A Brief History of Portable Literature (New Directions Paperbook) by Enrique Vila-Matas

Author:Enrique Vila-Matas [Vila-Matas, Enrique]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: New Directions
Published: 2015-06-08T21:00:00+00:00

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.

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