The Diaries of Emilio Renzi

by Ricardo Piglia

  Friday

  Series C. Yesterday I walked through the city with Julia, beautiful with her short hair and the boots I gave her, surprised, as always when she receives something; she was confident in her own beauty, confirming it in the windows and mirrors of the city, but can also doubt it in moments of great conflagration, when everything has been lost, and the Shadow comes toward her for any number of reasons, like when the zipper on her boot got stuck and provoked her anger, or when a tiny little red spot appeared on her skin, behind her left ear, which, according to her, is surely an incurable cancer! And then she cries until she’s sprawled out, only to get up, go to the bathroom, and touch up her eyes, becoming beautiful again as she was in the early afternoon.

  Sunday

  At night, Rodolfo Walsh came to record a conversation that will precede his story “A Dark Day of Justice.” Dialogue with him is difficult, he’s too pragmatic for my taste. He shows a cautious abstention when faced with any abstract thought, but his journalistic reflections work very well, and he confirms his intelligence several times. Politics serves as a common ground for us and, at the same time, he too can clearly see the close relationship between nonfiction stories and persuasion. He derives his ideas about the novel, if I’m not mistaken, from two places: his difficulty in finishing his novel Juan Was Going Down the River, despite the fact that he had dedicated more than a year of work to it, supported by the salary from Jorge Álvarez; on the other hand, his suspicion of a Borgesian root behind any story of more than twenty pages and his absolute loyalty to a very precise prose, which makes “long-distance races” seem impossible to him.

  Tuesday 26

  To fall (like Cacho, like Malcolm X) on account of a clock, isn’t it an omen?

  A visit from Aníbal Ford, who gives off a dull tension, as if the two of us were giving each other little jabs to the liver between smiles. What is it on his side? An excess of references to himself, to things he has written or is writing, and a populism that logically results in anti-intellectualism, the division between some things that can be criticized and others that cannot. An overly thematic view about issues that he should work on more closely. The ideology of the artist circles beyond his poetics. The writer places himself in the center of the world, and everyone should read him, etc. I don’t run those risks. I’m too proud and too sure of my value to beg for people to pay attention to me.

  Wednesday 27

  Carlos Altamirano brought an article for Clarín and stayed over for dinner, always sharing good ideas about literature and politics, aesthetic complexity: distance and discord between the writer and the reader, who are—or are not—connected based on experiences and cultures that are different, divergent, and often antagonistic.

  Friday 29

  Yesterday I got up early in the morning, sat down to write at noon, and by five in the afternoon I’d finished an acceptable version of chapter 5. Then I stayed in bed with Julia, reading, listening to music on our new radio, making love, until finally we went out for a walk around the city, bought the latest novel by J. H. Chase, drank peach nectar from tall glasses while sitting on the sidewalk of Calle Corrientes opposite posters announcing a new edition of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a very popular novel in the nineteenth century, of course, which was published in the same year as Melville’s Moby Dick.

  At midnight, León came over to discuss his article about nationalism, full of good ideas, very critical about the idea of symbolic and invisible units like the concept of a nation-state, and we ended up eating chitterlings in Pippo and talking about David, who finished his play Lisandro, talking about how wonderful it will be to work in peace, writing alone at night in an empty factory. Two good ideas from León: people on the left reproach the weakness of the revolutionary parties because they take the ideal of traditional parties as a comparative model; that is where—I would say—the seduction of Peronism comes from. That can be applied to any “entryism” that resolves the issue without deepening it, always looking uncritically for the positive moment of the traditional organization: its drawing power, its real proximity to powerful forces and groups, etc.

  Déjà-vu: a feeling of having already lived through a situation, a way of altering experience and erasing the restlessness of the present, turning it into something already lived through and passed.

  Today I slept until mid-morning, and when I was about to eat breakfast or had just finished breakfast, David came with the manuscript for Lisandro, the play that he wrote in five days, excited, harried by his need for money, sustaining himself on amphetamines. He read Lisandro’s long monologue in front of Bordabehere’s catafalque, accentuating the words, working himself up as he read with a civilized and even romantic emphasis, a kind of local Victor Hugo talking to ghosts. I still can’t talk about the work, I like the idea of the chorus transformed into a variety of characters, but I see the development as overly simplified. I went out with him and we walked together to Corrientes, at which point I continued to Viamonte and visited Aníbal Ford, who gave me back a couple of books, and then I went to the publishing office but didn’t find anyone there. At the Galerna bookshop I picked up the translation of Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness and Freud’s letters to his lover. I drank a coffee and ate a ham sandwich amid the apocalyptic chaos of the publishing house, creditors and labor lawsuits. At a table in the bar, I wrote a couple of notes about the kidnapping of Aramburu; I skimmed through Lukács’s book looking for connections to his ideas from The Theory of the Novel. Afterward I visited Signos publishing, where I collected fifty thousand pesos for the collection, although I had to wait for the office boy, who brought me the check in the late afternoon.

  Saturday, May 30

  I’ve been working on a response to Altamirano’s article for Clarín since ten in the morning. In the middle, David came over to have lunch at my place: he’s broke. His immediate predicament is contagious; he’s closed off in himself, smothered under the urgency of publishing, success, competition, etc. After going out to the street and drinking a coffee, I returned home and finished the article with a thirty-eight-word paragraph in response to the question, “What is literature for?”

  It is ten at night, I want to read Doris Lessing, eat grilled provolone cheese, and go to bed with Julia without thinking about the days to come, the things I have to do, or the books I want to write.

  Sunday

  Mid-morning today, after patiently reading the Sunday papers, filled with turmoil because of the mysterious kidnapping of General Aramburu, I ran into Nicolás Casullo and rediscovered a natural relationship with him in terms of his politics and his very grounded vision of literature, uncommon among Argentine writers these days. I appreciate Casullo’s determination to organize the intellectuals and to bind them to political work. At night, Altamirano came over and took the article. I ended the day listening to Radio Colonia; I too am intrigued by Aramburu’s kidnapping, was it the Peronists or the security services?

  Monday, June 1

  I woke up very late and had lunch at four in the afternoon. David dropped by in the middle, going around looking for money, hoping to sell his play for the Signos collection. We discussed the matter of Aramburu with little success. I stopped by the publishing house to pick up an advance of twenty-two thousand pesos. At Los Libros magazine, I insisted on doing the issue about American literature, which I’m putting together. Finally I ran into Battista; he sold the first issue of Nuevos Aires (exhibitionism, prestigious signatures in no order). Ismael was waiting for me at home, tired, out of commission: we agreed that oratory is a disappearing literary genre (just as the novel will one day disappear).

  Tuesday, June 2

  A letter came from Onetti, responding to my questions about his story.

  Wednesday, June 3

  On Calle Carlos Pellegrini I come across an old woman screaming in the door of a luggage store. She was insulting them without pause: “People walk by on the sidewalk and these bastards grab them with a hook and use their skin to mak
e the bags.” The woman had a certain haughty dignity, buried in a horrible truth that she alone knew. She repeated the insults over and over again, once again describing how they hooked the men and women, pulling the skin off their backs to make bags.

  Thursday 4

  Thinking about Onetti: he works with isolated situations, with no past-tense, narrating from the present. The mosaic expands as though the writing had no axis. A Brief Life is a deliberate growth outward from a nucleus that was already present in The Pit with the story of a man who invented a life for himself.

  Friday 5

  X Series. An attack of the liver, too much wine last night. Rubén K. came at eleven, bringing his revolutionary stories: a Huracán fan stole an umbrella painted with the Racing colors: the police arrest him for disturbing the peace but immediately blame him for a murder and torture him, and he spends two years in prison. Everyone in the yard stares at him like he’s an idiot. He goes up to the bars, calls for the policeman on guard, sticks out his arm and hits him. Sent to solitary confinement, he makes a shiv out of a steel strip from his bunk, and when he returns to the yard he fights the king of the hill and takes his place. In prison he meets a militant politician from the left and becomes a revolutionary. Now he’s Rubén’s clandestine partner in Córdoba. Then Menena came over, suffering a reaction from some illness I don’t know, and we had lunch in a Chinese restaurant to combat the power outage that’s affecting all of Buenos Aires.

  Sunday

  Of course Onetti has his flaws; they are flaws of his tradition, I would say, as with Arlt, who is “metaphysically” explicit; his characters suddenly devolve into desperate sentimentality, and they’re always thinking about suicide or murder and don’t love anyone except women lost in the past or adolescent girls. No doubt Cortázar saw that with clarity and tried to escape from those “depths,” but sometimes he goes too far in the other direction and everything seems like a children’s game (except in Hopscotch).

  A meeting for the next magazine that I’ve planned for Tiempo Contemporáneo publishing: León R., David V., Eliseo Verón, Oscar Braun, Eduardo Menéndez, and we’re also thinking about Oscar Terán. A certain tension was circulating, especially at the beginning. For a while, Verón would only talk to me, and then there was an argument about Borges, about the character of the magazine and its relationship to politics: in the end, after two hours—with León trying to drag Verón into political argument that Eliseo, always abstentious and amiable, wouldn’t get into—we had agreed to put together a first issue on violence, and we’ll see about the others.

  Monday, June 8

  I got up at seven thirty, ready to continue with the chapter about Malito and the preparations for the robbery. I’m writing a twenty-five-page outline: from the preparations until the escape.

  Coup d’état: Lanusse supplants Onganía, who resists. It was Toto who came to wake me with news of the army communiqué; everything is a result of the Cordobazo.

  Wednesday

  Many dreams last night: in one I was a prisoner, maybe of the civil police, in a house with friendly people whom my very presence endangered. Other dreams of empty streets and an old ice box that I used as a sarcophagus or a pencil case. My father, at the end of a sidewalk that cut up crossing the train tracks, and I, maybe to his right, looking at the sky so I could see his face and tell whether he was dead and why he was walking with a limp. I woke up at midnight, filled with rage against the world, I am as sharp as a knife, though not so in reality, certain—from the outset—of the quick workings of my intelligence.

  “Whether the life is criminal or not, the decision is to encourage the psychopath in oneself, to explore that domain of experience where security is boredom and therefore sickness, and one exists in the present, in that enormous present which is without past or future, memory or planned intention, the life where a man must go until he is beat, where he must gamble with his energies through all those small or large crises of courage and unforeseen situations which beset his day, where he must be with it or doomed not to swing,” Norman Mailer.

  Friday

  If I maintain my intention to read only in service of what I’m working on, then I almost completely stop reading. I prefer to try selecting the books for themselves, forgetting about what I’m writing.

  David came over in the morning: both of us are broke, and we put together what little we have to eat at Bachín. David sermonizes about historical themes, wanting to write (for Signos) a novel with Urquiza’s death. Two conclusions: he always writes for money, and his project is a homage to my story “Las actas del juicio,” which—in my modest understanding—exhausted the subject in ten pages. At the publishing house I find Eduardo Menéndez, and we talk about the possible future magazine. Eduardo is a very lucid anthropologist, and the two of us are thinking about the possibility of using the magazine to conduct field work. Possible subjects: libraries and their audiences, militants of the left as a tribe, a register of feminism in Argentina (its history and its present state).

  Saturday, June 13

  After an unexpected encounter with Gustavo F.—who came to see me, full of adolescent expectations—we went to the theater to see Stolen Kisses, an excellent film by Truffaut. In the late afternoon Roberto Jacoby stopped by for a little while and ended up staying until one in the morning. Very imaginative plans to use comics in political propaganda, also ideas about the work of artists and the definition of actions, the design of publications, and the “format” of leftist positions.

  Sunday 14

  I’m reading Deleuze’s excellent work on Sacher-Masoch, a brilliant synthesis: sadists create institutions, and masochists sign contracts. I’m also reading De Micheli’s book on the avant-garde.

  First with David, overly eager about the possible premiere of Lisandro at the Liceo theater, always agitated and dependent on success. Then Manuel Puig came over, calm and collected: he worked for three years on Betrayed by Rita Hayworth, “writing,” as he smilingly told me, “every day, except one.” He started his third novel in October of 1968, and so far he has written a hundred pages (eight chapters), only 20 percent of which is salvageable; he’ll have to rewrite the rest. He turns down a proposal from the Stivel clan to write an original plot for TV, he turns down Ayala’s proposal to write a script for a film of Heartbreak Tango. He’s working on a novel, he says, based “on the Dantean space of the detective genre.”

  Series E. The diary: a “psychotic genre,” a denial of reality, a drawbridge, and a last resort.

  I keep working on a novel that, inwardly, I already consider a failure, and I describe it here so that something will remain of all these months of work: a hundred-page story based on the robbery of a bank truck in San Fernando. It centers around the confinement and persecution that the criminals are subjected to as they hold out in an apartment in Montevideo, besieged by the police. Written in classic third-person, it combines their situation of being trapped (they hold out all night and die at dawn after burning the money) with the biography of a hostage they capture as they enter the building. The whole novel respects the unity of time and place and is interwoven with the monologue of the man who has been captured (a Uruguayan soccer player).

  Tuesday, June 16

  At Corrientes and Montevideo, a casual meeting with David who “was thinking about you.” We had a coffee at La Paz, he’s obsessed with theater and the next premiere. Then conversations with Andrés about some friends, Maoist militants: they sell everything (their cars, their apartments) and give the money to the party, they make eighteen thousand pesos per month when they become professional. A meeting at Nicolás Casullo’s house at eight: Dal Masetto, Germán García, Carnevale, Alba, Plaza: a good disposition toward being tied to politics, distraction and snobbery, laborious possibilities for work that will have to be organized.

  Wednesday

  X Series. Celina tells me that Lucas T. was uncomfortable because he couldn’t tell me about having seen my book published in Havana while he was do
ing military training in Cuba. Political secrecy conflicts with the affectionate spontaneity of friendship. Causing hatred, promoting indifference toward acquaintances in order to protect the secret of a covert life. They live two lives, and the visible one changes and turns gray because it exists in service of protecting the other life (going around armed, pursued by the army). I remember one afternoon when Lucas came to visit me because he was near my place and, when he sat down to have some tea, I saw, though he didn’t realize it, the pistol that he wore in a shoulder holster.

  Monday 22

  I got in line to buy kerosene because the cold had come, and it’s impossible to work without the heater. The frozen, gray city seemed enveloped by a tulle fabric. The woman in front of me was talking to a man in a suit with an imperious aspect (similar to Marcelo, my uncle): “A naughty little seamstress, a low-class nothing, I wouldn’t think of going to her. I take advantage of it. It works for me. You should see them, four or five men a week, married men, the most. They’re only eighteen and already look old. I’m thirty-four and look like a little girl next to them. Bad living eats them up (pause). By age thirty they’ve seen it all, they’re worn out.”