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

portables began arriving in Prague. And on taking rooms at guesthouses in the Jewish quarter, they began to feel the increasingly active presence of the dark occupants, along with the anguished certainty that their most authentic and intimate selves were being torn away, premeditatedly and against their will, merely so the ghostly figures could take plastic form.
    Skip Canell speaks in his memoirs about his Odradek, who turned out to be nothing less than a sword swallower: “Not long after arriving in Prague, in a guesthouse in the city center, I was in my room, sitting at the desk I’d cobbled together, when I heard the door open. I turned, thinking some colleague of mine must have found out where I was, and saw my self coming into the room, approaching and sitting at the desk facing me, propping his head in his hand and beginning to dictate what I was writing. We spent a number of hours like that, until, finally, I managed to bring myself to ask him who he was. He was a sword swallower, he said, and a devotee of the dagger. We had dinner in the guesthouse dining room, where something genuinely astonishing took place: the poor sword swallower absentmindedly gulped down a fork, and I had to take him to a clinic, where, after a spectacular operation, a doctor removed it. I’ve never seen the Odradek again, but I have the sensation that he is swirling around me and might at any moment reappear.”
    In another guesthouse in Prague’s Jewish quarter, the Spanish painter Juan Gris wrote down the following in a music notation book: “I find myself profoundly unsettled, as I wait to run into one of my friends here in the city of Prague. In the old houses of this neighborhood I feel spectral movements. I have come to understand, to my astonishment, who the hidden rulers of the alleyway are where I’m staying. Strange characters live here, similar to shadows: beings not of woman born, whose ways of thinking and acting are pieced together from random fragments. When they pass through my spirit, I feel more inclined than ever to believe that dreams have an abode all their own; I think they inhabit or hide inside dark truths latent in my soul, when I’m awake, like the vivid impressions of brightly colored tales.”
    When Stephan Zenith arrived in Prague, he also discovered that he was giving lodging to a dark occupant, whose form, in this case, wasn’t exactly human. Terrified, he decided to leave the city though not before leaving the following illuminating note to Witold Gombrowicz, with whom he’d been sharing a room:
    “I’m leaving, because I am afraid of myself, and what is certain is that Prague is making a powerful contribution to this. Bid farewell to our colleagues on my behalf should you manage to run into them, and tell them larger forces have compelled me to go back to New York. I’d like them to know I had a wonderful time at the party, except for when that guy went crazy with the gun. As I say, I’m leaving because I’m afraid of myself, now that I believe something akin to a spool of black thread is lodged within me—and sometimes without. It tries to make me say things I neither think nor will ever think. The spool is flat and star-shaped; in fact, it seems covered in threads: old threads, of course—interwoven, knotted together—but also other kinds of threads that are other colors, also interwoven and knotted together.
    “But it isn’t simply a spool; a small pole sticks straight up out of the center of the star, and another attaches to this at a right angle. With this latter pole on one side, and one of the beams of the star on the other, the ensemble manages to stay upright, as though standing on two limbs. Often, when one goes out of the guesthouse door and finds it leaning there in the stairwell, one feels the urge to talk to it. One naturally addresses it with simple questions, treating it rather like a child (perhaps because it is small).
    “And what’s
your
name?”
    “Odradek,” it