Macedonio Fernández - The Museum of Eterna's Novel

If inside my mind there’s no extension and yet I can represent in any image I make the entirety of what I’ve seen, it’s simply because there is no Extension, the entire Universe is no more than a single point, or less even, it’s no more than an idea, an image in my soul.

This extension is what creates the illusion of plurality that isn’t applicable to the only reality of being: Sensibility.

I’ll stop here; I think these words could bring your sensibility to the abyss of being and from there to the recognition that everything is psyche, and thus immortal. Because I already insinuated, in my many attempts to move your melancholy belief in death, that I feel that the obstacle that dominates me, keeping my love for you from being the totalove that you deserve and which is reality’s entire worth, is this discrepancy that separates us: you believe that death awaits us, a termination of our persons and our love, and I don’t believe that totalove can flourish in beings who believe that they are fleeting.

The past, art, and the present offers four marvels: cold, fatalism, negation of the Human as a possibility for happiness and intellection, and indirect affirmation of the hedonistic and intellectual failure of the Human, which is Cervantes’s attitude in Quixote and Sancho’s, the only great and genuinely ironic attitude, the only authentic pessimism presented in literary art, where so many cardboard pessimists seek to persuade; Rabelais’s negation, which is equally rotund, happier, and not as sentimental, since it’s sometimes direct and as if deliberate, doctrinal, thus less secure; Beethoven’s Joy and Torment, whose joy is rarer and more prodigious, never joyful in itself, but in sympathy, opening itself in the storm that, in his music, is always approaching; and one of Eterna’s Gestures which I haven’t yet seen, yet I know how it will be, and I’ll see it in her face the day I make a certain request, if I ever make it.

One can live well on a single Story, and, in truth, totalovers live on only the news of Being, of the Mystery that one is for the other.

And even when I found Eterna in fantasy, I discovered, and I now am certain, that I could live on only one of her gestures, and there are others in her, so many, just to live on one. This gesture is so immense, so full of personal and total signification, that without having it, but feeling it possible in her, and knowing that it must show itself before a demand that I have yet to make, I find myself in the fullness of being.

This is entirely another prologue, I haven’t begun it anywhere but here, and only those who still don’t know what I say in it can assert that it contains nothing of what is proper and necessary in a prologue: a reader can’t always get by just by making there be less pages of Literary Art (i.e., that there’s no prologue).

I’m going to enumerate the books that I planned to write when I was twenty-five. I will use a prologue, a few pages to demonstrate how much the public has been spared because the circumstances of my life denied me the means, my pen and ink, for thirty years. The page that gives the public a clear idea is a page well-employed; just as it seems to me that this page is nearly as genial as Maeterlinck’s three-hundred-page eulogy to silence; it’s a pleasure to read any number of pages if they dedicate themselves to sufficiently praising precious Silence. Few virtues merit more than silence the application of the belarte of the Word — Prose — in their recollection and explanation to the public.

The books I was going to write are: A Lawyer’s Health; A Lawyer's Guitar; Theory of Being; Doctrine of Science; Theory of Beauty or the Aesthetic; Meter, Rhythm, and Rhyme; Art’s Sophisms; Theory of Effort and its Hedonic Personal Influence; Theory of the Idyll-Tragedy; Tragic Poem; Individualism: A Theory of the State; Critique of Pain; Music as Mere Case of Respiratory Pleasure.

People who understand that pleasure is merely suffering avoided, readers who are part of the public and have the psychological acumen to recognize this as hedonic truth — won’t they hasten to discreetly dissimulate any irritation that reading my present book might cause them, which I modestly give in exchange for all those I didn’t write, considering the amount of reading I’ve spared them in these thirty-five years?

In this way, then, dear reader, an unknown, so notable that in him may be found all the unknowns of the world, has spoken to you in pages that in other authors’ books, which are bound in the usual fashion, would be blank and which in my book, for the first time ever, detain the reader:

To speak about people who have written nothing.

Nicolasa is leaving, and in this prologue the novel bids her farewell. More sad than ill-humored, Nicolasa and her corpulent volume leave “La Novela,” having resigned, as we already said. She passes in front of the novel’s little watchman, who, as a good friend, asks her in surprise:

“How do you feel about leaving the novel?”

“I don’t know. But you’re a man of good appetite, you can imagine what will come of a novel without a cook: a novel of fasters.”

The novel regrets this deeply, but hastens to add that when all of the furniture shops in Buenos Aires found out that Nicolasa was available, they fought among themselves to employ her and her 140 kilos, to test the resiliency of chairs and beds via the application of a certain part of her body. The chair or bed that can withstand her is thus imprinted with that certain body part, and this seal makes for a ten-year quality guarantee.

Nicolasa quickly tired of this position, though it earned her a lot of money, perhaps because she missed her position in the novel; she went to establish an Empanada Shop near the station, where you can catch the train to “La Novela.” The fact is that the aroma of those delicious empanadas was such a powerful enticement that she not only almost deprived the novel of readers, since everyone on their way there was waylaid by the Empanada Shop, but she also held up the locomotives, whom she had spellbound. This earned her a distinction from the Municipality, whose traveling public benefited from trains no longer passing through the station without stopping.

Despite her bulk, Nicolasa is very sensitive. She was mortified when she discovered that she might deprive the novel of readers, and she abandoned her enviable situation at the Empanada Shop and only worked in the winter, in the wide avenues of Buenos Aires, using her ample person to shelter transients from the wind and cold. So many took refuge there that space became very limited.

I can also add that the images (gustatory-olfactory-visual) of the last empanada we ate rendered us incapable of conversation. It was universal, in the world-village of Veronica, to launch the epithet “He’s got his head in empanadas” at the distracted listener, or repeat the saying “Whoever thinks of empanadas is not thinking badly.” So it was that business meetings or other urgencies were fixed for “before empanada-hour” and, having concluded business, the custom was to bet on empanadas and celebrate in the shop. The “empanada-and-a-half,” a gastronometric of Nicolasa’s invention, was a frequent betting prize: to put up a dozen “empanadas-and-a-half” was at times an acceptable solution to disputes and prognostications alike. An old resident of Veronica was known for his skillful way of drawing apart an “empanada-and-a-half” without damage; you “drew” them apart, you didn’t use the words cut or slice with empanadas-and-a-half.