35
On the bus, I started leaving my memories of the previous bad night behind, the remembrance of an extremely difficult session in the cabin. I suspect the most overwhelming thing about those sleepless hours wasn’t just meditating on Europe’s tragic fate, but also perceiving that I wasn’t wrong to see myself transformed into a total Kassel native, one more citizen of that provincial German city. Once again, I told myself that my habit of informing everybody I was from whatever place I found myself in had made me the victim of my own words and ended up doing me real harm. The proof was that it was suddenly no trouble to see myself as a humble and eloquent, melancholy Kassel citizen, who spent the night hours meditating on the solitude stretching away beyond time in the feeble light of his fatherland. .
With visions this terrifying, it’s understandable I barely slept a wink all night. I saw the world slipping through my fingers. I felt it was undesirable to have it with me any longer. I wanted to hurl it on any old galactic garbage dump, or perhaps into a Euro Sex Shop, or a butcher’s in the Black Forest, or a carpet store in El Paso, or a laundromat in Melbourne. I did not know what to do with the world.
I spent the night turning over awkward questions in my mind and I was incredibly restless, sometimes twisting in a ridiculous, tragic way between the sheets, transformed into a sort of neurotic Sinbad, old and forgetful, devoted to summoning up, in a series of litanies, all the cities I’d ever laid eyes on. I remember myself that way, simultaneously tragic and comical. A homegrown Sinbad or a Kassel-made one, if you prefer, dedicated to evoking, from inside his precarious cabin, with a rosary-like rhythm, solitary refuges to which in times gone by great anguished minds had withdrawn to think.
But what really drove me to the most dogged insomnia and a near fatal nervousness — I went on remembering on the bus heading in the direction of the Chinese restaurant — were the visions that followed one another in front of my astonished eyes. However little credence I gave them to start with, I was unable for many hours to push them away. It all began when I suddenly felt enveloped in a deadly silence and noticed that not a breath of air stirred inside the cabin, not a sound could be heard, not a squeak, nothing. The utter conviction that Europe had long since been wrapped in a shroud hit me all at once. Or, more accurately, the feeling had slowly crept up on me over the last few hours. I was in the center of Germany, in the center of Europe, and there, in that center, it was more obvious than anywhere else that everything had been cold and dead and buried for decades, ever since the continent allowed itself to make its first serious unpardonable mistakes. Everything had been wiped out in the center of that actually inanimate territory, where by day (as I’d been able to observe during that now past and very regretful morning and afternoon), the sun had remained unchanging at its zenith and, nonetheless, had stayed hidden behind a haze that seemed to have been hanging in the air for centuries, traces of a sort of dust as fine as residual pollen, from an earth that was disintegrating with terrifying slowness.
You are in Europe and Europe is not here, said a singsong, obsessive inner voice, which seemed keen to do away with me at all costs, simultaneously reminding me that the weight of our most recent terrifying history was too much, a history in which horror was the dominant presence.
It was a difficult night. And my eyes were like lighthouses. Europe was infested with ghosts, like the ones in Sehgal’s dance hall, and it was laden with symbols from the past. Europe, already a tragic composite, would never again manage to feel part of the world in a good or natural way, in fact would never again manage to feel on earth in any way at all.
At last, I could sleep, albeit only for an hour. At seven o’clock, I dropped off, and that drop drowned out my horror. I woke an hour later, and in a great frame of mind, which surprised me because nobody expects to find himself suddenly feeling so good after one hour’s sleep.
“Life is serious, art is joyful,” I said out loud, and then imagined cannon fire waking the whole of Kassel.
36
Time moved like lead and so did the whole city, but my buoyant mood didn’t flag for a second.
Among other things, I wasted no time discovering that on the bus — unlike in my meditation space in the cabin — thinking turned out to be simply relaxing, and even helped most of the phantoms from my night of insomnia to evaporate. I should have had more sleep, but I wasn’t tired. I sat at the front of the bus that morning, giving thanks to God and Duchamp for the existence of theories in art, conscious, too, that much as I’d had to put my shoulder to the wheel and knuckle down to the actual practice on so many occasions, the theoretical would always be my great passion. I was sitting there at the front when I decided to move down to the back, convinced the windows were bigger and I’d see the landscape better.
At that point it became Autre who was looking out at the rainy highway. And, quick as a flash, Autre thought up a character who resembled me and was supposedly part of the avant-garde, which was why he traveled at the front of the bus. I was feeling more and more lively thanks to my unexpected mental strength that seemed to increase the farther the bus ventured into the outskirts.
On reaching kilometer 19 of the Auedamm, we stopped for a few brief moments outside the Dschingis Khan. I looked at the place through my window and felt an immense weakness: an uncommon fatigue swept over me just at the thought that I was going to get off where nobody was waiting for me and where there might even be someone who would hate me, taking it as a given that I was a writer of no great interest.
Even so, I stood up with the intention of getting off the bus, but something compelled me to sit back down again at once. From my recaptured seat, I carried on looking in utter amazement at that place that appeared so innocuous, so insubstantial, so dreary in the rain. I still remember the horror, the tremendous horror, with which I regarded it.
Then the bus continued on its way. I was so utterly alone, knowing I was going to continue that way for so many hours, that I felt the need to see myself from the outside, precisely in order to be accompanied at least by the person who imagined he was seeing me. And that was how I ended up seeing myself: as the main character in a scene from an old Wim Wenders movie, one of those films in which the characters travel on every sort of public transport, looking out the windows of a multitude of different vehicles, with infinite longing, at cold German cities.
The bus continued on its way and I discovered that the route on that line was circular, so twenty minutes later we stopped again at kilometer 19. That time I was closer to getting off than before, but seeing again how dull and dreadful the place was in every way beneath the rain, I still didn’t alight. That morning I was interested in everything, but I couldn’t manage that sinister place. I went around another eight times on the bus, each turn lasting twenty minutes; some three hours in total sitting on public transport, resisting facing my Chinese destiny alone.
And the oddest thing was that I didn’t even have time to regret not having the books from my suitcase with me, Journey to the Alcarria or Romanticism, that is, not having something I could read on such a long and obsessively circular trip. The thing was, I was very well entertained by the repetitive run through the outskirts of the city, due to a faint but strange euphoria, which, although it was slight, subjected me to a hitherto unknown mental activity. I imagined that I went into the Dschingis and felt not only Chinese and as though I were going home, but that once again my arms had become excessively long and my legs were too far away from me. Totally Chinese and totally monstrous, I saw myself going into the Dschingis and looking at the round table with its vase, discovering that none of it was nearly as bad as I’d thought. Was that the effect of my tendency to see things in a positive light in the morning? That’s what I asked myself, imagining this scene on the bus, while outside the rain got heavier and heavier.