The Diaries of Emilio Renzi

by Ricardo Piglia

  Series E. Neither the historical essay nor literature, strictly speaking, has succeeded in registering the microscopic changes of private experience. A narrator talks about himself in the first person, as though referring to someone else, because he habitually reconstructs his life from the end of the series that he is narrating, that is, from the present time of the writing. The best parts of the genre are the drafts or remnants or plans for a future autobiography that is never written. Life is momentum toward what does not yet exist, and, therefore, to pause in order to write it is to cut off the flow and leave behind the reality of experience. For its part, literature is a way of living, an action like sleeping, like swimming. Does this idea take away the sense of deliberate construction that literature possesses? I don’t think so; the mistake is to seek the ashes of experience within the book when you should instead seek them in pauses, in fragments, in short forms.

  Thursday 25

  A hectic afternoon; I went to the Biblioteca Lincoln to look for Melville’s complete novellas in a single volume, and then I got Raymond Queneau’s article on Bouvard et Pécuchet from Galatea to use as a preface for the translation of the book. Then I went to Tiempo Contemporáneo to collect ten thousand pesos so that I can go on spending, and finally I ended up at Jorge Álvarez; not much new except for Y. Mishima’s book Confessions of a Mask.

  Friday 26

  “Because I’m creating an imaginary—it’s always imaginary—world in which I would like to live,” William Burroughs.

  I’m at La Paz, a bar with modest delusions, annoyed because I’m overdressed and overheated and also because Jorge Álvarez didn’t come to our meeting, so I don’t have enough cash to make it to the end of the month. I interrupted my note because B. appeared, wanting to write a script with me based on my novel in progress about the struggle in the hideout in Montevideo. I don’t have much interest in using the subject for another parallel story, but Carlos is insistent and offers me so much money for the script that, in the end, I write the first scene, very much in the tone of my short stories.

  Saturday 27

  Surprised and uncomfortable after news of the publication of Gazapo, a novel by Gustavo Sainz, which, according to Monegal, was written using a tape recorder. The same as my story “Mata-Hari 55” and the novel I’m writing. I hope I don’t have to deal with an unintentional precursor.

  Series C. A woman appeared in the brief moments of early dawn as though pulled along by the wind or the morning, dressed in a strange leather jacket, a dark mantle to command the night.

  Novel. Among the theories to explain the betrayal, a possibility emerges that the Englishman chose the apartment knowing that the police would come.

  Toward an aesthetics of the typewriter. To write with a typewriter means to introduce the fixed reading into the moment of writing, since the act of tapping out words is distinguished by the possibility of reading what is being written simultaneously, though in another register and in another position of the body, without having to withdraw from the paper or stop writing (as happens when writing by hand). At the same time, the sound of the keys creates a rhythm, directed at both the ear and the eye, which can be sustained or altered. The keys with their printed letters create a musical score of language, a key that one must know how to perform in order for the music of language to be heard (but I, of course, write by hand in a notebook with a black ink pen).

  Wednesday, May 1

  Series B. Last night a multitudinous gathering to celebrate Pirí Lugones’s birthday. At some point someone—I don’t know if it was a man or a woman—gave her a dare, and a moment later Pirí was kissing Laura Y. in the middle of the living room, and it was like a flash of lost desires and secret fantasies. We stayed all night, attending to the little neurotic nuclei of the party, and came back home at eight in the morning.

  Thursday, May 2

  I entertain myself in every way possible, he said, and always with people whom I observe with a stranger’s gaze; every once in a while, I head out into the streets in search of an adventure.

  I’m not so sure, but the risks are minor in any case. The risks are always minor. I think: “There are too many people in my way.” I think about Zelda, who died the same way as any of her husband’s characters; she refused to leave the hospital, as if she had been waiting for the fire.

  A story. One early morning at the Atenas club in La Plata, the body of Mousy Benítez lay strewn across the floor, face up as though floating in the flickering light of dawn. // In a cracked and yellowed clipping from El Gráfico, covered in rags, The Viking’s fine, illuminated face looking at the camera head-on, his eyes opened wide, next to Archie Moore, who was laughing with his serious eyes.

  Monday 6

  Series A. A period similar to the last days of 1964; he talks about himself as though he were a historian reconstructing some long-lost past.

  Today I didn’t do any writing on “Mousy Benítez” (it is ready now) because I couldn’t see it. The (verbal) image is everything in a short story: the gym at the Atenas club, a boxer feinting in front of a full-body mirror.

  A desire to escape from here and to go out alone, with no baggage, to rent a room at a hotel downtown, to compose the inner logic of my life.

  Series E. Diary: collage, montage, short forms, tension. “Killing oneself seems easy.”

  Smoking marijuana calms him. Rather, it relaxes him. He was always very tense and alert. Through the window the city full of lights, and below, far below, the dark street.

  The father’s suicide. The telephone tore him away from sleep, he sat up in bed, and he struggled so much getting dressed that he thought he was dreaming. Then he went to the hospital: it was there that he realized what he already knew. (Maybe it’s better to begin when the nun comes in.) A dry tone, terse, without metaphor.

  Karl Marx. Historical creation of the categories of understanding. Philosophy takes up the rationality of the means of production at a linguistic level. The historical process is not thought of as content but rather is based on the categories produced by the process itself. Example: Nation. Example: Social class. Is literature also a concept produced by historical experience? In any case, we don’t call the same texts literature in different periods.

  An economy. “The money which I got in exchange for sex was a token indication of one-way desire that I was wanted enough to be paid for, on my own terms,” John Rechy, City of Night.

  Saturday

  Series E. Drastically changing lives, another name the same as other passions, seeking peace, leaving this empty chaos.

  In Cuba, during a long and talkative walk with León Rozitchner along the Havana pier, León pauses and asks me: “But would you live here?” His philosophy is founded on the claim of an accord between modes of thought and ways of life. He calls this throwing yourself in. I recalled the habitual challenges in gaucho poetry—what I say with my lips I defend with my neck.

  Novel 1. For me it was like returning to the town, pretending those hooks in my wrists did not exist, while the faces of the passengers in the train car watched me fleetingly, a woman across from me in a polka-dot dress did not know where to rest her blue eyes. I was returning to the town, as always, bound, with a policeman attached to me.

  Novel 2. Costa comes to me and says: The Englishman told me you’re staying here, but I just saw him leaving Acapulco, going to Suipacha. We’ve been sleeping on the La Plata-Buenos Aires train for three days, back and forth, back and forth. I tell him: some day we’ll end up in the railway sheds, a day and a night, Costa says to me, sleeping. We were hitchhiking to anywhere we could go, we would cross the tracks and already be traveling backward, to the south.

  Saturday

  Series A. In El Foro. I write in bars, spend my hours here. Once more the vertigo, turning in wider and wider circles around a center that changes with the clock. Yesterday with the newspaper classifieds, I go back and forth (as they say), from one end of the city to the other, and finally find an apartment on Pasaje del C
armen. I look for a guarantor, that is, a guarantee. I pay for three months as a deposit. Last night, turmoil with Pirí because of my leaving. The coming weeks seem difficult. If I manage to land this place (or another), I’ll try, after ten years of hotels and single rooms, to begin to live in a stable environment. Otherwise, my economic problems will start up once again. I prefer them to the others…

  Series A bis. Another bar, now on Carlos Pellegrini, cold air filters in through the cracks of the poorly-closed window, to my left a woman speaks quietly in French with a man who seems to be her father, she laughs at him and he tells her a dubious story about an Algerian making the crossing to Gibraltar. The older man, who perhaps is not her father but rather her lover, who perhaps supports the woman or is supported by her, repeats “Gibraltar, Gibraltar” several times like a litany.

  Sunday, June 2

  Settled into this bright apartment, in an alleyway that comes from the past, the rear-guard, last bastion, last defense. An end to the journey. How many places in recent years? Some economic security to let us survive for a season. I was lucky. Out on the sidewalk there was a fair, lots of noise starting at four or five in the morning, but to my good fortune they changed places and moved away from here… as of yesterday. All is calm now, waiting.

  The structure of Puig’s novel is Faulknerian, choral narration based on narrators who at once participate in and witness the events. It is the reader who must reconstruct and synthesize a hodgepodge of faltering sentences, fragments of conversations, letters, and diaries, finally building a story that is not located anywhere, that has not been told but rather alluded to. A coming-of-age novel, great skill in the use of orality.

  “A woman once left me stunned at the concept of ‘corny’ when she wrote to me in tears. These laments and protests of mine will seem corny to you. Corny is all sentiment that is not shared,” Ramón Gómez de la Serna.

  Tuesday, June 4

  Series E. As always, my tendency to blame my lack of solitude on “presences,” my difficulties with entering the game, are in reality an excuse. I think about empty spaces as places where I can cease to be myself, like someone in the corner of a station waiting room who changes his glasses, uses fake documents, and transforms himself.

  Just now a walk down Santa Fe to the Supervielle bank to cash the check and stop by the bookshop to find Cabot Wright Begins by James Purdy.

  Thursday 6

  Series B. Yesterday I ran into León Rozitchner, who offered me a bookcase to organize my books, and I walked with him down Florida, with everyone frightened after the assassination of Bobby Kennedy. Finally at Jorge Álvarez I ran into David Viñas, who has a striking ability to change the subject and draw me into the world of his concerns. In this case, our friendship is founded on what could be called a shared velocity for thinking about several things at the same time, avoiding obstacles. Impossible to have a conversation if it doesn’t come out of a dense series of implicit understandings and common ground.

  In Puig’s Betrayed… a phenomenon of stylization occurs, a sort of visible distortion that can be viewed as a “defect” of the composition (in the manner of Onetti’s clashing and stylistic affectation). Yet this is its greatest merit; the novel reveals the extreme nature of a world that moves around within a common language based on forms of expression derived from Hollywood cinema—photo-novels and sentimental letters—which mold lived experience (and exist outside all literary formulation or high culture). What is striking is that he controls this form of verbal realism with such skill that he transforms language into the lived expression of life. That language is now a form of life. The novel, then, works with reality that has already been told (by the mass media).

  Series A. I cross Viamonte to buy croissants, walking quickly to beat the cold, with the wind and sun in my face. The alleyway opens onto Calle Córdoba to the left and onto Viamonte to the right, and it runs parallel to Rodríguez Peña. Long ago, these shortcuts were passages for cars or the tram. The street is silent, and I feel well here.

  Friday 7

  Yesterday I worked out the matter of the newspaper pieces with old Luna. I arrange ninety dollars per month (a stipend). My dream of living off three dollars per day… I have to be in the editorial office for three hours every day, which I don’t like.

  X Series. Later, Lucas comes to my place dressed like a banker; he always follows the walk signs when he crosses the street, but he goes around armed and carrying fake papers. He came with beautiful Celina, and I imagine (love notwithstanding) that she also serves as an alibi for him, or creates the natural image of a married man strolling along with his wife. Everything is fake, except for the danger. He sits down, and we talk calmly. Celina was my student at La Plata and is much more intelligent and sensitive than he is, but perhaps isn’t as brave. (I ask myself: does she know? Or, at any rate, how much does she know about Lucas’s clandestine life?)

  Hamlet = Stephen Dedalus = Quentin Compson = Nick Adams = Jorge Malabia. The young romantic, the aspiring artist, who faces the world as it is and can’t bear it. The story told is how each one reacts to the weight of an unbearable (and adult or adulterous) reality. Creating, then, a story of the imaginary writers.

  Saturday 8

  Series B. Just now a visit from José Sazbón, he’s my oldest friend from my new life (which began in A.D. 1960). I don’t know anyone more intelligent or more cultured (from the culture that interests me), no one shier or friendlier. Veiled conflicts about five thousand pesos, etc.

  “It is not that one expresses anything when writing. One constructs another reality, the word,” Cesare Pavese.

  “Literature is not a mirror that reflects reality but is something added to the world,” Jorge Luis Borges.

  “Economy and interest are at the base of behaviors, beliefs, systems of neurosis,” Roland Barthes.

  Dostoevsky. In his novels, the action moves forward for reasons that are hidden to the reader, and it is only when catastrophe approaches that the hidden cause is made clear by means of an extensive confession. Underneath, there is always an inability to remember or name “The Crime” (which is different for everyone and is secret). This outmoded exposition is the theory of the crime and the superior man, which Raskolnikov communicates only after the murder. It is the Legend of the Grand Inquisitor that functions as Ivan Karamazov’s novel. Stravrogin’s confession in Demons belongs to the same method.

  Sunday 9

  I saw Godard’s The Carabineers, a fable about war, a silent film, an air of Beckett and Borges creating a story full of surprises, vertigo, earth, magic, etc., with photographs of everything in the world (style of Bouvard et Pécuchet) wrapped up in the violence of war.

  Tuesday 11

  Puig’s poetics. “Without a model I can’t draw,” says Toto. Then there’s the magnificent chapter with the school composition describing the experience of seeing the film The Great Waltz and retelling it. The letter that ends the novel is the same one that Berto tears up in the first chapter.

  It is striking to observe the treatment of seduction in Stendhal and Laurence Sterne (A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy). The same situation in both: Julien Sorel and Sterne’s autobiographical narrator hesitate to take the hands of the women they love for the first time. Nothing more. A touch, the gesture of moving toward…

  “It is time the reader should know it, for in the order of things in which it happened, it was omitted: not that it was out of my head; but that had I told it then it might have been forgotten now;—and now is the time I want it,” L. Sterne (seems like Macedonio Fernández).

  Wednesday

  Series A. A visit from my father, always cheerful and distrustful, with an air of helplessness but strong convictions. Disheartened because I’m not interested in politics (that is, in Peronism) like he is; we have dinner together, and he makes me recall moments of my life that I had forgotten. (My attempt to put a bomb in the UCR headquarters in 1956, in what had been Carlos Pellegrini’s old house in Adrogu�
�, when I was fifteen and did everything in secret, or so I believed, though I see now that my father knew the score. I planned it with my cousin Cuqui, and it seemed natural to us to do something like that in response to the catastrophe caused by the Revolución Libertadora.) My father amuses himself by telling that story and, in the same way, silences the story of his own “exploits,” which put him in prison.

  I read Absalom, Absalom! for the second time with astonishment and admiration. From a used bookshop I get the Mexican series Los narradores ante el público, autobiographies of writers from my own generation who describe ways and routines from their lives that are very similar to my own or those of Saer or Miguel Briante. A generation is a scattered, non-chronological series of shared readings and rituals, which will age along with us.

  Thursday 13

  Celina L. comes to see me with a proposal for a lecture in La Plata. She is sick but perseveres despite her bleak outlook and goes onward, intelligent and firm. I left and went down Corrientes in the light rain. In Jorge Álvarez everything is going along well, he brings me Rojo’s book on Che. Many anecdotes with no great importance, critique of Guevara’s foco guerrilla theory.