Dissipatio H.G. by Guido Morselli (tohfa e dulha read online .TXT) 📗

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