The Illogic of Kassel (19 page)

“What brings you here, good fellow?” I said.

“I went back to the
Sanatorium
and they haven’t fixed what’s out of order.”

I offered him my sympathy with a few words that gave the impression I was agreeing to take on his clinical case. And, of course, I was immediately alarmed. I realized I had to tread very carefully, unless I wanted my participation in Documenta to consist of setting up a confessional at my table with its vase.

That scenic picture of “doctor and patient” had something of the
installation
about it but little that was avant-garde. It was also clear you couldn’t expect much from Autre either, his being a conservative writer. Thinking about all this led me to finally take Autre’s place and put in an appearance myself. With a swipe, I knocked the vase to the floor, pricked up my ears, and asked the crackpot to tell me his problem. The Chinese waiter came over and complained about the broken vase, but whatever he was spluttering was the only thing I didn’t manage to translate all morning, nor can I say I was terribly interested in his reproaches.

To start off, the mustachioed Serra held back and asked what problem I was talking about. He said he didn’t have any and asked whether I had perhaps forgotten he was a success. But it wasn’t long before he crumbled. It was a trivial thing he had to tell me, he ended up confessing, but it had stopped him from doing anything his whole life.

“I collapse . . .” he said.

“Excuse me?”

“I collapse what is the fact of Galileo, but it is obvious he escaped here the contribution of Kepler . . .”

He was speaking like a Google translation into Catalan. And what he said was strange, too, assuming he was actually saying something. He was talking like a bad translation, but also like a Cheyenne Indian; the fact was, he spoke in a very disjointed manner, or at least in a way that seemed so. Looking at it from another perspective, his language was reminiscent of the jargon peculiar to psychoanalysts in the seventies, Lacanian jargon in particular.

I saw with a measure of dismay that noncommunication between two people was an even more catastrophic matter than I’d imagined and also that this type of problem interested Autre more than it did me. I was at the point of letting the conservative writer come back to the brazier table and staying on myself only in the capacity of rigorous observer, but in the end I preferred it to be me who attended the case, essentially an interesting one, because when all was said and done everything before me that morning was exciting. I found the good in it all and didn’t stop appreciating what I saw the world was offering me. I felt it wasn’t life I loved, but living; it seemed that those who did not experience delight in things showed little accomplishment, just as Democritus had once said: “Fools live without feeling joy in life.”

“I not collapse,” I said, “so not recovery.”

The two of us sounded increasingly Cheyenne.

Serra cried and I stayed there a good long time, determined to prove my great capacity for self-sacrifice, which was perfectly tied to my unexpected labor of assisting the needy, attending to this patient, while also coming to understand, in its most tragic dimension, the terrible disgrace of not being able to communicate, being unable to do anything for that sick man.

We’ll have to wait and see, I thought. I often had the impression—like right now—that the imagined was inseparable from what took place, and vice versa.

Outside, beyond the bus window, in the great ring of the outskirts, it was raining heavily.

38

I once heard it said that real life is not what we lead but what we invent in our minds. If this were true, it was somewhat agonizing that just a moment ago, I had locked up my imagination in the Dschingis Khan. Able to fly wherever I wanted, I’d stayed in a corner of that pitiful Chinese restaurant talking to the mustachioed Serra. Why such masochism? Was it that Serra’s vulgarity was the very same coarseness Catalonia had sunk into in recent decades, and, not getting out of there in so many years, I’d become accustomed to the stench? Did I not remember that (as Autre would say) in any situation, come what may, even if it was marvelous, the right thing to do was always to take off, to travel to other spheres? Did I just want to invent an insipid life for myself, with no horizon other than a mustache painted over the navel of the Catalan fatherland?

39

I was reconstructing in my memory the bombardment reproduced by Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s loudspeakers when my cell phone rang very loudly. I hadn’t noticed, but the volume was turned all the way up. The eyes of all the passengers on the bus—and there were quite a number of them at that hour—converged on me.

It was Boston, asking where I was right at that moment. She’d like to meet me in about four hours, since she couldn’t get away from the office any sooner.

I preferred not to mention that I was on the bus and still less that I’d spent three hours watching the rain falling on the windows of the vehicle. So I lied and told her I was in the Dschingis Khan and already getting tired of hearing Chinese and German and constantly translating to myself what I overheard the customers talking about.

I kept quiet for a moment but I had the idea of explaining to her: “You know, when you expose yourself to languages you don’t understand, you suddenly imagine you can decipher everything.” I didn’t say it, because it would have been too obvious I was out of sorts, she might even have guessed I was upset about being so alone.

Instead, I started to tell her I knew everything about the mighty power China and Germany wielded on their respective continents and how they planned to join forces to invade the world. It was anticipated that the future of humanity would be governed by those two immeasurable powers, exercising their centuries-old immutable imperialism . . .

I stopped. I realized this chatter was obviously revealing that I was in a state, anxious, and had already spent too many hours alone. So I tried to dissemble. I pretended I was very busy with the people who were coming to see me, but it didn’t do any good.

“And all this time nobody came along to interact with you?” Boston interrupted me maliciously.

I told her that in fact I’d only seen the same crazy guy as the day before, the crackpot Pim had possibly told her about. No, Boston said, I don’t know anything about that gentleman. Then a silence fell. “Remember,” she said finally, “you’re having dinner with Chus this evening. I’ve sent you yet another email with the details of the restaurant.” It was as if she were saying: In a few hours, I’ll see what’s going on with you. What’s going on is that I’m running on empty, I mumbled, but I’m sure she didn’t hear me because she’d already hung up.

Minutes later, the bus stopped for the tenth time outside the Chinese restaurant. For the hundredth time, the music played the theme song from
Out of Africa
.

Art is joyful, I thought.

And this time, I decided to get off.

The rain hit my face hard and forced me to shut my eyes tight. It was raining noisily on the restaurant roof, and, on the way to the entrance, the raindrops fell at such an angle and so strangely that I thought I could hear a wind unlike all others blowing at regular intervals. It was a wind that didn’t seem to be from that place, almost frightening, especially if I remembered that now I wasn’t imagining things but actually experiencing them.

The wind is cheerful, I told myself, and I carried on walking fearlessly. I didn’t know I was on the brink of seeing that, as they say, there’s always a lot going on if you look carefully. There was a slight obstacle for me in the doorway: a small man with a sullen air, around my age, who wore a checked cap. He protected himself from the rain with an umbrella that was also checked, and he was smoking a Montecristo. All of this made me think he might be Spanish, but nonetheless he turned out to be a Frenchman, who worked at a Renault office and was a lover of contemporary art. He’d just come from the nearby
Sanatorium
and, following the route marked by Documenta signs, had got himself to this Chinese restaurant, where he hadn’t understood what sort of
installation
it was they were telling him to see.

“They’ve installed
me
,” I said.

“What for?” he asked.

“I listen to problems.”

He raised an eyebrow, as if he thought I might be a psychoanalyst, or perhaps just mentally unstable.

That frightened me because it reminded me of a popular claim that at the beginning of time, it was a single misunderstanding that led to our undoing. I remembered that everything that happened in the world was caused by those kinds of dangerous mistakes. The world itself was built on an initial misunderstanding, I thought. I decided to cut this error off at the root, whatever the error was.

“You’re mistaken,” I said.

“That is my problem,” he replied unexpectedly. “That’s my great problem, I’m always mistaken, and now I don’t know where to turn for help to make fewer mistakes.”

In my clumsy French, I told him not to worry, that I did nothing in life but make mistakes too and it was only human after all. I let him in on my sudden suspicion that my joy that morning—because that morning I was experiencing a constant and very controlled joy that caused me to take an interest in everything—my joy originated in a possibly erroneous reading of what had most captured my attention in Kassel: the invisible push of the breeze from the Fridericianum, upon which I was bestowing subversive, avant-garde powers.

Although he’d said he was passionate about contemporary art, I didn’t expect him to understand me very well, so I was surprised when he assured me he knew just what I was talking about. More than you could imagine, he said emphatically. And he told me he was from Strasbourg and that my vision of the push from the unseen breeze reminded him of what he always imagined about the origin of the wind blowing around the cathedral in his city.

I had the impression, he said, that in former times the Devil was flying over the earth traveling on the wind, and one day he saw his likeness carved into the outside of the cathedral; he felt immensely gratified, and went in to see if there were any more images of himself, and once inside, he was trapped, which has resulted in the wind waiting for him on the porch ever since, impatiently and ceaselessly clamoring for him all around the place.

I was very direct and told him I was terribly sorry, but I didn’t see any relationship between my breeze and his wind.

“No, no there isn’t any,” he acknowledged, keeping very calm.

I felt frustrated because I wanted to argue with him. And even more so when, to my surprise, immediately afterward, seeming happy in spite of all his mistakes, he hopped into a car that had come by to pick him up.

Suddenly, his problem of always making mistakes seemed to have evaporated.

“
Au revoir
,” he said with a simplicity bordering on insolence.

For a moment, it was as if I’d lost an important client from my psychiatry practice. I was left only with the consolation that the place I had to sit in the restaurant was a soft, red couch, which, given its color and another detail or two, brought to mind Freud’s divan in London. I felt bad about losing that good client, I felt very bad. And I felt even worse when, on entering the Dschingis, I experienced a sudden mistrust thinking of the breeze and wondering why, like the wind in Strasbourg with the Devil, it didn’t ceaselessly clamor for me. What was it waiting for? Maybe so much joy stopped the breeze from visiting the forest in which I seemed to be trapped?

I would have liked it if, when Boston came in to the Dschingis, she’d found me terribly busy, attending a lady who was spending a good while telling me her innumerable problems. And that also sitting at my table was a young man who seemed despondent, a second patient gravely waiting his turn in my improvised, very active branch of the
Sanatorium
. He would be talking with his unsuitable muse, a very young girl with gray hair, who was against his visiting my practice for reasons that escaped me.

I would have liked Boston to find me in full-on medical activity, turned into an important psychiatrist, highly esteemed by the Chinese, overwhelmed by so many people anxious to tell me their problems; or I would have liked her to find me simply doing something worthy of a writer: and not the way she did, which was humiliating. I was fast asleep, snoring uncouthly, belly-up on Freud’s divan.

40

When I opened my eyes and discovered her looking at me, somewhere between horrified and amused, I remembered—still befuddled by sleep, the sentence about nobody sleeping on their way to the scaffold. The striking thing was that I’d ended up being the exception to the rule and slept right there beside my own gallows. A few seconds had to pass for the situation not to seem quite so serious. After all, the bus journey had given me such an enormous jolt, and not having slept a wink all night weighed so heavily on me that in the end it wasn’t so strange I’d ended up completely exhausted, slumped on my Chinese sofa, on my personal scaffold.

I quickly went back over the most positive aspect of that awakening: I’d managed to keep my excellent state of mind, as it had lost nothing of the high it had reached before I flopped onto the couch; in other words, I continued to feel extremely interested in everything and appreciated being alive like never before. Being so interested, I was even entranced by Boston’s dumbfounded expression. You could tell my involuntary “Chinese number” had shocked her.