The Illogic of Kassel (12 page)

I took a turn around the block trying to reflect on what I’d just experienced. I felt the chill of an early September morning. Could the contemporary avant-garde frighten a person to death? I realized there was still absolutely nobody out on the street, so I returned to the Hessenland.

I had not only regained my usual morning cheer but also found myself far more euphoric than usual; I took no notice of this, not wanting to give it any importance. There, in the very doorway of the hotel, I literally bumped into Alka, who was bringing me a note telling me María Boston couldn’t come to fetch me that morning (she was backed up with work at the office), and Pim Durán would come instead, arriving about eleven o’clock.

There was more than an hour until the cheerful Pim arrived. I didn’t want to spend all that time with Alka in the lobby, so I decided to go ahead with what I’d planned, which was to go up to my room. I noticed that a Chinese man in reception—probably an artist or journalist—was checking in and incessantly asking questions nobody knew how to answer. I jotted that down in a small red notebook I’d called
Impressions of Kassel
. It wasn’t the first time I wrote something in that book. In fact, since leaving Barcelona, I’d been sketching scenes—I don’t draw well, but it doesn’t matter—and noting plenty of things down, as if I guessed that maybe one day I’d decide to work up some impressions of it all.

In the elevator, two plump Chinese women, who were quite young, with no apparent link to the man of a thousand questions, got in as the metal doors were closing. They got out at the same floor as me and went into room 26. Seeing we were neighbors, they smiled broadly, which made me think there must be something ridiculous about me, or rather, that in China the fondness for laughing and smiling was prodigious, although we somewhat befuddled Westerners were still not in a position to understand what they were laughing about or what could make them so happy.

Now in my room, I went out on the balcony and established a new mental connection with Sehgal’s dark room. It was my special way of letting my lighthouse in the dark know I was thinking of returning to visit it a third time, but that I wouldn’t be able to bear any more frights. Then I went back into my room and, listening through the wall, devoted myself to spying on, or rather, imagining what the two Chinese girls were saying.

One of them said: “When winter came, he always assumed you’d die of cold.” And the other replied: “But he was the one who died.” I could not know then that the “Synge method”—my personal system for finding out what was being said by anyone it was impossible to understand—had only just fired up and in the long run would become the method—I was going to describe it as
infallible
, but it would be a mistake to classify it that way—that I would use in the Dschingis Khan to comprehend what the customers and waiters were talking about.

I stopped listening to my neighbors, who—from the solitude of my room—I imagined even bigger and rounder than they were. I returned to my computer to try to discover whether Critical Art Ensemble had announced the time and place of my “Lecture to Nobody” yet. I was unsure whether they’d included my talk in the program after all, as the previous afternoon Boston hadn’t even mentioned the subject. I searched but found nothing about the talk that I’d agreed to give in a remote spot beyond the farthest forest, on the outskirts of Kassel.

I found nothing about that, but instead came across another interview with Chus Martínez. The photographs accompanying the text all had one thing in common: Chus wasn’t laughing in any of them. She was asked how she thought Spain had taken the economic crisis. Dreadfully, she said. On a psychological level, she continued, it was sort of like the end of the world. The politician Durão Barroso had said the situation in Portugal couldn’t be compared to Spain, because Spanish gloom and doom was ferocious. According to Chus, her compatriots did not know how to be easygoing: “We thought ourselves really crazy, but it turned out we were nothing of the sort. It’s precisely madness and a sense of humor that are lacking. Humor, as a fundamental element of the modern, has been laid claim to since Cervantes. A way of life that’s a bit more relaxed, open, flexible . . . I wonder, was Don Quixote’s humor ever Spanish?”

Next, I began to hatch a plan, so that no one in the Dschingis Khan who wanted to spy on my work would be able to get the slightest idea what I was writing. To this end, I invented a character very different from myself: a writer obsessed with two problems, with two themes that held him captive. I’d have no problem developing them in full view of the entire audience. The invented author, then, would sit in a corner of the Dschingis Khan in front of the visitors and tackle two stories that would hound him, but never me. And as that Barcelona author would be a nervous man, afraid his computer might get stolen in the Chinese restaurant, he’d just write his stories in a notebook—let’s say a red one, mine, why go looking for another, I could save myself the cost, financial and mental, and use a pencil and an eraser. The author would be far from intellectual (not being an intellectual was abominable in Kassel, although in the rest of the world being illiterate, or appearing to be so, made one immensely successful); this might make communication easier with the people who came to see him writing on the spot. The author would be a man in whom ingenuousness and raw intelligence would coexist perfectly. A rather simple man, who would set his characters very simple problems, that he, with his lack of sophistication, would think tremendously complicated.

The first of the simple stories holding him captive revolved around the conundrum that we are so many million people in the world, and yet communication—real communication—is absolutely impossible between any two of us. A most tragic theme, Autre thought (Autre was the provisional surname I gave my nonintellectual author until something better came along). Anxiety about noncommunication went way back for that good man, in fact it had worried him greatly as a boy when his intense loneliness had produced in him the desire to start bellowing. Maybe because of this he had taken up this momentous question an infinite number of times.

The other theme that held Autre captive was that of fleeing. A journalist had once asked for a précis of the story that had occurred to him on this theme, and he’d said something solemn, convinced of his talent (although at night he cried when he discovered in dreams that he altogether lacked genius): “Change your life completely in two days, without caring in the slightest what has gone before, leave without further ado. Do you know what I’m referring to?”

“Starting again?” the journalist asked.

“Not even that. Going toward nothing.”

I’d just finished inventing this Barcelona author who was in possession of two such serious themes (communication and flight—I laughed out loud) when they notified me from reception that Pim Durán had arrived. I quickly took the red notebook, pencil, and eraser from my bedside table, and went down to reception, already in my role as a nonintellectual author “with two problems.” As I went, I felt I was being activated by an invisible breeze from the Fridericianum.

25

They say nobody sleeps on their way to the scaffold. I can only speak for myself and say that I was more than wide awake that Wednesday morning on the free Documenta bus heading toward my fast-approaching Chinese gallows. Alka and Pim kept laughing at what I was telling them with my morning good humor. I was witty, or at least I thought I was, though I didn’t manage to forget I was actually a prisoner.

The bus soon left the network of the city center, which had been entirely rebuilt since the war. It took a road that I think looped around the city, an unobtrusive ring road. It also looped around the baroque-style Karlsaue Park, which was Kassel’s vast and beautiful extension. Entering this open space multiplied my optimism and joy, although I didn’t forget the shadow of the Chinese gallows continuing to loom over the present.

And that’s how we ended up going onto the Auedamm, a lovely road running beside the Fulda River and along which walked hordes of retired Germans. Pim told me that Germany was a country for old people. The old knew how to have fun there, how to travel en masse better than anyone. It was enough to see them euphoric on the terraces beside the Fulda drinking beer, defying a world that otherwise believed only in youth.

For a while I’d been wondering what Autre had meant with that comment about “not even starting again, but going toward nothing” and I ended up asking my two jovial companions how they would interpret a man of a certain age suddenly showing a desire to go “toward nothing.”

A difficult question, I thought, a question to make you laugh or cry. Alka and Pim looked at me with mistrust and then backed away from me on that half-empty bus; they stood still a second, and then, like automatons, said something into each other’s ears and burst out laughing simultaneously.

The uncalled-for synchronization of their laughter and their movements made me rather uncomfortable, although a distinction had to be made between Alka—who laughed not understanding anything (once more, she was laughing only because she thought that was what her job entailed)—and Pim, who reacted that way because, it seemed to me at that moment, she was dictated to by what we might call the downside of her charm, which obliged her to show herself, without the slightest letup, always delighted by life.

Anyway, it was drizzling when we got off the bus at kilometer 19 of the Auedamm. On one side of the highway, a beer terrace with views over the river was crammed with German pensioners. On the other was the most miserable-looking Chinese restaurant I’d ever seen in my life. Karlsaue Park spread out behind it.

The Dschingis Khan, I thought, was a place for the evenings when anxiety gripped me; it had not been designed for my jubilant mornings. I was left hoping this first impression was false—I had to add, moreover, that I was convinced of finding myself confronting my own personal gallows. Perhaps it was all down to the drizzle that made the whole place look unwanted and disastrously glum.

In for a penny, in for a pound. Whatever the circumstances, I’ve never been one to turn and run if I didn’t like something; I’ve always known there’s only one battlefield with no way out. I say this because as soon as I went in to the Dschingis Khan, I spotted the old-fashioned round table, a sort of Spanish warming-table, and could barely believe it: pushed to the back of the dismal corner they’d assigned me, it was one of those tables with a space underneath for a heater and had a hideous vase and a worn, old yellow sign that read: “Writer in Residence.” Despite all this, I did not run away.

I had been so many men (I thought, parodying Borges), and now I was just a resident writer they’d invited to come and do a Chinese number. To cap it off, you could tell the sign had been handled by a large number of writers who’d been invited in the preceding weeks, some of whose names I remembered: Adania Shibli, Mario Bellatin, Aaron Peck, Alejandro Zambra, Marie Darrieussecq, Holly Pester.

I thought I’d be able to bear it.

I would sit at my gallows with dignity.

I knew some of those writers. I had preferred not to email them to ask how they’d artistically come to terms with the obligation to sit in that disagreeable corner each day. The fact of the matter is that writers can get drunk with one another, but they can never resolve together the technical problems they have with their respective lives or novels or Chinese residencies. Watching two writers talk of these matters is as excruciating as watching two future mothers swap details of their respective pregnancies, believing they’re talking about one and the same thing.

At that time of the morning, there were no customers in the dark, not terribly attractive restaurant, and there were just a few employees: some cooks and some waiters. There was also a Chinese woman at a table piled high with papers next to a large fish tank, who was devoting herself, in full view of everyone, to doing the accounts.

Not a single employee bothered to greet me; they all behaved with notable indifference, if not aversion. I understood right away that they saw me as a dangerous element: one more link in a frightening chain of scribblers, which made me surmise that the ones before me had, in general, left dreadful memories behind them. Furthermore, from certain disparaging looks I thought some of the cooks were sending in my direction, it seemed that more than a thousand different reasons to steer clear of writers had built up in their minds.

I took advantage of the unwelcoming atmosphere to ask Pim what she thought I should do with my pencil and my eraser and my red notebook in that somewhat inhospitable spot. No reader had come along at that mid-morning hour to see me, which wasn’t surprising, considering the fact that my appearance at the table in the Chinese restaurant hadn’t been announced anywhere in the city or on the Internet, and only one sign on the restaurant door and another on my table indicated I was there, at the mercy of any idiot with a vocation for gossip or who wanted to snoop at what I was writing.

“Who do you think is going to bother taking the Auedamm bus this miserable Wednesday to come spy on what I write here?” I asked Pim, with all the common sense in the world.

I was waiting for her answer, when a German woman weighing over 260 pounds came in and spoke briefly to Alka or, more accurately, Alka spoke to her very sharply. She must have said something to her about me, because, seconds later, the woman came resolutely forward and, in the most effusive manner, proceeded to embrace me with rare enthusiasm.

“Writer, writer, writer!” she shouted gleefully, as if she’d never seen one before in her life.