Page 119 - Fernando Sinaga. Ideas K

The German Breakfast
Erich and Edith were on holiday in Russia. Their home was a quiet place, like the rest of the town, and this made our stay
as unsettling as it was pleasant. I discovered that people in Germany keep noise to themselves and that you have to make considerably more of an effort to find the sound in situations. Our daily breakfast consisted of Dreikornbrot, plum jam, butter, a soft-boiled egg and a cup of coffee. We would get up late and this made Gudrun and me happy. It is possible that I might not have tolerated a constructivist lunch then, but breakfast—and, what is more, at lunchtime—is a different matter. It seems like lunch yet you are starting the day a bit later than everyone else and more lightly, with the sensation of having breakfast.
I believe it was the only way of coping with this northern Europe that is as appealing as it is alien to our own ways. And without a doubt it was this identity which led me that summer to set off on a journey that would change my life.
“Look Fernando, man is a being in continuous unstable balance!” That is how Agustín Pirella, the Italian psychiatrist we had tea and cake with that September afternoon, defined his vision of the contradictory dynamism of psychic processes, quickly in a break between other conversations.
Schwitters, the polyglot, this time from his city, led me to discover something about ourselves.The trams of Hanover remind me of those Zaragoza once had.
[119]
Written in Hanover, September 1985.
First published in exh. cat. Agua Amarga, Fundació Pilar i Joan Miró, Palma de Mallorca, 1996.