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
