Enrique Vila-Matas: The Illogic of Kassel

After saying this to myself, I left.

And leaving behind those good moments, I thought it would be possible to remember that farewell to Untilled territory with the same exactness I remembered a work of art when I desired to: a work like my favorite Édouard Manet painting, Le serveuse de bocks ( The Waitress ).

Art, I thought then, is something that is happening to us.

I left aware that just leaving there was art, and knowing that when I had completely gone away, I would occasionally dream I’d returned to that territory, that I was returning to Untilled , and the drive leading to the place was winding away before me, twisting and turning to reveal, as I advanced, the silhouette of some kind of imposing space, secretive and silent, where everything — absolutely everything, even what I didn’t notice — had great importance, because actually nothing there had been tilled, nothing there had ever been truly cultivated; deep down — notice I say deep down— everything was all still to be done.

I returned to one of the places that most intrigued me in Documenta. I went back to The Last Season of the Avant-Garde and took another look at the easel with its unfinished battle-scene canvas. There was the tiny press and the wooden board with Martinus von Biberach’s great epitaph. And once again I activated the button Bastian Schneider had installed beneath the word fröhlich (happy), which once again spat out a little piece of paper, this time with a different message than the one it threw on the floor the day before: the text warned that at night, when there was no one there, the place was taken over by beings wearing Polynesian masks, singing songs from the future, songs that will be sung six centuries hence in a very different Germany, but one where Lichtenberg will still be read, even if only out of respect for that passage in which he expressed his conviction that, without his writing, such different things would be discussed “between six and seven on a certain German evening in the year 2773.”

Unlike my previous incursion to that spot, there was no one around me this time. I was alone, because it was very early, so early that I understood I’d probably have a longer time to try to see things than I’d been able to on the previous occasion. But I soon had the impression that everything was just the same as the day before, so it was going to be pretty difficult for me to see anything very different from what I’d already seen. Even so, I began to inspect that interior again in case there were other secret springs, like the tiny printing press that produced leaflets. I looked in the drawers of the single piece of furniture in the room and found photographs of the gold hinges that were protected by the fake electric alarm system. But I didn’t find much else. In The Last Season of the Avant-Garde , it would be deluded to hope to find surprises or novelties.

I was about to leave, when it occurred to me to go to the green door of the main façade and look through the keyhole. I don’t know what I expected to find. Perhaps that Bastian Schneider might have set up something like Étant Donnés , Duchamp’s famous last work (twenty years it took him to make it), where the spectator, looking through a crack in an old Cadaqués door, saw a cryptic scene with a woman stretched out on a bed of twigs, her legs spread, her sex very open and off center, with a gas lamp in her left hand.

I looked through the keyhole of the green door of The Last Season of the Avant-Garde but I saw nothing but darkness and more darkness. I tried again. Nothing. I looked again. Darkness. When I turned around, I saw a woman my own age, still beautiful and not too tall, smiling at me. She was a strange blend of the writer Lydia Davis and my Aunt Antonia. The woman was American, though she wasn’t actually Lydia Davis. And I knew the whole time that, in fact, she wasn’t Davis, because I’d once had dinner with her in Brussels. Obviously she wasn’t my Aunt Antonia either, because this woman was American, from somewhere in the States, although she’d spent time in Zaragoza, and also in Girona and in Begur, so she spoke a mix of broken Catalan and Spanish. This woman found my voyeurism immensely funny. We began a conversation, and she immediately declared herself curious about everything, though she didn’t go, she said, to such extremes as I did. Her favorite hobby, she informed me, had been collecting medieval weaponry, but that wasn’t all: she’d studied Hebrew philosophy, written about China and religious leaders in India, and been a friend of numerous painters and writers (she named several but I didn’t know any of them).

When I took my leave to begin descending toward Karlsaue Park to continue my early morning walk, and somehow search for, I told her, other happy moments, she asked how I imagined one of those might be. Absurdly, I didn’t know how to answer her. My euphoria didn’t stop growing, but I didn’t know what to tell her about happiness. And so she told me that she’d once read about an English teacher in Shanghai, who’d asked a Chinese student what had been the happiest moment of his life. The student had hesitated for a long time and finally smiled, blushing. He told him that his wife had once gone to Peking, where she’d eaten duck, and she’d often told him about that trip, so he could say that the happiest moment of his life was his wife’s trip when she’d eaten duck.

After this, I was even quieter and felt blocked. Why did I encounter China so often on the paths I took to avoid it?

I went for a walk along the Fulda River, past the terraces that would soon be filled with indefatigable German retirees.

Pretending to have a retired air, I went into a bar overlooking the Fulda. There was a jukebox playing “Parisien du Nord,” by Cheb Mami, an Arabic protest song from the French banlieues . I soon discovered that the jukebox was part of Die Gedanken sind frei ( Thoughts Are Free ), Susan Hiller’s project for Documenta. The work was composed of a hundred popular protest songs for the hundred days the exhibition lasted.

There were five jukeboxes in five bars in Kassel, one of which was this one. As I left, I was cheered by the young voices I could suddenly hear amid the mist rising off the river. They were Arabic women who’d just gotten off the bus and who, by their way of speaking Spanish, I guessed might belong to the big Saharan tent set up on the Karlsaue grass, beside the Orangerie.

I approached the group and I hadn’t been mistaken. They were going to The Art of Sahrawi Cooking . Pim had told me about this tent. It was a project, if I was not mistaken, realized by Robin Kahn from New York, and also a Cooperative, which (I’d later verify at the hotel) was called The National Union of Sahrawi Women, an association from a refugee camp in the Western Sahara.

From what Pim told me, visitors received tiny glasses of tea there and sat on cushions, maintaining a climate of permanent conversation in low voices; the tent functioned as a research station, providing information about the Western Sahara: about the history of the occupied territories, the refugee camps, and the so-called Wall of Shame, which is a dividing wall in the south of Morocco, and scandalously unfamiliar to most Europeans.

I walked a long way along the Fulda. I hadn’t had a call on my cell phone for an infinity of hours. No one in Kassel seemed to remember I was there or that I would be giving a lecture that afternoon. Maybe I’d now been forgotten by Boston, by Ada Ara, by Pim and company. The fog of the place reminded me of those scenes in my books, which began or ended up in misty lands, in Manderleys of the spirit. All this stemmed from adolescence, from the days when, if a movie began with a melancholy scene and an enigmatic guy walking along a road in the middle of nowhere through fog on his way to a seedy bar, from the start (and to the finish too) the scenario made my eyes as wide as saucers; it was something that interested me enormously.