You are in Germany, an inner voice seemed to want to repeat to me, reminding me somehow of the voice running through Europa, that Lars von Trier film that speaks to us, powerfully and obsessively, of the brutal ruination of the old continent.
“You are in Europa” was heard insistently in that film, and what the cameras showed us was a continent turned into a vast, infinite hospital.
As I came out of the Fridericianum, the voice telling me I was in Germany became unrelenting, and I felt it was likely that I had now finally, really landed. If that were so, I was in a country famous for combining intelligence and barbarism, one deeply familiar with remorse, which had spent years hesitating between feeling great pain for its sins and trying to feel a lesser regret; in short, a country whose citizens tried to find a reasonable balance between going overboard and placing too little emphasis on it, perhaps aware, on the one hand, that without memory they ran the risk of turning monstrous again, but also with too much memory, the risk was that they’d remain firmly stuck in the horror of the past.
17
I was in Germany wondering all the while whether I was really in Germany. When María Boston and I left the Fridericianum and headed straight down Königsstrasse in a southerly direction toward the Hotel Hessenland, I began to ask myself what sort of relationship there could be between avant-garde art and the bottle of perfume that had belonged to Eva Braun.
To put it succinctly, it pained me to see that war criminals and contemporary art could be related, even if it was only through art. I was turning this question over in my mind. Almost without realizing it, I drifted off not just mentally, but physically, and was on the verge of losing my balance and crashing — fortunately María Boston didn’t notice — into the window of a large department store.
A minute later — in the instant when, not without understandable concern over what had happened, I managed to peel myself away from the wretched window — I was dazzled to see in the store’s plate glass the false glitter of an utterly improbable summer light, and I realized that, contrary to what I’d thought, I still couldn’t say with complete certainty that I’d landed in Kassel or anywhere else.
That was when, to feel more as though I was in Germany, I started to pretend — just to myself, of course — that I felt a certain nostalgia for the starry nights of this country: for the deep blues of the wide German sky, the gently curved sickle of the Aryan moon, and the somber whisper of the pine trees in all the forests of that mighty land.
The moon isn’t Aryan, I corrected myself at once. And then I told myself that too many things had got muddled up in my head, and all the tiredness from the day was making them pop up in the most alarming way.
I was starting to feel really worn out, and at that stage even greater muddles can end up materializing in my mind. I’d gotten up terribly early in Barcelona to catch the plane to Frankfurt, and over the course of the day the fatigue of the flight, the lengthy Croatian incident and other tribulations had been piling up. On top of that, I didn’t want to bother Boston any longer, whom they seemed to have obliged to carry out these welcoming acts of courtesy toward me; as she herself had been half-hinting, she was expected as soon as possible in the central office, where she’d left a host of work matters pending.
It was time to start saying goodbye to her and devote myself to setting up the “thinking cabin” in my room in the Hessenland. Soon it would be getting dark, and, what’s more, I believed I could feel tiredness stealing over my body. It followed that the glitter of summer light in the store window could only be false (that sparkle I’d glimpsed a moment ago). Already in the grip of the imminent appearance of anguish, I was reminded of the philosophers of the Tlön school, who declared that, if we mortals didn’t already know it, it was as well for us to understand that all the time in the world had already transpired, and our life was only the crepuscular and no doubt falsified and mutilated memory or reflection of an irrecoverable process.
In a chain of events that took place out of my control, I saw myself as a worthless twilight reflection and fell into a state of unease that I guessed would not now be assuaged for the rest of the day, not even by the genuine glitter of the truest summer sun. And all this, naturally, was putting off the moment when I could at last feel I was fully in Germany. Depending on how I chose mentally to tackle the problem of my definitive landing, Germany might even come to seem like the other side of the moon to me, with its craters and its great seas.
18
On the terrace of a bar on Theaterstrasse, we stopped to eat some frankfurters, and I recovered more than I expected to, although it so happened that, once again, I couldn’t avoid a silly memory coming back to me. Since boyhood, it has been hard for me to eat a frankfurter without thinking of the two pounds of mud my grandfather claimed to have accumulated on the soles of his shoes near Frankfurt during World War I.
If the anecdote was ridiculous, its absurd tendency to come back every time I was about to swallow that sort of snack was even more so. Trying to escape the muddy memory by fleeing it mentally, I said the first thing to Boston that popped into my head. This was as spontaneous as it was outlandish and, seen from my present perspective, perhaps somewhat suicidal (although, not wishing to punish myself too much, I prefer to see the question as utter whimsy, like a McGuffin):
“Do you think there can be any point of connection between the avant-garde and Aryan perfume?”
Nobody has ever looked at me with such rage as Boston did hearing this question.
“What concept do you have of the avant-garde?” she asked.
At that moment it was hard to imagine what consequences this question would have for me.
19
I didn’t know what crime I had committed. I was almost scared. I took the opportunity to remind Boston that since my physical collapse some years back, I had taken exceptionally good care of my health, and, because of this, in spite of having just recovered my strength, even though I knew it was still early, I was going to retire to my hotel to rest until the following day. Surely, I thought, my question had originated in my accumulated tiredness of that day.
Boston objected, asking me at the same time if I was really so sure I had to go. I told her that I was, indeed, very tired. And then, in a very friendly tone, I reminded her that in Barcelona I’d made exceptions going out for dinner with her twice, and I could make another one or two, but not that evening because I felt worn out and needed to recover.
She laughed. I wanted to know what about. “Because,” she said, “you spoke in terms of ‘physical collapse’ and ‘recovering your strength’ and your language coincided with the motif of Documenta 13, which is precisely Collapse and Recovery.”
I reacted with what must have been a dense-looking expression.
“Collapse and Recovery,” she reiterated, still smiling.