The Illogic of Kassel

29

A few minutes later, a guy of medium height came in, overweight and sporting a mustache, around forty years of age. He was dressed in a conventional gray suit: a guy, I would soon see, who was coarse and refined at the same time. He was heavy, but also seemed light; his personality was sporadically graced by a certain crackpot charm.

On seeing him, I went so far as to wish the whiskery fellow was not a restaurant customer, but someone coming in to pester me. That shows what a bad state I was in at that moment. I was desperately lonely. My unique existence no longer seemed poetic after all these ludicrous minutes playing writer to an empty spectators’ gallery.

“I feel terrific, how are you?” said the guy with the crackpot air about him. It gave me enormous joy to find he was talking to me, and it was a nice surprise that he was speaking in my mother tongue, in Catalan. His surname was Serra, and he said he was from Igualada, near Barcelona. He had come from the sanatorium, he explained. At first, I thought he was talking about an outpatients’ unit or a hospital, maybe an asylum, but no, far from it — the fat man in gray came from a Documenta installation called Sanatorium, a project by the Mexican artist Pedro Reyes. Sanatorium was a pavilion in the middle of Karlsaue Park, an improvised clinic with seven rooms for psychotherapy, with specialists attending those who needed to overcome stress, solitude, and fear. The visitors, if they so requested, were cared for as patients and could be treated with goodoo therapies (positive voodoo); they were encouraged to stick small objects onto cloth dolls. Sanatorium was right in the south of Karlsaue Park, in other words, almost adjacent to the Dschingis Khan.

The fat man with the crackpot air had just emerged completely cured (not crude) from there. At least, that’s what he told us, as though trying to crack a joke. He also wanted to play with the word goodoo. I’ll be healthy later, he said, but it’s good-oo to be healthy now. He’d read something of mine once but didn’t remember the title. I’m delighted you’re in a good mood too, he said. I’ve been sticking super-positive things onto a rag doll. Sticking? I queried. Don’t go thinking I said slicking, he said. No, you said sticking, I heard you perfectly. I’ve been gluing things to the doll, he said, now do you understand me?

Standing beside the table, Pim seemed interested to see what I made of things with the man who came along so good-oo from Sanatorium. And tell me, the jovial fellow said, is it true you’re going to let me see what you write? Even though I knew I had set myself up for this to happen, I’d discounted the possibility, so the request took me very much by surprise, even rattling me more than usual, but I reacted in time. I’ll let you read the latest thing to occur to me, I said; in fact I just wrote it down here. I passed him the red notebook, and he read aloud: “Change your life completely in two days, without caring at all about what has gone before, leave without further ado. When all’s said and done, the right thing to do is take off.”

He read it out and said he would have written: “Change your life completely in two hours with glue from the Sanatorium.” Although I wasn’t exactly Autre, I felt offended and leaped to the defense of the beleaguered professional I knew to be inside that long-suffering writer, humiliated at his table in the Chinese restaurant. I’m trying to write about an average man, I told him, who’s going through a difficult time and doesn’t even look to start again. He plans to go toward nothing. And tell me, Señor Serra, what do you imagine going toward nothing means? No idea, he answered, I live with success and every day I go further toward that.

If I had any doubt, he’d just made everything perfectly clear; once again, a strange situation had cropped up in my life with an oddball included. Nothing new there. For reasons that escape me, I’ve attracted crazies my whole life.

You should know that just a few months ago, he said, I was able to leave behind a perfectly uninteresting forty-year-old life and start to savor success as a writer. I began to experience it in the only place in the world I wanted to triumph, New York. Here Serra paused (I’d say perversely and with malicious intent) in order to ask if I proposed to triumph in this Chinese restaurant. He didn’t give me time to reply, not even just a tenth of a second, to say that the verb savor didn’t indicate he was such a good writer as he himself declared. Because if you do propose to triumph here, Serra went on, unperturbed, I have to advise you that New York is more suitable. You’re not going to get anywhere with a Chinese ambition. I trust, I said, already rather peeved, that’s not just because New York is more central than this crappy restaurant. He laughed and I was again aware of that crazy side of him. I wondered if it wouldn’t be better to say suddenly that I was going to the bathroom and wouldn’t be back, or suggest he order a babao fan at the bar, which, if I hadn’t read wrong, was the dessert that nourished the first Chinese cosmonaut on his space voyage. Alternatively I could suggest he order — I’d memorized the menu — an “eight-treasures rice pudding.”

I don’t know if you can imagine, he said, suddenly sounding somewhat pained and serious, what it is to astound Greenwich Village with your novels and publish brilliant articles in the New Yorker and the Coffin Factory and the Southern Review at the same time, and for your appearance to be simultaneously slovenly and splendid and your mind to ebb and flow the whole time like water, and the blond waves of your hair to spring up rebelliously around your head, and to finish nights chatting with the editorial team of Screen Gossip finding out the latest rumors or arguing with Rockefeller Senior to ascertain which of you best carries the burden of success.

I didn’t need to hear another word. He spoke a more than distinguished Catalan with a wide vocabulary, but how many years had it been since Screen Gossip was last published? Fat, gray Serra was even loonier than his overly conventional appearance suggested. This seemed to me to offer a more than good enough excuse to run away. Providentially, I saw Pim signaling to me from the doorway, as if indicating I should pop out with her to take some air, and I remember very well how it felt: as if someone had just proposed I should get out of Hell on my own two feet before it was too late.

I left.

The right thing to do was take off.

We went out to the back of the restaurant and from there started to descend a pronounced slope of green grass, heading to the southern end of Karlsaue Park. After a while, we began to follow the arrows on scrappy signs pointing toward Sanatorium. It wasn’t drizzling anymore. The unfriendly restaurant was being left behind, and for me it was like losing sight of Sing Sing. As we went farther and farther into the park and at the same time into Documenta territory, “the Chinese number” also felt increasingly far away.

“Do you think the Chinese couldn’t even see me?” I asked Pim.

She didn’t answer, which didn’t particularly worry me. I preferred to remember that when you’re walking along with another person you don’t feel obliged to respond to everything that’s said to you and that’s why a lot of sentences end up unanswered.

Half a minute later, Pim finally decided to speak. She did so to say that she’d talked to Boston on the phone the last time she’d gone out to smoke and they’d told her from the curatorial team office that there was really no need to overdo things, that the time spent in the restaurant was flexible, was up to the writer in residence, and the last thing that must be allowed to happen was for the invited writer to feel under pressure at any point.

You could have said that sooner, I thought. But I said nothing, I just kept walking. I would rather everything followed its course. After all, we were getting farther away from the Chinese restaurant, which was the most important thing just then. At least for that day I would not be returning to Hell. Nothing could feel better than that calm push of the invisible current.