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

last year. (Quite grotesquely, that book would rescue me from a nightmare on the third day.) I sat before the typewriter all afternoon, never touching it. The clickety-clack of the keys would have upset me. Either that, or some superstition wouldn’t allow me to break the silence. I reheated the coffee on tiptoe in the kitchen. The rain was pattering hard on the cobblestones outside, but I felt I must make no sound. Like them, I must be dead. My bodily functions were normal: I ate with appetite, even voraciously; the horror was ongoing, without intervals, so I shuddered as I ate, in time with my chewing. I slept, dreamlessly, strange to say. Smoked the odd pipe, drank the usual brandy. Urinated more often than usual; it’s a well-known fact that fear excites the excretory system. Even when fear becomes one with the person, as was happening to me.

It went on for two days, no more, and not even full days, before the crisis resolved things. As to how it felt: it was a taste of eternity.

•

And yet, the Inexplicable came about because of me. Or anyway, the events coincided, at the beginning, with a strictly private thing of mine. A conjunction, a correlation, I dare say—not mere chance.

That fanciful night between June 1 and June 2. The night when it was decided that I would commit suicide.

Why.

Because the negative outweighed the positive. On my scales. By seventy percent. Was that a banal motive? I’m not sure.

•

So far as precise estimates go, I confess my psychic life is poor. Also simple, elementary. Someone’s said to be “a born accountant”: I must confess I don’t recognize the unconscious frustrations and visceral pains, the festering evils that afflict modern man. A colleague accused me of reductive criticism. I was forever insisting (everything’s already been said but nobody’s listening, so it has to be constantly restated)11 that the interior monologue, typical of contemporary literature, that gives vent to unconscious sorrows and visceral suffering in capillary inspections of the self and false encounters with the other, is proof that we haven’t moved beyond the psychologism of that sub-feeling and sub-thinking that was already artificial (and dull) a century ago. However, anyone looking into my case would certainly not make the mistake of psychologism. He would have to be reductive, no way around it.

I decided to kill myself in the first place because I was the victim of a kind of mafia. And there’s no escaping the mafia, I knew.

It began with an illness. Bodily, not mental; real, not imaginary; somewhat chronic. One of those illnesses that allow you to go on living, and when treated with a certain amount of humanity, to be cured. And in practice, I was on my way to being cured. The doctor at Chrysopolis who was supposed to be taking care of me instead sent me to a specialist, and the specialist to a radiologist, and he ordered a second specialist, and he a second radiologist, and he prescribed some tests (only eleven, Wasserman to ESR) to be done at a clinic in Chrysopolis, after which I was advised to undergo a series of diagnostic procedures, then sent to another specialist (#3) by another radiologist (also #3). And so it went, in pairs, or rather threes, (specialist, radiologist, clinic with lab for exams, brief inpatient stay) expanding exponentially to total, a few weeks ago, twelve specialists, twelve radiologists, thirty-three sets of blood tests, and twenty-seven series of diagnostic procedures over a period of two years and eight months. An experience familiar to millions of victims like myself taken in by the “early detection” racket. A racket that’s part of the System (in the Marcusian sense)12 and thus is benevolently considered by the sociologists (it goes unmentioned, uncondemned) but which meets in every way the criteria of mafia extortion. The initial illness is not serious, but could become so, and therefore “we must keep an eye on it” via frequent medical interventions to ascertain “in a diagnostic setting” whether there has been possible degeneration. But, wonders the subject (passive), what’s the purpose when, should “possible degeneration” manifest itself, it is incurable, and will go untreated? Every three months you force me to await the verdict: “Has it appeared, or hasn’t it?” What’s the purpose when, if it has “appeared,” the death agony will be slow and certain, conscious, and unavoidable?

The purpose, patently, is not so much the money, counted in the hundreds of thousands, but the power. The subjugation of throngs of men and women to a class. Or a clan, or a corporazione. I don’t wish to be dramatic, but to my mind, capitalist exploitation, boss over worker, is pretty much an amusing parlor game next to this other forced subservience. And since escape is impossible, the attendant blackmail is bound to be the most vicious and entrapping.

It’s an industry built on the soundest of economic bases. It’s not exposed to market downturn. Within the group, its members practice strict solidarity. It has no competition from outside. No crises for them.

For us, for me, yes: in my case the crisis was one of disgust. Disgust with myself. There were mornings when I tried not to see myself in the mirror as I stood shaving.

When a person leaps over the balcony or throws himself under a train, some driving psychic mechanism is at work, obviously, but on its own, it’s not sufficient. There must be a trigger, said old Durkheim, and the fellow was not devoid of acumen.

Returning to my own case, what comes to mind is this: last autumn I found—a couple of hundred paces from my mountain retreat (1,395 meters above sea level)—some numbered stakes in the ground. They gave me a fever. Literally. A frenetic investigation, consultations with friends who knew something, friends in Chrysopolis. I call it the Golden City but it is above all the country’s operative hub where decisions are made, especially opprobrious decisions. The news was deadly. A despicable “anonymous” company, Euro-Autoroute SA,