The Illogic of Kassel

37

I imagined again that I decided to go into the Chinese restaurant and, over the course of the next hour, instead of getting bored doing nothing or sitting writing about noncommunication as the fun-loving Autre would have done, I devoted myself to spying on what an almost hundred-year-old couple sitting beside me was saying — the two of them really were very ancient — and also to interpreting a conversation between a Vietnamese cook and her boyfriend, a young man who was probably Austrian, plus the discussion between two Chinese waiters who were commenting in a very veiled way on the chat they’d had some weeks earlier with a writer who’d sat where I was sitting.

I also imagined suddenly returning from a quick visit to the restroom. I was shocked to see the guy with the crackpot air about him beside my table, that nuisance by the name of Serra from the day before. Under normal circumstances, I would have run straight out of there, but that morning I imagined being so disposed to finding life and the world interesting that, imitating the calmness of the Vietnamese woman’s boyfriend, I sat down mildly beside the loon, who appeared to have something more interesting about him than the day before.

“What brings you here, good fellow?” I said.

“I went back to the Sanatorium and they haven’t fixed what’s out of order.”

I offered him my sympathy with a few words that gave the impression I was agreeing to take on his clinical case. And, of course, I was immediately alarmed. I realized I had to tread very carefully, unless I wanted my participation in Documenta to consist of setting up a confessional at my table with its vase.

That scenic picture of “doctor and patient” had something of the installation about it but little that was avant-garde. It was also clear you couldn’t expect much from Autre either, his being a conservative writer. Thinking about all this led me to finally take Autre’s place and put in an appearance myself. With a swipe, I knocked the vase to the floor, pricked up my ears, and asked the crackpot to tell me his problem. The Chinese waiter came over and complained about the broken vase, but whatever he was spluttering was the only thing I didn’t manage to translate all morning, nor can I say I was terribly interested in his reproaches.

To start off, the mustachioed Serra held back and asked what problem I was talking about. He said he didn’t have any and asked whether I had perhaps forgotten he was a success. But it wasn’t long before he crumbled. It was a trivial thing he had to tell me, he ended up confessing, but it had stopped him from doing anything his whole life.

“I collapse. .” he said.

“Excuse me?”

“I collapse what is the fact of Galileo, but it is obvious he escaped here the contribution of Kepler. .”

He was speaking like a Google translation into Catalan. And what he said was strange, too, assuming he was actually saying something. He was talking like a bad translation, but also like a Cheyenne Indian; the fact was, he spoke in a very disjointed manner, or at least in a way that seemed so. Looking at it from another perspective, his language was reminiscent of the jargon peculiar to psychoanalysts in the seventies, Lacanian jargon in particular.

I saw with a measure of dismay that noncommunication between two people was an even more catastrophic matter than I’d imagined and also that this type of problem interested Autre more than it did me. I was at the point of letting the conservative writer come back to the brazier table and staying on myself only in the capacity of rigorous observer, but in the end I preferred it to be me who attended the case, essentially an interesting one, because when all was said and done everything before me that morning was exciting. I found the good in it all and didn’t stop appreciating what I saw the world was offering me. I felt it wasn’t life I loved, but living; it seemed that those who did not experience delight in things showed little accomplishment, just as Democritus had once said: “Fools live without feeling joy in life.”

“I not collapse,” I said, “so not recovery.”

The two of us sounded increasingly Cheyenne.

Serra cried and I stayed there a good long time, determined to prove my great capacity for self-sacrifice, which was perfectly tied to my unexpected labor of assisting the needy, attending to this patient, while also coming to understand, in its most tragic dimension, the terrible disgrace of not being able to communicate, being unable to do anything for that sick man.

We’ll have to wait and see, I thought. I often had the impression — like right now — that the imagined was inseparable from what took place, and vice versa.

Outside, beyond the bus window, in the great ring of the outskirts, it was raining heavily.