The Illogic of Kassel

53

I thought, no one will ever know how obsessively I’m devoting myself to memorizing the route from my hotel to the Osteria restaurant; but it shall be known, because I’m going to confess. I won’t tell it entirely, for fear it won’t be believed. It was an exaggerated, meticulous, almost insane preparation.

I left the Hessenland and simply began to walk along the spacious sidewalk, up Friedrich-Ebert-Strasse, passing in front of the Trattoría Sackturm, and not turning left on Königstor but turning at the next corner, which was an alleyway I had to take briefly to get to Jordanstrasse.

It was a very easy route; in fact I already knew part of it. Nevertheless, I was afraid I’d get lost even though I’d spent a while memorizing it.

What kind of fear was making me act like that? Where did it come from? These questions reminded me of Tom Thumb, that tale of a tiny boy who left a trail of breadcrumbs along the path to be able to find his way back home again. It was the first story I ever heard in my life. In fact, my parents had made me learn it by heart and, at the age of four, when we had visitors, they’d make me recite the Catalan version out loud.

I was shocked to discover that Tom Thumb — or Pulgarcito, originally Daumesdick—the German fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm had been written in Kassel; they’d written it in a long-demolished house that once stood a few steps from where I was that very moment. It could be said that, instead of traveling to Kassel in search of the very center of contemporary art, I had actually traveled there to discover the exact place where the first story I’d ever heard in my life had been thought of and written down, the first of a series of tales I would go on to listen to over the course of many years.

You can’t understand Tom Thumb’s story without taking into account the terror or fear of getting lost. It was strange to see how that fear had just returned to me unexpectedly at dusk, sixty years after first discovering its existence.

My childhood fear had been summoned up as I left the hotel, as I walked along Friedrich-Ebert-Strasse toward my dinner with Chus. Although I already knew this fear of getting lost from the story of poor Tom Thumb, I remembered my discovery of the very essence of this fear one day in the summer of 1953, in a small coastal town north of Barcelona (a town with a long name, but known to everyone as Llavaneres). My grandfather’s Swiss-style villa had been requisitioned as the Chilean Consulate during the Spanish Civil War. Later, the family recovered it, and in the fifties we spent all our summers there. In that town, on Sunday evenings, it was the custom for Barcelona families to go to the cinema. The first movie I went to see with my parents was a western. I don’t remember the title or the plot. After all, I was only four years old. But I do remember, as if I were seeing it now, that we watched, up on the screen, the daily life of a happy family of farmers: an affectionate mother, an upright father, and a boy my age. Suddenly, normality was transformed by the appearance of a few strangers — later I would learn they were Cheyenne Indians — whose faces were painted and who wore feathers on their heads and communicated with one another using incomprehensible words; they were tremendously agitated, showing clear signs of hostility toward the poor, peaceful family of honorable white folks.

That unexpected incursion of the first alien people I ever saw in my life was etched in my memory, because up till then I’d never seen anyone who looked the slightest bit different from my own family. My terror undoubtedly arose from the discovery of true difference. In time, I would find out Nietzsche had said that fear is more beneficial for the general knowledge of human beings than love, for fear makes one want to find out who the other is, what it is that they want. And it’s possible that’s the way it is, I don’t really know. But this distant memory of fear has always come along to warn me of the danger inherent in every first step one takes outside one’s comfort zone, away from the familiar: that first step, which, if we don’t pay attention, might just as easily leave us outside of a neighborhood association as outside a family circle of farmers in the American West, or just outside of everything. If one takes that first step into someone else’s territory, one knows there will undoubtedly be, hidden, sometimes invisible, that sudden, first childhood fear. That fear we all discover in childhood, that terror of the inhospitable that I discovered one day in the summer of ’53, when I saw, at first amazed, and then with the greatest panic, the alien world of the Cheyenne. The panic was accentuated by the fact that the Indians were speaking a strange language. It took me years to find out that their language wasn’t so strange (it was Algonquin, after all). The name Cheyenne comes from the Sioux sha hi’yena; it wasn’t so strange either, because it actually means “the people of alien speech.”

Almost without noticing — caught up in the evocation of my first terrors — I passed the Königstor intersection and came to the second intersection, with the alleyway that provided a shortcut to Jordanstrasse (the street the Osteria restaurant was on). There wasn’t a soul in the alleyway and, since I was remembering so many early fears, I proceeded with caution. I couldn’t help but think that in badly lit side streets like this, surprises were always waiting; sometimes it was even pleasant in a solitary spot to feel a dry, icy breath on the back of your neck when it turned out nobody was there.

After so much indecision, in the end I passed through that little alleyway over to Jordanstrasse without the slightest problem or fear, perhaps because I went along absorbed in other thoughts, for I had begun to wonder what I would tell Chus about my time at the Dschingis Khan; I didn’t know how to explain that, apart from a Catalan success story called Serra who’d first been cured in Hollywood and then been harmed in the Sanatorium, no other onlooker had come to see my “Chinese number,” that is, to see how I wrote in public.

I was worried about what I was going to tell Chus. Ever since I was at school, I’d felt guilty about not doing my homework. I was also worried about the possibility of arriving at the Osteria and finding Boston there telling me that Chus couldn’t make it but that, anyway, she was there, and she was actually Chus. Then I’d enter into a loop, into a new “Groundhog Day cycle,” where everything repeats ceaselessly and pitilessly.

I was already seeing myself smiling like a poor fool, saying to Boston: “You’re Chus, of course. You always were. What an idiot I am. I should have guessed, but I never learn.”