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

I learned from others, not from him. He was content with his job, seemed satisfied, and in any case didn’t speak about himself.

I saw his lean face with a brown beard (a nice, thick beard, which on him appeared fateful, stigmatic); his smallish and not very well-fed person next to me, who was tall and solid. He lay his two hands on my chest (something he wouldn’t have permitted himself when I knew him in the clinic), clinging to the lapels of my jacket. I listened to his soundless speech, I understood the meaning. He encouraged me as he once had: “You will get well, believe me.” A heterodox physician, with a degree from Vienna on the epistolary relationship between Freud and Jung, willing to dispense with psychoanalysis.23 No couch; he spoke to his patients, slowly and persuasively; no questioning, no necktie complex, no bric-a-brac. A week later, after having considered the matter, he offered his conclusions.

“I won’t conceal from you that yours is no intellectual neurasthenia, nor is it a mere neurosis. It is a federation of neuroses. Some of them uncommon, such as the pyrophobia or the obsessive-compulsive drive that when you leave the house makes you check four times to be sure that the gas and electricity are turned off. Even so, if you want to get well, you will. It depends on you, on a decision that I ask you to make this very instant.” In my vision, or involuntary evocation, or apparition, I heard him repeat those words. But the voice was alive.

I can’t say I’ve ever forgotten the cast of characters at Villa Verde; I remember them well, beginning with Wanhoff, the director who gave his name, informally, to the place, down to the “guests,” among them Mylius. But now I’m rediscovering one of them. Who’s been interiorized, actualized. Who comes alive as vivid experience, nothing to do with mere memory.

Karpinsky, so different from the industrialists of the early detection diagnosis business. He was paternal (although younger than I). He would come to see me in the evening when I was already in bed, would pick up the phone and order me hot chocolate. “Drink it, and turn off the lights,” he’d say. “Turn off the lights and detach your ego, think of anything but yourself.” Not a man to soften his message, he’d sometimes say, “That establishment on the other side of the lake,” which was a sanatorium for tubercular patients, “is more cheerful than this place, and easier to get out of. But you will get out, if you assist me.”

He was younger than I. Two years later, just by chance, I had word of his death. He had leapt into the middle of a fight between two nurses in the district mental asylum, and was stabbed with a knife. Internal hemorrhage, twenty-four hours, and he was gone.

He didn’t drink and ate little; what he did like were Gauloises (his fingers were yellow with nicotine) and powerful motorbikes. Carlini, Wanhoff’s bursar, would lend him his, and Karpinsky would go off on long nighttime expeditions. Two hundred, three hundred kilometers.

•

The hallucination dissolves, and I come to in the hall of the Mayr stumbling over the suitcases of the Swedish guest, or at the bottom of the siphon, or the Lake of Solitude with my nostalgia for Dr. Karpinsky, who I realize, now that it’s so late, was my only friend, before and after the Wanhoff.

Now that it’s so late. The pathos of some cheap song, but it’s what I feel. Meanwhile people and acts—or things that happened to me—that were far more intimate are filed away in my memory and stir no echo. Every day I pass by the villa where, a few summers ago, the redheaded Henriette and I took up with each other.

It was a pointlessly beautiful evening and I was walking with her in the pine wood behind the house, and she told me that she found it strange that our relationship was “so neutral.” Platonic, that is. She (she went on) was burning with desire to be mine.

That’s how she said it, that tired colloquial expression, so false in the physiological sense. Twenty minutes after I’d regularized our situation, she told me candidly, and on the spot, that the desire she’d been feeling was really a need to “discard” me. I laughed, but I shouldn’t have, for this time Henriette spoke her mind. On the whole, the wish to materially possess a thing or a person conceals an intention to free oneself of them and move on to something else. What we have possessed we can put behind us, put in the past, the already done. Nice work, Henriette.

9

IN THIRTY centuries men have unleashed some five thousand wars. They’re guilty (as Albert Camus had it) of persevering at history, even if they didn’t start it. I don’t condemn them.

Their worst crime, or anyway the most recent, is the uglification of the world. Other associated offenses often attached: pollution, provocation (a euphemism, better known as violence), inflation (no euphemism, the monetary plague).

I don’t condemn them. Perhaps it’s enough for me to see Chrysopolis reduced to Necropolis. It’s a fitting punishment, to my mind. Beyond the ideological satisfaction, I would paraphrase what some Bolshevik said of St. Petersburg in 1917: “Destroy this city and this city alone in order to destroy the past—and all the rest may remain.”

I don’t condemn them, with the exception of Chrysopolis. I did not condemn them, I did not judge them. In my court, the only guilty parties are environmental conditions, and chromosomes. It is they who make history and persevere at it.

Today, I would say more; as of the night of June 2, I’m full of admiration. After so many gaffes their departure was quite elegant.

They left no trace. A fact that would delight a spiritualist; in other words, life was not tied to organic material, to weight and corruption. Myself, I can’t help thinking their elegance risks blurring into comedy, into a hoax well