The work by that unexpected fanatic of Hessenlandian chocolate began with the first notes of the traditional Catalan tune “Per tu ploro” as a curtain representing a vast and desolate mineral landscape was raised. The convulsive and catastrophic shapes of the rocks offered a clear notion of an ancient geological delirium. A large, silver spoon came directly out of a rock of pure iron oxide and diagonally crossed the exposed, somewhat Angolan landscape. In the spoon could be seen two eggs on a plate. . Then the curtain went down and came back up again, now with the tango “Renacimiento” playing in the background. The stage was full of cyclists, who, with loaves of bread on their heads and blindfolded, intertwined very slowly among tango-dancing couples. When the cyclists and dancers disappeared, a black woman could be seen center stage playing a harp and wearing a Chanel suit. Every once in a while she’d hit the harp brutally with loaves of bread she’d taken out of a basket set beside her. Then she’d calm down and just play. When her piece was finished, she threw the loaves and began to demand that the curtain fall, which it finally did so that everything would start all over again, that is, the Catalan sardana came back.
I do sometimes find sardanas moving; they remind me of unknown ancestors, making me cry out of a sentimental confusion. However, that spectacle essentially reminded me that I had to phone Barcelona, ask how everything was going back there. How was everything in my dull country? I noticed that it felt like an eternity since I’d left my city.
47
Ada Ara said goodbye, as she had to get back to the office. Boston said she was going to stay awhile longer, and we sat down in Die Büste Bar, near Kochstrasse.
There were children running around, chasing one another between the tables under the indulgent eyes of their parents and grandparents. The bar, full of adults crowded together almost fighting to get a drink, wasn’t the best place for a conversation. But we talked. Boston told me she was looking forward to growing old, to being able to walk more slowly and dress like an elderly lady. She managed to surprise me.
“Walk more slowly?”
I looked at her feet. She was wearing the golden sandals that had so fascinated me before, and I imagined them destroyed by the passing years. At the same time, I couldn’t help but be surprised at her sentimental, human notes infiltrating my cold investigation into the state of contemporary art (I might even say “too human”). What were those notes doing there? It occurred to me to ask her if her desire to walk more slowly might have something to do with the slow treatment of time she’d perceived in Kentridge’s work. Not at all, she said. What an idea. What was true, she said, was that she was becoming an increasingly fanatical walker, so much so that she was confident that as an old lady she wouldn’t have to give up her walks, they would just be at a slower pace, down the hallway of her house, better than ever. She would always be dressed in strange clothes; she dreamed of wearing very thin dresses with thick socks and, as night came on, falling asleep with her head back and her mouth hanging open. .
I want to reach old age, she insisted, and have trouble sleeping. I want to wake up in the middle of the night and stay awake until dawn drooling and become senile and stupid. Her voice had curiously recovered all the charm of the first time I’d heard it. It was sounding immensely warm and so human. It even seemed too human. It was a voice that, despite what it said, managed to increase the power of its spell moment by moment. I would have stayed there in Die Büste Bar listening to her for the rest of the day, or the rest of my days, until she started to grow old. I don’t know how I came to imagine that some of the grandfathers in the bar were practically on top of us and that they wanted to touch us, that their breath enlivened the red of the little dresses of the girls running around, the way oxygen enlivens fire. I believe it can be said that, in the company of old lady Boston, among the flames and little red dresses, I fully lived for a few moments in the tough hell of old age.
48
On my walk back to the Hessenland, I was tearing along at such a pace that I walked right past my hotel without seeing it; I kept on going, maybe because I was concentrating too hard on my old folks’ experience in Die Büste Bar and going over and over my two quick farewell kisses to Boston.
Without noticing, I stumbled into unknown territory, in the unfamiliar area of Friedrich-Ebert-Strasse, and as I passed in front of the Trattoría Sackturm, I felt someone touch my shoulder. For a second or two, I thought I’d returned to Sehgal’s salon. I looked around rather cautiously and saw it was Nené. (I call her that because I don’t think the actual person would like me to give her real name.)
The moment has been engraved in my memory, not only because I was momentarily startled, but also because the person who’d grabbed me was Nené, an old girlfriend of my friend Vladimir (an ex-girlfriend from a very long time ago — to tell the truth, from the early seventies). I was quite shocked. I thought, if such things were happening to me — meeting a woman like her here — it meant when I got home I’d have to write about what had happened to me on this trip. Who could have expected things might still happen to me?
Nené was alone in the truest sense of the word. She was about to have dinner on her own when she saw me coming up the street. She was, she said, enormously thrilled. She was as high-strung as ever, though older, with a slightly crooked nose and shiny, bouncy auburn hair. She had just been left by her husband, a famous German artist. When? An hour ago. Horrible, she said. Her husband? No, that she’d been dumped again; my friend Vladimir had done the same thing, didn’t I remember? I didn’t remember that Vladimir had left her, was all I could say, and I thought this really took the cake; all I needed now was to have to justify decisions my friends had made in the seventies.
You’ve aged, she said maliciously. I’m not surprised, I thought. Was I not coming from experiencing a scene in Die Büste Bar with a decidedly elderly atmosphere? You’re gaga yourself, I was about to answer, but I was bursting with such well-being that it was unthinkable I could hurt a recently separated old dame. She kept insisting I come have dinner with her. I don’t know how many times I told her I had dinner plans with the co-curator of Documenta at the Osteria and couldn’t have two dinners in one night, but the fact is, I didn’t put up too much resistance going into the Sackturm, since I was really quite hungry and had been for hours.
I hadn’t heard that you’d participated in Documenta, Nené said after ordering a salad to share, once we’d been seated at a table inside the Sackturm. I hid from her the fact that I was still participating; I didn’t want to have to see her the next day in the Chinese restaurant or at my lecture. Nené was just as intellectual as she’d been in those distant days when I’d seen her often in Barcelona. I told her I had never seen anything like This Variation, but she made a gesture of absolute disdain. I would swear she hadn’t heard of the installation, but there remained that gesture. While she was making it, I suddenly felt the beneficial stealthy company of toil, that concept so familiar to me since coming across it in a line by Yeats: “In luck or out the toil has left its mark.”