The Museum of Eterna's Novel

DOES SIMPLY “COMING BEFORE” MAKE A PROLOGUE?

We want to present a good novel, even though the author does not promise never to write again, and as a guarantee of such an altruistic pact — a sacrifice of a thinker of such great power that he foregoes publication, or he already has, as he isn’t known or even thought of for his books — he throws all four (pens)¹ to the bottom of the ocean (Does it have a depth worthy of these deep instruments with which some plumb and others pluck at mysteries?); or, as we know, when he retires the pens are given over to the adoration of one of the loveliest and most universal cities of the spirit, Buenos Aires, a city capable of understanding what it means to live on promises. There was absolute originality, if not in what they produced, then in their surrender; and in this act there were signs of the serious character of the writer, a suspicion that led to a justified mistrust and at the same time to the perspicacity of knowing where to find more pens: in the cabinet full of all things commercial (there’s always at minimum one man of letters in there), where one can even find manuscripts of entire works of his. He shows this by coming out with a new book just after the spontaneous capitulation of the thinking pens and the editing pens. The new book appears to have been written with the same.

That a promise to Buenos Aires has not been kept is a remaining subtlety in this matter.

I don’t know how it feels when promises aren’t kept; I give the novel what I promised; the promise not to write has not yet been invented, and I lack the ingenuity. What internal drama for the person for whom writing constitutes a broken promise!

I think I’ve arrived just in time, a day before the genre of Novel becomes impossible. Art is possible but any question of Art’s possibility is impossible; my novel has been possible and it contains only impossibilities.

I can’t boast of having discovered the region in this novel where nothing happens, which is known by another name, “Land of Lions.” But all the impossible things happen in it: there’s all of life for the possible, and for this and its equivalent besides, to what end realism? I only know that the reader complains when something Impossible is not achieved in my novel, and he knows that somewhere, in Art, to which he has recourse, there must be found something that you can’t get by tossing about in bed or looking out the window: the Impossible, which isn’t what’s left out, since there’s all of that in the world, but what is lacking when we want it, even if it existed before or after the desire.

This is how Eterna was an impossibility for me for many years, yet still she existed, perfect.

The only absolute impossibility is death. How limitless is Possibility: though now I can’t conceive of it, it was possible for me to live long years without Eterna’s love, even without knowing her.

Thus the President deliberates and resolves in his tormented spirit, he to whom Eterna says, “Let him love what he has believed, and not what is.”

1 It will be remembered now and again (to strike dead inexistence, Chapter IX) that a certain book of conventional literary success was displayed in public in a case alongside the quills with which it was written.