The Museum of Eterna's Novel

PROLOGUE THAT STANDS UP ON ITS TIPTOES TO SEE HOW FAR AWAY THE NOVEL BEGINS

The sun comes up in the quietude of the estancia “La Novela.” A first window opens. A morning chill.¹ It’s cold for the author, too, faced with what is for him the most uncertain part, the irreparable beginning.

I have a friend by my side cheering me on, saying:

“Everything will come out well, success is guaranteed. Don't make the characters wait any more! Don’t you want them to be happy? They deserve it.”

“But I’ll disgrace them.”

“No, ‘characters’ can’t be disgraced. I envy them all, even in the times when they are clamoring for death.”

“But mine are clamoring for life.”

“I cannot believe that characters you invented would have such bad taste.”

“I think they’re still happy in the novel, and it’ll be later on that they ask for life; but they will surely ask for it. This is a very sad novel. I can’t look anymore. What I wanted to see by standing on tiptoe was whether Sweetheart had yet approached adequate happiness, leading her to beg for life and to get someone else to play the rest of her part.”

But this prologue-character won’t want to know anything ahead of time after this. It already senses that this will be a book almost as sad as the most vigorous tome of Pessimism: The Quixote. So much so that the author didn’t have the strength to tell us how the sad, disgraced protagonists of his novel parted ways: the President and, even more so, the unfairly frustrated Eterna.

1 Sometimes I get confused in my simultaneous undertaking of both novels and in this, the good novel, I write something that belongs in the bad genre.