Macedonio Fernández - The Museum of Eterna's Novel

“How preoccupied you are, Sweetheart! Your suffering is useless; he’s not interested in her at all: it must have to do with his plans for the novel.”

“And you’re wrong about something else: the first thing he observes in people is the color of their eyes and…”

“So there is more than one first thing?”

“And their voice.”

“So in these two first things you win.”

“Don’t criticize my grammar, Maybegenius.”

“Your eyes are made for listening to a good story.”

“You are such a joker, Maybegenius!”

“On the contrary, Sweetheart, I’m heartbroken. I feel the dizziness of existing only in writing, when I could be here not in writing but in reality; this kind of engulfment is like what the film projector imposes on characters when it first of all projects the moment that they fall into a kiss, and then afterwards it has to withdraw them from sight. Tell our gentleman author, Sweetheart, that we should only exist in writing when we’re in pain.”

“Everyone’s sad!… but I will say that you just complimented me for the first time.”

“I’m in love, and I want life now, the life that is mechanically erased for cinema characters, when they should be given life in novels. In this, novels are sublimely superior to the cinema. I’m in love and I want life now that this love will make me happy; and so it’s with fear that I think perhaps now the novelist will raise his pen from the paper and stop. Anyway, do you want me to keep complimenting you? Your mouth…”

“Your own mouth should admit that the first compliment was mine, since a minute ago I told you that you’re an agreeable person, and good.”

“Now I’m really leaving: here’s Señorita Petrona’s carriage, with the legitimate cargo of her personage.”

And so they parted.

THE WATCH STOPS TICKING

Sweetheart: “Reader, I need you to breathe on this breathless page. Lean in more; all existence is so sad. Sweetheart is sad today.” Reader: “I’ll trade my leaden earth for your levity! Why so pensive, Sweetheart?”

“Maybe because all feeling is sadness.”

“Would that my life was worth lending you, was character-worthy!”

“It’s enough that we each think of each other.”

A SALUTE FROM THE CYPRESS

In the afternoon, while the foliage and the dusty ground make the initial music of a summer rain, the President, alone in the estancia, hears the desperate appeal of the Past interrupt his conscience: his soul clamors to recapture those nights at home spent in contemplation, aware of each respiration of the five beings in the filial home, all together under a single roof. Everyone was asleep, and leaving his desk in search of these beloved figures, bodies denounced for bedclothes, heads, hands. Could he be more gripped by the past?

ONE OF THE FIVE "LOOSE PAGES IN THE NOVEL"

The lady mentioned in the conversation between Sweetheart and Maybegenius was the august woman to whom the President directed himself for six years before the following letter, as careless in its redaction as it is ardent in tone, because of the agitation of those days of his life:

Buenos Aires, July 1923

To Eterna.

I can’t go a single moment without thinking of you.

I can’t quite grasp what impulses motivated your conduct towards me since the telephone call on Friday at two, which is to say Saturday morning, remember? Until today.

I have been tenderly but energetically chastised by the valiance and sensitivity of a great woman, peerless among those I have known, discreet, pious, active, pure — and my pride has not suffered. Before, yes, the rage I felt at losing everything, unsure of my attraction and calmed, in those days, waylaid by your constant kindness, not by infatuation but by the insidiousness of trust, of faith in the joy that possessed us and then suddenly went numb, I was humbled whenever I enjoyed your company; only fear ruled my conduct, faced with this first admonition of your lips; pride had nothing to do with it. From the moment I met you, the difference in worth and grace between us came to the fore, and I lived timidly, entirely submitting myself to the hour in which I would, in my inferiority, not win you, but lose you. I will consider nothing else now except what of you I might lose, perhaps even the sight of you; injury or flattery are now nothing to me.

Saturday night you showed me an evasiveness, a tormenting attitude in your constant clarity of tone and gesture, and your unfailing, inscrutable spontaneity. But I had already buried all my hopes, buried my heart, as the Spanish say, ever since the telephone communication of Saturday at dawn.

All the things you so cordially spoke about in the days we were together seem so different to me now. I enjoyed the profound goodness of our exchange for so many weeks and now those days are over! Perhaps there will never be another time like this for us.

I came again to your house on Sunday night, with the last day as an intimate illusion. The only thing I had, as I crossed your threshold, was this terror of even the most imperceptible shuttering of your manner. And you were waiting for me, and you confided in me and offered me again the precious consideration that enchants each daydream instant with you. I knew then that you had recently called my telephone; I was in constant agitation; I waited long moments in the vestibule before you received me, you received me with flowers, much more out of passion than charity, an unmerited abnegation given that, as you yourself said, no future can begin there.

What a dark hour we had, and what I couldn’t grasp then was how you, too, were suffering. I was and am unjust, and I have been, in this ennobling attachment, the freer and happier of the two.

No rebellion was ever born of this memory, and nothing is left of my pride, nor do I want any pride to remain, where you or your memory reside. I only want holiness to reign in my thoughts and treatment of Eterna. One day I can hope that my spirit will be possessed of such powers that I will trade this phrase, which now and for a long time has defined the feeling of our sympathetic exchange, for something limitless.

But I will wait for so long, and so quietly, that maybe you’ll disquiet yourself, be injured by my mute suffering, and, generous as always — or perhaps, as is my fervent desire, touched by passion — humble in your tenderness, not out of pity but out of delight, you’ll venture to give yourself to the fullness of the immense feeling of identification, of love — and you, ardent woman, will be the first to speak.

You who suffered the most and toiled the hardest, who is more and gives more, who teaches yet has nothing to learn, nothing distant in your soul, ever

Eterna

And the truth is, Eterna, that in those days there was a world of things to discover in you. One word from you on the telephone in the last of Saturday’s dawn was the first announcement — because of its tone, and when it was said, not because of its cold reception — of the flight of our happiness. How much more disillusionment must you have suffered by my errors and defects!

I think I know; and I am drawn, as in a nightmare, to name them all.

It had to be this way. No man can be great before you, nor can he ever hope to be, having come to you, unless he learns it from you. And even so: I wanted to learn, not invent, my holiness of passion. I hoped for everything from passion, I lived until today without it, and without wanting to prepare myself for it, only wanting to learn passion under torment, hopeless of any comparison with the beauty of spirit I would some day encounter. And even now, knowing passion, I live more for your pardon than for martyrdom, purification, faith in myself; I lived in the happiness of knowing a living Beauty, definite as a model of my virtue.