My father’s fears in the night when I was alone with him. My weeping (rather theatrical) when I saw him come out of the operation with the same pale face that I will see him wear in death.
Now the shrill voice on the television, the empty hours, the free time, the waiting. My mother comments on Justine by Durrell. “Love taken too seriously,” she tells me. She is referring to the “artistic” excesses in the description of landscapes, which she dislikes.
Saturday 20
Rulfo’s silence, fifteen years without publishing, is connected to his prose: restraint, rigorousness, short form, fragmentation. At the same time, Rulfo’s silence is an aid to understanding his writing, allowing its true dimension to be seen.
Monday, December 22
I’m back in Buenos Aires again, writing in the semi-darkness that won’t let in the sun, and I let myself go with this notebook, trying falsely to persevere in it. I walked around the motionless city at dawn, a newcomer knowing nothing, waiting for phone calls that will never come.
A terrible final night in Mar del Plata. An asthma attack, choking, terror that forced me to grab at the light and sit up in bed, as though I were about to die. Like a child, I had to sleep with the light on to shake off the ghosts and be able to breathe (the ghost of Hamlet’s father, he always returns).
Late afternoon. A first walk around the city, euphoria at Tiempo Contemporáneo because they were chosen as the best publishers of the year. The Horace McCoy novel came out, volume 3 of the Serie Negra. Cosas concretas is selling well in its first week (four hundred copies).
Earlier a phone call from David: “Finally you came back, I missed you.” The affection that he shows when he’s in crisis. Now obsessed with Último round by Cortázar, his sole rival these days.
Tuesday 23
David called me at midnight because of a very negative review of his novel that came out in Periscopio (ex-Primera Plana). A frontal attack, according to him, from the right, a rejection of the “literature of ideas,” etc. David refuses to come to my place so he won’t have to face Julia and Beba, already forgetting that he himself is the only one to blame for all of that business.
Tired of my clever little pieces in the magazine, which I stop liking when I read them.
Series E. I wrote six notebooks like this one over the course of the year, and I doubt that more than twenty pages will survive, an index of failure, inadequacy, and loss. I know that literature is founded there, at least that is where the writing of this diary began for me. A true record of illusory events and promises (that I will not keep). My writing grows ever worse, unintelligible handwriting, caustic style, dry (I go around in circles, trying to find my personal style of writing). I hope that the only possible reading will be ideographic, viewed as hieroglyphics in which only the suggestive image of the words matters. The lines grow more frustrated, furious, ruining themselves and tracing the shapes of my soul…
A good critical response to the detective books in the Serie Negra. I insist, in vain, that we announce a hundred titles in order to maintain our advantage of novelty, before they start copying our concept in Spain.
Thursday 25
A party last night, lots of alcohol, in a country villa on the outskirts, we stayed there swimming in the pool until sunrise. Old Luna increases my salary to forty thousand pesos for my pieces in El Mundo, and then I see Toto, we’re planning Issue 7 of the magazine, which I don’t believe in.
The fundamental thing is to break through this feeling of vertigo, of being lost in a tide of incidents that I never manage to understand. What matters most remains outside tonight; I’ve thought about all of my past Christmases as though they were a single day.
Ismael Viñas shows a certain arrogant helplessness this morning, with his shirt open to make himself seem easygoing and free, asking when they’ll pay him for his article in the magazine. I ran into David, having seen him through the window of La Paz while I was there with Oscar Steimberg. He seemed reclusive and very intelligent to me, and I thought that when I’m forty I’ll cry just like he does, trying to process the very harsh reviews in Confirmado and other magazines, not really knowing what to do with his future, absent, not breaching the topics of digression that I offer to him like someone holding out a hand to a castaway.
Tuesday, December 30
The whole journalistic world is caught in the delirium of assessing a decade. Even I: the “decade of the sixties” brought about a myriad of divisions. The politics of the left changed. Great freedom for seeking what each person wants. Argentine literature, with my generation, managed—after Borges—to enter into a direct relationship and become contemporary with literature in any other language. We cut away the feeling of always being out of sync, behind, out of place. Today, any of us can feel connected to Peter Handke or Thomas Pynchon, that is, we have managed to become the contemporaries of our contemporaries.
Wednesday, December 31
Some facts about “maturity,” which have been accumulating over the course of my life, allow me to predict a future in which some signs will be repeated, to the point that my reactions seem to be the movements of a stranger. In any case, even though I haven’t finished anything that I can really feel satisfied about, I’ve learned to live in multiple series, like parallel lives, without worrying about how they are superimposed. I imagine that my prose is the only place where all of these paths cross. For me, the key is to think in opposition, to struggle and to live against the current. That’s why I’ve always thought of myself as being five years behind. But with respect to what level, age, or established norm?
Confidence in my “talent” has marked all of these years, which explains the way I’ve worked, brilliant nights followed by long empty stretches. So far, the results have halfway confirmed my prediction. I want to change my life just as everyone does, but in my case that pretense means changing the way I write. Being more systematic and tenacious, less “inspired” and sudden. I seek a continuous brilliance, persevering in a story that lasts as long as the time I take to write it.
3
Diary 1970
Monday, March 30
Last night a meeting at home with Julia, Josefina, Nicolás, Toto, and Germán to discuss the book Crítica y significación by Nicolás Rosa. Oscar Masotta and a troupe—Luis G., Osvaldo L., and Oscar S.—made an unexpected appearance. Masotta went to work like a psychoanalyst and unleashed—helped to unleash—chaos, narcissism, and competitiveness. He accused Nicolás of copying his style from him and Sebreli, when in reality all three of them are translating Sartre. Then he confronted Nicolás as though the two of them were enacting the conflict between Lacan and Sartre. We fight to the death to defend these translations as our own.
Schmucler had planned two committee meetings for Los Libros magazine to discuss Nicolás Rosa’s book and use a transcription of the debate as the bibliographic note.
A blank night, going in circles around the bars of the city with Germán García, who is somewhere between insane and abandoned, the same as me.
Thursday
X Series. Yesterday the “sudden” (as always) incursion of Roberto C., his cautious and docile air, a kind of calm that makes me nervous and sparks moralistic introspection within me.
Friday, April 10
All afternoon in La Plata in the old hall of the University Library in Plaza Rocha, as always, the same broken clock and students from Peru who sleep with their books open.
A scrap of paper and some pencil marks in a book that I read more than ten years ago, as if they were the faint traces of acts that have now been lost.
Places evoked memories as I entered the city; in this sense, a return is nothing more than a memory, one documents the distance and the difference compared with the city in which one lived, and each place shows the absence of the emotion preserved in memory.
Taking note of all the books displayed in the windows of various bookshops in Buenos Aires—seeing the genres, the authors, the nationalities, the ages
, looking at what is repeated and what is differentiated—would be a way to evaluate the state of literature in the city.
Let’s review: ten years ago (April 1960) I was in this same library, which I came to by crossing the diagonal avenue with blue flowers along the ground. What would I have said back then about a day like today? Or rather, what would I have said back then if I could have known what I would be now, sitting here in the same place?
Saturday
In Jorge Álvarez with David, his moustache growing bushier as though the face he always had were being drawn again. He bought gel and shaved in the little bathroom behind the bookshop, every now and then sticking his head out to argue with Germán, who was trying to defend Masotta from his combined attack: “He is a simple translator.”
Artificial Respiration. I determined two things (while crossing Calle Sarmiento to buy tea) as a synthesis to respond to Celina Lacay’s report for El Día of La Plata. It’s the story of a homicide that a man commits against himself because of a woman. Two: it’s a detective novel in which the narrator, the murderer, and the victim are the same person.
Sunday 12
I go around through secondhand bookshops, walk among shelves where the most outlandish books are mixed together, where literature acquires a particular coherence and shows the dislocation that it’s subjected to: Bataille coexists with Bellamy, Bellow: the real order is visible, which is not that of Bataille beside Bachelard or Barthes.
Monday 13
Last night at home with Beatriz Guido and Torre Nilsson, drinking French wine with homemade empanadas and Gruyère cheese, and she was calmer for being with him. Bapsy had lain down in the leather armchair, suffering from a painful hernia. The essence of the night was confusion and surprise, somewhere between irony and “innocence,” because of the fact that the film The Knight of the Sword has made a profit of two hundred million pesos in its first two weeks. Based on that, we revive the Fitzgeraldian world of excess. Burning through money in the Mar del Plata casino, buying a house with a pool in Punta del Este, and, at the same time, there is the underlying attraction of the young, talented, poor writer of the left with so much ahead of him. Then the exchange of information about Jorge Álvarez’s self-destructive decadence. Beatriz shows interest in having me read her newly finished novel and two new stories by T. N. or, as Julia thinks, it’s an attempt to offer me a position in the distribution and publishing house that Bapsy plans to start based on the structure of Contracampo. Unknown quantities that time will dispel.
On the bus a woman was saying to another in a low voice: “So she says to her mother: ‘Mamá, I want you to wash me.’ ‘No, hija, no, they’re going to operate on you.’ ‘No, Mamá, they won’t operate because I’m going to die. I want you to wash me and call the priest so I can leave my body and soul clean.’ She said that several times and then fell asleep: ‘What a dream I had, Mamá, if only you could see what a dream, I can’t describe it.’ She left carrying that secret.”
April 15
I spend the day at home, half of the afternoon in bed with Julia, and the evening reading Trotsky. In the middle, a conversation with Schmucler about Issue 8 of Los Libros magazine. The prospect of opening with a polemic based on David’s article about the new generation. If that works, I’m thinking of saying that David talks about us because he’s obsessed with Cortázar. At noon, I find David himself in Ramos, desperate due to his lack of money: a striking relationship between his writing and money. All of his novels are “finished” by economic deadlines.
Thursday 16
Spent the afternoon with Toto, who loaned me his tape recorder and spent an hour showing me how to use it. Finally he said goodbye, because he’s going to Chile to gain the patronage of the university publishing house for the magazine. Then Ismael came, and I spent an hour with him recording the history of his life. Before leaving, I recaptured his ironic and intelligent conversation and his excellent characterizations of León and David. Now I’m waiting for Juana Bignozzi, who is going to bring money for Andrés, and it annoys me because I have a lot to get done.
Sunday
David just came over with the same destitution he has every Sunday, alone in the empty afternoon: as always, he is intelligent in understanding my reclamation of the concrete historical against the structuralists’ abstract and unrestrained consumption. Then, his anguished greed when faced with the two hundred million that Tore Nilsson made.
Monday 20
Dream. Julia is about to give birth to my child, and I sit waiting in the hallway of the hospital, uncertain because I don’t know what name to choose, having doubts, and my imagination is closed off. I think: “Why did I leave this until the last minute.” I go over boys’ names, Luciano, Horacio, and rule out each one. Suddenly I find the name: Juan. I think Juan Renzi, I like it, but immediately I remember that it’s Juan Gelman’s name, and I’m estranged from him. At the same time, I’m secretly sure that it will be a girl, and I have two names to choose between: Greta or Pola. That calms me down.
Nicolás just called from Rosario: deep down, he seems slightly withdrawn. I’ve never gone to visit him, haven’t written him the letter that I promised (the truth is that, secretly, I’ve always been bothered by his way of installing himself in my house every time he comes to Buenos Aires).
Yesterday a walk around the empty Sunday city with hundreds of teenagers walking arm in arm, and, after confirming in the display window of Galerna bookshop that the books from Mexico had come (Lowry, Pacheco, José Agustín), such an anxiety was unleashed that I still haven’t recovered from it even now, as I write this. Julia opens the door with Lowry’s Panama, translated by Elizondo, and tells me that Polo “stashed” the books by José Emilio Pacheco and Agustín that I’m going to look for this afternoon.
Tuesday
A heavy atmosphere, a mixture of the heat, my three-day stubble, the humidity, the exhaustion, my mute fight last night with Julia; before she went to the College she made excuses about why I shouldn’t see Germán, who just called, even though I didn’t have the slightest intention of meeting him.
Earlier I saw David, who’s in his depressive and penniless phase; then Pancho Aricó, from the Signos publishing house, where they keep getting letters about publishing the nouvelles from the series with Onetti, Sartre, Beckett. In the midst of that, Andrés Rivera read a chapter of my novel with a careful eye, interested in the tone and the irony. I picked up Pacheco’s poems and José Agustín’s autobiography from Galerna and read them in one shot, together, before midnight, with great intensity.
Wednesday
All of us originate from Roberto Arlt: the first one who manages to connect him to Borges will have triumphed.
At night I talk with Carlos B., who grasps onto me to stop from sinking into delirium: fear of death after a nocturnal phone call predicting that he had the same congenital defect (of the liver) that killed his brother.
Thursday
Dinner with Jacoby last night, many different plans and projects. Sobre magazine and the cartoons about the illustrators’ strike. At noon today I had lunch with León at the publishing house; he’s reading Freud as though it were a dream of his own. Now it is three in the afternoon, and I’m dying of heat in this prolonged and humid summer, reading Scott Fitzgerald with excitement. I come back to his line: “There are no second acts in American lives,” as if American writers were condemned to always be immature because they refuse to cultivate their natural talent, and their best writing is always in their first books (see Hemingway, Faulkner, Salinger).
Fitzgerald has such a natural grace that it seems calculated.
I should analyze my relationship to illusion as the creator of a desired reality. Just now, Rozenmacher asked me for information about American literature. I think: that guy is trying to flatter me. I’ve already told Julia about it. I think: she was at the magazine and heard the conversation; she confirmed that it was true.
Twofold hesitation: the unreal quality of the desires
I’ve achieved and, at the same time, illusion as the realization of those desires. I should trace my relationship with literature here, as well as certain verbal anticipations of desires that are achieved because I need it.
Friday
A strange nostalgia this morning as I crossed the street to go to the market and buy milk and bread. The humidity and heat against the dark light of dawn, tired working girls returning to their homes, garbage cans lined up on the sidewalks one after another: deep within, a memory surfaces of other early mornings in the “pauses” before the action began. Dead time that always leaves its mark.
David called at noon and then stopped by here at two in the afternoon, and we spent a while dreaming up collections of writings by travelers who have passed through Latin America, “which would allow us to live for two or three years.” Then I stopped by the publishing house and went to have a coffee with Rodolfo Walsh, who’s going to Cuba for the jury on the new testimonial genre. We talk about the relationship between nonfiction and the novel.
The Diaries of Emilio Renzi Page 22