The Illogic of Kassel

46

A hundred meters from the Hauptbahnhof, on the ground floor of a building in a squalid alley — I was thinking of my younger days and an old terror that would have been upon me by now in the form of a dry, icy breath directly on the back of my neck — we went in to see One Page of Babaouo, the singular installation by the Portuguese artist António Jobim.

Ignoring the long line, we flashed our passes, going in to see that performance directly inspired by Babaouo, the film script Salvador Dalí wrote in the 1930s. As was to be expected, we saw a disconcerting show (considering that Kassel wasn’t exactly known for dancing to a logical beat).

Boston had no information about that performance. She hadn’t found the time to see it and, moreover, she hated Jobim because she remembered his first visit to Kassel in the middle of a February blizzard earlier that year. At eighty-five, he was the oldest artist invited to Documenta and he arrived in the city in February to set One Page of Babaouo in motion. He arrived with the strange reputation of having a tendency to disappear, to vanish into thin air, to get lost; so Boston was ordered to make sure that didn’t happen. But he’s eighty-five years old! she’d said. It doesn’t matter, they told her, this is an unpredictable man, who likes nothing better than to slip under the radar. That a man of his age, in the middle of a city where it was snowing copiously, was going to get lost still seemed impossible. But it happened. António Jobim was a genius of disappearances. He arrived on the coldest day of the year and went to that squalid building in the alley (that inhospitable ground floor by the Hauptbahnhof, where they’d begun to rehearse his version of a page from Dali’s Babaouo). He had lunch with Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev and Chus Martínez in the Osteria restaurant, singing them an emotional rendition of the fado “Não Quero Amar.” Afterward, they accompanied him to the hotel so he could have a siesta, and they put Boston in charge of setting up surveillance and looking after him as soon as she saw him reappear in the lobby.

They didn’t see him again for two days. María Boston never found out how he’d outwitted her surveillance. She had to spend all her time looking for him all over the city, calling the police, hotels, brothels, anyone who might have seen him. Jobim was originally from Angola, and in the snow of that German city, if only by pure contrast, his blackness might have made him visible, but no one saw him anywhere. He didn’t reappear until two days later, when they’d almost given him up for dead. All Jobim said was that the chocolate in Kassel — actually, all the chocolate of the Hessenland region — was very good. At that moment, if she’d been able to, Boston would have murdered him on the spot.

The work by that unexpected fanatic of Hessenlandian chocolate began with the first notes of the traditional Catalan tune “Per tu ploro” as a curtain representing a vast and desolate mineral landscape was raised. The convulsive and catastrophic shapes of the rocks offered a clear notion of an ancient geological delirium. A large, silver spoon came directly out of a rock of pure iron oxide and diagonally crossed the exposed, somewhat Angolan landscape. In the spoon could be seen two eggs on a plate. . Then the curtain went down and came back up again, now with the tango “Renacimiento” playing in the background. The stage was full of cyclists, who, with loaves of bread on their heads and blindfolded, intertwined very slowly among tango-dancing couples. When the cyclists and dancers disappeared, a black woman could be seen center stage playing a harp and wearing a Chanel suit. Every once in a while she’d hit the harp brutally with loaves of bread she’d taken out of a basket set beside her. Then she’d calm down and just play. When her piece was finished, she threw the loaves and began to demand that the curtain fall, which it finally did so that everything would start all over again, that is, the Catalan sardana came back.

I do sometimes find sardanas moving; they remind me of unknown ancestors, making me cry out of a sentimental confusion. However, that spectacle essentially reminded me that I had to phone Barcelona, ask how everything was going back there. How was everything in my dull country? I noticed that it felt like an eternity since I’d left my city.