Enrique Vila-Matas - The Illogic of Kassel

The moon isn’t Aryan, I corrected myself at once. And then I told myself that too many things had got muddled up in my head, and all the tiredness from the day was making them pop up in the most alarming way.

I was starting to feel really worn out, and at that stage even greater muddles can end up materializing in my mind. I’d gotten up terribly early in Barcelona to catch the plane to Frankfurt, and over the course of the day the fatigue of the flight, the lengthy Croatian incident and other tribulations had been piling up. On top of that, I didn’t want to bother Boston any longer, whom they seemed to have obliged to carry out these welcoming acts of courtesy toward me; as she herself had been half-hinting, she was expected as soon as possible in the central office, where she’d left a host of work matters pending.

It was time to start saying goodbye to her and devote myself to setting up the “thinking cabin” in my room in the Hessenland. Soon it would be getting dark, and, what’s more, I believed I could feel tiredness stealing over my body. It followed that the glitter of summer light in the store window could only be false (that sparkle I’d glimpsed a moment ago). Already in the grip of the imminent appearance of anguish, I was reminded of the philosophers of the Tlön school, who declared that, if we mortals didn’t already know it, it was as well for us to understand that all the time in the world had already transpired, and our life was only the crepuscular and no doubt falsified and mutilated memory or reflection of an irrecoverable process.

In a chain of events that took place out of my control, I saw myself as a worthless twilight reflection and fell into a state of unease that I guessed would not now be assuaged for the rest of the day, not even by the genuine glitter of the truest summer sun. And all this, naturally, was putting off the moment when I could at last feel I was fully in Germany. Depending on how I chose mentally to tackle the problem of my definitive landing, Germany might even come to seem like the other side of the moon to me, with its craters and its great seas.

On the terrace of a bar on Theaterstrasse, we stopped to eat some frankfurters, and I recovered more than I expected to, although it so happened that, once again, I couldn’t avoid a silly memory coming back to me. Since boyhood, it has been hard for me to eat a frankfurter without thinking of the two pounds of mud my grandfather claimed to have accumulated on the soles of his shoes near Frankfurt during World War I.

If the anecdote was ridiculous, its absurd tendency to come back every time I was about to swallow that sort of snack was even more so. Trying to escape the muddy memory by fleeing it mentally, I said the first thing to Boston that popped into my head. This was as spontaneous as it was outlandish and, seen from my present perspective, perhaps somewhat suicidal (although, not wishing to punish myself too much, I prefer to see the question as utter whimsy, like a McGuffin):

“Do you think there can be any point of connection between the avant-garde and Aryan perfume?”

Nobody has ever looked at me with such rage as Boston did hearing this question.

“What concept do you have of the avant-garde?” she asked.

At that moment it was hard to imagine what consequences this question would have for me.

I didn’t know what crime I had committed. I was almost scared. I took the opportunity to remind Boston that since my physical collapse some years back, I had taken exceptionally good care of my health, and, because of this, in spite of having just recovered my strength, even though I knew it was still early, I was going to retire to my hotel to rest until the following day. Surely, I thought, my question had originated in my accumulated tiredness of that day.

Boston objected, asking me at the same time if I was really so sure I had to go. I told her that I was, indeed, very tired. And then, in a very friendly tone, I reminded her that in Barcelona I’d made exceptions going out for dinner with her twice, and I could make another one or two, but not that evening because I felt worn out and needed to recover.

She laughed. I wanted to know what about. “Because,” she said, “you spoke in terms of ‘physical collapse’ and ‘recovering your strength’ and your language coincided with the motif of Documenta 13, which is precisely Collapse and Recovery .”

I reacted with what must have been a dense-looking expression.

“Collapse and Recovery,” she reiterated, still smiling.

Then she paused, as if she might need to take a deep breath. “That theme seems almost custom-made for you,” she insisted, not hiding a touch of sarcasm. We were at this juncture when a tall guy with dark hair and a beard passed by. He greeted Boston in German, discussing something with her that I thought, from his exaggerated gestures, could only be a weighty matter, something beyond measure. I understood nothing of what they said, but I imagined they were talking in tragic tones about the powerful force of the storms around the Irish Aran Isles. I imagined the entire conversation she had with that man whose eyes — to tell the truth — were unusually deep-set and gloomy, enjoying myself during that imaginative exercise. After they spoke for a few minutes, the man went on his way as if returning to his distant homeland. “He’s a sad one,” was all Boston said after he had moved off. This gentleman seems very worried about the storms in his country, I was about to say, although in the end, I contained myself; it was not the moment to make things worse.

Not long afterward, the greatest possible contrast to the sad man passed by that corner of Theaterstrasse: along came joy personified, Pim Durán, a very attractive brunette, from Seville, Boston’s assistant in the office and the same person who had sent me the Lufthansa tickets in Barcelona. She was the person I’d spoken to at the Frankfurt airport when Alka didn’t show up. I’m the one who sent you emails and talked to you on the phone, she said with a lovely smile. She spoke into María Boston’s ear about what was surely a work-related matter, then continued on her way. She was off to a post office, if I wasn’t mistaken. She seemed a fundamentally happy woman and would have made me envious if it weren’t for the fact that I wasn’t exactly seeking happiness.

When we were alone once more, I asked Boston where the name Pim came from. She thought about it for a moment, and it turned out she didn’t know. I would have to ask Pim myself. Then she deftly reintroduced the theme of collapse and recovery, which, according to her, ran through Documenta 13 the same way that it ran through Kassel’s tragic wartime past and its regeneration since then. It would not do, she added, to lose sight of the fact that these concepts — collapse, recovery — didn’t necessarily have to proceed consecutively, but could also take place simultaneously.

The two processes, she told me, could occur at once , in the same way that existential insecurity lately had become the norm for everyone and so we were living in a permanent state of crisis punctuated by situations of emergency and exception; we recovered, but violent collapse returned at the very same moment, and then it could be the other way around, and so on, without end, all the time. Nobody seemed immune from the general upheaval of the world, which was precisely what — unofficially, but ultimately significantly — that edition of Kassel was most concerned with.

More than just talking about Documenta, Boston instructed me about what was happening there. It seemed they had charged her with doing so. I decided to cooperate and make her undertaking easier, asking her for more details about the city’s past. Straightaway, I saw I’d made it plain with my request that I was entirely ignorant about the place, which shocked her in a way, almost as much as my question minutes earlier about Aryan perfume and the avant-garde.