unexpected remedy for unbearable ills. How strange that in other times the millennium, the end of days, was considered a cruel punishment, when in fact it is so fair and good. As for myself, will it come prematurely in my twenty-seventh year? No. I am with them and one of them. First, an involuntary instrument, now I offer myself as an object of death.
I translate this in my own words, but the substance of the message (Hölderlinesque, I should say) is clear. “An instrument of death,” this good fellow who crowned the Saint-Honorés with whipped cream and custard? A doleful prophet at his solitary desk as the end came near. I imagine him as a dilettante exegete, interpreting Nostradamus. A Millenarian, or a Jehovah’s Witness.
What strikes me is his social status. He was far from belonging to the intelligentsia. This final page of his, although it borrows from common prophesies and judgments, rings true.
And I, seeking “guarantees” receive an astonishing, reassuring one from him.
13
YOUR TEMPERAMENT is repetitive, Karpinsky told me.
Repetition, in the sense that psychiatrists use the word, is a quality that may have helped me to adapt. But I’d give the credit above all to my nominalism. I’ve always been a nominalist; society doesn’t exist, what exist are groups, or rather the individual, to put it simply.
The only reality that a man must take into account is the one he creates as an individual.40 The statement isn’t mine, it is Charles Reich’s, but there’s truth to it.
The night of June 2 brought thinking life to an end, and thus History. Maybe. In the meantime, the rain has also come to an end, and I take advantage of the pause to climb the road and then the track that leads up to the Malga Ross, and this problem of the end of History grows less worrisome. The res gestae, the deeds accomplished, don’t necessarily imply a plurality of gerentes, of actors; history could carry on with just one person, for one person. In Widmad this morning I smashed the window of a shop to take two grapefruits. So as a historian, let me record that anarchy has prevailed with the defeat of its primal enemy, private property. At the same time a monarchy has been installed, in the most elementary meaning of the term: all power to one man. Anarchy and monarchy coexist, now and in me. No one possesses me; I possess all. In theory I could take the Codex Atlanticus or the Gutenberg Bible and carry it home, and no one would report me; I could call myself a philosopher and no one would contest it; I could proclaim perpetual peace on earth and be sure it wouldn’t be breached. In theory . . .
The mule track that leads up the bottom slopes of Mountàsc is wide and comfortable; it’s paved with stone slabs that rise in steps, neatly squared off. Worthy of the name it bears, or did once, the Via Romana. A sort of mountain Via Appia climbing past sober stands of larch, trees even plainer than the Mediterranean cypresses of the Appian Way. Across the valley, no more than 300 meters away as the crow flies, I can see the mouth of the cave of the siphon. Cave of the futile invitation. I think of the testament I found in that attic apartment, the words mixing ingenuous rhetoric and genuine desperation: Death’s roll call cannot go unanswered. But I, for one, did not respond. I was resistant to the call, evidently. Courageous or coward, I survived.
Maybe it was neither courage nor cowardice, but a kind of armored mediocrity that provided me a pardon just for that reason. An insignificant individual was chosen to embody continuity, a mysterious choice that may contain some wisdom. The mule track comes to an end where the larch trees end, and the path narrows so much that a single person can barely pass. How did the Ross family get their enormous Fleckvieh cows up here? Then again, maybe the melancholy cook from the Mayr wasn’t wrong in his farewell message, apart from his romantic conception of death. If it’s hard to believe that death could take the voice of a siren to seduce men, it’s certainly true that men, whether they knew it or not, wanted to die. For years, for decades. Pollution: the polluters sullied themselves first and foremost: “I live in my factory yard, even though I have a house in town,” says one company owner. It was violence, first and foremost against themselves. A young man charged with armed robbery is asked whether it was necessary to shoot at the cashier. He replies, “I don’t know why I sho
t the cashier, I wanted to shoot myself.”
But in their explicit self-awareness, the melancholy cook, the armed robber, and the kamikaze factory owner weren’t typical. On the larger scale the death race took place in silence, impelled by a pressing, unacknowledged need. And that silence, as well as the absence of obvious cultural or economic motives, meant that our poor, sad discipline of sociology ignored the matter, although there were some who kept their eye on it. The chief of the New Jersey state highway patrol, a perfectly ordinary official, told reporters: You speak of “carelessness” when you write about the Sunday slaughter on the highways, but carelessness is not the cause, just the means. Drivers are careless because they intend to die. Because they don’t want to go home. Take away their cars and they will throw themselves from a window.
The path widens as it levels out, or rather, it disappears into the vast basin of the Ross pastures, clothed with heather, and junipers and clear brooks that run between boulders growing lichens, and some of those boulders are in themselves perfect small mountains. The glaciers of Mountàsc open like a fan, and I remember having seen them burst into flames at dawn, above the snowfields that still held the color of night. At the height of its triumphant evolution, the self searched out the most direct route to the non-self: not slow descent into entropy but swift and total self-destruction, and it didn’t have to be painless. The cupio dissolvi, the “wish to dissolve.” Freud called it the death drive, or instinct, and universalized it, assigning it to everyone. In his day, it was a wanton abstraction even to him. A harmless philosopheme, not even very original for that matter, to set against the dogma of omnipresent Eros for the symmetry. Freud was quietly bourgeois: how dismayed he’d have been if he’d ever thought that human experience would confirm his death drive, and even surpass it.
•
The glaciers of Mountàsc are becoming visible, although today it’s easy to confuse them with the low, uniformly white sky, and because the Karessa glaciers on the other side can also be seen, they, too, confused with the clouds, I have the impression it is all just one mass, a curving vault, and there’s no sky and I’m standing in the middle of an immense frozen cave. Two mountain ranges hold it up, for now. At any moment it could crack and collapse, or just slide slowly down onto these rocks, and me.
Note: human beings were not pursuing a collective catastrophe; they’d already carried out a first, limited trial of that at Hiroshima, and found it was within their means. They were seeking separate, individual deaths, and in this they stayed close to the traditions of conventional suicide: in the family car with wife and children; or at the bank where only a few clients and the tellers were witnesses; in a hijacked plane, with no more than seventy or eighty fellow passengers. The atomic holocaust, so much in keeping with ancient eschatology, was too spectacular, or too “social.” Eschatology: who today, in this world of computers and supersonic planes, knows anything about that archaic and abstruse science? No, even if the cupio dissolvi collectively willed it, the actual dissolution had to take place in private, which is individualism’s sacred altar. To each his own, wherever and however his particular fate or his customs and interests lead him. All to the same end, but not in a crowd. Sociologism, that collectivizing god, had to make peace with its opposite in extremis. Cows and goats, Giovanni would have said.
•
And so it was, they got what they wanted.
This, then, is the famous Malga Ross. The Ross who gave this Alpine pasture its name were distant relatives of my family, and I used to come up here when I was just a boy. I come back experimentally now, in search of the metus silvanus (dread of the forest) and the ancient pavor montium (fear of the mountains) of fables. This isn’t merely academic. The disappearance of the reverential fear that vast, uncontaminated nature once inspired in man is one of the vital impairments our age suffers from. Here there is no one between me and nature; the crags and the ice are sheer solitude and immensity, and I must salvage nature and taste it again. The Ross kept their herd in this high pasture most of the summer, and as a child I used to appear smeared and stained with the bilberries I’d picked along the path. And I’d help out with the animals; I’d try to milk the cows, and ride them, or maybe just chase them with a stick to frighten them, or so they’d frighten me. The fence and the cows are gone; the pasture is nothing but juniper and heather in flower, and the wild bees don’t come. No grass to graze on, sparkling green beneath the snow in patches.
The place has grown more rugged; it’s untouched, as it was in the beginning. Objectively, it has become markedly more beautiful. I, instead, am inert, lifeless. Uninvolved. I observe, without emotion. I suspect this has been pointless. (Why undertake a hike of two hours to see and hear, but not to feel?) The sky, so heavy and close, is a real threat. When at times the wind comes down, it really does carry the smell of the glacier (a vitreous odor, of caves and abysses), and in the intervals, the silence is utterly primeval. The cliff that plunges straight down a hundred paces away is desolate, merciless; it cuts off the world. And yet the pavor montium I feel is merely a sensation of cold, bodily cold. I wish I had boiling hot coffee and a wool sweater. To experience nature poetically, perhaps I had need of someone to contend it with, someone I must keep at a distance?
A disheartening thought: nature was beautiful and fearsome, but asocial. It presupposed (in a negative sense) man. I wanted a nature inviolate, but violable.
I wondered: to enjoy it, was it necessary to post No Trespassing signs?
•
The sign, or better, the scroll. The words “They were as you and you will be as they are” painted over a grate on the side of St. Vilcifredo, under the portico. And a fleshy elderly woman dressed in a cheap pink wool dress, who calls to me: “What’s this say? Mister, can you please translate?”
It happened in the early evening of Saturday, June 1. I had gone down to Widmad to see the village for the last time and equip myself with a pocket flashlight to light my way inside the cave of the siphon that night. I was starting out toward home, and the setting sun was sending out oblique, reddish rays that pierced the houses, the square, and the portico of the church, a rare, fatal sunset. I stood and explained to the foreign lady. Around 1650 there had been an epidemic, and a few decades later the church had been built on the spot where a large common grave had been dug. Following Catholic custom, the skulls, hundreds of them, were walled up in a small space that was part of the church but opened out onto the street for the benefit of passersby. “The bones you see, held in by the grate, were once great minds. Remember the scene with Hamlet and the gravediggers?”
According to my plan, I then had seven or eight hours to live. As I excused myself and got away from the lady in pink, I thought it could not have been just a random coincidence. I didn’t dwell on it, though. I believed I had more important things to think about at that moment.
This evening, passing by St. Vilcifredo at the same hour, I catch sight of the grate again. What I can only consider a miracle, a dreadful miracle, has taken place.
14
THE THREE grated windows under the portico have lost their macabre commemorative significance. Now they suggest something else, something worse. They are empty.
And I am still alive. Eyes wide, nerves shattered, I stare at them. In a sort of horrid hypnosis. I, the witness.
•
I manage to break away. At the corner of the street is a garden, where some branches have been severed by the wind beating against the gate. I’m not sure how, but I walk to the gate and pick up a branch, return to the grates, and push it through. As I poke around, disgust floods me. There’s nothing left: death, dry and dusty, has departed. I enter the church and walk around behind the space where the skulls were. Walled up as before, intact.
My gestures appear logical. I act from an impulse that takes the place of reason, and of will. I don’t think, and I don’t speak to myself. I seek no connections or explanations. I’m aware I won’t r
eturn home. I’m aware that I have (should have) a desperate longing to hear a (human) voice. Sure enough, I head toward the market square, and find myself, out of some dumb reflex, about to enter a phone booth. The rain coming down sideways on the piazza drives me toward the road to Lewrosen. I climb the stairs of the Hôtel Mayr. I won’t be alone there, I imagine. I won’t be alone?
I sense (and only sense), befuddled, that the night will be long, that I won’t have the courage to go up to one of the rooms, that I’ll be cold, terribly cold, in the vast, empty hall, beneath lights that will not give me reprieve. But I won’t go home, for the love of God, no.
Hmm. “For the love of God.” I ought to sink into solemn horror. Or at least quiver with superstitious awe.
I ought to say, “But therefore—” the theological and technical term that I know and that would justify the announcement about to be absurdly confirmed for me and only me, today, millennia later. For me, here and alive. But I will not say that word. I refuse. My fear cannot be described. It is too great.
•
And too new. No one on earth, in a world convinced it had known every possible fear, knew this one.
I don’t enter but remain standing, resting against the revolving door, my back to the mystery that I allow myself to think I’ve left behind. And wait.
Once again, I resurface from my trance to eat. I find something comestible in one of the ground-floor rooms. To drink, no; I do not drink. I curl up in a chair, covering myself with the long black jacket belonging to Battaglia the porter that was hanging there. I don’t dare to turn off the lights in this corner where I find myself, and they beat down on me violently. Still, I fall into a heavy slumber and wake not long after from a nightmare: in an immense, blazing grotto I am lying flat under two keys crossed over my sternum, crushing it. They are nothing more than the gold keys pinned to the lapel of Battaglia’s jacket, which I had noticed while covering myself. I cannot go back to sleep now. And the night is interminable.
Dissipatio H.G. Page 9
