The Museum of Eterna's Novel

TWO REJECTED CHARACTERS

In a novel as well-ordered as this one, the reader should know the characters. And they should be classified.

Ours are:

Real Characters: Eterna, the President.

Fragile Characters, owing to their vocation in life, because they believe they can be happy: Maybegenius, Sweetheart.

Nonexistent Characters (with presence): The Lover.

Perfect Character, owing to a genuine vocation for being content to be a character: Simple.

End of the Chapter Character: The Traveler.

Absent Character, or Absence as character: The Man who Feigned to Live.

Smart, theoretical Character: The Metaphysician.

Thwarted Character, and Candidate for Character: Federico, the Boy with the Long Stick.

Unknown Character (the only celebrity appearing in the Novel).

Awaited Character: the Beloved of the Lover.

Characters by absurdity: the Reader and the Author.

Characters rejected ab initio: Pedro Corto and Nicolasa Moreno.

Those last two won’t be in my novel. Pedro Corto wanted to read it just so he could be in it — some Readers don’t want to start reading a book if you tell them beforehand everything that’s in it — and he demanded that the book finish before certain pies, which he had acquired just before the narrative began, could get cold; I believe his exclusion is justified without leaving me vulnerable to accusations of avarice in the number of characters. Nicolasa Moreno will not appear either, and although she accepted her role with great pleasure, she’s obliged to leave the novel for periods during which she goes to see whether the milk has boiled over, or she lifts the lid every few minutes on the sweet pumpkin she’d set to boil a third time; both activities cut down on her appearances in the book, and I can’t do anything about it, since everyone knows that God made a mistake when he prohibited ubiquity.

I hope that the lack of a Cook character will not give rise to the fear that I left all the characters with nothing to eat from beginning to end, something which would only suit the silhouette of the elegant Maybegenius. I fixed this difficulty, but I can’t remember now just how.

I forgot because I also had something else around here that could get cold: a food item or perhaps something more spiritual, I’m not sure, or something that could boil over: perhaps an enthusiasm or clarity in the Mystery, a half-phrase that might make all things finally transparent, give me mystic perception: perhaps it was something higher: one of Eterna’s gestures, leftover from yesterday, a new sublimity in her tenderness, a smile at her melancholy or of gratitude towards the present and fear for the future, for what will put an end to her; and I didn’t want to stop gazing at her in my memory, I kept this image of her expression — a pleat in her visage — with me in my solitude, making it appear to me again in memory, just as someone repeatedly throws a stone into quiet water, making the reflected light dance on the surface as it ripples with circles in relief.

In the end, John Mountainclimber found a job with us. He wanted to be an employee, not a character in the novel; it makes him nervous to be read, to be tickled by the gazes of the eternally curious: your gaze, reader. This means that in the tangled thought of this Mountainclimber the reader’s existence was the obstacle to fame. Mountainclimber is so ruined by charity that he thought I might pay him with five centavos and still want change. He’s the kind of person who wants you to lend him a suit when he needs it, which is when it’s raining cats and dogs; and he found himself with the sort of person that only offers to lend his umbrella when it’s a beautiful day, and only to someone who has influence with the State Meteorologist, or to someone who will be sure to lose the umbrella so he has an excuse to get a better one.

The author told him everything without displeasing a single character; I haven’t done harm to anyone, and the fact that not one of them has written anything against me proves it. Mountainclimber, you will soon grace our pages, but we won’t let you speak before we do, which will keep the public from meeting with your sharp tongue.

Some of the characters in question wanted to appear, but didn’t:

Nicolasa and the Boy with the Long Stick; others like the little Watchman and the Traveler hardly even know of the novel. Our characters are a “heterogeneous population” of pretenders, unknowns, aforementioned, and actual characters in the novel; there are even characters who vary in their appearance and others who appear under different names. And a non-existent character. And outside there’s a character that dreams the novel and the character of whom the novel dreams.

What can you tell me about Identity? Here all adventures transpire and all the tomes of metaphysics can’t tell you a thing. What you think when you lie down to sleep, what marvels you dream of, and what you think on awaking — what do these states have in common? And we don’t know that we’ve slept (we always believe when we wake up that we were awake at least several minutes before), and we wouldn’t know if we had slept if other people (who could be just dreams themselves) didn’t tell us, just as we don’t directly experience our birth but are told about it by others, who don’t know anything directly about their own births. And if they don’t know themselves, how can we believe them? So it is that this novel resembles life more than the “bad” or realist novel, that is, the conventional novel. Continuity (identity) of the characters makes sorcerers out of the bad or conventional novelists: this continuity was never shown in a novel nor does it exist in life; these writers aren’t very realist in this sense: they can’t even say what continuity is.

We would have liked to talk about each type of character, but I will only explain one, this character who is missing, because he takes his role of Traveler seriously. He is always in the middle of an inexhaustible journey: he looks for a country or region whose climate and political system (I suppose it wouldn’t be an electoral system) favors three conditions that are immensely advantageous for him: a clean shave lasts up to five weeks; and boots, usually so ephemeral, last as long as buttonholes.

We’re doing this prologue while we wait for a certain uproar to quiet down: among all the prologues there has arisen the moveable prologue, which, they tell me, is going around changing pages; there should be no disagreements between prologues of the same novel; this unstable prologue is the one that looks around for where it is missing, in a Novel that found where art and spirit were missing.