The Diaries of Emilio Renzi

by Ricardo Piglia

  Thursday 18

  I find an enormous apartment on Sarmiento and Montevideo. With a phone, three rooms, good lighting, and a lease until April 1971. I left a down payment, but we’ll see if the guarantees work.

  Saturday

  I’m reading Heartbreak Tango voraciously, the striking control of tension, the ruptured movement of the narration, the final perception of social relationships. Eroticized flesh as an engine for the plot. Prose that is very attentive to registers of speech. And the most innovative part is the absence of the narrator.

  Suddenly, I feel nostalgia for my old knowledge of history. The reconstruction of complex structures and long spans of time.

  Tuesday, September 23

  For the last few days I’ve had anxiety, angst, difficulty working. I’m always waiting for a catastrophe that never comes. There is a waiting akin to that of a hunter in a blind, lying in wait for the prey (but I myself am the prey).

  Friday 26

  I leave behind my apartment on Pasaje del Carmen, the window that opens over the street, the city sounds and the daylight, all the time I’ve spent here, writing. We’ll see if I can manage to put everything into place and organize my books.

  My plans, as always:

  1. Write final versions and not drafts.

  2. Improve the diary.

  3. Write criticism on demand.

  4. Systematize my reading.

  5. Don’t postpone the publishing work.

  6. Sleep little.

  7. Go to the cinema often.

  Saturday 27

  I’ve already settled into this large and bright apartment; I set up my desk in one of the rooms, all my books in boxes, no furniture, happy with the excess of space.

  Sunday 28

  Good light, Faulkner’s portrait on the wall, we went out to look for chairs and tables in the neighborhood shops.

  Tuesday 30

  Last night with David, who was back from La Rioja, where he’d gone with Olivera to scout locations for El caudillo, a film David wrote the script for. I went to see him to ask for ten thousand pesos, which I need to pay the library. At the magazine office I see Osvaldo L. and Oscar S., they show too much desire to astonish and be original, and I watch from a distance.

  Series E. I struggle—clearly—to find a tone for these notebooks, but that’s exactly what I like about them: the prose is spontaneous and swift, and therefore it’s very changeable, there’s no common rhetoric. The best part is the continuity, the persistence, which are the great challenges of writing. Another thing that appears is a feature of everything I do: I never concentrate on one point but rather disperse myself, letting myself be led by the impulse of the writing. The breadth comes through accumulation, not because I give time to the writing and develop a subject to its end, and motifs reappear but are not developed. Everything that I’ve managed to do, I’ve done in the pure instant, without a future; for me, the future has always been a threat.

  October

  Series C. A copy of El Corno Emplumado magazine came for me, and as always it brings up the memory of Margaret Randall, because she always used to send it to me in spite of my silences. I met her in Cuba; for me, she was the living connection to San Francisco and the Beat Generation, since she was connected to them. Close friends with Ferlinghetti. The night we walked along the beach and then stretched out on the warm sand until the next day is still very present for me, as though it were a photo, or rather a sequence of photographs. Margaret had a poetic theory about instantaneous love, free, casual: “It’s like metaphors,” she would say, “they’re everywhere, and so is physical love. An opportunity for pure metaphor.”

  Always this surreal quality, as though my life were happening to someone else. Yet, for the first time, the phantoms meet the present. I devote myself to dreaming of a future that is the same as today: conservative, for once. What do I mean? A job that does not take up my time, a good place to live, enough money to deal with the inclemency of the moment, books for free, and a personal writing that moves forward, slowly but continuously.

  Tuesday 7

  A good time with David yesterday, he has developed facial tics due to the imminent release of his novel Cosas concretas; he wants Pirí to handle the publicity, he’s jealous of the five thousand copies per week that Pirí sells. In the middle of all that he keeps himself in shape, we talk about the intersection between Sarmiento and Hernández (desert, blood), he recalls my article on Puig, and we go back to the intersection between sex and money.

  Before, on Saturday, I have an intense argument with León R. when he reproaches me for having cut apart the bookcase that he gave me a few days ago. “I put it to the use I needed,” I told him. “You should’ve asked me. What if I needed to use it again soon?” “Don’t worry, León,” I told him, “In that case I’d buy you another.” The argument went off down a dangerous path: how do we connect our thoughts with our actions? No one has solved that problem.

  Wednesday 8

  The Cubans sent me several books and hinted at a possible invitation, although the relationship on my side has cooled following Castro’s support of the Soviet invasion in Czechoslovakia.

  Figures of the public writer: David Viñas, Günter Grass, and Norman Mailer.

  On reading. There can be no reading without an extra-verbal situation. These situations are a priori; they control and organize what is read. This can be seen clearly in works with a strong existing hallmark: detective novels, classic works, melodramas. There is an existing provision that determines the way a book is used. Criticism must describe these situations: these include what we might call “the prior knowledge” with which we approach a book, and even a debut work responds to that background. It is a book that we know nothing about, and therefore we read it with an established attitude that is not the same as the one we have for a consecrated author.

  Friday 10

  Notes on Tolstoy (8). He writes a new Gospel (Gospel in Brief by Leo Tolstoy) based on uniting and synthesizing the four existing gospels. Wittgenstein: “You are living, as it were, in the dark and have not found the saving word. And if I, who am essentially so different from you, should offer some advice, it might seem asinine. However, I am going to venture it anyway. Are you acquainted with Tolstoy’s The Gospel in Brief? At its time, this book virtually kept me alive. If you are not acquainted with it, then you cannot imagine what an effect it can have upon a person” (letter to Ficker, July 1915). Tolstoy discusses the gospels: the moment when Jesus admits to his disciples that he is the Son of God is the most extraordinary moment due to the enunciation and use of language (because he is).

  Sunday, October 12

  The conflicts at the magazine grew worse, arguments with Toto, Willie, etc., about attempts to reorganize the magazine and leave us out. I listened to myself as I raised furious moral diatribes that had little effect. Everything goes on in the same way, and now I’m the one who wants to detach myself (after I earn this month’s salary to cover my deficit from moving).

  Monday

  A visit from David, caught up in one of his economic thrills that always seem attractive when he describes them. A project of starting a publishing house, starting a magazine, buying a place for a bookshop. It will all dissolve as soon as his euphoria passes. I lent him an ear with the same indifference as always.

  My unexpected and “visible” memories: the projected, metallic, perfect voice of the announcer for Cabalgata Deportiva Gillette, announcing a boxing match with Lauro Salas, brings me back to my cousin Lili’s house; she had bought a TV a few days before. It would have been in the year ’53 or ’54. I can see the glass of the window, the device placed on a Japanese-style table, and I can see myself sitting on the floor in front of the screen.

  Tuesday 14

  Yesterday, Andrés Rivera, like all the writers of his generation, brings liberal temptations with him: nostalgia for a strong CP with newspapers, publishers, jobs, positions of power in the cultural sphere. He criticizes the Tupamaros aft
er the attack in Pando: they rented a funeral cortege and took over the town, cut the phone lines, robbed three banks and the police station, etc. A radio enthusiast gave them away: the army and the police came in with helicopters; there were three dead, six arrested, and twenty of them managed to get away. For Andrés, it is suicidal adventurism.

  Wednesday 15

  The books in the Serie Negra have had a very good reception and are selling well.

  The “I” in narrative is no longer the singular subject of the biography, but rather the occasional experimenter. The first person can be generated by the third person, etc. Writing produces a series of transformations and disintegrations, whether it is the “I” who stages the story, or the material or experiences that are integrated into its workings.

  I’m tempted to abandon Pavese as the subject of the story and to include the maladjustment of the outsider who doesn’t have a good command of the language in the country where he lives.

  Thursday 16

  Last night too much wine after the dinner that followed the magazine meeting. Today I had to get dressed early in the morning and go out to buy aspirin to combat my headache. The little neighborhood shops were almost empty, with lone women and men wandering around at five in the morning while the garbage trucks crossed the damp streets.

  Hemingway’s three books of memoirs (Death in the Afternoon, Green Hills of Africa, and A Moveable Feast) are also exercises in nonfiction and anticipate many elements of what is now called “new journalism.” They are also admirable examples of the open novel: several levels in the prose, rupturing of genre, direct speech, etc. The final chapter of Death in the Afternoon is resolved in the same way as the still unwritten “possible stories” from “Kilimanjaro.”

  Along these lines, the contemporary writer moves among several registers. I myself could be an example of that condition. A person who reads detective fiction “professionally” because he is in charge of a series, receiving more than three hundred books every month, out of which he selects five. A detective novel is always good for the first twenty pages because that is where the author presents the world in which the intrigue will develop: for example, let’s say, the Japanese laundromats in Buenos Aires. First, that world is described, which always holds some interest, and one finds out or wonders why it is that the Japanese population in Buenos Aires opens laundromats. After that question is answered a crime appears and, from that point onward, the bad novels respond to the mystery with predictable schemes. Only the best writers are able to add something extra to the construction of the intrigue, going beyond simple suspense or simple solutions to the problem. A writer who is able to write something beyond the simple plot is one who achieves a novel that is worthy of translation.

  But if I continue with this sort of anthropological vision of myself, we could say that this individual is also part of the editing committee at a cultural magazine. He participates in meetings, discusses the material, suggests topics for upcoming issues, and fills his time, as is my case, writing brief reviews—never more than five lines—of all the books that are published every month in Buenos Aires. What’s more, this Argentine writer writes two newspaper pieces per week and receives a fixed salary for them; the pieces began as bibliographic reviews, but after some serendipitous event (the crime reporter is sick or was sent to cover a crime in Bajo in Buenos Aires) he also became the crime reporter. In 1965, he was sent to Montevideo to cover the police’s siege on three Argentine criminals who had robbed a bank truck in San Fernando. For a week, he sent back notes about what was happening there, from when the police first came until it all ended two days later. In addition to keeping up with his correspondence (an average of two or three letters per day), reading the newspapers (habitually the morning papers), a news magazine, and subscribing to several foreign magazines, he dedicates part of the day (never more than an hour) to writing down his life’s adventures in a notebook. The question is: at what point does this Argentine writer sit down to write? For the moment, there is no answer. Further, we could say that this individual is invited, often, to give courses and lectures in a variety of places.

  I have recorded here a substantial though incomplete part of my daily activities, which, due to those same occupations, I can’t always record in this diary.

  Friday

  Notes on Tolstoy (9). Tolstoy’s respect for the common man, his simple and frank affection for an ordinary worker. (“More intelligent than me.”)

  Saturday 18

  Yesterday a very good conversation with David, who started my afternoon with a phone call that sounded at once attractive and mysterious, announcing his visit. When I agreed to see him, the bastard said: “Thanks.” We went to Ramos, where I had a tea and he had a café con leche, and we saw César Fernández Moreno and other friends passing down Corrientes, as though we were on the balcony of a country house, observing the movements of our neighbors in their cars. David was bitching about Félix Luna and Ayala, who ruined the script he’d written for El caudillo. He fantasizes about cursing them out and telling them to go to hell despite the million pesos they’ve given him for his work. “And about the ability to ruin them,” I said. Then some ideas about the speed of consumption, “burning through” products (books, authors). With a very wise reflection, David perceives the current logic of the cultural world: circulation accelerates, and there is a consolidation of the places that decide which literary products will be published or not. We ended up at the publishing house where he’s going to publish his novel Cosas concretas.

  I read David’s novel, it is in a confessional style. All the characters drift into a very personal kind of declaration and a direct and excessive sincerity. The novel is written with more monologues than dialogues. Politics is the thematic aim of his work. In that sense, the genre in which he undertakes his critique of the dominant violence is never distinguished: it can be a novel, an essay, or a film script.

  Friday

  Yesterday a car ride along the edge of the river with my mother, always more intelligent and entertaining than I imagine her. Yesterday her ironic discourse had to do with family relationships, with a special critical statement about abusive mothers. She knows the tiniest minutiae about the whole family: she is the youngest of twelve siblings and, in a sense, is the heiress to all of the stories that have been circulating since the beginning. She has a particular quality that I admire, one that I’ve learned a great deal from: she never criticizes anyone, whoever they may be or whatever crime they may have committed, as long as they belong to the family. She never judges others’ conduct if they are part of her circle. In that sense, as I think I’ve already said before, my mother is, for me, a model of what a writer should be. Detailed, meticulous, and incapable of condemning other people’s actions.

  Saturday

  Yesterday was the roundtable on “the new generation” at the Hebraica. Many friends and many enemies in the audience. A slight argument with De la Vega, who recited McLuhan, and some points of agreement with Jusid and Manuel Puig. I was very nervous, but I calmed down in the moment and said some amusing things.

  Sunday

  I’m writing a short piece about “Beckett’s Nobel.” He wasn’t to blame, and he hid and wouldn’t let himself be seen by the reporters or the Swedes who had awarded it to him. In any case, it is yet more proof that the system can incorporate what, at first glance, seems most contrary to its values and most antagonistic.

  Tuesday 28

  It is five in the morning and I’m working on Hemingway: reading several articles, a chronology, and several texts. I’m defending the writing in his first works, closely tied to his experiences on the front lines.

  I travel to San Fernando with David to see Carlos B. and console him about his brother’s death. David is grieving as though someone close to him had died, although on the way back he told me some secrets about his life (which I won’t reveal) that allowed me to understand his melancholy moments.

  Wednesday 5

  “A s
ymptom is formed as a substitution for something that has not been able to manifest itself externally; it is a sort of permutation,” Freud.

  Sunday, November 9

  I spent all day Saturday in La Plata with Nicolás Rosa at Menena’s house. The old, touching house where I lived for many years stood one block away. I wrote “Mata-Hari 55” there one clear October morning; I’d bought peaches and plums and chilled them in a bucket of ice and ate them throughout the day while I wrote the story. At one moment, yesterday, I went out to buy cheese to have with wine while we were waiting for Toto to finish the barbecue, and then I tried to go to the house and spy through the balcony to see what was there now, but I was afraid I would lose my way in the night and turned back.

  Wednesday 12

  My father’s voice came through the air pocket of the stairwell, asking for me from some part of the building, searching for me, and he finally came in and sat with me to talk about his suicidal temptation and fear of death, his night terrors and anxiety. Oh life, oh pain. What can a son say to his father about the hardships of existence. The whole time, I was on the point of saying to him: “Don’t tell me these things,” but I contained myself and said: “There are moments of depression, losing streaks, we all have dark moments. The worst thing you can do is to think they’ll never pass, but they always leave, they pass, and you forget them.” He seemed relieved, not because of what I’d said, but rather because he’d been able to talk with his son, which, I think, is what he’d come to do.