The Illogic of Kassel (25 page)

After so much indecision, in the end I passed through that little alleyway over to Jordanstrasse without the slightest problem or fear, perhaps because I went along absorbed in other thoughts, for I had begun to wonder what I would tell Chus about my time at the Dschingis Khan; I didn’t know how to explain that, apart from a Catalan success story called Serra who’d first been cured in Hollywood and then been harmed in the
Sanatorium
, no other onlooker had come to see my “Chinese number,” that is, to see how I wrote in public.

I was worried about what I was going to tell Chus. Ever since I was at school, I’d felt guilty about not doing my homework. I was also worried about the possibility of arriving at the Osteria and finding Boston there telling me that Chus couldn’t make it but that, anyway,
she
was there, and
she
was actually Chus. Then I’d enter into a loop, into a new “Groundhog Day cycle,” where everything repeats ceaselessly and pitilessly.

I was already seeing myself smiling like a poor fool, saying to Boston: “You’re Chus, of course. You always were. What an idiot I am. I should have guessed, but I never learn.”

54

I walked along the extremely dark Jordanstrasse toward the pale lights of the Osteria, the only illuminated place on the short street. And, making sure—almost like a blind man would—that I was now in front of the restaurant, I climbed the two big steps up to the porch leading to the entrance and decided to have a look from outside to see what the place was like inside. It was packed. Leaning my face against the big window, I saw Chus sitting there on the other side of the glass. It was her. The same person whose photo I’d seen on the Internet. There would not be a Groundhog Day or anything like that. It was Chus Martínez herself staring at me from inside the Osteria. She seemed to be saying: What are you looking at? Get off the damn porch and come in!

Whether it was from not having slept or from the constant impulse of my breeze, or from the delirium of having already had dinner before going out for dinner, which had generated an energy greater than I’d had two hours earlier, I felt increasingly outside myself, with a mental strength that gave me an unexpectedly enhanced audacity.

As a private joke, I went inside the Osteria as if I were Chinese, not like one who was finally finding a home along the way, but like a Chinese man simply going inside the Osteria for the first time with the word
Shanghai
written across his forehead. The way I walked in with my head bowed, I frightened myself, but at the same time I felt I was bringing the fiesta with me and that calmed me down. I greeted Chus, a kiss on each cheek, while I mumbled something about how nice, we meet at last, or something along those lines. I immediately saw Chus didn’t see me as Chinese, and I laughed, relaxed even more, and sat down across from her at the table. My private game was over. She was, as one might expect, a woman full of ideas, actually an unstoppable ideas machine, but also not lacking grace, a sense of humor, or beauty. And of course she was very self-confident. I found this charming and I also loved seeing that my state of mind almost couldn’t be better, especially after I was seated.

“I hear you were a dramatic tenor,” said Chus.

“Where did you get that from?”

Chus had managed to make me feel very confused. I wasn’t even sure what a dramatic tenor was. Maybe it was a calculated phrase on her part to reduce my possible pretensions, perhaps it was a phrase intended to warn me that any protest on my part for having to spend useless hours in the Dschingis Khan would be given short shrift. Finally, it all became clear when she revealed that she knew I was fond of McGuffins, so that phrase about a dramatic tenor was just a McGuffin, a way of welcoming me. Had I lied, she said, and confirmed that in fact I had once been a dramatic tenor, the first minutes of our conversation could have constituted an exemplary McGuffin scenario.

A big laugh from Chus.

The menu was Italian—almost the spitting image of the one at the Trattoría Sackturm—not at all appetizing to me for the obvious reason: I had already eaten too much. Perhaps I gave too many explanations for my complete lack of appetite, when a simple excuse would have been enough. Probably so she wouldn’t have to hear all my justifications, Chus interrupted me to point out a nearby table where some friends of hers were eating. They all waved in unison with icy British and Germanic affability. I got the feeling that she’d be joining them as soon as our dinner had finished. That struck me as perfect, since it would facilitate my early withdrawal to my “thinking cabin” (in which I’d barely managed to concentrate enough to think, because I seemed to truly ponder things only when I was outside of it).

In those first minutes, waiting for the tortellini alla panna, the single dish we finally decided to order—my first nonmelancholy night in a long time was well on its way to being a great night of Italian pasta—I reminded Chus of our brief phone conversation the previous day, and we went back to talking about Barcelona, of the horror the city inspired in us, every day more stifled for a thousand reasons, especially by the mediocrity of a truly inept political class.

I don’t remember how we got onto the subject of art, which for Chus was not a question of aesthetics or taste, but of knowledge. There were some things, she said, that produced knowledge and others that did not. In Kassel, I had seen things that hadn’t struck me as so aesthetically pleasing but that had brought me knowledge, hadn’t they? Indeed, I said, and I noticed, by the way, that there were very few people who were, say, architects, urban planners, or commercial film directors here. Exactly, said Chus, no neuroscientists, but there were biologists, philosophers, quantum physicists, that is, people who went in search of knowledge, creative people operating on the least practical side of life, people trying to invent a new world. I wanted to believe I was one of them, which gave me a certain sense of security. From that moment on, everything I said to her was with the conviction—reinforced by my increasingly supernatural enthusiasm, I can’t find a better adjective—of one looking to invent a new world.

We talked about the difficulty Spaniards had accepting art without a message, accepting literature without the necessarily humanist touch or a communist dimension. Spanish realist literature, Chus said, was pre-Manet, that’s why she’d left the country, really, she couldn’t take it anymore; the economic crisis had served as an excuse to revive the same old, early twentieth-century naturalism. What obstinacy, insisting on reproducing what already exists!

I noticed it was hard to say which of the two of us was the more fervent enthusiast. I’d arrived there in a great mood, but Chus’s vitality, her desire to have an influence on every point, every angle of the art world, did nothing but get me even more revved up. And, in the middle of so much animation—conversing with Chus was very strange, because it was as if we’d spent our whole lives talking like this—I don’t know how it was that she asked me something about the world, I think she wanted to know how I saw it.

That question caught me completely off guard. At that moment, I was thinking of the incredible amount of sleep I had to catch up on and how my fear had begun to inspire the joy that was now my traveling companion. It was logical that this should alarm me because on one occasion of great fulfillment and unbridled happiness, on one warm afternoon in the past, after a great seaside feast by the Mediterranean, I’d felt this unique moment so strongly, I’d thought of committing a theatrical suicide along the lines of Heinrich von Kleist’s, which he’d staged like a play. It was as if I already knew—I do know now, but didn’t so much back then—that early Romanticism was the only beautiful Romanticism: mad, imaginative, rapturous, and profound. The fact is, I thought a death by my own hand would allow me to never get away from the ecstatic beauty of that powerful afternoon: a ridiculous beauty, because after lunching copiously that day, at the very moment I thought of killing myself I was tasting a melon.

“How do I see what?”

“The world,” said Chus.

It seemed as if she had realized perfectly well that I was Piniowsky. She was almost handing me my answer on a silver platter.

“I no longer think anything of the world, Chus. Nothing at all. It’s perished.”

“Really, nothing?”

“I think I’ve become like Marcus Aurelius. He announced one day that he had stopped having any sort of opinion about anything whatsoever.”

“Then you don’t have an opinion about me, either?”

I noticed again that with her excessive enthusiasm, she might be playing another dirty trick on me. I sensed that with my Marcus Aurelius quote I’d made a fool of myself. An avant-garde author like I claimed to be would never quote someone like that. Or was it the reverse? Wasn’t it very avant-garde not to be intimidated by a classic? Besides, Marcus Aurelius had written
Meditations
, and that went beyond the classification between classic and modern . . .

I calmed down when she wittily summoned up the figure of Petronius, who, she said, reminded her—admitting an unmissable disparity—of
my
Marcus Aurelius.

Petronius, said Chus, one day told Nero that he was ever so sorry but he was totally fed up hearing him recite his “doggerel verses, wretched poems of the suburbs” and also seeing his “Domitian belly.” Of course, after such interesting words, Petronius committed suicide.

Well, yes, I said to Chus, when I think of the world, I no longer think anything about it. I’m tired, even tired of having to see the world’s deplorable belly of a Domitilo. Domitius, Chus corrected me. Of a Domitius, I said. And then she wanted to know what I’d seen of interest so far in Documenta. I immediately started talking to her about Sehgal’s
This Variation
and how much it had impressed me. I was so emphatic that Chus was on the verge of not believing me. But I finally managed to get her to see that the sparkle of the authentic was in my words, I was not deceiving her. And then Chus, more relaxed, said that, regarding Sehgal, she was more than convinced we needed other voices in art, because what we’d been hearing for a long time, she said, were monotonous repetitions of things we already knew. What was urgent was inspiration from ideas, an energy that was different . . .

“An impulse,” I hastened to say.

Never in my life had I said anything with such assurance, such self-confidence, with such happiness. And it seemed to me that the word sounded smooth, like a whipcrack. It began to expand with potential in the night, inviting us to flee down paths without logic. And for a moment—it felt like forever—I thought the word “impulse” was more than a single thing racing down those logic-less paths. Expanding, its physical magnitude was greater than the plain old, succinctly dry impulse—that is, the single run-of-the-mill impulse inhabiting our dictionaries. Newton had given it its second sense and opened a new door, and now whoever desired could bask in the glory of this new type of impulse, so different from the one known up till then.

55

“There is a logic to be changed,” said Chus in her unique way of talking. “If you are feeling that you’re being pushed and have been for hours by an invisible impulse, which you consider neither normal nor Newtonian, what you have to think is that you’re in the grip of the
third
sense of impulse.”

And somewhat later:

“I don’t think people have any problem with art; in general they don’t have any problem with culture. It’s politics that creates the problem, it doesn’t really know what culture is. When there’s no money, people simply treat it as if it were an added extra, no? And that is the logic that needs to be changed. If artists are intellectuals, then obviously they’re not a luxury, they’re a necessity, they can change our lives. And today more than ever we need other voices, because the ones we’re hearing just tediously repeat what we’ve been hearing all our lives. What we need are new ideas, a different energy. We need to listen to those who are formulating something new and trust them and say: ‘Okay, maybe I don’t fully understand you, but I believe in what you’re proposing, at least it sounds different.’ We have to give opportunities to those who’ve been silenced and to the insane, to tell them to carry on, to not look at them with mistrust and cynicism or with an air of having seen it all before. That’s precisely what we’ve lost; we believe that it’s all been done before, refusing to see that there is still ingenious, complex, wise art that pushes our limits. We need to
listen
to artists. Never before has it been so necessary as in our time. Artists are the opposite of politicians. Do you remember Flaubert’s letter about going to the palace to see Prince Napoleon, but he’d gone out? I’ve heard how they talk about politics, writes Flaubert, I’ve listened to them and it’s something immense. Human stupidity is so vast and infinite!”

56

For a while, as I was eating my tortellini, we got marvelously caught up in Chus’s idea that art was essentially thought more than experience, which led her to conclude that artists should play a fundamental role in our society, as should poets, if art and poetry weren’t the same thing. As for politicians, they all came off looking really bad.

It was perhaps the key moment, the most fascinating of my trip, because I noticed how her words were gradually restoring a lost atmosphere from my past, a former climate of rupture with conventional art, a way of considering things that I’d almost forgotten. It was as if I were reencountering what I would enjoy encountering most, my inner truth. It was a truth, however, that I’d been constructing on the basis of four initial misunderstandings. Maybe that’s why many of my past mistakes began to file through my mind and I remembered the supposed avant-gardist I was for years and dreamed of being, as well as my yearning to go beyond provincial rupturism.