Macedonio Fernández - The Museum of Eterna's Novel

Sweetheart: “I, on the other hand, have had to learn everything here. Like everyone, I think.”

Simple: “But for some of them it’s difficult. It’s difficult for Maybegenius, a man who couldn’t learn to cough unless you put a conductor in front of him.”

What joke of Maybegenius, told while they both painted the walls of the vestibule, had led Simple to try to poke fun at their mutual friend’s difficulty with happiness? Sweetheart smiled broadly, and together they continued sunning themselves among the poplars, while Simple explained that he possessed a soul capable of procuring the “world on a string” for him. (It is not known whether, apart from the novel’s time, there is also good or bad time that accounts for Simple’s mood swings.)

Maybegenius makes his way to the conquest of Petrona, whistling. Is there something conceited about him, perhaps?

Maybe: a pinch of the seducer’s infatuation, and two pinches of jealousy maybegenialize his character.

My perhaps frightening affirmation will perhaps come as a surprise, that besides Maybegenius’s solid moral sense, that is, his general sympathy for the “other I,” for the plurality of sensibilities or individuals which he displays in this motto: “In this life, at the very least everyone has to leave his seat warm; leaving his place, or the time and place in which he lived, a little more comfortable for the next man than it was before (or perhaps he meant: labor, and the warmth that disinterested labor yields, should be left for others, rather than taking recourse in the great egoism of one’s own destiny); one must be the sort of man who did a little more good than harm;” very well, despite this motto and, what’s more dissonant, despite his supreme elegance in egocentric and severe inspiration, Maybegenius is jealous of two things — and jealousy is the most durable indignity from which a personality can suffer, it’s a fault in egocentrism (it must be, to be narrowly egocentric to the point where Passion cannot be realized as an absolutely selfless love): he envies the waiters in a bar their enviable muscular-tactile pleasure, as when they wipe down the marble counter when something has spilled there, and the consummate drying effect, almost not to be believed, so swiftly and softly has the rag run across the surface; but he is more envious of the grocer boys’ delight as they sling glasses, teapots, and mugs down the length of the counter.

And so Petrona replies to Maybegenius:

“Your presence here strikes me as rather insolent, courteous and amiable though you may be.”

“Truly, Señorita Petrona, I would love to be able to say to you in this moment what I expressed in a similar circumstance, in another novel, to a young woman who almost equaled you in charm. I remember what I told her: ‘This mention of insolence is very cruel, Señorita Luciana. I am truly motivated to desist in this visitation.’ This last part is what I cannot say to you, Señorita Petrona. Because today I do not feel the urge to desist in my visit, I will simply say: Your impressive and seductive presence alters my language and my bearing, and so I may seem insolent. I got out of this very well by desisting in my visits to Señorita Luciana in the aforementioned other novel. I cannot deprive myself of the exchange with you that circumstances offer me in this case.”

Other honeyed words and a few improvised couplets made happy this day for Maybegenius (who wanted to tell Sweetheart everything) and the secret of “La Novela” is safe for now.

1 (Author: An unknown feeling pesters me. What if there’s some bitter critic reading me right now, mocking me because, with my weak grammar, for “you” I sometimes use the Spanish familiar “tu” and sometimes the regional Argentine “vos”?)

LETTER TO THE DISTANT SHADOW OF ETERNA'S ADMIRER, THE YOUNG PORCIO DE LARRENAVE, AS IT LENGTHENS WITH THE PAST, AS HE FORGETS HER.

Fleeting gentleman, lord of Oblivion.

When, more than the sound of your steps — the silence that passes over your figure as you walk — the indifference of the steps before you empties your solitude and you stop for a rest, it may be that this letter reaches you, and then you might hear the distant rhythm of another’s step as it starts down the path that you follow, beginning the lesson in sadness you have already suffered. Ah, you will say, it must be the one who shared Eterna’s attentions, the one who came after I left, who innocently caused my departure with his arrival, and you won’t realize that there’s only room for one at a time alongside that sampler of souls, Eterna. You have my commiseration, then. Take it.

When I met her I said to myself: When she looks this way, her downcast eyes turned obliquely towards the ground in front of her or towards the table against which we are reclining, and in which our downhearted bosom casts its insignificant shadow, just as I saw Porcio de Larrenave four years ago, the night when I met Eterna, what is it that I saw?

Today I know what it is. I know that you see yourself like this: as a path away from Her, the path marked by oblivion, that you must tread from that night on, the path which from that night on is also mine.

How much sadness, Señor Larrenave, did this road bring you? Tell me how to take a little of the sadness away from this path. Your experience will help me to avoid suffering as you did. What do you think about while you travel it? It’s best to think only of her, no? Think of her beauty, of Eterna forever, give Sorrow our life and body for sustenance.

You watched me that night, Larrenave, with piety and malice, and you were silent. Did you already guess, upon seeing her prefer me to you, that regardless there would come a day when I would travel the same path as you do now?

Take pity on me: the only compassion I want for myself in this terrible undertaking is yours.

Sorry for you also. Yours,

The President

With this, I tell the Reader how Eterna and the President first met, and how it was a boundless dazzlement both for him, an inexpert thinker, and for Eterna, though she is as majestic and profound in her feelings as she is suspicious and in control of the self-delusion and easy games of what men believe love to be. So it was that much time passed before the President sought her out again, having weighed and measured his passionate inclination, and understood that Eterna’s attitude was not one of illusion, and he told himself that he would not be able to feel passion except passion for her.

That’s how it is possible, thought the Reader, to travel Larrenave’s road again, or else an Eterna will be lost to us forever — an insuperable, lifelong regret.

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

Maybegenius: “Whatever you like.”

“Today we have each other.”

“So we have Sweetheart’s happiness.”

“And the President’s. Let him be happy for at least a day.”

“But look, Sweetheart, here’s the lady who’s visiting.”

“Black eyes; she’s lovely; sad; she’s serious, and attractive. How many of us are sad, Maybegenius! Of course she has black eyes. She is tilting ever so gently.”

“What do you mean of course black eyes? No doctor could predict that a future newborn of course has black eyes. I predict that your blue eyes are the best and blackest, if that’s what you’d like.”

“If she sent a letter first, it’s because they already knew each other.”

“They might know each other, but as sure as there are good stories waiting to be told, if you ask him what color eyes she has, he won’t know.”

“You’re wrong about everything, thinker; he’s very interested in her.”