The Museum of Eterna's Novel

GUIDE TO THE PROLOGUE (WARNING PROLOGUE)

I’m furnishing a new Chapter for leftover characters and scenes. I must improvise some kind of accommodations, pages, facts, and redaction for them, since my characters are all extremely minor: the second I leave off writing they stop doing things; when I’m not working, everything stops. Here’s little Juancito, “in floorless air of space”—a lyric that swells in me like a breath of relief in the face of the prologues that remain — in the middle of falling from a balcony, because yesterday I stopped writing, as any writer of conscience would do, to clear a space for his fall’s inevitable end (and to prepare the description thereof). It wouldn’t cost him anything to follow the action to its conclusion, but he doesn’t do it! Another time they were looking for me all over the Novel because I had left Don Luciano while he was putting one arm into his overcoat, and this posture had resulted in unbearable cramps. And the President complained because I interrupted his redaction just when he was going to blow out the match with which he had lit his cigarette, so he spent the whole afternoon burning his fingers with nothing to smoke. This seems impossible. At any given hour in my novel there’s someone with only one boot on, a young man with only one girlfriend, or some couple who wanted to be left alone except I hadn’t finished sending Mama to bed or having Auntie nod off. Also I left off writing Don Luciano when he was being fitted for a new Moral Sense, and I was nowhere to be found when they wanted me to return it. And what’s worse, though of a fortuitous consequence: I abandoned the entire audience at the christening of a new street name, and they were counting on getting some sleep as soon as the Minister got up to give his boring speech. I left him standing, and in the moment in which I was going to write about how the public was asleep, I was called away because of some curl that hadn’t curled or because only one side of some face was shaved; since the public was a character in my novel and the Minister wasn’t, he expounded at length all of his indispensable notions, and the public had to listen to it all, something which has never happened in a single inauguration, anniversary celebration, high school prize day, or statue unveiling. The audiences in my novel will never again call for streets to be christened. In the end, the editors warned me that if I leave off writing someone who’s going to buy my novel in that delicate instant of his unstable decision, I’ll be unworthy of the thousand pesos they spent on postering the walls with assurances about the “Best novel since both it and the world began.”