The Illogic of Kassel (2 page)

I smiled without really knowing why. We’re going to reduce your Chinese sentence, she suddenly said. I don’t understand, I answered. Well, you see, she said, using the authority Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev and Chus Martínez have invested in me, I’m reducing the time you have to spend in the Chinese restaurant from three weeks to one.

From what she was telling me, I figured out that the Dschingis Khan wasn’t located in a very central part of Kassel, but just the opposite. It was on the southern edge of Karlsaue Park, which in turn bordered a wooded area. In other words, the restaurant was on the outskirts of Kassel. I could take it or leave it. There were worse things than agreeing to it, because, after spending time in the restaurant, I could go for great walks through the park, through the forest. It would be a unique experience, she said, I could see unusual things, even discover (she smiled) the resolution to the mystery of the universe . . .

That proposal contained very little logic, actually none. This invitation to a Chinese restaurant on the outskirts of Kassel had a slightly preposterous air about it, but the trip was a year away. I thought, or wanted to believe, that perhaps in that space of time other things for me to do there would occur to the organizers. (Or should I call them agents or curators? I wasn’t experienced in these matters.)

“Will someone eventually reveal the mystery of the universe?” I asked.

She answered astutely in a voice that hadn’t lost its charm all evening, and so I asked her permission to write her answer down on a napkin. I told her I’d devote myself to admiring it for the rest of my life.

“Without the McGuffins,” she said, “there’s not much we can do, perhaps sing hey, ho, the wind and the rain. But dinner’s over.”

It seemed as if she’d controlled the exact length of time for our dinner. In any case, it was much better that it should all end there because, at home before going out, I’d taken a happy pill that my old school friend Dr. Collado was trying to patent at the time. (I’ve changed the name of this dear and somewhat frustrated inventor of somewhat medicinal drugs.)

I’d taken that pill thinking it would help me minimize my nocturnal anguish. And although the pill did work initially, for a while now its effects had been wearing off and my situation was getting dangerous. I was starting to notice my usual bleak nighttime mood beginning to emerge, my deeply melancholic side. It seemed that at any moment Boston was going to ask me where I had left that supposed severe anguish I’d told her arrived so punctually every evening, which meant it was inadvisable for me to go out at night . . . I dreaded that question and all the more so as I observed my melancholy advancing moment by moment. I even began to fear my face would turn into that of Mr. Hyde, so it seemed a very good idea that things here should end as soon as possible.

4

One evening, several weeks later, Chus Martínez and I arranged to meet. But when I arrived at the appointed place, there was María Boston, even more amusing and luminous than on the previous occasion, as if she wanted to show me she was capable of getting into the skin of a better character than the one she’d played for me the first night. I asked about Chus and there was a strange exchange of glances that struck me as incomprehensibly arduous.

“Don’t you understand that I am Chus?” she said.

For a moment, she managed to make me feel like a complete idiot. I had to understand, she said, that the first time she phoned me, she thought it best to pass herself off as María Boston, a more energetic name so much more attractive than Chus Martínez, which was so Spanish and traditional. Afterward, she hadn’t known how to unravel the snag, the windup that she was now trying to undo.

“I’m Chus. I’ve always been Chus. Got it?”

She seemed to be saying: Look, you really are stupid.

I smiled. What did one do in a case like this? Once again I had taken another euphoria-producing pill from Dr. Collado. What choice did I have? I couldn’t sit there looking anguished all evening. I hoped I was taking it for the last time in my life. It had made me smile in a very natural way, although I was actually smiling, it seemed to me, like a perfect fool. The truth is I was in a fine mess. From the start, I’d noticed the mood produced by Collado’s experimental pharmaceutical—what he called “the aspirin of charm”—wasn’t entirely bad, but still left quite a bit to be desired.

I smiled like a poor fool.

“You’re Chus, of course,” I said. “You’ve always been Chus. Now I understand.”

Over the course of this second encounter, she confirmed everything that had been said: she and Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev had agreed I could spend fewer days in Kassel, that one week would be enough, she only asked that I spend a while in the Chinese restaurant each morning. Indeed, they’d be grateful if I’d communicate as much as possible with the people I met there, with those interested in what I was writing, or rather those interested in my being a writer, and also with those simply wondering what on earth I was doing lost in that Chinese restaurant on the outskirts of Kassel.

Lost! Why did they want to see me adrift? Did they want to laugh at me? I decided to ask her why two women I barely knew—she and Carolyn—had devoted themselves to planning my loss in some faraway corner in the summer of 2012. What interest could they have in seeing me lost beside a forest? Luckily, my question coincided with an explosion of joy produced directly by the tablet, enabling me to show a more than ample smile on my face and scarcely any anxiety. I think, she said, that you’re blowing things way out of proportion. There was a brief silence. I was trying to surmise, in any case, that there was something good about my being lost and also I tried to believe that deep down she, as curator of Documenta 13, was very deliberately challenging me: I had to accept her squalid proposal and not be offended, seeing the bright side of her paltry offer by virtue of my imagination.

I got up the nerve to ask her if she and Carolyn believed that, once I was at Documenta, my powers of observation would help me to probe more deeply into the amazing splendor of contemporary art. (I was being as ironic as I could.)

She stared at me. I could tell she was not going to affirm or deny anything. She simply recommended that I not lose sight of the fact that near the Chinese restaurant there was a forest, and forests were always where real stories took place. I didn’t know what to say to that. I didn’t know what she meant by real stories.

I told her that for years, I thought in order to write well one had to lead a bad life, and she immediately asked: What’s that got to do with any of this? Nothing, Chus, it’s just a McGuffin, as I suspect your phrase about real stories was. For a moment, everything got tangled up; the rhythm of our conversation was broken. We fell silent. I tried to remedy the situation, and the only thing that occurred to me was to tell her that I had a weakness for McGuffins, but that produced nothing but stupor on her part and more silence. Until she decided to diminish the tension and told me that the following day she was going to Afghanistan. The Documenta she and Carolyn were preparing with their curatorial team was taking place not only in the German city of Kassel, but also in Kabul, Alexandria, Cairo, and Banff. With the exception of the small team of organizers and a few invited guests, Documenta 13 would be too vast for any single visitor. She was sorry she had to be away for a while because she was really enjoying our conversation and she was grateful for how well I’d taken her passing herself off as María Boston one day and revealing her true identity the next.

Well, anyway, I said, it’s a relief to know you’re not going to change your name again. No, don’t worry, she said, smiling enigmatically as she began to tell me about Documenta’s road map, insisting on the spatial expansion from Kassel to Kabul, Alexandria, Cairo, and Banff. She advised me—in case it had occurred to me to think so—that I shouldn’t believe she and Carolyn had a postcolonial attitude, rather that it was pure
polylogical
will.

I made a mental note of that adjective, which I’d never heard before. A short time later, I believed I saw a certain hope for my apparent dark future as a man confined to a polylogical Chinese restaurant. Among other things, she told me that a group called Critical Art Ensemble had found a recondite space far beyond the Kassel forest and was planning a series of lectures during the hundred days Documenta lasted. Talks, she told me, which probably no one will attend and no one will hear, given the remoteness of the place. I immediately realized that this space could be an ideal spot—obviously better than the blasted Chinese restaurant—to give a talk on any subject related to the avant-garde and the art of the new century. I asked her to try to get me invited as one of Critical Art Ensemble’s hundred speakers, for suddenly nothing fascinated me as much as planning a talk that would be delivered beyond a forest, entitled “Lecture to Nobody.”

I got very excited about this title, and here the pill, which was meant to liven me up, seemed to function perfectly. Perhaps the enthusiasm I displayed was excessive. We’ll look into it, she said coldly, as if it bothered her to see me excited by the possibility of having some truly interesting activity in Kassel. But not much later she changed her tune and said she loved the title of my lecture. I could start preparing it because from that very moment it was in the program; but that wouldn’t relieve me—she lowered her marvelous voice—from my daily sessions at the Chinese restaurant.

The cheerful expression on my face twisted slightly. What a huge obsession with that restaurant, I thought.
Nobody, nobody, lecture to nobody
, I heard her repeating to herself, as if suddenly the idea of a total absence of audience beyond the forest excited her as well.

We ended up finding ideal dates for my trip to Kassel: the last six days of the hundred that Documenta lasted; six days of September when the summer heat let up and the city would certainly be filled with visitors (as was the case on previous occasions) before the imminent closure of the exhibition.

As we said goodbye, she did not have the courtesy to tell me that she’d deceived me and was not Chus Martínez (as she had tricked me into believing). I did not discover that she’d been an imposter until a year later, when I arrived in Kassel and discovered the truth. I had said goodnight to her, convinced that she was Chus, and began to walk through the solitary streets on my satisfied and unhurried return home.

5

During my slow walk home, in the grip of an unstable state of mind, some words Kafka once wrote in a letter to Felice Bauer kept appearing and disappearing in my head: “Marienbad is unbelievably beautiful. I imagine if I were Chinese and were about to go home (indeed I am Chinese and I am going home), I would make sure of returning soon, and at any price.”

This is the only passage in all of Kafka’s writing where he says that deep down he is Chinese, which seems to indicate to us that Borges—recognizing Kafka’s voice and habits in texts from diverse literatures and eras—was probably right to see Kafka’s affinity with Han Yu, a ninth-century prose writer whom Borges discovered in the admirable
Anthologie raisonnée de la littérature chinoise
published in France in 1948.

According to what Kafka wrote to Felice Bauer, it’s obvious that the Prague writer sensed his enigmatic relationship with China, who knows whether perhaps even including his precursor Han Yu.

That night, during my slow return home, I walked along imagining—for whatever reason, obviously I had my motives—that I was enacting Kafka’s phrase; in other words, that I was Chinese and was going home. I eventually started enjoying playing that role, until there was a shift in everything and the pill’s occasional positive effects stopped. Suddenly everything darkened for me, and I fell into the state of anguish and melancholy I’d wanted to avoid; I couldn’t do anything to escape that slump in my mood and I muttered a thousand curses for having put myself in the hands of Dr. Collado. I remembered some old nocturnal strolls dominated by the same anguished perception that the world was full of messages in some secret code. In the middle of these negative perceptions, while I struggled in vain to recover my mood, I told myself it was very curious that a Chinese fellow like me had been invited to an Asiatic enclave in faraway Germany. While I thought all this (in a somewhat confused way of course), I remembered an absolutely intense and pivotal dream I’d had three years earlier in the town of Sarzana, in northern Italy, when I went to an international writers’ event there and they put me up in an inn called Locanda dell’Angelo, way out in the countryside, eight kilometers from the town’s center. Upon entering my room in this remote hotel, I immediately discovered that I’d forgotten my sleeping pills in Barcelona as well as the book I’d planned to read in bed. Even so, in spite of not having my usual sedatives, I managed to fall asleep, falling literally into a dead sleep, by remembering a Walter Benjamin essay in which he suggested that a word is not a sign, nor is it a substitute for something else, but the embodiment of an Idea. In Proust, in Kafka, in the surrealists, said Benjamin, the word parts company from meaning in the “bourgeois” sense and takes back its elemental and gestural power. Word and the gesture of naming were the same thing back in the time of Adam. Since then, language must have experienced a great fall, of which Babel, according to Benjamin, would only be a stage. The task of theology would consist of the recovery of the word, in all its mimetic originating power from the sacred texts in which it has been conserved.

I wondered there in Sarzana if fallen languages might still, all of them together, bring us closer to certain truths, truths related to the unknown origin of language. Suddenly realizing that, deep down, my whole life, without being entirely conscious of it, I had been trying to reconstruct a disarticulated discourse (the original discourse, shrouded in the mists of time), I fell asleep and into a very intense dream through which passed, with very quick steps, two of my friends, Sergio Pitol and Raúl Escari. The two of them marched electrically down the alleys of some old, possibly European, city center. The rain, however, seemed to be falling with strange sluggishness and with the same toxic appearance it has in Mexico City. The two of them went into a classroom and Sergio began to write signs I’d never seen, he wrote them with great speed on an extraordinarily vivid green chalkboard. The chalkboard transformed into a door in a pointed Arabic arch, which was even more vivid green and on which Pitol was inscribing, slowing down the rhythm of his hand, the poetry of an unknown algebra, containing formulas and mysterious messages in cabalistic, Jewish style, although perhaps it was Islamic, Chinese Muslim, or simply Italian, from Petrarch’s time; this poetic, strange, stateless algebra sent me to the center of the mystery of the universe, of a universe that seemed full of messages in some secret code.