The Illogic of Kassel

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.