The Museum of Eterna's Novel

CHAPTER XVI (TODAY THERE'S MORE PAST THAN THERE WAS YESTERDAY)

So Eterna gave the President a pleat in her skirt to hold and she said, “Take hold here, and follow me, to your penitence.”

The President desired this — to be treated like a child punished by his mother — now that he couldn’t do anything more with his ill-temper and his depression during frequent conversations when Eterna seemed so sure of herself, although so loving, more certain than him in her coddling and even more certain than he, always, of what could derail, degrade, or dull their love. Sulking, dominated, drunk with her ever-increasing beauty, care, energy, clairvoyance, resigning himself to the subtle, and most intelligent thought that pleased him: “It’s enough for me that all beauty resides in her; what does it matter what I am?”

So he followed her.

And Eterna…

Suddenly, with a suave attitude, Eterna turns to you, reader, and says in a rich, courteous voice:

“I address myself to you, reader; I am Eterna; a woman who is perhaps noble, perhaps beautiful and strong headed, of generous sentiment and grave destiny, perhaps haughty, with majestic manners, from an old and prominent family, and with a sumptuous house; with a clean and severe past, perhaps unhappy, and capable of an adventure whose exquisite, shuddering, brimming laughter, intrepid laughter that resonates from a deep place within, perhaps is capable of wiping the idea of Death from the face of the earth.

“You read what I’ve been saying and doing here, and perhaps you think that I’ve just been passing time with the President. Allow my words to reach you from these corners, that my accent and figure may reach you from the written word, and I’ll tell you, come closer: “Tell me, swear to it, can you feel my breath? Can you hear my voice?

“Every day I’ve got more of a past: to live is to create a past; so since mine grows every day, which can only happen for someone who’s alive, I must be alive and you and I must be in the same current of murmuring, faint, fleeting Time, and so you will have noticed that you learn more of my past in each page.

“But I’ll never know what I am; if perhaps what’s happened is that I was once real, and an artist with strange plans, tormented with tenacity and determination, turned me into a dream of these word-covered pages, which you hold in your hand.

“And if that’s so, I’ve got you, too: so much that happened to me must have been predetermined by novelistic causality. What you don’t have is a shocking sorrow: the sorrow of knowing that what my ambitions are to suffer and achieve is already written, prefigured in these pages; everything I don’t know, that will befall me; I don’t know anything of myself beyond this page, I know nothing of what fortune has in store for my great aspiration and so I’m even more disconcerted, and I rebel even more if I think about how unconcerned you are, reading, without realizing or thinking that how much you read, and at what speed, is the event that at this moment lacerates me, perhaps, and snatches from me whatever goodness was or would have been given me.”

It’s true, Eterna, you’re perfect, a unique perfection: all of your sensory existence is emotionalized, which is to say, that the slightest occurrence or action or consequence of that action is judged emotionally for itself, for its own tenderness, laughter, or reproach.

That’s why the President, who knows you so well — and who hasn’t a single emotion of his own — turns instantly and irrevocably into a child. Eterna, who applauds every lover’s caress and would give and receive all of them, has until today denied any caress that he would give her or that he conceived; she would be tireless and indiscriminate in caresses, but only with a lover and a beloved who were not perplexed in any way. Her torture, of being so much this way and not being able to accept caresses nor condescend to give advice in giving them, is the greatest and least evident, most unique and irreconcilable, disadvantage from which a human can suffer.

The Lover understands Eterna’s love. He, who is a Lover and who was the first to suspect Maybegenius’s affection for Sweetheart, and who more than once thought about this love, and Eterna’s love, believes that although Maybegenius loves Sweetheart the most, and she also loves him the most., that does not make Sweetheart the most loved among women, if we can’t prove that Maybegenius is the man with the most power to love in all the world, since there could be another woman who had all of the love of the man who had the greatest force of love possible; and it could also be that a woman was loved by the most amorous man in the world but that she wasn’t the only one he loved, or the one he loved the most.

In contrast, Eterna did not want to be the only one loved by the most loving man, and she didn’t find this, nor does she have a splendid, that is maximum, human love. She is what Reality loves: Perfection. Reality has rested from its anxiety to realize a Perfect being, or an identification of the plurality among equals, that is, the annihilation of Plurality. She knows this, that she’s Being’s beloved, the World’s beloved, and this is the reason for the happiness in her face; she doesn’t have the total love of an Individual lover, and as proof I have here the immense sadness of her pursed mouth: she’s the happiest and the most unhappy of women. She isn’t understood. Reality is still unhappy, it can feel her convulse, lost. Even the best lover does not reach the best beloved; he had the love and even the exclusive love of various real individuals, but not the totalove of the best lover. Reality cannot stop itself: the absurd, the stupidity of Plurality continues, it has not been undone.

Author: “Why the devil do I write? What you are doing, reader, and what I’m doing — is it better than sleeping? A reader can define himself as a man who can’t sleep without a book in his hand; but it’s a minor neurosis, very understandable. On the other hand, the author writes about someone sleeping, or everyone else falls asleep.” Reader: “I seek, and I wait.”

Author: “To be an author?”

Reader: “Because I’m resisting the belief that a ‘man of letters’ is someone who says everything and knows nothing.”

Author: “Reader, sometimes your presence is requested in my pages and you are absent: your face comes close, and mirrors the dreaming in these pages, and you are absent. What bothers me is the reader: you’re my problem, your existence is invincible; the rest is just a pretext to keep you within earshot of these proceedings.” Reader: “Thank you.”