The Illogic of Kassel (18 page)

I spent the night turning over awkward questions in my mind and I was incredibly restless, sometimes twisting in a ridiculous, tragic way between the sheets, transformed into a sort of neurotic Sinbad, old and forgetful, devoted to summoning up, in a series of litanies, all the cities I’d ever laid eyes on. I remember myself that way, simultaneously tragic and comical. A homegrown Sinbad or a Kassel-made one, if you prefer, dedicated to evoking, from inside his precarious cabin, with a rosary-like rhythm, solitary refuges to which in times gone by great anguished minds had withdrawn to think.

But what really drove me to the most dogged insomnia and a near fatal nervousness—I went on remembering on the bus heading in the direction of the Chinese restaurant—were the visions that followed one another in front of my astonished eyes. However little credence I gave them to start with, I was unable for many hours to push them away. It all began when I suddenly felt enveloped in a deadly silence and noticed that not a breath of air stirred inside the cabin, not a sound could be heard, not a squeak, nothing. The utter conviction that Europe had long since been wrapped in a shroud hit me all at once. Or, more accurately, the feeling had slowly crept up on me over the last few hours. I was in the center of Germany, in the center of Europe, and there, in that center, it was more obvious than anywhere else that everything had been cold and dead and buried for decades, ever since the continent allowed itself to make its first serious unpardonable mistakes. Everything had been wiped out in the center of that actually inanimate territory, where by day (as I’d been able to observe during that now past and very regretful morning and afternoon), the sun had remained unchanging at its zenith and, nonetheless, had stayed hidden behind a haze that seemed to have been hanging in the air for centuries, traces of a sort of dust as fine as residual pollen, from an earth that was disintegrating with terrifying slowness.

You are in Europe and Europe is not here, said a singsong, obsessive inner voice, which seemed keen to do away with me at all costs, simultaneously reminding me that the weight of our most recent terrifying history was too much, a history in which horror was the dominant presence.

It was a difficult night. And my eyes were like lighthouses. Europe was infested with ghosts, like the ones in Sehgal’s dance hall, and it was laden with symbols from the past. Europe, already a tragic composite, would never again manage to feel part of the world in a good or natural way, in fact would never again manage to feel
on earth
in any way at all.

At last, I could sleep, albeit only for an hour. At seven o’clock, I dropped off, and that drop drowned out my horror. I woke an hour later, and in a great frame of mind, which surprised me because nobody expects to find himself suddenly feeling so good after one hour’s sleep.

“Life is serious, art is joyful,” I said out loud, and then imagined cannon fire waking the whole of Kassel.

36

Time moved like lead and so did the whole city, but my buoyant mood didn’t flag for a second.

Among other things, I wasted no time discovering that on the bus—unlike in my meditation space in the cabin—thinking turned out to be simply relaxing, and even helped most of the phantoms from my night of insomnia to evaporate. I should have had more sleep, but I wasn’t tired. I sat at the front of the bus that morning, giving thanks to God and Duchamp for the existence of theories in art, conscious, too, that much as I’d had to put my shoulder to the wheel and knuckle down to the actual practice on so many occasions, the theoretical would always be my great passion. I was sitting there at the front when I decided to move down to the back, convinced the windows were bigger and I’d see the landscape better.

At that point it became Autre who was looking out at the rainy highway. And, quick as a flash, Autre thought up a character who resembled me and was supposedly part of the avant-garde, which was why he traveled at the front of the bus. I was feeling more and more lively thanks to my unexpected mental strength that seemed to increase the farther the bus ventured into the outskirts.

On reaching kilometer 19 of the Auedamm, we stopped for a few brief moments outside the Dschingis Khan. I looked at the place through my window and felt an immense weakness: an uncommon fatigue swept over me just at the thought that I was going to get off where nobody was waiting for me and where there might even be someone who would hate me, taking it as a given that I was a writer of no great interest.

Even so, I stood up with the intention of getting off the bus, but something compelled me to sit back down again at once. From my recaptured seat, I carried on looking in utter amazement at that place that appeared so innocuous, so insubstantial, so dreary in the rain. I still remember the horror, the tremendous horror, with which I regarded it.

Then the bus continued on its way. I was so utterly alone, knowing I was going to continue that way for so many hours, that I felt the need to see myself from the outside, precisely in order to be accompanied at least by the person who imagined he was seeing me. And that was how I ended up seeing myself: as the main character in a scene from an old Wim Wenders movie, one of those films in which the characters travel on every sort of public transport, looking out the windows of a multitude of different vehicles, with infinite longing, at cold German cities.

The bus continued on its way and I discovered that the route on that line was circular, so twenty minutes later we stopped again at kilometer 19. That time I was closer to getting off than before, but seeing again how dull and dreadful the place was in every way beneath the rain, I still didn’t alight. That morning I was interested in everything, but I couldn’t manage that sinister place. I went around another eight times on the bus, each turn lasting twenty minutes; some three hours in total sitting on public transport, resisting facing my Chinese destiny alone.

And the oddest thing was that I didn’t even have time to regret not having the books from my suitcase with me,
Journey to the
Alcarria
or
Romanticism
, that is, not having something I could read on such a long and obsessively circular trip. The thing was, I was very well entertained by the repetitive run through the outskirts of the city, due to a faint but strange euphoria, which, although it was slight, subjected me to a hitherto unknown mental activity. I imagined that I went into the Dschingis and felt not only Chinese and as though I were going home, but that once again my arms had become excessively long and my legs were too far away from me. Totally Chinese and totally monstrous, I saw myself going into the Dschingis and looking at the round table with its vase, discovering that none of it was nearly as bad as I’d thought. Was that the effect of my tendency to see things in a positive light in the morning? That’s what I asked myself, imagining this scene on the bus, while outside the rain got heavier and heavier.

In that scene, totally invented from my seat on the bus going around the Auedamm, a young Chinese waiter looked annoyed and led me through the Dschingis Khan to my table for the damned invited writer. I noticed right away there was no respect for writers in that dive, but I didn’t find his attitude worrying and simply thought the guy envied me and wanted to take my place in the restaurant, possibly because my soft red couch looked very appealing on that rainy day. Then I forgave the jealous man and took out my notebook, pencil, and eraser. I read the first thing I’d written. (“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.”) Then I wrote a few sentences about the worrisome problem of poor communication, though no doubt it would be better to say it worried Autre, since it didn’t bother me one bit. Why should I concern myself about it, anyway, when I was a poor lonely soul from a sad Wim Wenders movie? Sad? Actually, quite the reverse. I’d better correct that, as in fact I was actually going along uninhibited and happy there on the bus and all I needed was to start singing like I was a radio. What’s more, I wanted to, because the piped music on the bus kept repeating, as if wanting to overwhelm its passengers, the intensely nostalgic soundtrack from
Out of Africa
.

What a contrast, I thought, to a few hours earlier, what a contrast to the torment of last night when my radical isolation had started to impinge on my state of mind, causing me, out of pure desperation, to react against it and, by way of a natural defense mechanism, to try to create, all through that never-ending night, a potent mental antidote or an “emetic” against my demoralization.

I was thinking, or rather imagining, along these lines, and the longer I sat beside that window watching the rain falling, the more my imagination seemed to visit the Dschingis Khan. With my euphoria, my interest in everything heightened (except in personally going to that damned Chinese restaurant), the world seemed thought-provoking, worthy of study, utterly fascinating; there was nothing around that could not be praised. I judged everything, or almost everything, adorable; it was as if I were immersed in a complete celebration of the very fact of living, as if it were a year later and I’d decided to try a third of Dr. Collado’s tablets, discovering over the last few months that he’d substantially developed his invention and ended up creating a happy pill that made the world seem less imperfect. Or perhaps it was the force of the same breeze from
The Invisible Pull
that was creating an extra impetus in me and making me see things with a certain enthusiasm.
Or maybe the slight euphoria came from my intense and permanent contact recently with different works of art, different ideas and new concepts that I’d been seeing and discovering in Kassel and which had come to form part of my world. In the end, so many hours looking at such unconventional art had left me with very positive feelings. And it only remained to be asked—if it actually needed asking—whether there really was anything new in all that had been seen. The answer was no, but it hardly mattered. I had been fascinated by most of it, surely because I preferred to think it was the newest thing for thousands of miles around. Without my fascination for the new—or everything that at least tried to seem that way—I could not live, I’d never been able to, at least not since I found out that the new existed or could exist. And this was something that Kassel had the virtue of reminding me, because, through intermittent memories, it had brought back to me the bleak days of my extreme youth in Cadaqués, especially that day I saw a golden reflection of the sun in the mirror of a restaurant where at that exact moment the widows of Duchamp and Man Ray were having lunch. Back then, I didn’t know what sort of work their husbands had left behind, but there were photos on the restaurant walls of one or another of them—enigmatic cultural traces—and I wanted to be a foreign creator like them too; I wanted the air of difference about me that I imagined these artists had always shown, and, if it wasn’t too much to ask, when the summer was over, I wanted not to have to return to “backward” Barcelona. I wanted to be an avant-garde artist. I mean this is what I understood at the time by “someone breaking away from the dried-up artistic reality of my city.” And, as I desired all this, I thought that the most direct way to become “avant-garde” would be to adopt an air like that adopted by Marcel Duchamp or Man Ray in those photographs at the restaurant: dressing, for example, as I’d seen Duchamp, in a different white shirt every evening, a sort of uniform of the avant-garde.

With every curve the bus took on the Auedamm, the strength of the invisible push carried me mentally further along. I felt at times an almost subconscious joy and now I imagined sitting at my table in the Dschingis Khan, making sure Autre wrote something about how radical solitude drives some people to an anguish of such proportions, it makes them wish the world produced something more than just anguish, perhaps something we don’t yet know and have to seek at all costs.

The new, perhaps?

I remembered Chesterton said that there was one thing that gave radiance to everything. It was the idea of something around the corner. Perhaps it is this desire for something more that propels us to seek the new, to believe something exists that can still be distinct, unseen, special, something different, around the most unexpected corner; that’s why some of us have spent our whole lives wanting to be avant-garde, because it is our way of believing that in the world, or maybe beyond it,
out beyond the poor world
, there might be something we’ve never seen before. And because of this, some of us reject the repetition of what has been done before; we hate them telling us the same as always, trying to make us know things all over again that we know so much about already; we loath the realist and the rustic, or the rustic and the realist, who think the task of the writer is to reproduce, copy, imitate reality, as if in its chaotic evolution, its monstrous complexity, reality could be captured and narrated. We are amazed by writers who believe that the more empirical and prosaic they are, the closer they get to the truth, when in fact the more details you pile up, the further that takes you away from reality; we curse those who prefer to ignore risk, just because they are afraid of loneliness and getting it wrong; we scorn those who don’t understand that the greatness of a writer lies in his promise, guaranteed in advance, of failure; we love those who swear that art lies solely in this attempt.

It is the desire for there to be something more and this desire leads us without fail always to seek out the new. And this endeavor, this eagerness, this
toil
—I started to use this word I found and liked in some lines by Yeats—this toiling was something that was in me since those summers of my youth and is still there; I think it is my center, the very essence of my way of being in the world, my stamp, my watermark: I’m talking about that ongoing concern for seeking the new, or believing that the new can perhaps exist, or finding that newness which was always there.

There is eagerness in this voice that speaks for me when they ask me about the world.

“The world?” I say. “No, just art.”

“Why?”

“Because art intensifies the feeling of being alive.”

The new, I imagined making Autre write at his table in the Chinese restaurant, was what some sought to align themselves with, taking the most advanced positions on the “literary battlefield.” These vanguard positions exercised a fascinating power over some writers. Innately optimistic, they thought that from those positions where they were making an unexpectedly intense search, they might perhaps find the only possible way out of their existential angst.

In fact, all known great novels are avant-garde in a way, in the sense that they bring something new to the history of literature. Dickens, for example, never presumed to be avant-garde, nor would he have wanted to be, but he was; he was because he changed the course of literature, while many presented themselves to literary society, putting on avant-garde airs and never innovating a thing.

I was wrapped up in all this when, next to my table in the Dschingis Khan, in my imagination, someone pointed a finger at me and said right beside me: “Look at him. He has an avant-garde world, a Duchamp’s widow’s world.”

I felt not in the least ashamed of this, and anyway, it was only in my imagination. As far as real life was concerned, I was still on the bus. The rain continued to fall, relentlessly punishing that labyrinthine geography of the outskirts.

37

I imagined again that I decided to go into the Chinese restaurant and, over the course of the next hour, instead of getting bored doing nothing or sitting writing about noncommunication as the fun-loving Autre would have done, I devoted myself to spying on what an almost hundred-year-old couple sitting beside me was saying—the two of them really were very ancient—and also to interpreting a conversation between a Vietnamese cook and her boyfriend, a young man who was probably Austrian, plus the discussion between two Chinese waiters who were commenting in a very veiled way on the chat they’d had some weeks earlier with a writer who’d sat where I was sitting.

I also imagined suddenly returning from a quick visit to the restroom. I was shocked to see the guy with the crackpot air about him beside my table, that nuisance by the name of Serra from the day before. Under normal circumstances, I would have run straight out of there, but that morning I imagined being so disposed to finding life and the world interesting that, imitating the calmness of the Vietnamese woman’s boyfriend, I sat down mildly beside the loon, who appeared to have something more interesting about him than the day before.