The Illogic of Kassel

3

María Boston’s face gradually lit up, and for a moment she looked absolutely radiant. Perhaps she was satisfied at having achieved her mission of getting me to accept the proposal.

I knew why I’d accepted, but it would not do to be too sincere. Apart from the originality and literary nature of the invitation, I’d accepted because I had never imagined that this would one day be within my reach. It was as if they’d asked me to play soccer for my favorite professional team: something that, even if only because I’d just turned sixty-three, nobody was ever going to propose now. Also, in recent years, since overcoming a collapse brought on by the excesses of my old lifestyle, I had been recovering on all levels, and part of that process included opening my writing to arts other than literature. In other words, I was no longer obsessed with just literary material and had opened up the game to other disciplines.

For a man growing old and doing nothing to hide it, going to Kassel meant finding doors opening to a new world. Perhaps there I’d come across ideas other than my habitual ones. Maybe I’d manage to reach — with the patience of a prowler — an approximate vision of contemporary art’s situation at the beginning of the twenty-first century. I was curious, besides, to see if there were many differences between the literary avant-garde — if it existed — and the artistic avant-garde that gathered every five years at Documenta. In the literary sphere, the avant-garde had lost ground, if not become almost entirely extinct, though there might still be the odd poetic project of interest. But had the same thing happened in the art world? Every five years, the great anticommercial fair of innovative art was held in Kassel. Documenta was famous for not being overly contaminated by the laws of the market.

I wanted to go to Documenta, I told her, but without having to go to the Dschingis Khan, for there I’d undoubtedly feel mislaid, completely displaced. Boston looked at me, smiled indulgently, and said I had just uttered the key word, for Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev and Chus Martínez planned to make their Documenta all about displacement, to put their heavy artillery behind this idea; they wanted to place artists outside their habitual mental comfort zones.

I didn’t want to hazard a guess what “mental comfort zones” were for her, but I did want to know if there was still the slightest chance they might offer me something other than spending absurd mornings in the Chinese restaurant. It would be best if I didn’t refuse to set foot in Dschingis Khan, she told me. It was to be the center of operations for successive invited writers and I couldn’t be different from the others. She could reveal in advance that it would all be quite informal. I’d be left with more than enough time to devote to doing what I did best: observing, glancing, walking around like a profound idler; the organizers knew — having read my work, the entire curatorial team had interpreted it this way — that I saw myself as a sort of erratic stroller in continuous perplexed wandering.

I smiled without really knowing why. We’re going to reduce your Chinese sentence, she suddenly said. I don’t understand, I answered. Well, you see, she said, using the authority Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev and Chus Martínez have invested in me, I’m reducing the time you have to spend in the Chinese restaurant from three weeks to one.

From what she was telling me, I figured out that the Dschingis Khan wasn’t located in a very central part of Kassel, but just the opposite. It was on the southern edge of Karlsaue Park, which in turn bordered a wooded area. In other words, the restaurant was on the outskirts of Kassel. I could take it or leave it. There were worse things than agreeing to it, because, after spending time in the restaurant, I could go for great walks through the park, through the forest. It would be a unique experience, she said, I could see unusual things, even discover (she smiled) the resolution to the mystery of the universe. .

That proposal contained very little logic, actually none. This invitation to a Chinese restaurant on the outskirts of Kassel had a slightly preposterous air about it, but the trip was a year away. I thought, or wanted to believe, that perhaps in that space of time other things for me to do there would occur to the organizers. (Or should I call them agents or curators? I wasn’t experienced in these matters.)

“Will someone eventually reveal the mystery of the universe?” I asked.

She answered astutely in a voice that hadn’t lost its charm all evening, and so I asked her permission to write her answer down on a napkin. I told her I’d devote myself to admiring it for the rest of my life.

“Without the McGuffins,” she said, “there’s not much we can do, perhaps sing hey, ho, the wind and the rain. But dinner’s over.”

It seemed as if she’d controlled the exact length of time for our dinner. In any case, it was much better that it should all end there because, at home before going out, I’d taken a happy pill that my old school friend Dr. Collado was trying to patent at the time. (I’ve changed the name of this dear and somewhat frustrated inventor of somewhat medicinal drugs.)

I’d taken that pill thinking it would help me minimize my nocturnal anguish. And although the pill did work initially, for a while now its effects had been wearing off and my situation was getting dangerous. I was starting to notice my usual bleak nighttime mood beginning to emerge, my deeply melancholic side. It seemed that at any moment Boston was going to ask me where I had left that supposed severe anguish I’d told her arrived so punctually every evening, which meant it was inadvisable for me to go out at night. . I dreaded that question and all the more so as I observed my melancholy advancing moment by moment. I even began to fear my face would turn into that of Mr. Hyde, so it seemed a very good idea that things here should end as soon as possible.