The Museum of Eterna's Novel

ATTEMPT TO HEAL THE WOUND INCURRED

Here’s where the readers will agitate for the characters to be resurrected and for the plot to continue, now that they’ve fallen in love with the novel. (Because my book was as enchanting as Eterna’s tresses, a loving enchanter of readers who do not know when, in what page, their hearts were conquered.)

In the final moment of a novel that’s been ripped apart, any appreciative reader begs the author for the resurrection of one or more characters, novelistic resurrection, which is to say that they continue to be characters, not novelistic birth, which is to make the character into a person; and since you can’t continue being a character without continuing the plot of the novel, the author would have to satisfy the reader by following the character’s ongoing trials and tribulations.

The character who I guess the reader would most like to see continue is Sweetheart, and that he would most like to see life continue in “La Novela.” Eterna’s sadness has such a halo of grandeur that the reader doesn’t have the stamina to continue reading her, he doesn’t want to know any more of this sublime and pain-stricken destiny. On the other hand, since the reader is just as smart as the author, he can imagine that if I have given him advance events in this novel in the person of Eterna and the enviable environment of “La Novela,” Maybegenius won’t be long in sniffing it out and making a second appearance to fight for Sweetheart’s love. Not even if he himself urged me to could I keep him separated from Sweetheart. The reader’s state of mind is this: he would bet that if Sweetheart and Maybegenius are able to stay together in “La Novela,” that there would be not only insuperable stories and dialogue like the ones through which they got to know Maybegenius, but also that both characters would be immensely and imperturbably happy, and the reader would thus have at the same time the picaresque pleasure of seeing an author who otherwise specialized in total misfortune obliged to portray unbreakable happiness. He would thus craftily put in my hands an “indestructible happiness,” and he would guarantee himself a lot of laughs at my expense, seeing me fail at breaking it, since I’m a slave to my pessimist’s instinct. If he does it, I’ll sign it; but for me to describe a felicity, knowing that none was ever immortal in art and that only some tears, sobs, and some unhappy “Ay, poor me!”s are what people read centuries later, I won’t undertake the task while I still have to invent at least a dozen situations in which my characters must sally forth into life.

Isn’t it sad, reader, that the living adventurers of the estancia “La Novela” are dispersed so far afield, never to return to that innocent existence?

Even with the few details I’ve given you of what life was like there, I’m certain that you envy it; and once there, no one would have pulled you away from there, since there was no sudden imperative to save Eterna from humiliation, or to save Sweetheart from the President when he involuntarily takes a brusque tone with her.

It hurts me, the author, more than anyone to interrupt this life; no one had more aptitude than I for the warm society of mutual affection.

No author has had the vision to torture the reader after the words THE END. No one took charge of that moment. I do it here for the first time, since I know that when the reader falls in love with a book he always wants two pages more, despite the words THE END. With the book gone, they stay with the reader.

Finally, grant me this merit (it chokes me to think of any merit), grant me that this novel, because of the multitude of its inconclusions, has been created largely in your fantasy, in your capacity and necessity to contemplate and give rise to finales. Except me, no novelist existed who believed in my fantasy. The complete novel, which is the easiest kind to write and the only kind that was previously used, is made entirely by the author. It kept us all like children, spoonfeeding us. Let us all enjoy the compensation that my novel provides for this irritating omission, which is in very poor taste.