The Illogic of Kassel

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.