The Illogic of Kassel

19

I didn’t know what crime I had committed. I was almost scared. I took the opportunity to remind Boston that since my physical collapse some years back, I had taken exceptionally good care of my health, and, because of this, in spite of having just recovered my strength, even though I knew it was still early, I was going to retire to my hotel to rest until the following day. Surely, I thought, my question had originated in my accumulated tiredness of that day.

Boston objected, asking me at the same time if I was really so sure I had to go. I told her that I was, indeed, very tired. And then, in a very friendly tone, I reminded her that in Barcelona I’d made exceptions going out for dinner with her twice, and I could make another one or two, but not that evening because I felt worn out and needed to recover.

She laughed. I wanted to know what about. “Because,” she said, “you spoke in terms of ‘physical collapse’ and ‘recovering your strength’ and your language coincided with the motif of Documenta 13, which is precisely Collapse and Recovery.”

I reacted with what must have been a dense-looking expression.

“Collapse and Recovery,” she reiterated, still smiling.

Then she paused, as if she might need to take a deep breath. “That theme seems almost custom-made for you,” she insisted, not hiding a touch of sarcasm. We were at this juncture when a tall guy with dark hair and a beard passed by. He greeted Boston in German, discussing something with her that I thought, from his exaggerated gestures, could only be a weighty matter, something beyond measure. I understood nothing of what they said, but I imagined they were talking in tragic tones about the powerful force of the storms around the Irish Aran Isles. I imagined the entire conversation she had with that man whose eyes — to tell the truth — were unusually deep-set and gloomy, enjoying myself during that imaginative exercise. After they spoke for a few minutes, the man went on his way as if returning to his distant homeland. “He’s a sad one,” was all Boston said after he had moved off. This gentleman seems very worried about the storms in his country, I was about to say, although in the end, I contained myself; it was not the moment to make things worse.

Not long afterward, the greatest possible contrast to the sad man passed by that corner of Theaterstrasse: along came joy personified, Pim Durán, a very attractive brunette, from Seville, Boston’s assistant in the office and the same person who had sent me the Lufthansa tickets in Barcelona. She was the person I’d spoken to at the Frankfurt airport when Alka didn’t show up. I’m the one who sent you emails and talked to you on the phone, she said with a lovely smile. She spoke into María Boston’s ear about what was surely a work-related matter, then continued on her way. She was off to a post office, if I wasn’t mistaken. She seemed a fundamentally happy woman and would have made me envious if it weren’t for the fact that I wasn’t exactly seeking happiness.

When we were alone once more, I asked Boston where the name Pim came from. She thought about it for a moment, and it turned out she didn’t know. I would have to ask Pim myself. Then she deftly reintroduced the theme of collapse and recovery, which, according to her, ran through Documenta 13 the same way that it ran through Kassel’s tragic wartime past and its regeneration since then. It would not do, she added, to lose sight of the fact that these concepts — collapse, recovery — didn’t necessarily have to proceed consecutively, but could also take place simultaneously.

The two processes, she told me, could occur at once, in the same way that existential insecurity lately had become the norm for everyone and so we were living in a permanent state of crisis punctuated by situations of emergency and exception; we recovered, but violent collapse returned at the very same moment, and then it could be the other way around, and so on, without end, all the time. Nobody seemed immune from the general upheaval of the world, which was precisely what — unofficially, but ultimately significantly — that edition of Kassel was most concerned with.

More than just talking about Documenta, Boston instructed me about what was happening there. It seemed they had charged her with doing so. I decided to cooperate and make her undertaking easier, asking her for more details about the city’s past. Straightaway, I saw I’d made it plain with my request that I was entirely ignorant about the place, which shocked her in a way, almost as much as my question minutes earlier about Aryan perfume and the avant-garde.

The Nazis, she ended up explaining to me somewhat tersely, produced a great deal of military hardware in Kassel, especially tanks, so the city and its environs were a priority target for allied bombing raids in 1943. In fact, the bombs wiped out ninety percent of the city’s thousand-year history.

The fateful evening hour was now very close at hand, and I noticed that, perhaps even a little earlier than usual, anguish and melancholy were beginning to take hold of me. I would have to wait until the following morning to recover a decent state of mind. I was thinking about the tragedy of this split life, the life of morning joy and nocturnal collapse I seemed destined to live out for the rest of my days, when I saw that the man with the unusually deep-set and gloomy eyes was circling around us (although on this occasion he had not even bothered to greet us). He looked different to me now, seeming suddenly exhausted, as if he were already overcome by the worry he’d probably been dragging around with him since the day he left the Aran Isles. But I preferred not to say anything. All at once, I started to feel unsure whether it was the same German I’d seen before.

Minutes later, looking more closely at this man with the unusually deep-set eyes, I saw that I couldn’t have been more mistaken, as it wasn’t the same guy who’d spoken to María Boston earlier; I’d simply been speculating about a complete stranger. We were getting ready to leave the terrace on Theaterstrasse, and María Boston asked me if I’d ever reflected on the fact that walking was almost the only activity not appropriated by people who devoted themselves to the world of business, that is, capitalists. I paused to think. It had been ages since I’d heard that word, so clear-cut and so unambiguous: capitalists. Look, she said, there’s nothing special that’s sold for walking, and yet there’s a whole market around eating, running, sleeping, having sex, reading, even drinking water. . Well, I said, I liked walking very much, I loved the idea of going for a stroll. That’s all I said. Just that. I remember it perfectly, because it was from that moment on that things started to go downhill, as if following the same rhythm of decline that daylight does when dusk overtakes it.

Strangely, the more María Boston said there was lots of work waiting for her in the curatorial team office (seeming to indicate to me that she had to leave without further delay), the more she insisted on setting off with me on a new walk. It was as if leaving me or not leaving me, staying or abandoning me, amounted to the same thing; and there was something in that contradiction that reminded me of the idea that I could very well experience collapse and recovery simultaneously.

That was an interesting idea, no doubt, but one which anyone could see didn’t really work when applied to normal life, because it made no sense at all. For example, she must clearly perceive I was tired but still suggested we go on walking; who knew if she meant to the end of the world? I found out later she meant only to the end of a train platform, although it wasn’t one that was exactly around the corner.

I looked at Boston, and she did everything in her power not to return my gaze. “I thought the sad man came from the Aran Isles,” I said, just to try out a bit of mischief. This was a somewhat desperate McGuffin, only to make her feel sorry about how tired and irrational I was and to get her to let me withdraw to the hotel and set up my “thinking cabin.”

As might be expected, Boston said she didn’t know what islands I was talking about, and so it fell to me to explain that they were found on the west coast of Ireland, washed by the Atlantic, in Galway Bay. “I thought that you and he were discussing what was happening on those remote islands,” I said. “Who was I talking to?” she asked. “To that sad man earlier,” I said. In the end, it became clear I was referring to that sorrowful German who’d stopped to speak to her. “But poor Hans and I only philosophized a bit; he explained to me that the idea of ‘trying to survive’ was just for megalomaniacs, and I didn’t know what to say to him. What would you have said?” “That I didn’t understand him,” I replied, “but not to worry because, when all is said and done, life is governed by all sorts of misunderstandings, and the natives of Galway Bay know everything, absolutely everything, there is to know about that.”

If it had been Alka, she would definitely have split her sides laughing at what I’d said, not understanding a thing. But in that whole trip, I never again saw Boston as serious as she was at that moment. To tell the truth, it was an almost terrifying moment. And that was despite the fact that I still couldn’t even imagine the sort of heavy pressure Boston was going to put on me in the ensuing minutes to go to that train platform she considered vital for me to see that very evening.