The Illogic of Kassel by Enrique Vila-Matas Read Free Book Online Page A

trembled.
    “Alka speaking,” I said to her in Spanish. “I am in the
aeropuerto
. And you?”
    It was horrible because she went into such convulsions that she fell on the floor laughing. When she stood up with my help, I almost said “Alka speaking” again to see if she’d test out the cold floor of the spotless Hessenland reception area once more. But I resisted this malicious temptation.
    13
     
    When María Boston arrived at the Hessenland to relieve Alka of her mission and incidentally, I suppose, rescue me from her laughing assistance, I, logically, thought it was Chus Martínez who had arrived at the hotel. What else was I going to think? For that reason, when she warned me that she wanted to resolve an important misunderstanding, I was a little lost. It might strike me as odd, she said, but a year ago in Barcelona she had found herself forced to pass herself off as her boss, as Chus. Chus had begged her to usurp her personality, for she feared I would get angry if she didn’t show up at our meeting that evening. Did I forgive them for the deceit?
    First I was astonished. Then I reacted. Sure, I forgave them, I said, but had they imagined I was so sensitive, so irascible? Perhaps someone had told them that since turning sixty I’d become somewhat intransigent? Who’d told them?
    I pretended that it didn’t much matter, but in reality I couldn’t really understand it very well. That identity exchange was surely odd, almost as odd as people, seeing my taxi go past, stopping in the streets of Kassel to approve my arrival with their gazes. No, there was nothing that could justify María Boston pretending to be Chus that evening in Barcelona. Even so, I decided not to make too much of a fuss about it. Besides, I thought, if I admitted my skepticism, I might be seen as a neurotic or not very flexible guy, maybe not very understanding of human weakness, and, most of all, as not much of a lover of what I most defended in my literature: playing games, transferring identities, the joy of being someone else . . .
    I tried to act as naturally as possible and asked Boston about Pim Durán. What I really wanted to know was whether Pim Durán was also her, because now anything was possible.
    “She’s my assistant,” Boston said, “and I’m Chus’s assistant.”
    I asked her if she knew where her boss was and if her boss wasn’t afraid—now that she had more reason to be than she did a year ago—that I’d get angry that I still hadn’t met her.
    What happened, María Boston hurried to explain, was that the incredibly busy Chus had to go to Berlin that very morning, but I mustn’t worry, since she was coming back just to have dinner with me on Thursday evening, at eight on the dot. She urged me to write it down: at the Osteria restaurant on Jordanstrasse; everything was foreseen, planned, organized with true Germanic order.
    I wanted to know where the works of Tino Sehgal, Pierre Huyghe, and Janet Cardiff could be found. I pronounced those names as if I’d known them all my life when actually I had no idea who they were.
    Tino Sehgal’s contribution to Documenta, said Boston, was taking place in the building right next door to the hotel, and, if I wanted, she’d go there with me. It was called
This Variation
. It was, in fact, of all the works presented in Kassel, the only one that was very close; it was just there, in an old annex of the hotel, now unused and currently one of Documenta’s venues. Was I a Sehgal fan? I preferred to tell her the humble truth, that I knew nothing of that artist’s activity, actually I knew nothing of any of the participants in Documenta 13.
    “This is so contemporary!” she exclaimed.
    She meant that in the world it was more and more normal not to know about what was truly contemporary. Her phrase was also a sort of a wink, she said later, to a recent Tino Sehgal performance in Madrid, where a group of museum guards—to the visitors’ surprise—suddenly came to life, began