Macedonio Fernández - The Museum of Eterna's Novel

Perhaps this messenger crossed paths with another that that joker Maybegenius also unleashed on the city: a trombonist with paralyzed respiration who carried a candle in the fingers of a equally paralytic hand, so that he could neither blow out the candle or let go of it; and gesturing for somebody to please put it out so he wouldn’t burn himself, he ran for many blocks and ended up charring his fingers, just as Maybegenius had foretold, as he wanted to make him believe in the shocking egotism of the population, which prevented anyone from offering to blow out his candle; with this he proposed to play a joke on the vaunted fraternity or benevolence of the population, when in reality this negative attitude owed itself to a general distrust of transients, as well as the porteño fear of practical jokes.

Sweetheart competed with Maybegenius in the deployment of jokes as conquest. She found Buenos Aires’s the most mechanically incompetent man, and also it’s most myopic, and she sent him a very high-end radio as a gift, complete with a tiny, complicated closure, which made of this radio the first obsequity of a final calamity, since this poor man could not rid himself of the apparatus when he wanted to sleep or rest, because although he was slow and nearsighted, he was also grateful and kind, and he couldn’t bring himself to shut the radio up with a hammer; what’s more, he endured the complaints by those in the pension house where he lived.

I still remember the apoplectic accounts that circulated each night; electric telephone calls; powerful magnets surreptitiously distributed throughout the city, that invincibly attracted any bit of metal men or women carried on them; and the envelope-letters, letters written on envelopes and dispersed among all the tramway and bus seats, with a prize to whomever could tell if it was an envelope with a letter or a letter without an envelope. (The envelope-letter brought back one of the author’s own advertisements from eight or ten years back, in which the same intent of the conquest of Buenos Aires was proposed: to give Buenos Aires a certain mystery that it never had.)

How was it that the population never took to the streets, demanding a President Painkiller to rid them of these many exasperations?

One can easily imagine the idealism of the Conquest by thinking of what few truly memorable actions there are, and so it was that the city of Buenos Aires opened itself to beauty, erasing all the facets and vestiges of porteño life’s former ugliness.

It happened that certain past events were struck with nonexistence, making use of Eterna’s talent for undoing the past and tying on new, substitute pasts. (This is why you’ll sometimes see Eterna looking pale, and you’ll notice that she can’t pronounce the “n” in syllables ending with “on.” When she says “passiom” for “passion” or “salom” for “salon,” which are the only known signs of this fatigue, it’s because she’s spent the night in the immense mental effort of nulifying a past and, harder still, of inventing another that will content the owner of this sad story.)

Some of these past events are: Dorrego’s execution; Camila O’Gor-man’s martyrdom; Irma Avegno’s destiny; 1the exhibition of a certain writer’s pens to the adoration of the intelligent and modest Buenos Aires public; and the publication of the letters of a certain empress, which were of such lovely sentiment that it would have been a shame to violate their intimacy

One thing that never happened came into existence by virtue of novel-magic: Carlos Pellegrini’s presidency over the Argentine people, the most interesting kind of presidency, since it seems we can’t even breathe without the president. It’s interesting because at least he was a humorless man, and now we know whether it’s possible to govern without comedy.

The beauty of non-History came about; all homage to captains, generals, litigators, and governors was abolished — not a single recollection of a mother’s magnificent act, nor a childhood grace, nor the dark suicide of a youth overwhelmed by life; death was left to the dead and people spoke only of the living: soup, the tablecloth, the sofa, the hearth, nasty medicine, little shoes, the steps, the nest, the fig tree, the pine tree, gold, a cloud, the dog, Soon! roses, a hat, laughter, violets, the teruteru bird (there’s nothing sweeter than to use children’s nonsense to speak of Happiness); plazas and parks that bear the names of superlative human lives, but with no last names; streets named The Bride, Remembrance, the Prince, Retirement, Hope, Silence, Peace, Life and Death, Miracles, Hours, Night, Thought, Youth, Rumor, Breasts, Happiness, Shadow, Eyes, Patience, Love, Mystery, Maternity, Soul.

All the statues that saddened the plazas were evicted, and in their place grew the best roses; the only exception was that the statue of Jose de San Martin was replaced by another statue symbolizing “Giving, and Leaving.” In the end, something happened to non-flowing time, like history, and there was only a fluid Present, whose only memory was of what returns to being daily, and not what simply repeats, like birthdays. That’s why the city almanac has 365 days with only one name: “Today,” and the city’s main street is also named “Today.”

Many other small things were also accomplished, whose tiny sorrows might fill a life with horror, like what was spared, for example: the half-full glass, or the little lamp with hoarded light, or the twisted tie, or artificial flowers on tombs.

When the neighboring areas of Buenos Aires saw that this plan to purge the culture of its recent past had been accomplished, public health restored itself. Everyone affiliated with the Jubilant-Romantic feud woke one morning wondering how they had ever lived by such a fixed, banal, and batty ideal.

Once the Conquest was concluded, it was left to the Mystery to reveal to the President the most singular fact of any city, of which he was the only witness. I have it on good authority that on a certain day of the year 1938, and during a period of mere living, of frivolity, when it happened that the body of Alfonsina Storni reached death’s waters, the city displaced itself, spinning instead on her axis by moving a few centimeters. The President, still perplexed as to whether this urban gyration was a plea—“Don’t die!”—or a sorrowful approval of a dreaded and sad refusal of life, knows that thanks to this occurrence in the sensibility of the heart of a city at the instant of the death of this dreamer’s soul, Buenos Aires entered the Mystery.

When the President and his character army returned to the estancia “La Novela” at the same time the next morning, they “greeted each other with “Good morning”s. But the President returned to Buenos Aires that night, and I know why. To assign to the two central Plazas the names “City that knows no Death” and “For Non-Identical Men;” these denominations took place at the intersection of the two Plazas (the non-identical is exempt from death). 2

Thanks to these remedies and hopes, along with the Death-Concealer that Eterna invented, and the Joke-Laughter-Reviver that the Humorist made, Buenos Aires was blessed.

1 All traces of this woman’s path were erased — she who irrevocably disillusioned human piety — the path that sought a voluntary death in the streets of Buenos Aires and its suburbs.

2 Perhaps some readers will find the much-vaunted Conquest of Buenos Aires by Beauty and the Mystery to be less than lucid. It’s inevitable: the imperfection, truncation, and even insipidness of a novel that was only conceived as a cure, as Action without Object, as a state of depression and disorientation. If the author had made this chapter robust and gracious, he would have misrepresented the psychology of this Action. For the rest, I will satisfy my incredulous and clever reader by confessing that the chapter is simply the work of a dried-up writer, who can do no more.