Macedonio Fernández - The Museum of Eterna's Novel

When they arrived at the Constitution station in Buenos Aires, some of them split up, and part of the group went on together. Downtown, Maybegenius accompanied Sweetheart to her office and, kissing her (this is true, but inexplicable), he went to the Palace of Justice — because he was a solicitor (inexplicable, and also true)! The truth is that he went through all the offices and files so sweetly and conscientiously, just as if he were at the pots and pans of his country kitchen, and it was rare that a judge had the heart to rule against him, just as his pots rarely boiled over and his pans rarely burned him. The Andalusian got lost in the bars of the city, fishing for news for the President. He played the lotto, read the palm of whomever would buy him a drink, and when the patron was generous, he predicted a happy future and separated in his fortune all the Fridays from their thirteenths, though how he arranged this we don’t know.

They all met up again at nine in the bar at Constitution to get on the train, all tired and with the good humor that comes at labor’s end, taking their tea with an end-of-the-day pleasure and zeal, as was their custom every day after their work was done. See how they live this moment of sympathy and pleasure at the end of each day, since besides their labors, deceptions, injuries, humiliating obligations, or indifference towards their anonymity in the crowd, they also have the sorrow of having to be far from the estancia every day, for long hours of forced privation; see their happiness, their innocence, and think: not one of them feels lifeless!

The President awaits their noisy arrival in his hammock chair under the vineyard loft, all twined with climbing wisteria. Later they disperse throughout the house and make themselves comfortable, while Maybegenius and Sweetheart, who assists him in the kitchen, light the fire under the pots and warm the meal prepared earlier that morning.

THE PRESIDENT TO ETERNA

“Profoundly, decisively: here is the formula for the fulfillment of my soul with which I call upon destiny in this unexpected moment, convulsed with uncertainty and sadness, with my intimate and contemptible humiliation, heavy with inferiority:

“If glorious love can be attained — it would only now have been given meaning, which would explain the apparition of one individuality more (that is, mine) among the innumerable traces of Being. In truth love would give me the individuality that I didn’t have until today. Love makes the present eternal, it totally occupies the memory, and makes of the eternity that awaits us only an instant, or only the memory of an instant made eternal by perception, which is to say memory triumphs over Eternity, replaces it with the instantaneousness of Passion, of totalove, which happens at any stage of the totality of time, a totality that is ours since no life has a beginning; making not life but a single instant an eternity, the highest instant of perception. If, then, glorious love can be attained, it will only be after I have left off working on my soul and have made it as beautiful as yours, to return when my feelings have softened.

“Last night, contemplating expression of the happiness of love— that I took as my own when there was a moment, the first moment, and unknown to yourself, of love for me — of the happiness of love for another person (this same happiness of love, of pure and exalted and blessed sympathy, and your eyes searching this face for long hours, forgetting about all other humans) I lived two hours of your oblivion; I experienced “The Oblivion of Eterna,” the unforgettable. This Oblivion also cures the past, using your unlimited powers of enchantment to substitute another past for the past of whomever was made unhappy, a dignified and graceful past, so overflowing is its single instant.

“Eterna, I often hear you say that a trip or fall due to distraction or clumsiness has no remedy; your ridicule has no remedy. I oppose this idea that to stumble is, better than the “game” and the “table,” the opportunity to prove whether one’s character is beautiful or ugly; and for a fully graceful soul (and a soul can only be so if it knows no other impulse than the one towards sympathy) there is nothing prosaic nor ridiculous…”

Eterna appears and reads the beginning of this letter.

When she gets to the place where it says that he would equally happily carry on a conversation with another visitor, she writes the following, wounded by the muddled President’s lack of comprehension, pale, her eyes wet:

“Adios, President, no more for today. Nothing in my life could be crueler than to read these lines. I’m leaving, I think it’s hopeless. Don’t try to stop me. I can’t imagine you will ever understand me.”

She returned to her room with insufferable mortification, her face flushed with fever, and supporting herself, she repeated a prayer and truly took desperate refuge in a God who she had never defined for herself (since she didn’t adhere to any religious practice) and to whom she addressed herself only when inundated with tears and desperation… Later, somewhat soothed, she exclaimed:

“And without prayers he suffers more than I do. Let him pray, I want him to pray. We are the miserable ones in this sinister life.” She took up the telephone and said only:

“Pray now, pray right now, and then try to sleep. I demand it: pray.”

Then, feeling sorrier for him, the cause of it all, she hung up and sat on the side of her bed, sobbing.

“Poor thing, poor me, we used to read about Bovary, who destroyed her soul with each step of her existence, we looked at each other when reading about this unhappy destiny became intolerable, but always with this envy or juvenile jealousy to be a character in a novel. And now life runs roughshod over us with its enigmatic fury, and now maybe life will make us both piteous, we who were anxious to be characters who were read and to feel nothing, this character-being that every ingenuous reader finds enviable, no matter the misfortune and desperation which the novel afflicts upon it. We will go mad if we keep on like this, and we will want to escape from Life to a chapter of the Story. Who will show me that he never existed, that I only read about him, that I myself am nothing more than a shadow, a silhouette of pages!”

The President and Eterna could not realize totalove because he never wanted to rest his head on Eterna’s breast, as a shelter, and she could not manage (this is her only imperfection) to liberate herself from this maternal inclination, which is wrong in love, and she couldn’t live without this sensation in her bosom. For his part, the President was inept in that he couldn’t love Eterna without thinking about her, that is, without representing her mystically. Thus it was impossible for him to see her as a being, because being cannot be intellectualized.

“Eterna: you are not perfect; your novelist must tell you this, since he is also your friend.”

“Make me perfect, then, if you can, like God made Man.”

“I can’t: the image came to me inwardly; sometimes you go looking for a lover’s head to Shelter on your bosom; and when, in this image, I evade you, you raise a sad, discontented face; I combat this expression and then this move, ‘sheltering in yourself,’ reappears. I am able to triumph over this mentally and again comes the soft gesture of sadness in your face.”

Other times Eterna buys “outfits” for the President, who rebels against this maternalization of love, he refuses himself the attitude of shelter because it debases: he only concedes the identity of equals.

In the meantime, the Man Who Feigned To Live affects a perfect Absence.

Sweetheart: “What’s coming up in the novel, Maybegenius?” Maybegenius: “When I’m the author, I’ll tell you.”