I was waiting for her answer, when a German woman weighing over 260 pounds came in and spoke briefly to Alka or, more accurately, Alka spoke to her very sharply. She must have said something to her about me, because, seconds later, the woman came resolutely forward and, in the most effusive manner, proceeded to embrace me with rare enthusiasm.
“Writer, writer, writer!” she shouted gleefully, as if she’d never seen one before in her life.
She let me go, but then embraced me again. Again she shouted, Writer, writer.
I heard Alka’s needless laughter.
“Yes, I’m a writer,” I said, annoyed. “What of it?”
26
When I got a grip on myself, Frau Writer-Writer was saying goodbye to Alka and Pim and leaving. Her absence was immediately noticeable, as I was stuck without potential admirers who would want to spy on what I wrote. The woman went without saying anything to me, as if she had forgotten me immediately after her second savage squeeze.
A German experience, I thought.
And I was left relying on what really interested me: whether Pim, the cheerful girl whose name reminded me of a beach in the Azores called Porto Pim, would take responsibility for the absurdity of my situation, given that there weren’t any people there now to annoy me.
I was going to ask her again what she thought I should do there with my pencil and my eraser and my red notebook on the outskirts of Kassel. Up to that point I hadn’t been interested, but now I wondered if she could give me any idea how those who’d preceded me in this Chinese number had worked out this peculiar situation. I was going to ask, but at the last moment, I decided to inquire about my talk with the title “Lecture to Nobody.” I wanted to know if it had been scheduled for a particular time, as I was keen to give it, even if, I said to myself, it was possibly only to make up for the conspicuously shabby “Chinese number” that they’d entrusted to me. What’s more, it seemed that only if I gave my “Lecture to Nobody” would I feel as though I’d really taken part in Documenta.
It took Pim a while to understand my question, but finally the penny dropped. I was to give the talk on Friday, she said, but they’d changed the venue and I would not do it out beyond a forest without an audience, but in the very center of Kassel, in the conference room of the Ständehaus.
“Then I can’t call it ‘Lecture to Nobody.’ ”
“If it’ll make you happy, we’ll stop the public coming in.”
I laughed and asked what kind of place the Ständehaus was. It was the old Hesse parliament, she said, and one of the few buildings left more or less standing at the end of the war. She’d show me around inside whenever I wanted to get a good idea of where I’d be speaking.
I didn’t want to let the opportunity pass me by and asked whether that meant we could go and see the Ständehaus right that minute.
“Don’t even think about it!” Pim barked.
Bit by bit, she lost her smile, which up to that point had suited her so nicely. Seeing her like that made an impression on me. Noticing that her reaction surprised me, she took it badly, not knowing how to get back to her permanent exuberance, the downside of her charm. The return to that state had seemed expected.
“But we’re not doing a thing here in this Chinese restaurant,” I said.
“What do you mean we’re not doing a thing?” Pim said. She seemed put out.
Far from venting my rage on her false charm or accusing her of taking orders from superiors about what she had to do with me, I kept quiet. Perhaps it was for the best. I smiled, took a step toward her, and positioned myself very close to her face; then I retreated, making out nothing had happened, that I hadn’t noticed she wasn’t always charming. But something had happened, and then some. There was something shockingly horrible about the unpredictable Pim’s face. When it’s artificial, I thought, joy can fall apart in an extremely alarming manner. And what’s more, how frightening people are who suddenly show a side of themselves we’d never imagined (as sometimes happens to me, which is why I try not to be seen out too much at night).
27
Minutes later, I was seated behind the dog-eared “Writer in Residence” sign, like someone who is waiting for a very absentminded customer to come into his disastrous shop. Three tables away, Pim and Alka were drinking Chinese tea while talking about mysterious matters. Everything led me to suspect they had instructions to observe what I made of it (and from a certain distance in order to ensure the whole thing worked). The ball, they seemed to be saying to me, is in your court now, so what you make of it is up to you. You could see perfectly well they were thinking this or something along those lines, because occasionally their glances were somewhat sadistic, as if they were expecting a real gallows expression to take hold of me.
I wrote in the red notebook:
“Change your life completely in two days without caring in the slightest what has gone before; leave without further ado. When all’s said and done, the right thing to do is take off.”
I wrote this just in case. It would be a total miracle if anybody came in and was interested to know what I was working on. At least I would give that visitor the impression I was really writing there at my table in the Chinese restaurant. If anyone asked me, I would speak at length in Autre’s voice about the creation of a character in a novel, who was an average man, naive and intelligent at the same time: a man who lived through a particular moment and wasn’t even looking to start again, but wanted to leave without further ado and go toward nothing.
And what did going toward nothing mean? I didn’t have the slightest idea. In my role as Autre, I would ask the first person who inquired about it. Of course, that person might never turn up. In short, in the highly unlikely event that anyone should approach my table, my idea was to act as though I were a writer seeking the collaboration of his fans. It goes without saying that having to ask readers for their help seems a pretty unattractive method to me, but I knew I could allow myself to do it if the circumstances arose. I would feel not that it was me myself who was doing it, but the guileless Autre. Moreover, I was indifferent to a desire to change life and leave without further ado: in the end, that was somebody else’s desire, expressed in somebody else’s work, in the book being written by a man from Barcelona whose name was (provisionally) Autre.
While I was waiting for I’m not exactly sure what, I entertained myself by writing an autobiographical note for poor Autre, letting him borrow several details from my own life so he wouldn’t turn out too radically different from me. I focused the text on his early relationship with art and revealed that cinema had been a big thing for him long before literature was:
From the window of the living room in the house where I was born, you could see the Metropol. I followed the changes on the marquee from there and the pasting up of huge posters of Bogart, for example. At the age of five I saw Humphrey Bogart a hundred times a day. I was only three when I saw my first movie one summer in Llavaneres, a village north of Barcelona, a kilometer from the beach. My mother’s family had settled in that village four centuries ago. My first film was Magnolia, with Ava Gardner. I remember that, on leaving the cinema, I began to imitate William Warfield, the black singer who sang “Ol’ Man River” at the end of the film in an extremely deep voice (which I aspired to, I suppose, the voice of a man). The event was much celebrated in my family. More than that, it seems they thought I wanted to be a black singer when I grew up. .
Alka and Pim came to see me to say they were going outside to smoke, and after their interruption I was no longer capable of carrying on with my autobiographical note. It’d be best if they went a long way away, I thought. That’s all I thought.