The Diaries of Emilio Renzi

by Ricardo Piglia

  Saturday 10

  Yesterday a visit from Germán García, an immediate verbal magic, taking off toward thoughts that floated in the air, Germán returning to his attacks against Primera Plana, since they praised him and then forgot about him.

  Since we can only choose what is possible, the things that we choose—nothing can be rescued from the past now, not the paths or the meanings—are phantoms that guide us; strange portents arise behind uncertain intuitions, dark certainty, empty eyes, the blind gaze.

  Sunday 11

  A sudden, but not unexpected, appearance from Ismael Viñas, escaping from the emptiness of this rainy afternoon, and a long conversation about Argentine nationalism and the merits of epigrammatic and provocative style. We made a genealogy that began with El Padre Castañeda and went all the way to Aráoz Anzoátegui. From there, critiques of the left’s journalistic style: they write poorly because they’re always trying to be optimists. Only the negative shines in language.

  Thursday 22

  I’m in Mar del Plata, in the bedroom I’ve always had, with the window that opens to the tree that grows up from the sidewalk; I see old friends, and we reconstruct the years with Steve in Buenos Aires, his obsession with Malcolm Lowry, etc.

  Friday

  Yesterday a dangerous situation. Three boys in blue pullovers appeared in the hallway, followed by my brother; I thought they were his friends until I saw the guns. I was drinking maté with Julia in the kitchen. At first I was frightened, thinking they were police, and strangely I calmed down when I realized it was a robbery. They were looking for cash, but I of course didn’t know where my father kept it hidden, and he wasn’t home. The one who had the gun, a skinny guy with a cap and a face like a bird, was very nervous, more nervous than we were. I thought: “Something’s going to happen if they don’t find the cash,” but we didn’t have a single peso, no jewelry, nothing. The tension mounted until, suddenly, the one who had been standing guard brought in a round-faced man who had been looking for my father. They sat him down in one of the chairs and pointed the revolver at his temple. The man gave them all the cash he had, close to eighty thousand pesos. The one with the gun kissed him on the head and said: “You saved us, baldy.” Suddenly they left, and we remained sitting at the table. The man they had robbed went out to the street and returned with the police. He thought that Julia, my brother, and I were part of the gang because we were so calm. We explained the situation to the policeman, and my brother took the opportunity to lodge a complaint because the thieves had stolen a tape player that he really liked. My father came back that night, but he didn’t place any importance on the matter.

  Monday 26

  Novel. A moment of tension and expectation. Caught in a trap, as the police sirens cross the city, they are all silent. Malito: Speak, say something. Costa: What? Malito: Something, anything. Costa: When I was a boy, I saw my uncle coming in through the country on horseback…

  I realized yesterday, during the robbery, that, in the middle of a tense, violent situation with an armed, nervous man looking for money, any dialogue can work well because no one refers explicitly to the situation they are experiencing. That’s how to make a narrative scene work: If the situation is strong, the dialogue acts as a soundtrack.

  Recorded scene in the novel. Four or five people are talking about the Englishman. They let slip hints, pieces of information about him and his history, though they’re talking about other things at the same time.

  X Series. “They lived in conditions where the unusual may be dangerous,” Joseph Conrad. (That seems to capture Lucas’s situation, the clandestine man must live a “normal” life and avoid what seems out of the ordinary to him.)

  March 2

  A novel. Imprisonment, outside of time, floating action, several unidentified narrators.

  Realism. Balzac was not a realist in spite of his theocratism but rather precisely because of it. That was the condition of his critical view of bourgeois society. One’s way of seeing social issues is defined by one’s status and one’s way of life.

  Sunday 3

  There’s an obvious preconception that leads “university thinkers” to dispel oppositions and disagreements in favor of always thinking about halfway solutions. It is the neither-nor that Barthes spoke of. Balanced thinking that opposes all positioned, “biased,” localized thought: they seek the truth in high places, in the middle ground. They imagine that not taking a position in a conflict is the same thing as being objective, while they actually hold the position of one who disengages and thinks outside of social matters (as though that were possible).

  You have to look behind the criticism of Hopscotch for what has been offended, which is first of all the idea of what a novel should be, as though that were already determined; the critics don’t perceive the fluid nature of novelistic form. Other critics reject the novelty of the technique and argue that it has already been done before, etc. Of course, the model of the encyclopedic novel can be traced to Flaubert’s Bouvard et Pécuchet (going no further), and of course also in Borges’s structures (“Tlön,” for example) or in Macedonio Fernández’s novel that is always about to begin. But to find precursors is not to say anything about a book’s value.

  Little contact, even with unreality (these days).

  Series A. We have moved very carefully, as though conserving energy, because we have no cash, and, it goes without saying, money guarantees many movements and changes. We have five hundred pesos, and that must be the measure of the distance we can traverse. Or, in any event, the material choices we can face. I am discovering, then, a secret relationship between economy and space, or rather, between the velocity and amplitude of subjects’ movements according to their wealth, etc.

  Tuesday 5

  I’m in La Modelo, always in this bar, which I will try to describe in a story someday. The lattices darkening the air, the blades of the ceiling fan turning slowly. The light of the afternoon, muted, filtering in through the picture windows onto the wood-paneled walls. I used to meet José Sazbón here now and then to read the chapter on fetishism in Marx’s Das Kapital.

  I believe that everything I describe is autobiographical, only I don’t narrate the events directly.

  “All Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken,” F. S. Fitzgerald.

  “That those who can, do, those who cannot and suffer enough because they can’t, write about it,” W. Faulkner.

  Friday

  Someone reads your absence on the palm of my [left] hand. A daydream that no one must discover [but for me alone].

  Reading early Hemingway is crucial, definitive; he refuses to accept “depth” and narrates the surface of events. The fragility, the brevity, and the transience of action in some of his stories put the integrity of reality in danger. He acts toward reality as though he were blind. He takes the linearity of the story to the point of exasperation, and does not write what lies before or what comes after the events. He seeks the pure present, narrating the invisible effect of the action.

  Suicide. His father had attempted suicide two days before. He learned about it that night, when someone called him several times on the phone and finally managed to reach him. “I’m a friend of your father’s,” she said, and there was a silence. The father attempts suicide. They save him. He stops talking. He saw his father sitting in a living room armchair, covered with a blanket of uncertain color, and he seemed… not bothered, more distracted. They looked at each other without speaking. (A man’s “reasons” for killing himself are never known.) During the journey by bus, he tried not to think. It was raining. At one of the stops, in a desolate area, at the entrance to a town, by the side of the road, it seemed to him that the men and women traveling with him knew each other and were talking too much. He went back and sat in the empty minibus, drowsy. Dawn came. He sat down in a bar to wait for the sunrise to end. In the taxi he could see the sea. He stays with his father that night. Grows bored. Goes back, leaving him alone.

  Sunday 10<
br />
  Suddenly, a couple days ago, like a gust of wind, I envisioned the story of the father’s suicide, entire, complete. Basically, I’m thinking about narrating that nocturnal journey home.

  Novel. Work with footnotes that interrupt the narrator. Confirming or denying the events. Adding information. Micro-stories at the foot of the page.

  In Beckett, always the attempt to write. A post-Joyce literature, that is, a story that moves between the ruins and the void. “It seemed to me that all language was an excess of language,” Molloy.

  I’ve always thought with a delay; the experiences were there, but when I wanted to say them it was always too late, they were out of place.

  Monday

  X Series. Lucas appeared. He always seems the same, but between one visit and the next what takes place is brutal (a bank robbery, the kidnapping of a businesswoman), but he never describes any of that, I find traces of it in newspapers, in notices, and in police reports.

  Monday 18

  Last night, I unexpectedly ran into a friend, Mejía, in Pasaje de La Piedad. He lives there, a fantastic place. I haven’t seen him since childhood, in Bolívar. That alleyway is another world; it is circular, with large houses and trees, at the end are a church and a sign: Exit for coaches. Mejía played the bandoneon and my grandfather would always ask him for “Desde el alma,” and he would play the waltz with great feeling, sitting on a bench, a cloak of black cloth wrapped around his thighs, where he rested the bandoneon. His father and mother were communists, and they read Russian magazines and scathingly criticized Peronism.

  Thursday 21

  Series A. Bogged down and penniless. I’m working on the story “Mousy Benítez.” It will never be known for sure… That’s how it should start. Miguel Briante offers me two editorials in Confirmado for twenty thousand pesos, I tell him no. An uncertain future, but not so different from that of former years. A personal economy always in crisis.

  Today on TV: Hitchcock. Cinema on the small screen, as they say, becomes something else when interspersed with advertisements from reel to reel. It seemed as though there were two interwoven narratives, a collage between a painstakingly made story with fully-conceived and almost perfect images and, in parallel, happy people with tyrannical images attempting to sell a number of objects in brief microscopic stories. This double game causes a detachment, dissolving the illusion that cinema creates in a theater. On the other hand, television is watched with the lights on, and people can talk and move around. Something has changed in the reception of images.

  Monday 25

  I was born on November 24, 1941, and I’ve looked in the papers for news from that date. I looked in the National Library for everything I could find. The war took up all the informational space. It was six in the morning, and, according to my father, it was raining.

  Novel. With the three gunmen already inside the apartment, the informant managed to leave the place for a few minutes under the pretense of buying provisions and took the opportunity to notify the police that everything had gone according to plan, and he then returned quickly to the place with his orders, coming back out after a few minutes for reasons he did not reveal. (From the newspapers.)

  Saturday, March 30

  Novel. Investigation using a tape recorder. The storyline appears from the beginning (they have been surrounded and cannot leave the apartment). It is about narrating the pauses, three recorded monologues, oral syntax.

  Sunday 31

  In a decisive hour of the early morning (around four), I try to reverse my life and start working at night. I isolate myself even further. I go out into the city with a different spirit than at other times, more attentive to myself than to reality. Ready to return home and work through the night, without interruptions. The discipline of work is a way to organize passions like any other.

  I wake up at two in the afternoon, shower, shave, and have breakfast. I go to the Biblioteca Lincoln and work there for a while in the afternoon.

  “No one can describe a man’s life but the man himself. His inward being, his real life, is known to him alone; but when writing of it, he disguises it… he exhibits himself as he wishes himself to be seen, but not at all as he is,” J.-J. Rousseau.

  Tuesday, April 23

  Nonfiction. Up all night reading Treblinka, a testament of the descent into hell. The first thing that makes an impression in this investigation into the workings of a death camp is the use of technique, a recognition of a change in the use of mechanisms of destruction. A certain historicity of the horror and forms of slavery appears. Formally, it is along the lines of Oscar Lewis and Walsh: it is a “novel” like The Children of Sanchez and a narrative judgment in the style of Operation Massacre. Today, anyone who wants to respect critical realism has to employ the tape recorder, reportage, and nonfiction. This new way has as much documentary importance as cinema. It constructs a reality through the use of new methods and language. Narrative experience with forms of investigation, using the techniques of true (or testimonial) stories.

  “Only make the reader’s general vision of evil intense enough, I said to myself—and that already is a charming job—and his own experience, his own imagination, his own sympathy (with the children) and horror (of their false friends) will supply him quite sufficiently with all the particulars. Make him think the evil, make him think it for himself, and you are released from weak specifications,” Henry James.

  Julia awoke from her sleep at noon and started to drift around the house, half-covered in my pajama top, her magnificent legs exposed, which was enough to rouse me, so I got up to have some tea with her. Then I took a cold shower, and even though my body remained dead and elsewhere, I couldn’t escape the beginning of the day.

  “Destiny is character,” Heraclitus. “Character is destiny,” Novalis. The modern concept of experience is contained between these two definitions, and emphasis on one or the other defines a vision of the world. The quote from Novalis (closer to psychoanalysis) escapes Heraclitus’s magical, ritual, tragic meaning, which sees a design in character, a proof of the existence of fate. In Novalis, by contrast, there is no distance: a man “freely” chooses according to his character, that is, his impulses, his repetitions, in other words, his destiny.

  A Christian conception: consciousness of original sin, initial guilt and the fall into mundanity (and into contingency), nostalgia for the paradise lost, prior to the division of the sexes, a sense of the supernatural. Transcendence.

  A tragic approach: personal guilt does not exist, but judgment and fate do. Each person’s destiny is written and dictated by the gods, but, by reading it in the many signs (oracles) and being mistaken, the tragic subject is condemned (in pure immanence).

  Octavio Paz is mistaken in Alternating Current; it is not our art that is “underdeveloped” but our way of understanding art, that is, our colonial way of seeing, blinded by certain models. In Argentine literature, this moment covers history until Borges: since the beginning, our literature felt itself lacking compared to European literatures. Sarmiento says it precisely, and Roberto Arlt says it ironically: “What was my work, did it exist or was it ever more than one of those products that they accept around here for lack of something better?” Recently, after Macedonio and Borges, our literature—in our generation—exists in the same plane as foreign literatures. We are now in the present of art, whereas, during the nineteenth century and until quite a way into the twentieth century, our question was: “How can we be in the present? How can we become contemporary to our contemporaries?” We have resolved this dilemma: Saer or Puig, and even I, are in direct dialogue with contemporary literature and are, to put it metaphorically, at its level.

  Wednesday, April 24

  Series B. Sometimes I feel that I am “letting go” of certain friendships (my relationships with José Sazbón or León Rozitchner, for example), distance from the world and other people, and an apathy that always postpones actions.

  Sometimes I worry because I’ve gone several months w
ithout writing, marked by vertigo and social circulation. Meetings, parties, entertainment. I’m determined to have done with this farce and finally sit down to write, come what may.

  Novel. Maybe the whole account of the events could be structured as an interrogation or a conversation with Malito, the chief, alternating with third-person narration, not in chronological order.

  “What?”

  “Because talking with that thing on bothers me.”

  “The tape recorder bothers you?”

  “I get all shy, it’s like that thing makes me shy.”