The Secret Crypt (Mexican Literature) - Softcover

Elizondo, Salvador

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1628974389 ISBN 13: 9781628974386

Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press, 2022

Synopsis

Originally published in 1968, The Secret Crypt is something of a cult classic in Mexican literature. 

Elizondo’s impassioned, breathless prose launches the reader into a labyrinth that is also a hall of mirrors. Here, we find a small group of characters who are part of an underground sect called Urkreis, one of whose aims is to discover the identity of the sect’s founder, known only as “the Imagined.” The identities of narrator, author, and characters blur into one another as the narrative moves between the two worlds of the novel and the author writing the novel—an unclassifiable masterpiece containing initiation rites, sacrificial murder, conspiracy, and delirium.

About this title

About the Authors

Salvador Elizondo was a Mexican experimental novelist, poet, and critic. His works include Farabeuf, or the Chronicle of an Instant (1965), The Secret Crypt (1968), The Graphographer (1972), Elsinore: A Notebook (1988), and Theory of Hell (1993). He won the Xavier Villaurrutia Prize in 1965 for his first novel, Farabeuf o la crónica de un instante, and was awarded the Mexican National Prize for Letters in 1990.

Joshua Pollock is a poet and translator. He lives in the Pacific Northwest.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

. . . Tell me, I implore you —he says—: the darkest oblivion enveloped the night. Evoke; evoke that dream which will—here, now—come true. It will only take a few moments. Let us try to take stock of what’s been done, and how you participated in it. All of it; like a very slow dance. They are there: a source; the mouth in which the dream becomes word. Pray; that your words invoke the guides. Discipline is like a plain that we’ll cross at a gallop; a cart pulled by the horses of crime. Please; I implore you; repeat after me. Try to concentrate. Remember and forget that luminous wound; three times in a row. Set aside your own desires and surrender yourself to the plan . . . The word . . . Take me . . . Break me, I am but a weak reed in your fist . . . Like that; repeat after me: “Break me . . . Pluck off my petals as if I were the Flower of Fire… the blood that burns, that gallops, that spills across the edges of the wound from which it flows . . . Descend like death’s own vultures into the vast ravines and remember, remember and forget the words written in this book three times in a row; remember and wear away the words contained on this page. . .: coins between your sharp fingertips; sand, a memento of desolate mountains dropped into your frozen lap; sand stuck to the anxious skin of your thighs. Motionless. Like that. Don’t move. This is an extremely important part of our discipline. Now forget. Forget it all. Drive those drunken horses out of sight. Don’t think about the night, now. Everything is dawn and this is the first moment of daybreak; see the light between the marble columns in the peristyles of your memory. We must try it tonight. Remember and forget it three times, until the memory falls to dust again; just ash to be scattered by time, they—the members of Urkreis—say, making another attempt to complete the experiment. You must break tonight, Bitch. While you submit to that great discipline, that madness, that forgetting of your name through which you will be purified, I will move toward the dawn of your memory, will cross the night to drink at your origin, at the origin of your name I’ll evoke our first encounter, and our second, and our third, and then I’ll forget the third and I’ll forget the second and I’ll keep the first—as morning approaches—beside my heart; and then another obliteration of your name and the memory of your name, of your dress and the memory of your expression, of your eyes and the memory of your name, of your dress and of your wounds, and of those unsettling scenes, your little victories in the darkness of a museum of frozen words, of the myth and the word and the word that is myth and the ceremony of that apparition in a passageway furrowed like the raging waters of a river or sea: mirrors in which the dance of the Flower of Fire diminishes and our chants crack like the shafts of the columns of the deserted peristyles where we, the members of Urkreis, first dreamed of initiating you into the most immense of all terrors: forgetting your name and even the memory of your name, Bitch. Come, Bitch, come. But don’t move. This is important. Just show yourself and repeat these words:

“Break me, I am but a weak reed in your fist, I am but a filthy word on your lips, I am but a flower of fire, a dog too stupid to sit still in a dark room; pluck the petals from me with your breath, as if I were the Flower of Fire; crop my ears and tail and teach me to forget myself because I am a dog; teach me to submerge myself in the oblivion of those fateful nights on those sickening theater stages, in the accursed flickering of the footlights, under the eyes of Mr. Know-It-All, there, in the orchestra, sitting with his back to the stage, open to the surgical stare of a few spectators. . .” Yes, repeat after me; now repeat the memory of your name: Mía, Mía, a sketchy character at best, but still the most prominent, in a book written in a code whose key has been lost and whose decryption relies now on ambiguous data, on unreliable research, on false impressions, on a secret chronicle that is, to an extent we cannot trace with any precision, precisely the heritage upon which our lives have been founded—is the nucleus around which we develop those activities that inspire our modest circle of philosophical scholars. You don’t blame us, I hope? You aspired to this submission. You went missing, disappearing into our arms, into all of our mouths; into the mirrors of our eyes, where you discovered, perhaps, your true appearance, and where someone—perhaps the Pantokrator Himself—called you by your true name, there beneath an enormous arch; it was either somebody you bumped into, casually, turning a corner, or someone with whom we’d set up a meeting, to discuss literary matters, beneath an enormous tree, after the rain; maybe it was even the Pantokrator Himself who called you by your true name under a vast, sunny portico, that livid monument which the natives or else those who had migrated here had erected in honor of the shadow, and you saw yourself reflected in that name as if in a mirror, and you opened your legs so that the moonlight could enter your body, as a rat enters the contorted mouth of a cadaver, as a rat takes refuge in the heat of a woman’s sex while she sleeps among the rubble of a wall demolished by the winds of millennia. You would have been able to dictate it to us then, this book that we’re vainly attempting to write—all of it, after ten thousand generations of fools assembling letters and symbols to learn his true name, his, the Pantokrator. But we knew that you knew it; we looked into your eyes and were sure. The mark of your name was visible on your body, like a cancer, like an allusion to the mythical salamander, like a scorpion; igneous vermin burning in your chest; demented words whose utterance would have given us command of every city, of the secret of all architecture. How tall you would have been. And now there’s barely time. With your eyes you cried out to be submitted to our discipline, you roamed among the fractured colonnades, in whose shade we occasionally sought refuge so as to pass, in secret, close to that identity already known to you.

Edition details

• Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
• Publication date: 2022
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1628974389
• ISBN 13: 9781628974386
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 148