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

thing when one is traumatized. The habit of strumming on a typewriter, the pleasure (even if sloppy, or morbid) of intellectualizing ordinary experiences, including those that are highly personal and all but inconfessable.

Charles, or Carlos, Lopez. A walk-on character in the not entirely agreeable commedia of my thirty-, thirty-two-year-old existence. I have no idea why he turns up again on such a different stage, and an empty one.

A North American, he was the correspondent of a New York financial weekly in Chrysopolis when I met him. Lately promoted to write a column for a Washington paper. To him I owe my meeting with the sweet Henriette, who from all appearances was part of his harem and so technically I pinched her from him, without losing his sympathies. Carlos had a gift for friendship of a formal kind, and he was one of those who took part in the annual extortion of greetings. At Christmas and other holidays he would send me marvelous, exceptionally beautiful cards. With messages of impassioned encouragement to put out. To produce, to publish? Publish what?

“He was,” “he would send.” Carlos was my age. There’s still no reason to speak of him in the past tense.

Anyway, I can check on it. The Mayr has a number of eminent American clients; a list of phone numbers is not likely to be lacking at the desk.

There is a list, and the clock in the vestibule points to ten minutes before midnight. It will be six PM on the East Coast, certainly not an hour when a columnist would be expected to be in the office. But someone will answer. The intercontinental phone lines won’t be tied up these days and I’ll be able to speak to someone quickly—that is, if someone there is able to speak. I dial the number, preceded by a litany of prefixes.

Three, four seconds go by. A woman’s voice. You’ve reached Washington, DC, and this is the Washington Post. Today, Saturday June 1 and tomorrow, Sunday, June 2, the publisher’s offices are closed. To speak to an editor, please dial the following numbers . . .

A woman’s voice. Recorded. As at the office of the dentist Ibn Yussef, Ahmed, in Paris. And the message hasn’t changed since Saturday June 1. Them too. Over there as well.

The broad American accent rings in my ear: “Uàscinton Di Si.”

17

I LINGER in front of the door of the phone booth, humiliated by the foolish outcome. It occurs to me that because I am not personally “aligned” with the Western bloc, I ought to try—in order to be scrupulously impartial—to telephone Moscow, Peking, or Tirana. At the same time I’m thinking to myself, the night of June 2 didn’t distinguish between East and West, it’s pointless, I’ve phoned enough. In that instant, the phone booth still open, someone calls me.

The (masculine) timbre of the voice doesn’t sound like that of someone speaking through a receiver. In any case, the receiver can’t be working. I hang it back up.

“Yes,” says the man, “you recognize me, it’s me.” I recognize the voice. “It’s me and I’ll prove it; do you remember that poem you taught me? Here are the first couple of verses.” He recites them. “Now listen to me. I know you need help, and I can help you. I hope we’ll soon meet where you were unable to follow me.”

The hallucination (am I hallucinating?) is crystal clear and precise, there is no sophistry to it, and nothing frightening about it. It is good. It is calming. I didn’t recall the detail Karpinsky refers to, but he is right. I had only just arrived at the clinic a few days before when I read Karpinsky the opening lines of a poem by a well-known Latin-American writer. “The stethoscope falls on a white coat.45 Under the white coat, a shirt, under the shirt, a chest. In that chest, a heart.”

The circumstances in which I heard his voice were ordinary, but I have no doubt about the fact that he spoke to me from some place far more distant than Washington, DC, from a place that isn’t of this earth. I don’t need to think about it to know that, my intuition tells me with absolute certainty. He convenes me. For when? Tomorrow, if I wish. Where? Where does he reside now? No: here, down here. He’ll come down here. Didn’t he say, “You need help, I’ll help you.”

So, where? Once a week, Saturday or Sunday, Karpinsky was free to take the day off from his work in the clinic, and we wouldn’t see him. A friend of his, Carlini, told me the doctor was a believer and had a position in his church in the city. Someone else told me that no, he was active in politics, likewise in the city. That he was an activist in one of those dissident circles that went under the name of rayons (rays) or Fäustchen (fist, diminutive) and once upon a time were ungenerously known as “extremist sects.” In any case, he didn’t speak of it. I myself asked him how he spent his free time and he replied, “Come with me and you’ll see.” But Wanhoff the director advised me not to leave the premises, and I did not insist. Which explains Karpinsky’s final words: “Where you were unable to follow me.” He did give me a hint, though.

This paradoxical new world of mine admits dear and pious ghosts, it admits a Karpinsky. Ghosts that curiously address me using the formal Lei, not tu, and speak from telephone booths. The medium, fortunately, is not the message. The message is benevolence, aid.

I’ll see Chrysopolis again, the city is Chrysopolis.

Morning has just dawned, and I search for my little car. This time I’m not shy about it, and I find it, as well as a small surprise that seems a good omen. A baby ibex is stretched out on the ground between the wheels; it has fallen asleep out of the rain. The mother and some other adult