Free A Brief History of Portable Literature by Enrique Vila-Matas Page B

either immersed, or one’s thoughts float off,” wrote Juan Gris. This partly explains why the Shandies installed themselves in the
Bahnhof Zoo
, a stationary submarine: they were looking for this immersion, or focus on their work. Focus, however, entails risks and ends up creating Odradeks, golems, Bucharesters. Creatures of all kinds populated the solitude of those, who, in fraught coexistence with their doppelgängers, set themselves apart in order to work.
    Not even in the International Sanatorium did the Shandies manage to escape being constantly harried by these creatures—a conspiracy parallel to HYDRE INTIME —and this prompted their decision to travel to Trieste, since they thought, naively, a Mediterranean setting would disorientate their pursuers (beings that must be more disposed to mysterious Czech mists than to the diaphanous blues of the Adriatic shores). But the Shandies didn’t take into account Trieste’s thick, obstinate mists and, following a hazardous stay in that city, they ended up making their way back to Paris.
    Upon arriving in Paris, the Shandy travelers were anxious, having confirmed the existence of the parallel plot in Trieste. They were anxious and even deformed. Meyrink, for example, looked like a cabin boy. Littbarski was dressed like a Japanese sailor. Salvador Dalí was constantly scanning the horizon for his own personal Moby Dick. Rita Malú went around dressed as a frigate. Robert Walser looked like he’d stepped straight off the
Potemkin
.
    Clearly, a maritime delirium. Larbaud collected toy boats, Prince Mdivani messages in bottles, and Pola Negri photographs of whales with prey gripped between their teeth. A maritime delirium led them to mistake Paris for a gigantic country house. This led to a number of incidents with those Shandies who had remained there, but the dust didn’t take long to settle. In Trieste, the portable travelers had intoned the first hymns to boredom and inconstancy in art (doubtless an anti-hysterical reaction to so much hard work). Those portables anchored in Paris’s terra firma only had to make a gesture in praise of idleness for the newcomers to consider brokering a peace that would reunify the secret society.
    On the day Marcel Duchamp declared that parasitism was one of the fine arts, peace was made during a dinner at La Coupole in honor of Pyecraft, an H. G. Wells character; this fictional character was portable
avant la lettre
, seeing as he lost weight but not mass, and fearing he’d float up to the sky, he left home with flat discs of lead sewn into his underclothes, lead-soled boots, and a bag full of solid lead.
    Carrying my own bag full of lead, I went last week to the island of Corsica, hoping to free myself of the portables for a few days. I thought a clear consequence of my Shandy obsession and my daily dedication to writing on the subject was the creeping paralysis overtaking my Olivetti Lettera 35. I felt I’d earned a rest and the right to lose myself in an always gratifying chapter of idleness.
    But it was terrible what happened to me. I saw, for example, a miniature of Napoleon—Ajaccio’s local hero. I was not only immediately reminded of the Shandy enjoyment of anything small, but also the thought came to me of how small one of the portables, Robert Walser, felt when, in one of his books, he imagined himself as an infantry soldier in Bonaparte’s army: “I would only be a little cog in the machine of a great design, not a man anymore . . .”
    Everything I saw and thought, I instantly and unavoidably related to the world of the Shandies. For instance, I lay on a deck chair by the sea and immediately remembered that the portables spent whole days on deck chairs in the city of Trieste, not to relax after working so hard, but because they had no choice if they wanted to get free of their Odradeks (these creatures wouldn’t hover around as long as their hosts gave themselves over to indolence).
    There was no way for me to forget