The Illogic of Kassel

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.