The Illogic of Kassel

47

Ada Ara said goodbye, as she had to get back to the office. Boston said she was going to stay awhile longer, and we sat down in Die Büste Bar, near Kochstrasse.

There were children running around, chasing one another between the tables under the indulgent eyes of their parents and grandparents. The bar, full of adults crowded together almost fighting to get a drink, wasn’t the best place for a conversation. But we talked. Boston told me she was looking forward to growing old, to being able to walk more slowly and dress like an elderly lady. She managed to surprise me.

“Walk more slowly?”

I looked at her feet. She was wearing the golden sandals that had so fascinated me before, and I imagined them destroyed by the passing years. At the same time, I couldn’t help but be surprised at her sentimental, human notes infiltrating my cold investigation into the state of contemporary art (I might even say “too human”). What were those notes doing there? It occurred to me to ask her if her desire to walk more slowly might have something to do with the slow treatment of time she’d perceived in Kentridge’s work. Not at all, she said. What an idea. What was true, she said, was that she was becoming an increasingly fanatical walker, so much so that she was confident that as an old lady she wouldn’t have to give up her walks, they would just be at a slower pace, down the hallway of her house, better than ever. She would always be dressed in strange clothes; she dreamed of wearing very thin dresses with thick socks and, as night came on, falling asleep with her head back and her mouth hanging open. .

I want to reach old age, she insisted, and have trouble sleeping. I want to wake up in the middle of the night and stay awake until dawn drooling and become senile and stupid. Her voice had curiously recovered all the charm of the first time I’d heard it. It was sounding immensely warm and so human. It even seemed too human. It was a voice that, despite what it said, managed to increase the power of its spell moment by moment. I would have stayed there in Die Büste Bar listening to her for the rest of the day, or the rest of my days, until she started to grow old. I don’t know how I came to imagine that some of the grandfathers in the bar were practically on top of us and that they wanted to touch us, that their breath enlivened the red of the little dresses of the girls running around, the way oxygen enlivens fire. I believe it can be said that, in the company of old lady Boston, among the flames and little red dresses, I fully lived for a few moments in the tough hell of old age.