The Museum of Eterna's Novel

CHAPTER IX (IN THE TIME BETWEEN FEDERICO'S TWO EXPULSIONS, SINCE HE APPROACHES THE DESERTED "LA NOVELA" TWENTY TIMES A DAY)

THE CONQUEST OF BUENOS AIRES

For some time, the President had followed the news of the fierce discord stewing in Buenos Aires, because of the antagonism between two gangs into which the population had divided itself: The Romantics and the Jubilants.

Each one of these gangs sought dominance; one by means of ultra-tender poems and the invention of impassioned tales, the other by means of literature and a multiplicity of other ingenious devices dispersed throughout the city to provoke the grotesque.

One of the recourses of the Jubilant Gang, it will be remembered, was that they used military force to pinch and distort the city’s mirrors, a plan that was ordered and executed within twenty-four hours and by means of which they created a veritable hysterical crisis that put an end to all transit and business (official and otherwise) in Buenos Aires for an entire week. (The President himself was wrongly suspected of being the source of this measure, which would have explained his frequent excursions to the capital, and sojurns there.)

The next week the Romantics dominated. Bolstered by all of the loudspeakers in the city, they repeated in unison, for an entire day, a lacerating poem about a woman of advanced age and very plain features who had caused a young blind man to fall in love with her beautiful, youthful voice; this woman, the afternoon on which her lover was expected to arrive, and whose eyesight had been restored by a helpful surgeon, kills herself by burning herself in a pyre so immense that it instantly reduced her face and body to ashes, so that the young lover, believing that she anxiously prepared herself to receive him in her best clothes and that the fire in which she perished was an accident, was driven mad with sorrow and threw himself from the balcony. This story in verse was repeated to the population as if it were breakfast, lunch, tea, and dinner, with the result that by the end of that Romantic Week a mere boy was able to appoint himself to the governorship of Buenos Aires. And in truth, the story was doubly tragic: a woman who could not stand her lover’s horror at seeing her, though he believed in her and he imagined her to be so beautiful: but he never felt this horror, not even at first, because someone who is born blind has no visual imagination and, once the power of sight is granted to him, he is almost never able to tell beauty from ugliness, because these are matters of custom.

(This civil war also reached the metaphysicians: between the Soulists, who wanted Human Consciousness to reach to the Third Reflection, and the Automatists, who believed that supreme wisdom is found by returning to the Zoological Psyche.)

The President meditated on this civil discord, and knowing that a certain inclination to tolerance, to civil coexistence, characterized Argentine society, outside of the bull-headed, had thought on it for a long time, finally deciding that this unusual porteño (as the inhabitants of Buenos Aires are called) exasperation must have a psychological, but non-reflexive origin, indicated by the city’s various errors incurred in the course of the last thirty years, and maybe a few more to come, since it was particularly careless in the regulation of the tastes and aesthetic practices of civil cohabitation.

The President also attributed part of the disenchantment of porteño life to the failure to achieve a particular historic fact that had been featured, but frustrated, in the past.

Once Ugliness was eliminated from its history or its streets, once that historic injustice or excess of civic enthusiasm was rectified, the gang war would disappear and Buenos Aires would be forever ruled by Beauty and Mystery.

So it was that the President arrived in Buenos Aires with his diminutive but devastating army of characters, with the plan to meet with the leaders of both gangs and to convince them that their behavior, so dissonant with Buenos Aires’s usual mode of being, could only be the fruit of an impulse, suggestion, or cause of which they themselves were ignorant.

And the Romantics and the Jubilants understood the sterility of their dispute, and the fecundity of beautiful work that common effort offered.

How did it happen? A novelistic miracle! (The most abstruse miracles, like immaculate conception, have brought the incomprehensible to life for humanity for centuries. The pinnacle of universal incomprehensibility is often fame, just as the praise of those who do not understand them has made certain philosophers famous. What’s more miraculous than these glories is those modest, useful miracles of which the novel avails itself.) And, this miracle happened by means of diverse and subtle recourses most amenable to desperation or the bewitching of the Buenos Aires population, so that they became docile towards the President’s forces. For example: in the bars, among the odors of alcohol and tobacco, rolled a boiling wave of savory stew whose vapors emitted a homey, charming perfume and which dismantled the incipient orgy; it also put an end to the imperfect irrigation of the trees in the plazas and sidewalks, some of which had been left unwatered, something that leads to the desperation of those who enjoy watching trees be watered; it put an end to that woman who walks around asking everyone if her face is wider than it is long; it dispatched all hanging mirrors that are so thin that they only show half your face; all falsely distributed automatic photography machines; the subsidized circulation of the fat and the deaf that was everywhere nothing but an obstruction, everyone yelling at the deaf people and watching the fat ones argue with the bus conductor: “Yes sir, I'm over 90 kilos, bring the scale if you like!” so as to take advantage of the free fare that was municipally mandated for those whose previous weigh-in was over 90 kilos; it got rid of the sound of corks squeaking in bottles (Maybegenius’s favorite pastime); it dispatched with the backwards hat, and the poorly-knotted tie…

Among so many measures, which were indiscriminately employed by the President’s whole company, Eterna thought of and used only one: to make a messenger with a lighted lamp run from one end of the city to the other, so he could give the lamp to an artist who was at that moment seated at his desk, filled with inspiration, but without a light.

Perhaps this messenger crossed paths with another that that joker Maybegenius also unleashed on the city: a trombonist with paralyzed respiration who carried a candle in the fingers of a equally paralytic hand, so that he could neither blow out the candle or let go of it; and gesturing for somebody to please put it out so he wouldn’t burn himself, he ran for many blocks and ended up charring his fingers, just as Maybegenius had foretold, as he wanted to make him believe in the shocking egotism of the population, which prevented anyone from offering to blow out his candle; with this he proposed to play a joke on the vaunted fraternity or benevolence of the population, when in reality this negative attitude owed itself to a general distrust of transients, as well as the porteño fear of practical jokes.

Sweetheart competed with Maybegenius in the deployment of jokes as conquest. She found Buenos Aires’s the most mechanically incompetent man, and also it’s most myopic, and she sent him a very high-end radio as a gift, complete with a tiny, complicated closure, which made of this radio the first obsequity of a final calamity, since this poor man could not rid himself of the apparatus when he wanted to sleep or rest, because although he was slow and nearsighted, he was also grateful and kind, and he couldn’t bring himself to shut the radio up with a hammer; what’s more, he endured the complaints by those in the pension house where he lived.

I still remember the apoplectic accounts that circulated each night; electric telephone calls; powerful magnets surreptitiously distributed throughout the city, that invincibly attracted any bit of metal men or women carried on them; and the envelope-letters, letters written on envelopes and dispersed among all the tramway and bus seats, with a prize to whomever could tell if it was an envelope with a letter or a letter without an envelope. (The envelope-letter brought back one of the author’s own advertisements from eight or ten years back, in which the same intent of the conquest of Buenos Aires was proposed: to give Buenos Aires a certain mystery that it never had.)

How was it that the population never took to the streets, demanding a President Painkiller to rid them of these many exasperations?

One can easily imagine the idealism of the Conquest by thinking of what few truly memorable actions there are, and so it was that the city of Buenos Aires opened itself to beauty, erasing all the facets and vestiges of porteño life’s former ugliness.

It happened that certain past events were struck with nonexistence, making use of Eterna’s talent for undoing the past and tying on new, substitute pasts. (This is why you’ll sometimes see Eterna looking pale, and you’ll notice that she can’t pronounce the “n” in syllables ending with “on.” When she says “passiom” for “passion” or “salom” for “salon,” which are the only known signs of this fatigue, it’s because she’s spent the night in the immense mental effort of nulifying a past and, harder still, of inventing another that will content the owner of this sad story.)

Some of these past events are: Dorrego’s execution; Camila O’Gor-man’s martyrdom; Irma Avegno’s destiny;¹ the exhibition of a certain writer’s pens to the adoration of the intelligent and modest Buenos Aires public; and the publication of the letters of a certain empress, which were of such lovely sentiment that it would have been a shame to violate their intimacy

One thing that never happened came into existence by virtue of novel-magic: Carlos Pellegrini’s presidency over the Argentine people, the most interesting kind of presidency, since it seems we can’t even breathe without the president. It’s interesting because at least he was a humorless man, and now we know whether it’s possible to govern without comedy.

The beauty of non-History came about; all homage to captains, generals, litigators, and governors was abolished — not a single recollection of a mother’s magnificent act, nor a childhood grace, nor the dark suicide of a youth overwhelmed by life; death was left to the dead and people spoke only of the living: soup, the tablecloth, the sofa, the hearth, nasty medicine, little shoes, the steps, the nest, the fig tree, the pine tree, gold, a cloud, the dog, Soon! roses, a hat, laughter, violets, the teruteru bird (there’s nothing sweeter than to use children’s nonsense to speak of Happiness); plazas and parks that bear the names of superlative human lives, but with no last names; streets named The Bride, Remembrance, the Prince, Retirement, Hope, Silence, Peace, Life and Death, Miracles, Hours, Night, Thought, Youth, Rumor, Breasts, Happiness, Shadow, Eyes, Patience, Love, Mystery, Maternity, Soul.

All the statues that saddened the plazas were evicted, and in their place grew the best roses; the only exception was that the statue of Jose de San Martin was replaced by another statue symbolizing “Giving, and Leaving.” In the end, something happened to non-flowing time, like history, and there was only a fluid Present, whose only memory was of what returns to being daily, and not what simply repeats, like birthdays. That’s why the city almanac has 365 days with only one name: “Today,” and the city’s main street is also named “Today.”

Many other small things were also accomplished, whose tiny sorrows might fill a life with horror, like what was spared, for example: the half-full glass, or the little lamp with hoarded light, or the twisted tie, or artificial flowers on tombs.

When the neighboring areas of Buenos Aires saw that this plan to purge the culture of its recent past had been accomplished, public health restored itself. Everyone affiliated with the Jubilant-Romantic feud woke one morning wondering how they had ever lived by such a fixed, banal, and batty ideal.

Once the Conquest was concluded, it was left to the Mystery to reveal to the President the most singular fact of any city, of which he was the only witness. I have it on good authority that on a certain day of the year 1938, and during a period of mere living, of frivolity, when it happened that the body of Alfonsina Storni reached death’s waters, the city displaced itself, spinning instead on her axis by moving a few centimeters. The President, still perplexed as to whether this urban gyration was a plea—“Don’t die!”—or a sorrowful approval of a dreaded and sad refusal of life, knows that thanks to this occurrence in the sensibility of the heart of a city at the instant of the death of this dreamer’s soul, Buenos Aires entered the Mystery.

When the President and his character army returned to the estancia “La Novela” at the same time the next morning, they “greeted each other with “Good morning”s. But the President returned to Buenos Aires that night, and I know why. To assign to the two central Plazas the names “City that knows no Death” and “For Non-Identical Men;” these denominations took place at the intersection of the two Plazas (the non-identical is exempt from death).²

Thanks to these remedies and hopes, along with the Death-Concealer that Eterna invented, and the Joke-Laughter-Reviver that the Humorist made, Buenos Aires was blessed.

1 All traces of this woman’s path were erased — she who irrevocably disillusioned human piety — the path that sought a voluntary death in the streets of Buenos Aires and its suburbs.

2 Perhaps some readers will find the much-vaunted Conquest of Buenos Aires by Beauty and the Mystery to be less than lucid. It’s inevitable: the imperfection, truncation, and even insipidness of a novel that was only conceived as a cure, as Action without Object, as a state of depression and disorientation. If the author had made this chapter robust and gracious, he would have misrepresented the psychology of this Action. For the rest, I will satisfy my incredulous and clever reader by confessing that the chapter is simply the work of a dried-up writer, who can do no more.

Despite this confession, I must acknowledge a reduction of sixty-three readers, who demand impeccable style.