The Museum of Eterna's Novel

CHAPTER IV

LETTER TO THE DISTANT SHADOW OF ETERNA'S ADMIRER, THE YOUNG PORCIO DE LARRENAVE, AS IT LENGTHENS WITH THE PAST, AS HE FORGETS HER.

Fleeting gentleman, lord of Oblivion.

When, more than the sound of your steps — the silence that passes over your figure as you walk — the indifference of the steps before you empties your solitude and you stop for a rest, it may be that this letter reaches you, and then you might hear the distant rhythm of another’s step as it starts down the path that you follow, beginning the lesson in sadness you have already suffered. Ah, you will say, it must be the one who shared Eterna’s attentions, the one who came after I left, who innocently caused my departure with his arrival, and you won’t realize that there’s only room for one at a time alongside that sampler of souls, Eterna. You have my commiseration, then. Take it.

When I met her I said to myself: When she looks this way, her downcast eyes turned obliquely towards the ground in front of her or towards the table against which we are reclining, and in which our downhearted bosom casts its insignificant shadow, just as I saw Porcio de Larrenave four years ago, the night when I met Eterna, what is it that I saw?

Today I know what it is. I know that you see yourself like this: as a path away from Her, the path marked by oblivion, that you must tread from that night on, the path which from that night on is also mine.

How much sadness, Señor Larrenave, did this road bring you? Tell me how to take a little of the sadness away from this path. Your experience will help me to avoid suffering as you did. What do you think about while you travel it? It’s best to think only of her, no? Think of her beauty, of Eterna forever, give Sorrow our life and body for sustenance.

You watched me that night, Larrenave, with piety and malice, and you were silent. Did you already guess, upon seeing her prefer me to you, that regardless there would come a day when I would travel the same path as you do now?

Take pity on me: the only compassion I want for myself in this terrible undertaking is yours.

Sorry for you also. Yours,

The President

With this, I tell the Reader how Eterna and the President first met, and how it was a boundless dazzlement both for him, an inexpert thinker, and for Eterna, though she is as majestic and profound in her feelings as she is suspicious and in control of the self-delusion and easy games of what men believe love to be. So it was that much time passed before the President sought her out again, having weighed and measured his passionate inclination, and understood that Eterna’s attitude was not one of illusion, and he told himself that he would not be able to feel passion except passion for her.

That’s how it is possible, thought the Reader, to travel Larrenave’s road again, or else an Eterna will be lost to us forever — an insuperable, lifelong regret.