"There's a Man in the Habit of Hitting Me on the Head with an Umbrella" by Fernando Sorrentino

Ah, the paths that a search for literature can take you on. This evening, it started with a quote. Reading The Man Who Invented Christmas: How Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol Rescued His Career and Revived Our Holiday Spirits by Les Standiford, I found the following: "'Art cannot rescue  anybody from anythng,' rings the last line of a well-known story by Gilbert Sorrentino." I was taken aback by this; having read Sorrentino's Mulligan Stew: A Novel and some other fiction by him, I just could not believe that there was such a thing as a "well-known" story by him. So, off to the Internet. Sure enough, this quote has been picked up by at least one other source, which attributes it to The Moon in Its Flight, a collection of short fiction not available in my public library (but then neither is Mulligan Stew!). So maybe there is a story with the same name as this title--the "well-known" one.

Given my penchant for connecting umbrellas and literature, the next step was to search for Sorrentino and umbrellas (after a side trip to Wikipedia to read more about Sorrentino). Well, I end up with a wonderful hit, but not for Gilbert Sorrentino, but for Fernando Sorrentino,  an Argentine writer. While not a lot of his work appears to be translated into English in published books, there are quite a few stories available on the Internet, most importantly for our purposes: "There's a Man in the Habit of Hitting Me on the Head with an Umbrella" translated by Clark M. Zlotchew. I will quote the first paragraph for you, and then you can go read the rest:

There's a man in the habit of hitting me on the head with an umbrella. It's exactly five years today that he's been hitting me on the head with his umbrella. At first I couldn't stand it; now I'm used to it.

Borges, anyone?

It is available in its original Spanish, too, and was published in his collection: Imperios y servidumbres (1972)