Enrique Vila-Matas - The Illogic of Kassel

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.”

I walked along the extremely dark Jordanstrasse toward the pale lights of the Osteria, the only illuminated place on the short street. And, making sure — almost like a blind man would — that I was now in front of the restaurant, I climbed the two big steps up to the porch leading to the entrance and decided to have a look from outside to see what the place was like inside. It was packed. Leaning my face against the big window, I saw Chus sitting there on the other side of the glass. It was her. The same person whose photo I’d seen on the Internet. There would not be a Groundhog Day or anything like that. It was Chus Martínez herself staring at me from inside the Osteria. She seemed to be saying: What are you looking at? Get off the damn porch and come in!

Whether it was from not having slept or from the constant impulse of my breeze, or from the delirium of having already had dinner before going out for dinner, which had generated an energy greater than I’d had two hours earlier, I felt increasingly outside myself, with a mental strength that gave me an unexpectedly enhanced audacity.

As a private joke, I went inside the Osteria as if I were Chinese, not like one who was finally finding a home along the way, but like a Chinese man simply going inside the Osteria for the first time with the word Shanghai written across his forehead. The way I walked in with my head bowed, I frightened myself, but at the same time I felt I was bringing the fiesta with me and that calmed me down. I greeted Chus, a kiss on each cheek, while I mumbled something about how nice, we meet at last, or something along those lines. I immediately saw Chus didn’t see me as Chinese, and I laughed, relaxed even more, and sat down across from her at the table. My private game was over. She was, as one might expect, a woman full of ideas, actually an unstoppable ideas machine, but also not lacking grace, a sense of humor, or beauty. And of course she was very self-confident. I found this charming and I also loved seeing that my state of mind almost couldn’t be better, especially after I was seated.

“I hear you were a dramatic tenor,” said Chus.

“Where did you get that from?”

Chus had managed to make me feel very confused. I wasn’t even sure what a dramatic tenor was. Maybe it was a calculated phrase on her part to reduce my possible pretensions, perhaps it was a phrase intended to warn me that any protest on my part for having to spend useless hours in the Dschingis Khan would be given short shrift. Finally, it all became clear when she revealed that she knew I was fond of McGuffins, so that phrase about a dramatic tenor was just a McGuffin, a way of welcoming me. Had I lied, she said, and confirmed that in fact I had once been a dramatic tenor, the first minutes of our conversation could have constituted an exemplary McGuffin scenario.

A big laugh from Chus.

The menu was Italian — almost the spitting image of the one at the Trattoría Sackturm — not at all appetizing to me for the obvious reason: I had already eaten too much. Perhaps I gave too many explanations for my complete lack of appetite, when a simple excuse would have been enough. Probably so she wouldn’t have to hear all my justifications, Chus interrupted me to point out a nearby table where some friends of hers were eating. They all waved in unison with icy British and Germanic affability. I got the feeling that she’d be joining them as soon as our dinner had finished. That struck me as perfect, since it would facilitate my early withdrawal to my “thinking cabin” (in which I’d barely managed to concentrate enough to think, because I seemed to truly ponder things only when I was outside of it).

In those first minutes, waiting for the tortellini alla panna, the single dish we finally decided to order — my first nonmelancholy night in a long time was well on its way to being a great night of Italian pasta — I reminded Chus of our brief phone conversation the previous day, and we went back to talking about Barcelona, of the horror the city inspired in us, every day more stifled for a thousand reasons, especially by the mediocrity of a truly inept political class.

I don’t remember how we got onto the subject of art, which for Chus was not a question of aesthetics or taste, but of knowledge. There were some things, she said, that produced knowledge and others that did not. In Kassel, I had seen things that hadn’t struck me as so aesthetically pleasing but that had brought me knowledge, hadn’t they? Indeed, I said, and I noticed, by the way, that there were very few people who were, say, architects, urban planners, or commercial film directors here. Exactly, said Chus, no neuroscientists, but there were biologists, philosophers, quantum physicists, that is, people who went in search of knowledge, creative people operating on the least practical side of life, people trying to invent a new world. I wanted to believe I was one of them, which gave me a certain sense of security. From that moment on, everything I said to her was with the conviction — reinforced by my increasingly supernatural enthusiasm, I can’t find a better adjective — of one looking to invent a new world.