Enrique Vila-Matas - A Brief History of Portable Literature

Death by drowning, I’d add, to paraphrase T. S. Eliot’s verse homage to Pola Negri’s disappearance.* Deep down (in the sea and in their consciousness), every single one of the group paid homage to this death, just as all noticed that the Odradeks were also afflicted by that strange ailment. In an opium dream, Paul Klee claimed he’d seen his Odradek take to the air from the divan shrouded in mauve smoke and flee the Bahnhof Zoo , swimming underwater to Saint-Malo, taking a seat on Chateaubriand’s tomb and, there, at the foot of a blue anchor painted onto a whitewashed wall, watching the ships go by, he took a revolver from its pocket, placed it in his mouth, and pulled the trigger. “For a moment,” writes Paul Klee, “the Odradek remained seated, looking at the grave, the radiance of the sea and the ships. But soon after, everything, including him, vanished into the Breton sunset.”

This story and a great many more, came to be staged in the puppet theater of the submarine’s Malabar Salon. All of the Shandies remembered the celebrated beginning of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister , in which the eponymous character tells of being introduced to the marvelous world of hand-spectacle. (As a child, his father gave him a portable puppet theater. So there was no way the Bahnhof Zoo could do without the fascinating puppet universe. To the portables, the puppets were useful as a metaphor for being happy and in motion; the puppets’ actions didn’t depend on their own consciousness. They were able to postulate the starting points of a wise pilgrimage among the crags and cliffs of knowledge, the high illuminations of grace. The puppets served, additionally, as a way for Shandies to tell their continuous stories, an essential pleasure in all voyages.

Some of these stories were especially interesting, such as the one presented by René Daumal, who reflected on the death of literature using an old wardrobe. His spectacle concluded with the following wise words, uttered by a puppet meant to be the Phantom of the Opera: “Properly considered, literature comes alive when someone, sitting down to write a simple letter, hesitates for a few moments, wondering how to make what he proposes to say credible. And in the worst-case scenario — taking into account that people will one day cease to write letters — literature will still never die, that is, as long as the poets know how to read as well as how to write: Poets will never die, precisely because they die.”

Death, the language of death, language, and the death of language were the most common themes of the performances at the Malabar. And when word came of Jacques Rigaut’s disappearance in Palermo, a dramatization of his death by Georgia O’Keeffe became a favorite among the portable audience.

It was narrated in a cruel and coldhearted manner, seeing that Jacques Rigaut was presented on stage going mad and finally throwing himself grotesquely onto a mattress made to resemble a canoe, paddling upstream against death. Tasteless and unfair, it provoked critical responses. Frederico García Lorca’s stood out in particular; without ever having personally met Rigaut, he decided to rise to his defense and put on one of the Bahnhof Zoo ’s loveliest ever puppet shows.

García Lorca moved the action from Palermo to Granada, specifically to the Alhambra Hotel, where Rigaut — wan and Andalucian — playfully experienced his own death accompanied by the tragic tap dance of several ballerina “pill puppets” (their sparkling blue blinded everyone in the audience). Following the dazzling, barbiturate dance of death, an electrical contraption appeared on stage, invented by Lorca himself, its objective when turned on being to radiate a very intense cold that would chill the blood. At that moment — and while the audience’s only thought was to find some way to wrap up warm — the curtain fell, with a painting on it by Lorca of an infinite yellow-sand avenue. In the foreground, where the avenue began, a Sudanese marionette could be seen: a black beggar woman with gray matted hair singing “Nessun Dorma.” While practicing the art of divination, she announced the Shandy conspiracy’s dark future.

Another of the most interesting puppet shows came courtesy of Stephan Zenith, who turned the puppets into quick-change artists, using them to represent (with remarkable brevity and ingenuity) the most extraordinary parts of the most select Shandy biographies. For every part, a different costume. All at high speed, worthy of Fregoli. There were six or seven scenes for each biography, seeing that life — sorry to say — isn’t worth much more than that.

After these speedy transformations came the final scene, which was the same for everyone: A skeleton with a scythe appeared, pretending not to seek its victim but knowing it would actually find him, the two then bumped into each other, and Death would mow down the portable’s abbreviated life at the roots.

This scene always brought a sad and resigned applause from the audience. The fact is, if one thing had become evident, there aboard the Bahnhof Zoo , it was that the conspiracy could, at any moment, enter into its final agony: there were signs now that Death was tightening its net.

Poor, powerless Death. “It boarded the submarine,” says Klee, “only to scramble away in dismay. And sailed for dry land, navigating terrifying Breton rocks along the way.” We come to the end of Klee’s ship’s log: not wanting to go into detail about why the immobile voyage reached its end, he resorts to poetic imagery telling us that, in spite of Death’s visit, the portables managed to frighten Death away, thereby delaying the final agonies of their heroic conspiracy.

I’ve always enjoyed taking literally what Paul Klee tells us at the end of his ship’s log. It’s always been pleasing to me to believe that, indeed, Death showed up in the early hours, with its skeleton and its scythe, curious to find out what was going on inside that submarine. Three surprises awaited It. The first was finding that what was aboard the Bahnhof Zoo was reminiscent of Livy’s splendid description of the destruction of Alba Longa with its inhabitants roaming the streets, bidding farewell to the stones. The second surprise was seeing rainfall at the bottom of the sea and “a thick tear falling, deliberately overflowing itself, like a ghost of itself, making as though to extinguish itself with a vague gesture of forgetting, in a reasonable sea, where the rain was slow and slanting, and what was weeping was prose. .”

As for the third surprise, it was considerable, and put to flight poor, powerless Death. Death decided to go into the Malabar Salon, and there discovered its puppet status. Death sat down and, before fleeing in terror, smoked some opium, sweating buckets, and, like any other spectator, impatiently awaited the end of the final scene to find out if there was any ever after.

* “The Shady Shandy,” a Spanish version of which appeared in the Ocnos anthology (Barcelona, 1967), translated by Jaime Gil de Biedma.

I don’t know why they disembarked from the Bahnhof Zoo . Most likely it was fatigue that forced them up to the surface again. Fatigue and also a certain anguish, which is what we can gather from a document found in a false-bottom trunk stored in a loft in the house Crowley would later own; the document was discovered by the house’s subsequent owner, the Singer sewing-machine magnate, Edward Clark (also an ardent student of the history of the portable conspiracy), who died in strange circumstances a few days after finding the document and writing a brief text, A Shandy Draws the Map of His Life . This text, it seems, was inspired by some images from his dream about the years that Walter Benjamin toyed with the idea of making a map of his life.