The Illogic of Kassel (29 page)

When I took my leave to begin descending toward Karlsaue Park to continue my early morning walk, and somehow search for, I told her, other happy moments, she asked how I imagined one of those might be. Absurdly, I didn’t know how to answer her. My euphoria didn’t stop growing, but I didn’t know what to tell her about happiness. And so she told me that she’d once read about an English teacher in Shanghai, who’d asked a Chinese student what had been the happiest moment of his life. The student had hesitated for a long time and finally smiled, blushing. He told him that his wife had once gone to Peking, where she’d eaten duck, and she’d often told him about that trip, so he could say that the happiest moment of his life was his wife’s trip when she’d eaten duck.

After this, I was even quieter and felt blocked. Why did I encounter China so often on the paths I took to avoid it?

63

I went for a walk along the Fulda River, past the terraces that would soon be filled with indefatigable German retirees.

Pretending to have a retired air, I went into a bar overlooking the Fulda. There was a jukebox playing “Parisien du Nord,” by Cheb Mami, an Arabic protest song from the French
banlieues
. I soon discovered that the jukebox was part of
Die Gedanken sind frei
(
Thoughts Are Free
), Susan Hiller’s project for Documenta. The work was composed of a hundred popular protest songs for the hundred days the exhibition lasted.

There were five jukeboxes in five bars in Kassel, one of which was this one. As I left, I was cheered by the young voices I could suddenly hear amid the mist rising off the river. They were Arabic women who’d just gotten off the bus and who, by their way of speaking Spanish, I guessed might belong to the big Saharan tent set up on the Karlsaue grass, beside the Orangerie.

I approached the group and I hadn’t been mistaken. They were going to
The Art of Sahrawi Cooking
. Pim had told me about this tent. It was a project, if I was not mistaken, realized by Robin Kahn from New York, and also a Cooperative, which (I’d later verify at the hotel) was called The National Union of Sahrawi Women, an association from a refugee camp in the Western Sahara.

From what Pim told me, visitors received tiny glasses of tea there and sat on cushions, maintaining a climate of permanent conversation in low voices; the tent functioned as a research station, providing information about the Western Sahara: about the history of the occupied territories, the refugee camps, and the so-called Wall of Shame, which is a dividing wall in the south of Morocco, and scandalously unfamiliar to most Europeans.

I walked a long way along the Fulda. I hadn’t had a call on my cell phone for an infinity of hours. No one in Kassel seemed to remember I was there or that I would be giving a lecture that afternoon. Maybe I’d now been forgotten by Boston, by Ada Ara, by Pim and company. The fog of the place reminded me of those scenes in my books, which began or ended up in misty lands, in Manderleys of the spirit. All this stemmed from adolescence, from the days when, if a movie began with a melancholy scene and an enigmatic guy walking along a road in the middle of nowhere through fog on his way to a seedy bar, from the start (and to the finish too) the scenario made my eyes as wide as saucers; it was something that interested me enormously.

The mist rising off the Fulda seemed to arrange things in a way in which a mystery story could burst out at any moment. However, the biggest mystery was within me and it was the unbreakable perfection of my mood. I was tired, sometimes sleepy, but excited at the same time, the enchanted accomplice of everything that crossed my path.

After a long rambling wander without getting lost thanks to the river, I felt that my physical fatigue had become an absolute reality, and then, almost providentially, I remembered I’d decided that, when I had to sit down again to write at the table in the Chinese restaurant, I’d turn myself into one more installation at Documenta and pretend to be sleeping. I would pretend to sleep in the style of one of my idols, the marvelous Benino, that shepherd who slept the whole time, not noticing anything, in Neapolitan nativity scenes.

The idea was for possible spectators to leave me in peace during my working hours, that is, during the hours of writing in public. If they saw I was sleeping like a log, that would happily frighten them off. But who was I expecting to come and see me? Nobody had been interested in spying on me, and in reality, I had never been left in such peace and so abandoned as during those hours they made me spend in the Chinese restaurant. Still, a short phrase on a sign on the table would give some clue about that installation, making anyone believe that the writer was sleeping and not thinking about anything.

Somehow, I needed to pretend to profess the religion of sleep, which went on about how sleepers were closer to God. Not thinking about anything was like connecting to that divine sleep that sustains the world.

ASLEEP, ONE IS CLOSER TO DUCHAMP

That’s what I would write on the sign to leave there on my table. I decided this as I left the Fulda behind, crossing the road to go to the Dschingis Khan. At that moment, I was struck by the intuition that it wasn’t going to be difficult for me to pretend to be asleep. I could tell I’d surrender to sleep as soon as I stretched out on the comfortable red couch. I was happy, but somewhat unsteady, a bit zombie-like at times. I didn’t even know if I’d have the strength to write the sign where Duchamp would take the place of God.

On the threshold of the Chinese restaurant, I hesitated. The more one vacillates before a door, the stranger one feels, I told myself. And in I went. This time they didn’t even recognize me, nobody seemed to register that a writer who was working there had entered. Perhaps my appearance was to blame for that misunderstanding. Or perhaps I hadn’t been exerting myself enough as a writer, maybe since I was Piniowsky, I had a slightly different air; or perhaps being so tired and unshaven and wearing smelly clothes—nobody passed through
Untilled
with impunity—all that disoriented them. But the fact is I noticed that they’d gone from indifference to not even remembering I was the invited writer.

“I am Piniowsky,” I said.

That, of course, did not help matters.

I saw an isolated, glacial Chinese smile from behind the circular bar in the middle of the restaurant. When the staff finally remembered that I had a table reserved there, they resigned themselves to suffering as many mishaps as they imagined must be coming. I wrote the sign, but at the last moment I put down a different text from what I’d planned:

APOLOGIES FOR DESCARTES

Writing at top speed, that’s what I begged on the sign and left it on my table. Obviously, it was a phrase taken from Kundera, his interpretation of what he supposed Nietzsche had said to the horse in Turin.

Half an hour later, I was lying down but still awake. Crisscrossing through my mind were Chinese and German words, which seemed increasingly attracted to each other and seemed even to be creating a new language (the language of Galway Bay). I remembered some beloved Robert Walser pages that, admitting the unmissable disparity, I could practically have written myself. In his delightful diary of 1926, Walser spoke of walks with cheerful young women that sounded rather akin to my experiences in Kassel.

Today, said Walser, I went for an agreeable little walk, brief, minimal, without going too far away. I went into a grocery shop and saw a nice girl inside . . . He began like that and a little while later, in a burst of sincerity, said that what he wanted to explain was that in this city he’d had occasion to meet some really adorable and very nice women. He ended by asking who could be bothered by the affection he’d grown used to feeling for people who radiated confidence, overflowing with joie de vivre!

I was also cheerful that morning, although at the same time I lacked sleep and felt disconcerted. After a short while, I fell asleep for real; I curled up in the fetal position on the red couch and didn’t even apologize for Descartes, nor did I feel close to the god Duchamp, nor did I stroll with young girls. I slept and I dreamed that having traveled to Kassel in an intensely red and Chinese room, I was submitting the trite idea of
feeling at home
to incessant though skeptical scrutiny, until I finally understood that I had found my home, that place I’d always expected to find along the way, on the road of life. In this friendly home I’d searched for so long, a stranger was writing signs I’d never seen; he was writing them on a chalkboard in a very intense green, a chalkboard that ended up transforming itself into a door in a pointed Arabic arch. On this door the stranger was inscribing—while slowing down the rhythm of his hand—the poetry of an unknown algebra. Through what seemed a secret code, it ended up revealing to me with startlingly bright clarity something very private, something I’d not detected until then: the Chinese logic of the place.

64

The bright clarity evaporated as soon as I opened my eyes, but the Chinese logic remained in place.

That was my home along the way.

I remembered the Hungarian professor with the unruly hair in a Russian short story I had read a few months ago. He affirmed that if we isolated the stray, passing thought of indiscernible origin, then we were beginning to understand that we were systematically unhinged, that is, that our madness was an everyday matter. The students of this professor loved the idea of daily madness. As for the professor, wouldn’t he also be an expert in the Chinese logic of place?

In the depths of our minds was the enormous bestial, territorial back room, full of irrational fears and murderous instincts. That’s why we invented Reason, to oppose the great muddle, the general emptiness that is so lethal. At least that’s what the Hungarian professor in the short story said, and every time I remembered that story, I liked to think that the professor was entirely right, which would mean that deep down he wasn’t; but it was better to believe him, for if what he said weren’t true, one might end up outside oneself or out of one’s room, no more and no less than how I’d ended up the night before at
Untilled
, the night spent out in the open.

I looked at my watch. It was past noon. They still hadn’t called me on my cell phone; luckily they hadn’t phoned while I was sleeping and dreaming, so I was able to get some rest. I felt excessively enthusiastic, which didn’t take long to create a conflict for me when I began to smile at the waitresses. It was deplorable (it goes without saying). The worst of it was that I was attracting attention. I was acting stupidly and my euphoria might end up arousing suspicion. So I tried as hard as I could to control myself. Everything seemed to indicate that when I wasn’t at my desk in Barcelona, I felt empty, like a skinned, boneless hide, lurching through life. Even so, I tried to improve the situation. With elbows propped up on that Chinese corner table with its vase, I pretended to search for something I could write on. From so much pretending, I ended up searching for real. I finally thought I should say something on that oh so overused idea that nobody can step twice in the same river. I’d heard it so many times and I’d never been convinced. I remembered that in my role as a writer in public I could write whatever I wanted to in my notebook and, as if debating that commonplace about the river you step in twice, I finally wrote:

“Hummm . . .”

Thirty times I wrote that out as a drill. In another thirty lines, in a somewhat cynical homage to Germany, I strove to reproduce a Goethe phrase:

“Everything is there, and I am nothing.”

Then I carefully described in my notebook the carpet of larch needles I’d walked across before I got to
Untilled
territory. It was an even more masochistic exercise than the previous two; I hated writing lingering descriptions that belonged more in other eras of narrative history. But I thought that the one there, writing in the Chinese restaurant in public, much as he was called Piniowsky like me, couldn’t be anything more than a conventional writer and, therefore, he should believe in the “power of descriptions.” This so unbalanced me (nobody likes to turn into a poor, old crock) that I had to say to myself several times:

“Calm down, Piniowsky.”

On the other hand, though what I was writing wasn’t all that serious, not a single person approached to see, which, occasionally, slightly undermined my self-esteem (even if it was the other Piniowsky’s morale). I called Barcelona and calmed down, but not enough. A friend wanted to know why he had to tell me everything that was going on in the city and why I wouldn’t tell him anything about Kassel. Because, I told him, absolutely nothing has happened to me since I got here, nothing at all, I’ve barely spoken to anybody. I walk around, sleep. My life lacks action, I told him, but I was thinking that surely, in a very Borgesian way, everything that was happening to me—which was nevertheless very little—was happening to the other Piniowsky.

I let the conversation with my friend dwindle down of its own accord, just die out. And so I didn’t tell him anything about my red couch like a scaffold or the lecture I needed to prepare and might not prepare for. I was undoubtedly right not to tell him, for that friend surely wouldn’t have understood what I was talking about. When I finally said goodbye and hung up, I stared at the figure of a dragon over by the door and remembered that some oriental dragons were said to carry the palaces of the gods on their backs, while others were known to determine the courses of the streams and rivers and protect subterranean treasures. I remembered the dragon at the entrance to Parque Güell in Barcelona, which I saw so often when I lived in the upper part of my city, and which sometimes, for no reason, I imagined secretly alive and ceaselessly devouring pearls and opals: something impossible, for it was simply a sculpture to which more and more tourists, especially Chinese tourists, were becoming addicted every day.