Suddenly, in anguish, just as the Odradeks, their golems, the femmes fatales, the Bucharesters, the monks, and the professors from Madrid all attached themselves stickily to my shoulders, I woke up. Looking in the mirror, I was relieved to see not Crowley but someone researching the secret Shandy society. No, I said to myself, I wasn’t Crowley. (I repeated this one hundred times.) After that, I decided I’d go back to Barcelona that very afternoon and simply try to forget the effort involved trying to put the Shandy world behind me.
Back, then, to my brief — or, if you prefer, my interrupted — history. In The Bucharesters—his account of his time in Trieste — the Satanist Aleister Crowley presents his research on Bucharesters as a pretext to hammer on mercilessly about the portables, though not expressly mentioning them. Instead, he uses the enigmatic term “Bocángels.”*
It’s an extremely annoying book, made up of twenty-seven fragments in which Aleister Crowley unscrupulously repeats, in twenty-seven different ways, that the Bocángels spent all day on deck chairs, and with what great difficulty he bore the weight of the sticky, not at all imaginary, tribe that had attached to his shoulders. This made him sway when he walked. It’s a book that seems custom made to mock anyone looking for information about the portables’ stay in the frontier city of Trieste. Here, for example, is an excerpt chosen at random:
“Trieste or the province as spectacle. I write in a bad mood after having walked the length of the Aqueduct and greeted Mr. Italo Svevo, the person least like the Bocángels of anyone. The afternoon is cold and the sky is clear, despite the sirocco that has been weighing on the city since this morning. It seems impossible that the consumptive carnival happening here — which began this afternoon with a bal masque—can resist the cold and damp. It’s a poor carnival, and my playmates, my beloved Bocángels, have spurned it. The only things they like are the deck chairs. Elusive sky of Trieste! Unhappy city where I would rather not have been, because I found in an evil hour that every Odradek has its golem and every golem its Bucharester! The latter, I would like to emphasize, are beings from Romania, tiny, terrifying, and constantly attached to their masters, the golems. Here in Trieste, I would rather not be, because my own personal Odradek frequently settles on my left shoulder, accompanied by its corresponding golem, with a Bucharester also attached. On my right shoulder, my femme fatale and a professor from Madrid named Bérgamo attempt to offer the appropriate counterweight so I won’t sway fiercely when I walk. Even so, I’m always swaying. The extraordinary epaulettes of my black satin jacket — black is the color of wisdom, being a concentration of all extant colors — did nothing to disguise the weight on my shoulders. On this day I decided (purely on a whim), to set out on an adventure, which, paradoxically, would be nothing if there weren’t so many obstacles to overcome, or if the weight of the beings weren’t so great, those beings who brazenly (resting on my shoulders) tried to impede it.”
It’s impossible to read Crowley and not feel constantly incredulous at all the fireworks, for instance, the unleashing of so many Bucharesters. Nonetheless, when we compare his text with Walter Benjamin’s (The Last Moment of European Intelligence) or Man Ray’s (Travels with Rita Malú), or Tristan Tzara’s, it is surprising to see that the three concur, to a large degree, with Crowley’s speculations.
“In Trieste,” wrote Walter Benjamin, “the rooms of the hotel I lived in were almost all taken by Tibetan lamas who had come to the city for a pan-Buddhist convention. The number of doors left slightly ajar caught my eye. What at first seemed like coincidence ended up seeming mysterious to me. Then I found out they were members of a sect sworn never to dwell within closed spaces. I’ve never been able to forget the fright I felt. Someone whispered in my ear that these Tibetan lamas were, in fact, our Odradeks, and could be seen by day in the streets of Trieste, moving in the background, hidden in shacks, bordellos, cheap restaurants, pretending to be beggars, one-eyed men, out-of-work sailors, thugs, drug dealers, or doormen at brothels.”
Man Ray wrote: “During our stay in Trieste, we weren’t shocked by monstrousness itself, but rather just how evident it was. This is why we took refuge on the deck chairs — what a relief to regress back to infancy and discover laziness anew! We were careful not to move too much. And slowly, inexorably, it became clear that we were accompanied on our travels by the shadows of a parallel conspiracy, phantasmagorical but perceptible, led by beings that were not of flesh and blood; unlike ours, this conspiracy had an objective: it sought nothing less than the destruction of our secret society. Weird bastards they were, not of women born, dwelling, variously, in lofts, stairwells, corridors, vestibules, and also on our shoulders, even, sometimes, inside our brains.”
In the opinion of Maurice Blanchot — who looks briefly at the portable phenomenon in Faux Pas—the “weird bastards” referred to by Man Ray were no less than the forms assumed by forgotten things; these things become distorted, unrecognizable, but nevertheless travel with us, alongside us: things in sad abandoned places, occasionally penetrating our brains, gathering together in perfect silence (“the silence of the stealthy,” to quote Tristram Shandy, “who listen in on those, who, at one time, thought they were the only stealthy ones”).
But in my opinion, there’s also the chance these phantasms in the brains of the portables may have simply been the literature they produced. In any case, what’s beyond question is that all the portables were aware of the existence of the parallel conspiracy, which shows they placed a very high value on art’s secret demand: that the artist must know how to surprise, and be surprised by, what, though impossible, is.
We need only look at what Tristan Tzara says, in his Portable History of Brief Literature, when he confirms the existence of the parallel conspiracy: “We’d left Prague in search of a Mediterranean setting where we might shake off our relentless pursuers, but they had the temerity to arrive in Trieste ahead of us. We knew they took ether, and this delivered them faster than an express train. Their conspiracy danced at the top of a stairwell of cliff-faced steps. Meanwhile, our shoulders began to turn to rubber — as though all the water content of our bodies were dripping onto them — and seemed to want to propel us upward. Over our mouths, there was something like a mouth of ice; that is the name — Mouth of Ice — by which we began to refer to the unnamable conspiracy traveling with us and, more than once, assuming the form of that figure we find on the last and terrible page of ‘Arthur Gordon Pym,’ that figure whose skin was the perfect whiteness of the snow. .”
The group left Trieste and went to Paris feeling sure that, with the help of the portables who’d stayed there, it might be easier to rid themselves of the Mouth of Ice; but it turned out that the perfectly snow-white conspiracy had also suffocated the Paris community of portables (using sphinxes of fire). This led many of the Shandies to take refuge at the bottom of the sea and to resume their creative endeavors in a submarine called Bahnhof Zoo, forgetting the deck chairs of those days of literary leisure, leaving behind the fleeting brilliance of an idle chapter.