The Illogic of Kassel (14 page)

From everything I heard and translated using the Synge method, I came to the conclusion that there was an undercurrent of violence about the place. A tension between the German and Chinese citizens—both countries stars on their own continents—ran almost covertly in every corner. It was as if all the immense tension between the Chinese and the Germans over dividing up the world as soon as the United States lost it was concentrated there in the limited space of that establishment.

You could feel that tension, and the dialogue somehow reproduced it with a hefty emotional charge. It ended up leading to my notable physical exhaustion, and only that morning’s excellent mental state saved me from a weariness and anguish premature at that time of day. It was obvious I couldn’t bear being in that absurd place any longer, where perhaps the worst thing of all was that I wasn’t doing anything. Nobody came to see me, despite how ghastly that would have been. Maybe because of this, when I saw Pim reappear I actually felt happy. At first, I thought Alka had got left behind. But I soon discovered that not only was Alka no longer there, but she was perhaps several miles away. It was obvious Pim had sent Alka off to laugh elsewhere; but I didn’t inquire, I didn’t want to know. I preferred to remain ignorant of what had become of the marvelous Croatian woman who laughed because she thought her job obliged her to. I was more concerned with things of a different order, most particularly my weird situation waiting at that table with its monstrous vase.

As if being there all by myself with the red notebook weren’t enough, Pim angrily remarked that nobody was coming to see me. I’ve always thought it most unnecessary that she told me so. I contained myself as best I could and, letting myself be carried along by my generally good state of mind, I simply said that I found her immensely amusing and somehow was going to put her into my next novel.

I expected she would at least want to know what my next book was about and that might even cause her to lean over my table to see what I’d jotted in my notebook (that way, a feeling that people were interested in me would be created, and this might possibly help with the formation of a line; it’s well known that people tend to be imitative); but not only did she not glance toward my notebook, she half turned around, and after saying she was going back outside to carry on smoking, she disappeared from sight so quickly I almost felt offended. I was so annoyed by her attitude that I couldn’t bring myself to follow her. I didn’t even want to get up from that absurd table and catch a breath of fresh air, or concentrate on the sprightliness of the pensioners on the terrace by the Fulda.

The minutes that followed have all vividly stayed with me, even though nothing happened. The mysterious mind sometimes seizes on moments that are simply dead or appear quite banal, but which, for reasons that escape us, stay in our memory and end up leaving us uneasy. These memories seem to be ineradicable, making us think these moments mean more than we first believed, and perhaps we just didn’t succeed in seeing it all at the time. In fact, if we take stock, all the moments of our lives are like that; in other words, more happens than we think. But there are some moments that surprisingly tend to be dull and yet mysteriously lodge in the memory, perhaps so we might investigate later on what buried reality ran through it all.

I was there a long time in this second phase of strange lingering; I was basically hanging around, waiting for Pim to return from her latest cloud of smoke. And during that time nothing happened, but taking into account the fact that I remember it minute by minute, I tend to think much more took place than seems possible to get down on paper. Throughout that period of time, boring and memorable at once, I devoted myself to recalling an unexciting impasse
experienced on a now dimly remembered group trip to Dublin: I was trying to buy film for my camera, but we were in the suburbs and in a hurry to get up some metal steps leading to a bridge we had to cross to reach a train station. . . . Well, I won’t go on, because nothing happened. Or, more accurately, I didn’t know how to identify what it was that really happened and left me intrigued for life.

I was just thinking of this when Pim came back in, this time to tell me she was considering seeing a hypnotist to give up smoking.

“As nobody’s coming to see me, don’t you think we could go now?” I said.

“It’s not all about you being seen,” she replied, aghast.

It was unnecessary for her to tell me this, too, but it did sound like she was reproaching me for not getting down to writing, which ultimately, she seemed to think, was what I should really be doing.

29

A few minutes later, a guy of medium height came in, overweight and sporting a mustache, around forty years of age. He was dressed in a conventional gray suit: a guy, I would soon see, who was coarse and refined at the same time. He was heavy, but also seemed light; his personality was sporadically graced by a certain crackpot charm.

On seeing him, I went so far as to wish the whiskery fellow was not a restaurant customer, but someone coming in to pester me. That shows what a bad state I was in at that moment. I was desperately lonely. My unique existence no longer seemed poetic after all these ludicrous minutes playing writer to an empty spectators’ gallery.

“I feel terrific, how are you?” said the guy with the crackpot air about him. It gave me enormous joy to find he was talking to me, and it was a nice surprise that he was speaking in my mother tongue, in Catalan. His surname was Serra, and he said he was from Igualada, near Barcelona. He had come from the sanatorium, he explained. At first, I thought he was talking about an outpatients’ unit or a hospital, maybe an asylum, but no, far from it—the fat man in gray came from a Documenta installation called
Sanatorium
, a project by the Mexican artist Pedro Reyes.
Sanatorium
was a pavilion in the middle of Karlsaue Park, an improvised clinic with seven rooms for psychotherapy, with specialists attending those who needed to overcome stress, solitude, and fear. The visitors, if they so requested, were cared for as patients and could be treated with
goodoo
therapies (positive voodoo); they were encouraged to stick small objects onto cloth dolls.
Sanatorium
was right in the south of Karlsaue Park, in other words, almost adjacent to the Dschingis Khan.

The fat man with the crackpot air had just emerged completely cured (not crude) from there. At least, that’s what he told us, as though trying to crack a joke. He also wanted to play with the word
goodoo.
I’ll be healthy later, he said, but it’s
good-oo
to be healthy now. He’d read something of mine once but didn’t remember the title. I’m delighted you’re in a good mood too, he said. I’ve been sticking super-positive things onto a rag doll. Sticking? I queried. Don’t go thinking I said
slicking
, he said. No, you said
sticking
, I heard you perfectly. I’ve been gluing things to the doll, he said, now do you understand me?

Standing beside the table, Pim seemed interested to see what I made of things with the man who came along so
good-oo
from
Sanatorium
. And tell me, the jovial fellow said, is it true you’re going to let me see what you write? Even though I knew I had set myself up for this to happen, I’d discounted the possibility, so the request took me very much by surprise, even rattling me more than usual, but I reacted in time. I’ll let you read the latest thing to occur to me, I said; in fact I just wrote it down here. I passed him the red notebook, and he read aloud: “Change your life completely in two days, without caring at all about what has gone before, leave without further ado. When all’s said and done, the right thing to do is take off.”

He read it out and said he would have written: “Change your life completely in two hours with glue from the
Sanatorium.
” Although I wasn’t exactly Autre, I felt offended and leaped to the defense of the beleaguered professional I knew to be inside that long-suffering writer, humiliated at his table in the Chinese restaurant. I’m trying to write about an average man, I told him, who’s going through a difficult time and doesn’t even look to start again. He plans to go toward nothing. And tell me, Señor Serra, what do you imagine going toward nothing means? No idea, he answered, I live with success and every day I go further toward that.

If I had any doubt, he’d just made everything perfectly clear; once again, a strange situation had cropped up in my life with an oddball included. Nothing new there. For reasons that escape me, I’ve attracted crazies my whole life.

You should know that just a few months ago, he said, I was able to leave behind a perfectly uninteresting forty-year-old life and start to savor success as a writer. I began to experience it in the only place in the world I wanted to triumph, New York. Here Serra paused (I’d say perversely and with malicious intent) in order to ask if I proposed to triumph in this Chinese restaurant. He didn’t give me time to reply, not even just a tenth of a second, to say that the verb
savor
didn’t indicate he was such a good writer as he himself declared. Because if you do propose to triumph here, Serra went on, unperturbed, I have to advise you that New York is more suitable. You’re not going to get anywhere with a Chinese ambition. I trust, I said, already rather peeved, that’s not just because New York is more central than this crappy restaurant. He laughed and I was again aware of that crazy side of him. I wondered if it wouldn’t be better to say suddenly that I was going to the bathroom and wouldn’t be back, or suggest he order a
babao fan
at the bar, which, if I hadn’t read wrong, was the dessert that nourished the first Chinese cosmonaut on his space voyage. Alternatively I could suggest he order—I’d memorized the menu—an “eight-treasures rice pudding.”

I don’t know if you can imagine, he said, suddenly sounding somewhat pained and serious, what it is to astound Greenwich Village with your novels and publish brilliant articles in the
New Yorker
and the
Coffin Factory
and the
Southern Review
at the same time, and for your appearance to be simultaneously slovenly and splendid and your mind to ebb and flow the whole time like water, and the blond waves of your hair to spring up rebelliously around your head, and to finish nights chatting with the editorial team of
Screen Gossip
finding out the latest rumors or arguing with Rockefeller Senior to ascertain which of you best carries the burden of success.

I didn’t need to hear another word. He spoke a more than distinguished Catalan with a wide vocabulary, but how many years had it been since
Screen Gossip
was last published? Fat, gray Serra was even loonier than his overly conventional appearance suggested. This seemed to me to offer a more than good enough excuse to run away. Providentially, I saw Pim signaling to me from the doorway, as if indicating I should pop out with her to take some air, and I remember very well how it felt: as if someone had just proposed I should get out of Hell on my own two feet before it was too late.

I left.

The right thing to do was take off.

We went out to the back of the restaurant and from there started to descend a pronounced slope of green grass, heading to the southern end of Karlsaue Park. After a while, we began to follow the arrows on scrappy signs pointing toward
Sanatorium
. It wasn’t drizzling anymore. The unfriendly restaurant was being left behind, and for me it was like losing sight of Sing Sing. As we went farther and farther into the park and at the same time into Documenta territory, “the Chinese number” also felt increasingly far away.

“Do you think the Chinese couldn’t even see me?” I asked Pim.

She didn’t answer, which didn’t particularly worry me. I preferred to remember that when you’re walking along with another person you don’t feel obliged to respond to everything that’s said to you and that’s why a lot of sentences end up unanswered.

Half a minute later, Pim finally decided to speak. She did so to say that she’d talked to Boston on the phone the last time she’d gone out to smoke and they’d told her from the curatorial team office that there was really no need to overdo things, that the time spent in the restaurant was flexible, was up to the writer in residence, and the last thing that must be allowed to happen was for the invited writer to feel under pressure at any point.

You could have said that sooner, I thought. But I said nothing, I just kept walking. I would rather everything followed its course. After all, we were getting farther away from the Chinese restaurant, which was the most important thing just then. At least for that day I would not be returning to Hell. Nothing could feel better than that calm push of the invisible current.

30

We were walking along peacefully through Karlsaue Park for what must have been a tremendously long time. Suddenly, looking to the left, I thought I saw a series of tiny individuals—sometimes singly, sometimes in pairs or groups—all inside a gigantic glass of water. Like Cartesian divers, the little people rose vertically in the liquid and immediately, without having reached the surface, plunged toward the bottom, where they rested an instant before starting a new ascent.

I was very thirsty because it had already been a long walk, and I thought I might be suffering from a passing spot of sunstroke. It seemed to me that Pim had told me the glass was really an athlete holding back the flight of a great bird and contained drowned dwarves, who, trained in crime, were trying to strangle Raymond Roussel.

Okay, I said. And we carried on walking.

When I realized I was hallucinating, I put all my hopes into being able to sit and rest as soon as we got to the terrace of the café-bar at the Orangerie Palace. You could already see the terrace on the horizon casting a strange and lovely oasis-like light, in this case it wasn’t hallucinatory. We were heading for that terrace, and one might assume we’d have a good rest in the bar, but in the meantime my thirst was getting worse. I longed for water more with every moment. This did not outweigh my impression that at the same time, I was increasingly firmly in the grip of a very enthusiastic mood. The sensation was unusual for me: I was extremely tired, but at the same time I kept up my almost inordinate enthusiasm with just as much vigor as I had hours before, most especially for anything to do with Documenta. I maintained a critical attitude toward certain installations and pieces but, in general, felt very interested in what I was seeing. Entirely happy, I’d say, to stroll around a city turned upside down by avant-garde art, or contemporary art, or whatever it was.