You should know that just a few months ago, he said, I was able to leave behind a perfectly uninteresting forty-year-old life and start to savor success as a writer. I began to experience it in the only place in the world I wanted to triumph, New York. Here Serra paused (I’d say perversely and with malicious intent) in order to ask if I proposed to triumph in this Chinese restaurant. He didn’t give me time to reply, not even just a tenth of a second, to say that the verb savor didn’t indicate he was such a good writer as he himself declared. Because if you do propose to triumph here, Serra went on, unperturbed, I have to advise you that New York is more suitable. You’re not going to get anywhere with a Chinese ambition. I trust, I said, already rather peeved, that’s not just because New York is more central than this crappy restaurant. He laughed and I was again aware of that crazy side of him. I wondered if it wouldn’t be better to say suddenly that I was going to the bathroom and wouldn’t be back, or suggest he order a babao fan at the bar, which, if I hadn’t read wrong, was the dessert that nourished the first Chinese cosmonaut on his space voyage. Alternatively I could suggest he order — I’d memorized the menu — an “eight-treasures rice pudding.”
I don’t know if you can imagine, he said, suddenly sounding somewhat pained and serious, what it is to astound Greenwich Village with your novels and publish brilliant articles in the New Yorker and the Coffin Factory and the Southern Review at the same time, and for your appearance to be simultaneously slovenly and splendid and your mind to ebb and flow the whole time like water, and the blond waves of your hair to spring up rebelliously around your head, and to finish nights chatting with the editorial team of Screen Gossip finding out the latest rumors or arguing with Rockefeller Senior to ascertain which of you best carries the burden of success.
I didn’t need to hear another word. He spoke a more than distinguished Catalan with a wide vocabulary, but how many years had it been since Screen Gossip was last published? Fat, gray Serra was even loonier than his overly conventional appearance suggested. This seemed to me to offer a more than good enough excuse to run away. Providentially, I saw Pim signaling to me from the doorway, as if indicating I should pop out with her to take some air, and I remember very well how it felt: as if someone had just proposed I should get out of Hell on my own two feet before it was too late.
I left.
The right thing to do was take off.
We went out to the back of the restaurant and from there started to descend a pronounced slope of green grass, heading to the southern end of Karlsaue Park. After a while, we began to follow the arrows on scrappy signs pointing toward Sanatorium. It wasn’t drizzling anymore. The unfriendly restaurant was being left behind, and for me it was like losing sight of Sing Sing. As we went farther and farther into the park and at the same time into Documenta territory, “the Chinese number” also felt increasingly far away.
“Do you think the Chinese couldn’t even see me?” I asked Pim.
She didn’t answer, which didn’t particularly worry me. I preferred to remember that when you’re walking along with another person you don’t feel obliged to respond to everything that’s said to you and that’s why a lot of sentences end up unanswered.
Half a minute later, Pim finally decided to speak. She did so to say that she’d talked to Boston on the phone the last time she’d gone out to smoke and they’d told her from the curatorial team office that there was really no need to overdo things, that the time spent in the restaurant was flexible, was up to the writer in residence, and the last thing that must be allowed to happen was for the invited writer to feel under pressure at any point.
You could have said that sooner, I thought. But I said nothing, I just kept walking. I would rather everything followed its course. After all, we were getting farther away from the Chinese restaurant, which was the most important thing just then. At least for that day I would not be returning to Hell. Nothing could feel better than that calm push of the invisible current.
30
We were walking along peacefully through Karlsaue Park for what must have been a tremendously long time. Suddenly, looking to the left, I thought I saw a series of tiny individuals — sometimes singly, sometimes in pairs or groups — all inside a gigantic glass of water. Like Cartesian divers, the little people rose vertically in the liquid and immediately, without having reached the surface, plunged toward the bottom, where they rested an instant before starting a new ascent.
I was very thirsty because it had already been a long walk, and I thought I might be suffering from a passing spot of sunstroke. It seemed to me that Pim had told me the glass was really an athlete holding back the flight of a great bird and contained drowned dwarves, who, trained in crime, were trying to strangle Raymond Roussel.
Okay, I said. And we carried on walking.
When I realized I was hallucinating, I put all my hopes into being able to sit and rest as soon as we got to the terrace of the café-bar at the Orangerie Palace. You could already see the terrace on the horizon casting a strange and lovely oasis-like light, in this case it wasn’t hallucinatory. We were heading for that terrace, and one might assume we’d have a good rest in the bar, but in the meantime my thirst was getting worse. I longed for water more with every moment. This did not outweigh my impression that at the same time, I was increasingly firmly in the grip of a very enthusiastic mood. The sensation was unusual for me: I was extremely tired, but at the same time I kept up my almost inordinate enthusiasm with just as much vigor as I had hours before, most especially for anything to do with Documenta. I maintained a critical attitude toward certain installations and pieces but, in general, felt very interested in what I was seeing. Entirely happy, I’d say, to stroll around a city turned upside down by avant-garde art, or contemporary art, or whatever it was.
No doubt it was this same enthusiasm that led me to want to locate the work of Pierre Huyghe, one of the artists who had been recommended to me.
“Make sure you see the work of Tino Sehgal, Pierre Huyghe, and Janet Cardiff,” Alicia Framis had written me.
Not even five minutes had passed, and we were already on the path through the park leading to the installation by Huyghe, a French artist who was, as Pim started to explain, hard to classify. In any case, here was a guy who had challenged the narrow, ambiguous relationship between reality and fiction and was, moreover, adored by people who loved playfulness in all manifestations of art. He was mad about Dada and Perec and Louison Bobet (the latter was the oddest, as he was a famous cyclist whom Huyghe considered a Dadaist); in fact, he was crazy about everything that struck him as displaying unfettered imagination and an unruly capacity for invention. He liked reality to turn itself into fiction and vice versa, for it to be hard to tell the difference between the two. Huyghe had been working outside the framework of the museum or gallery for over ten years, Pim went on to tell me, fleeing all that was conventional, and his work sometimes seemed related to that of the Belgian Maurice Maeterlinck.
I was surprised by that name cropping up, I hadn’t heard him mentioned for decades. For a time, I’d actually studied Maeterlinck in depth. He was the author of philosophical essays about the natural world: The Life of the Bee, The Intelligence of Flowers, The Life of the White Ant. Under a very clear German influence, this Belgian writer was adept at creating atmospheres in his books that were thick with invisible forces and very somber. Víctor Erice, the Basque filmmaker, took the title of his much-admired movie The Spirit of the Beehive from the beginning of a paragraph from The Life of the Bee. And I myself had ended up writing a long article about the curious relationship between certain film titles and certain insects.