The Diaries of Emilio Renzi

by Ricardo Piglia

  Saturday

  Series E. Everything had become so dark that he could have committed suicide that morning. Bound to the personal notebooks in which he hopelessly attested to what he had lost. As if he had already lived the best part of his life and only the void remained.

  Sunday

  Notes on Tolstoy (10). His wife, Sophia, hardly more than a girl when they married, let herself be molded according to the writer’s desires, providing him with ample collaboration not only in his private life, but also in his literary work. His wife is materialistic and practical, in the style of Brecht’s Mother Courage. A feminist, Sophia sets herself against her family and children. Faced with Tolstoy’s ambition to become Christ, she responds: “It is not possible to save all of mankind, but you can feed a child and teach it to read. It is impossible to feed the thousands of starving human beings in Samara, the same as all poor populations. But if you yourself see or know a man or woman who has no bread, no cow, no horse, no cottage, then you must provide them immediately.” She sees him as someone who “was in Yasnaya Polyana to play Robinson Crusoe.” And she adds: “If a fortunate and happy man suddenly starts to see only the bad side of life and closes his eyes to the good, he must be ill. You must get better. I say this with no ulterior motive. It seems true to me. I experience great pain because of you, and if you reflect on my words without resentment, maybe you will find a remedy for your situation. You started suffering long ago. You used to say: ‘I want to commit suicide because I cannot believe.’ Why then are you so wretched, now that you have faith? Did you never happen to notice before that there were sick, unhappy, perverse people in the world?” She also thinks about another moment when he fled: “If he does not return, it means he loves another woman.” (The intense sexual attraction that bonds them.)

  And it is she who fights for him to return to literature. “That is your salvation and happiness. That will unite us once more: it is your true work and will console you and illuminate our lives.”

  May 1

  I remember the tradition of barbecues twenty years ago, when the whole family would get together to celebrate their continued existence (although they took advantage of the moment to retell the stories of the fallen). The trampled earth of the back patio at my grandparents’ house with the cross grill driven into the ground. A confusing memory of Uncle Gustavo, a kind of conservative caudillo, to one side of me, listening to an argument? They were blaming him, I think; the curious thing is that I can see myself, I have an awareness of the place where I was and yet, at the same time, in that moment I’m someone watching the scene—as in a dream.

  In the late afternoon David dropped in, with his habitual neuroses around the holidays, reciting his renewed fury against Cortázar, which this time came from an uncomfortable magazine cover on Atlántida with a caricature of Cortázar holding a baby bottle and a cigarette, announcing statements from his mother (which seem like one of Cortázar’s stories with his mixture of flamboyance and “refined” commentary). After that, David went on all night about his misfortunes: he doesn’t know whether to continue with his novel about the urban guerrillas (in the style of a thriller in order to exorcise his latest “obsession”), or to put together a book about the anarchists. Pulled back and forth by his need for money and his desire to publish with Barral in Spain, he exaggerates his intelligence as a way to make excuses (like all of us). He feels alone, underestimated. He tilts at windmills that keep coming back, confusing the life of a writer with that of a boxer, always attentive to rankings, always in “the news.” We ended up eating pizza and drinking coffee while watching the city, which had been deserted all day, as it began to fill with people.

  Saturday, May 2

  I woke up alone at seven in the morning, dying of cold, worried about money, there isn’t even enough for us to go to the theater today because of the mess last night with David (fifteen hundred pesos). Those dismal thoughts helped get me out of bed and steered me to the letter I have to send today by Air France. I get dressed and turn around in pirouettes to close the blinds without waking Julia, who’s going to sleep all day. With these lovely domestic thoughts, I go to the kitchen and prepare maté. In La Nación I find out about the American invasion of Cambodia, and I look at the schedule to see when we could see Midnight Cowboy. I sit down at the table here in the kitchen and start writing these notes while a sharp pain in my stomach comes and goes. Immediately I think it is an ulcer, connected to the regimen of amphetamines that I use to write at night. I don’t like it and promise myself that I will change my system, start writing every day in the early morning “next week.” The burning in my stomach pursues me. I want to make love, but once Julia wakes up after I make coffee, she will be hurt because of our fight last night, forgetting the real causes of the conflict, sure of her indignation and my egotistical mistakes. This is my new day, an exclusion due to a physiological intermission, I sit on the toilet and then get up and fill the bucket with water to flush away my remnants since the water system isn’t running well, thanks to the porter’s “fix” for the water loss that we’ve been dealing with for a week; I’m in the midst of a recurring primitive procedure, sitting down in the bathroom, the same as every morning (and thus repeating this ritual, undervalued, no doubt, in contemporary literature). As I sat, I read an article about Philip Roth in La Quinzaine and decided to copy a fragment that weaves together literary analysis and psychoanalysis, which, back in the kitchen once again, I now copy: “The patient is at once the actor and the spectator in this dramatic game of which he is the author, under the offhand but attentive gaze of the psychoanalyst” (signed Naïm Kattan). My stomach burns, and in the future I may lie (like my father) in a hospital bed, terrified of the coming operation, certain of my death.

  Pavese. The model for Pavese’s lover must have been Juan from The Seducer’s Diary: “I can imagine him able to bring a girl to the point where he was sure she would sacrifice all, but when matters had come that far he left off without the slightest advance having been made on his part” (S. Kierkegaard).

  A story in Italy. I would like to find a mythical structure that could work as the basis for this nouvelle: I don’t know if Pavese will work, of course he is too modern. Anyway, he is all I have, and in order to give it weight, the best thing will be to connect it to other modern “myths” (The Seducer’s Diary, Othello?). In the story, I have to write Pavese as though he were a negative hero. What if the myth were the repetition and replication?

  Sunday 3

  At six in the morning, the center of the city is a strange mix of night owls, young people going to mass, gentlemen buying meringues with cream. In Ramos, where I get breakfast before going to bed, there’s a group of actors or, at least, a noisy group, all false happiness and gesticulations, drinking beer, shouting back and forth. There’s an older platinum blonde woman with them and they all celebrate her with speeches and toasts.

  Monday 4

  León R. came over on Saturday night, more intelligent than he is on other days due to the analysis of Freud that he started writing that afternoon, a work that has obsessed him for around three years. Carefully, I show him that the texts he is working on (Moses and Monotheism; Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego; Totem and Taboo) don’t seem like the most representative examples, but León doesn’t hear me. What I like most about him is his savant-like obsessiveness, which leads him to persist again and again with an idea when you critique it, as though he thought you didn’t understand him. I also like the way he makes a symptomatic analysis of Freud’s writings, reading them as though in a dream.

  Tuesday

  Yesterday afternoon at Beatriz Guido’s house; she is “suffering” because of her latest novel, in which, like other writers of her generation, she has discovered—after the success of Hopscotch—experimental literature. As in David Viñas’s case, she remains bound to a type of imagination (journalistic) that doesn’t match her formal intentions.

  Yesterday I ran into Francisco H. at El Foro
and he wrote me a check for fifteen thousand pesos to pay for a story of mine that he took without telling me for one of his anthologies; even though it seems unlikely, I earned thirty-five thousand pesos this month for my works of fiction. Anyway, I haven’t resolved my economic problems with this. Today I’m going to Signos to get one hundred thousand pesos (for the collection of nouvelles) to pay off my debts.

  Wednesday 6

  Many visits, David, Ismael, Andrés, Nicolás on Friday, which have contributed to my feverish state (it’s true, I have the flu). If I could take all the time I needed to finish the nouvelle that I’m writing, I would feel much better. But to do that I’d have to live alone, on an island or in a town in the country, without my friends, who are asking me to publish all the time. Without having to earn my living in that way, without people imposing a rhythm of work and problems to resolve, like Toto with Los Libros magazine, like Carlos B. with the script, like Nicolás with his visits, like León with his Freudian ideas: that is the only thing I have to learn to do.

  Tuesday 12

  Maybe in Joyce’s story “Grace” and his altered allusion to Dante’s inferno (a drunkard who falls, just as Tim Finnegan falls, drunk, down the staircase to the basement) one can see the germ of Lowry’s Under the Volcano. Coming back to Finnegans, which I was reading until two in the morning today, Tuesday, May 12, after rising at eight to once again sit at the desk and go on reading this impossible book.

  Finnegans Wake. Is it not about incest? Written in a language that echoes the maddened language of his daughter Lucia Joyce, that disjointed style, doesn’t it disguise another initial myth? In any case, beyond any interpretation, one must remember that the entire novel, ultimately, narrates a drunkard’s dream.

  Wednesday 13

  Concoctions, comings and goings: Roberto C., Manuel Puig, Nicolás Rosa, et al. Always the same exasperation. The will to become a stranger (to myself), to move in the world with another rhythm. I know now that I will never learn how, at least not in these dark times, lit only by the lamp with its white light, with no way to shut it off except for a complicated ceremony of kneeling on the floor, going under the desk and unplugging it, a tiring effort (clearly) so that I can sit alone in the dark.

  As always, I seek refuge in books, brush off my problems (this month: the rent, my economic future) and enter some walled-off enclosures where I experience the forms of my own insanity: reading from five in the afternoon until two in the morning, then from eight in the morning until two in the afternoon, the same impossible book—Finnegans Wake—which I resume at five in the afternoon to continue until ten at night with annoying interruptions like breathing, getting some air, changing positions, so that, having read thirty pages in two days, having understood an average of thirty lines per hour, there’s a point at which I have to go out into the street, browse through bookshops, and search for another volume that I can hide behind to stave off my apathy or desperation. I play hide-and-seek, a moral game if viewed from up close; I too am writing thick volumes, behind which some pessimistic or rather contemptible young people will be able to seek refuge in the future, people who will, after confirming the monotony of that solipsistic exercise of reading, be able to move from the chair to the table, senselessly, until finally they too will come to write thick volumes, behind which other young people will hide in the future, etc. I project, then, from a history of literature as a reconstruction of the positions of the body in the moment of writing, fixed forms that have been repeated since the beginning of time: someone sitting in the solitude of a room, moving through characters marked on a page. Let us not forget the beginning of this game: someone, designated by bad luck, faces the wall with a book in his hand and reads in silence until, months later, he too begins to write…

  I have thought that, perhaps, one path to salvation for me would be to set everything aside and dedicate the next twenty years of my life to studying Sarmiento, for example, inside libraries, filling out notecards, consulting old editions, alone and friendless, in order to reach the end of my life with hundreds and hundreds of notes and cards, to finally compile an enormous volume of a thousand pages talking about Sarmiento—and only Sarmiento—or maybe about Facundo—and only Facundo—and in that way one would remain forever outside of life, so consumed with knowing another person’s life that he would come to forget his own, and, in a moment of despondency, it would be enough for him to go back to the notecards to recover his happiness, and he could even look for moments of despondency in Sarmiento to find relief and comfort. Because it always comforts us to know that someone else has lived through the same sad vicissitudes that we privately think of as unique, different, individual and idiosyncratic. Isn’t that happiness?

  Artificial Respiration. A novel of the pure present, because that is my natural tense and that is the tense of this diary, no remembering, no thinking, just letting the future come. That is the logic of this notebook, in which I take notes according to the present moment, without narration.

  Miguel Briante just called me on the phone, a long conversation about Rulfo, whom he’s going to interview in Mexico.

  As before with the short stories, and before that with the books I read, and before that with jazz musicians, and before that with soccer players and before that with comic series—I write lists. Shopping lists, to-do lists, lists of friends to see, lists of friends to call, lists of cities I haven’t seen, lists of chapters for the novel that I’m going to write. Lists have always calmed me, as if I could forget the world by writing them and, in some cases, as if taking notes were the same as doing the things that I imagine or promise. Happy then, as if, by jotting down the chapters, I had already written the novel. (Artificial Respiration. Dedication: to Ramón T. and Roberto C., for what is to come.)

  David came over, angry, nervous, anxious about his conflict or his fight with Daniel Divinsky, affectionate and forever disoriented: David went looking for money and Daniel answered him with some jokes and then David, confused, told him he wasn’t there for jokes and said a series of other things that he’s already forgotten. Don’t worry, David, I told him, Daniel will be very happy to have a story to tell.

  A significant presence of politics in Joyce, Parnell, the Irish hero, arguments in the family, always implicit and allusive. Very good control of the possible awareness of the characters, never saying anything that could signify some external knowledge that the protagonists would not possess.

  Monday 18

  When he loses control, he has the experience of madness. Everything collapses, he lives up in the air, in pure contingency, money problems, too much sleep, not enough time to do the things that accumulate day after day, he clings to isolated moments, like an inmate who leaves the asylum to take a walk around the block.

  “I am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar,” Nietzsche.

  All day spent locked in, dying of cold because the heater doesn’t work, a morning wasted, an afternoon going in circles.

  Yesterday, a car trip through Olivos with the family. The neighborhoods cut off from the world among the plants and the river, the old abandoned station. My mother always dreams the same dream; every night she has to rebuild the same ruined house.

  On Friday, dinner with León, David, and Beba. Prognoses about actions for the intellectuals to take, we plan a dictionary, several public actions, and David as always is obsessed with having an impact, polarized about Z. Then León, whom I always argue with (when David is present): he’s thinking of setting up an analysis of a revolutionary against a bourgeois. I demanded a less simplified option.

  Stuck in this house, I spend a long, lonely, freezing night, reading Joyce. “Artifice is that ability to make of one’s mother tongue a foreign language.”

  León returned after midnight, wanting to discuss his article on nationalism: lucid, with good ideas about the “private” and the real, but perhaps too tied to the problem of the subject.

  Wednesday

  Yesterday at noon D
avid came to have lunch, to ask for money, and to recount his concerns about the anarchists, whom he is studying. We went to La Paz at two in the afternoon and I ran into Palazzoli, who gave me his book about Peru. From there I went on alone in the rain as far as Viamonte to see Aníbal Ford and discuss David’s article about the new generation, which he published in Cuba. He uses all of us (Puig, Germán García, Néstor Sánchez, and myself) to fight with Cortázar, saying that we’re all influenced by his literature; in my case, that’s ridiculous because he knows full well that I have based myself on Hemingway. It bothers him that he doesn’t have literary disciples. At Signos, they assured me that on Friday I’ll get the eighty thousand pesos I need to buy a bed. Things are getting back on track; Andrés brought me sixty thousand pesos from Córdoba, and the guys from Tiempo Contemporáneo gave me my salary of fifty thousand pesos. They’re very enthusiastic about my project with the magazine. We’ll see. Possible issues: on Borges, on style, and on violence.

  Call:

  Toto (Gusmán),

  De Brasi (Lukács),

  Altamirano (Lefèvre, Mussolino),

  China book,

  Boccardo.

  See:

  Álvarez,

  Willie.

  David just brought me a heater, which raised me out of the arctic climate. I told him I was thinking of starting an argument over his article about us (Puig, Sánchez, García). According to him, Cortázar invented collage and the use of beggars. “Querido,” I said to him, “my writing is based on Hemingway and Roberto Arlt; I hope you aren’t offended.”