But there’s one more thing that we can’t put off saying for another minute: the coming and going of Federico around the world. We’ll say this at least: it was very slow. He left when it was time to shift Eterna’s lips and flutter her pale eyelids for an animated smile at the President’s ingenuity, and he returned when the smile disappeared because the President had suffered an impossibility of candor at the impossibility of sulking and he took hold of Eterna’s skirt as a signal that he wanted to “go to the wardrobe,” that is, be punished.
And with that we’ve introduced Federico into the prologues.
1 An allusion to the troubled times in the postwar period 1914–1918 (commercial and bank competition, unlimited printing of German marks, and the proposition of the North American President Wilson for a League of Nations). (Editor’s Note— Adolfo de Obieta)
THE WINDOW-SHOPPING READER
After long experience in beginning polygraphy, preceded by an A-plus silence, the kind of authoritative silence or encyclopedic clamming-up that touches on everything and that everybody welcomes, I have come to suspect that the Reader has a very fragile disposition. But his evanescence is not so extreme that Titles and Covers, at the very least, cannot reach him. From this reflection was born my innovation: title-texts. This is how I want to explain the length of my novel’s title.
Since the circulation of covers and titles is at the mercy of window-dressers, newspaper stands, and warning labels, the ideal Reader of Covers, Reader in the Doorway — Minimal Reader, or Unsought Reader, will finally here stumble across the author who had him in mind, the author of the cover-book, of the Title-Novel. And consider that “the hooked reader” must be the title of the Title that we’re presenting of our novel, since the first plot point already happened on the cover, where the Minimal Reader is solidly hooked by the only thing that the booksellers (ever stingy with their time) have read: the title page, the only page that for most books anyone bothered to edit; truly Posterity, which everyone worships and which no one has met in person, will recognize this.
The Sunday editions of La Nación and La Prensa perhaps suggested to me the cover-text, since they are a species of Sunday edition, a Sunday edition of titles and, despite their length, a holiday of titles. As I have also observed, after a long time believing that these editions never ended — and that’s a warning to everyone who leafs through these editions, thinking them endless — they do indeed end: you have to have a Sunday as desperate as I did during the times when I read them in their entirety, just to extricate myself from the error of believing them infinite, a belief that no thinking person should ever have about anything.
The origin and plan of my inauguration of the title-read is thus proved: to take advantage of the better circulation procured for the title by the shop window, compared with the bulk interior of the book. That part is later circulated by a cordial character, the man of letters, who operates like the match that lights more than one cigarette. One man alone, if he is able to obtain a pension from the “Promotors of the Book” and longevity from tonics (these are the only religion left to us, besides those two great Argentine religions: the faith that whoever goes to Paraguay will return with a parrot, and the faith that people come from the North bring Tafi cheese. Without these tokens no one will believe that they’ve really returned; you can’t bring back another bird, like the way rich gentlemen and ladies bring back philosophers from Europe, taking advantage of the sales) — one man, then, can make a whole edition from a single book, and the buyer won’t even notice when sales fall off, since the borrower leaves him far behind with his invisible trajectory. A hundred title-readers are calculated for each book reader; text-titles and cover-books do not mistake the reader; they are often brilliant Literature’s only hope for a wide radius of influence, since these titles are not content with the modest title of cherished and secret Literature.
I therefore prevent my book from continuing on after those who have finished reading my title withdraw, since it does not belong to that species of facsimile books in wood that simulate full library shelves. This way if the reader does not continue reading, no one will blame me for not warning him. It’s already too late for the author who doesn’t write and the reader who doesn’t read to come to an agreement: now I am decidedly writing.
TWO REJECTED CHARACTERS
In a novel as well-ordered as this one, the reader should know the characters. And they should be classified.
Ours are:
Real Characters: Eterna, the President.
Fragile Characters, owing to their vocation in life, because they believe they can be happy: Maybegenius, Sweetheart.
Nonexistent Characters (with presence): The Lover.
Perfect Character, owing to a genuine vocation for being content to be a character: Simple.
End of the Chapter Character: The Traveler.
Absent Character, or Absence as character: The Man who Feigned to Live.
Smart, theoretical Character: The Metaphysician.
Thwarted Character, and Candidate for Character: Federico, the Boy with the Long Stick.
Unknown Character (the only celebrity appearing in the Novel).
Awaited Character: the Beloved of the Lover.
Characters by absurdity: the Reader and the Author.
Characters rejected ab initio: Pedro Corto and Nicolasa Moreno.
Those last two won’t be in my novel. Pedro Corto wanted to read it just so he could be in it — some Readers don’t want to start reading a book if you tell them beforehand everything that’s in it — and he demanded that the book finish before certain pies, which he had acquired just before the narrative began, could get cold; I believe his exclusion is justified without leaving me vulnerable to accusations of avarice in the number of characters. Nicolasa Moreno will not appear either, and although she accepted her role with great pleasure, she’s obliged to leave the novel for periods during which she goes to see whether the milk has boiled over, or she lifts the lid every few minutes on the sweet pumpkin she’d set to boil a third time; both activities cut down on her appearances in the book, and I can’t do anything about it, since everyone knows that God made a mistake when he prohibited ubiquity.