Macedonio Fernández - The Museum of Eterna's Novel

But faced with the President’s confidence in the project to abolish Buenos Aires’s ugliness, they all longed to conquer in the name of beauty and the mystery.

“It’s over, it’s broken!”

“There’s another one just the same, don’t cry!”

“But Life isn’t like that! That limpid, content friendship we once had will never be the same.”

President: “And a love that once was impossible now will never be…”

Maybegenius: “But it was my first time in love, and I’ll keep it forever, even if she doesn’t return it. What is the ‘beloved self?’ Only a word; I’ll have her love for him for myself.”

The Lover: “In life. But in personal eternity? Eternal, individual time exists for every Possibility; impossibility only exists in terms of space and time: to be and not to be at the same time in a single point; for something to occur and not occur at the same time, this is the only impossibility. In truth there’s no impossibility except contradiction, which is to say, senselessness. To love and not to love is contradictory, but to love today and not tomorrow is not.”

President: “You give me eternity and, in her, total possibility; in her my invariable identity. But this identity is not that of one who cannot love a perfect lover today, but can tomorrow. Perhaps I’m not someone else when I feel what before I did not feel?”

But the Lover was silent, as far as anyone could tell: what I like most in “La Novela” is nonexistence’s discretion, invisible and impossible dealings with the Gentleman Who Doesn’t Exist.

THE CONQUEST OF BUENOS AIRES

For some time, the President had followed the news of the fierce discord stewing in Buenos Aires, because of the antagonism between two gangs into which the population had divided itself: The Romantics and the Jubilants.

Each one of these gangs sought dominance; one by means of ultra-tender poems and the invention of impassioned tales, the other by means of literature and a multiplicity of other ingenious devices dispersed throughout the city to provoke the grotesque.

One of the recourses of the Jubilant Gang, it will be remembered, was that they used military force to pinch and distort the city’s mirrors, a plan that was ordered and executed within twenty-four hours and by means of which they created a veritable hysterical crisis that put an end to all transit and business (official and otherwise) in Buenos Aires for an entire week. (The President himself was wrongly suspected of being the source of this measure, which would have explained his frequent excursions to the capital, and sojurns there.)

The next week the Romantics dominated. Bolstered by all of the loudspeakers in the city, they repeated in unison, for an entire day, a lacerating poem about a woman of advanced age and very plain features who had caused a young blind man to fall in love with her beautiful, youthful voice; this woman, the afternoon on which her lover was expected to arrive, and whose eyesight had been restored by a helpful surgeon, kills herself by burning herself in a pyre so immense that it instantly reduced her face and body to ashes, so that the young lover, believing that she anxiously prepared herself to receive him in her best clothes and that the fire in which she perished was an accident, was driven mad with sorrow and threw himself from the balcony. This story in verse was repeated to the population as if it were breakfast, lunch, tea, and dinner, with the result that by the end of that Romantic Week a mere boy was able to appoint himself to the governorship of Buenos Aires. And in truth, the story was doubly tragic: a woman who could not stand her lover’s horror at seeing her, though he believed in her and he imagined her to be so beautiful: but he never felt this horror, not even at first, because someone who is born blind has no visual imagination and, once the power of sight is granted to him, he is almost never able to tell beauty from ugliness, because these are matters of custom.

(This civil war also reached the metaphysicians: between the Soulists, who wanted Human Consciousness to reach to the Third Reflection, and the Automatists, who believed that supreme wisdom is found by returning to the Zoological Psyche.)

The President meditated on this civil discord, and knowing that a certain inclination to tolerance, to civil coexistence, characterized Argentine society, outside of the bull-headed, had thought on it for a long time, finally deciding that this unusual porteño (as the inhabitants of Buenos Aires are called) exasperation must have a psychological, but non-reflexive origin, indicated by the city’s various errors incurred in the course of the last thirty years, and maybe a few more to come, since it was particularly careless in the regulation of the tastes and aesthetic practices of civil cohabitation.

The President also attributed part of the disenchantment of porteño life to the failure to achieve a particular historic fact that had been featured, but frustrated, in the past.

Once Ugliness was eliminated from its history or its streets, once that historic injustice or excess of civic enthusiasm was rectified, the gang war would disappear and Buenos Aires would be forever ruled by Beauty and Mystery.

So it was that the President arrived in Buenos Aires with his diminutive but devastating army of characters, with the plan to meet with the leaders of both gangs and to convince them that their behavior, so dissonant with Buenos Aires’s usual mode of being, could only be the fruit of an impulse, suggestion, or cause of which they themselves were ignorant.

And the Romantics and the Jubilants understood the sterility of their dispute, and the fecundity of beautiful work that common effort offered.

How did it happen? A novelistic miracle! (The most abstruse miracles, like immaculate conception, have brought the incomprehensible to life for humanity for centuries. The pinnacle of universal incomprehensibility is often fame, just as the praise of those who do not understand them has made certain philosophers famous. What’s more miraculous than these glories is those modest, useful miracles of which the novel avails itself.) And, this miracle happened by means of diverse and subtle recourses most amenable to desperation or the bewitching of the Buenos Aires population, so that they became docile towards the President’s forces. For example: in the bars, among the odors of alcohol and tobacco, rolled a boiling wave of savory stew whose vapors emitted a homey, charming perfume and which dismantled the incipient orgy; it also put an end to the imperfect irrigation of the trees in the plazas and sidewalks, some of which had been left unwatered, something that leads to the desperation of those who enjoy watching trees be watered; it put an end to that woman who walks around asking everyone if her face is wider than it is long; it dispatched all hanging mirrors that are so thin that they only show half your face; all falsely distributed automatic photography machines; the subsidized circulation of the fat and the deaf that was everywhere nothing but an obstruction, everyone yelling at the deaf people and watching the fat ones argue with the bus conductor: “Yes sir, I'm over 90 kilos, bring the scale if you like!” so as to take advantage of the free fare that was municipally mandated for those whose previous weigh-in was over 90 kilos; it got rid of the sound of corks squeaking in bottles (Maybegenius’s favorite pastime); it dispatched with the backwards hat, and the poorly-knotted tie…

Among so many measures, which were indiscriminately employed by the President’s whole company, Eterna thought of and used only one: to make a messenger with a lighted lamp run from one end of the city to the other, so he could give the lamp to an artist who was at that moment seated at his desk, filled with inspiration, but without a light.