Macedonio Fernández - The Museum of Eterna's Novel

neither deity nor knowledge

nor the world, nor human

I scarcely have

her

company.

THE SHADOW IN LOVE'S DAYLIGHT

What is most loving in my love for you is that I think of you as uncreated, eternal; I see you as fragile, docile, dressed in mortality; and I think that you too will know a day when your face and hands feign death.

I’m certain that this dream will reach you. This thought — the thought of your Heart going mute, already without what my love heard, without this beat repeating in you, always and only: “my lover”—this thought is pain but not pallor, it torments my earthly existence, but it does not dismay my certainty.

A silence in your breast, a hand that does not reach out to follow mine as it calls to your palm, this is sadness, it’s everything lived culminating in the total pain of an instant. Everything we were is made pain, from when your heart forgot all the words that it gave to life, preferring to always and only to beat out: “my lover”—until this terrifying silence!

If you or I has to be the one to hear this last palpation, if you or I has to be the one who first experiences the silence of a heart, either mine or yours, may whoever of us knows the greater pain also die; do not cry out, wishing for one heartbeat more, as if it meant the whole pain of the Earth, all of Life, but instead seek a new encounter, to wake together, it’s as close as every waking, every dream.

Let’s always say so to each other.

Sometimes, when I’m by your side

Your eyes close halfway, and forget me.

Forgotten and close to you

I am like one who watches all night

at the head of the bed of a sleeping lover.

But you’re not asleep, you’ve gone; you always love

But not always me.

So I keep watch

over the links forged between our hours

and unknown to you

I ardently seek

a new link, invisible and strongest of all

but I can’t work on it if you’ve already turned away.

I’ll always fear

your returning past

this present, when you leave me.

LIVE, CHARACTER!

This is your doubting eyes task

to tend an ardent feeling

to sweep your gaze

over all you fear

to think of what you love, even adore,

what might hurt you.

Discover, discover!

I will look where you look.

If you don’t find it, who will?

Today if I am found where you are.

You are Totalove, and I am Clarity.

So Eterna gave the President a pleat in her skirt to hold and she said, “Take hold here, and follow me, to your penitence.”

The President desired this — to be treated like a child punished by his mother — now that he couldn’t do anything more with his ill-temper and his depression during frequent conversations when Eterna seemed so sure of herself, although so loving, more certain than him in her coddling and even more certain than he, always, of what could derail, degrade, or dull their love. Sulking, dominated, drunk with her ever-increasing beauty, care, energy, clairvoyance, resigning himself to the subtle, and most intelligent thought that pleased him: “It’s enough for me that all beauty resides in her; what does it matter what I am?”

So he followed her.

And Eterna…

Suddenly, with a suave attitude, Eterna turns to you, reader, and says in a rich, courteous voice:

“I address myself to you, reader; I am Eterna; a woman who is perhaps noble, perhaps beautiful and strong headed, of generous sentiment and grave destiny, perhaps haughty, with majestic manners, from an old and prominent family, and with a sumptuous house; with a clean and severe past, perhaps unhappy, and capable of an adventure whose exquisite, shuddering, brimming laughter, intrepid laughter that resonates from a deep place within, perhaps is capable of wiping the idea of Death from the face of the earth.

“You read what I’ve been saying and doing here, and perhaps you think that I’ve just been passing time with the President. Allow my words to reach you from these corners, that my accent and figure may reach you from the written word, and I’ll tell you, come closer: “Tell me, swear to it, can you feel my breath? Can you hear my voice?

“Every day I’ve got more of a past: to live is to create a past; so since mine grows every day, which can only happen for someone who’s alive, I must be alive and you and I must be in the same current of murmuring, faint, fleeting Time, and so you will have noticed that you learn more of my past in each page.

“But I’ll never know what I am; if perhaps what’s happened is that I was once real, and an artist with strange plans, tormented with tenacity and determination, turned me into a dream of these word-covered pages, which you hold in your hand.

“And if that’s so, I’ve got you, too: so much that happened to me must have been predetermined by novelistic causality. What you don’t have is a shocking sorrow: the sorrow of knowing that what my ambitions are to suffer and achieve is already written, prefigured in these pages; everything I don’t know, that will befall me; I don’t know anything of myself beyond this page, I know nothing of what fortune has in store for my great aspiration and so I’m even more disconcerted, and I rebel even more if I think about how unconcerned you are, reading, without realizing or thinking that how much you read, and at what speed, is the event that at this moment lacerates me, perhaps, and snatches from me whatever goodness was or would have been given me.”

It’s true, Eterna, you’re perfect, a unique perfection: all of your sensory existence is emotionalized, which is to say, that the slightest occurrence or action or consequence of that action is judged emotionally for itself, for its own tenderness, laughter, or reproach.

That’s why the President, who knows you so well — and who hasn’t a single emotion of his own — turns instantly and irrevocably into a child. Eterna, who applauds every lover’s caress and would give and receive all of them, has until today denied any caress that he would give her or that he conceived; she would be tireless and indiscriminate in caresses, but only with a lover and a beloved who were not perplexed in any way. Her torture, of being so much this way and not being able to accept caresses nor condescend to give advice in giving them, is the greatest and least evident, most unique and irreconcilable, disadvantage from which a human can suffer.

The Lover understands Eterna’s love. He, who is a Lover and who was the first to suspect Maybegenius’s affection for Sweetheart, and who more than once thought about this love, and Eterna’s love, believes that although Maybegenius loves Sweetheart the most, and she also loves him the most ., that does not make Sweetheart the most loved among women, if we can’t prove that Maybegenius is the man with the most power to love in all the world, since there could be another woman who had all of the love of the man who had the greatest force of love possible; and it could also be that a woman was loved by the most amorous man in the world but that she wasn’t the only one he loved, or the one he loved the most.

In contrast, Eterna did not want to be the only one loved by the most loving man, and she didn’t find this, nor does she have a splendid, that is maximum, human love. She is what Reality loves: Perfection. Reality has rested from its anxiety to realize a Perfect being, or an identification of the plurality among equals, that is, the annihilation of Plurality. She knows this, that she’s Being’s beloved, the World’s beloved, and this is the reason for the happiness in her face; she doesn’t have the total love of an Individual lover, and as proof I have here the immense sadness of her pursed mouth: she’s the happiest and the most unhappy of women. She isn’t understood. Reality is still unhappy, it can feel her convulse, lost. Even the best lover does not reach the best beloved; he had the love and even the exclusive love of various real individuals, but not the totalove of the best lover. Reality cannot stop itself: the absurd, the stupidity of Plurality continues, it has not been undone.