Macedonio Fernández - The Museum of Eterna's Novel

Each one of them had determined on his own to live on the estancia with the President, having lived in various places and having occasionally seen him, and gradually, through casual dealings, having made friends with him. Each morning they all left together, except Father, who was only irregularly present, heading towards their studies or commissions in Buenos Aires in an old hack. The estancia was located twenty blocks from the station, on the bank of the River Plate; from there, it was ten minutes in the train to the Constitution station in the city.

The “estancia” was about ten hectares of perpetually disputed land, to which the President had a prominent claim. There were other interested parties whom he recognized, and from whom he had obtained permission to dwell on the property, in exchange for keeping an eye on it and settling its claims. The characters thus congregated haphazardly there, thrown together by the whim of an artist in the pages of fantasy. They kept the President company for almost two years in that old estancia, on that land awaiting judicial decision.

All the inhabitants sensed the dream-like quality of finding themselves there all reunited, on this unstable settlement, due to a lucky encounter with the President, who was passing through just as they were, but who could have left them at any second. They associated this quality with great dreamers like themselves, living there together freely, finely, affectionately, changing, with numerous new sympathies, living their dreams, not being able, no matter how they opened their eyes, to convince themselves that they actually were where they had dreamed they were. They resigned themselves to the fact that it was a dream, which initially made them feel anxious, but later gave them the feeling of being real. Their suffering grew less as they renounced its realization, accepting it as a permanent dream that wouldn’t carry over into reality — but not verisimilitude— as if dreaming alone were their vocation. This is why they felt real when they were in the streets of Buenos Aires, and became anxious to return to and thrive in the novel; they went to the city as if it were Reality, and they returned to the estancia as if it were dream; and each departure was a sallying forth by the characters into Reality.

Two years ago the President decided to make friendship the focus of his future life. And his reception with each new friend was characterized by open curiosity and sympathy. (Each one said to himself as he arrived at the estancia, moved by this double impression: “I entered ‘La Novela,’ and I entered the novel.”) His last conquests, whom he had befriended and brought to that place of cohabitation, were The Lover and Sweetheart.

The Lover impressed everyone most of all. But everyone soon forgot that he was there with them — it even took the President a while to consider him a real inhabitant — until they happened to see him again. Only after some time did a certainty grow that the Gentleman Who Doesn’t Exist was living among them, even though they saw him constantly.

Each one remembered the first day they arrived, how they felt the dark attraction that brought them there, as they saw everyone’s face on that day when they looked around the house and let their bags and parcels drop at the front door. And then what future? How did they first move towards the novel? Was it the President’s words when he met them, and afterwards invited them into his home, or was it the image they saw, in that instant, of the estancia where they were to dwell? And what about how each one left behind family, past, sorrow, or solitude?

All of those who are today present in “La Novela” were there when they were treated to an unexpected pleasure, the arrival of the Sweetheart — or so they later baptized her, the only female inhabitant there — so graceful, carrying flowers from the city for the President, as she walked across the garden. (What sweetness to see her like that, so absorbed that she didn’t sense the charm of crossing a garden with flowers. But nobody saw her. How do we know about it? Magic.) Father was not a regular resident; he came and went from time to time, but that day he wasn’t around. Sweetheart only knew that he was an acquaintance of the house, and only saw him there that night before the drilling maneuvers.

Maybegenius was the one who opened the door to this surprise. It was rather a cold, cloudy day; the waters of the River Plate separated, and rippled along the banks, and the stand of trees which bordered the estancia shook. Sweetheart was taken to the warm, whitewashed, thick-walled camp kitchen, with one of those campfires that are so loved in winter, and a constant sibilant wind in the rooms of the countryside home. This wind was like a voice that Sweetheart never knew and that we heard on our first vacation in the estancia and, a half century later, in an unexpected or longed for return to the country, we again heard this same timbre, the same word that the wind eternally whispers in crevices and which reappears in the ear, unequal to the flow of individual life.

Maybegenius, who regularly cooked for everyone, brought her some well-prepared hot food. Before they were reminded that anyone was in that silent house, or even realized that they themselves were there, Sweetheart and Maybegenius conversed for two hours in the kind of happy colloquium where each person talks more than the other. These two hours were the only truly happy ones in Maybegenius’s love for Sweetheart, and in Sweetheart’s friendship with Maybegenius. Both the friendship and the love affair were born out of this lively conversation, without either of them knowing it. Are not this relationship and this dialog, this friendship and love, always burgeoning in their souls? Why must we say it began, if they didn’t sense it beginning, or didn’t think of it afterwards as something that had begun? In those two hours both made themselves absurd by the sadness of mutual recognition, the absurd encounter between love and friendship.

The wind in the eaves always repeated a single word: there was always friendship and love in those poor souls, but those two words, out of the exchange of dialog, gave birth to sorrow.

A DAY IN THE LIFE OF THE INHABITANTS OF "LA NOVELA"

I’ll randomly select a Thursday in August of 1927, the second winter that they had spent in the novel. Everyone — except the President, who didn’t go out anymore — left together, early, in the old carriage. They passed the Watchman, who liked them and was curious about them, and they passed through the humid little green valley. They looked at the little snake that the river traced along the lower edge of the coastline; from the estancia, at any time of day, the undulation of the waters could be seen along the line of earth that it lapped… And so they went, in the chilly, windy morning, talking and making observations from time to time until a large newspaper from Buenos Aires absorbed their attention, as a gust of wind pulled it out of their hands and sent it flying along the road in front of them, rolling along in the same direction as this pampero wind. They couldn’t occupy themselves with anything else, so transfixed were they by the flapping and tumbling of the broad, printed pages as they settled and rose, nervously shifting or running ahead of the group as it traveled, filling the carriage compartment with their exclamations, until, transported as it was by recurring gusts of wind, the paper came along with them for maybe fifteen blocks, almost all the way to the station where the carriage stopped. Sweetheart was most excited and intrigued of all, vacillating between hilarity and superstition when confronted with the capricious path of the periodical. This pleased the Lover entirely. It was enough for Maybegenius to watch Sweetheart’s enchantment with what was happening, and the Andalusian didn’t care about anything except that she might brush up against him; nevertheless, his comment was enigmatic: “Newspapers! Does anyone believe that what’s going on with this periodical is newsworthy?” Nobody answered this, and they got on the train.