The Diaries of Emilio Renzi

by Ricardo Piglia

  “A suggestion that, like all magical practice, finds its only resources in a situation of prestige and dependency, capable of inducing the victim into significations that are foreign to him,” J. B. Pontalis.

  One of my first memories—not the first—is of a moment when my grandfather Antonio is carrying me on his shoulders in the garden at his house, and on the other side of a green wooden trellis is my grandmother Albina and a table with a rubber cover by the right-side wall. (Is the patio across from that wall, with the two doors leading inside and one door leading to the kitchen?) I can see a little jug for drinking maté on that table, and someone—my grandfather, I think—tells me that it’s my beer jug because I’m a child. (My grandfather had a white ceramic jug for drinking beer.) I also remember his death; one of the two doors on the wall (the first, passing through the trellis) leads to the room where the casket is located. There are some women (“neighbors” I recognize without knowing who they are), and there is the body. Someone takes me by the waist and lifts me up to kiss “the deceased.”

  A dream. Watching the city below, in a room full of light. I want to say what I’m expected to say but can’t remember the words. I see a woman’s face, her bright eyes. All the while, I’m taking a leap of faith. The woman has an air like Marlene Dietrich, a clever face, keen, very bright eyes, a light on her tanned face.

  Friday

  All the walls I’ve written on, seeing nothing.

  My face is burning, I feel a slight stinging on my cheek, I slide my palm over it, the burning grows. I rub brutally at my cheek, a way to bring the skin of my face back to life.

  “This first account may be compared to an unnavigable river whose stream is at one moment choked by masses of rock and at another divided and lost among shallows and sandbanks,” Freud, on a case of hysteria.

  Series C. I thought that I was an unknown, that no one knew about me, that there was no motivation behind my activity. I had to reread what I’d written in order to remember. I had the feeling that I’d done things she never found out about; it was nothing but a metaphor for forgetting, for my death to her. That is, a way to erase loss and to combat death.

  Outside, a boy is reciting aloud the multiples of two: “two times two is four, two times three is six, two times four is eight.” I remember the classroom near the entrance to school no. 2, where I was trying not to cry because they were transferring me to a religious school and I was going to lose my third-grade teacher forever.

  Saturday 15

  Lunch with David. “You suddenly feel that everything has become naturalized for you, and you catch yourself telling time by the changing of the seasons,” he said.

  Series E. A central core that radiates out in multiple directions, all of my fantasies are transformed into different levels of the same story. A narrative delirium, hundreds of tiny anecdotal centers, scenes, situations, a microscope of time and memory. A diary.

  Sunday 16

  I’m reading Freud with the passion of all my unforgettable discoveries. “For the child, just like the adult, can only produce fantasies with material that he has acquired from somewhere; and the ways in which he might acquire it are in part closed to the child,” S. Freud.

  In fact, The Interpretation of Dreams is the first modern autobiography.

  Freud speaks of the “narcissistic origin of compassion.”

  My current terrors are grounded upon a fear of excessive consciousness: thinking too much.

  When I’m writing by hand, after a little while, after I’ve written a page, let’s say, the pain in my wrist forces me to run through the events quickly here, to be superficial. And so I use this physical situation to explain my difficulty in “writing the truth.”

  All of that without forgetting the methods, that is, certain that only one who understands technique can be sincere in writing.

  An interesting part of The Interpretation of Dreams is the abundance of perspectival changes in the writing. For example, “Through this displacement of the emphasis, this regrouping of the elements of the content, the manifest dream becomes so dissimilar from the latent dream thoughts that no one would suspect the latter behind the former… I am aware [that is, in the present as he writes] that this conception cannot be generally demonstrated, but I maintain that it can often be demonstrated even where one would not have suspected it, and that it cannot be generally refuted [transferring to the future an unknown that he, of course, has not resolved, but leaves the solution suspended].”

  Another example: “The patient, who succumbed to the toxic effects of the drug, bore the same name as my eldest daughter. I had never thought of this until now; but now [in writing this] it seems to me almost like a retribution of fate.”

  A third example: “There must be some reason why I fuse the two persons into one in my dream. I remember that, in fact, I was on bad terms with both of them for similar reasons.” It could be said that Freud is a detective going after himself in this book; he becomes the field of his own investigation. He shares the peripeteias and the intrigues of his slow process of recognizing the reasons—or the meanings—behind the dream, or rather, behind his own dreams. We could say that the form Freud uses in his dream analysis is the narrative monologue, recounting his discovery to someone else, following the order that the dreams took on as he was analyzing them, and that is the reason for the abundance of interrogations such as, “Am I thereby trying to make fun of Dr. M?” Another, “But what can be my motive in treating this friend so badly?” Or, “How do these… get into my dream?” These questions not only pause the account but rather are formulated from the position of the person whom he addresses in his writing (a reader). In fact, he asks himself the questions that an intelligent reader would ask in his place. On the other hand, in this way he dramatizes the things that he writes about.

  Saturday, November 22

  Series E. A diary, this series of notebooks, is made from little traces, isolated situations, nothing spectacular, a narrative imbalance for which dead time seems not to exist. This is why I feel good when I’m able to include my projects in a history, that is, in a narrative temporality, when I say, for example, “I have a week to finish the essay that I’m writing for the magazine.” I tend to make the experience exist in the present and, in that way, all of the stories and all of the places convene in a single moment.

  Sunday 23

  Last night, we saw a film by Enrique Juárez about the events in Córdoba: high-quality documentary and journalistic material, but held back by naïve commentary, poor resolution. I still can clearly see the narrative possibilities of journalistic style in film (an agile camera, nervous rhythm, abrupt cuts). Also, the need to work with everyday realities so as not to mythologize the story or turn it into a spectacle, narrating, for example, a failed strike.

  November 25

  I was at Los Libros and saw Osvaldo L., with whom I keep up an ironic relationship based on some level of intellectual agreement. In L., one can see a very willful path toward perversion, considered as a fine art. Anyway, I’m tired of his affectation and his conspiratorial insistence that never leads anywhere.

  December 1969

  At noon, one Gabriel Rodríguez visits me, coming to see me in search of work. He doesn’t know anyone in Buenos Aires, comes from Rosario, tells me he’s an astrologer, and asks me if I think it’s a profession with potential. He speaks in a very serious way, and I answer him seriously as well. Someone vaguely mentioned me to him as a way to get rid of him. I tell him that the person who can help him is David Viñas; I give him the address and send him there but also give him a little money. I expect the kid will traverse the whole city, going from one friend to another, advised and compensated with bits of money that he hasn’t asked for.

  Then I meet Germán García, the only person in whom I see an intelligence that works quickly. He’s now working on popular singers. I go to the magazine, which I’m running for a few days because Toto went to Córdoba. I ran into Ismael Viñas and he seemed
tired, with no spark, as though defeated, mentioning his daughter every two minutes because he never sees her. The kind of parent who abandons his children; that kind of fatherhood is what I’ve rejected all of my life.

  Tuesday, December 2

  A journey amid multitudes. I met David to get lunch, then coffee with Fernando Di Giovanni, and from there to Andrés, who was back from Uruguay. I went to the magazine office and ran into Eduardo Meléndez. On my way back home, Ismael Viñas was waiting for me, and at eight Roberto Jacoby came over with a friend and they stayed until one in the morning. The conversation revolved around the usual axes—is an avant-garde politics possible? The answers were divided over whether art or society would be the site of the experimentation. Power dynamics in both spheres. But literature is a society without a State.

  Wednesday 3

  I am moved by Arguedas’s suicide. He had announced it and postponed it. The ills of the soul; he sought to unite Andean culture with contemporary culture and died in the attempt. That’s not why he killed himself (he was succeeding there). He killed himself because life is, often, unbearable. His death is also a metaphor for the hidden Latin American writer, never revealed, underground, opposite to the marquees of the Boom.

  I make good progress this week with added hard work (a review of Cosas concretas, with the difficulties that always come with writing about a book by a friend, especially if one doesn’t like the book). Hot weather and social relationships. Today Manuel Puig came over in the late afternoon, a long conversation about our mutual projects: developments in the detective tradition. Manuel uses the genre to critique the criminal relationships in the world of art and settles his debts along the way with the stupidity and despotism of cultural criticism.

  Friday

  At Los Libros I see F., a disciple of Oscar del Barco, he is circulating Tel Quel problematics, purism in terminology, the cult of destruction following Bataille. They seem to think that desire in literature only functions in the writers who make it explicit. The same thing happens with language. Snobbery invades Buenos Aires with the jargon of structuralism. An absurd joint article on Marechal, using Greimas’s actants to analyze Adam Buenosayres.

  Sunday

  I travel to Mar del Plata, my father was hospitalized. I spend the night with him, look at him lying nearby, the intravenous tubes that immobilize him, in a room with two beds in the Central Clinic.

  A very surreal feeling. Indecision about the future; I want to be here and, at the same time, I decide to travel back home in the early morning. My father in a fetal position.

  “Private property in the sphere of language does not exist,” Roman Jakobson.

  Thursday 11

  Several encounters with David, he meets me at Ramos to give me a fairly decent piece about Chacho Peñaloza to read, and he seems very nervous about the release of his novel. Then G., who goes on talking, never stopping, no matter whom he’s with, always about whatever he’s been reading lately. Dipi Di Paola, who, from what he told me, has stopped “using his head,” and De Brasi, who gave me a short piece about Dal Masetto. I saw all of them in El Colombiano. Last is Toto, who wants to start a publishing house with the money from T., and finally, around midnight, I’m at a table on the sidewalk along Carlos Pellegrini.

  I always end up getting the money I need, though that knowledge does me no good while I’m trying to get it. It’s as though I were cultivating a certainty that I don’t want to “earn my living,” or, rather, it’s as though I thought—in harmony with society—that the work I do is for free.

  Tuesday, December 16

  I went back to Mar del Plata to see my father. These are physical returns to the past, the streets that lead me backward, toward the time when I started thinking for myself.

  I spend several hours with my ailing father, shortly after the operation. I recognize in myself, more and more, the signs of his personality, especially the need to not see reality. That is, I start to distance myself from him, seeing him as a future double and, in spite of everything, I construct the facts of my own independence.

  A little summary. On Friday morning Aunt Elisa called to let me know that Dad was having an operation. Some trouble cashing the check from Jorge Álvarez (dated 12/29), and then I went to León R., who makes his own interpretations in such cases and treats the family as the center of balance in everything. Well, he suggested that I should psychoanalyze myself, something my friends often suggest these days.

  In my conversation with León, I once again discovered the importance of my theory about guarantees in literature. Society demands some support, some foundation that guarantees the form. For León, that support is not just “talent” but also pain. He believes that with greater pain comes greater truth. At the same time, he’s opposed in all of his philosophy to the Christian logic that views suffering as the path toward salvation. Rather, it is experience that functions as support in literature. Of course, I have a less direct notion of experience than León. For me, what matters is not the life lessons, but rather the memory left—in the future—by lived events.

  For example, I could write a story about my experience of the trip to Mar del Plata to see my father in the hospital. The key is how the events of the journey anticipate—in the frightened gaze of the narrator—what is to come.

  In that sense, it is clear that there’s always a treasure hidden in each of us, which can guarantee the writing. The foundation is always the unknown, and the issue is how it passes from that dark place into the clarity of the prose.

  I traveled late in the afternoon on Friday. Several stops during the night in desolate towns along the road. A woman got off with her hand luggage and listened to music that she played on a jukebox with cards changing in the case.

  “Ideas that have first to be translated from their native language into a foreign language in order to circulate, in order to be exchangeable, constitute a slightly closer analogy; but the analogy here lies not in the language, but in their being in a foreign language,” K. Marx.

  Wednesday 17

  Series E. I wake up alone at seven in the morning and go out to drink maté in the park. When I reread my spontaneous notes, I put these notebooks in crisis. I hope to adjust the tone, which frequently appears and frequently fades away. I want to maintain three or four levels in the prose: narration, reflections, irony, developments.

  On Friday I saw David at Ramos, anxious, delirious because of the release of his novel. He concentrates all of his competitive ability into rivalry with Cortázar, as he did before with Sabato and before that with Walsh or Puig. Like me, he never uses his acquired momentum, the possible “certainties” acquired with his previous books, forgetting about them in favor of competitive composition. Rivalry is the key to his drive. We also talk about his work on Chacho Peñaloza, following Hernández and Sarmiento. I’m interested in his internal analyses, except for their political framing, in which I can clearly see his spontaneous tendency to schematically control a circuit with far too many levels, trying laboriously to synthesize them. He crosses Calle Montevideo to buy Confirmado magazine and shows me a short piece by Miguel Briante announcing his novel Cosas concretas.

  I returned to Buenos Aires by train. An intermission in which everything is organized around consumption, a scene traced falsely from international travel, an attempt to depict the wide world in which attendants pass along the sleeping car, offering whiskey and champagne. In the middle of the night, we pass through Adrogué and Temperley, the settings of my childhood. In the dining car, I rediscover the past and classical myths. Sitting opposite me, a covert couple is traveling to a resort for a silent getaway. That unexpected proximity fosters sociability, the professional sympathy that can be found everywhere, something I’ve seen many writers cultivate with skill, seeming to be (or being) diplomats: Urondo, Fernández Moreno, Rodríguez Monegal.

  In Mar del Plata, disorientation at first, my mother in the terminal, no one at home; Cuqui, my cousin, found out in the clinic that “a s
on of Sr. Renzi” had been there and thought someone was pretending to be me.

  Thursday 18

  A visit from Aunt Coca and Marcelo Maggi, the family myths. Marcelo took her out of a cabaret and imposed her on the family.

  Series E. Setting aside recollections, writing as though I don’t know how the stories will end (though I’ve lived through them). An absent writing, without memory: the model for these notebooks.

  Friday

  My mother establishes an ironic tension, an incessant and blind activity, and I’ve been fleeing from its fatal attraction my whole life. It is a kind of euphoric activism that leads me to passion and chaos. In the midst of that circle, to calm herself, my mother has been reading, for years, one novel every day (or nearly). Currently, the trilogy by Durrell.