Macedonio Fernández - The Museum of Eterna's Novel

Author: “Why the devil do I write? What you are doing, reader, and what I’m doing — is it better than sleeping? A reader can define himself as a man who can’t sleep without a book in his hand; but it’s a minor neurosis, very understandable. On the other hand, the author writes about someone sleeping, or everyone else falls asleep.” Reader: “I seek, and I wait.”

Author: “To be an author?”

Reader: “Because I’m resisting the belief that a ‘man of letters’ is someone who says everything and knows nothing.”

Author: “Reader, sometimes your presence is requested in my pages and you are absent: your face comes close, and mirrors the dreaming in these pages, and you are absent. What bothers me is the reader: you’re my problem, your existence is invincible; the rest is just a pretext to keep you within earshot of these proceedings.” Reader: “Thank you.”

Sweetheart: “Don’t you think the President’s a little down?”

Maybegenius: “He undertook the Conquest of Buenos Aires with enthusiasm, and showed a good example of activity, but now I sense a certain enervation in his initiative.”

“Maybe it’s his memories.”

“How the past can weigh on us.”

“But many people live on a momentary happiness.”

“Is it the past or the future that makes the President sad?”

“What if we ask him? How good he is!”

“Will he guard his secret jealously?”

“I don’t think so. If we come at an opportune moment, we may learn what concerns him.”

“But let’s also speak of ourselves today.”

Maybegenius: “Today I have two new storylines, sweetest Sweetheart; do you see how I make good on my promise to invent a story or a plot for you every day? Thinking of lives, almost all of them sad or empty of great inspiration, it pleases me to create destinies that are shaded with the sense that it is preferable to have lived than not to have.” Sweetheart: “The discoloration of not having lived makes me sad, too. To live must be more than just a blast of light before sleep. But I don’t want to get depressed, I want to laugh with you.”

“I’ll have to invent a new plot; I was so happy with you that I wanted to cry.”

“It doesn’t matter, tell me today’s double stories, even if they’re not happy.”

“If you like. My first invention is merely a novelistic schema. It’s called, ‘The perfect third-party or love’s friend, or friendship’s third party in a love.’ In my opinion, two of the most delicious human attitudes are: the collective sentiment of knowing oneself to be publically in a state of Passion and the state of friendship’s third party with respect to other’s loves, or to a dead friend’s passion. My novel would be called The Transparency of the Third Party in friendship of a love , or Transparent Third Party, or Novel of the Third Party-Transparency of love. What do you think?”

“If your novel fails, it won’t be from a lack of titles.”

“It’s just that when I look at you, my improvisations get all muddled.”

“But your inventions or jokes or great ideas always make me pass the best time with you, and I, on the other hand, don’t even know how to show you how much cheer and good company you give me. But I remember your novel; it’s melancholy to live in the shadow of others’ lives. What about your other story?”

“It’s very tragic, maybe it will impress you, it’s called ‘Every Fear.’ It’s also just a sketch, the story itself will be a little long. What do you think about leaving it for later?”

“Tell it now. I listen with live pleasure: it could last all afternoon.”

“The character says, ‘Although I am dying, I must speak…’” Author (to Sweetheart and Maybegenius): “What Maybegenius is relating already happened to me. (To the reader): Seeing Sweetheart’s enthusiastic attitude when listening to Maybegenius, it’s obvious that in her mind he is the finest and most inventive teller of live experiences. Sweetheart has forgotten that I’m the narrator. While she gets a tray with the ingredients for a mate , which she’s going to ask Maybegenius to make her so that he doesn’t stop telling her a single detail of what happened with his protagonist, I’ll tell you my story, reader. Eterna is a deity when she listens: to contemplate her while she listens makes the President fail at every story he tells. I would be equally paralyzed, but I write down my narratives, and perhaps I’m thereby obligated to write competent novels.”

Maybegenius: “Do you hear something? Is life trying to get in here? It’s always near.”

Sweetheart: “Go on, go on, I’m hanging on your every word.”

“The dying man removes himself and says, ‘Make me stay, since I still have to tell you my great personal secret.’ They respond: ‘Yes, yes, stay, Substitute. Stay, we all want you to.’ So you know that in those days and among that people an abnormal psychology made it so that you could make people stay in life, the way today we make affable or much-loved visitors stay a while longer when they are about to retire or leave the conversation. So it was that this sick-unto-death man jauntily spoke up: ‘I will tell you why I was always known by the name of Substitute. I was born and was made to live as an understudy for Dionysius, that beautiful and intelligent man who the abnormal Mutilator of our people had in reserve so as to torture with brilliant mutilations, as if they were surgical models carved with an Extra-scalpel. Everyone here knows that the mutilation-type we love is Pure Mutilation, which is to say without hatred or the filth and vulgarity that Hateful appetites bring.’”

“Continue, please; the narrator of this story has no right to breathe.”

“Very well: ‘I was living and alert until I encountered my Disembowler, which had not yet been used, since it would be exclusively for me, since like all of us, I wanted its first Action (or anything worthy of that name, that is, anything destructive) to be, naturally, on me. I lived a horror of moral martyrdom when. . But no, I’m regretting having asked for the prerogative of life: I should remain myself, regardless of the final consequences, I should die with my great personal secret. .’ Substitute begged them to find a death whose effect would be retroactive, occurring the moment when he had been given his prerogative of life in order to make this regretted confession. Death throes have their duties but also their privileges, and the abnormal ones did not want, despite the intrigued anxiety that Substitute elicited in them, to force him to unveil the horrors of his moral martyrdom.”

Maybegenius or Substitute: “You must learn not to promise a story whose legitimate ending cannot appear on the record; otherwise you leave a little wound on the curiosity of whoever has legally contracted to hear your story. I am not content to let Substitute carry the greatest secret of the abnormal ones to his grave!”

“I recognize that Substitute has a certain defect, though I think that if he had known you would be so interested he wouldn’t have left off in his confession of the secret of the Extra-scalpel. I propose instead that I read you the first chapter of The man with only one nose (an incredible novel).”

But Sweetheart can’t forget about Substitute so quickly, so Maybegenius has to find a way to absorb her in one of those subtle problems that he likes to cultivate: man’s existence or being, from which some other equal creature exists in the world (the secondary man), or man’s existence which is alluded to in a correspondence of dialogue between people who know each other and who have heard him talked about but don’t know him. But since Sweetheart remained pensive, he opted for trying to cure her mental wound with some mental tickling. So he told her that although in the trajectory from Buenos Aires to Rio de Janeiro a packet ship does not carry an official castaway, the orchestra makes more noise than moving house and would have drowned out the clamor of a hundred castaways. So the captain got great results with the following method: When there wasn’t a favorable wind, he had all the hot dishes served, and with all the wind that the thousand occupants of the boat blew in the same direction to cool off their dishes, he had a better than steady wind, and in the end, with this method he arrived in port a day before he would have been late.