The Diaries of Emilio Renzi

by Ricardo Piglia

  On Puig. In his work, there is no ironic distance between the writer and the speech of the characters (as there is indeed in Bioy Casares or Cortázar, who clown around, spurning the use of the subordinate classes’ language). There is a sentimental relationship between language and character. They tell themselves stories without discerning any meaning. Puig immediately understands the need to write without parody. Instead of ironically observing from the outside, the narrator moves among the characters like one of them. Puig avoids aristocratic satire, the kind of speech that creates a facile complicity with the reader; instead, Puig establishes a complicity with his characters.

  Series E. Ultimately, like it or not, these notebooks will be an archive or register of my sentimental education, and so they will basically be composed of reflections on my feelings, barely intersected by actions or events or words about myself. At the same time, these notebooks form a narrative with little significance on the level of plot, but they have a tension that only arises from the reading yet to come: as in any novel, what takes place in the moment, brought on by chance and contingency, will be viewed as immutable once it has come to pass. I tend now to intersplice the narrative with analysis of the actions and with pure description of the events.

  Saturday 13

  Solidarity with Viñas and his reserved and violent speech, rejecting what he calls “the seduction of the media” (which seduces him too much, I say). He’s right, he has captured the change in the intellectual climate. Literary validation no longer passes through the traditional systems (Sur for example), but instead through the mass media; journalists are the new intellectuals or, at any rate, they’re the ones who fulfill the function of intellectuals.

  In the year before I published my first book, beginning a new story was an exhausting effort; my nerves were frayed, and I would catch perilous glimpses of the right names and spend a whole morning calling everyone, men and women, “Ramón.” One afternoon, which I experienced as though it were a sunrise, I watched the sunset through the window three hours after I’d gotten out of bed. I was hungry and listening to a strange radio story about a desert region in the north of the country. At the time I was living in a room in a large boarding house near Parque Lezama, on the corner of Martín García and Montes de Oca. I was calm, waiting to see nightfall before going to buy ham, cheese, and sardines at the market to eat with fresh bread and wine, letting the night pass without surprises. Now, by contrast, a year later, I live besieged by momentary visions or—as I call them—vistas. It’s as though I had a private TV channel activated inside my head, making me see a sequence of blurry, real images on the edge of my mind. At this stage, closing my eyes does nothing for me. Are they mental images or forgotten memories?

  Monday 15

  Light rain. I’m getting started. Fiction for B. now, then a meeting for the magazine with David Viñas, pushing forward well, on my side, but the rest is ambiguous, unclear. We’ll see what happens.

  Novel. Tone before storyline, inner voices before plot.

  “The author? For me, the author is the one who puts on the title,” Juan Carlos Onetti.

  Thursday 18

  Series B. Yesterday a walk with David through Boca, the little houses that I almost never saw while I lived there. A world mixed with tango and anarchist tradition. A brotherly meeting with him, his way of understanding reality is very akin to my own (more so than anyone else’s). Then, in the end, we have ravioli with wine in a tavern looking out at the boats, between the clamor and the painted walls.

  Sunday

  Series B bis. More visits from David, his attempts to attack Borges that I blocked elegantly but unsuccessfully, dinners in Bajo, meetings for the magazine, and meanwhile I’m working on Puig, many ideas.

  Monday 22

  Bursts of insomnia, rare for me, and no great results, a conflicted month. Today I saw Boorman’s Point Blank, with Lee Marvin, the loneliness of gangsters.

  Series A. What enchants me about the indifferent figure is the decision to drive oneself to live without others. Living in a closed circle.

  A complicated day, but so are all days, unless I decide to live on an island.

  Sunday 28

  Adventures with David, who lambasts Borges again and again. We went to a lecture by Sabato last Thursday to stir up some trouble. Apprehension, but I am happier, riding out this period of my life without drama, with little clarity and much exhaustion, with nothing lying ahead but my own confusion, empty certainties, repeated mistakes. Disorganized reading. Fleeting elation.

  Thursday, August 1

  The month ends with no great internal cataclysms, with Pirí, with Julia, with reality.

  Friday 2

  I don’t tell anyone what I see. Even here, I take care in writing about my “vistas” so as not to give them validation. What is happening? Hallucinations, visions. It is not a secret, they are not secrets or anything like that, but they’re so vivid that I can’t describe them (still).

  Notes on Tolstoy (3). “Poet, Calvinist, fanatic and aristocrat,” Turgenev defined him with these four words. In the end, the categories of “Calvinist and fanatic” canceled out those of “poet and aristocrat.” After his crisis and conversion, he progressively distances himself from literature, learning how to make shoes with the cobbler in the town. “A good pair of boots is worth more than War and Peace.” As has become clear, in another context, the opposition of literature vs. boots had a tradition in the political and social debates in Russia. “Pisarev… following Bazarov, had resoundingly declared a shoemaker to be more useful than Pushkin.” The Peronist slogan of shoes yes, books no seems to be a creole version of the same tradition (extreme populism).

  August 8

  Disoriented, I realize that it’s been more than a week since I’ve paused to write about what is happening, the nights that stretch on past noon, altered sleeping patterns, working on the essay about Puig that interrupted a letter to Cabrera Infante. Meetings for the magazine, a certain sadness that came and took me two days ago. The worries continue, yesterday it pained me to cross the entryway with the woman sitting there, so I turned back and waited until I couldn’t see her. She wears a navy-blue cloak, and she even knows my name. She is fat; I have seen her in dreams, and she reappears to me now.

  Friday 9

  Yesterday David came over, assuring me that he felt “very good, better than ever.” Beba Eguía was already on the way to Europe, neither Julia nor I knew what to do for him, in my case due to my excessive shyness, in hers out of respect for my excessive shyness, until he finally left, as though it pained him, and agreed to call me on the phone. The light is low; my eyes are tired, and now I’m reading Gombrowicz’s Diary.

  Tuesday 13

  Series E. I get up early in spite of the cold and open the window, and on the other side of the street, against the wall, two old men are warming themselves beside an improvised campfire in an oil can which has already turned red from the heat. The flames rise and envelop the precarious container, and they shift around it and laugh, tapping their feet on the ground. The day is at once gray and clear.

  Tuesday 20

  Hard work to get five thousand pesos in advance of the fifty thousand for the book of three nouvelles by Melville, with a preface by Carl Olson! Earlier, a doctor gave me a prescription for eyeglasses. We’ll see if, by seeing more clearly, I can see more clearly. It would be amusing to prove that a pair of glasses modifies reality. According to the ophthalmologist, peripheral visions of figures or objects is a result of excessive reading. He treated me like an idiot: what do you see here? he asked me, and he lit up the wall with a little flashlight, pointing to different sized letters on the eye chart poster. Nothing, I told him, I mean, basically nothing, I can see the light from your flashlight. We went on like that for a while because he wanted to verify whether I was seeing those figures, but I only see them when I’m alone. This specialist is very expensive. Junior recommended him to me.

  Series E. Someday, I will have to mot
ivate myself to revise all of the notebooks I’ve written, selecting from within them and making clean copies. I am afraid, among other things, of misrepresenting the past, of deliberately forgetting, of choosing poorly, leaving out things that—in ten years, let’s say—may seem fundamental to me. I come and go with the style; sometimes everything is very fluid and other times I fall into private shudderings. The fundamental thing is the fatigue in my left hand, the stress from writing, and that’s why, I think, I see too much.

  Thursday 22

  The effects of reviews are always insubstantial; it seems as though they are talking about something else and that is in fact the case, but what can you really expect? Something that can never come, and so you have to keep writing. There is no way to gain certainty in what you are doing, unless you come back from death. All this hot air because the Centro Editor’s chapter on this generation was published yesterday (which generation is mine?). Exclusions, little hostilities, etc. To overcome my abstract anger, I have to sit down and write, projecting myself toward a future that seems uncertain (but isn’t that the essential quality of the future?), because I’ve been in this dry spell for two years so far, writing to forget.

  Series A. A splendid lesson, in any case; I’m here but would prefer not to be, which confirms some half-glimpsed truths. If I had the courage (I could barely make myself write down the above, I should never talk about myself or my relationship with the critics), I would keep coming back to this period but would write everything in third person: everything since I arrived in the city in 1965, my trip to Cuba, my stay in Pirí’s house, my work with Álvarez, my book release, my economic problems and solutions. This whole process is a sort of novel of education, and I still haven’t written about it because I find it hard to step back, despite mentioning this distant attitude as my most legitimate pretension. Maybe the fundamental work lies in finding the tone to narrate my passions with distance. Knowing how to let the incidents come. All the same, it is evident that I’ve spent my life asking for more time, looking for ways to postpone the moment of informed decisions.

  One unexpected afternoon, his wife—the woman he considered to be his wife in his imagination—spontaneously appeared at his room in a boarding house in La Plata, along with the father (his father). He was in bed with Constanza; they weren’t doing anything special, they’d only gotten into bed because it was very cold. Inés came up the staircase first, and when she opened the door she stood there motionless, not entering, and only told him that she’d come with the father (his father). Confusion; Constanza took a moment to get dressed and put on her shoes and then went down the stairs, calmly (trying to seem calm). He remembers nothing of that day. Inés told him that his father had turned up, looking for her, and the situation was so confusing that she’d decided to come to La Plata with him, without warning. He imagined his father trying to seduce Inés, he’d already tried it with Helena, and he felt so wounded that he decided right there to leave everything behind and go to live in Buenos Aires with Inés. He remembers the journey on the bus, he and Inés were speaking in low voices, maybe he was making promises, and his father traveled in the seat behind the two of them.

  Sometimes, the reality of an action is manifested to us in its consequences (I should say: it is always manifested in this way). On certain occasions, great crimes have been committed easily, as if in a dream. Then came the desire to wake up, but it was too late. I would not like to say that this has been the story of my life.

  “I am not an entertainer… I’m concerned with the precise manipulation of word and image… to create an alteration in the reader’s consciousness… to make people aware of the true criminality of our times,” William Burroughs.

  Trouble concentrating and reading, a certain undefined restlessness; my sidelong glances, as I call them, persist. Now I’m reading André Gide’s diary, which I remain outside of, as if he were accountable for raising a fence to isolate his life, or rather, the everyday story of his life, presenting it as the experience of a man too aware of his privileges and virtues (and also his beautiful imperfections).

  Friday, August 23

  Alone, with Julia, at an event for Felipe Vallese in Avellaneda, caught up in excitement and anger.

  I finish a draft of my essay on Puig, read Gide’s diary, and agree to write some articles for Luna under the pseudonym of Trekiakov, caught up in the narrative aspects of journalism; I finish two pieces, one on social delinquency and another on the military. In this voluntary work, I foresee a more and more efficient and impersonal mechanization.

  Good times, at any rate, despite some indeterminate sources of restlessness that I put aside until suddenly, as I turn my head, I am surprised, seeing them in front of me as though catching myself, spontaneously, in a mirror. In such cases, of course, experience does nothing. If I could get them to leave me alone, I would not spend so much time gazing into this unexpected mirror.

  Series B. David arrived last night.

  Series A. Nervous about my visit to Jorge Álvarez in a little while. Why so many problems? I can’t bear economic favors, both because of my delirious relationship with money and my resistance to “entering” reality (and the two movements are just one). I would like to receive enough money—out of thin air, as they say—to work for a whole year in peace without seeing anyone.

  I resist describing last night’s dinner and my meeting with David, a certain shared nostalgia for past times.

  Sunday

  Today I spent the day alone without any surprises. Decent work yesterday, although the piece about Puig is still twenty centimeters short of the final. Correcting a piece of writing seems like one of Zeno’s paradoxes. Further still: to correct a text—with each modification—is to open a new path, finding another passage that moves the entire structure and opens a new balance and a new imbalance, which, in being modified, will open a new balance, etc. At any rate, if there’s time, I hope to correct the beginning and end before I type it all up definitively.

  Monday

  A good meeting for the magazine at David’s house. Discussion of some weak materials (by Ismael on intellectuals), prior tensions that David experienced after his conversation with me the other night (which I didn’t want to relate). Raúl Sciarretta has good critical sense, though he’s excessive sometimes: his joining, with David and Walsh, along with my momentum (how long will it last?) may work out.

  Series E. Clearly, I struggle to write down here what I’m living through in the present; the experience takes on all of its newfound weight in memory. Anyway, I must demand greater continuity and less direct style from myself in these notebooks. But how can I write about crossing Carlos Pellegrini yesterday afternoon after taking LSD, with my super-heightened senses and a kind of velocity that went beyond the events themselves? Or Friday afternoon in Plaza Lavalle, reading an article on Gustavo Sainz in Mundo Nuevo and thinking about how I was the same age as him but still hadn’t published a novel? I think about how old writers are, what they did when they were twenty-six years old, my age. Better still, I thought about this while sitting between an old asthmatic man and a lady opening her lunch bag.

  According to Julia, I talk in my sleep; last night, for example, I said: “But, old man, you know this issue is a spiritualization.” Before that, on Friday, according to her (if I must believe her), I said in my sleep: “For me, Erdosain is the literary unconscious, so to speak.”

  Tuesday 27

  Series B. In a bar filled with light on the corner of Lavalle and Rodríguez Peña. A convoluted morning that began badly, an argument with Julia that grew worse to the point that I left home and came here to calm down. The people in this place come and go, leaning over me to talk on the public phone on the wall at my back. When I saw a beautiful free table by the window, I didn’t consider the risk of the telephone located behind it. After a while I started to entertain myself with their conversations: a blue-eyed girl was announcing her father’s death to a friend, who asked her to repeat the news twice. Invasio
ns of trusting ladies who covered my table with purses and objects, while they complained about the time and the state of the country.

  Saturday

  Noon. A meeting for the magazine yesterday. A good editorial written by David and decent reception of my article, although David took the opportunity to criticize Puig and insinuate that he didn’t deserve an essay like mine. For his part, Ismael said that while my article was very good, I didn’t ever say whether the book was good or not. Then David, with a mischievous air, said to him: “Ismael, that isn’t done anymore.” For his part, Sciarretta critiques my article for lacking a critical element and literary theory. What is literary theory to him? I don’t know how to put it. Croce, maybe, or Della Volpe. Is literary criticism knowledge that is lacking from a book or knowledge that is already there? Sciarretta believes it’s what is lacking, which the critic must include in order to “complete” the meaning. Finally we find a middle ground; we will introduce my essay on Puig as part of a book, and in this way they can calm down because what is lacking can come later. All of them praise the prose and the level, but we’re in different worlds.