“Hummm. .”
Thirty times I wrote that out as a drill. In another thirty lines, in a somewhat cynical homage to Germany, I strove to reproduce a Goethe phrase:
“Everything is there, and I am nothing.”
Then I carefully described in my notebook the carpet of larch needles I’d walked across before I got to Untilled territory. It was an even more masochistic exercise than the previous two; I hated writing lingering descriptions that belonged more in other eras of narrative history. But I thought that the one there, writing in the Chinese restaurant in public, much as he was called Piniowsky like me, couldn’t be anything more than a conventional writer and, therefore, he should believe in the “power of descriptions.” This so unbalanced me (nobody likes to turn into a poor, old crock) that I had to say to myself several times:
“Calm down, Piniowsky.”
On the other hand, though what I was writing wasn’t all that serious, not a single person approached to see, which, occasionally, slightly undermined my self-esteem (even if it was the other Piniowsky’s morale). I called Barcelona and calmed down, but not enough. A friend wanted to know why he had to tell me everything that was going on in the city and why I wouldn’t tell him anything about Kassel. Because, I told him, absolutely nothing has happened to me since I got here, nothing at all, I’ve barely spoken to anybody. I walk around, sleep. My life lacks action, I told him, but I was thinking that surely, in a very Borgesian way, everything that was happening to me — which was nevertheless very little — was happening to the other Piniowsky.
I let the conversation with my friend dwindle down of its own accord, just die out. And so I didn’t tell him anything about my red couch like a scaffold or the lecture I needed to prepare and might not prepare for. I was undoubtedly right not to tell him, for that friend surely wouldn’t have understood what I was talking about. When I finally said goodbye and hung up, I stared at the figure of a dragon over by the door and remembered that some oriental dragons were said to carry the palaces of the gods on their backs, while others were known to determine the courses of the streams and rivers and protect subterranean treasures. I remembered the dragon at the entrance to Parque Güell in Barcelona, which I saw so often when I lived in the upper part of my city, and which sometimes, for no reason, I imagined secretly alive and ceaselessly devouring pearls and opals: something impossible, for it was simply a sculpture to which more and more tourists, especially Chinese tourists, were becoming addicted every day.
I ended up devoting myself to writing the first words of my afternoon lecture in the Ständehaus. I decided it would begin like this:
I left for Kassel, via Frankfurt, searching for the mystery of the universe and to initiate myself in the poetry of an unknown algebra. I also left for Kassel to try to find an oblique clock and a Chinese restaurant, and, of course, though I sensed it was an impossible task, I also left to try to find my home somewhere within my displacement. And now all I can tell you is that it is from this “home” that I am speaking to you.
As soon as I finished these lines, I realized that Piniowsky had never written anything so authentic in his whole life. He was saying that he was at home, that the table in the Chinese restaurant was his destiny, and that he was giving the whole lecture as if he were sitting at his private gallows in the Dschingis Khan. As long as no one was asking about the logic of it all, he had the impression of knowing it all by heart; but if anyone asked him, he wouldn’t know how to explain it.
Not know how to explain it?
The Chinese logic of the place was him!
Or to put it a better way, the Chinese logic was me.
I was a bit nervous, too.
“Calm down, Piniowsky.”
65
Hours later, I crossed Karlsaue Park at a slow pace, and then walked through downtown Kassel until I ended up taking refuge in the hotel. I’d lost count of the hours spent on my own. Except for minor incidents, I was staying in a constant good mood, perhaps I would never again feel as marvelously good for the rest of my life. I increasingly attributed it to the creative atmosphere of the city, and to the works of art I’d seen over the course of those last days, and the recovery of the juvenile impulse that had once led me to break with the obsolete forms of so many dull, non-avant-garde artists.
Who had said that contemporary art was on the decline? Only the intellectuals of uncultured, depressed countries like mine could reach such backward conclusions. Europe had died — maybe the young madwoman in mourning had been right to wear black from head to toe — but art was very much alive in the world, it was the only open window left for those still searching for spiritual salvation.
As soon as I entered my hotel room, I went out onto the balcony and sent a new greeting toward This Variation. Since Kassel was inviting madness, seeming to open up many complex paths to my own Chinese logic, I decided to greet the dark room this time with the most horrible grimace I knew how to make. I greeted it the way I imagined one of the many Chinese mandarins of the ancient legends I’d read in childhood would have. I said as if speaking from a public platform:
“The twentieth century, a film from Germany.”
In the street my slanted words were perfectly audible, and some young people on their way to see Sehgal’s work in the annex of the hotel looked up.
Those were the words pronounced by an engrossed, very intense character in Hitler: A Film from Germany, an avant-garde film from the seventies made by Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, one of the cineastes who had most impressed me in my youth and whom I remember asking for his autograph one night in the course of a long party in the port district of Barcelona.
After the Chinese grimace, I went back inside. I decided to lie down on the bed with my arms behind my head and my knees raised. I looked at the ceiling and stared at the cracks: at the German cracks, I said to myself. And then I started fixating on the peeling paint, the stains, and the chips. Suddenly, I didn’t feel like seeing anybody, much less speaking in public, or going outside, or even moving. However, there wasn’t much time left before I had to move, to go out, and give a lecture.
I remembered that not so long ago — on a day and at a time like this — I’d been overcome for the first time by this sudden apathy. I had thought I’d discovered I didn’t know how to live, that I’d never known how to live. That day, the sun beat down on the roof tiles of my house. I hadn’t yet met the people who would be decisive in my life and would help me to know a tiny bit how to be in this world, the same world I’d turn my back on many years later, on behalf of Piniowsky. . That day, sunk in the deepest depths of my tragedy, I spent an infinity of hours with my eyes glued to a white wooden shelf on which I thought there was a washbowl; I concentrated on that bowl, which later turned out to be imaginary, though by the time I found out I’d already spent hours thinking about that basin and death. It was the first time in my whole life that I had a serious anxiety attack, though with an undoubtedly slightly comic or ridiculous touch.
I got over this brief moment in which I’d remembered the day of my initiation in anguish. Then, I managed to recover my desire to see people, to speak in public, to go out, to move. But it served as a warning that any triviality might end up breaking my general state of great enthusiasm.