The Illogic of Kassel (13 page)

She let me go, but then embraced me again. Again she shouted, Writer, writer.

I heard Alka’s needless laughter.

“Yes, I’m a writer,” I said, annoyed. “What of it?”

26

When I got a grip on myself, Frau Writer-Writer was saying goodbye to Alka and Pim and leaving. Her absence was immediately noticeable, as I was stuck without potential admirers who would want to spy on what I wrote. The woman went without saying anything to me, as if she had forgotten me immediately after her second savage squeeze.

A German experience, I thought.

And I was left relying on what really interested me: whether Pim, the cheerful girl whose name reminded me of a beach in the Azores called Porto Pim, would take responsibility for the absurdity of my situation, given that there weren’t any people there now to annoy me.

I was going to ask her again what she thought I should do there with my pencil and my eraser and my red notebook on the outskirts of Kassel. Up to that point I hadn’t been interested, but now I wondered if she could give me any idea how those who’d preceded me in this Chinese number had worked out this peculiar situation. I was going to ask, but at the last moment, I decided to inquire about my talk with the title “Lecture to Nobody.” I wanted to know if it had been scheduled for a particular time, as I was keen to give it, even if, I said to myself, it was possibly only to make up for the conspicuously shabby “Chinese number” that they’d entrusted to me. What’s more, it seemed that only if I gave my “Lecture to Nobody” would I feel as though I’d really taken part in Documenta.

It took Pim a while to understand my question, but finally the penny dropped. I was to give the talk on Friday, she said, but they’d changed the venue and I would not do it out beyond a forest without an audience, but in the very center of Kassel, in the conference room of the Ständehaus.

“Then I can’t call it ‘Lecture to Nobody.’ ”

“If it’ll make you happy, we’ll stop the public coming in.”

I laughed and asked what kind of place the Ständehaus was. It was the old Hesse parliament, she said, and one of the few buildings left more or less standing at the end of the war. She’d show me around inside whenever I wanted to get a good idea of where I’d be speaking.

I didn’t want to let the opportunity pass me by and asked whether that meant we could go and see the Ständehaus right that minute.

“Don’t even think about it!” Pim barked.

Bit by bit, she lost her smile, which up to that point had suited her so nicely. Seeing her like that made an impression on me. Noticing that her reaction surprised me, she took it badly, not knowing how to get back to her permanent exuberance, the
downside of her charm
. The return to that state had seemed expected.

“But we’re not doing a thing here in this Chinese restaurant,” I said.

“What do you mean we’re not doing a thing?” Pim said. She seemed put out.

Far from venting my rage on her
false
charm
or accusing her of taking orders from superiors about what she had to do with me, I kept quiet. Perhaps it was for the best. I smiled, took a step toward her, and positioned myself very close to her face; then I retreated, making out nothing had happened, that I hadn’t noticed she wasn’t always charming. But something had happened, and then some. There was something shockingly horrible about the unpredictable Pim’s face. When it’s artificial, I thought, joy can fall apart in an extremely alarming manner. And what’s more, how frightening people are who suddenly show a side of themselves we’d never imagined (as sometimes happens to me, which is why I try not to be seen out too much at night).

27

Minutes later, I was seated behind the dog-eared “Writer in Residence” sign, like someone who is waiting for a very absentminded customer to come into his disastrous shop. Three tables away, Pim and Alka were drinking Chinese tea while talking about mysterious matters. Everything led me to suspect they had instructions to observe
what I made of it
(and from a certain distance in order to ensure the whole thing worked). The ball, they seemed to be saying to me, is in your court now, so
what you make of it is up to you.
You could see perfectly well they were thinking this or something along those lines, because occasionally their glances were somewhat sadistic, as if they were expecting a real gallows expression to take hold of me.

I wrote in the red notebook:

“Change your life completely in two days without caring in the slightest what has gone before; leave without further ado. When all’s said and done, the right thing to do is take off.”

I wrote this just in case. It would be a total miracle if anybody came in and was interested to know what I was working on. At least I would give that visitor the impression I was really writing there at my table in the Chinese restaurant. If anyone asked me, I would speak at length in Autre’s voice about the creation of a character in a novel, who was an average man, naive and intelligent at the same time: a man who lived through a particular moment and wasn’t even looking to start again, but wanted to leave without further ado and
go toward nothing
.

And what did going toward nothing mean? I didn’t have the slightest idea. In my role as Autre, I would ask the first person who inquired about it. Of course, that person might never turn up. In short, in the highly unlikely event that anyone should approach my table, my idea was to act as though I were a writer seeking the collaboration of his fans. It goes without saying that having to ask readers for their help seems a pretty unattractive method to me, but I knew I could allow myself to do it if the circumstances arose. I would feel not that it was me myself who was doing it, but the guileless Autre. Moreover, I was indifferent to a desire to change life and leave without further ado: in the end, that was somebody else’s desire, expressed in somebody else’s work, in the book being written by a man from Barcelona whose name was (provisionally) Autre.

While I was waiting for I’m not exactly sure what, I entertained myself by writing an autobiographical note for poor Autre, letting him borrow several details from my own life so he wouldn’t turn out too radically different from me. I focused the text on his early relationship with art and revealed that cinema had been a big thing for him long before literature was:

From the window of the living room in the house where I was born, you could see the Metropol. I followed the changes on the marquee from there and the pasting up of huge posters of Bogart, for example. At the age of five I saw Humphrey Bogart a hundred times a day. I was only three when I saw my first movie one summer in Llavaneres, a village north of Barcelona, a kilometer from the beach. My mother’s family had settled in that village four centuries ago. My first film was
Magnolia
, with Ava Gardner. I remember that, on leaving the cinema, I began to imitate William Warfield, the black singer who sang “Ol’ Man River” at the end of the film in an extremely deep voice (which I aspired to, I suppose, the voice of a man). The event was much celebrated in my family. More than that, it seems they thought I wanted to be a black singer when I grew up . . .

Alka and Pim came to see me to say they were going outside to smoke, and after their interruption I was no longer capable of carrying on with my autobiographical note. It’d be best if they went a long way away, I thought. That’s all I thought.

Then I plunged into a text in the style of Jonathan Swift’s
Resolutions When I Come to Be Old.
I barely diverged from the original: “Not to marry a young woman. Not to be peevish or morose or suspicious. Not to be too free with advice, nor to trouble any but those who desire it. Not to be too severe with the young, but make allowances for their youthful follies. Not to be categorical or stubborn. Not to insist on keeping so many rules for fear you should keep none of them.”

I preferred to attribute these
Resolutions
to Autre too. As well as preparing everything so that, if any reader-spy were to appear, the writing I showed wouldn’t be mine but my double’s (that is, poor Autre’s), I dumped the whole drama of the extreme proximity of old age onto him.

Of the two women, only Pim came back, but not until almost an hour later. I wouldn’t see Alka again for the rest of that day. During the hour spent alone, with the girls smoking outside, I had more than enough time to lament, a thousand times over, not having brought
Romanticism
or
Journey to the Alcarria
with me. As I had nothing to read, I devoted myself to
remembering
something I’d read: a letter from Kafka to his girlfriend Felice Bauer, in which he expressed his fear that, when they married, she would spy on everything he wrote. (Indeed, Bauer had affectionately written to him of her desire to sit beside him in the future while he was writing.)

Perhaps my terror of being spied on in the Dschingis Khan was humbly and distantly related to Kafka’s panic at the mere possibility that Felice Bauer wouldn’t let him write in solitude. I had the feeling that part of my problem with the invitation to Documenta had been just that fear of mine. If I remembered correctly, Kafka’s panic was mixed with some Chinese business in a January 1913 letter, in which he wrote something along these lines to Bauer: “You once said you would like to sit beside me while I write. Listen. In that case I could not write at all. One can never be alone enough when one writes, there can never be enough silence when one writes, even night is not night enough.” And these words mingled with far-off China because, in the same letter, Kafka used the anecdote of a poem to mark a separation between himself and Felice, and in passing he showed her that even in that distant Oriental land, working at night was the exclusive preserve of men. The poem sketched the lovely image of the scholar bent over his book who’d completely forgotten to go to bed; the Chinese man’s companion, who had made a huge effort to keep her anger under control up to that point, snatched the lamp away and asked him whether he knew what time it was. But he was absorbed, engrossed in his fascinating task. . . . With this in mind, I also became engrossed and missed all the things I was used to having around me. When I was able to react, I once again felt ridiculous grasping my true situation: waiting for some very absentminded customer to come into my disastrous business. Business? Yes, the business of a man of letters, seated at his own gallows.

28

As the hour approached when Germany has lunch, the Dschingis Khan started to liven up, as you might expect, and customers began coming in: people chose tables near mine. I was so alone there (in theory Alka and Pim were still smoking outside, although I’d soon discover Alka had taken the bus back). For a while, I entertained myself by pretending everyone in the place was an acquaintance or a friend, a really surprising gathering of people linked to different periods of my life.

As everyone asked for the menu, so did I, though in my case it was just to have something to read. They might be old acquaintances or friends, but none of them spoke to me, which never ceased to be a relief. I was worried they might all want to head for me at once and I’d have to choose between friends or acquaintances from one period or another; the truth is, I’ve always hated favoritism.

I’m not sure how it came about that I bent down and started looking for a hole under the table. Knowing that Marie Darrieussecq knew that I, too, liked those jail scenes in which prisoners leave useful messages for their successors in their cells, I was trying to find a cranny into which she might have slipped some instructions about how to survive in those tricky Chinese circumstances. As you might guess, I didn’t find anything, but I did spend quite a while pleasantly entertained, mostly by imagining I did find a scrap of paper, which turned out to be a message for Holly Pester, not for me. She was another of the writers who’d passed through here. I’d been able to read some of her poetry on the Internet and enjoyed it a lot.

On deciding the fruitless search was over, and also purely to fill the time, I turned to doing something else. I devoted myself to listening to the conversations in German and Chinese that I could hear in the restaurant, as well as those between customers and waiters that mixed the two languages together. They might be acquaintances or friends, but they all spoke in German and Chinese. Supposing our paths had crossed over the years, my friends certainly seemed to have changed a good deal, at the very least to have changed languages.

I rang a friend in Barcelona to ask if he could possibly imagine the idea of a Catalan taking up the Chinese language and renouncing his own forever. Luckily for my friend, he wasn’t at home. I didn’t feel like calling anyone else after that.

Soon the whole restaurant had turned itself into a new Galway Bay as I began to use my fantastical “Synge method”: that special technique that allowed me to believe I understood everything everyone was saying so perfectly that I could even draw conclusions about what was going on there.

For a moment I went so far as to believe that, if the circumstances were right, I could someday work as an interpreter in meetings between Chinese and German entrepreneurs. I heard, for example, a German customer telling his wife that her face, usually washed out and tending toward a sort of eggish hue, had acquired an incandescent tone. And I heard the wife replying that he was a dead man. I heard a Chinese cook tell a waiter he wanted to get over his sexual extravaganzas and that he was fed up with his horrible girdle. What girdle was he talking about? Did I really know what a girdle was? I heard another waiter tell a customer he understood his desire to stand out when there were ladies around and I heard the customer promise him a big tip if he managed to make him stand out even more. I heard one of the Chinese cooks tell a German kitchen boy he was a greaseball and that they’d end up finding him in a sewer and have to scrape a layer of filth off in order to identify him. I heard the kitchen boy tell the cook she had a lovely big ass. He congratulated her on having such a large one but said that every day she wasted half her time stuck in the doorway, as it was so hard for her to get into the kitchen.