Macedonio Fernández - The Museum of Eterna's Novel

You intertwine your steps in the present with the Night, and you secret yourself from the call of the Day, of the President; you make your present nocturnal and love your past as dazzlement.

You love the night and sometimes in your pallor you are the night in your bestarredness, your eyes, your sighs, in the silence, in the non-present, in the Remembering. You. I believe in your pallor of love and remembering, not in the pallor that one day death will simulate in you.

You are the night where I saw my way

You carry me, you are the guiding night!

I call you illumined night,

Because you make the night’s light fresh,

The daylight wounds you, snuffs your world.

You are the night. I only found my way in you.

And only I

Discovered you

In night’s shadows.

HOW I MAY HOPE TO KEEP YOU

I will be defeated, but there’s only one thought that can give you the entire response to the Mystery of your being and of all being, and it’s mine. One day you’ll seek me out for it, in the pathways of eternity. I’ll tell you the word that only I possess and you’ll stay by my side year after year. I have the thought that explains all being, yours included. And now I search your portrait for the trace not of your being, but of how you are, because you are however we see you and know you.

DARLING BEING:

Nothing matters as you do, as we do; no work of man or of the world, nothing has a chance, nothing breathes as it does in you, what lightens or rests or bids farewell, for an instant, to the murmuring memory where recollection sleeps in you, if only for an instant. Not even your quick laugh, so noble, tremulous, and wet with tears; it’s my laugh, it is the word you have for me, the word that among all of your words alone finds comprehension in me; may the entire Future wait until I have come, and may it not linger after, Never shall another drink from your throat, from your being, like the artist who speaks to you now, who has found you, who follows you. And I don’t want you, the Wellspring, the eternal Child who still finds her first tears in this tender, fleeting laughter which sometimes I can elicit in congress with you and which seems to be the last sob of weeping like petals, opening with the day: tears, tears from the Wellspring, tears of hope, of “weep no more…”

IT COULDN'T BE

You will show me

Dolorous Eterna.

Pious, we wound ourselves

with oblivion’s kiss

it burns memory

but loveless leave us on this ground

Without this futile love.

Let it be when tears’ kiss presses

Our faces in what our bodies knew

supreme intimacy

When we feel passion’s last pain

And its greatest.

We’ll forge lethal

the sign

all pain

but with death.

The death asked for love’s

Initiation is not

the death lovers fear.

Day through night,

not night through the day.

SUBMISSION

If I cannot stay by your side

you must give me

a lover’s talisman.

Faithful as you are strong

you must forge oblivion’s kiss

fatality’s kiss, impossible kiss

here we submit our destinies.

And let tearing ourselves away

be our departure,

separating ourselves from when we were closest.

Pull our resigned destinies

first step of no return

out of our last caress

when we were the closest.

And we will not await

Love’s vanquishment

Tormented.

Your love slept while it could

I didn’t fall apart until you awoke.

I already know how it will be.

I’ve already known my love

impatient in the future’s ardent study

pulling us our gullible hands will say: come to me

later…

0 ETERNA, IN YOUR MOUTH NOTHING MORE BE SAID: I AM FLEETING

Suspense remained, the breath placid

murmuring quiet existence,

placid a faraway gaze, and a thought resting

amused for a quiet while

free from agitation or life’s demands

influencing the caring white hand

you placed on me, as if it were a breeze

and this is how I know the new paces of your thought.

Knowing your spirit’s ways in the cool pressure of

your palm

drinking with you the air you breathe,

it just vibrated with your voice, you said:

I am fleeting.

Below, at my gaze’s edge,

Your white hand

Like your black pupil wholly ardent, where

I don’t look, judging it full.

What you said, just now, without looking at me

Waiting in precious silence

gracious and assured of the answer you know

My enamored mind sought to surrender to you

with all its forces, immense, eternal.

This silence, Eterna, in a mouth subtlely smiling

trusting in love, this silence gentle and clear

only I have discovered this smiling light,

I would like to keep it.

And in my eternal memory I’ll have it

eternal as our love’s wealth of speech.

This silence

You hold this silence between your lips

so close to my happy contemplation

it provokes me.

To a lover’s rage against

the ephemeral

against death, in all my thoughts.

Rid yourself of the silence you toy with in love’s security

feigning hopelessness while you expect certainty

I have the answer you know already, it cannot be hidden

no matter the fictions of ceasing, of leaving

we call death.

So close, venturesome, looking at your throat

and your breast alive with respiration’s murmur

It comes and goes, is moved and loses itself

in opened mouths’ immense signification.

The air we drink in

the sound of rhythmic breathing

our breasts’ oscillation in unison with the ocean.

I loved Eterna

though I never hoped to be her lover

and today, how modestly

you gave me a beginning more real more

pristine, more inaugural than birth

when you said “Yes, I love you too.”

as if it were nothing

as if the magnificence of Life’s creation

didn’t light your prodigious words!

Yes, I am as one who trembles

one who trembles happily in a beautiful dream

and, hurt, because wakening robs him

nevertheless reality awaits him

and the wakening that keeps her words,

I am here, trembling

without receiving the gift, not believing it

not intimately receiving it, surest joy of my being

without faith

in your love’s present, what before I begged for

with lamentation

this love was given to me so often in dreams

of which wakefulness robbed me.

Even if I could

today the real is more daring for me than any dream

tell me again, call me, wake me

I still haven’t the courage

to draw back wakefulness, morning’s curtain, make

this dream distant in exchange for the real.

KEEPING COMPANY

“It isn’t that I didn’t know

but I was late”

she told you, strangely disturbed me, my voice,

submerged in contentment

the first time I met you.

Fortune teller, now my foot is on your threshold

it introduced us.

You are wise, but there is no place, no instant

where you are.

Or how you look, talk, and appear,

only your soul knows love,

and there can’t be anything more in it

anything more in me.

Only I was late

because the fences said as I walked

coming here, walking again

“It was never love, it can never be.”

and truly there were flowers withering

in the fences, in the hour of siesta, all light.

I told the countryside fences and walls

“I have left it to her, she must give me her love.”

I know how to be only love,