The difficulty comes not from what the words say, but from what is said between them. This means that the syntax matters more than the lexicon.
Suddenly, in the middle of my work preparing for the course on Arlt and Borges, an attack of terror comes upon me: fear of being unable to write any longer, of failing, etc. I am rational with literature and irrational in my relationship with literature.
Monday, September 2
Series B (or C?). I’m at La Modelo in La Plata, at a table by the window, in the sun, on the left side. Outside, you can see the trees, the wide streets; my past lies in this bar. The succession of afternoons when I was the only regular customer. Today I ordered sausages with fries and a bottle of white wine, just as I used to. And suddenly Lucía Reynal walked past, beautiful as always, on the other side of the glass, smiling and greeting me with an affectionate wave. Then she came into the bar and sat down with me and we were quiet. We had a history six years ago, which I imagine neither of us will forget. She wrote down her phone number for me on a scrap of paper and told me to call her when I came back here. But I won’t do it, I prefer the memory.
Tuesday, September 3
I looked at my face in the mirror and it was 5:30. I looked at myself again, and two hours had passed. Now I’m drinking maté to combat my hunger. And it is 8:30.
Wednesday, September 4
Now I’m watching the street through my “round pair of glasses” (heavy, with black frames), unsure whether they help to clarify things for me or erase them completely. The things I’m trying to forget can be seen more precisely. The images are clear and yet oblique, appearing as though blurred. The family dog, which had become rabid, had a black coat and was named Duke. They locked him up in a room, and we watched him through the skylight. He jumped around and growled furiously, and a fat policeman climbed up onto a table and killed him with a bullet.
Notes on Tolstoy (3 bis). Ostranenie [defamiliarization] as the difference between showing (making seen) and telling. In this way, Tolstoy broke away from the allegorical way of interpreting the Old Testament and the Gospels and imposed his detached (“Rational”) reading. Everything is built around the question “What must be done?” And, laterally, “Who am I?” Compromise as a theory about use, about the relations between art and life, about the rejection of artistic autonomy as false religion and false art. Against the kitsch that is possible in profane illumination, ostranenie, and epiphany.
Series E. When I manage to assemble my notebooks from the last eight years, I will type them up. I always run the risk of trusting more in my past than in my future. Anyway, it would be interesting to publish all of my diaries from 1958 to 1968.
Thursday 5
I wake up at five thirty, get out of bed. Now it is six, and the clear light of the sun enters through the window. Uncertain about my perception, I wonder about my eyes, certain that my glasses are overly focused; my sight has started to grow cloudy, and now I struggle against a pained vision, sensing my own eyes as though they were made of glass. It is interesting to observe my way of seeing, understanding the contingency of the world; a pair of glasses can change the visible texture of reality. Of course, I can also go to the ophthalmologist to confirm or deny the excessive focus. But just what is focus?
Seeing one thing at a time.
Description of a mental state. My head paralyzed, a pain in my eyes, an emptiness, as though floating in the air, a weight that pulls my head to one side; I’ve always distrusted my body, which I cannot entirely control; that is where my rage at illnesses comes from. I undergo these states like rebellions, metaphysical experiences through which I confirm the existence of my body.
If I let myself be carried away by mysteries, so easy, so attractive, I would find a magical relationship in my encounters with certain books: Mad Toy, Hemingway’s short stories, Pavese’s diary, which I’ve never been able to “let go of,” which I’ve come to rediscover again and again, finding some quality that I hadn’t noticed but made me love them in the past. It is clear that these were the encounters that made me into who I am, and so I see them as encounters and not as origins. And that works for any magical idea about destiny; we always think we’re seeing events and things for the first time while, unknowingly, we’ve been learning to discover them.
Friday 6
I continue my confused testing, trying to ascertain what is happening with my glasses. For example, I look at my face in the mirror without them on, and I recognize myself, but with the contribution of the prescription lenses my face changes, changing from one moment to the next, maybe because of the motions I make when I see myself in glasses.
Saturday, September 7
Series B. Yesterday confessions and misfortunes from Luna; I see in him that ferocious duplicity of all humbled. At night, David comes over and we walk down Corrientes in the insane atmosphere of the city on Friday nights and finally see Accident by Losey, with a script by Pinter, with all the snobs in Buenos Aires enraptured in the entrance hall, gaping at each other.
Series E. I would like to fill these notebooks more quickly, to systematize the information, to write about the everyday and analyze it, but—and I’ve already said this many times before—how can I write my conversation with Luna yesterday without making “literature” in the worst sense? The difficulty of writing openly in these notebooks arises from their lack of deliberate construction, which is both the virtue and the meaning of a diary. But, since I don’t believe in spontaneity or sincerity, it is clear that this diary will be no more than sketches, notes, a way of looking down at myself, leaving behind details with which to later reconstruct certain periods, certain states. Therefore, what they need is not “more literature” but more swiftness, more of a snapshot. What is important is to search for these tones, to practice them, to write “with the flow of the pen.”
A surprise last night on finding the drunk and half-crazed ex-boxer, who greets me every time I go down to the street, sleeping in the entryway to the building. I tried to step over him without waking him, but he spoke to me as soon as I opened the door. A frightened conversation with him ensued, throughout which I was trying to calm myself down more than calm him down.
I recall my experience yesterday in the carpenter’s shop. As I enter, I witness an argument between a blue-eyed workman and a laborer with a bored expression who was holding up a decree that banned long hair on men and miniskirts on women. “It’s a good thing,” he said, “that they passed this.” The other was looking at me, surprised and amused. “But you’re an enemy of mankind,” he said to him. “You should be sent off with the prisoners.” Finally, when the one with blue eyes crossed the street to check my opinion, the other watched me without stopping work. “Now. That guy doesn’t want to talk to me. Just got out of jail. He was a prisoner for five years…” It was a clash between the free man’s defense of military repression and the ex-prisoner’s defense of liberty. For me, scenes like this are the ones that condense experience, because they’re left open and you can construct the complete story (which you don’t know but can imagine).
Just now a boy’s voice through the window: “I’m in such a hurry, I don’t know where to go.”
Sunday 8
Series A. A cloudy noon with a pale sun in the sky. Today is my father’s birthday, and I feel the same indifference as ever toward this man who was beaten “by history,” as he himself would say. He felt political anger and hatred as personal matters; that’s what Peronism was to him, a private matter, as though he was trying to be faithful to a friend (Peronism turned politics into an emotional matter, that’s why it has persisted). I called him on the phone; he always tries to seem euphoric and busy with projects. When will we see each other? is our leitmotif.
Yesterday, by contrast, was a splendid day with a clear sun, a walk down Calle Córdoba in the late afternoon, the warm air; the jacaranda trees had bloomed and my senses were heightened, maybe because of the conversation with Dad, who insisted yet again on my coming to live in Adrogu
é now that the house is empty. Worried about Nono’s archives, could I take over? “Maybe,” I said to him, “I should file and publish the old man’s secrets and the dead men’s letters.” The men in the family pass on these mournful remains from one to the next. And so I walked through the restless city, amid the warm air and the voices of the people.
“All science would be superfluous if the outward appearance and the essence of things directly coincided,” K. Marx. There’s an element of Platonism in this sentence that opens the way toward an analysis of fetishism, that is, of the reality that is illusorily revealed in capitalism. And there is also a poetics of detective narrative; the philosopher is a detective investigating confusing traces in order to decipher the occult world. Only one who has a naïve and optimistic (or conservative) viewpoint can think that things are as they are.
A group of boys is playing with a ball in the ravine: one kicks it aiming for the goal that they’ve set up precariously. The ball goes off course and breaks a window. “I passed it sideways,” one says, “and it bounced off you.” “Yeah, well the redhead didn’t stop it.” They accuse each other, looking for the guilty one, and they all individualize, thus “separating” themselves from the group and also differentiating themselves from each of the members in particular. It is the inner mechanism of social matters, children learn it quickly. The guilty parties are individuals, collective responsibility is dissolved, and no one thinks about how they set themselves up to play on a narrow field with many windows for the ball to hit. A splintered way of seeing the world, and one that is learned in childhood.
Inevitably, literature works based on a situation (a non-verbal context) of reading: the interpretive delirium is measured in accordance with readers’ greater or lesser ability to understand the things that will limit their reading.
Monday 9
A peaceful day, brutally cut short by the arrival of Luna with a stupid, shifty excuse (work problems that could be solved another time, a project of a new publishing house that is an underhanded jab at my working relationship with Álvarez). He sets in with an idiotic stubbornness, invading the space, occupying it completely, talking to himself, always telling the same stories in the same way, with the same professorial, schematic tone. I feel bursts of rage, and I’m on the point of cursing at him, laughing, escaping. He goes on like that, waving his arms, slow, satisfied with himself and his own anger and resentment.
Two hours later, still irritated, I made some maté and drank it slowly with the imbalanced feeling that the act of drinking maté alone can cause, as though missing someone who could sustain the cyclical rhythm of the ancient ceremony of getting together to drink “unos amargos,” something bitter. As always, it is the little things that worry me, trivial matters, phone calls, ill-timed visits, avoided responsibilities, making me uncomfortable. It is very simple; for me, the only way out is absolute isolation, living outside of everything in a locked-off space, without a future. The only path left is to shut myself away, seeking refuge in an area of my own, high and walled, and working as though the world did not exist.
All that matters is knowing the limits of the outer wall, but this learning takes a lifetime. Now the cool air is coming in through the open window with the dry noise of crates, below, and the wheels of a car on the mismatched cobblestones.
Yesterday, an epiphany: In the empty street, Martínez (the crazy, drunken ex-boxer) with an air of “seriousness,” his expression docile, “well-behaved,” was standing next to a watchman, smoking fearfully, holding a package wrapped in white paper in one hand, his shirt open—and leaning in a doorway behind him, another vagrant, quite old yet with a fierce gleam still in his eyes and a scar on his face that gave away his real age—walking with a sluggishness I’ve never seen in anyone, immobile, moving imperceptibly, going slowly with the rhythm of a man who’s lost his way in the darkness, moving away, led down by another policeman, who paused every two steps and waited, bored, to let him catch up.
“I am Ricky Martínez, boxer, I have a beautiful young wife,” he applauded himself, looked for any wine left in the empty bottles, went on shouting insults: “Policeman, knob, snitch, animal.” The row of boys provides him a chorus: “Martínez is the greatest boxer in the nation. Martínez corazón.” He raised his arms with his fists closed, lowered his head, and danced around, on guard.
Tuesday 10
Seven in the evening on the almost empty bus, about to leave for La Plata. Where does this restlessness come from? As we know, I’ve always seen things “from above”; it bothers me to think about a group of idiots, condescending to the “lecturer.” Maybe I can’t stand to live in this time, knowing that no one knows anything about me. I can’t stand the middle ground. We shall see.
Wednesday 11
Series B. In La Modelo, empty, with the clear sun on the other side of the window. I ordered, as I always have for many years, sausages with potatoes and a glass of white wine. A certain stillness and peace. Then I give my first lecture. Everything goes well, some hesitation as I start, but then comes the feeling of controlling the subject, apart from some empty stares among the women in the audience. This first experience proves that my best tone comes from improvisation, almost without any notes; I go with the ideas and fall into the void, and after a while I feel the people coming along with me. The best part was my unexpected theory on translation (conceived of as social practice), which determines the literary style of an era more than any person can. For that reason, books must be retranslated every so often because, without realizing it, translators repeat the models of what can be said “literarily” at a given moment. They are working with the foreign language but also with the present state of the translation’s target language. For them, this state marks possible turns of style, permitting them to say certain things in a way that is acceptable for the era. Thus can be seen, implicitly, the traces of social and literary style. Books are translated into an already-formed language, with its rhetoric and “aesthetic” grammar.
Beforehand, a professor, a poet and journalist from the SADE, gave me an Arltian introduction, speaking about global knowledge and my fame “beyond the frontier”; I looked down at the floor and now and then glanced at him, trying to raise me up onto some kind of pedestal, at a vast table, far away from everything.
Ezra Pound says: Flaubert is Joyce’s immediate precursor. Joyce learned the encyclopedic form that structures his Ulysses from Bouvard et Pécuchet.
Tension between baroque style and classical style, defined by T. Wolfe in a letter to Scott Fitzgerald. I am a “putter-inner” and you are a “leaver-outer.”
Thursday 12
The difficulty in the morning is not to think about what lies outside, almost as though I were piling up all of the senses, the events, into what begins after two in the afternoon, when I finish working. Today, for example, stopping by J. Álvarez, paying Pirí back what I owe her, dealing with everything for Gide’s diary, and also the many likely meetings with friends, acquaintances, etc. Then going to Luna’s place, enduring his gossip, his complaints.
Today I’m working on the script for B. In two hours, I unenthusiastically lay out three scenes—still very schematic—for the outline of the story about the criminals who escape to Montevideo. Then I take notes on Gide’s diary and Kafka’s diary, and I’m also reading Musil’s diary. What do they have in common, and what do I have in common with them?
In the short stories from my book, I have discovered, without knowing it, the difference between dramatization and story-telling. On one side are the “objective” stories, which tend to be narrated in the present tense, while the events and dialogues are taking place (“Tarde de amor,” “La invasión”), and on the other side are the monologues, which are defined more by tone than plot (“Tierna es la noche,” “Una luz que se iba”). So, when Héctor Alterio read “Mi amigo” aloud, it easily turned into a theater monologue. “Mata-Hari 55” is a reduced novel: recording, documentary, juxtaposition of voices (a model or plan f
or the novel about the criminals who escape to Montevideo). Present tense. Spoken prose, the act of storytelling, the form of the (false) nonfiction novel based on real events.
Friday
Series A. Last night with my brother Marcos, a stranger whom I struggle to recognize. “Grown up,” more legitimate than I have ever been, determined to leave this country behind and take his family and my mother to live in Canada. Conflicted about my father’s (his father’s) weaknesses, a fragile tone that my brother can no longer endure. They drove from Mar del Plata together, with Dad confessing his crises, seeing no way out; politics is a crime, he says, and he lays his misery on Marcos, as he used to do to me in Mar del Plata, making me be his confessor at age eighteen. I learned from him that you must never let yourself be blackmailed by people who put history on their side and justify all of their own weakness or failures with “historical” reasons. My father experienced the misfortunes of banned Peronism as though they were directed at him personally. At the same time, I recognize my own conflicts in him: being trapped by future events, refusing to accept reality. And so how can I, his mirror, blame him?
I’m reading Scott Fitzgerald’s letters: “Don’t worry about popular opinion. Don’t worry about dolls. Don’t worry about the past. Don’t worry about the future. Don’t worry about growing up. Don’t worry about anybody getting ahead of you. Don’t worry about triumph. Don’t worry about failure unless it comes through your own fault. Don’t worry about mosquitoes. Don’t worry about flies. Don’t worry about insects in general. Don’t worry about parents. Don’t worry about boys. Don’t worry about disappointments. Don’t worry about pleasures. Don’t worry about satisfactions.” Only concern yourself with doing things well, and seek compensation in the work itself (not even in its result). You’d have to be a saint to follow those rules, she said.
The Diaries of Emilio Renzi Page 7