Macedonio Fernández - The Museum of Eterna's Novel

Days after the horrifying instant we shared, I understood all of your punishments, injuries, and blows couldn’t reach me, no matter how sorry you felt for them afterwards, and even if you and the entire family had been driven to this behavior by the extreme misery and eternal despair of my incredible carelessness. I understood that I hardly even remembered these undeserved punishments, and I sadly supposed that this is why you had proposed a model correction.

(Father recalled in horror the moment in which, it was true, he had thought about making a mark on his daughter that no one could erase. He thought: “Happily I cannot commit that act which is motivated by desire, and never hatred”) By then the President had guessed your purpose that afternoon and, thinking I was neurotic, he warned me that if we didn’t separate either I would kill you or that, mad with rage at the calamities I caused at home, you would humiliate me; he also said: ‘Your father is a very good man who loves his entire family selflessly; there is no one more generous and compassionate than he. But there’s a trace of hysteria added to the growing burden of his bankruptcy, which has been accentuated with you. Avoid him until I return.’”

“It’s true, I thought: Poor President!”

And yet in truth it was Sweetheart who was to be pitied, “perhaps for her shame,” her form both innocent and sensual, her agreeable yet not meaningful face; with a beautiful voice lacking in musical sensibility, with a bit of a chip on her shoulder, blonde hair; very docile and kind and very intrepid regarding personal combat, to the point that when Father admonished her he had to be on the lookout for her combative, though not hateful, reaction.

In Sweetheart’s innocent and sensual curves one could see Buenos Aires gleaming, that supreme city prowling through the shadows of the limitless land, living in the darkness without destiny, like an ocean liner, illuminated in the vast darkness of the sea whose heart it cleaves; both live directionless, in the fullness of the present. When one lives historically there’s nowhere for Passion to go, there’s this progress of humanity, which is the emphasis of History; once one has experienced the passion of the present, progress and the future become pointless; the depraved notion of progress exists only in historical writing, not in anyone’s heart.

Passion does not think of situation, or time, comparatively; each lives the same present continuum; the insatiable notion of Progress is always empty, always nothing; everyone has the opportunity to “weigh anchor,” everyone has the opportunity of the Quixote’s two sallies towards Passion. Buenos Aires, Passion, Sweetheart…

Father finished his goodbyes, saying:

“Who knows when or whether we will see each other again. I’m glad you’re staying with the President. Goodbye, Sweetheart, I think you will forget me. I didn’t imagine that you were sick, and it even displeased me when the President told me his view of the situation, so that I wouldn’t punish you. Now I'm convinced. Goodbye.”

“I don’t know how I’ve had the bravery to remember and explain, nor how you’ve managed to hear me. Goodbye.”

As for Nicolasa, Federico, and Mountainclimber, upon whom the reader cannot rely — they aren’t in the cast, but they asked to undergo the training maneuvers of the characters so as to be worthy of another novel — it will be remembered that they brought back what appeared to them to be good; and between the three of them they were able to procure only a single thing, which they triumphantly handed over: “Here’s what this day is worth (no one would have believed it).” It was: the reason why gangster funerals are so well-attended, discovered after dedicating a day to attending such an event. Despite the rain, all of the people whom the deceased thug had threatened in life had attended his funeral without fail, out of gratefulness for the longevity he had conferred upon them by not carrying out his threats.

But Federico, who was bored because it seemed to him that the mud and the rain were scant, slept in and dreamed that the President said to him: “You who are light of foot, go all the way around the world in one day; humanity will forgive you for the long stick you carry if you dedicate some time this afternoon to putting a banana peel in front of every uneven patch, hump, or hole on every road in the world. This is the banana peel that every man who stumbles wishes had been there, just as common courtesy, to take the blame for his fall.” And he dreamed he exceeded this task, bringing also the little banana peel of the mind that we wish everyone would see as the cause of the moral slip up we have when, in the heat of an argument and out of vanity, we make an unmeditated assertion and we stumble about, searching for the arguments we need to substantiate it.

Emboldened by his dream of twofold success in his mission, Federico dreamed that they let him be in the novel — be real in it. But he only dreamed it; this is why he once approached Eterna to ask if, with her gift for changing the past, she would divest him of the notion of having once been a part of the novel, since no one was ever going to let him live there.

"DIARY OF THE HUMILIATED CHILD SWEETHEART WHICH HER FRIEND THE PRESIDENT COMPOSES IN SECRET, HIMSELF ALSO UNHAPPY, WHILE LIVING IN HER HOUSE FOR TWO YEARS."

Sweetheart unexpectedly reads “her” Diary, which she finds in the President’s desk, believing that he’s left it there on purpose so she’ll be driven to reflect on her passion for him, and to give up loving him. It was actually only carelessness on the part of the President.

The most interesting chapter in the aforementioned Diary is the interruption that happens in the very moments when Sweetheart’s unparalleled misfortune befalls her, and which will later be taken up again by its author, unaware of what he’s been reading, until one day he finds a note from Sweetheart thanking him for the interest he shows in her with this manuscript.

There are three reflections of the President in Sweetheart’s mind: Enamored of him, she wants to meet him, when in one of the journeys of her uncertain life the President takes up residence in her house for a while and Sweetheart thinks he is unaware of her love.

One day, upon reading the Diary written by the President pretending to be her, she sees that he had avoided being the person to whom the love applied in the title the Sweet-Child-of-an-Undeclared-Lover that, although impossible, was now more undeclared than ever. And now she knows that the President is her “friend.”

After a while, the President and Sweetheart meet as friends in “La Novela,” a third reflection of one life in the other.

The Traveler appears, saying:

“I’m the only one who believes this is happening. Why don’t the others believe that I travel? And why am I the one in charge of destroying the hallucinatory moment when the reader believes that it really happened?”

Sweetheart: “What do we have today in ‘La Novela?’”

Maybegenius: “Pure time.”

All week long they commented upon and enjoyed that day’s events with the happy air of leisure.

Afternoons they got together with the President. When they separated early in the day it was with their minds fixed on these agreeable afternoons, as each one tended to his own tasks and preoccupations. Later they would tell him — his favorite pastime was to hear about it each night — what had happened to them or what they had thought during the day, when he wasn’t there.

(It was at these times, when they were all united in friendship, their voices animated without any ill humor, that a little being liked to pass unnoticed among the characters: a little doll with the power of thought, to whom Eterna wanted to give life, because the doll once smiled at her; there is also a little plant that is so delicate and meek that any visitor who fails to caress it is denounced as perverse.)