The Illogic of Kassel (8 page)

I was in Germany; it was the first time during the whole trip that I started to feel somewhat conscious of being there. We recognize that in journeys to countries by plane, we take time to truly land where we’ve set ourselves down. In my case, it wasn’t until I came upon A.H.’s towel and Braun’s perfume that I had the feeling for the first time that perhaps I had now landed on German soil. The Nazi artifacts and the presence of the irreversible past succeeded in making me come down to earth all at once, with a bump. There was the old horror, the giant stigma of interminable Nazi guilt. But did that constitute a landing? Perhaps I hadn’t completely set down and I should keep asking myself whether I was in Germany.

Shortly before leaving the Fridericianum, María Boston insisted on taking me to a separate room to see
Sleeping Sickness
, the strange work of a Thai artist, Pratchaya Phinthong. At first, what I thought I saw was a black smudge caught at the center of a large sheet of glass on top of a large table. But when I got closer I saw it wasn’t a little smudge. According to what was written on a small plaque, it was two tsetse flies, a fertile female and her sterile consort. In that instant—later on I would see more oddities—the work seemed extremely weird to me, very far from my idealized concept of avant-garde art.

Pratchaya Phinthong, Boston told me, was researching the ecological control of the tsetse fly, which spread sleeping sickness in humans. I was left confused, not knowing what to say, thinking of people I’d known who behaved just as though they had been bitten by that deadly fly.

Afterward, leaving the vicinity of the Fridericianum, I thought again of Eva Braun’s perfume bottle and ended up going off on the subject of guilt. That question came back to me like flies returning to an infected person in order to infect them twice as much. In my home country—a nation especially famous for its macabre civil war—guilt barely existed; that vulgarity was left to the ingenuous Germans. Nobody in Spain wasted time regretting having been a Nazi, or pro-Franco, or even a Catalan collaborator with the dictator in Madrid, an accomplice himself to the assassins of the Third Reich. In my country, we have always lived with our backs to the drama of Europe’s demise, possibly because—as we didn’t directly take part in either of the two world wars—all that was seen as other people’s business. Perhaps also it is because at bottom we’ve almost always lived in our own decline; we are so sunk in it, we don’t even recognize it.

You are in Germany, an inner voice seemed to want to repeat to me, reminding me somehow of the voice running through
Europa,
that Lars von Trier film that speaks to us, powerfully and obsessively, of the brutal ruination of the old continent.

“You are in Europa” was heard insistently in that film, and what the cameras showed us was a continent turned into a vast, infinite hospital.

As I came out of the Fridericianum, the voice telling me I was in Germany became unrelenting, and I felt it was likely that I had now finally, really landed. If that were so, I was in a country famous for combining intelligence and barbarism, one deeply familiar with remorse, which had spent years hesitating between feeling great pain for its sins and trying to feel a lesser regret; in short, a country whose citizens tried to find a reasonable balance between going overboard and placing too little emphasis on it, perhaps aware, on the one hand, that without memory they ran the risk of turning monstrous again, but also with too much memory, the risk was that they’d remain firmly stuck in the horror of the past.

17

I was in Germany wondering all the while whether I was really in Germany. When María Boston and I left the Fridericianum and headed straight down Königsstrasse in a southerly direction toward the Hotel Hessenland, I began to ask myself what sort of relationship there could be between avant-garde art and the bottle of perfume that had belonged to Eva Braun.

To put it succinctly, it pained me to see that war criminals and contemporary art could be related, even if it was only through art. I was turning this question over in my mind. Almost without realizing it, I drifted off not just mentally, but physically, and was on the verge of losing my balance and crashing—fortunately María Boston didn’t notice—into the window of a large department store.

A minute later—in the instant when, not without understandable concern over what had happened, I managed to peel myself away from the wretched window—I was dazzled to see in the store’s plate glass the false glitter of an utterly improbable summer light, and I realized that, contrary to what I’d thought, I still couldn’t say with complete certainty that I’d landed in Kassel or anywhere else.

That was when, to feel more as though I was in Germany, I started to pretend—just to myself, of course—that I felt a certain nostalgia for the starry nights of this country: for the deep blues of the wide German sky, the gently curved sickle of the Aryan moon, and the somber whisper of the pine trees in all the forests of that mighty land.

The moon isn’t Aryan, I corrected myself at once. And then I told myself that too many things had got muddled up in my head, and all the tiredness from the day was making them pop up in the most alarming way.

I was starting to feel really worn out, and at that stage even greater muddles can end up materializing in my mind. I’d gotten up terribly early in Barcelona to catch the plane to Frankfurt, and over the course of the day the fatigue of the flight, the lengthy Croatian incident and other tribulations had been piling up. On top of that, I didn’t want to bother Boston any longer, whom they seemed to have obliged to carry out these welcoming acts of courtesy toward me; as she herself had been half-hinting, she was expected as soon as possible in the central office, where she’d left a host of work matters pending.

It was time to start saying goodbye to her and devote myself to setting up the “thinking cabin” in my room in the Hessenland. Soon it would be getting dark, and, what’s more, I believed I could feel tiredness stealing over my body. It followed that the glitter of summer light in the store window could only be false (that sparkle I’d glimpsed a moment ago). Already in the grip of the imminent appearance of anguish, I was reminded of the philosophers of the Tlön school, who declared that, if we mortals didn’t already know it, it was as well for us to understand that all the time in the world had already transpired, and our life was only the crepuscular and no doubt falsified and mutilated memory or reflection of an irrecoverable process.

In a chain of events that took place out of my control, I saw myself as a worthless twilight reflection and fell into a state of unease that I guessed would not now be assuaged for the rest of the day, not even by the genuine glitter of the truest summer sun. And all this, naturally, was putting off the moment when I could at last feel I was fully in Germany. Depending on how I chose mentally to tackle the problem of my definitive landing, Germany might even come to seem like the other side of the moon to me, with its craters and its great seas.

18

On the terrace of a bar on Theaterstrasse, we stopped to eat some frankfurters, and I recovered more than I expected to, although it so happened that, once again, I couldn’t avoid a silly memory coming back to me. Since boyhood, it has been hard for me to eat a frankfurter without thinking of the two pounds of mud my grandfather claimed to have accumulated on the soles of his shoes near Frankfurt during World War I.

If the anecdote was ridiculous, its absurd tendency to come back every time I was about to swallow that sort of snack was even more so. Trying to escape the muddy memory by fleeing it mentally, I said the first thing to Boston that popped into my head. This was as spontaneous as it was outlandish and, seen from my present perspective, perhaps somewhat suicidal (although, not wishing to punish myself too much, I prefer to see the question as utter whimsy, like a McGuffin):

“Do you think there can be any point of connection between the avant-garde and Aryan perfume?”

Nobody has ever looked at me with such rage as Boston did hearing this question.

“What concept do you have of the avant-garde?” she asked.

At that moment it was hard to imagine what consequences this question would have for me.

19

I didn’t know what crime I had committed. I was almost scared. I took the opportunity to remind Boston that since my physical collapse some years back, I had taken exceptionally good care of my health, and, because of this, in spite of having just recovered my strength, even though I knew it was still early, I was going to retire to my hotel to rest until the following day. Surely, I thought, my question had originated in my accumulated tiredness of that day.

Boston objected, asking me at the same time if I was really so sure I had to go. I told her that I was, indeed, very tired. And then, in a very friendly tone, I reminded her that in Barcelona I’d made exceptions going out for dinner with her twice, and I could make another one or two, but not that evening because I felt worn out and needed to recover.

She laughed. I wanted to know what about. “Because,” she said, “you spoke in terms of ‘physical collapse’ and ‘recovering your strength’ and your language coincided with the motif of Documenta 13, which is precisely
Collapse and Recovery
.”

I reacted with what must have been a dense-looking expression.

“Collapse and Recovery,” she reiterated, still smiling.

Then she paused, as if she might need to take a deep breath. “That theme seems almost custom-made for you,” she insisted, not hiding a touch of sarcasm. We were at this juncture when a tall guy with dark hair and a beard passed by. He greeted Boston in German, discussing something with her that I thought, from his exaggerated gestures, could only be a weighty matter, something beyond measure. I understood nothing of what they said, but I imagined they were talking in tragic tones about the powerful force of the storms around the Irish Aran Isles. I imagined the entire conversation she had with that man whose eyes—to tell the truth—were unusually deep-set and gloomy, enjoying myself during that imaginative exercise. After they spoke for a few minutes, the man went on his way as if returning to his distant homeland. “He’s a sad one,” was all Boston said after he had moved off. This gentleman seems very worried about the storms in his country, I was about to say, although in the end, I contained myself; it was not the moment to make things worse.

Not long afterward, the greatest possible contrast to the sad man passed by that corner of Theaterstrasse: along came joy personified, Pim Durán, a very attractive brunette, from Seville, Boston’s assistant in the office and the same person who had sent me the Lufthansa tickets in Barcelona. She was the person I’d spoken to at the Frankfurt airport when Alka didn’t show up. I’m the one who sent you emails and talked to you on the phone, she said with a lovely smile. She spoke into María Boston’s ear about what was surely a work-related matter, then continued on her way. She was off to a post office, if I wasn’t mistaken. She seemed a fundamentally happy woman and would have made me envious if it weren’t for the fact that I wasn’t exactly seeking happiness.

When we were alone once more, I asked Boston where the name Pim came from. She thought about it for a moment, and it turned out she didn’t know. I would have to ask Pim myself. Then she deftly reintroduced the theme of collapse and recovery, which, according to her, ran through Documenta 13 the same way that it ran through Kassel’s tragic wartime past and its regeneration since then. It would not do, she added, to lose sight of the fact that these concepts—collapse, recovery—didn’t necessarily have to proceed consecutively, but could also take place simultaneously.

The two processes, she told me, could
occur at once
, in the same way that existential insecurity lately had become the norm for everyone and so we were living in a permanent state of crisis punctuated by situations of emergency and exception; we recovered, but violent collapse returned at the very same moment, and then it could be the other way around, and so on, without end, all the time. Nobody seemed immune from the general upheaval of the world, which was precisely what—unofficially, but ultimately significantly—that edition of Kassel was most concerned with.

More than just talking about Documenta, Boston instructed me about what was happening there. It seemed they had charged her with doing so. I decided to cooperate and make her undertaking easier, asking her for more details about the city’s past. Straightaway, I saw I’d made it plain with my request that I was entirely ignorant about the place, which shocked her in a way, almost as much as my question minutes earlier about Aryan perfume and the avant-garde.

The Nazis, she ended up explaining to me somewhat tersely, produced a great deal of military hardware in Kassel, especially tanks, so the city and its environs were a priority target for allied bombing raids in 1943. In fact, the bombs wiped out ninety percent of the city’s thousand-year history.

The fateful evening hour was now very close at hand, and I noticed that, perhaps even a little earlier than usual, anguish and melancholy were beginning to take hold of me. I would have to wait until the following morning to recover a decent state of mind. I was thinking about the tragedy of this split life, the life of morning joy and nocturnal collapse I seemed destined to live out for the rest of my days, when I saw that the man with the unusually deep-set and gloomy eyes was circling around us (although on this occasion he had not even bothered to greet us). He looked different to me now, seeming suddenly exhausted, as if he were already overcome by the worry he’d probably been dragging around with him since the day he left the Aran Isles. But I preferred not to say anything. All at once, I started to feel unsure whether it was the same German I’d seen before.