On our left-hand side, on an avenue that crossed Königsstrasse, Boston pointed out the stop for the Documenta bus. In the mornings, it could drop me for free at the door of the Dschingis Khan in fifteen minutes.
These were the words I most feared: Dschingis Khan.
Going to that Chinese restaurant felt like a schoolroom chore, and, on top of that, I had no desire to show anybody at all what I was writing. Perhaps that’s why I pretended I hadn’t heard, staying very focused on my walk.
A few seconds followed, during which I looked solemnly at the ground. We were heading down Königsstrasse toward the Fridericianum, the central museum, or temple of Documenta. I felt I was walking along resisting everything and particularly going into the Dschingis Khan.
“Sehgal’s dark room is the closest room you have to your hotel bedroom,” Boston said, accompanying her convoluted sentence with beguiling diction and an attractive slight smile.
I didn’t understand why she said that, but for precisely that reason the sentence stayed more firmly engraved on my memory; I think I retained it in the hope of understanding it later on, as in fact did happen. When I returned to the hotel two hours later and went to my room with the idea of starting to turn it into a “thinking cabin,” I remembered her phrase straightaway. I remembered it as soon as I saw that, in effect, you really could lean into the street from the balcony and see the entrance to the building where the dark room was to be found.
“And are you going to write about this?” she asked, as we slowly continued making our way down Königsstrasse toward the Fridericianum, about a twelve-minute walk. Write about what? Oh, she said, I’m asking whether you’re thinking of writing about your direct connection with Sehgal’s dark room. Well, possibly, was all I said in reply, perhaps a little thrown because the question seemed related to the idea of showing my texts to visitors at the Dschingis Khan. But later I realized that perhaps what she was really asking me was to write for her. Why not? Was it then true that one could take a girl captive by writing? Luckily, thinking things through more carefully, I very soon saw I’d get nowhere if I considered wanting to take Boston captive. So, making the most of my common sense, I calmed down, telling myself that by no means had she asked me to subjugate her. I then chose to explain to her that I planned to shut myself up in my hotel room in the evenings and turn it into a place of isolation, a space well-suited to reflection: a place similar in the imagination to a cabin where it would be easy to devote myself to thinking, to meditating on joy, for example, and seeing it as something possibly within the nucleus of all creation; the location was as similar as possible to a space where I could think of my relationship with the lost and irreparable world. Perhaps I would write something there but I didn’t think so; my objective in that room-turned-cabin was not to write, but to think.
On hearing this, Boston couldn’t refrain from a kind, beautiful laugh, really very friendly. She shot me a friendly glance. (I’d started to uncomplainingly put up with that type of fond glance “toward the old man,” which some women had thrown my way with sad affection lately.) And I realized that sometimes her natural happiness surpassed the charm of her marvelous voice, which was really saying something. It seemed to her, she said without letting slip her expression of strange satisfaction, that there was nothing less conducive to meditation than staying sitting in a closed room or a “thinking cabin,” or a fretting cabin, or whatever I wanted to call it.
She said it in such a captivating way, it might even be the case, I thought, that she was absolutely right. But I did not want her to notice I’d admired the wisdom of her words, so I acted as if I’d heard nothing. I pretended not to have taken in what she’d said. And while I was pretending, I started to turn over in my mind the fact that somebody had brushed up against me in Sehgal’s dark room and that I had thought at the time about resisting a second touch. It was not something to pass over with indifference. Maybe this was a touch, I said to myself, I would find hard to forget.
Today, I think things would have gone better for me if at that juncture I’d already read — I did not read Chus’s piece until that evening — that “art is art, and what you make of it is up to you,” that peculiar McGuffin from Chus Martínez that could also be interpreted in this way: “The touch has already happened, and now it all depends on you, let’s see what you can make of it.”
But at that point I still hadn’t come across Chus’s sentence. Happening on it that night, I associated it with something Boston had said to me during the afternoon about Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev’s desire that participants in Documenta 13 be left to make something, and that there should be no artistic brief to mold their intervention. Through that association, everything caused me to wonder if perhaps Carolyn and Chus, with their strange invitation to the Dschingis Khan (an invitation without sense or instructions) had deliberately brushed up against me, to see if I were capable of turning their Chinese proposal into something creative, or what amounted to the same thing: a fertile and properly productive way of making something of it.
15
I did not have Locus Solus by Raymond Roussel in my luggage, a novel I adore but didn’t bring with me. It was as though I had, because I knew it almost all by heart. I’d read it an infinite number of times and always had the feeling that memorizing it instead of taking it with me constituted a sort of strange, and no doubt singular, good luck charm. For me, Roussel’s whole book has always been, above all, a summary of walks. Over the course of an afternoon — which takes on the character of an itinerant initiation rite — the learned Martial Canterel goes along expounding each one of the rarities dotted around his property, the lovely villa at Montmorency.
Sometimes, I find it amusing to feel as though I’m in other people’s novels. Perhaps because of this, when María Boston and I finally arrived, after a brief walk, at the great esplanade of the Friedrichsplatz, I remembered the beginning of the second chapter of Locus Solus when they “came in sight of a broad promenade which was completely bare and very smooth.”
In fact, that route traveled with Boston was the prologue to other walks that would come later and would in part turn my trip to Kassel into the story of a journey punctuated by strolls, during which I saw, in the style of Locus Solus, a good number of rarities, many marvels.
On arriving at the grand esplanade, we arrived at a point on Friedrichsplatz where we could literally go no farther due to the huge crowd waiting to enter the Fridericianum, the oldest public museum in Europe and the heart of Documenta since its beginning in 1955. It was unthinkable to visit the whole exhibition and not enter the impressive neoclassical building (one of the few to survive the brutal devastation of the war), since that would have been like traveling to Germany and not even hearing about a city called Berlin.
In short, I had never seen such a gigantic line in my life. The pleasant temperatures for August, along with the fact that Documenta was only on for another four days, had filled Kassel with a host of last-minute visitors. In the line I seemed to once more see, with astonishment, that there were people looking at me with a strange fixation. They were all but saying: It’s about time you deigned to get here. Once again I felt I could be someone they were expecting: an impression entirely lacking any sense, but from which I could not escape, which allowed me to suspect that everything I thought I was observing had some hidden basis in truth, a truth I would not necessarily one day know.