Catastrophe: And Other Stories Read online

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  Mr. and Mrs. Baby by Mark Strand

  In the Garden of the North American Martyrs by Tobias Wolff

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Preface by Kevin Brockmeier

  The Collapse of the Baliverna

  Catastrophe

  The Epidemic

  The Landslide

  Just the Very Thing They Wanted

  Oversight

  The Monster

  Seven Floors

  The March of Time

  The Alarming Revenge of a Domestic Pet

  And Yet They Are Knocking at Your Door

  Something Beginning with “L”

  The Slaying of the Dragon

  The Opening of the Road

  The Scala Scare

  Humility

  The War Song

  The Egg

  The Enchanted Coat

  The Saints

  About the Author

  Also by Dino Buzzati

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Preface

  by Kevin Brockmeier

  FOR SOME TIME I WAS CONVINCED THAT THE BOOK YOU are now reading did not exist.

  My first exposure to Dino Buzzati came during my junior year of college, when I happened upon “The Falling Girl” in an anthology of very short stories. Readers who have encountered nothing else by Buzzati might nevertheless recollect this one title, so frequently is it anthologized and so memorably is it devised. The story follows the fate of a nineteen-year-old girl who, in the luster of a beautiful spring twilight, “seized by inspiration,” lets herself swoon from the edge of a skyscraper and gradually, as the building’s floors ease past her, becomes an old woman. It’s an excellent distillation of the practical, even reporterly, stance Buzzati often takes toward the fantastic, and of the punctilious, almost apollonian doom that is the signature mood of his fiction, which is to say that if you’re looking for a single representative Buzzati story, it’s certainly not a bad choice. I myself, however, did not become a devotee of his work until more than a decade after I read it, when I discovered his out-and-out masterpiece The Tartar Steppe. Take a Stendhal or Tolstoy novel and then strain and clarify it through a Kafka filter and this is the book that might result: a battlefront epic without the battle, about the ease with which a life can be squandered on nothing more than hopes and routines. It’s among the most flawless novels I know, an airtight work of late existentialism, one that never quite violates the bounds of realism yet slowly, drop by drop, assumes an efflorescent dreamlike quality, generating an atmosphere of softly disquieting impalpability that seems, to me at least, much closer to how life actually feels in the memory than a more naturalistic, less troubled tone would permit Buzzati to achieve. It is also, considering how unsparing it is, surprisingly moving: How, it requires you to ask, did a life that might have become anything at all become precisely this?

  That was all it took. As soon as I finished The Tartar Steppe, I set out to read everything Buzzati had written, or at least everything that was available in English.* At the time, his illustrated children’s novel The Bears’ Famous Invasion of Sicily was newly in print, with extensive accompanying material by Lemony Snicket—fittingly, since its opera-comique narrative about the dangers that civilization poses to the wilderness, and, more abstractly, that humanness poses to bearishness, though not so astringent as Snicket’s own novels, is similarly playful, ambiguous and absurd. Soon to follow was Buzzati’s graphic novel Poem Strip, a rock ’n’ roll take on the Orpheus myth, heavily flavored with the 1960s, in which Buzzati himself makes a brief appearance as a cigarette-smoking sentry at the door to the underworld. Both of these books are treasures. In decades-old English-language editions were six additional Buzzati volumes: his story collections Restless Nights and The Siren, which are sometimes frightening, sometimes austere and always mesmerizing; his semi-autobiographical novel of tortured romantic obsession, A Love Story, inspired by Buzzati’s own late-life courtship of his much younger wife; his science fictional examination of digital reincarnation and artificial intelligence, Larger Than Life; and his classic work of cycling journalism, originally written in installments for the Milanese newspaper Corriere della Sera, by whom Buzzati was employed for more than forty years, The Giro d’Italia: Coppi Versus Bartali at the 1949 Tour of Italy.

  And then there was Catastrophe. Supposedly published by Calder and Boyars in 1965, and supposedly reprinted by Calder in paperback in 1981, this particular volume escaped every effort I made to acquire it. The rare used edition that surfaced online went for multiple hundreds of dollars and swiftly winked from availability. Not once but repeatedly, I would locate a more affordable copy, order it, and wait weeks and then months for it to arrive—but again and again, attempt after attempt, it failed to do so. The fruit receded, the water ebbed, each time I reached for it, each time I bowed. Tracking down a relatively obscure book by a relatively undervalued writer rarely presents this kind of difficulty these days. I began to suspect that I would never lay my hands on the collection; to suspect, in fact, that I was never meant to. That there was no such book. That it didn’t exist.

  Then, in 2010, visiting Omaha, Nebraska, for a literary festival, I went browsing through Jackson Street Booksellers, and there it was, a bright red paperback with black and white lettering on the spine, shelved alphabetically with all the other used and rare fiction and marked at five dollars—half off the cover price. This remains the single most exhilarating bookstore find of my life. As I paid for the volume at the register, I felt oddly like a thief. Even now I can’t help but think that by buying it for so little, after such a protracted search, I somehow managed to abscond with it.

  Alone in my room that night, I cracked the collection’s pages. Inside, bookmarking a story called “Something Beginning with ‘L’,” was a receipt for four dollars and thirty-six cents, dated Saturday, August 31, 1991, at 5:15 P.M. (On August 31, 1991, I was just beginning my freshman year of college and didn’t yet know anyone. At 5:15, I was probably reclining against the end rail of my bed, taking advantage of one of my roommate’s weekends at his parents’ to listen to a tape without wearing my headphones, contemplating whether I could bite a bigger chunk out of the evening by heading straight down to the cafeteria or waiting another half hour.) On the opposite side of the receipt, in a hand that seemed feminine to my eye, were notes for what might have been a poem or might just have been a commentary on one of the stories:

  Back turned

  soundless

  seeing

  her talk from away

  distant

  yet silent

  I read no more than those few lines in blue ink and then the cover copy before I went to sleep, reserving the stories themselves for my plane ride home. Catastrophe is not a long collection, but there’s nothing fleeting or abrupt about its effect, which is to say that its brevity speaks to its concentration rather than its ephemerality. By the time my flight landed, I had already reached the last page, and the best of its stories had joined such Buzzati classics as “The Colomber,” “The Falling Girl” and “The Time Machine” in my private pantheon of indispensable short fiction.

  Take “Seven Floors,” in which, through a series of confusions, inconveniences and darkly comic mis- and rediagnoses, a sickly
nursing home patient endures, as if by bureaucratic necessity, a gradual worsening of his condition.

  Or “The Slaying of the Dragon,” a parable-like account of the extended slaughter of a pitiable geriatric dragon by a hunting party who find “its awkward movements, its clayey parchment color (with the occasional green streak here and there) and the general apparent flabbiness of its body . . . even more reassuring than its small dimensions.”

  Or “The Alarming Revenge of a Domestic Pet,” in which a girl fails to admire the charms of her aunt’s wretched new pet, “immediately convinced that it was a bat, though [she] can’t think why, since it really had very little in common with one,” until the creature begets a profound retaliation.

  “I knew it,” a character remarks, “trembling a little,” at the conclusion of one of these stories: “I knew it would end badly,” a statement that might almost be taken as the book’s declaration of principle. For what you will find when you read Catastrophe is an assembly of fifteen stories (to which five previously untranslated stories have been added) that are unusually singular in their effect. Do you know that sudden inversion near the end of certain disturbing tales—“The Lottery,” “Royal Jelly,” “Sandkings”—when you intuit the terrible thing that is just about to take place? In each of this collection’s stories, it’s as if Buzzati has zeroed in on that moment and asked himself, What if there was nothing else? This singular instant of dreadful predictive clarity: What if I distended it over a lifetime? He has taken the split-second between the misstep and the fall, when your foot has slipped from the ledge but gravity is still deciding what to do with you, and heightened it to a sort of cosmology.

  Any writer who is capable of such an achievement is, it seems to me, an essential writer.

  It took me years of searching to find this collection, but it was more than worth the wait. The advantage you have over me is that you’re already holding it in your hands. You don’t have to question whether it’s real. You can begin reading it right now.

  The Collapse of the Baliverna

  IN A WEEK THE INQUIRY INTO THE COLLAPSE OF THE Baliverna begins. Will I be involved, I wonder? Will they contact me?

  I am terrified. It’s no use my telling myself that no one will give evidence against me; that the examining magistrate has not the slightest inkling of my responsibility; that, even if I were to be accused, I would certainly be acquitted; that my silence about the matter can harm no one; and that any confession I might volunteer would not benefit the accused. But this doesn’t console me. Also, since the Borough Engineer Dogliotti, on whom the brunt of the accusation rested, died three months ago, the only other defendant will be the Public Health Officer. And in any case, the accusation is purely formal; how could he be convicted if he had assumed office only a week beforehand? The real culprit, if any, was probably the previous Officer, but he had died the month before. And legal vengeance does not extend beyond the darkness of the grave.

  The cataclysm in question occurred two years ago, but it is still very much alive in people’s minds. The Baliverna was a huge, grim brick building put up outside the town during the seventeenth century by the monks of San Celso. After the order died out, in the nineteenth century, the building was used as a barracks and until the war it belonged to the military authorities. But then it was abandoned and, with the tacit acquiescence of the authorities, it became the home of a whole crowd of evacuees, homeless people who had been bombed out, tramps, deadbeats, even a small group of gypsies. As time passed, the Corporation, who had taken possession of the premises, had introduced a degree of discipline, registering the inhabitants, organizing basic services, keeping away troublemakers. Nonetheless the Baliverna did not have a good reputation, possibly because there had been several robberies in the neighborhood. It was not exactly a den of vice; but people avoided it at night.

  The Baliverna had originally stood in the open country, but the town had grown so much over the centuries that it now stood almost in the suburbs. Still, there were no other houses in the immediate vicinity. Grim and ghastly, the great building towered above the railway embankment, above the untidy fields and the sordid corrugated-iron shacks which stood scattered among rubbish and debris and which housed the local down-and-outs. It looked like a prison, hospital and fortress combined. It was built on a square base, about eighty yards long and half as wide. The interior was a huge blank courtyard.

  I often used to go there, on weekend afternoons, with my brother-in-law Giuseppe, an entomologist, as the surrounding fields were apparently well stocked with insects. It was an excuse to get into the country for a breath of fresh air.

  I may say that the hideous building’s state of repair had impressed me the first time I saw it. Its decrepitude could be seen in the very color of its bricks, in the rough repairs, the various beams acting as supports. The back wall was particularly horrifying, blankly bare, with a few small irregular openings more like loopholes than real windows; for this reason it looked higher than the façade, which was lightened by rows of windows. “Don’t you think that that wall’s leaning at an angle?” I remember asking my brother-in-law one day.

  He laughed. “Let’s hope so. But it’s just your imagination. High walls always give that impression.”

  One Saturday in July we were out there on one of these walks. My brother-in-law had with him his two daughters, little girls at the time, and a colleague from the University, a Professor Scavezzi, a pale boneless man of about forty whom I had always disliked for his hypocrisy and condescension. My brother-in-law always said he was a positive well of knowledge and a very worthy person besides. But I thought he was a fool: this seemed to me proven by the fact that he treated me extremely high-handedly just because I was a tailor and he was a scientist.

  When we arrived at the Baliverna, we went behind it along the wall I have described; here there was a wide stretch of dusty ground where the boys played soccer. There were no boys that day; just women with children sitting in the sun at the edge by the grass verge at the roadside.

  It was early afternoon and the only sound from inside the tenement was that of an occasional voice. The sun shone on the gloomy expanse of the wall, though without sharp brightness; poles protruded from the windows covered with piles of drying washing, which hung as lifeless as flags on a still day; there was not a breath of wind.

  In the past I had been a keen mountaineer; and while the others were looking for their insects, I felt a sudden desire to climb up the great expanse of wall: the holes, the jutting-out edges of some of the bricks, the bits of old iron embedded here and there in crevices between bricks, all offered convenient holds. I had no intention of climbing to the top. I simply wanted to stretch my limbs, to exercise my muscles. Rather childish, admittedly.

  Without difficulty I climbed about six feet up the support of a big door which had been walled up. As I reached the lintel I stretched out my right hand toward the series of irradiating rusty iron spikes, shaped like spears, which closed in the lunette (in the old days, perhaps, the cavity had housed the image of some saint).

  I managed to grasp the point of one of them and pulled myself up on it. But suddenly it gave way and broke. Luckily I was only about six feet off the ground. I tried, though in vain, to hold myself up with my other hand. I lost my balance and fell backward to the ground, landing on my feet unhurt, though with a sharp jolt. The broken piece of iron fell down after me.

  Almost immediately afterward, behind this iron spike, another one broke: it was longer than the one I’d broken at first and had been placed vertically so as to meet a sort of corbel above it. It must have been a sort of prop, an attempt at repairing a weak point. Without its support, the corbel too—a slab of stone about the width of three bricks—gave way, though it didn’t actually fall; it hung there precariously.

  But that was not the end of my involuntary act of demolition. The corbel was supporting an old pole, about five feet in height, which in its turn helped to support a sort of balcony. Of course it wa
s only now that I noticed all these flaws in what at first sight had merely been a vast expanse of wall. The pole was simply wedged in between the two projections; it was not actually fixed to the wall. Seconds after the displacement of the corbel, the beam fell forward, and I only just had time to jump backward and avoid being hit by it. It fell to the ground with a thud.

  Was it over? To be on the safe side I moved away from the wall, toward the others who were about thirty yards away. All four were standing, looking in my direction: but it was not me they were looking at. They were staring at the wall above my head and I shall never forget the expressions on their faces. Suddenly my brother-in-law shouted: “My God, look at that, look at it!”

  I turned around. Above the balcony, but farther to the right, the great wall, which was solid and regular in that section, was swelling like a piece of stretched material pressed sharply outward. First a slight shudder crept through the whole wall; then a long narrow weal appeared; and the tiles began to break apart, like so many rotten teeth; and then, amid showers of dusty rubble, a dark crack appeared.

  Was it a matter of seconds or of minutes? I simply don’t know. But while it was happening—it sounds crazy to say so—from the depths of the building there came an ominous rumbling, not unlike a bugle call. You could hear the dogs howling for miles around.

  At this point my memory provides me with pictures of a whole series of simultaneous events: myself running as fast as I could to catch the others up who were already some way away; the women by the roadside who had jumped up and were shrieking, one of them rolling on the ground; the figure of a young girl, almost naked, leaning in curiosity from one of the highest windows while, beneath her, the abyss had already opened; and, for a split second, the electrifying spectacle of the great wall hurtling downward. Then, as I saw through the rents made in the top part of the building, the whole immense remainder, piled behind it beyond the courtyard, began to move slowly, drawn on by some irresistible force of destruction.