by Rob Doyle
After taking a photo of De Maria’s tip-of-the-iceberg work, I spent hours wandering the galleries, numbly determined to encounter as much art as I could before leaving the following day. Towards nightfall, the rain that had been holding off finally burst. As thunder rolled I took refuge in a hushed, candlelit Austrian restaurant, where I had my first beer of the day, along with a schnitzel and some potatoes. Then I had my second and third beers while writing up my notes. As I scribbled and drank, I scanned the restaurant for a solitary woman, and although I saw none I felt as if Nesrin was watching me, as if I was in her lens. Every minute or two I checked my phone. My impatience for her to contact me hardened into annoyance, then anger, and the emotion swelled to envelop all of Kassel, all of the art world. I was conflicted: I had enjoyed the festival considerably, had found plentiful stimulation in the galleries and art-laden streets, yet I couldn’t let go of my resentment at contemporary art for allowing itself to become a festival of piety and earnest political sighs. I had hoped art would provide an escape from the internet, but like everything else, it turned out to be the internet’s reflection. Where were the outliers, the danger-artists who inverted the values of the group, threw matches at the powder keg just for the hell of it? Where were the neo-punks whose response to signs reading Danger Ahead was to hit the accelerator? Documenta’s anodyne, painfully woke fare had left me craving art whose intentions were purely corrosive, art that went against democracy and virtue, glorified evil, wallowed in destruction and chaos, art whose only dictate was hostility to the notion that art should ameliorate, edify, mould better citizens. And then it seemed to me that the kind of artist I longed to encounter was there all along: it was Nesrin, documenta’s hidden shadow, stalking the fringes, excluded yet present and effective. I emailed her again:
I really want to meet you. I’m at the Austrian restaurant on the corner of Bremer Strasse. I’m heading to an opening later, inside the train station. I hope you’ll come. If not, maybe see you afterwards. I’ll be out all night probably. I’ll let you know where we are.
After sending the message, I texted Estefanio. Then I put away my notebook and called for another beer.
The following morning, I awoke with a hangover that felt out of all proportion to the amount I had drunk – even though I had drunk a great deal – until I blearily recalled Estefanio thrusting a pill into my fist in some packed, smoky club. The alarm on my phone was going off. I reached out to hit the snooze function, feeling as if a steel rod had been driven through my temples, a miniature Vertical Earth Kilometer. My laptop was open at the foot of the bed, an Erika Lust porn film paused on the screen – I must have tried to jerk off. In half an hour I needed to vacate the bedsit. Memories tumbled through my pounding brain. I remembered sharing a joint with a group of black guys, then them hugging me, then Estefanio throwing a punch and falling over. The causal link between these events was obscure. I wondered for a moment if I’d been beaten up, but my body appeared to be intact – the hurt was all inside. My alarm rang again. The day ahead seemed unendurable – trains and stations, pain and nausea. I turned my belongings inside out in a vain search for ibuprofen. Lying back in my boxers, I snatched up my laptop, minimised the Erika Lust video and checked my emails. It seemed I had sent no fewer than seven messages to Nesrin over the course of the night, the latest at 6:23 a.m. I read them through in rising shame: with each message my self-abasement intensified, until the last vestige of dignity was exterminated. Since I had no dignity left, there was no reason not to send her another message now:
My train leaves in a few hours. I’ll be up on the hill again. Come and fucking meet me.
I had just clicked play on the Erika Lust clip when Nesrin replied – the first I’d heard from her since lunchtime the day before. There was no text in the email, just a link to what turned out to be a video. It took me a few seconds to realise what I was looking at: a large mound of severed cocks, a thousand of them, piled up in a concrete yard. The cocks were twitching, squirting blood, the nerve endings flailing. It could only have been a computer-generated vision but it looked all too real. I made it to the toilet just as my guts revolted. I clutched the white rim of the bowl as I spewed, spat, groaned. What came out of me was black, evil – I felt I was shitting from my face.
Out in the sunlight, with my wheeled suitcase at my side, I still felt like death, like shit, but it wasn’t the extravagant pain I’d woken to. My train left in five hours. Slowly I wheeled my suitcase through the centre of Kassel, past whispering installations and cheery tourists who roamed in the Sunday-morning calm. In a Turkish shop off Friedrichsplatz I bought two bottles of wine and, although I hadn’t smoked in years, a pack of cigarettes. Out in the street I sent Nesrin one last message, telling her again where I was going. I said I hoped she bled to death. I told her I would love her forever. I pulled my suitcase along the pathway that led up from the square, through bright gardens to the roof of the city. The hillside was deserted, as calm as a monastery garden. The marble tent looked no less lovely in the daylight. This time it did smell of piss. I chucked my suitcase inside. Then I clambered in too. I sat with my legs folded beneath me, in the doorway, looking out over the forest, and the autobahn that streaked to the horizon. Some dark-brown vomit had dried on my sleeve. The thought of catching the train no longer seemed compelling. In the high morning sun I opened the first bottle of wine and took a gulp. I felt the liquid pour down my gullet, sloshing through my insides to the pit of my stomach. With that first mouthful of wine I was drunk again, as drunk as I had ever been. I lit a cigarette, and thought maybe I would stay drunk forever.
Remember I told you about Eddie’s daughter Callisto? She invited me for a week in Marseilles with some friends. We’re staying in a large cool flat near the harbour, with a patio of white marble. I follow the narrow, scented streets of the Arab Quarter in a trance of sensualism and afternoon vermouth. If I squint my eyes I could be in Morocco, Tunisia, Algiers. Callisto’s boyfriend came for a few days. I liked him. He seemed more manly than me, by which I suppose I mean he has more money. Their flirtatious friend Lucia teases me about the scenes of sexual failure in the novel of mine she borrowed from Callisto: Are they autobiographical? she asks. Lucia wears tight bright dresses, or denim shorts and T-shirts with the middle tied in a knot. I might fall on my knees in the daytime street and kiss her belly-button piercing, accepting all consequences. Yesterday we went swimming in the harbour and she wore a bikini that was like metaphysics. She knows I’m tormented, and we both enjoy it. She’s seeing an engineer from Madrid. After a few drinks last night, she told me that once or twice a day she masturbates with him over video chat, and then she watched me imagine that.
We drink vermouth, rosé, glasses of beer, coffee, usually in bars by the harbour. For a while I had stopped drinking: I attained a long-lost clarity, suffered fewer debilitating depressions. I acquired the conviction that the drinking years were over – the possibility of happiness opened before me. And then, in classic alcoholic fashion, it occurred to me one morning that there was no abiding reason not to drink, to choose peace over euphoric destruction. I know by now I can’t pull off moderation (a sign of degenerate cultures and persons, according to Nietzsche). You told me once you don’t consider yourself an alcoholic, but you do consider yourself a drunk. What was the difference again? Was it Duras who wrote something on the matter? She who drank wine in bed, all day long. I imagine having a brief and violent affair with her: it ends terribly, her slashing at my face. Once in Calcutta, I watched a goat being sacrificed on an altar to Kali. The head flew off with one blow of the sword, then the body twitched on the dusty ground, ejaculating blood from the stump.
Does it annoy you when I talk about these girls with their thongs that are almost there, almost not there? Sorry. Tell me about young lovers, what they’ve got that men your own age lack, so that I can learn what I’m in the process of losing. I’ve ordered another green glass of vermouth, and I’ve just swallowed ten milligrams of Valium. Nothing o
n earth can harm me, at least for the next five hours. Maybe I’ll jump off the pier with the brown-skinned boys who seem to have clambered from the pages of Camus. That reminds me: I met an old guy on the beach who told me he killed a man in a fight over a woman. He served two decades in prison, was fucked and fucked others. He described the stench of shit, the hard cold eyes of killers. He had no regrets. He told me he believed we unconsciously seek out trauma, the extreme ordeal, when we have grown complacent (‘Lost respect for the gods of shit and pain,’ he said). Agony slams us back into life with terrified reverence. After we spoke, I swam in the sea and had the ecstatic drunken insight that everything is transient, everything is eternal, both statements are true. Also: that living your truth means loving even your suffering, and not masochistically. I imagine I can see Algiers from here, shimmering on the horizon, but it’s just a high-noon mirage, my feverish brain.
Mediterranean
On the cusp of autumn, convinced, for reasons I will get into, that it was absolutely necessary for me to get out of Paris for a few days, I conceived the idea of making a journey to Blanes, on the Costa Brava in north-east Spain. The Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño had lived in Blanes for many years, and I had read about a seventeen-stage Bolaño walking tour that had been inaugurated there in 2013, on the tenth anniversary of his death. The ruta literaria ‘Bolaño en Blanes’ – and the article I would write about it to cover costs and pay the rent – seemed a strong enough pretext for me to leave Paris.
On a Tuesday morning I rode a crowded Métro train to the Gare de Lyon, and there boarded a train to Barcelona. It was a double-decker and my seat on the upper floor faced backwards, so that as we travelled the landscape receded in front of me. On the journey I read Mónica Maristain’s Bolaño: A Biography in Conversations. The book is essentially a series of transcribed interviews with people who knew Bolaño, presented without much attempt at ordering or interpreting the material. Maristain is gushingly, irritatingly admiring of Bolaño; it is hard to avoid the accusation of hagiography when a writer insists on comparing her subject to a saint. As I read on, every little thing Maristain wrote grated on me. I should have been enjoying the journey, but instead I was all tensed up with irritation towards this lazy biographer.
I closed the book, or rather turned it off, for I was reading on an e-reader, which I’d bought the day before moving to France to curb my habitual accumulation of physical books while on the move. I watched the landscape vanish before me as we sped towards the south. To put it bluntly, I was in a wretched nervous condition. It felt like weeks since I’d last had a decent night’s sleep. Lying awake at two, three, four o’clock in the morning, I had been unable lately to slow the apocalyptic whirring of my thoughts. For years I had been living a largely solitary existence and it had never bothered me much. In Paris, though, it was getting to me badly. If you spend too much time alone, I reflected, then what would otherwise be a disturbing but transient thought will grow to immense, grotesque, obsessional proportions, so that finally you fear everything, emanating weirdness and menace on the streets and in the Métro. Your sleeping will go to hell and life will lose its flavour. Food, music, books, people, the days themselves – all of it will taste the same, taste of nothing. The very strategies you previously adopted to ward off paranoia and dejection – a good diet, exercise – will fall by the wayside. You will not eat well and you will certainly not jog. It will soon go from bad to worse, I reflected, so that when a friend comes to visit you in Paris, you will be terrified at the prospect of their arrival, for you’ll have forgotten how to do the simplest things, such as shake someone’s hand, make conversation, have dinner in company. In this abject condition you will walk the streets of Paris and you will look to the beauty that surrounds you, and this beauty will leave you unmoved. The women will not stir your lust, and it will seem that you will never lust again.
It was early afternoon when I reached Barcelona. I had managed to sleep a while, and the nap had untangled the coarser knots in my brain. I was glad to be on the move, and moving with purpose. Having a purpose, however questionable the purpose might be, was a relatively new phenomenon in my life. For years I had travelled to far-flung places, lingering for short or long spells before drifting on, with no purpose whatsoever – had gone to these places, even, because purpose would not bother me there, would leave me alone, let me be.
I dragged my suitcase away from Sants station into the hot afternoon, and stopped for lunch at the first decent-looking restaurant. Ordering my meal from the young, sullen waiter, I was pleased to find that my Spanish, dormant these last few years, was basically intact. On first moving to Paris, I had made considerable efforts to improve my French, which hitherto had been basic. I studied daily and soon reached a passable conversational level. Had I kept at it, I would have made significant advances in the months that had elapsed since that initial, assiduous period. By now I would have been confidently reading French novels, buying Libération and Le Monde, listening to current-affairs programmes and literary discussions on the radio. A couple of months into my stay, however, I broke up with my French girlfriend – a novelist I had met through my friend Zoé – and went to live on my own in a sprawling, shabby apartment in the nineteenth arrondissement that looked on to a vine-strewn courtyard. The end of the relationship removed any urgency to improve my French – it also foreclosed an entire future life, one that my girlfriend and I had dreamed up together and for a while believed in. In this foreclosed future we would live together in Paris, hang out with her artist friends, write side by side through the days and read to one another in the evenings, counting our blessings all the while for the children we didn’t have. Of course, I had only ever felt partly committed to this potential future: as good as it seemed, it cancelled out all the other potential futures, and so I resented it a little, and finally it dissolved before me. Gradually it was coming to seem that the only future I would have was a stark, lonely one that was not chosen so much as drifted into – the kind of future you get if you persistently decline to make the decisive gesture.
In the solitude of my post-break-up life in Paris, as the summer ended and my days stretched on in silence, I became fixated on the idea that the difficulties of my life were intractable. At moments of extreme nervous tension, the anxiety aroused by such obsessional thinking provoked fantasies of suicide. In the quiet of my vine-covered apartment, I would look up from whatever I was doing and imagine myself hanging from the rafters in the spooky spare bedroom whose door hung open as if in dismal invitation. In the grip of these fantasies I would draft suicide notes in my head, carefully worded to inflict the minimum damage on those who survived me; I would consider how to hang myself in the least painful way, and wonder if it were possible to avoid traumatising whoever would find me there, swinging over the grimy floorboards.
Despite the recurrence of these fantasies, I was confident that I would not kill myself, for now at least. Having the option of killing myself sufficed. I basically relished life and wanted to keep living. From a more cosmic perspective, the existence of the universe had come to seem to me utterly implausible: all explanations of it were equally unsatisfactory, hence equally feasible. As a result, I wasn’t fully confident that my life was not, say, an elaborate, hallucinated challenge – a sort of existential video game – in which the goal was to climb on to some higher plane of being by proving oneself in this one. Perhaps the unseen arbiters would look upon self-slaughter as the worst sort of failure, and I would thus be relegated to some more terrible sphere. Best to slog it out and leave the world by natural causes, just in case. Also, I lacked the physical courage to go through with suicide. Unless I could get some reliably fatal pills (but which kind?), the various methods of killing myself at my disposal – hanging, throwing myself from a tall building, slashing my arteries, plunging into a deserted stretch of the Seine late at night, and so on – were too painful and risky. There was only one way I would have the balls to kill myself and that was by shooting myself in t
he skull. That seemed by far the best way of doing it: quick, loud, bloody and – hopefully – painless. All of this was fanciful, though. I could not shoot my skull because I didn’t live in a country where I could acquire a gun. The only country I knew where I’d be able to buy a gun was America, and I could never live there again: I would rather kill myself.
