Enrique Vila-Matas: The Illogic of Kassel

The cheerful expression on my face twisted slightly. What a huge obsession with that restaurant, I thought. Nobody, nobody, lecture to nobody , I heard her repeating to herself, as if suddenly the idea of a total absence of audience beyond the forest excited her as well.

We ended up finding ideal dates for my trip to Kassel: the last six days of the hundred that Documenta lasted; six days of September when the summer heat let up and the city would certainly be filled with visitors (as was the case on previous occasions) before the imminent closure of the exhibition.

As we said goodbye, she did not have the courtesy to tell me that she’d deceived me and was not Chus Martínez (as she had tricked me into believing). I did not discover that she’d been an imposter until a year later, when I arrived in Kassel and discovered the truth. I had said goodnight to her, convinced that she was Chus, and began to walk through the solitary streets on my satisfied and unhurried return home.

During my slow walk home, in the grip of an unstable state of mind, some words Kafka once wrote in a letter to Felice Bauer kept appearing and disappearing in my head: “Marienbad is unbelievably beautiful. I imagine if I were Chinese and were about to go home (indeed I am Chinese and I am going home), I would make sure of returning soon, and at any price.”

This is the only passage in all of Kafka’s writing where he says that deep down he is Chinese, which seems to indicate to us that Borges — recognizing Kafka’s voice and habits in texts from diverse literatures and eras — was probably right to see Kafka’s affinity with Han Yu, a ninth-century prose writer whom Borges discovered in the admirable Anthologie raisonnée de la littérature chinoise published in France in 1948.

According to what Kafka wrote to Felice Bauer, it’s obvious that the Prague writer sensed his enigmatic relationship with China, who knows whether perhaps even including his precursor Han Yu.

That night, during my slow return home, I walked along imagining — for whatever reason, obviously I had my motives — that I was enacting Kafka’s phrase; in other words, that I was Chinese and was going home. I eventually started enjoying playing that role, until there was a shift in everything and the pill’s occasional positive effects stopped. Suddenly everything darkened for me, and I fell into the state of anguish and melancholy I’d wanted to avoid; I couldn’t do anything to escape that slump in my mood and I muttered a thousand curses for having put myself in the hands of Dr. Collado. I remembered some old nocturnal strolls dominated by the same anguished perception that the world was full of messages in some secret code. In the middle of these negative perceptions, while I struggled in vain to recover my mood, I told myself it was very curious that a Chinese fellow like me had been invited to an Asiatic enclave in faraway Germany. While I thought all this (in a somewhat confused way of course), I remembered an absolutely intense and pivotal dream I’d had three years earlier in the town of Sarzana, in northern Italy, when I went to an international writers’ event there and they put me up in an inn called Locanda dell’Angelo, way out in the countryside, eight kilometers from the town’s center. Upon entering my room in this remote hotel, I immediately discovered that I’d forgotten my sleeping pills in Barcelona as well as the book I’d planned to read in bed. Even so, in spite of not having my usual sedatives, I managed to fall asleep, falling literally into a dead sleep, by remembering a Walter Benjamin essay in which he suggested that a word is not a sign, nor is it a substitute for something else, but the embodiment of an Idea. In Proust, in Kafka, in the surrealists, said Benjamin, the word parts company from meaning in the “bourgeois” sense and takes back its elemental and gestural power. Word and the gesture of naming were the same thing back in the time of Adam. Since then, language must have experienced a great fall, of which Babel, according to Benjamin, would only be a stage. The task of theology would consist of the recovery of the word, in all its mimetic originating power from the sacred texts in which it has been conserved.

I wondered there in Sarzana if fallen languages might still, all of them together, bring us closer to certain truths, truths related to the unknown origin of language. Suddenly realizing that, deep down, my whole life, without being entirely conscious of it, I had been trying to reconstruct a disarticulated discourse (the original discourse, shrouded in the mists of time), I fell asleep and into a very intense dream through which passed, with very quick steps, two of my friends, Sergio Pitol and Raúl Escari. The two of them marched electrically down the alleys of some old, possibly European, city center. The rain, however, seemed to be falling with strange sluggishness and with the same toxic appearance it has in Mexico City. The two of them went into a classroom and Sergio began to write signs I’d never seen, he wrote them with great speed on an extraordinarily vivid green chalkboard. The chalkboard transformed into a door in a pointed Arabic arch, which was even more vivid green and on which Pitol was inscribing, slowing down the rhythm of his hand, the poetry of an unknown algebra, containing formulas and mysterious messages in cabalistic, Jewish style, although perhaps it was Islamic, Chinese Muslim, or simply Italian, from Petrarch’s time; this poetic, strange, stateless algebra sent me to the center of the mystery of the universe, of a universe that seemed full of messages in some secret code.

When I woke up the next morning, I had a sensation of having been very close to an essential message, which I suspected only Pitol knew to its most profound extent. Sometimes, like today, when I return to that dream, I realize that when María Boston called to say the McGuffins wanted to reveal the mystery of the universe to me, I agreed to go to the meeting in part because my unconscious was still under the influence of the Sarzana dream. It’s not out of the question that when I agreed to go to Kassel, I did so deep down (actually, very, very deep down) expecting to find there the secret of contemporary art, or maybe be initiated into the poetry of this unknown algebra, or perhaps to find what lay behind the door in a pointed Arabic arch, a door leading to a distant Chinese past, where pure language would be leading a hidden life.

A year after that encounter with the fake Chus, at the beginning of September 2012, and a week before I was to fly to Frankfurt to catch the train to Kassel, things had changed, and I was even doubting whether to go on this trip. After a long year in which I’d hardly had any contact with Documenta’s curatorial team, there was almost nothing encouraging me to leave in a week for Germany. In that whole long year I’d received one single succinct email, from someone named Pim Durán, with my Lufthansa tickets attached and instructions for catching the train from Frankfurt to Kassel.

I had no further news from Chus Martínez (or, rather, from the person I believed to be Chus Martínez), and all my attempts to communicate with her had failed. Even so, I was completely sure I’d be seeing Chus as soon as I arrived at Documenta; a friend of hers had told me that most likely she’d been very busy co-curating the huge exhibition and hadn’t had time to get back in touch with me, but in Kassel things would probably be easier.

From what I’d been able to read about Documenta 13, one thing was very clear: that is, it had far surpassed the previous occasion, the twelfth, which, among many other mistakes, had given in to the temptation of pandering to the media by inviting the Catalan chef Ferran Adrià. Its far-reaching television coverage undermined one of the unwritten laws of the twice-a-decade exhibition: to maintain a weak connection with the art market.