The Diaries of Emilio Renzi

by Ricardo Piglia

  Friday 4

  Yesterday, a brief exchange with David around four in the afternoon, very emotional, with unusual antipathy and helplessness that he tries to conceal behind his emphatic gestures, his rhetoric, and his intelligence.

  Working since seven in the morning, always in intermittent stretches, with the temptation that everything I write must be “consumed” in a day. For me, concentration is synonymous with swiftness. I must cultivate the virtue of continuity.

  Just now, my face pressed against the foggy windows, I watched the water falling against milk bottles piled up in wirework boxes on the sidewalk next to “Provisión San Miguel.” The whole street was dark under the rain, and I once more felt the calm of certain mornings when anything is possible because the dawn, the rain, blanket me and hide me from the future.

  Sometimes I have doubts, unsure whether this unscrupulousness—writing for an hour, completing one scenario, pausing—is the maturity I’ve hoped for, or laziness. Before, writing used to be a passion, something that carried me, that required certain rituals, certain exact times. Now I’ve found a discipline for my work, the first hours of the morning like a blessing, leaving a page half-finished and resuming it the following day and moving on ahead. I don’t think I’ve lost the enthusiasm, because I like nothing more than to be sitting and writing, but I think I would like to turn it into a practice or habit that is picked up and set down, as in the days when I used to swim in the pool at Club Temperley and would break records, or improve my time, every day, not waiting for ideal moments.

  Writing is like swimming. The stories have the speed of a front crawl stroke, a hundred meters at top speed, but for a while I’ve wanted to write as though swimming at sea, with no limit but my own exhaustion urging me to return to shore. A while ago, I wrote a story called “The Swimmer,” relating the experience of a man I met on the beach who swam out three kilometers to a sunken ship and delved into the interior of the submerged boat, hoping to find treasure. For me, that could be a metaphor for the novel.

  In any case, I think I could always go back to my old “pure moments of creation” and write stories, but I want to acquire a swimming rhythm that would allow me a longer term, “extended” concentration. On one side is the experience of “Tierna es la noche,” written in six hours; on the other is the work that goes in circles around itself, my “Italian” nouvelle with Pavese at the center of the plot.

  Saturday 5

  Learning about Pavese in 1935, in total confinement and with three years of exile ahead of him, with no news of the woman he loved, alone, under the elements, he writes in his diary about his poetry, about the way he works, and never lets himself be won over by the “tragedies of the soul.” I mention this because yesterday I worked all morning, until I was lost, “addled” by exhaustion, a ring of iron around my head. After that, nothing until evening except for my “mundane routine,” which was barely a pass through the editorial office yesterday because Luna wasn’t there, and then I went down to the city for a walk around Plaza San Martín. As I was getting off the bus to go to Air France, there was an explosion in the Círculo de la Armada; fear, everyone running for the park, even though it had only been an innocent short circuit that filled the sidewalk with smoke “like a bomb.”

  “In writing, the difficulty is not in what to say, but in what not to say,” Kipling.

  Sunday, October 6

  Series C. We might say that the books I write are the price I have to pay for distant mistakes, sorrows that no one could have allayed, slow hours erased by a woman with a red skirt, black stockings, and a sweet smile. What is the point in distrusting and lamenting a history of which not even ashes now remain, from which only some lost books survive, a library that was divided as though the books were precious objects that warranted a dispute, when really they were only symbols of the love that was left behind, imperishable moments, monuments to past joy. For I have never escaped from the books, and so these books are all that I can lose and lament and ponder. For example, one day I would like to write a story about two lovers’ separation using only the titles of the books they fight over.

  Since a precise moment (1957), everything has come to me easily, as though the forces had been accumulating since that time and everything had come all at once: the redheaded woman (Vicky was the third in that streak), the decision to live alone, the money I needed (thanks to the work that Grandfather Emilio invented for me), and no effort, finally reaching this place where I live, in a corner of the city. That explains my conviction, the certainty that, of course, I’ve never doubted, going past the “failures.” An absence of the meaning, confused and always postponed, that I find in reality, in my love for the profession—and not in its results—which has allowed me to live for all these years.

  So now what? A life always discovered afterward, the decisions, the changes, the subtle choices that have led me to this need to organize everything around literature. Never thinking about other possible paths.

  I’m reading Marks of Identity by Juan Goytisolo. Of the writers of his generation (Viñas, Fuentes), he is the one who seems to have recovered best from the crisis that brought about “commitment” and the social novel. Here, he progresses in a new direction, political in the best sense of the word.

  Wednesday, October 9

  Yesterday I rediscovered a core part of my education, the English, French, and Italian literary magazines through which, in the Library of the Universidad de La Plata, I discovered contemporary literature and its debates and “learned” to become what I am. There was also my experience in the Historical Archives of Buenos Aires Province, in the basement of the Galería Rocha, where Barba was my Virgil. One learns quickly, with the instantaneous velocity of a bird of prey, and a few seconds are enough to clearly perceive a path in the woods of culture.

  Once again Andrés R.’s confessions, he’s obsessed with the Viñas brothers, with their girlfriends, with their stories, which he tells me as though they were his own. Ismael, hiding his father’s death from his brother David for two years, to prevent him from suffering. The descendants. Ismael, according to Andrés, asks David: What is it we have that makes our children turn out this way? A complaint, a lament.

  I spend two hours listening to music on Radio Municipal. I have at last perceived the dual logic of live concerts: the spectators applaud and scream for ten minutes as though that noise were the music. I think: “That is the concert.” Now it is time for the intermission, that is to say, the music. Now Schubert.

  Not much work today. I am waiting for Julia now, so we can go out to eat. A strange thing. I just started reading intensely, two hours ago, and now the letters dance before me, I can’t see.

  Earlier, a lovely walk at noon after a talk with Álvarez and a haircut. Stops at all of the bookshops in Buenos Aires (Dinesen, Akutagawa, Les Temps Modernes), and then I sat down outside a bar on Avenida de Mayo. Later, in the plaza, a woman was chasing pigeons and I, alone on a bench, was trying to decide whether I really would like to be a father. I decided that the decision I made ten years ago was best, no family. Last, I met Korenblit about the lecture on Arlt and Borges that I’m giving at the Hebraica on Friday for five thousand pesos, which I look forward to with little enthusiasm. Álvarez offered to have me compile an omnibus, that is, an anthology of David’s work. Will it mark the end of our friendship? I mean, could it become his will (his testament)? We shall see.

  Saturday 12

  Last night everything went well, the room was full and I “watched myself” walk out toward the people, remembering my body, and theirs sitting there, stirred by my youth and my brilliant speed. Afterward with Julia at Arturito, celebrating the five thousand pesos for my first paid lecture.

  A very good era, I’d have to look hard to come up with another period this clear and smooth and “creative.”

  “My passion began the day that my soul fell into this miserable body, which I finish consuming by writing this,” Michelet.

  Series E. I w
alked in the sun through Buenos Aires, deserted because of Día de la Raza (as it is called here), trying to find the desire to write the article on translation that I have to turn in on the 21st. An urge to pass through Mar del Plata, despite all of the family ceremonies, to look for the notebooks that I keep there and start transcribing my diaries from ’58 to ’62. See what can be salvaged from those times. And what will that rewriting be? A written reading of writings lived?

  Sunday 13

  Nothing worse than mornings, nothing worse than Sunday mornings. I listen to Mozart, watch fragments of sunlight through the slits of the window, the swishing of a broom below, gradually leaving the oppressive opacity of the morning, rediscovering certainty, convictions to hold on to and pull my head out of the water to breathe. After a while, everything is set into motion, the work that begins at dawn, the books to be read. Ahead lies the end of night, the day to come… I always regain my drive.

  “An autobiographical poem… portrays an idealized image of the poet, not what has occurred but what should have occurred,” Tomashevsky.

  Series C. Battles, ups and downs, there are times when this woman crosses from the other side, taking refuge in a strange ceremony that turns me into a strange guest. The two of us sitting, kneeling, lying in the bed, crying. Pausing to find new paths toward destruction. Strangers striking out at each other, their only motive not to know each other.

  Monday 14

  I suppose what bothers me in André Gide’s Journals is a certain fascinated contemplation of nature. His sanctimonious optimism irritates me: birds that eat from his hand, mountains that let themselves be scaled, fish that develop their lives before him, etc.

  Were my surprising tears at reading Pavese’s terrible final letters a way of “posing?” Above all, who knows why? Something that a relative wrote to him, naïvely congratulating him for his “great prize” (that year’s Strega), as though I had seen in that the clash of his own reality against abhorrent sentiments. A way to appear sensitive, worthy, crying for Pavese as though for myself. An aristocratic way to make myself be seen in that pain by the chosen, those whom the world crushes.

  “If the science of literature wants to become a science, it must recognize the ‘device’ as its only ‘hero,’” R. Jakobson.

  Every day, at ten thirty in the morning, the sun destroys my things, my books, my desk.

  “It is difficult to describe a character who has nothing to do in the story,” L. Tolstoy.

  “An artist’s fate, in its ultimate analysis, lies in his technique,” Heimito von Doderer.

  Wednesday, October 16

  Today the whole city in chorus: students from La Plata are intercontinental soccer champions. Car horns, confetti, noise, and chanting. Earlier with León R., his ideas about Freud are good since they confirm my intuitions; along with that are the trials, his skirmishes with David, which catch me off guard.

  At times I catch myself trapped in a blind vertigo, in the trivial chaos of the everyday, which I can’t control, which crushes me: calls, visits, interviews that use themselves up and invade me, paralyzing me. Once I react it is too late, gone are the times when I imagined a space of my own, as though my days became that confusion, my work a continuous postponement.

  Thursday, October 17

  A bomb in the Biblioteca Lincoln. I thought: “I hope they didn’t lose any books of literature.”

  A crisp morning, certain rituals interfere with the joy of launching myself into the Jakobson book, as I am learning to relate to my own body. Certain games that I play with reality have become a kind of rhetoric, and at the same time there is something fragile, theatrical about them. An effort of willpower, of intelligence, always leads me to be a rather cynical witness of the events that involve me (or someone close to me). I’ll never entirely know whether this pretext of ironic objectivity is anything more than an implicit production of bad faith. A bit like Andrés, who always gives away what he’s really thinking, denying any meaning behind what he says, though his words allude to it directly. It’s as though the most resilient ghosts were the opposite of the motions we make to exorcise them. I mean my inability to control myself has turned me into a sort of schizophrenic, leaping from extreme self-control and irony to confession. Anyway, I could write a series of performances: my grandfather’s death, accident in the army, attack in Mar del Plata. Incidents in which I have rehearsed a performance of myself. The old story about the sad songbirds.

  Friday, October 18

  My usual places: just now someone’s voice reading science fiction stories at Pirí’s house with a distant, passive affectation, the empty afternoons at those school desks that open up, a house full of invisible spiderwebs, unexpected visits, painful objects. From there come the searches, the meetings, that broken music (an oboe?), Cortina on Radio Municipal, which I listened to in La Plata, and in Medrano that woman’s voice reading a science fiction story, and before that the corner in Mar del Plata, a strange ritual with another woman when the only thing we had in common was the Montecarlo show, and before that the programs I used to escape from my adolescence—modern jazz, with Basualdo—which I’ve rediscovered in the afternoons now, here.

  I prefer to know about myself through others, through the reflection of a gesture, from a phrase on the face of someone close to me. Knowing about myself through the mirror that startles me suddenly as I enter a room, showing me a threatening stranger who watches me watching him, astonished.

  Yesterday afternoon, the way I dealt with all (or almost all) of my ideas about a possible history of translation and was unable to resist the temptation to seem more lucid than I am in front of Roberto C., is proof of my several lives: one of them is the way I let myself go in order to be sincere. The lives I speak of are ways of being, and they always remind me of a quote from the Austrian philosopher: “The world of the happy man is a different one from that of the unhappy man.” Changes in outlook and perception of reality, then, are complicated by a certain point of view (like Henry James). And so, yesterday, I mentioned all of my theories that might seem brilliant, although the instant that I exhibit them could hold a high price: there is no need to speak about what is being written, and the luster is no a guarantee of quality. In this way, I have introduced a harmful rhythm into the tempo of my own maturation, as long as I need others in order to think.

  X Series. Yesterday a fleeting exchange with Lucas, always elusive and evasive, more “secure” than at other times, his face marked by his newly shaven beard, some certainty that sustains his life. “And what if they catch you?” He smiles: “They won’t catch me.” But if they do catch you, what can we do. They won’t catch me. Conviction is everything; nothing can be done without that. He also made some analysis and recalled his history. He was in the Taco Ralo guerrillas, after the EGP, these are previous experiences that began in 1961. At the same time, I perceive in him a demeanor of spying, of boredom, of falsehood. The man of action.

  Series A. On Tuesday I waited, anxious, for the shopkeeper across the street to open for business. That waiting unsettled me, isn’t it strange? It seems that every change in my plans or in my will, however small, microscopic, produces a greater effect in me. Finally, after two or three false starts, I went downstairs and saw him opening the metal shutter with both hands, his back to the street, and then I crossed and bought a bottle of milk. I paid with fifty pesos, there was no change. I accepted this, quickly, to avoid causing an uncomfortable situation, emphasizing my indifference about the fact that the shopkeeper still owed me eighteen pesos. This morning, I was the one who had no change. I put together thirty pesos in coins, but I was missing two pesos. Several times, as I slid the coins around, I came close to reminding him about the debt. Finally I held out the thirty pesos to him confusedly, asking him to trust me for two pesos. Without listening to his response—amiable—I went back as though escaping. For me, economy is a kind of secret passion, and I can never act with money “in the light of day”; in any situation, it feels like I’m han
dling counterfeit money and making unfair trades. A man without a personal economy. Or, better still, a man who has a personal economy, private, that is, who can’t share with anyone, in the sense that he has no people to talk to or figures to “do business” with.

  The violent reactions (see Sabato’s letter in the magazine Análisis) in response to any theory about the marginal character of Argentine literature provoke an outcry that proves the truth of my arguments. Clearly, it doesn’t have to do with talking about an “inferior” literature, but rather thinking about the temporality of culture in a territorially defined field. My argument was to say that, since the origins of the Literary Salon in 1837, Argentina thought about itself as a culture out of sync with the present, arriving late to the contemporary situation. What causes the outcry is my opinion about us, the writers who have begun to publish in recent years; we have broken from that imbalance and are now in the same literary temporality as European or American writers. The outcry comes from the fact that culture has been the space in which our relationship with the central countries has been most deliberately concealed and diverted. We have seen that things changed after Borges and Cortázar. Today, any one of us, Puig, for example, can exhibit the full contemporaneity of his writing and now has no need to go on about our “delayed” situation. It is about not accepting that mystification and using all contemporary literature, without any sort of “difference” or inferiority.