Macedonio Fernández - The Museum of Eterna's Novel

What a pious and august concern has been yours in these two days!

What depth of being you demonstrated, forgoing everything you cared about so as to spare me the pain you were bound to inflict.

I trusted in your forgiveness, before, and nothing more. And now: I believe it is I who suffers most. What a lightning bolt you were!

Forgive me.

Graces are reflected in your action: tenderness, energy, sensitivity, tact — even in these days, in the intricacy of such consternation, you have not abandoned them, nor your fantasy, nor the subtle mischief in your manner. These graces exceed everything I put in the little poem “You Went In The Night, Sad and Adorned,” when I told you that I could not guess at you, could not reach you.

I didn’t believe I knew so little of you, and that someone would teach me, and that I would grow in this way.

While you may believe that I’m tormented by love itself and have lost hope in any reciprocation of affection, I surprise myself alone, and I humiliate myself in measuring the delicate care for me that has so quickly been born in the heights of your sentiment. It shames me to think I didn’t see the growth of your feeling: I condemn this coarseness in my own feelings, and betray that which I don’t believe I deserve.

You’ll understand, then, why I had lost hope when the first warning sounded, when, fighting against yourself, you resolved to shatter my illusion.

As little hope as I had when our involvement began, I have conducted myself as a common cad in my conception of the fullness of our destiny. And it wasn’t caddishness but enchantment, and faith in the fortunes of Passion.

Something concrete must have intervened, not for you to change, since you’ve always managed to get me accustomed to the mobility of your sentiments towards me. But I’m already ashamed of analyzing these occurrences, what came out of our few exchanges.

You suffer no more, sensitive creature, if with such grateful happiness for my reappearance and, having retaken that lost path towards our existential communion in all its vicissitudes, the other day you showed yourself so jubilant and anxious for the reconciliation of our two lives. I return to you forever, and, impelled by the fear incurred by the grave risk I escaped, I accept these limits that you impose as inescapable.

Eterna!

The author: Here I have a letter that, it must be said, no great author of a great novel like this one would have written so poorly, with such excessive and sentimental language.

The President, apparently unconcerned, never thought it badly written, and in this I have the argument against novel characters writing private letters (since it’s obvious that this is a private correspondence that’s not intended for the reading public, since all the information needed to understand it and guess its outcome are missing, except for the person who already knows everything it’s going to say and might even decline to read it, which is a very sensible abstinence, considering that the lover — it can’t be concealed that the President is a lover, even though he expresses himself with a maximum of confusion in that regard — allows his letters to arrive at the beloved’s house as if he hadn’t really bothered himself to write them; he could have just burned them afterwards, telling his beloved when he sees her: “I wrote you a splendid letter that pleased me very much, but naturally I didn’t send it to you because it was only an exercise in literary agility.”

And then Eterna would ask the President every time she saw him, “Did you write me any letters?”).

In the preceding letter, the President alludes for the first time (though doubtlessly he did so frequently in his secret conversations in the novel) to his telephonic communications with Eterna. (The way to achieve a purely oral conversation without vision or gesture is to talk on the telephone in the dark.)

It’s true. They talked at length every evening, and Eterna always ended with a little song that sounded like the defiant, sobbing cry of a little girl who hasn’t gotten her way, to which the President would respond: “I want to do what I want. Give me this, and pamper me a lot until I fall asleep, so that I can dream of how much I like you, and how the one I love thinks of me and dreams of me.”

“I haven’t learned how to do it yet; tomorrow I’ll be better.”

“But today makes yet another day without perfect love; one more irreparable day. No, the past is not irreversible, this is what you always say.”

“Yes, there is every reason to Hope: when the days of perfect love number more than the days of turpitude, oblivion, laziness, and apprenticeship, the past is as nothing.”

“And after that you change again?”

“No, perfect love lasts an eternity.”

“No pity, no pity, President. No pity. The false lover is he who pities, or who asks for its recourse. Love is equality.”

THE MOMENT WHEN, AS THEY GO TO BED AFTER THIS INTERESTING CHAT, EVERYONE IS TROUBLED BY PROBLEMS THAT PERHAPS SLEEP WILL RESOLVE

President: Hallucination of the past, with its culmination in the Novel; a situation and a scene has equal power over feelings that have changed, like tyranny, or confusion.

Eterna: Absolute oblivion; oblivion in favor of a great present; oblivion of the person with whom one speaks, whom one regards.

Sweetheart: We want different things, sometimes we put on the light, sometimes we put it out; to see and not to see; let them see us, let’s see each other; let’s not.

Maybegenius: A test of the novelist’s art; to traverse the emotional state of a boxer at the ten count.

The Lover: The struggle between a present passion, a present beloved (her image), and the memory of a dead person.

Unlike his friends, Simple is not troubled by personal or imaginary — but more or less distant, idealized — problems; he has to honor the trust placed in him, his suitability to resolve this problem: with the perfumed smoke left over from forced smokers, cinema actors make an Illusion of Eterna, to cover up for their terrible gestures: just as the Lover must weave his own Hopes.

Author: You, reader, since now you may enter my pages, lose yourself and liberate yourself from reality and from these problems, since it’s just as worthwhile to stay in the real or to believe yourself real, if you’re like me and half the rest of humanity (the whole other half is devoted to altruism, since it’s just as easy to be good as it is to be evil, that’s why, if you notice, you’ll see that good people, even saints, don’t even realize what they are. (If Leopardi had known this, how many tear-soaked rants over humanity’s evils would we have been spared. (I’ll speak parenthetically about parenthesis: I’ve ordered parentheses of two sizes to be made (I don’t know why boring but emphatic literature, almost always written by grammarians, zealots, or artists, repudiates the emphatic parenthesis of the second order and yet makes use of two or three hundred adjectives; which is to say, organization of that instrument, the Word in lexicon and syntax as if they were steel workers forging palettes without thinking themselves artists by this action) you, reader, want the best for all humanity, and you tremble at the thought of its suffering. That’s why you hope that each character will resolve his problems tonight and wake in the morning with his mind as easy as his heart.

Reader: That’s so. Oh, if I could be a fly on the wall for your conversations, and in this way know for even an hour what it is to be a character! Who in “La Novela” does not breathe life?

Sweetheart, who seems to hear this echo of Life: To breathe, this rising and falling of the chest; ours don’t respire, and this blanching and blushing of lovers’ cheeks. Only think of the nothing that you and I both are, President.