The Diaries of Emilio Renzi

by Ricardo Piglia

  A tortuous walk under the merciless light that filters in among the clouds and shines on the cement like a knife of sun, avoiding meetings with other writers (for example, waving to Rozenmacher from far away and going on at a distance), until I dock at a bench in Plaza San Martín, under another sun, now clear and softer.

  Saturday

  If I were dragged out of paradise by age, when everything is worn away, and I realized it, how could I look outside of my experience for the certainties of that incomparable time? Our capacity for happiness depends on some balance between what our childhood has denied us and what it has granted us. Completely fulfilled or completely deprived, we will be lost. Maybe I am suffering the consequences of a too-happy childhood (too happy?).

  People who still explain the crisis of the tango as a result of the embellishment of themes fall into a realist mystification. They don’t see the tango as a genre that had a clear origin (1913, “Mi noche triste,” recorded by Gardel) and has had a glorious end (“La última curda,” 1953, sung by Goyeneche). Something shared by all the great genres (tragedy, for example): they are connected to certain conditions that make them possible, and, when those conditions change, the genre doesn’t adapt and comes to a splendid close. The lyrics that sustain the story had a short duration that, nevertheless, made it possible to tell a story in three minutes, but that duration was intimately tied to the dance. Tangos were danced to, and when the singers intoned the lyrics, the audience would sometimes stop dancing and move in closer to listen to them. Troilo, for example, sometimes shortened the song to a minute and then the music would fill the space. It is rock that has put an end to that logic; that is where young people find what they need to dance, and tango has become a music to be listened to and not to be danced to. Piazzolla is to tango what Charlie Parker was to jazz. Faced with the presence of rock, jazz also stopped being a popular, danceable music and took refuge in clubs or in bars where people go to listen, as in a concert, to the development of a sophisticated music, popular in its history but rarified in its new situation. The same thing happened with tango; the typical orchestra disappeared, and these days you go to Caño 14 or Jamaica to listen to duets like Troilo-Grela or Salgán-De Lío or to Piazzolla or Rovira’s Quintets. But now there are no lyrics, and people don’t dance to them the way they did in the great dances of the forties, which had allowed them to support a complex—and expensive—orchestral ensemble.

  Sunday, October 20

  My verbal anticipations of my own reality continue, my readings of the future; the project of writing about Pavese, in Turin, is a way for me to prepare for my journey to Italy, which today resurfaced as an imminent possibility. An escape.

  X Series. On Friday Lucas T. was here, brief and mistrustful as always, rigidly clinging to a stubborn rationality, which reminded me of some pianists I’ve known who always seem to be practicing the next piece. Lucas is always in action, never relaxes, comes to see me as a way to rest, to change conversation, lays down his weapons on the table and converses with me. “A man who’s worn out politically doesn’t talk,” he says. And the torture? “He doesn’t talk.” And what certainty can there be? “Ideological certainty, ideological work. I know what I’m telling you. I was a prisoner, as you know.” I grew furious, that’s metaphysical, I told him, pain is a leap into the void, like death. “I have absolute faith in myself and my companions. You know who they are, they’ll never betray me.” But absolute trust is the reason for failure. It is the opposite of voluntarism, reality doesn’t exist, you triumph or fail through errors, never through political matters. Lucas smiles. “If I thought the way you do I’d be working as a lawyer, I’d be living in Paris, spending my family’s fortune, if I wanted to.” A guy who acts tough and clings to the feeling of power that ideas give him. In his case the reasons make me ashamed: he has been betrayed, chased, his name put in the papers, accused of murder, all of the gates are closed, his only escape is by going forward. I love him like a brother, but he seems further and further away from me, even though I believe I’m the only friend he has left from his former life. We stay together until morning, shooting the breeze. If I read that line somewhere, I would say: “But why the breeze? Why shooting it?” Lucas would start a poem that way if he were living in France, free and away from danger.

  The city was empty today, as though he were imagining it, a clear sun predicting the arrival of summer. A stranger watching himself walk along the streets that lead to the river. “A city of no one,” he thinks.

  Roman Jakobson has taken on the task of demonstrating the relationships between the translator, the cryptographer, and the detective, insofar as all three decipher messages in another language, in another code, or in an implicit language that the murderer has erased in order to leave no tracks that could let his presence be read in the “scene of the crime.”

  Series A. In relation to Perón’s attempt, Onganía’s dictatorship is in crisis not due to political reasons but rather because of a lack of politics. It is a demonstration of what Gramsci said: “the dominant class” has lost consensus and is no longer the “leader” but just “dominant,” only boasting coercive force.

  A strange day, wandering, at intervals, around this empty apartment; Julia is in La Plata facing her mother and her daughter, and I am distant and neutral, in this place, as disconnected as everyone, listening to music on Radio Municipal, working at intervals on the essay, which seems to be on the right track and puts me at ease, thinking that tomorrow I’ll begin to give shape to these insights, which I leave hanging for now. Empty, exhausted, with no desire to read or to make the slightest motion, what am I going to do with the time left before she comes back?

  Tuesday 22

  Series B. The friendships that interfere with my reality are like a bridge that connects me to things, to the actions I must undertake in the near future, which invade and cancel out any present goal (the imagined actions, not my friends).

  X Series. The covert man, who immerses himself in armed conflict and becomes invisible; his life is duplicated, he lives in the light of day as any one of us, but at night he lives in the inevitable revolution, behaves deliriously or—to keep up the consonance—bravely. In the early years of this notebook the subject under study was Steve, the secret American writer who seemed to live in two worlds. Then the years passed, and the hero was Cacho Carpatos, the man outside the law who broke into the houses of the powerful and was surrounded by the necessary figures of his own life (Bimba, the call girl, “the fence” who moved the stolen objects). Now, for a while, the figure under my gaze has been the man of action, the clandestine revolutionary who works in the shadows to bring about changes in the course of history. The one who observes this varied species of men, his friends and the people he admires, he is the indifferent, tranquil man (this one would be me, in a sense). These are the characters in my life, my friends. The other series is that of the women I’ve loved: the redhead, the married girl, the tempestuous woman, the young girl of the night (the girl with the Vespa).

  Wednesday, October 23

  A murder in the neighborhood and a gaunt, slight man with many verbal tics is raving: “She was fifteen, but he bled her dry. He bled her dry, all bled out. I was in front, there, and I heard something I thought was fireworks. Didn’t even realize it or see the people crowded around because I thought it was fireworks. Now, a boy told me he saw them turn the corner, arguing, from what I saw they were stopped there, in the doorway.” A couple, nearby: “They’re going to close down the hotel,” she said. “No, why are they going to close down the hotel?” And her: “Don’t you think that’s too much?” she said. “What I saw was, it happened on the sidewalk. What does the hotel have to do with it?” Later, in the store: “What can you tell me about the crime? Now, she was kind of a bimbo. Every time she came I realized she was kind of a bimbo. But it takes all kinds…” And as I was leaving several people crowded around a woman holding up the Crónica newspaper, which showed photos. “She looks about the same,” s
he said with a mix of stupefaction and secret envy, as though the news belonged to her. And a man to one side said: “He gave her a kiss and she went like this,” with a gesture of wiping his hand over his mouth, “like she was cleaning herself off… If a woman did that to me I’d…” And the others looked on with a mix of compassion and irony. Meanwhile, on the corner, two kids were carrying some machines (photocopiers?). The one who was further away said, skeptically: “Nothing. See? They already cleared it away. What do you want to see?”

  The storm comes, breaking the bright afternoons that made way for the summer. It is noon, and in the street the darkness flattens the fronts of houses as the rain begins to fall violently, a classic scene, already seen many times in the repertoire of images of nature in the city. Now the rain has come down relentlessly (has the rain come down relentlessly?) and the fresh air carries the heavy smell of wet earth. The lamp traces a white circle on the table and warms my left arm while everything is dark in the world. A strange feeling of dispossession forces me to close the window to prevent the rain from dampening the notebook that I’m writing in, isolating me still further from reality. I am empty and alone, going in circles on a Ferris wheel, doing nothing but looking at the axis, immobile.

  Thursday 24

  Yesterday as I was getting off the subway there was a throng of people looking on with a strange mixture of satisfaction and shame. An acrid smell of burnt rubber, employees running from one end of the platform to the other, the train conductor, pale, pausing every time someone looks at him or suggests a question. He is a bald man, wearing glasses, with a pockmarked face and a strange object in his hand, some kind of handle. He pauses suddenly, as though having found what he was looking for, and explains that he couldn’t brake. “I couldn’t brake,” he says. Then he takes off running again. And then he pauses once more. I too peer around the edge of the platform and look through the gap left between the coaches, toward the dark opening of the rails. I try to imagine the woman below, silent and alive. She couldn’t have killed herself. The scene is extended. There’s a sort of continuous motion inside a static scene, some people moving and running around, the rest peering around the edge of the platform (like me), still others surrounding a man with an honest face, fat and dark, with gaps in his teeth, who has climbed up the stairs, onto a podium, and speaks slowly, seeming surprised, stunned. “I cried out,” he says, “if I’d seen that she wanted to throw herself off, I would’ve grabbed her, but I cried out because she went too close to the rails, she had a checkered purse and skirt, she was in line on the platform with the purse in her hand, standing there, next to me, and you could see the light of the oncoming train and after it hit the brakes she was nowhere to be seen.” The firemen came a half hour later. She was alive. “Destroyed,” said the policeman, who seemed inflated and spoke in a slow, almost childish voice that grew hoarse when he wanted to be authoritative and made the curious people circle around. I let myself be carried toward the surface by the escalator. I’d left home after the storm thinking specifically about “suicides,” but I was thinking about the metaphysics of that decision and not about the dark track where a body throbbed below, strewn across the tracks, where everyone was anxiously looking for her. The body of a woman who had clung to the edge of the precipice, thinking about what, about who… and had jumped into the void, breaking one storyline and opening another, more terrible, but distinct.

  Notes on a suicide. Everything takes place as though the horrific image could naturally give rise to a concept. There is a mysterious relationship between terror and thought. What lives becomes nature. Dying in the subway (sic), in the bowels of the city, run down by a silent vehicle that lights up the sorrow.

  We lived on a stage, facing the furtive but attentive eyes of our neighbors, residents who spied on our everyday routines: they peeked through the windows, pulled back the lace curtains, the latticework, the netting, the blinds, voyeurs spying in through the cracks. To kiss, we had to hide behind the doors or—almost always—in the bathroom, an enclosure where we finally settled in for good. (A story.)

  Sitting in an airplane seat, taxiing along the damp runway, and flying over the rainy city toward the sun.

  We could say that what scandalized the critics on the right or on the conservative left in Hopscotch is its explicit, visible poetics, the fact of its deliberately being a work in progress. Cortázar has tried to cross the narrow bridge that unites short form with vast novelistic structures without hiding the inner workings. Cortázar’s novel narrates certain renowned processes of cultural consumption. In a sense, he establishes a moral hierarchy in the interior of artistic products, and those critics felt provoked, seeing themselves tied to the “female reader” (the unfortunate name that Cortázar gave to conservative consumption).

  What if I were the subject of my collection of essays on literature? Criticism as autobiography.

  You’re Lonely When You’re Dead by J. H. Chase is a great crime novel because it is very aware of the techniques and traditions of the genre. It is a cynical novel that uses them coldly and, in that sense, is the opposite of Chandler’s The Long Goodbye, where the awareness of the history of the genre is romantic and nostalgic. The scene with the girl contorting, half-naked, her stockings with long runs in them, in front of the agent who writes on the typewriter, not looking at her, and she can’t insult him for fear of losing her chance to get a job, it’s sensational. On the other hand, the scene of brutal physical violence to elicit a confession stands out because Chase narrates it in the present tense, making it elapse over the same length of time that the reading lasts. We might say that the failed genre elements are the excessive expressivity and the use of coincidences to solve the investigation. Also the too-visible awareness of the rules of the crime novel. “‘This scene has gone a little sour,’ I said, for something to say. ‘The detective always gets his girl. If you shoot me the story will have an immoral ending,’” J. H. Chase.

  Series E. A good day of work, agile, full of ideas. Advantage: these notebooks are born “so that nothing can escape,” but they immediately show our “inner poverty,” while there’s nothing that can escape, and so I must attempt to think in order to “have” something that will not escape. A poetics of thought.

  Friday, October 25

  Series E bis. There is also subservience to the space in these notebooks: often, everything improves when there is a blank page and grows worse when I’m trying to fill the end of a page. Spatial arrangement is also a mode of thought. In literature, I think, the means are ends.

  In Andrés Rivera, I confirm his intuition for writing, which functions well, a less stylized but more dangerous poetics, and in rereading all his stories I discover his use of ambiguity, of midtones, few examples of which can be found among us (perhaps Conti’s “Every Summer,” Walsh’s “That Woman”). The key is not to close off the meaning when concluding the story. Of course, these virtues have their flaws and their limitations, and the material always seems on the point of losing its way. These writers (Wernicke, Rivera, Conti) hit their mark in one out of every five attempts, but they struggle to go beyond the limits they impose upon themselves. They are deliberately naïve, the opposite of Hemingway or Borges, because greater awareness comes with greater risk but also greater achievements. Rereading a few pages from these notebooks is enough to make me think about “spontaneity.” A need, then—or rather a desire—for an alert consciousness in the narrative, particularly when the technique consists of stating everything that happens, as I do here, as much as possible, while it is taking place.

  Saturday 26

  We went in circles around the room at two in the morning, thinking it was eight, and then I fell asleep holding Julia, and we awoke unexpectedly at ten after six, confused as we saw the hands of the clock but read ten to twelve on the upside-down alarm clock. Confusion in the springtime night, an effect of the passion that keeps us from sleep. We finally went out into the street and walked around in the icy drizzle. We found an English v
ersion of Dostoevsky (Notes from Underground) and ended up at La Fragata, on Corrientes and San Martín, having café con leche and croissants.

  I would like to recapture my wanderings with David Viñas around this same apartment; we talked as we moved around the room and then continued at his place, and later we had lunch together and ended up walking down Corrientes.

  Sunday 27

  Series E. This notebook also suffers from the effects of yet another static time, in which all I can do is look for a way out, as though I were swimming underwater in the hold of a sunken ship.

  Monday 28

  I watch the days passing, one after another, unable to do anything that would lend them meaning. Julia said: “In ten days, you’ll still think you’re burned out. You’ll look for more excuses so you can say: ‘I’m ready, I am at the bottom of the sea.’” All of that, said sweetly.

  Twenty-five years had passed; some women who had been very beautiful when they were young now exhibit the traces of time on their proud faces, and they hang Jeanne Moreau’s photograph on the walls of their hearts. But this is only the wall across from the glass table where I sat in one of its high-backed chairs, not taking off my jacket, looking at a woman with blue painted eyelids as she told stories with metaphors that included me in them and talked pejoratively about herself. Finally I left, made it to the ground floor without an umbrella, went back up, walked into the empty place until she appeared with my umbrella, wearing a terrible smile, a smile that awoke an endless sadness within me, the light rain still wetting the streets.