Dissipatio H.G. Guido Morselli (best time to read books .txt) 📖

from the newsstand, in my bones a queasy feeling of sleep repressed, in my nerves tension and worry. But I hold out. Imagining long sequences of hijackings. Simultaneous strikes by the pilots, the customs agents, the barmen, and the newsstand owners. I pretend not to notice that for eighteen hours I have been waiting strictly alone, that the great hall and the various spaces I’ve been walking through are abandoned, as are the bar tables with their layer of thick dust, on which my finger, motivated by the usual fool reflex, traces the letter H, the initial of my ex’s name, over and over.

From Nairobi—I begin to chant—from Cairo, Zagreb, Caracas, Athens. To Paris, Tehran, Montreal, Moscow.

6

NO, I AM not some comic Alceste le Misanthrope.16 I am, on and off, an Anthropophobe, I’m afraid of people, as I am of rats and mosquitoes, afraid of the nuisance and the harm of which they are untiring agents. This is not the only reason, but it’s one of them, why I seek solitude, a solitude (in the modest limits of the possible) that is genuine, i.e., extensive and abiding. But now that they are playing hard to get, or are trying to, anyway, I’m beginning to reevaluate their importance.

Names like Meggy Weiss Lo Surdo, Ahmed Ibn Yussef, and Mark W. Black have a new significance.

I’m about to leave the airport. Next to the stairs I see two suitcases and an olive-green duffel marked with its owner’s name: Sgt. Mark W. Black, 128 Pioneers Sect., Eleventh Army US Forces in Europe. And there, beyond the forlorn suitcases, sits a jeep with assorted American military insignia: white star, bison, tomahawk, etc. The fortuitous encounter with Sergeant Black makes up my mind. Fate has decreed I must make another search and has supplied me with the fuel. Literally: the jeep is carrying two canisters of gasoline, which I use to fill up my tank.

That Eleventh’s base, a stone’s throw from my home, made the papers a few months ago. There was a mutiny by the soldiers of color. (The sergeant wasn’t one of them; Black is as white as I am and he furnished the proof with a photo collection of young black women in scanty clothing, found in his army duffel bag.) The base is over the border of course. My country is the only one in the West not to host the American military within its territory.

It’s one of my home borders, one that I, neither a tourist nor a traveler, often cross. It’s seventy kilometers north of Chrysopolis, ninety from the airport. I drive up, slamming the brakes on sleepily, the gray entry lanes empty, and discover one positive effect of the exodus, or X-Bomb, or Operation House Cleaning: the frontiers are wide open, the great dream of supranational unity has been realized. I merely have to get out of the car and raise the entry bar. Guards and inspections are no longer needed, and in fact there aren’t any, neither on one side nor on the other.

America go home: the usual graffiti accompanies me. Thanks to a No Entry sign I recognize the road that leads to the base, which as it winds down becomes a Sunset Boulevard, with mini-skyscrapers, villas, and semi-detached dwellings, playgrounds and parks, swimming pools, and a bowling alley. Even a few out-of-place palm tufts. The sentry boxes in front of the immense gate contain no sentries (their weapons, yes), probably because of the hour. It’s midday. I walk around the fence, which extends for many kilometers, and find an opening, as expected. Every encampment of every army in the world has its clandestine entry points and the Eleventh’s base has quite a few, including one big enough to admit an automobile. I drive through and explore the village street by street, sundering the deep silence, passing rows of enormous bourgeois Chevrolets lined up neatly along the sidewalks. I coast by office buildings, warehouses, workshops, make a turn—and find other office buildings, other flowerbeds, other warehouses, other Chevrolets, a mirror image that fades into the mist.

Here and there instead of asphalt under my tires, there’s a steel platform as big as a tennis court: these must cover the cellars where the base hides its big guns, its tanks, transport vehicles, missiles. Aboveground, there is nothing to be seen; the base looks more like a factory making thermometers than a fortress full of military machinery. My pacifist amazement is that of the Capuchin friar on a mission to Hong Kong’s red-light district who finds nothing but fans and paper flowers, not one bed or sofa. But curiosity and amazement are merely superficial responses. Deep down, cold confirmation: the base has been evacuated. Not one man is on duty here. A sudden command from the Pentagon has put its guns and flowerbeds off duty. I stop, get out of the car and enter one of the buildings, a low white edifice. It’s a club for the troops; in the entryway, helmets and sub-machine guns hang on a rack.

A patrol has interrupted its rounds to sit in the cafeteria; there are bottles of beer and Coca-Cola on the tables, half-eaten hot dogs, playing cards, and magazines. Piles of trays on side tables, TV sets, a pool table. A calendar on the wall between two windows marks, for my exclusive benefit, the last day the place was occupied, June 1. Since then, no one has torn off the pages, and nobody has given a thought to the parrot either. The unfortunate, foul-smelling mascot lies dead as a doornail in its cage under the flag. America has gone home at last, it seems.

I, too, leave. Drive back up Sunset Boulevard. Head toward the border.

I know my way around these parts, but fog and fatigue plot against me. I take the wrong turn, can’t find the border, and at a certain point the road is blocked by two vans that have run into each other. My headlights illuminate, but don’t deter, the columns