Macedonio Fernández - The Museum of Eterna's Novel

So now he gathers them all together to propose that they give Eterna life, so that someone in the novel may be saved from the unreality of being a character.

FOR EVER-CHANGING ETERNA, AN ENDLESS, IMMUTABLE POEM

For Eterna:

At your feet, before either you or I is sure of the first word that says today begins for you, bend to me your amiable visage and lucid spirit, either frowning or with forehead serene, so that in it are shown your labors and your reposes; bend towards the grave thought that with my art I inspire; and today, more than the days before, when they made a Today for you of my own, I want severe and rigorous divinings of the mystery pulsing in your being and in the gracious line of your tiny, eternal steps, for now you are Matter, if I am your artist, and you are what I most hope for myself.

For I make your hope my hope. I didn’t bring it with me when I came, yet today I know hope, better than my own, your hope in me — I don’t want it for myself, nor would I have it without you. Now you know that if you let your faith fail, there will be no point, nothing will be left of me to die, not even hope, since everything of me dies in you.

CHANGES IN YOU.

Agitation, in the immortal, is your fantasy in love. Even if there were death, even if our heartbeats were numbered, you give yourself ardently to life’s pressures; your inspired being tries everything, and you call out everywhere so that nothing of your love is untested, so that nothing in it may sleep, even unexpected sleep; even if death could exist! Even if you had to learn and count each grain of sand.

Neither my love nor my mind had any warning of how you were yesterday.

I knew you anew, and loved you as you asked. With everything I already know and love of you, you made yourself a beautiful other: yesterday you wanted to be the being the Night showed you.

I still don’t know how to wait for you after you’ve come: in your genial changes you outstrip me, and even though I eagerly follow, my love cannot guess ahead of you. One day I’ll have a feeling for what you will and want to be each morning.

But in your ardent fictions, does it not sometimes happen that you are so far ahead of what I can guess that to see you transformed, stripped of your beauty, is always equally lovely? I love you for the first time with an entirely new love, and am thus unfaithful to the first; you make me unfaithful with your changes, and always in love with what I do not see in you. Is this not a death, the only kind that can happen in the fullness of love, because I love you forgetting what I have already loved?

I am still only an acolyte in the mystery of love, taught by your lighted eyes, and in your mobile accents. I vacillate, unable to recognize you amidst all the enchantments and mutations of your transfigurations, as you avidly renew your eternal beauty.

In the eternal, everything is, and this is how I may find myself bitter that I have ceased to love you, since you are always what I love; “another” love is possible in you, if you change so much that my memory cannot reach you, cannot find you. Let me learn. And later foretell.

NIGHT IS THE BEAUTY IN WHICH IT PLEASED YOU TO DRESS YESTERDAY

As if your eyes had thought themselves a part of the night’s vestment: stellar lights in them — but it wasn’t that, it was wishes of your soul, hardworking in their adornments and self-transfigurations, your spirit’s ardent fictions as it gives itself to fantasy and the force Beauty requires to protect your being from the near and involuntary cosmos — you feigned your eyes’ spoiled presumption — truly, you figure their disquiet — your vigilant concern was to live in exaltation, immune to the Forces of the mundane: Night, Beautiful-Sadness: you wanted to be beautiful and so you appeared, to the point that it gave me pain, for to equal you is impossible, and it’s impossible for any art to explain you.

You affirm the lights of your spirit — the day has no light, nor the night any purchase without your consent — you are unafraid to lose them, to be Night and to lose yourself in it, immense and untrammeled… And night has turned to today, it possesses the enigmatic night, and it possesses Departure, and nearby Dreaming — the departure is in its breast, invisible dreams trip us up — you listen to me with your breath agitated by the flutter of your full, confident heart and the skeins of your fantasy

You are deep night, with its ebony depths, heights of life in the ;domed headdress of the Milky Way, brilliant dimples at diverse distances, the immense, ample swing of the celestial vault.

Your thought is honored in your person, your vestments and motions, the statuary of the night, its subtle and magnificent path, and harmonious respiration in its full extension, your nearby step wakes the surrounding air, in the revolving processional towards the dawn your distant pace is congruent with all planes and summits. In you the “word” and the “voice” of the night are one; I heard its voice for the first time and in your hand I knew something even more prodigal: the touch of the night.

The night, which chooses its own precious, sparse, delicate and invariable adornments, not the day, whose oppressive dazzle we cannot avoid; the lunar paleness of your face blues in your black eyes and hair. We are capsized by both nearby voices and broad murmurs, vast ebonies that marble the heights and the depths alike. The night touches us, and we tremble, like its distant lights.

Night is life in beautiful sadness, but with hope’s flutterings, with voluntary, ornate, sparse, and elevated thoughts, this is how you made yourself, pale and dark, how you undid the distractions of immortality, how you gave yourself such beauty in the supreme and unhesitating predilections of your being, in spirituality’s reborn joys; let these joys defend your eternity and the Desire with which you have chosen to live it.

And you are the Night, as severe of aspect as your heart is lush with fervent invention.

THE DAY AJAR

I know who the “pale one” will be who can defeat me in your heart. He’s the one I sometimes meet on the way, who walks before me, fervently advancing along the walls and hedges. He twines roses in the fences; and in the whiteness of a thousand sparks with which the afternoon raises itself in light, he winds a band of darkest shadow around the roots of each tree, and he stretches a narrow ribbon of darkest shadow at the feet of the low fences of the countryside, and along the walls he runs a plank outlined in black, sets it “plumb” in the entire verticality and oscillation of the day, on the lake named Siesta. Little stains of darkness, dappled gray in the dazzling light, secrets kept from the Day at the foot of the rose bushes, as if the roses grew from this secret and the fragrance of the roses were the tears of this secret.

There is another man with the pallor of the artist and lover, another “pale one,” more loving, more artistic. He has no more life than what we give him. He’s the one who believes he’s found in me what I long to be: the Artist, he who even takes the shadows of things in hand, so that the Day does not subsume them, the Real in its transparency of being. The artist is he who loves everything and speaks everything.

He is invisible, if the light of the afternoon Siesta passes through him; dark in the Night, but his face is clear in its pallor and with the pallor of the moon and stars. When you think of him, I think of him.

You have eyes and hair of the darkest shade, they hate the light that lets things dodge the absorption of Siesta; tender things that love their shadows and humble love affairs, let the artist take them in hand, they don’t want to be absorbed into the transparent-making power of the Siesta and they wait, holding on to their shadows; they walk towards the Night, catching up their tulle skirts in their hands, skirts that tell them they exist: their shadows.