The Illogic of Kassel

24

It was becoming increasingly obvious to me that walking cleared my head and allowed me to dare to speculate with an open mind. I was going along so intent on what I was thinking, I bumped into a chair in the corridor leading to Sehgal’s room, and somebody looked at me as if to say: It’s about time you got here, but you blunder around.

Finally, I went into This Variation, my second incursion into the place that generated in me so many contradictory feelings. I thought because of the early hour, there would be nobody in there, and I entered too confidently. I marched in blindly, but somehow sure. I chose to go in a straight line, moving forward about two meters and, just when I was about to turn around, I heard some singing issuing faintly from the back of the room; then it started to get a little higher pitched and began to seem like a sort of reedy Hare Krishna chant with a mellow and surprising reggae beat, which eventually transformed into what I thought sounded like a foxtrot.

It started to become clear to me that there were people, or phantoms, in the dark practicing dance steps. Suddenly, two of these people, whom I could only sense, of course, became my escorts. Taking me by both arms, they gently whisked me much farther into the room and left me at what I imagined was its far end. They achieved what usually never happened to me in the morning: my anguish resurfaced bit by bit; it didn’t stay for long, but it brought with it certain consequences.

Standing probably at the far end of the room, in the most absolute darkness, I remembered a day in a village in La Mancha, close to the Ruidera Lakes, when I saw two men in black jackets with silver buttons removing a coffin from a back courtyard; inside the coffin, beneath a floral-patterned cloth, lay what looked by any reckoning to be the body of a man over seventy years of age.

In Sehgal’s room, the singing suddenly stopped. Impenetrable silence. I felt nostalgia for the foxtrot. The dancers, who had been in the dark so long and could possibly see me, seemed to have paused, standing absolutely still, like ghosts. Not wanting to lose the mood, but with a certain amount of trepidation, I said out loud: “You are in Germany.”

And then I tried to touch the wall that might be in front of me with both hands but I didn’t find one. I swiped around, like a poor tiger in the gloom. I decided it made no sense to go any farther, and in the end I laughed in the darkness. Not long after, I felt what one perhaps feels the day it’s all over: completely outside of this world, which at the same time had me thinking I had grasped the internal structure of life, as if a lightning bolt were lighting it up. Nothing more. It was brief, but extremely intense. Now I knew everything I needed to know about my death, although I quickly forgot it. Then I left the dark room and saw that the daylight was like the bolt of lightning that had momentarily illuminated me inside the room.

I took a turn around the block trying to reflect on what I’d just experienced. I felt the chill of an early September morning. Could the contemporary avant-garde frighten a person to death? I realized there was still absolutely nobody out on the street, so I returned to the Hessenland.

I had not only regained my usual morning cheer but also found myself far more euphoric than usual; I took no notice of this, not wanting to give it any importance. There, in the very doorway of the hotel, I literally bumped into Alka, who was bringing me a note telling me María Boston couldn’t come to fetch me that morning (she was backed up with work at the office), and Pim Durán would come instead, arriving about eleven o’clock.

There was more than an hour until the cheerful Pim arrived. I didn’t want to spend all that time with Alka in the lobby, so I decided to go ahead with what I’d planned, which was to go up to my room. I noticed that a Chinese man in reception — probably an artist or journalist — was checking in and incessantly asking questions nobody knew how to answer. I jotted that down in a small red notebook I’d called Impressions of Kassel. It wasn’t the first time I wrote something in that book. In fact, since leaving Barcelona, I’d been sketching scenes — I don’t draw well, but it doesn’t matter — and noting plenty of things down, as if I guessed that maybe one day I’d decide to work up some impressions of it all.

In the elevator, two plump Chinese women, who were quite young, with no apparent link to the man of a thousand questions, got in as the metal doors were closing. They got out at the same floor as me and went into room 26. Seeing we were neighbors, they smiled broadly, which made me think there must be something ridiculous about me, or rather, that in China the fondness for laughing and smiling was prodigious, although we somewhat befuddled Westerners were still not in a position to understand what they were laughing about or what could make them so happy.

Now in my room, I went out on the balcony and established a new mental connection with Sehgal’s dark room. It was my special way of letting my lighthouse in the dark know I was thinking of returning to visit it a third time, but that I wouldn’t be able to bear any more frights. Then I went back into my room and, listening through the wall, devoted myself to spying on, or rather, imagining what the two Chinese girls were saying.

One of them said: “When winter came, he always assumed you’d die of cold.” And the other replied: “But he was the one who died.” I could not know then that the “Synge method”—my personal system for finding out what was being said by anyone it was impossible to understand — had only just fired up and in the long run would become the method — I was going to describe it as infallible, but it would be a mistake to classify it that way — that I would use in the Dschingis Khan to comprehend what the customers and waiters were talking about.

I stopped listening to my neighbors, who — from the solitude of my room — I imagined even bigger and rounder than they were. I returned to my computer to try to discover whether Critical Art Ensemble had announced the time and place of my “Lecture to Nobody” yet. I was unsure whether they’d included my talk in the program after all, as the previous afternoon Boston hadn’t even mentioned the subject. I searched but found nothing about the talk that I’d agreed to give in a remote spot beyond the farthest forest, on the outskirts of Kassel.

I found nothing about that, but instead came across another interview with Chus Martínez. The photographs accompanying the text all had one thing in common: Chus wasn’t laughing in any of them. She was asked how she thought Spain had taken the economic crisis. Dreadfully, she said. On a psychological level, she continued, it was sort of like the end of the world. The politician Durão Barroso had said the situation in Portugal couldn’t be compared to Spain, because Spanish gloom and doom was ferocious. According to Chus, her compatriots did not know how to be easygoing: “We thought ourselves really crazy, but it turned out we were nothing of the sort. It’s precisely madness and a sense of humor that are lacking. Humor, as a fundamental element of the modern, has been laid claim to since Cervantes. A way of life that’s a bit more relaxed, open, flexible. . I wonder, was Don Quixote’s humor ever Spanish?”

Next, I began to hatch a plan, so that no one in the Dschingis Khan who wanted to spy on my work would be able to get the slightest idea what I was writing. To this end, I invented a character very different from myself: a writer obsessed with two problems, with two themes that held him captive. I’d have no problem developing them in full view of the entire audience. The invented author, then, would sit in a corner of the Dschingis Khan in front of the visitors and tackle two stories that would hound him, but never me. And as that Barcelona author would be a nervous man, afraid his computer might get stolen in the Chinese restaurant, he’d just write his stories in a notebook — let’s say a red one, mine, why go looking for another, I could save myself the cost, financial and mental, and use a pencil and an eraser. The author would be far from intellectual (not being an intellectual was abominable in Kassel, although in the rest of the world being illiterate, or appearing to be so, made one immensely successful); this might make communication easier with the people who came to see him writing on the spot. The author would be a man in whom ingenuousness and raw intelligence would coexist perfectly. A rather simple man, who would set his characters very simple problems, that he, with his lack of sophistication, would think tremendously complicated.

The first of the simple stories holding him captive revolved around the conundrum that we are so many million people in the world, and yet communication — real communication — is absolutely impossible between any two of us. A most tragic theme, Autre thought (Autre was the provisional surname I gave my nonintellectual author until something better came along). Anxiety about noncommunication went way back for that good man, in fact it had worried him greatly as a boy when his intense loneliness had produced in him the desire to start bellowing. Maybe because of this he had taken up this momentous question an infinite number of times.

The other theme that held Autre captive was that of fleeing. A journalist had once asked for a précis of the story that had occurred to him on this theme, and he’d said something solemn, convinced of his talent (although at night he cried when he discovered in dreams that he altogether lacked genius): “Change your life completely in two days, without caring in the slightest what has gone before, leave without further ado. Do you know what I’m referring to?”

“Starting again?” the journalist asked.

“Not even that. Going toward nothing.”

I’d just finished inventing this Barcelona author who was in possession of two such serious themes (communication and flight — I laughed out loud) when they notified me from reception that Pim Durán had arrived. I quickly took the red notebook, pencil, and eraser from my bedside table, and went down to reception, already in my role as a nonintellectual author “with two problems.” As I went, I felt I was being activated by an invisible breeze from the Fridericianum.