Enrique Vila-Matas - The Illogic of Kassel

A hundred meters from the Hauptbahnhof, on the ground floor of a building in a squalid alley — I was thinking of my younger days and an old terror that would have been upon me by now in the form of a dry, icy breath directly on the back of my neck — we went in to see One Page of Babaouo , the singular installation by the Portuguese artist António Jobim.

Ignoring the long line, we flashed our passes, going in to see that performance directly inspired by Babaouo , the film script Salvador Dalí wrote in the 1930s. As was to be expected, we saw a disconcerting show (considering that Kassel wasn’t exactly known for dancing to a logical beat).

Boston had no information about that performance. She hadn’t found the time to see it and, moreover, she hated Jobim because she remembered his first visit to Kassel in the middle of a February blizzard earlier that year. At eighty-five, he was the oldest artist invited to Documenta and he arrived in the city in February to set One Page of Babaouo in motion. He arrived with the strange reputation of having a tendency to disappear, to vanish into thin air, to get lost; so Boston was ordered to make sure that didn’t happen. But he’s eighty-five years old! she’d said. It doesn’t matter, they told her, this is an unpredictable man, who likes nothing better than to slip under the radar. That a man of his age, in the middle of a city where it was snowing copiously, was going to get lost still seemed impossible. But it happened. António Jobim was a genius of disappearances. He arrived on the coldest day of the year and went to that squalid building in the alley (that inhospitable ground floor by the Hauptbahnhof, where they’d begun to rehearse his version of a page from Dali’s Babaouo ). He had lunch with Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev and Chus Martínez in the Osteria restaurant, singing them an emotional rendition of the fado “Não Quero Amar.” Afterward, they accompanied him to the hotel so he could have a siesta, and they put Boston in charge of setting up surveillance and looking after him as soon as she saw him reappear in the lobby.

They didn’t see him again for two days. María Boston never found out how he’d outwitted her surveillance. She had to spend all her time looking for him all over the city, calling the police, hotels, brothels, anyone who might have seen him. Jobim was originally from Angola, and in the snow of that German city, if only by pure contrast, his blackness might have made him visible, but no one saw him anywhere. He didn’t reappear until two days later, when they’d almost given him up for dead. All Jobim said was that the chocolate in Kassel — actually, all the chocolate of the Hessenland region — was very good. At that moment, if she’d been able to, Boston would have murdered him on the spot.

The work by that unexpected fanatic of Hessenlandian chocolate began with the first notes of the traditional Catalan tune “Per tu ploro” as a curtain representing a vast and desolate mineral landscape was raised. The convulsive and catastrophic shapes of the rocks offered a clear notion of an ancient geological delirium. A large, silver spoon came directly out of a rock of pure iron oxide and diagonally crossed the exposed, somewhat Angolan landscape. In the spoon could be seen two eggs on a plate. . Then the curtain went down and came back up again, now with the tango “Renacimiento” playing in the background. The stage was full of cyclists, who, with loaves of bread on their heads and blindfolded, intertwined very slowly among tango-dancing couples. When the cyclists and dancers disappeared, a black woman could be seen center stage playing a harp and wearing a Chanel suit. Every once in a while she’d hit the harp brutally with loaves of bread she’d taken out of a basket set beside her. Then she’d calm down and just play. When her piece was finished, she threw the loaves and began to demand that the curtain fall, which it finally did so that everything would start all over again, that is, the Catalan sardana came back.

I do sometimes find sardanas moving; they remind me of unknown ancestors, making me cry out of a sentimental confusion. However, that spectacle essentially reminded me that I had to phone Barcelona, ask how everything was going back there. How was everything in my dull country? I noticed that it felt like an eternity since I’d left my city.

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.

On my walk back to the Hessenland, I was tearing along at such a pace that I walked right past my hotel without seeing it; I kept on going, maybe because I was concentrating too hard on my old folks’ experience in Die Büste Bar and going over and over my two quick farewell kisses to Boston.

Without noticing, I stumbled into unknown territory, in the unfamiliar area of Friedrich-Ebert-Strasse, and as I passed in front of the Trattoría Sackturm, I felt someone touch my shoulder. For a second or two, I thought I’d returned to Sehgal’s salon. I looked around rather cautiously and saw it was Nené. (I call her that because I don’t think the actual person would like me to give her real name.)