Enrique Vila-Matas - A Brief History of Portable Literature

It was Crowley — no doubt about it. He had chosen a splendid locale that was draped with chrome-orange crystals, one that was quite wide and with high ceilings, with tropical grasses and hummingbirds. Crowley was practicing the serpent dance, which requires the lower half of the body (from the hips to the toes) to move and nothing else. Going down into the crypt and being hit by the liquid oozing from the crystals, Crowley had turned black, and was moving his knees in at least fifteen different ways, which, even for a black person, is really quite a number.

The Shandies let out a few cries of admiration. Witnessing the chaotic conclusion to this episode — all the Shandies, smudged with black, fled the Cabaret — Cendrars took two of their cries and began constructing a new legend for his Anthologie nègre : a Babatúa tale in which the soul of negritude is defined as “a soul in chains, impulsive and puerile, sweet and jumpy, hungry for destruction, and, at the same time, possessed of a lucid experiential intelligence condensed in happy stories.”

These happy stories are kindred in spirit to those Blaise Cendrars gathered in his Anthologie nègre : an impulsive, puerile book — lucid and hungry for destruction — that took him no more than five days to write. This is exactly the time it took the Shandies to disguise themselves as figures carved into the flagpoles of African huts and to regroup — secretly, ardently — in the dark, broken ice kingdoms of Prague.

“Here in Prague,” Crowley wrote to Francis Picabia (who’d been awaiting word in Paris), “we came close to turning into ghosts. Seeing that more than one of us went mad and felt a desire to traverse the thick walls, I came to think we’d all end up turning into invisible beings, only able to recognize ourselves at night by our white dance scarves.

“All of it was down to Céline’s antics. Having convinced himself that the conspiracy would be nothing without a traitor to jeopardize it, he decided to play that thankless role and systematically began to raise his voice during our stealthy café meetings.

“Not content with this, he began to write a book, Le vrai nom du complot portatif , which opened with a recollection that among the ancient Egyptians, everyone had two names: their inconsequential name (known to all) and their true or great name, which they kept hidden. After reminding the reader that the name of Rome was also secret, he went on to reveal the real name of our portable society. He did! That name which you now shudderingly recall!

“One afternoon, Valery Larbaud and five other colleagues visited Céline in his hotel and discovered this manuscript. To find it they had to go inside a tent he’d set up in the middle of his room. Enraged,

Larbaud reminded him of Quintus Valerius’s fate when, in the last days of the Republic, he was executed for revealing Rome’s true name.

“Duchamp, Tzara, Vallejo, everyone there, made it clear to him that he might share Quintus Valerius’s fate, but Céline’s response was to smile the twisted smile of one who knows how to make the foulest, most underhanded intentions smell sweet. Faced with this attitude, they burned the tent and, with it, the manuscript.

“Céline barely flinched. He seemed very comfortable in his role as the traitor, and, a few days later, he showed up again at Café Slavia, the place where we met every afternoon. He came in shouting, flanked by two professors from Madrid, even more bothersome and clingy than he was. One of them boasted of having translated Joyce into Spanish — which couldn’t but fill us with misgivings since, as you well know, it was quite a while ago that Joyce parted company with us, thinking he’d have to pay a monthly membership fee. The other professor, who went by the surname Diego, claimed he was a Castilian seafarer, and proceeded to discourse on Greenland’s solitary inlets, and about certain hot springs at the North Pole. An utter bore, believe me!

“We had a few truly awful days of being pursued by these clingy professors, who, in concert with the traitor, even came to defy us when we went out to Prague’s purlieus, its most sequestered spots. We couldn’t find a way to shake off these damned professors, who were clearly spying on us. This made many of our number feel like turning into ghosts or invisible beings. And this added to the numbers taking part in the secret expedition to the International Sanatorium, situated on the outskirts of the city, where I’m writing you from today.

“Here, away from the persecution of the traitor and his underlings, we’re on a run of extraordinary, feverish creativity. All thanks to this attempt to betray us. And also in part thanks to the owner and director of the Sanatorium, whom we call Mr. Marienbad, because he doesn’t want his true name revealed to anyone.

“I do not believe you’d like Marienbad. This is a man who always wears new clothes. He is a poor conversationalist, an indefatigable chatterbox. He wears an enormous, carefully sculpted beard that makes him seem all the more corpulent. He subsists on buttermilk, rice pudding, and slices of banana with butter. A lover of women, he conceals, with his unctuous ways, a brutal disposition, in turn betrayed by his flat feet, his spatula-like fingernails, his steady gaze, and ecstatic smile.

“A scientist, man of the world, and gymnastics buff, he goes around to the international gymnastics meets escorted by a number of his nurses, who, under his personal supervision, frequently win all the top prizes. Marienbad is something akin to a demagogical toiler, tirelessly churning out heavy tomes not in the least bit portable and filled with banalities; he is nonetheless growing accustomed to seeing his massive volumes published and immediately translated into several languages. Innumerable newspaper pieces have spread his name, and it would not be surprising if with his new venture, the Anonymous Kafka Society, he goes on to achieve even greater renown.

“And the thing is, Marienbad loves money. I’ve been able to find out that he kidnapped his wife a number of years ago, a rich Jewish hunchback with an enormous dowry, which he used to set up the International Sanatorium. Although his love of lucre is considerable, he lets us stay at the Sanatorium for free. Occasionally, one of us will make an effort and tell him a story, or simply engage him in conversation to give him a chance to let loose his balderdash. That’s more than enough to keep Marienbad happy.

“He’s a perfect fool, but his hospitality comes in very handy. Walter Benjamin, for instance, has used the time to start designing a promising machine that will be able to detect any book that might be boring or bothersome, that, even in miniature, wouldn’t fit into a small suitcase.

“It is a very complex machine, complete with contraptions frankly unfamiliar to me: tibaida lenses, focal compartments, copper cuffs, oval cylinders, metal buttons, metal stoppers, magnetized needles, bolts, and iron jugulars.

“Walter Benjamin is sure the design will be complete in less than a month. Apparently, the method for weighing texts consists of putting a book in this cylindrical penitentiary and letting an immense, round lens look it over. Portable books will be immediately released through this black cylinder, heavy in appearance; positioned vertically on the ground, it will have a large spherical light bulb on top with the words CONTRA GRAND STYLE on it. A blue light emanating from the bulb will be visible even in bright sunlight. The book’s emotional-mechanical vibration will turn the light bulb off for a fraction of a second, showing that the glass is colorless and that the light itself is actually blue. In turn, this light will reveal the inscription VIVA VERMEER at the machine’s highest point — in twenty-seven different languages if possible — thus saluting effusively the recently liberated portable books.