Macedonio Fernández - The Museum of Eterna's Novel

No, it’s hopeless. A book could never make you so happy. 1

1 Indicates a 68 reader drop.

The sun comes up in the quietude of the estancia “La Novela.” A first window opens. A morning chill. 1It’s cold for the author, too, faced with what is for him the most uncertain part, the irreparable beginning.

I have a friend by my side cheering me on, saying:

“Everything will come out well, success is guaranteed. Don't make the characters wait any more! Don’t you want them to be happy? They deserve it.”

“But I’ll disgrace them.”

“No, ‘characters’ can’t be disgraced. I envy them all, even in the times when they are clamoring for death.”

“But mine are clamoring for life.”

“I cannot believe that characters you invented would have such bad taste.”

“I think they’re still happy in the novel, and it’ll be later on that they ask for life; but they will surely ask for it. This is a very sad novel. I can’t look anymore. What I wanted to see by standing on tiptoe was whether Sweetheart had yet approached adequate happiness, leading her to beg for life and to get someone else to play the rest of her part.”

But this prologue-character won’t want to know anything ahead of time after this. It already senses that this will be a book almost as sad as the most vigorous tome of Pessimism: The Quixote. So much so that the author didn’t have the strength to tell us how the sad, disgraced protagonists of his novel parted ways: the President and, even more so, the unfairly frustrated Eterna.

1 Sometimes I get confused in my simultaneous undertaking of both novels and in this, the good novel, I write something that belongs in the bad genre.

Useful postprenotes here occupy four or five pages, replacing the same pages that, because they were blank, said nothing in this common tome of the “marked out — traditional — structure — of — literary— binding” which the Editors have imposed. I hope that my Editor will not rob me of what I'm owed in universal ridicule by inserting the five blank pages — which I am here replacing — and then inserting the present critique of said practice. If there is a Critique for the written, I’ll write the critique of the blank; this way I get both the editors’ publicity and their criticisms, which are all homage for the written. These blank pages, texts that disdain the literary, are the pages with which in every book the non-authors and the always-unedited editors disguise themselves as poligraphers.

I repudiate all the blank pages published here as forgeries, that is, originals bearing my signature; actually I don’t know if they are authentic, although they do partially contain something ingenious or some thought, and some editor would even have you think that one of them sprang from my own pen in correlation with certain moments of mental “blankness.”

Consider then that these are: four or five pages at the beginning of the novel — the Editor is about to start his own — four or five more after the End, as if the Novel had to continue, if only in blanks; there are various pages between chapters; there’s another with the title of the book; another that bears a repetition of the cover; and all sorts of abuses of margins — about twenty pages, then, where the author isn’t publishing a thing and the continuous reader has purchased nothing at the bookstore.

Editor’s Observation: Permit me to assert the response that, in effect, the great novelist that I edit here, and whose talents of genius and facile extension of paragraphs the public has known from afar (with our marketing, he’ll get closer), has necessitated (I'm not talking here of monies) at times, when I was fed up with his literature, the insertion of a few blank pages, bound in folio, from some short story, and we understood that this constituted an extra-contractual practice.

This page is for the reader to linger, in his well-deserved

and serious indecision, before reading on.

Minute one: Evocation of Eterna’s face

The kisses you denied me bite your lips

Biting each other

lips make each other bitter

You write the manuscript of this your novel where

I give you my spirit as you gave me yours

And for what I could not be, I have your

Gesture of divine sadness, of your I Cannot,

In this denial my being made whole

Whole persona, you raised me in the no “Living”

And how much more in Loving.

THE " CHARACTERS" ARE TAKEN OUT FOR MANEUVERS: THEY TRAIN TO STRENGTHEN THEIR AFFECTION FOR ARTISTIC NON-BEING.

TEN GOOD-HUMORED RETURNS DESPITE STORM AND FATIGUE.

Moments before the present instant, the very present in which you, reader, are reading, the President abandoned his chair, which reclined against the back wall of the estancia “La Novela.” He usually occupied this chair when, separated from the rest of the characters, he meditated on sadness or action. In leaving his chair, he opted for the latter.

The modest old white house on the estancia seemed quiet. It was said that its façade, doors, and windows murmured in much the same way as the spirit of dust on a wide road murders when there’s no one walking there, only the noise of a dull footstep or the happy sound of a carriage’s bells in the distance. What does the house say, what does the road say?

“Men pass through me, immortal men.”

The house on “La Novela” has four windows: Time is the cracks in its plaster; the whisper of the wind in the kitchen chimney; the ever-present undulation of the brook next to the River Plate, its vibration making rivulets in the sand and waves like silk on the Plate’s horizon; and like the little triangular flame of a candle, standing very straight in the distance: the eternal boat of weak human endeavor, which every gaze encounters on every sea, moving along the horizon wherever some small sail touches the sky.

Rays of light along the length of the little valley where “La Novela” stands, a single cloud wandering in the green light of the last calm moments of the afternoon, collected one by one in the last hour of the day. Nevertheless, one can still make out the inscriptions on both pillars at the entrance to the estancia: “Leave your past at the gates;” “Pass here and your past will not follow.”

The subtle Watchman of the novel is at his post and he watches; his delicate, slim silhouette (he’s really a very small watchman) might be taken for a piece of fencing crowned with a motionless nest. He’s always at his post, which is a little ways away from the entrance to the house garden (except when he thought up and pointed out “part” of the finished novel, which was a lot of work for him, concerned as he is with historical and artistic truth); his perpetual immobility makes one think — and indeed some have thought — that he is an inanimate post, but if you want to be convinced that he’s watching, look at him when the last light of the day strikes his forehead with the additional luminosity of the lark’s song, or when the dark owl alights there, mute but meaningful, or when Fantasy unites all the characters of this narrative, here in the novel and in the estancia, like travelers brought together by chance in the same runaway stagecoach — except Eterna, who recently arrived during the night, and is hidden from the others, who do not know that she joins them in the novel.