The Museum of Eterna's Novel

CHAPTER XI (A PARENTHESIS IN THE NOVEL WHEREIN A FRAGMENT OF AN ESSAY IS INSERTED THAT TREATS OF THE FOLLOWING: A THEORY OF THE "READ BY CHARACTERS FROM ANOTHER NOVEL" NOVEL)

Maybegenius: “Last night, since I couldn’t sleep, I read a novel. It was full of love affairs and coincidences, the most extraordinary things happened in it. I will say that if it were a matter of fantasy, I wouldn’t be left behind. What do you think about the Lover’s idea of us all writing a novel together?”

Sweetheart: “It sounds very good to me. So many interesting things happen at the estancia. We’d have a story even if we didn’t tell anything more than the Saturday afternoon when we all walked together among the trees on the riverbank. Should we give this surprise to the President?”

“But surely the Lover has thought of some subtle plot.”

“And one as simple as he is.”

“But now I want to read you a chapter of the novel I read last night. It’s called Adriana Buenos Aires.¹ Would you like that?”

“Go ahead, I’m dying of curiosity, I must know these characters.”

“I’ll read you some scenes. ‘Impassioned young sleeping woman: What heartbeat of the tragic soul makes you, so innocent, a mistress of temptation, so that everything miserable in me, the sorrows I have? burned in my life, so that the bitter, fatuous ash of my sadness chokes; me, so that trembling with guilt and mystery I approach, sweating and sobbing, pale in the pale light of this dawn…! I’d do anything with you, Adriana, here and now is the only non-impossible, the mandate of Tragedy. I don’t know why I arise from my dark place and find myself, tremulous in the tremulous light of dawn, before my door, reaching towards your bed, which is my bed. Solitude pushes at my back in this corner of the sleeping house, I tread with rage on the past and the future alike. Everything is a stain on the world.’”

“How sad that is.”

“Does it seem to you, or do you feel like you’re in a similar situation to the one this character finds himself in, or even if there’s no similar situation, do you experience this intense suffering?”

“I would like to be this character. It’s no longer about pleasantly reading a novel. I can’t see an end to the desperation of this life.”

“Make an effort not to return to this thought of desperation. I think that life is preferable when you and I are together. It’s not true that our current existence is appetizing.”

“Keep reading.”

“But what’s pathetic is that the poor girl, who’s asleep, believes that the person speaking is her lover Adolfo, but it’s actually a mutual friend who’s in love with her. And he doesn’t know whether or not to kiss her.”

“Read me that page; let our pain keep company with the pain of these characters.”

“‘Blessed creature, soul of love, a maiden already maternal, I say to myself as I bend over her sleeping form. If I kiss you and you never know it, you won’t call my name in your dreams and you’ll believe that it’s me, here, who you name and you’ll call me by the name of the one who loves you, and made you a mother, and you’ll receive me with open arms into your bed… I won’t kiss you because you’re sleeping and this painful reality will wake you; I won’t kiss you because I don’t know what to make of my impulse to kiss you: Tenderness? Desire? To take revenge on him? The vanity of knowing that I had kissed you?’”

“These are the passions of the living.”

“Isn’t it better to be as we are, darling Sweetpassion, I mean Sweetheart? What do you think about what befalls these beings?”

“Are they like us? Happier than we are? Are they like the reader and the author?”

“I wish I could explain to you what they are, to what realm they pertain, what their destiny is, and what they believe.”

“I’d rather you tell me the story of that kiss.”

“Well, it says here that he hesitates a while longer, then kisses her. ‘No, I’ll kiss you, Adriana, on the mouth, because I am seeking love’s kiss, for you to respond to me. I understand that what moves me is love alone. After this desperate night I’ll have neither the strength nor clarity to deny myself this quenching of thirst, this pacification.’”

“This ‘life’ is terrible. I tremble at it, it frightens me. But you know, for a few moments, faced with the vehemence of what you read, I felt as though Life brushed up against me?”

“That’s possible. Last night, as I witnessed — as a reader — one of the most dramatic scenes, I felt my breath quicken, but it was so brief that I only dreamed, perhaps, that I was able to do what the living call breathing. I don’t know how to tell you about the sensation, we don’t have the words for it.”

“And how does this scene end?”

“As he bends over to kiss her, whispering, ‘Adriana, where is your mouth, let’s kiss,’ a shadow moves in the half-light of the doorway.”

“I want life! I want these upsets and shadows, I want life!” Reader: “I’m the one who’s about to lose it. I feel like I don’t exist right now. Who took my life?”

Author: “Pinch yourself, you need to get rid of this ringing of reality, of being. In dreams nobody pinches himself.”

Maybegenius: “Do you think the reader is listening?”

Reader: “I don’t understand.”

Author: “Then you haven’t been a good skip-around reader, Reader. You’ve succumbed to the vice of reading in order. My novel isn’t an epic. It’s not its genre that is irreproachable, impeccable; there’s no recipe for this kind of artwork. Forgive this novel for being a novice.”

Reader: “Ah.”

Author: “As for me, I’m not the President; I’m about to find out who I am now. If I’m wrong, I’ll be a finalist, but I will have had, by mistake, an exalted hallucination that I might call adventurous. The President pains me; I wanted life for him, and for him to have totalove. But I don’t think he’s headed in the right direction; his intelligence consumes him, he vacillates between passion and the mystery of being. He’s missing a word, only one, a single perception that will save him. He says to himself: There are four options: The Mystery of Being, Passion, Science, and Action. That’s not how it is. Science and Action are entertainments, they’re life for its own sake, longevity. There’s no excuse for entertainments, they’re all abasements (of power, erudition, glory, riches), fleeting pleasures; the abasements of the second and third part of Faust, the toy store full of petty pleasures, which is only excusable in childhood. The answer is: within the mystery there is full clarity, a singular Certainty: Passion. Certainty is essential to a mystic state, but the only mystic state is not religious, it’s Passion. It isn’t religion, with its diseased negation of being, its subordination, that turn us into unreal appearances, but Passion, a consciousness of fullness and eternity, with nothing subordinated. I wrote a novel to make Eterna happy, and she wants it to end, and believes that she’ll find it impassioned. In this way I’m the author of a fantasized metaphysics and of a metaphysical novel. It’s my luck that Eterna won’t be disillusioned in this, and I won’t attempt anything more in art so as to never again risk the fears and discouragements I risk by writing this. I even felt terror just a while ago, writing; I had to say, strongly, ‘I’m not the President.’ This is fearful pressure: I trembled for a moment, I worried, I believed I was a lifeless character in my novel, creating the President, creating him so similar to myself. And already all my characters want to live. It will be sad when I stop, when saying goodbye I say: ‘For those who want to live, I salute you.’”

1 A novel at that time still unedited, which now constitutes Volume V of the Complete Works (of MF). (Editor’s Note-Adolfo de Obieta)