The Museum of Eterna's Novel

FIRST PROLOGUE OF THE NOVEL FOR THE ABRIDGED READER

There are two things I want to make public: a drawing that Sirio or Audivert made me, showing with some persuasiveness the ladies and gentlemen pounding on my door, demanding to appear as characters in my novel; thus I have brought upon myself the anger of so many people, who leave in a huff because I cannot accommodate them. You’ll recognize also that only material impossibility and not a failure to recognize their talents is what obliges me to refuse admission. They will all read my novel (not because I am proposing to reserve them as readers since they are unfit to be characters), and they will be the only readers who are entirely entitled to their predisposition against the novel (because they aren’t in it). I have the same experience: I’ve never appeared in a novel and so none has seemed perfect to me, and there are lots of authors who have managed what I’ve managed (or will have managed, in what I write), which is to keep the Boy out of the novel.

And another drawing, which might be of the same moment, but with a hundred times more people, which gives me an idea, however remote, of the throngs of readers awaiting my novel.

Everyone has noticed my widespread success as an author, or anyway it behooves them to know it. But someone says that while there’s always a crowd of readers gathered around my novel, it’s not because they want to read it so much, but because there must be near my novel, or across the street, some notice from La Prensa that says (and this is pure conjecture): “Millionare gentleman, celibate and sentimental, seeks agreeable housekeeper to take exclusive care of his house and serve as his sole companion.” They add what the critics of the hard school, who only concern themselves with fundamental merits and essential aesthetics say, when synthesizing their plaudits in the comparative conclusion of whether the statement “My novel has more of a public than one of the most enticing personal ads from a great newspaper” is a concrete reality and not an unfair comparison; they’ve lazily commissioned the personal ad’s efficacy to attract the crowd that was already there. They also explain that there’s a difficulty in syntax in the aforementioned personal ad: it’s not clear whether the millionaire seeks a housekeeper or the housekeeper seeks a millionaire, and this is why half the crowd is female, seeking the millionaire, and the other half are millionaires looking for a housekeeper.

What must be recognized here is that I’ve used the incentive of appearing in the novel with a few people whose sympathy or consideration I wanted; and that sometimes I’ll withdraw someone from the novel because he or she made me angry, either justly or unjustly, or because of an inconsistent fidelity in the character.