The Museum of Eterna's Novel

CHAPTER II (THE NOVEL'S TIME BEGINS, AND LESS OF IT REMAINS)

Sweetheart: “What do we have today in ‘La Novela?’”

Maybegenius: “Pure time.”

All week long they commented upon and enjoyed that day’s events with the happy air of leisure.

Afternoons they got together with the President. When they separated early in the day it was with their minds fixed on these agreeable afternoons, as each one tended to his own tasks and preoccupations. Later they would tell him — his favorite pastime was to hear about it each night — what had happened to them or what they had thought during the day, when he wasn’t there.

(It was at these times, when they were all united in friendship, their voices animated without any ill humor, that a little being liked to pass unnoticed among the characters: a little doll with the power of thought, to whom Eterna wanted to give life, because the doll once smiled at her; there is also a little plant that is so delicate and meek that any visitor who fails to caress it is denounced as perverse.)

Each one of them had determined on his own to live on the estancia with the President, having lived in various places and having occasionally seen him, and gradually, through casual dealings, having made friends with him. Each morning they all left together, except Father, who was only irregularly present, heading towards their studies or commissions in Buenos Aires in an old hack. The estancia was located twenty blocks from the station, on the bank of the River Plate; from there, it was ten minutes in the train to the Constitution station in the city.

The “estancia” was about ten hectares of perpetually disputed land, to which the President had a prominent claim. There were other interested parties whom he recognized, and from whom he had obtained permission to dwell on the property, in exchange for keeping an eye on it and settling its claims. The characters thus congregated haphazardly there, thrown together by the whim of an artist in the pages of fantasy. They kept the President company for almost two years in that old estancia, on that land awaiting judicial decision.

All the inhabitants sensed the dream-like quality of finding themselves there all reunited, on this unstable settlement, due to a lucky encounter with the President, who was passing through just as they were, but who could have left them at any second. They associated this quality with great dreamers like themselves, living there together freely, finely, affectionately, changing, with numerous new sympathies, living their dreams, not being able, no matter how they opened their eyes, to convince themselves that they actually were where they had dreamed they were. They resigned themselves to the fact that it was a dream, which initially made them feel anxious, but later gave them the feeling of being real. Their suffering grew less as they renounced its realization, accepting it as a permanent dream that wouldn’t carry over into reality — but not verisimilitude— as if dreaming alone were their vocation. This is why they felt real when they were in the streets of Buenos Aires, and became anxious to return to and thrive in the novel; they went to the city as if it were Reality, and they returned to the estancia as if it were dream; and each departure was a sallying forth by the characters into Reality.

Two years ago the President decided to make friendship the focus of his future life. And his reception with each new friend was characterized by open curiosity and sympathy. (Each one said to himself as he arrived at the estancia, moved by this double impression: “I entered ‘La Novela,’ and I entered the novel.”) His last conquests, whom he had befriended and brought to that place of cohabitation, were The Lover and Sweetheart.

The Lover impressed everyone most of all. But everyone soon forgot that he was there with them — it even took the President a while to consider him a real inhabitant — until they happened to see him again. Only after some time did a certainty grow that the Gentleman Who Doesn’t Exist was living among them, even though they saw him constantly.

Each one remembered the first day they arrived, how they felt the dark attraction that brought them there, as they saw everyone’s face on that day when they looked around the house and let their bags and parcels drop at the front door. And then what future? How did they first move towards the novel? Was it the President’s words when he met them, and afterwards invited them into his home, or was it the image they saw, in that instant, of the estancia where they were to dwell? And what about how each one left behind family, past, sorrow, or solitude?

All of those who are today present in “La Novela” were there when they were treated to an unexpected pleasure, the arrival of the Sweetheart — or so they later baptized her, the only female inhabitant there — so graceful, carrying flowers from the city for the President, as she walked across the garden. (What sweetness to see her like that, so absorbed that she didn’t sense the charm of crossing a garden with flowers. But nobody saw her. How do we know about it? Magic.) Father was not a regular resident; he came and went from time to time, but that day he wasn’t around. Sweetheart only knew that he was an acquaintance of the house, and only saw him there that night before the drilling maneuvers.

Maybegenius was the one who opened the door to this surprise. It was rather a cold, cloudy day; the waters of the River Plate separated, and rippled along the banks, and the stand of trees which bordered the estancia shook. Sweetheart was taken to the warm, whitewashed, thick-walled camp kitchen, with one of those campfires that are so loved in winter, and a constant sibilant wind in the rooms of the countryside home. This wind was like a voice that Sweetheart never knew and that we heard on our first vacation in the estancia and, a half century later, in an unexpected or longed for return to the country, we again heard this same timbre, the same word that the wind eternally whispers in crevices and which reappears in the ear, unequal to the flow of individual life.

Maybegenius, who regularly cooked for everyone, brought her some well-prepared hot food. Before they were reminded that anyone was in that silent house, or even realized that they themselves were there, Sweetheart and Maybegenius conversed for two hours in the kind of happy colloquium where each person talks more than the other. These two hours were the only truly happy ones in Maybegenius’s love for Sweetheart, and in Sweetheart’s friendship with Maybegenius. Both the friendship and the love affair were born out of this lively conversation, without either of them knowing it. Are not this relationship and this dialog, this friendship and love, always burgeoning in their souls? Why must we say it began, if they didn’t sense it beginning, or didn’t think of it afterwards as something that had begun? In those two hours both made themselves absurd by the sadness of mutual recognition, the absurd encounter between love and friendship.

The wind in the eaves always repeated a single word: there was always friendship and love in those poor souls, but those two words, out of the exchange of dialog, gave birth to sorrow.

A DAY IN THE LIFE OF THE INHABITANTS OF "LA NOVELA"

I’ll randomly select a Thursday in August of 1927, the second winter that they had spent in the novel. Everyone — except the President, who didn’t go out anymore — left together, early, in the old carriage. They passed the Watchman, who liked them and was curious about them, and they passed through the humid little green valley. They looked at the little snake that the river traced along the lower edge of the coastline; from the estancia, at any time of day, the undulation of the waters could be seen along the line of earth that it lapped… And so they went, in the chilly, windy morning, talking and making observations from time to time until a large newspaper from Buenos Aires absorbed their attention, as a gust of wind pulled it out of their hands and sent it flying along the road in front of them, rolling along in the same direction as this pampero wind. They couldn’t occupy themselves with anything else, so transfixed were they by the flapping and tumbling of the broad, printed pages as they settled and rose, nervously shifting or running ahead of the group as it traveled, filling the carriage compartment with their exclamations, until, transported as it was by recurring gusts of wind, the paper came along with them for maybe fifteen blocks, almost all the way to the station where the carriage stopped. Sweetheart was most excited and intrigued of all, vacillating between hilarity and superstition when confronted with the capricious path of the periodical. This pleased the Lover entirely. It was enough for Maybegenius to watch Sweetheart’s enchantment with what was happening, and the Andalusian didn’t care about anything except that she might brush up against him; nevertheless, his comment was enigmatic: “Newspapers! Does anyone believe that what’s going on with this periodical is newsworthy?” Nobody answered this, and they got on the train.

When they arrived at the Constitution station in Buenos Aires, some of them split up, and part of the group went on together. Downtown, Maybegenius accompanied Sweetheart to her office and, kissing her (this is true, but inexplicable), he went to the Palace of Justice — because he was a solicitor (inexplicable, and also true)! The truth is that he went through all the offices and files so sweetly and conscientiously, just as if he were at the pots and pans of his country kitchen, and it was rare that a judge had the heart to rule against him, just as his pots rarely boiled over and his pans rarely burned him. The Andalusian got lost in the bars of the city, fishing for news for the President. He played the lotto, read the palm of whomever would buy him a drink, and when the patron was generous, he predicted a happy future and separated in his fortune all the Fridays from their thirteenths, though how he arranged this we don’t know.

They all met up again at nine in the bar at Constitution to get on the train, all tired and with the good humor that comes at labor’s end, taking their tea with an end-of-the-day pleasure and zeal, as was their custom every day after their work was done. See how they live this moment of sympathy and pleasure at the end of each day, since besides their labors, deceptions, injuries, humiliating obligations, or indifference towards their anonymity in the crowd, they also have the sorrow of having to be far from the estancia every day, for long hours of forced privation; see their happiness, their innocence, and think: not one of them feels lifeless!

The President awaits their noisy arrival in his hammock chair under the vineyard loft, all twined with climbing wisteria. Later they disperse throughout the house and make themselves comfortable, while Maybegenius and Sweetheart, who assists him in the kitchen, light the fire under the pots and warm the meal prepared earlier that morning.

THE PRESIDENT TO ETERNA

“Profoundly, decisively: here is the formula for the fulfillment of my soul with which I call upon destiny in this unexpected moment, convulsed with uncertainty and sadness, with my intimate and contemptible humiliation, heavy with inferiority:

“If glorious love can be attained — it would only now have been given meaning, which would explain the apparition of one individuality more (that is, mine) among the innumerable traces of Being. In truth love would give me the individuality that I didn’t have until today. Love makes the present eternal, it totally occupies the memory, and makes of the eternity that awaits us only an instant, or only the memory of an instant made eternal by perception, which is to say memory triumphs over Eternity, replaces it with the instantaneousness of Passion, of totalove, which happens at any stage of the totality of time, a totality that is ours since no life has a beginning; making not life but a single instant an eternity, the highest instant of perception. If, then, glorious love can be attained, it will only be after I have left off working on my soul and have made it as beautiful as yours, to return when my feelings have softened.

“Last night, contemplating expression of the happiness of love— that I took as my own when there was a moment, the first moment, and unknown to yourself, of love for me — of the happiness of love for another person (this same happiness of love, of pure and exalted and blessed sympathy, and your eyes searching this face for long hours, forgetting about all other humans) I lived two hours of your oblivion; I experienced “The Oblivion of Eterna,” the unforgettable. This Oblivion also cures the past, using your unlimited powers of enchantment to substitute another past for the past of whomever was made unhappy, a dignified and graceful past, so overflowing is its single instant.

“Eterna, I often hear you say that a trip or fall due to distraction or clumsiness has no remedy; your ridicule has no remedy. I oppose this idea that to stumble is, better than the “game” and the “table,” the opportunity to prove whether one’s character is beautiful or ugly; and for a fully graceful soul (and a soul can only be so if it knows no other impulse than the one towards sympathy) there is nothing prosaic nor ridiculous…”

Eterna appears and reads the beginning of this letter.

When she gets to the place where it says that he would equally happily carry on a conversation with another visitor, she writes the following, wounded by the muddled President’s lack of comprehension, pale, her eyes wet:

“Adios, President, no more for today. Nothing in my life could be crueler than to read these lines. I’m leaving, I think it’s hopeless. Don’t try to stop me. I can’t imagine you will ever understand me.”

She returned to her room with insufferable mortification, her face flushed with fever, and supporting herself, she repeated a prayer and truly took desperate refuge in a God who she had never defined for herself (since she didn’t adhere to any religious practice) and to whom she addressed herself only when inundated with tears and desperation… Later, somewhat soothed, she exclaimed:

“And without prayers he suffers more than I do. Let him pray, I want him to pray. We are the miserable ones in this sinister life.” She took up the telephone and said only:

“Pray now, pray right now, and then try to sleep. I demand it: pray.”

Then, feeling sorrier for him, the cause of it all, she hung up and sat on the side of her bed, sobbing.

“Poor thing, poor me, we used to read about Bovary, who destroyed her soul with each step of her existence, we looked at each other when reading about this unhappy destiny became intolerable, but always with this envy or juvenile jealousy to be a character in a novel. And now life runs roughshod over us with its enigmatic fury, and now maybe life will make us both piteous, we who were anxious to be characters who were read and to feel nothing, this character-being that every ingenuous reader finds enviable, no matter the misfortune and desperation which the novel afflicts upon it. We will go mad if we keep on like this, and we will want to escape from Life to a chapter of the Story. Who will show me that he never existed, that I only read about him, that I myself am nothing more than a shadow, a silhouette of pages!”

The President and Eterna could not realize totalove because he never wanted to rest his head on Eterna’s breast, as a shelter, and she could not manage (this is her only imperfection) to liberate herself from this maternal inclination, which is wrong in love, and she couldn’t live without this sensation in her bosom. For his part, the President was inept in that he couldn’t love Eterna without thinking about her, that is, without representing her mystically. Thus it was impossible for him to see her as a being, because being cannot be intellectualized.

“Eterna: you are not perfect; your novelist must tell you this, since he is also your friend.”

“Make me perfect, then, if you can, like God made Man.”

“I can’t: the image came to me inwardly; sometimes you go looking for a lover’s head to Shelter on your bosom; and when, in this image, I evade you, you raise a sad, discontented face; I combat this expression and then this move, ‘sheltering in yourself,’ reappears. I am able to triumph over this mentally and again comes the soft gesture of sadness in your face.”

Other times Eterna buys “outfits” for the President, who rebels against this maternalization of love, he refuses himself the attitude of shelter because it debases: he only concedes the identity of equals.

In the meantime, the Man Who Feigned To Live affects a perfect Absence.