As if being there all by myself with the red notebook weren’t enough, Pim angrily remarked that nobody was coming to see me. I’ve always thought it most unnecessary that she told me so. I contained myself as best I could and, letting myself be carried along by my generally good state of mind, I simply said that I found her immensely amusing and somehow was going to put her into my next novel.
I expected she would at least want to know what my next book was about and that might even cause her to lean over my table to see what I’d jotted in my notebook (that way, a feeling that people were interested in me would be created, and this might possibly help with the formation of a line; it’s well known that people tend to be imitative); but not only did she not glance toward my notebook, she half turned around, and after saying she was going back outside to carry on smoking, she disappeared from sight so quickly I almost felt offended. I was so annoyed by her attitude that I couldn’t bring myself to follow her. I didn’t even want to get up from that absurd table and catch a breath of fresh air, or concentrate on the sprightliness of the pensioners on the terrace by the Fulda.
The minutes that followed have all vividly stayed with me, even though nothing happened. The mysterious mind sometimes seizes on moments that are simply dead or appear quite banal, but which, for reasons that escape us, stay in our memory and end up leaving us uneasy. These memories seem to be ineradicable, making us think these moments mean more than we first believed, and perhaps we just didn’t succeed in seeing it all at the time. In fact, if we take stock, all the moments of our lives are like that; in other words, more happens than we think. But there are some moments that surprisingly tend to be dull and yet mysteriously lodge in the memory, perhaps so we might investigate later on what buried reality ran through it all.
I was there a long time in this second phase of strange lingering; I was basically hanging around, waiting for Pim to return from her latest cloud of smoke. And during that time nothing happened, but taking into account the fact that I remember it minute by minute, I tend to think much more took place than seems possible to get down on paper. Throughout that period of time, boring and memorable at once, I devoted myself to recalling an unexciting impasse experienced on a now dimly remembered group trip to Dublin: I was trying to buy film for my camera, but we were in the suburbs and in a hurry to get up some metal steps leading to a bridge we had to cross to reach a train station. . Well, I won’t go on, because nothing happened. Or, more accurately, I didn’t know how to identify what it was that really happened and left me intrigued for life.
I was just thinking of this when Pim came back in, this time to tell me she was considering seeing a hypnotist to give up smoking.
“As nobody’s coming to see me, don’t you think we could go now?” I said.
“It’s not all about you being seen,” she replied, aghast.
It was unnecessary for her to tell me this, too, but it did sound like she was reproaching me for not getting down to writing, which ultimately, she seemed to think, was what I should really be doing.
29
A few minutes later, a guy of medium height came in, overweight and sporting a mustache, around forty years of age. He was dressed in a conventional gray suit: a guy, I would soon see, who was coarse and refined at the same time. He was heavy, but also seemed light; his personality was sporadically graced by a certain crackpot charm.
On seeing him, I went so far as to wish the whiskery fellow was not a restaurant customer, but someone coming in to pester me. That shows what a bad state I was in at that moment. I was desperately lonely. My unique existence no longer seemed poetic after all these ludicrous minutes playing writer to an empty spectators’ gallery.
“I feel terrific, how are you?” said the guy with the crackpot air about him. It gave me enormous joy to find he was talking to me, and it was a nice surprise that he was speaking in my mother tongue, in Catalan. His surname was Serra, and he said he was from Igualada, near Barcelona. He had come from the sanatorium, he explained. At first, I thought he was talking about an outpatients’ unit or a hospital, maybe an asylum, but no, far from it — the fat man in gray came from a Documenta installation called Sanatorium, a project by the Mexican artist Pedro Reyes. Sanatorium was a pavilion in the middle of Karlsaue Park, an improvised clinic with seven rooms for psychotherapy, with specialists attending those who needed to overcome stress, solitude, and fear. The visitors, if they so requested, were cared for as patients and could be treated with goodoo therapies (positive voodoo); they were encouraged to stick small objects onto cloth dolls. Sanatorium was right in the south of Karlsaue Park, in other words, almost adjacent to the Dschingis Khan.
The fat man with the crackpot air had just emerged completely cured (not crude) from there. At least, that’s what he told us, as though trying to crack a joke. He also wanted to play with the word goodoo. I’ll be healthy later, he said, but it’s good-oo to be healthy now. He’d read something of mine once but didn’t remember the title. I’m delighted you’re in a good mood too, he said. I’ve been sticking super-positive things onto a rag doll. Sticking? I queried. Don’t go thinking I said slicking, he said. No, you said sticking, I heard you perfectly. I’ve been gluing things to the doll, he said, now do you understand me?
Standing beside the table, Pim seemed interested to see what I made of things with the man who came along so good-oo from Sanatorium. And tell me, the jovial fellow said, is it true you’re going to let me see what you write? Even though I knew I had set myself up for this to happen, I’d discounted the possibility, so the request took me very much by surprise, even rattling me more than usual, but I reacted in time. I’ll let you read the latest thing to occur to me, I said; in fact I just wrote it down here. I passed him the red notebook, and he read aloud: “Change your life completely in two days, without caring at all about what has gone before, leave without further ado. When all’s said and done, the right thing to do is take off.”
He read it out and said he would have written: “Change your life completely in two hours with glue from the Sanatorium.” Although I wasn’t exactly Autre, I felt offended and leaped to the defense of the beleaguered professional I knew to be inside that long-suffering writer, humiliated at his table in the Chinese restaurant. I’m trying to write about an average man, I told him, who’s going through a difficult time and doesn’t even look to start again. He plans to go toward nothing. And tell me, Señor Serra, what do you imagine going toward nothing means? No idea, he answered, I live with success and every day I go further toward that.
If I had any doubt, he’d just made everything perfectly clear; once again, a strange situation had cropped up in my life with an oddball included. Nothing new there. For reasons that escape me, I’ve attracted crazies my whole life.