Macedonio Fernández - The Museum of Eterna's Novel

In this novel the man who feigns to live is not seen, nor does anyone allude to him. He’s not in the novel. He’s a character “like that,” idiosyncratic; “he’s like that,” and so characteristically that no one notices that he doesn’t appear in the novel. He would have liked to appear more prominently, if he still could fit; to give him an importance worthy of a non-existent; to say, for example, that he carried off an artistically rendered Absence, an Absence finally realized in symbols and taking up space.

Or we could blame him for everything bad that happens to the characters, or for the style or lack of elegance in the idea and composition of our novel. Or use him as if he accumulated, in his inconceivable reality as a “absent character,” all of the impossibilities which are openly used in all novels and films and, from there, the impossibility of the author’s knowing what’s going to happen in the future, what the characters think but don’t say, and other small impossibilities that happen in stories.

But I will restrict myself to honestly saying that what’s impressive about this person is that he shows such satisfaction in the simple detail that the first page dealing with him is the only one, and the only one he requires. This wasn’t done intentionally, but by means of a rare strategy: a subtitle in parenthesis and a long footnote. Stories and poems are full of things that are much harder to explain than what happens here, which is the influential action of a character’s absence, thus typographically signaling the efficiency and the substantiality of this nonexistent protagonist.

As I said, nobody would know — this is how the author would have it — that this character isn’t in the novel, if it weren’t for the character (who before this prologue had not yet kindly agreed to be called Maybegenius) (since the man who may or may not be a genius tends to get confused with the Man who Feigned to Live), asking questions, being surprised and demanding his presence, even though he’s already been told that, because of his role, making him appear would be the end of him (not because he’d be bad company for the rest of the characters, but because with him Absence, which is one of the most lauded qualities of verse, would not communicate its enchantment in a novel).

This not-yet-named Maybegenius’s obstinance has obliged us to seek out and finally locate the explication that would have the most eloquence for the Man who Feigned to Live. Each time that Maybegenius asks for him, the reply is that the Man who Feigned to Live is busy with the only thing left in the world today that is shameful, or that could cause someone to hide: he’s tearing apart a box of matches to get to the Victoria Matches Company coupon. Maybegenius is entirely calmed by this news, and he sympathizes with the Man who Feigned to Live. He truly believes that this task is pleasant, but risky, and thus the only serious reason to keep oneself out of sight.

The Man who Feigned to Live does not appear because he thinks that a novel that itself failed to appear for such a long time must celebrate him, and he runs the risk of finding nobody who will praise him if he doesn’t retain, in the novel’s publicity, something of his invisibility, some trace of a future thing; it makes a novel which has waited a long time to be written, to exist — which rarely happens; a book’s non-existence is obtained between its being promised and its being published; a book that is not announced lacks non-existence — to maintain such a character in the state of being partially realized. But it also is convenient for the rigidity of the absolutely fantastic that we want to reign in this novel, that the services of a person with unassailable inexistence are guaranteed.

All of the events and characters in novels are pleasantly impossible, they are fantastic with respect to reality. The Man who Feigned to Live, in his pleasant inexistence, which is how he will gain the public’s respect, is fantastic with respect to the novel: it’s not only that he doesn’t appear in life; he also doesn’t appear in the book.

The reader will say if he and I are happy with the conduct of all the characters, and we don’t know how to thank him for sticking with us until the end, which he’s done so marvelously, running some of the characters over to whichever page the reader was on, so that they could be read. The Man who Feigned to Live has tirelessly attended to his nonexistent role, showing a real flair for non-being and a quite endearing proclivity towards absence; he must have had a lot of previous experience. Once the novel was finished, the ban on his being was lifted and he came to visit us like a newborn, weak and grateful and incipient, without a mark on him. It’s lamentable that this prodigal visit wasn’t part of our lovely novel, but it was already finished. It doesn’t have the talent of always continuing the way the reader would like and the way the Sunday editions of La Nation and La Prensa do. There’s no defect that shows his nonexistence, not even the smallest detail, nothing to run the risk of existing at every moment, of being a failed non-being, the type of nonexistent character that so many books have expelled from their pages.

I’m furnishing a new Chapter for leftover characters and scenes. I must improvise some kind of accommodations, pages, facts, and redaction for them, since my characters are all extremely minor: the second I leave off writing they stop doing things; when I’m not working, everything stops. Here’s little Juancito, “in floorless air of space”—a lyric that swells in me like a breath of relief in the face of the prologues that remain — in the middle of falling from a balcony, because yesterday I stopped writing, as any writer of conscience would do, to clear a space for his fall’s inevitable end (and to prepare the description thereof). It wouldn’t cost him anything to follow the action to its conclusion, but he doesn’t do it! Another time they were looking for me all over the Novel because I had left Don Luciano while he was putting one arm into his overcoat, and this posture had resulted in unbearable cramps. And the President complained because I interrupted his redaction just when he was going to blow out the match with which he had lit his cigarette, so he spent the whole afternoon burning his fingers with nothing to smoke. This seems impossible. At any given hour in my novel there’s someone with only one boot on, a young man with only one girlfriend, or some couple who wanted to be left alone except I hadn’t finished sending Mama to bed or having Auntie nod off. Also I left off writing Don Luciano when he was being fitted for a new Moral Sense, and I was nowhere to be found when they wanted me to return it. And what’s worse, though of a fortuitous consequence: I abandoned the entire audience at the christening of a new street name, and they were counting on getting some sleep as soon as the Minister got up to give his boring speech. I left him standing, and in the moment in which I was going to write about how the public was asleep, I was called away because of some curl that hadn’t curled or because only one side of some face was shaved; since the public was a character in my novel and the Minister wasn’t, he expounded at length all of his indispensable notions, and the public had to listen to it all, something which has never happened in a single inauguration, anniversary celebration, high school prize day, or statue unveiling. The audiences in my novel will never again call for streets to be christened. In the end, the editors warned me that if I leave off writing someone who’s going to buy my novel in that delicate instant of his unstable decision, I’ll be unworthy of the thousand pesos they spent on postering the walls with assurances about the “Best novel since both it and the world began.”