Read Online A Brief History of Portable Literature by Enrique Vila-Matas - Free Book Online

streets to find as many members of the secret society as they could.
    They set out on a relentless search through the bars of the Jewish quarter, but found no one. Then, they got lost on the outskirts and came to an old cemetery: a disordered jungle of jumbled tombstones piled up with dun leaves that seemed to grow out of the damp earth, vying with the wild grass to see which could grow tallest. Crows had taken over the bare trees and their cawing added to the air of nostalgic desolation about that place. On the far side of the cemetery, they saw the lights of an unsavory-looking bar: The Cabaret Zizkov. Inside the dive, someone talked to them about a foreigner who had turned into a dancing machine and was dancing alone in the bar’s basement. The description of the foreigner led them all to agree that it could be Aleister Crowley, and they asked the bar’s owner what they needed to do to see him.
    He opened a narrow, round-arched door, and they descended a stairwell glittering with tiny crystals. The occasional lamp guided the Shandies’ steps and, at the foot of the stairs, the crypt widened out. The warm and quivering air called to mind the heart of central Africa.
    They went another six- or seven-hundred feet in silence. At various points the wall was punctuated by lower overtures, and there were branches off the central passageway. The crystals were constantly changing color. As they got nearer to the place where Crowley was supposedly dancing, they realized black liquid was oozing from the crystals and occasionally dripping onto their faces. At last, they arrived at the spot where the potential Shandy could be seen dancing.
    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.

POSTCARD FROM CROWLEY
     
    But somehow every attempt always failed;
there was a traitor in the group.
    —Jorge Luis Borges
     
    “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