Enrique Vila-Matas: The Illogic of Kassel

I said goodbye to the whole curatorial team, with a special hug for Boston, who was moving to London in a week. She said she hoped to see me again one day somewhere. Maybe we’ll end up having dinner with the McGuffins on a foggy night, she said, smiling. I’ve always hoped to find that fog one day in London. .

The taxi was coming to pick me up at seven in the morning, an early hour, and the sole representative of Documenta there would be Alka, coordinator of my stay. I looked at the Croatian woman, who immediately smiled at me, and who, moreover, seemed content that we were talking about her, though she didn’t give the impression of knowing what we were saying.

Minutes later, after all the farewells, I began to walk aimlessly around downtown Kassel, feeling lonelier than ever in that city. It was all over, and I had too many hours to kill before the taxi would arrive the next morning. It would have been ideal to leave immediately. After an hour of wandering, I came out onto Königsstrasse by surprise and decided to set out for a fixed destination. I headed for the Gloria Cinema and once again was fascinated by its anachronistic foyer and box office that sent me back into the past. I stood there almost hypnotized. No matter how much time passes, I thought, I’ll never figure out the exact reason for the great magnetism exerted over me by the façade of the Gloria Cinema, so similar to the neighborhood cinemas of my childhood.

I was standing there half hypnotized when, to my astonishment, I saw the lights go out in the windows with the posters in them. I saw a man up on a ladder starting to change the letters to the next day’s film. I waited until I could read it: Shanghai . Directed by Mikael Håfström. A Chinese title and, if I wasn’t mistaken, a Nordic director, probably Swedish.

I stayed there a while longer, and a childhood memory came to me: halfway through a movie, I heard a bell ringing and started wondering if it had rung in the movie or if it came from outside, from the steeple of the neighborhood church.

Then I left. I left the Gloria’s foyer as if it didn’t matter to me, when actually I felt very moved because I had the impression I’d left behind something very important to me. I left and began walking back the way I came. Finally, now somewhat tired, after contemplating Horst Hoheisel’s reproduction of the fountain for a long time, I sat down on the terrace of a café on Friedrichsplatz. I called Barcelona and said I had a taxi for the next day. All I had left, I said, was the most tedious part, the return, now that it was all over.

What hadn’t ended at all, I suddenly noticed almost incredulously, was my creative mood and absolute enthusiasm for almost everything. Sitting on the terrace of that café, from my position of vigilance over that big public space, I suddenly realized everything that evening was splendid, magnificent, marvelous. I lacked adjectives. The sun, though now setting, still shone a little. The streets transmitted a contagious joy of bustling people. An agreeable breeze moved the leaves of the trees in the square. I loved most of the things I noticed, and I did so almost instantaneously. I did have disdainful glances for people I saw rushing past, as if wanting to make them comprehend it was incomprehensible that they weren’t stopping to contemplate such beauty.

I sat on that terrace for about an hour, contemplating things I’d been going over for years now, although perhaps tackling everything with an excitement and complexity far greater than I had at other times. I wondered how long that great vital impulse would last and also what could have happened to humanity that made it so difficult to give literary interest to joy, to the excitement of being alive, to the exaltation coming from what we were seeing.

Leaving that terrace, I went to the hotel. I had a thought for art itself , which seemed to me to definitely be there, in the air, suspended in that moment, suspended in life, in the life that went by as I’d seen the breeze go by when art went by.

I was walking up Königsstrasse, wondering why glorious moments always announced storms or misfortunes.

It was late now, and I suddenly noticed that everything had gone dark.

I had a sudden, complete sensation of being orphaned. As if a tiny break had caused a switch in the cheerful rules of the day and my mood had changed in the most radical way.

Walking toward the Hessenland, I stopped to contemplate the earth, air, and sky from within the darkness. And I remembered the dead, all the many people I’d known and loved who had died. And I also remembered that for the living there was only a gloomy path, to the grave, to the earth; there was no other route to any other world than what went by way of the grave. All the marvels of life — the nice colors, the charm and joy of certain days, family homes, unforgettable days, the sweet and gentle paths, the marvels of small and great art — everything was on its way to expire and disappear, everything was oblivion. The sun on high would pass away, and all the best emotions, and with them the eyes of men who cry. . It had really grown dark. I took refuge in the hotel, went into my room, went out on the balcony, waved for the last time to Sehgal’s invisible room, came back into mine, that enclosure that hadn’t even provided me with a thinking cabin.

One hour later, I was sitting on a plain chair in my room, my bag packed, totally ready to embark on that return journey despite having so many hours left to wait. My computer was in its case. And I was there in the chair as if petrified, as if in hell. The invisible impulse, the effect of the breeze, seemed to have reached its end. I looked toward the black hole that had originated inside myself, and it showed me my own face. As if with my brain I was going through this zone without a bit of good humor; it was a region with no jokes at all. I wanted to go back to the world, although it had perished some time ago and was no longer within my reach. I had been trapped inside Piniowsky since the moment he was born in me. I was a victim of my own mask. It was no longer possible to have any opinion on the world. Every axiom of my life had turned out to be false, it felt, and I didn’t see anything, there was nothing, I was nothing; everything was, from top to bottom, a false illusion. The invisible impulse had vanished entirely.

I barely moved from the chair the whole night, thinking of all the dead I’d once known and who had gone with an inadmissible ease. I spent the night in this misty humorless zone thinking that what was happening to me was going to stay with me forever. But at dawn, everything changed: at first just slightly; then, in a more dynamic way.

At seven on the dot the taxi arrived. I went downstairs with my suitcase and my laptop. At reception, as I’d imagined, Alka was not there; she probably hadn’t set her alarm. It was obviously too early for her. The day looked splendid, magnificent, marvelous. Stealthily and slowly, the black taxi slipped through the deserted streets, and for a moment, I feared I might encounter the image of young Kassel leaning against a rough wall, weeping in silence for the end of Europe.

But no. Kassel too, like all the dead I’d once loved, had disappeared, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

The taxi driver was Chinese. I was grateful for this last detail from the curatorial team. Even his Chinese cap had meaning, and noticing it led me to understand that I was back in a zone of luminosity and joy.

Art was, in effect, something that was happening to me, happening at that very moment. And the world seemed new again, moved by an invisible impulse. Everything was so relaxing and admirable, it was impossible not to look. Blessed is the morning, I thought.