The Diaries of Emilio Renzi

by Ricardo Piglia

  Relationships with writers from other generations are always complicated because each one speaks a different language, and so we end up understanding one another through an invented jargon with fragments of each person’s private language, and all we accomplish is incomprehension and unease.

  My distrust of overly effusive and obvious outward performances of affection is the first thing that separates me from my Sartrean friends, León, David, Ismael, even Massotta. They act out their childhood readings, seeking “authenticity,” turning sincerity and explicit words into proof of a conscience open to the world. For my part, I have had other readings; the true emotions are the ones that don’t show themselves, and passion is too strong to be exhibited as though it were an object in a toy store window.

  Even better, I find this quote from Borges in the book that David gave me: “The subject is almost grammatical, which I announce as a warning to those readers who have condemned (in the name of friendship) my grammarianisms and requested a human work. I could answer that there is nothing more human (that is, less mineral, vegetal, animal, and even angelical) than grammar.”

  Another from Borges: “Someone who does not work to earn his living finds himself a bit outside of reality.”

  Thursday

  The bookcase León gave me arrived, I set it against the wall, and now the books are there in rows, too many to see in a single glance, too few for my fantasy (to read everything).

  Sunday, September 29

  I get the volume of Pavese’s letters, so expensive (nine thousand pesos), the chance nature of what he writes, I can fill in the voids between one letter and another using his diary and his stories. What am I looking for? Always the same thing, to know why he writes, who or what it was that led him to write—just as it did me. The result: when I’m interested in a writer I read everything. There are not many who have this good fortune. And Pavese was one of the first.

  An impression from that reading helps me understand that we are in a situation of breaking free from the exterior nature that has defined us from the beginning. Now we no longer look at other literatures or foreign writers as though they had more opportunities than us. We read as among peers, that’s what has changed.

  Series E. I imagine myself based on three or four clear, not-so-distant memories, as though my life began not long ago and before that—the rest—was the lost paradise of my over-prolonged childhood. The decision was made impulsively, and my closest friends (Diana, Elena, or Raúl’s sister) insisted that I couldn’t dedicate my life to literature, far too risky a gamble. For a few years, my father and his cronies began a campaign to convince me that I needed to make sensible decisions, and that was what ultimately had me cornered in a suicidal defense of a future about which I had very confused ideas. I recall and look at those scenes as a way to understand my subsequent vengeance (literature as revenge), and above all as a way to understand why I write this diary. For years, it was—and still is—the only place where I could support myself in maintaining this delusional decision. All or Nothing would have to be the title of these notebooks if I ever published them.

  This all comes because of my shock in confirming in Pavese what I haven’t realized about myself, shall we say, “consciously,” something I only understood long after I decided, once again, “to be a writer” before I had ever written anything to justify that delusion. The advice I wouldn’t listen to was trying to convince me to admit that literature must be a “secondary occupation” for me. I saw all of that—almost psychotically, I saw my whole life already lived—in one instant that afternoon, as I sat on the tiled floor of the hallway, my back leaning against the wall, writing furious words in a notebook. I must have thought: “If I write the things I want to experience here—and not, stupidly, only the things that I do experience—then I’ll be able to experience them like prophecies come true.” Just like that, I bound writing and life together forever. I was never worried by the idea that literature can distance you from experience, because things were the opposite for me: literature created experience.

  Protect yourself well from making art a secondary occupation, because the gods who watch over general mediocrity will punish you, I thought without realizing it. I saw it at age seventeen, when I had done nothing so far to justify that belief. That was why I was intrigued by the lives “of writers,” I was seeking their moment—or moments—of decision. I remember reading Proust’s Recherche one summer and seeing the epiphany of that discovery in the Guermantes’s library, when at the end of his life Marcel understands that he has lived through everything so as to be able to write the novel you are reading. In my case, the matter was reversed; I made the decision before I had lived, sitting on the floor in a hallway of our dismantled home.

  I set aside all excuses (studying law, looking for stable work, making, as they say, a family, etc.) before anything else, in the same way that Marcel understands that his fascination with social life, parties, and the aristocratic world was nothing compared to his will—put better, his desire—to be a writer.

  There is something strange in that decision to choose the imaginary as a reason for life itself. A flaw, a fracture that no one has seen, the consequences of which can be felt in the language, in a murky and troubling ability with words: None of that justifies anything, and you can have that certainty and never get as far as writing a single page. And so, without realizing it, I have also started to continue the creation of imaginary writers in fictional texts. What kind of writers do writers invent in their novels? What do they do? What is their work? The first in that lineage for me was Nick Adams, the young aspiring writer in Hemingway’s stories, and then came the great Stephen Dedalus, the young aesthete who looks at the world—at his family, at his homeland, at his religion—with contempt because he has chosen to be an artist, and we never know whether he succeeds because, at the end of Ulysses, Joyce leaves him walking half-drunk through the Dublin night, with Leopold Bloom, who brings him home with the secret intention of adopting him as a son (and also, perversely, as his splendid wife Molly’s lover). I read this succession fervently, as though it were my own life: Quentin Compson, Faulkner’s suicidal character, who kills himself before he has done what he imagined he wanted to do (to be a writer). The list goes on, and I’m on the way to attempting a gallery or an encyclopedia of the lives of imaginary writers: They all seem to have a certain immaturity in common—they never manage to become adults (because they don’t want to). Here, I could use Gombrowicz’s novels, where the artist resists maturity. That is the limit, since maturity is the transformation of the artist into an assimilated man. That is what happens at the end of Don Quixote, once Alonso Quijano has forgotten all his delusions and resigned himself to a trivial life. That is why the lives of artists in novels end quickly and, in general, they all die or commit suicide so as not to resign themselves and admit the weight of reality.

  I respond to an almost surreal scene: A woman asks me to lend her a novel and asks if I’ve read it, and a few weeks later I’m writing these notebooks. That would become clear if I thought about the situation in which—“without realizing it”—I gave Vicky my diary instead of my class notes. And she was clearly the second love of my life (for that reason).

  Everything would be in place if I dared to live as though I were about to turn (not twenty-eight, as is the case, but rather) eighteen years old. Then I would indeed be able to wait, to be calm, to let myself go, ready for my formative years. But, of course, the temporality worked backward in my case.

  Monday, September 30

  While reading Pavese’s letters, I once again felt the desire to compose a story that takes place in Turin, an invisible collage made from fragments of his diary and my own. Narrating Pavese’s life (or one day, or the end) and at the same time a few days—or a few hours—in the life of the protagonist, who is an imaginary writer (and that’s why he has gone there to see images of Pavese up close). One possible beginning (if I write the story in first person): “I do not understand why
I am here, how I have come to be in Turin, with nothing to justify this journey to a city that I do not know, one that I only feel close to because my father and my father’s father were born here. I came on a fellowship to study Pavese, or rather, I came here to write something about Pavese’s diary, but that is a pretense. As always, the reasons and the causes are something darker. Sometimes, some afternoons, when I am more disoriented than usual, I find a place in this room at the Hotel Roma, open my suitcase, and reread the notebooks in which I write, here and there, about what I am doing or thinking. I am alone in Turin, I scarcely know three or four people, the waiter who serves me in the restaurant, the girl who comes to clean the room, a circumstantial friend I met in the café where I go for breakfast every morning. My Italian is slow and hesitant and my acquaintances think I’m a bit slow in the head, not really a foreigner, more a stranger, an outsider…”

  French and English Books

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  October 1

  Now the sun, which is always reflected in the window at the same hour and gets in my eyes: a white brilliance, moving away and blinding me; then everything is silhouetted clearly with a gleam that gives the city the guise of a photograph.

  Pavese also deals with the key to all of us (or put better, some of us, or better still, only me); literature is contrary to life, and that is its virtue. For example: what it is that he does in that city he doesn’t know, studying an author who spoke a language that was his father’s and his grandfather’s but not his own. Maybe it would be better, instead of getting lost in duplicating forms, to simply devote himself to translating some of Pavese’s stories that he likes (“Wedding Trip,” “The Leather Jacket,” for example). In that way, his residency in Turin would be productive, and he could present a report at the end, justifying the money from the fellowship that had allowed him to travel. For example, to say: Pavese was an unbelievable man, which is not to say that he was a valuable man.

  Yesterday a long meeting for the magazine with David, Ismael, Rodolfo, and Andrés; we finished at two in the morning in Munich, near the port. Argument about the publishing house, the issue is how we’ll fit in what I call the foreign series. I’m trying to capture the multiple meanings of a lateral position with a single term. A nation on the margins of the central currents. Sarmiento already saw it, but we now think that such a position does not prevent us from establishing direct contact with the current state of culture. We are synchronized with contemporary culture for the first time.

  Andrés gives himself a clear conscience there. He looks to others for the source of any ambiguous action that implicates or complicates him. A slightly out-of-focus image of any one of us, resentful; he seeks security, revolutionary verbalism, and imagines that experiencing everything in a complicated way is a demonstration of sincerity. A beautiful soul that conceals what we might call, in his words, dark temptations.

  Very excited about the project of writing a story about Pavese, I rediscover old notes that have been inside me since ’64. Suddenly, a phenomenal lucidity allows me to see the whole story and its title in a single image: a fish in a block of ice.

  A fish. I came to Turin with the snows of January and saw the glimmers of the pale sun on the waters of the Po. To get to know a writer, you have to turn him into a part of your life. That is why I am here. (Use my own name to signal a fictitious narrator, inverting the mechanism of the pseudonym.)

  Destiny. The texture of unconsciously chosen events. A path only seen in its entirety at the end, when it is already too late.

  Wednesday, October 2

  Unwanted entanglements yesterday. It’s Luna every time. Now he’s spinning an ambiguous web around some women and—especially—several men he wants to take his revenge on. Intent, ritual desire, repeating his own misery, able to be (after so many times that he’s played that role) a “prestigious” bastard, deceiving, usurping a friend’s wife, abandoning the “honest” but miserable side of the wronged, faithful husband deceived by his comrades.

  Sartre’s face, framed, half-bearded, his eyes watching the corners of the room; imagine the moment when he looked at the camera and felt the tension preceding this fleeting immortality, and what came immediately after that pause, which I have hung on my wall, the photographer and Sartre in conversation, saying goodbye, while I was somewhere else in the world, not knowing the photograph was destined for me.

  Now I’ll drink the tea that I let cool while the crisp morning air brushes by my face and a woman sweeps the sidewalk below, a familiar sound that carries me off to childhood. I am in bed, I must be six or seven years old, gliding the tips of my fingers along the wooden railing that crosses the wall at face level. It is seven thirty in the morning, and, as though wanting to make this moment eternal, I struggle to begin this pause in which everything is yet to happen and I am alone, free, in the middle of the city.

  Why didn’t my failure with “Los días futuros” in 1965 change anything in me? Everything stayed as it was, the same certainty, the same emphasis despite the amount of time it took me to write any stories that still last for me. What place, what blindness did I extract my confidence from in those days? Then the failure, partial, momentary, coming back to me with the certainty that it is only fools who triumph and come out ahead. (You need 40 percent mediocrity to be able to succeed in art. A decrease in those stupidity quotas condemns you directly to failure.) This theory is the direct realization of the way I think about reality.

  Series E1. What is in play is the opposition between form and sincerity. An old polemic that has taken many names over the course of the years and has resurfaced in this present time, when people sing the praise of ignorance and celebrate the spontaneity of the noble savage. Meanwhile, I am alone, rowing against the tide and trying to create my literature by inserting that tension—life versus literature—into the themes of my stories (and also into these diaries). Creation in art and creation in life. Giving form to experience.

  Series E2. Certain periods of my life that I’ve experienced with angst reclaim their true reality when I “go back to read them” (not the same as going back to experience them): some good insights, certain happy quotes that betray a healthy “movement of the soul,” despite the suicidal tedium with which I sustained them, as though I were looking at a painful wound without seeing the beautiful texture of the flesh that is visible thanks to the division of the skin. The passage from wound to scar. And so, today, tense and with a strange lucidity, I see no reason to allay the burden that holds me away from (my own) mandate to write, every morning, my novel in progress.

  Series E3. And what if the best thing I have ever written, the best thing I will ever write in my life were these notes, these fragments, in which I record that I never manage to write the way I would like to? An admirable paradox: infuriated because he is unable to write what he wants, a man dedicates himself to recording the story of his life in a notebook, always going against himself, and sustains himself on his notebooks, observing himself, continuing to fail, never knowing that he is writing the greatest literature of his time in those notebooks. He dies, unknown, anonymous, with no one interested or able (even despite knowing their value) to publish them. Notebooks in which an unknown man talks about his life, recounting his frustrations day after day, writing the deepest testimony of his era, about the fate of failure. It would be Kafka’s life in reverse, the secret of a quality that is completely ignored, a great literature ignored, or rather, unknown even to its own author.

  Thursday 3

  It is raining, seven in the morning, the damp air comes in through the open window, and I’m troubled because I can’t read now, waiting to go out to the street in the afternoon after writing all morning, going to see friends, have drinks, and seek adventures in the city until late at night
.

  Notes on Tolstoy (4). In his later years, Tolstoy struggled intensely to free himself from the bonds of his social life and from conformity, and therefore he fascinated a great number of men and women around the world who—like Gandhi—wanted in all sincerity to “return” to a simple and pure life and practiced nonviolence. Tolstoy himself was tragically unable to bring about this return, and his final attempt was, in its own way, a suicide.

  Don Quixote. “All in the style of those his books had taught him, imitating their language as well as he could.” In Cervantes’s novel, there is always an aspiration to move on from life to literature, to the future novel: “When the veracious history of my famous deeds is made known, the sage who writes it, when he has to set forth my first sally in the early morning, will do it after this fashion: ‘Scarce had the rubicund Apollo spread… ’” and he goes on, showing how his story will be told. That is, he indicates the true meaning behind his actions: they are meant to be read. What he does by living is to indicate the rhythm of the wise writer who will write his life. In short, he speaks and acts in accordance with the novels he has read (which is what defines his madness), and, at the same time, he aspires to become a writer who would write things in the future according to how he has experienced them (which will define his sanity). And his peace, when he dies, sane, as Alonso Quijano once again, will lie in the hope that he has left his (written) mark, while the author speaks through the pen with which he is writing.