For a few moments, I imagined what my two Chinese neighbors might be doing in room 26. I thought I could hear a string quartet. Maybe they had found two lovers who were musicians. These things sometimes happen. Accompanied by the good music coming from that room, I stayed for quite a while reading page 193 of Romanticism, about “Aimless Journey,” a poem by Eichendorff, whose verses expanded on the traditional motif of a great voyage and the losses that sent Odysseus on his way, the motif from which the romantics extracted the voyage without arrival or goal, the endless journey, and that Rimbaud would continue with his “Drunken Boat” and Roberto Bolaño, among others, would prolong saying that journeys are roads leading nowhere; nevertheless they are paths down which we have to turn and lose ourselves in order to find something again: to find a book, a gesture, a lost object, maybe a method, with luck, something new, which has always been there.
“So the avant-garde doesn’t exist?” I asked Dalí when I interviewed him in his house beside the sea.
“No, but there’s Giorgione’s Tempest, which revolutionized everything.”
I looked at the clock. I didn’t have much time to keep reading or to do anything else, because it was almost time to leave for the Ständehaus and give my lecture. I thought it strange no one had phoned to arrange to take me there, but since that’s how things were, I’d better get used to the idea that I should get there under my own steam.
I looked at my emails again to see if there was a message telling me someone was coming to pick me up, but there wasn’t. I double-checked my Google map and the notes I’d made so I wouldn’t get lost downtown. I looked to see if there were any messages accidentally lost among the spam, but there were none there either. Then, precisely at that moment, my cell phone rang and it was Ada Ara saying she’d come by and get me at five. I relaxed, but not entirely, because it was very close to that time. In any case, I took the call as a good and almost providential sign, even thanking Ada for remembering me, for I had the impression, I told her, that going on my own, without anyone to accompany me, I would never arrive at the Ständehaus.
Then, remembering that the lecture should have a certain amount of content and seeing with some terror that all I’d prepared was the beginning (“I left for Kassel, via Frankfurt, in search of the mystery of the universe. .”), I decided that in the first minutes of my talk, since I was going to be forced to improvise something, I would talk about how over the last few years I had learned to escape from my sole and exclusive obsession with literature and that I had opened the game up to other artistic disciplines.
This big opening up to other arts, I’d tell the audience, might never have happened if not for a telephone call I’d received seven years ago from Sophie Calle. I would tell them, at length, about meeting her at the Café de Flore, in Paris, and the strange proposal she’d made to me: to write her a story that she would try to live.
Then I would talk about Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and my modest collaborations in some of her brilliant installations. In my memory, above all her other works, was her setting for after a universal flood in the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern.
In telling these two stories about my recent relationship with artistic disciplines other than literature, I hoped to fill as much time as possible. But in case I didn’t manage to fill it all, I could always start listing how many things happened to me in my life, even though I didn’t notice most of them when they were actually taking place, but rather as I went back over them and examined them under a magnifying glass; writing them up was the most interesting way to extend them — taking a long time over them and studying them in depth — to see how very true it was that we tend to think that things we ignored have no relevance but in fact they always do, they have a great deal.
While I was organizing this final part of the lecture, I inopportunely felt an impulse to go outside again and directly visit This Variation. I was somewhat disoriented. It might be said that the permanent good mood I was enjoying was very interesting, undoubtedly a great positive force, but it sometimes dragged me into an undesirable true bewilderment and chaos; it was as if on occasion the invisible wanted to take me pitilessly to the center of whirlpools that were getting more and more excessively wild.
The fact is, I suddenly felt this impulse to go outside and, for a moment — as if I’d sensed that I needed to hold myself back and reflect — I tried as hard as I could to cut it off at the root. I stopped to think of what is termed “physical magnitude,” which, according to what I’d read, characterized the movement called “impulse” in physics. .
But this attempt at distraction was futile. Trying to immobilize myself was a wasted effort. Because in a few seconds, propelled by unexpected physical magnitude, I was out on the landing, going down in the elevator and waving to the girl at reception as I went outside (not the one who spoke Spanish, but a Japanese one; they’d swapped, and I made a note of it in my red notebook, as if it were a sign of something I should study in depth).
I was so convinced of having imbued myself with models of Chinese conduct that I entered Sehgal’s room as if I were just another component of the Ming dynasty. I tried to confuse the dancers who crouched in the shadows of the place. Someone from the Ming dynasty, I thought, would have had flat feet and walked slowly. I convinced myself of this, even aware that I knew nothing about the people who’d lived under the Ming dynasty and the only thing I could be sure of was that someone from then and there had to have other characteristics than the ones I was attributing to him.
In any case, I entered the total darkness of the room pretending to believe myself transfigured into a man from the Ming dynasty and hoping to confuse the hidden dancers, who, more invisible than ever, allowed me to advance without giving any indication of being there.
Confident and now breathing freely with relief, I decided to turn around, forgetting for a fraction of a second to keep moving the way I thought a flat-footed man in the long-ago Ming dynasty would have. Then, at that very moment, everything changed and someone whispered in my ear:
“Last bear.”
I had seen a film with that title. If that was what the dancers were talking about, it seemed to lack logic. The last bear? Or was it the last beer? I took two more steps in the darkness and headed toward the exit light. When I was about to reach outside, I saw something phosphorescent in the shape of a crescent moon and at first I tried to catch it, but I failed utterly. It completely dazzled me, and I ended up going outside with my sight cloudy while hearing again: “Last bear.”
Back at the hotel, I couldn’t get that whisper out of my head, and I even strayed down grammatical paths looking for hidden intentions in the two words. Finally, I calmed down very unexpectedly: a memory buried in time was resurrected, the memory of when I was little and my sister dared me to stay in a corner until I stopped thinking about a white bear. The more I tried not to think of the white bear, the more I thought of him. For years, I thought of that animal often. I forgot him the day I tried to mock that image, forcing myself to really see the way the language of logic laid traps for me. I forgot the bear then, but defusing deceptions immersed me in an even more disturbing obsession.
66
At the last minute, Ada Ara couldn’t make it, and María Boston showed up at the hotel to take me to the Ständehaus. She arrived accompanied by Alka, who I suddenly remembered had been introduced to me by Pim as “the person in charge of your visit to Kassel.” Since she hadn’t taken charge of me at all, everything led me to think that up in the offices of the organization — so invisible to me — they’d decided to relieve her of that job. Now she reappeared with Boston, more smilingly than ever. Each time I saw her, I wanted to ask her what she was laughing at, but I was aware that could lead to a tremendous, endless spiral of misunderstandings and linguistic short circuits. Of course, since arriving in Kassel I’d discovered a special pleasure in studying those short circuits that seemed to rebel against the logic of our common language. But I preferred not to study Alka too much because I sensed that could end up driving me crazy.