The mist rising off the Fulda seemed to arrange things in a way in which a mystery story could burst out at any moment. However, the biggest mystery was within me and it was the unbreakable perfection of my mood. I was tired, sometimes sleepy, but excited at the same time, the enchanted accomplice of everything that crossed my path.
After a long rambling wander without getting lost thanks to the river, I felt that my physical fatigue had become an absolute reality, and then, almost providentially, I remembered I’d decided that, when I had to sit down again to write at the table in the Chinese restaurant, I’d turn myself into one more installation at Documenta and pretend to be sleeping. I would pretend to sleep in the style of one of my idols, the marvelous Benino, that shepherd who slept the whole time, not noticing anything, in Neapolitan nativity scenes.
The idea was for possible spectators to leave me in peace during my working hours, that is, during the hours of writing in public. If they saw I was sleeping like a log, that would happily frighten them off. But who was I expecting to come and see me? Nobody had been interested in spying on me, and in reality, I had never been left in such peace and so abandoned as during those hours they made me spend in the Chinese restaurant. Still, a short phrase on a sign on the table would give some clue about that installation, making anyone believe that the writer was sleeping and not thinking about anything.
Somehow, I needed to pretend to profess the religion of sleep, which went on about how sleepers were closer to God. Not thinking about anything was like connecting to that divine sleep that sustains the world.
ASLEEP, ONE IS CLOSER TO DUCHAMP
That’s what I would write on the sign to leave there on my table. I decided this as I left the Fulda behind, crossing the road to go to the Dschingis Khan. At that moment, I was struck by the intuition that it wasn’t going to be difficult for me to pretend to be asleep. I could tell I’d surrender to sleep as soon as I stretched out on the comfortable red couch. I was happy, but somewhat unsteady, a bit zombie-like at times. I didn’t even know if I’d have the strength to write the sign where Duchamp would take the place of God.
On the threshold of the Chinese restaurant, I hesitated. The more one vacillates before a door, the stranger one feels, I told myself. And in I went. This time they didn’t even recognize me, nobody seemed to register that a writer who was working there had entered. Perhaps my appearance was to blame for that misunderstanding. Or perhaps I hadn’t been exerting myself enough as a writer, maybe since I was Piniowsky, I had a slightly different air; or perhaps being so tired and unshaven and wearing smelly clothes — nobody passed through Untilled with impunity — all that disoriented them. But the fact is I noticed that they’d gone from indifference to not even remembering I was the invited writer.
“I am Piniowsky,” I said.
That, of course, did not help matters.
I saw an isolated, glacial Chinese smile from behind the circular bar in the middle of the restaurant. When the staff finally remembered that I had a table reserved there, they resigned themselves to suffering as many mishaps as they imagined must be coming. I wrote the sign, but at the last moment I put down a different text from what I’d planned:
APOLOGIES FOR DESCARTES
Writing at top speed, that’s what I begged on the sign and left it on my table. Obviously, it was a phrase taken from Kundera, his interpretation of what he supposed Nietzsche had said to the horse in Turin.
Half an hour later, I was lying down but still awake. Crisscrossing through my mind were Chinese and German words, which seemed increasingly attracted to each other and seemed even to be creating a new language (the language of Galway Bay). I remembered some beloved Robert Walser pages that, admitting the unmissable disparity, I could practically have written myself. In his delightful diary of 1926, Walser spoke of walks with cheerful young women that sounded rather akin to my experiences in Kassel.
Today, said Walser, I went for an agreeable little walk, brief, minimal, without going too far away. I went into a grocery shop and saw a nice girl inside. . He began like that and a little while later, in a burst of sincerity, said that what he wanted to explain was that in this city he’d had occasion to meet some really adorable and very nice women. He ended by asking who could be bothered by the affection he’d grown used to feeling for people who radiated confidence, overflowing with joie de vivre!
I was also cheerful that morning, although at the same time I lacked sleep and felt disconcerted. After a short while, I fell asleep for real; I curled up in the fetal position on the red couch and didn’t even apologize for Descartes, nor did I feel close to the god Duchamp, nor did I stroll with young girls. I slept and I dreamed that having traveled to Kassel in an intensely red and Chinese room, I was submitting the trite idea of feeling at home to incessant though skeptical scrutiny, until I finally understood that I had found my home, that place I’d always expected to find along the way, on the road of life. In this friendly home I’d searched for so long, a stranger was writing signs I’d never seen; he was writing them on a chalkboard in a very intense green, a chalkboard that ended up transforming itself into a door in a pointed Arabic arch. On this door the stranger was inscribing — while slowing down the rhythm of his hand — the poetry of an unknown algebra. Through what seemed a secret code, it ended up revealing to me with startlingly bright clarity something very private, something I’d not detected until then: the Chinese logic of the place.
64
The bright clarity evaporated as soon as I opened my eyes, but the Chinese logic remained in place.
That was my home along the way.
I remembered the Hungarian professor with the unruly hair in a Russian short story I had read a few months ago. He affirmed that if we isolated the stray, passing thought of indiscernible origin, then we were beginning to understand that we were systematically unhinged, that is, that our madness was an everyday matter. The students of this professor loved the idea of daily madness. As for the professor, wouldn’t he also be an expert in the Chinese logic of place?
In the depths of our minds was the enormous bestial, territorial back room, full of irrational fears and murderous instincts. That’s why we invented Reason, to oppose the great muddle, the general emptiness that is so lethal. At least that’s what the Hungarian professor in the short story said, and every time I remembered that story, I liked to think that the professor was entirely right, which would mean that deep down he wasn’t; but it was better to believe him, for if what he said weren’t true, one might end up outside oneself or out of one’s room, no more and no less than how I’d ended up the night before at Untilled, the night spent out in the open.
I looked at my watch. It was past noon. They still hadn’t called me on my cell phone; luckily they hadn’t phoned while I was sleeping and dreaming, so I was able to get some rest. I felt excessively enthusiastic, which didn’t take long to create a conflict for me when I began to smile at the waitresses. It was deplorable (it goes without saying). The worst of it was that I was attracting attention. I was acting stupidly and my euphoria might end up arousing suspicion. So I tried as hard as I could to control myself. Everything seemed to indicate that when I wasn’t at my desk in Barcelona, I felt empty, like a skinned, boneless hide, lurching through life. Even so, I tried to improve the situation. With elbows propped up on that Chinese corner table with its vase, I pretended to search for something I could write on. From so much pretending, I ended up searching for real. I finally thought I should say something on that oh so overused idea that nobody can step twice in the same river. I’d heard it so many times and I’d never been convinced. I remembered that in my role as a writer in public I could write whatever I wanted to in my notebook and, as if debating that commonplace about the river you step in twice, I finally wrote: