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

says.
    “And where do you live?”
    “Domicile unknown,” it says, laughing; the laughter, of course, is of someone who has no lungs. It sounds more or less like the whispering of fallen leaves. . . . I’m frightened, Witold, and that’s why I’m leaving. Perhaps, away from Prague, I’ll manage to shake off my Odradek.”
    On the basis of this text, the dark occupants quickly came to be termed
Odradeks
in the Shandy lexicon. And being in Prague too, George Antheil and Hermann Kromberg echoed Zenith’s text, speaking frankly of Odradeks, referring to their respective dark occupants. In George Antheil’s case, the Odradek wasn’t a spool but a pin stuck in a ribbon, while for Hermann Kromberg, it wasn’t a tiny object but became a spectral figure again.
    “Here in Prague,” wrote Antheil, “while running into my colleagues again, I have come to understand that I only experience minor sensations—those associated with very small things—intensely. My love of futility is the reason why. Perhaps my scrupulous attention to detail. But I do rather think—I’m not sure, I never analyze such things—that it’s because minimal things, having absolutely no social or practical importance, do have, merely due to this absence, absolute independence from unclean associations with reality. Minimal things—and my Odradek is one—always feel unreal to me. These useless things are beautiful, because they’re less real than “useful” things, which go on and on. The marvelously futile, the gloriously infinitesimal, stays where it is, doesn’t cease to be, living free and independent. Like the mere existence of my Odradek, which is this pin here before me, stuck in a ribbon. The mystery never becomes so clear as in the contemplation of small things that, as they move, admit that mystery’s light perfectly and stop to let it pass.”
    By contrast, the German writer Kromberg’s Odradek wasn’t a miniature, but (as I said) a spectral figure: someone who posed as a poet and infiltrated the portables by traveling with them to Vienna and afterward to Prague, where he installed himself in the same hotel as Kromberg. This was the terrible Aleister Crowley, who many will know as a friend of Pessoa’s, but he was other things as well—a mountaineer, a Satanist, a philosopher, lion tamer, pornographer, cyclist, heroin addict, chess player, spy, occultist—that is, a very lively Odradek, as demonstrated by the fact that he obliged the sedentary Kromberg to go abroad to Vienna and Prague. In the latter city he abducted him, used dark arts to force him into initiations of sexual magic and to scale the highest peak in Kashmir.
    “What am I doing here in Kashmir?” wrote a desperate Kromberg in his travel journal, “when I like nothing better than my own hearth and to receive letters from my nomadic friends when they are off in far-flung places? I never wanted to join up with them in Vienna, but the malign influence of my Odradek drew me to that city, and then urged me onward to Prague, whence I set out for Kashmir; in Kashmir, I am currently living in the cold and in fear for my life, possessed by an inner demon that, as far as I can see, is a traveler.”
    Sedentary Kromberg went mad in Kashmir, losing his way, but not losing his travel journal. If we go along with certain accounts, Kromberg, not far from the highest summit in the region, thought he’d stumbled across a hat that Pessoa had left in the snow years before. But Pessoa had never brought any hat to those icy, remote expanses, which has led more than one person to suspect that Kromberg was losing his mind, something confirmed when, on resuming his ascent, he said that he felt overcome by the flapping and cawing of crows. This in spite of the fact that there were no crows anywhere.
    Finally, reaching the summit, Kromberg cried out in horror when he saw his Odradek was there, that it had overtaken him. Dressed in rigorous black, Aleister Crowley—who two years later