Thus, the famed Anthologie nègre was born, published two years later in Paris as “a compilation of short but very vivid entries (twenty-seven), which enabled the author, for the first time in Europe, to reproduce a set of stories that missionaries and explorers had transmitted orally among us.”
When it was published by the Au Sans Pareil Press in Paris, in 1927, all the French critics fell for it, greeting the work as “the first chance the lay public ever had to learn about popular African literature,” when in fact what the lay public read was an African literature fabricated by Cendrars, who was able to salvage words from his portable friends’ stories. The fraud went so unnoticed, the deceit was so all encompassing, that there was even a translation into Spanish by none other than Manuel Azaña.
A complete fraud. For example, the oft-repeated story “Death and the Moon”—a legend attributed to the Sande tribe and explored in great detail in the 1940’s by none other than Lacan — is simply the upshot of the association of images prompted by the words moon and death (plucked by Cendrars from what Rita Malú told him the evening they met in Prague).
Rita Malú mentioned there was a full moon and, a little later, confessed she’d been feeling slightly insane in recent days. In spite of the hot weather, she’d carried on feeling terribly cold, as if Prague were being gripped by a death freeze.
Moon and death. Cendrars retained these two words when Rita Malú stopped speaking and informed her about what it was she’d just unwittingly engendered. Rita Malú fell silent, as did black Virgil and Meyrink, both of whom had been caught up in a discussion about the pros of short stories, fragments, prologues, appendices, and footnotes, and the cons of the novel. They all stopped, allowing Cendrars to narrate the legend that would become the first tale featured in the Anthologie nègre.
An old man comes across a dead body in the moonlight. He assembles a great number of animals and says to them: “Who among you brave creatures will take charge of transporting this dead man and who will take charge of transporting the moon to the other side of the river?”
Two turtles stepped forward: the first, who had long legs, carried the moon and made it to the opposite shore safe and sound; the other, who had short legs, took the dead man and drowned.
And this is why the moon reappears day after day, and the man who dies never comes back.
This tale was punctuated by cannon fire, warning of the breaking up of the ice on the Moldova River. Spellbound, Meyrink shut his eyes to better hear Cendrars’s story. But at the end of the tale, as he struggled to open his eyes again, long lines of human faces passed before him, and he saw death masks of his own ancestors: men with short, straight hair, parted hair, curly hair, long wigs, and wavy toupees. Masks approached him through the ages, and increasingly familiar lineaments gradually came together in one final face: that of the golem, which broke the ancestral chain. The darkness became an infinite, empty space, with the mother of the human race at its center.
When Meyrink finally managed to open his eyes, he communicated what he’d seen to the others. Cendrars only retained the last few words (“the mother of the human race”), using them for the title and theme of the second tale in his Anthologie nègre, a chronicle he attributed to the Mossi tribe:
Three men appear before Oendé to tell him their wants. One says: I want a horse. The other says: I want dogs for hunting in the brush. The third says: I want a woman to delight in.
Oendé gives it all to them: to the first, his horse; to the second, the dogs; to the third, a woman.
The three men leave, but rains suddenly come, preventing them from leaving the scrubland for three days. The woman cooks for the three of them. The other two men say, Let us go back to Oendé. They arrive and they ask to be given women. Oendé agrees to change the horse into a woman, and the dogs too, and the men leave. But the woman made from the horse is a glutton, the woman made from the dogs won’t behave. The first woman, the one given by Oendé before, is fine: she is the mother of the human race.
This legend Cendrars kept to himself, unable to externalize it, because, as he was finishing composing it in his mind, there was a knock at the door. Salvador Dalí came in visibly excited, accompanied by Nezval and Teige, two young Czech poets who wanted to join the secret society. To judge by their radical, dazzling gazes, these two poets were very high-spirited bachelor machines. Their eyes were like highly illuminated, extraordinarily light suitcases.
Anticipating the general sentiment, black Virgil commented that he couldn’t look the two Czechs in the eye because they were so dazzling. Teige hastened to say, indeed, it was true, and there was a simple explanation: their eyes were a permanent homage to Edison, the inventor of the light bulb. He then gave the floor to his colleague Nezval to announce, very emphatically, that from that moment on, for them, the sexual attractiveness of women would be based on their spectral capacity and resources, that is, on their potential dissociation, their separate carnality and luminosity. The spectral woman, he concluded, will be the woman that can be dismantled.
Teige took the floor again, showing himself to be a cutting edge Shandy by the fact that he was altogether aware of the portable Odradek-golem secret. He spoke of Prague’s unusually warm air and of the presence in the city of a number of weird beings, quiet creatures pretending to sleep so no one would notice their deceptive, hostile selves. These, he said, came out when Prague’s night mist covered the streets, obscuring their quiet, barely perceptible, back-and-forth gesturing and posturing: they were as profoundly dark as the spongy flesh of zombies. Additionally, he concluded, these golems were relentlessly hunted by their own “Bucharesters”: beings from Romania and poor relations of Count Dracula.
Cendrars, who had listened in his own way — that is, distractedly — to the two Czech poets, then interceded to offer Nezval a pint of shandy with ice, at the same time telling him that, from his description of the woman who could be dismantled, he’d come up with a Zulu legend, “The Black Specter”:
Once upon a time, the wind was a person, specifically, a specter, until she turned into a feathered being. Because she could no longer walk, she flew. Indeed, flying, she lived on the mountainside. Once upon a time, she was a black specter, and that is why — once upon a time — she killed missionaries. Afterward, she turned into a feathered being, and from then on she flew and lived in a cave in the mountain. She goes to sleep there, wakes early and leaves; she flies far away; the next day, again, she flies far away. She comes back to her home because she feels the need for sustenance. She eats again, and again, and again; she comes back to her home, again, coming back to sleep.
As for what Teige had said, Cendrars said he didn’t believe a word, but it had been useful to him in composing the fourth story of his Anthologie nègre, “The Zombie’s Spongy Flesh” (a Babua legend). He was about to tell it, when the others asked him, in unison, to save it for later, seeing as they were all keen to go out into the 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.