The Museum of Eterna's Novel

CHAPTER VIII (NO.)

One day was not like the others. Returning from Buenos Aires they found the President lost in thought. Later in the evening he gathered them all together, telling them:

“I have bad news.

“I stretched this test of friendship over two years, and although you all have given me a life that is worth more than not living, it hasn’t given me consciousness of finality, of dignity. Only Passion can give me this. And passion’s cure for my soul, which I couldn’t achieve through friendship, I now hope — my new, and final hope — will be achieved through Action.

“Tell me if you will join with me in this Action, whose object will be something we once considered: the conquest, through Beauty, of Buenos Aires.”

It’s true; the President’s old hobbyhorse was to rescue that great city with whose destiny he so strongly identified, to save her. He observed the meaning of her history, the truth of her grandeur like no one else had. But she needed to be purged of a certain crassness and enervation of conduct.

The President had also exhorted the characters at other times, in what Maybegenius called his lucid meditations, like this:

“If solemnity, a prudent posture, statues, and streets with names were proportional to virtue and profound thought, how few they would be; this life does not need so much patience, nor does it abound in so much temptation to vileness in exchange for celebrity.

“For now, the profusion of statues, birthdays, historical volumes, named streets, and writings of secure virtue have made this society very suspicious of us poor, pardonable people; it runs in circles to recognize men’s labors to appear good, in a civilization so enamored of Yale locks and pleasant tones, which are a trick to put victims to sleep.

“The best cities have streets named for Rain, for Waking, for Mother and Brother, for He who is Called, and who Goes Without, streets named You’ll Come Back, and Goodbye, and Wait For Me, and Return, and Loving Family, Kiss, Friend, Hello, Dream, Again, Sleeplessness, Maybe, Remake Yourself, Forgetfulness, Undertaking, Come Back To Me, Literary Salon, Live in Fantasy, Home, Smile, Call Me, and the great avenue Later He Dreams the Day, which is crossed by the avenue Unidentified Man.

“It gives light, not ashes, to the day.”

His gaze was distant, his eyes open wide, searching, and seeing the phantasm of the future and the vacillations of the route between a doubtful future and a happy present.

“One day,” the President concluded, “friendship won’t be enough for you, either — and you, too, will sit with your gaze fixed on the empty air in the hours before dawn, looking to the future and yet not wanting to look at it, feeling pained to look at the floor, the house, the present which you used to regard so cherishingly.”

The long gaze that the President held that dawn was such that Sweetheart, asleep in her bed, became agitated with the anguish of friendship’s farewell that she, along with the others, had heard of in the hours before. Her caring nature was able to discern the defeated sorrow in the President’s decision. And she dreamed and mourned the now-truncated present, moments in the pleasurable length of their days which would see no more mornings when everyone was happy together in the kitchen or the garden, no more nights of everyone gathered together, animated, unconcerned — or even when each was troubled by his own pain but lighthearted in the harmony of communal life.

Such was his gaze, charged with sadness for Sweetheart’s future, for himself and Eterna, with thoughts about everything that lay at Eterna’s feet. He rested his elbow on the headboard of Sweetheart’s modest bed and inclined himself towards her, his hand supporting his forehead and his gaze a screen, with his face at an angle to the bed and his gaze at an angle to his face.

Friendship opened windows on to phantasms; it filled the friends’ eyes with phantasms; the gaze became empty again at the President’s proposition: “But President, is it possible that friendship is not enough?”

But faced with the President’s confidence in the project to abolish Buenos Aires’s ugliness, they all longed to conquer in the name of beauty and the mystery.

“It’s over, it’s broken!”

“There’s another one just the same, don’t cry!”

“But Life isn’t like that! That limpid, content friendship we once had will never be the same.”

President: “And a love that once was impossible now will never be…”

Maybegenius: “But it was my first time in love, and I’ll keep it forever, even if she doesn’t return it. What is the ‘beloved self?’ Only a word; I’ll have her love for him for myself.”

The Lover: “In life. But in personal eternity? Eternal, individual time exists for every Possibility; impossibility only exists in terms of space and time: to be and not to be at the same time in a single point; for something to occur and not occur at the same time, this is the only impossibility. In truth there’s no impossibility except contradiction, which is to say, senselessness. To love and not to love is contradictory, but to love today and not tomorrow is not.”

President: “You give me eternity and, in her, total possibility; in her my invariable identity. But this identity is not that of one who cannot love a perfect lover today, but can tomorrow. Perhaps I’m not someone else when I feel what before I did not feel?”

But the Lover was silent, as far as anyone could tell: what I like most in “La Novela” is nonexistence’s discretion, invisible and impossible dealings with the Gentleman Who Doesn’t Exist.