If I’m wrong, I won’t be the first, or the last. You may give me the maximum sentence.
I know very well that my work will keep you waiting in your quest for
Perfection, but perhaps I may succeed in whetting your appetite. If your appetite is whetted, then my book was good enough.
I realized that all you really know is what Perfection is not.
— M.F.
INTRODUCING ETERNA
Hesitation.
I’ve had some days of my own like those winter days of storm and sunshine, tremulous days that bum out for moments at a time and make the world a spectacle of the turn of Indecision’s screw. After I first met Eterna I wandered in such darkness and depression that I vacillated between her, Art, and Mystery. Now resolved to be unlost, I have since lived for discovery.
Even when I was able to achieve faith in myself, only faith in her was always ready at hand.
And I write this unnecessary book simply because she wants to smile at her lover from outside this love, from the space of Art.
The book is not hard to write at all if it is of little importance. I already did it a long time ago, as an initiate in skepticism, not in art but that which would conserve for us some kind of reference for Art.
The storm birds will not hover over our love, they will not cross its path.
But a certain shadow of the End, of concealing…
When it comes we’ll narrow ourselves, drawing in our bodies and our clothing so that the pale terror that surrounds us cannot touch them.
All that is sad in her eyes is exalted in my being, my being of hope. And the instant passes. And passes again, and I did it, I had to split open this shadow, so it never returns.
You still don’t believe it. I didn’t see you coming either. The impossibility that you are. The impossibility of an Answer to death, yet I have it. The all-love that you are; the all-knowing that was mine.
Whether you exist or not, I dedicate this work to you; beauty eternal, you are at the very least what is real in my spirit.
A HOME FOR NON-EXISTENCE
In the construction of my novel, my fervent hope was to make of the novel a home for non-existence, for the non-existence necessary to The Lover, the Gentleman Who Doesn’t Exist, to effect his very real hope, by putting him in some region or locale worthy of the subtlety of his being. His exquisite aspiration is to have a place somewhere in my novel while he waits for his love to return from the other side of death, the one he named Bellamuerte, beautiful death, she who made death beautiful when she smiled at its coming. Only her Beauty died: a beauty made of separation and concealing, for death engenders all the beauty of Reality: it separates lovers, there is no other death. One does not die for oneself, nor is there death for he who has not loved; nor is there beauty that does not proceed from death, nor death that does not proceed from love, since death is what accounts for the exaltation of the Idyll-Tragedy, the idyll exalted because of a fear of death and the tragedy made of the deep sorrow of an idyll destroyed.1
In other words, my novel has the sacred vocation and the allure to be the Where from which the Beloved will come, fresh, returned from a death that couldn’t best her, that didn’t need Her to purify itself. It only needed her to worry the Lover, which is why she’ll come fresh from death, not resuscitated but reborn, smiling just as she did when she left, as if her years-long absence lasted only an instant.2
The droning bees of Life will alight on the new smile of the returned woman, just as they did in her departing smile, finding for a time that both smiles were fresh and united in an ever-present time, an adamantine time that breath cannot corrupt.
The vigil of The Lover was also pure and singular. His non-existence, which is purer than death, gives him the power, “among equals,” to marry her again — as if she had died without confusion, or shame.
1 Cf.: “The Idyll-Tragedy” in Miscellanea, as well as other references in this novel. (Editor’s Note — Adolfo de Obieta)
2 M.F. had thought of consecrating a book to the “Ella” named or alluded to in various passages and who he later characterized as “character with the being of being awaited.” In a letter written in 1932 to Ramon Gomez de la Serna (in the Epistolario) he says: “I’ll soon finish my Novel of Eterna and my metaphysics Ella (theory of the Eternity of Figure, Feeling, and Memory)”, and from here I’ll start with a new page:
“Explanation. Having lived from a young age among poets, thinkers, musicians and statesmen, the inclination to occupy the public’s attention and to leave a public record neither dominates me nor repulses me. For the first time, already in the shadows and the superfluities of so-called life, the impulse to publish and perpetuate a public persona and a public action has appeared to me, which probably won’t happen again. So it is that I enter the world of professionals in the expression of thought and feeling just in time to leave it without any pretension possible, neither possessing nor mourning the tact and vigor of the profession; it’s better to beg pardon and aid beforehand so that my ambition to win a bit of glory for this name (an ambition that She will look upon with disapproval and pity) and principally, to win a bit of sympathy and knowledge of this person, her character and her actions.” (Editor’s Note — Adolfo de Obieta)
WE ARE A LIMITLESS DREAM AND ONLY A DREAM. WE CANNOT, THEREFORE, HAVE ANY IDEA OF WHAT NOT-DREAMING MAY BE
Every existence, every time, is a sensation, and each one of us is only this, always and forever. Where does a feeling or a sensibility get any notion of what might be a non-feeling, like time without passing? Only things that happen in our states of consciousness and senses exist. Only our eternity, an infinite dream identical to the present, is certain.
But you will say that there are dreams that end, or rebel dreams that we cannot recover: there are dreams that conceal themselves, concealments, perhaps, of those who once existed but who we will never see or know again.
These concealments only exist for a hesitant Dreamer: there are dreams that clamor to return to the plenitude of the overflowing soul, itself a shadowless certainty as soon as we dream it.
In our hesitant dreaming, who knows how many times we have bid farewell to a fantasy of those who may return to us, how often have we disbelieved, denying the full and eternal vision that someone Returning from Concealment can bring!1
1 Cf: “Majesty” in Miscellanea. (Editor’s Note — Adolfo de Obieta)
FOR READERS WHO WILL PERISH IF THEY DON'T KNOW WHAT THE NOVEL IS ABOUT
(In which it is observed that the readers who skip around in a book are nevertheless complete readers. Moreover, when something like skip-around literature is inaugurated — as it is here — they should exercise caution, and read in order, if they want to continue being skip-around readers. Equally, the author is surprised to discover that although he is an out-of-order man of letters, he likes skip-around readers just as much as the ones who read in order, and to persuade the reader he has found this good argument: he who reads everything to the end (since it’s lazy to read out of order and disrupt the frame) will be mortified by this novel, saying to himself: “I read it in bits and pieces; very good novel, but a little disjointed, very truncated.”)