Enrique Vila-Matas - The Illogic of Kassel

“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.

I once heard it said that real life is not what we lead but what we invent in our minds. If this were true, it was somewhat agonizing that just a moment ago, I had locked up my imagination in the Dschingis Khan. Able to fly wherever I wanted, I’d stayed in a corner of that pitiful Chinese restaurant talking to the mustachioed Serra. Why such masochism? Was it that Serra’s vulgarity was the very same coarseness Catalonia had sunk into in recent decades, and, not getting out of there in so many years, I’d become accustomed to the stench? Did I not remember that (as Autre would say) in any situation, come what may, even if it was marvelous, the right thing to do was always to take off, to travel to other spheres? Did I just want to invent an insipid life for myself, with no horizon other than a mustache painted over the navel of the Catalan fatherland?

I was reconstructing in my memory the bombardment reproduced by Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s loudspeakers when my cell phone rang very loudly. I hadn’t noticed, but the volume was turned all the way up. The eyes of all the passengers on the bus — and there were quite a number of them at that hour — converged on me.

It was Boston, asking where I was right at that moment. She’d like to meet me in about four hours, since she couldn’t get away from the office any sooner.

I preferred not to mention that I was on the bus and still less that I’d spent three hours watching the rain falling on the windows of the vehicle. So I lied and told her I was in the Dschingis Khan and already getting tired of hearing Chinese and German and constantly translating to myself what I overheard the customers talking about.

I kept quiet for a moment but I had the idea of explaining to her: “You know, when you expose yourself to languages you don’t understand, you suddenly imagine you can decipher everything.” I didn’t say it, because it would have been too obvious I was out of sorts, she might even have guessed I was upset about being so alone.

Instead, I started to tell her I knew everything about the mighty power China and Germany wielded on their respective continents and how they planned to join forces to invade the world. It was anticipated that the future of humanity would be governed by those two immeasurable powers, exercising their centuries-old immutable imperialism. .

I stopped. I realized this chatter was obviously revealing that I was in a state, anxious, and had already spent too many hours alone. So I tried to dissemble. I pretended I was very busy with the people who were coming to see me, but it didn’t do any good.

“And all this time nobody came along to interact with you?” Boston interrupted me maliciously.

I told her that in fact I’d only seen the same crazy guy as the day before, the crackpot Pim had possibly told her about. No, Boston said, I don’t know anything about that gentleman. Then a silence fell. “Remember,” she said finally, “you’re having dinner with Chus this evening. I’ve sent you yet another email with the details of the restaurant.” It was as if she were saying: In a few hours, I’ll see what’s going on with you. What’s going on is that I’m running on empty, I mumbled, but I’m sure she didn’t hear me because she’d already hung up.

Minutes later, the bus stopped for the tenth time outside the Chinese restaurant. For the hundredth time, the music played the theme song from Out of Africa .

Art is joyful, I thought.

And this time, I decided to get off.

The rain hit my face hard and forced me to shut my eyes tight. It was raining noisily on the restaurant roof, and, on the way to the entrance, the raindrops fell at such an angle and so strangely that I thought I could hear a wind unlike all others blowing at regular intervals. It was a wind that didn’t seem to be from that place, almost frightening, especially if I remembered that now I wasn’t imagining things but actually experiencing them.

The wind is cheerful, I told myself, and I carried on walking fearlessly. I didn’t know I was on the brink of seeing that, as they say, there’s always a lot going on if you look carefully. There was a slight obstacle for me in the doorway: a small man with a sullen air, around my age, who wore a checked cap. He protected himself from the rain with an umbrella that was also checked, and he was smoking a Montecristo. All of this made me think he might be Spanish, but nonetheless he turned out to be a Frenchman, who worked at a Renault office and was a lover of contemporary art. He’d just come from the nearby Sanatorium and, following the route marked by Documenta signs, had got himself to this Chinese restaurant, where he hadn’t understood what sort of installation it was they were telling him to see.

“They’ve installed me ,” I said.

“What for?” he asked.

“I listen to problems.”

He raised an eyebrow, as if he thought I might be a psychoanalyst, or perhaps just mentally unstable.

That frightened me because it reminded me of a popular claim that at the beginning of time, it was a single misunderstanding that led to our undoing. I remembered that everything that happened in the world was caused by those kinds of dangerous mistakes. The world itself was built on an initial misunderstanding, I thought. I decided to cut this error off at the root, whatever the error was.

“You’re mistaken,” I said.

“That is my problem,” he replied unexpectedly. “That’s my great problem, I’m always mistaken, and now I don’t know where to turn for help to make fewer mistakes.”

In my clumsy French, I told him not to worry, that I did nothing in life but make mistakes too and it was only human after all. I let him in on my sudden suspicion that my joy that morning — because that morning I was experiencing a constant and very controlled joy that caused me to take an interest in everything — my joy originated in a possibly erroneous reading of what had most captured my attention in Kassel: the invisible push of the breeze from the Fridericianum, upon which I was bestowing subversive, avant-garde powers.

Although he’d said he was passionate about contemporary art, I didn’t expect him to understand me very well, so I was surprised when he assured me he knew just what I was talking about. More than you could imagine, he said emphatically. And he told me he was from Strasbourg and that my vision of the push from the unseen breeze reminded him of what he always imagined about the origin of the wind blowing around the cathedral in his city.

I had the impression, he said, that in former times the Devil was flying over the earth traveling on the wind, and one day he saw his likeness carved into the outside of the cathedral; he felt immensely gratified, and went in to see if there were any more images of himself, and once inside, he was trapped, which has resulted in the wind waiting for him on the porch ever since, impatiently and ceaselessly clamoring for him all around the place.