Enrique Vila-Matas - The Illogic of Kassel

Climbing into my taxi with my suitcase as quickly as possible, I looked like I was skipping town. Maybe I was the only citizen who was leaving. I was sure there was more to life than the nation; after all, I was traveling to the very center of the contemporary avant-garde, I was going to Kassel, via Frankfurt, probably to look for the mystery of the universe and be initiated into the poetry of an unknown algebra, and also to try to find an oblique clock and a Chinese restaurant and, of course, to try to find a home along the way.

When I arrived at the Frankfurt airport, contrary to what I’d been told, no one was waiting for me. At first, I was incredulous. One always fears these kinds of things are going to happen, and they often do. When they do, one even feels slightly upset: it’s the same sensation as feeling lost in a strange place without knowing where to spend the night or who might shelter you in a distant city.

I tried to remember the name of the young lady who was supposed to meet me to help me get the train to Kassel. Finally I remembered: she was called Alka and was Croatian. That’s what I remembered hearing from Pim Durán, whose telephone number I’d had the good idea to save in my cell phone. I called her to say I was in Frankfurt and nobody had come to meet me. How odd, said Pim Durán. Hang up, and I’ll call you right back. I hung up, beginning to plan my return to Barcelona. After all, now I had a justification for leaving. Actually, I had two. The other would be that at the last moment, on arriving in Frankfurt, I’d realized that the labyrinth of the avant-garde of contemporary art just made me laugh and I was backing out, returning that same day to Barcelona and to Catalonia’s National Day celebrations. But I couldn’t use that miserable excuse because I’d systematically forbidden myself to laugh, as so many do, at certain types of avant-garde art aspiring to originality. I’d forbidden myself because I knew that it was always quite easy for idiots to insult that sort of art, and I didn’t want to be one of those kinds of people. I detested all those ominous voices very common in my country that displayed their supposed lucidity and frequently proclaimed fatalistically that we were living in a dead time for art. I guessed that, behind this easy tittering, there was always a hidden resentment deep down, a murky hatred toward those who occasionally try to gamble, to do something new or at least different; this tittering hides a morbid grudge against those who are aware that, as artists, they’re in a privileged position to fail where the rest of the world wouldn’t dare, and that’s why they try to create risky works of art that would lack meaning if they didn’t contain the possibility of failure at their core.

I had systematically forbidden myself to laugh at avant-garde art, though without losing sight of the possibility that today’s artists were a pack of ingenues, a bunch of Candides who didn’t notice anything, collaborators unaware that they were collaborating with the powers that be. Of course, so I wouldn’t get entirely discouraged, I kept in mind a novel by Ignacio Vidal-Folch, The Plastic Head , in which he laid out a funny sketch of the business of visual arts, with its museum directors, critics, gallery owners, professors of aesthetics, and (as a dispensable element given the abundance on offer) its artists. It was a tale that intelligently and energetically set out the paradox of the most furious and radical visual arts having turned into an ornament of the nation. Vidal-Folch — who is essentially a man of letters — showed some sympathy for the poor artists, who, though they were the final and weakest links in the chain, seeming to him still in some way dangerous and powerful.

Maybe because I’m a man of letters and still believe that one can be somewhat optimistic in this world — to tell the truth, I only believe that in the mornings when I enjoy an enviable mood — I was on the side of some of the artists. This was a choice I’d made at a certain point in my life and I’d promised myself that, even if I found some reason to, I’d never change. One sometimes needs to think that not all the strangers surrounding us are horrible beings. I think I was telling myself this, or something similar, when my cell phone rang.

“Alka speaking. I am here in the airport. And you?”

“Alka!”

I wanted to love her, you’ll have to understand. When one spends a long time alone in the Frankfurt airport, one goes crazy at receiving even the tiniest crumbs of affection.

The strange thing is that, after I exclaimed her name, from then on, over the course of six exhausting telephone calls before she finally figured out my exact position in the airport, she never again spoke to me in my own language. She spoke in English, German, and even Croatian, languages I neither speak nor understand. Maybe that’s why we took over an hour to find each other. There was no way to clarify anything. Alka had clearly memorized those first three sentences she’d said when I’d answered my phone, but she didn’t know how to say anything else in Spanish.

After almost an hour of countless telephonic vicissitudes, we finally saw each other face-to-face. By then I was on the very verge of insanity. Suddenly, Alka appeared with an enormously wide smile and she was so beautiful and exotic, so irremediably sexy, that I lost all capacity for rage. I didn’t complain at all about the wait, turning into a silly fool and probably moving and acting as if I’d been stupidly seduced. I followed her obediently to the train. Halfway to Kassel — perhaps because in spite of many attempts, we could only manage to understand each other through physical and sometimes quite confusing signals — I started imagining that she, in our unspoken language, was telling me it was very hot and she kept repeating this until finally showing me that she wasn’t wearing anything under her skirt. I took a good look. It was true, and then I threw myself on Alka, and she encouraged me to continue and said to me: Yes, yes, destroy me, destrózame !

Setting aside that torrid scene, I returned to the real world, where I confirmed once again that everything was monotonous, and poor Alka, as far as I could tell from her ridiculous gestures, was describing something she’d eaten the previous night in Kassel, which was quite possibly a hamburger, although it might also have been, according to the drawing her fingers sketched out several times, an ant.

I told myself the latter was true, that her story wasn’t as humdrum as I believed, but I had no way of knowing. I decided to turn my gaze toward the landscape framed by the train window: monotonous villages without church steeples to break the flat perspectives, all the houses the same height, a pure apotheosis of tedium. I remembered something Roland Barthes had written about his admired and later so reviled China, what he’d commented about the Chinese villages seen from afar: all so insipid, he said, because of their lack of steeples, all absolutely insipid, like Chinese tea.

“So, you’ve been eating ants,” I said. I knew that luckily she wouldn’t understand me.

Soon afterward, after arriving at the more modern of the two stations in Kassel, we took a taxi to the Hotel Hessenland, located at the top of Königsstrasse, an important thoroughfare in the city. I still find it difficult to forget the trip between the station and the hotel, because all along the way, it seemed like people in the street were stopping all of a sudden when they saw me go by, standing and following me with their gazes, as if saying: It’s about time you got here.

Were they expecting someone and confusing me with him? That was really weird. How could I think that passersby were staring at me when in reality the opposite was happening and nobody — I well knew — was expecting me in Kassel?