The Museum of Eterna's Novel

A CHARACTER, BEFORE HER FIRST APPEARANCE

“I want to know what kind of people I’ve ended up with here.”

“Nobody who isn’t worthy of it. Eterna, the Lover, the President.”

“But you should know, Mr. Author, that I can’t learn any more, and I can’t teach anything to anyone else. Sometimes I’m called Mignon, in Wilhelm Meister…

“But if we have Eterna here, who was called Leonora in Poe; and the one who was called Rebecca in Ivanhoe, and our own Eterna finds herself in Lady Rowena.”

“When will I find my own great novelist?”

“Haven’t you found him here?”

“But look, your novel doesn’t have a ‘hermetic seal,’ but it leads the way to another novel, because I’m a transmigrating character and I arise not from readers’ posterity but out of authors’ posterity.” “Let’s leave it at this: behave yourself for me. For the rest of it, I don’t believe that the authors of the future will be content with used characters, but this isn’t my concern. We have an understanding.”