Yesterday I watched the World Cup match, Brazil 4 – Italy 1, in Mexico. Six hundred million viewers on TV. Pelé and Gerson’s talent. The Italians, violent, mediocre, caught off guard by the Brazilian players’ “natural ability,” rendering the Italians’ effort and sacrifice to contend with them absurd.
Tuesday, June 23
I think I’ve given up on the magazine project for the publishing house, a poor meeting last night at Eliseo Verón’s house. León disagreed violently with Eliseo, who opposes the magazine due to a “lack of common motivation.” He added: “We can’t go putting together articles just to make a sack of potatoes” (my own position previously). I said that making a magazine went beyond our “desires,” it had to do with responsibility. Eliseo answered that this was political paternalism. León stayed silent. I reproached him when he left. Hard to bring a group together.
Wednesday
Notes on Tolstoy (11). A Sportsman’s Sketches by Turgenev and The House of the Dead by Dostoevsky are his favorite books. He turns away from the novel. “It was probable that, as a result of these two works, a new literary form would evolve which would leave the novelist free from the usual necessity of devising a formal plot.” The future of writing will not depend on the imaginary construction of a map of events, but rather a combination of autobiography, observation, and reflection.
Thursday, June 25
I ran into Manuel Puig, who mentioned his work on Heartbreak Tango to me: he had to work for six hours to finish half a page. From there to Los Libros magazine, commenting on the meeting last night at Eliseo’s house. And then I gave the script to B., though I don’t like it very much.
At 4:00 p.m. a call came from the Rodríguez bookshop; I went all the way across city, avoiding the corner where Pedemonte restaurant is, and came back with Ellmann’s Joyce, eight hundred pages, and I’ve already read a hundred.
Friday 26
I sit down to read Ellmann’s book on Joyce, trying to forget everything I have to do.
Saturday, June 27
A tribute to Emilio Jáuregui in Recoleta: we walked around among the graves, assembled, and took off running, pursued by the police. Outside, ochre explosions of fire from Molotov cocktails, the dull noise of tear gas bombs, a car tire starting to burn. The tearful faces of people walking through the empty streets with a seditious air, avoiding the police.
Monday 29
Marechal died (on Friday?), but he managed to finish his novel. According to David, no one was there. And when I die?
Let’s take a look at today’s itinerary: I wake up, startled as always by the open window that lets in light through the glass; it always seems like a neighbor from the upper floors is spying on me through it. I get up despite my fatigue and cross the freezing house, wrapped up in my old gray overcoat, and pick up the paper, a letter from my parents, and the magazine Actual with the article on Puig that I wrote two years ago. I try not to look at or read the letter because I can foresee what I’ll find in it. I sit down to write at ten in the morning and “forget” about my afternoon appointments (Cozarinsky at two, Lafforgue at three). I work well until five and then go out to get kerosene at the old garage where I used to go in 1966 (when I lived on Riobamba and Paraguay). I walk through the old neighborhoods without nostalgia, thinking about what I would have said four years ago about a day like today. But they no longer sell kerosene there, so I end up walking all the way around the city, stubbornly, with my empty twenty-liter can, and end up on Lavalle and Jean Jaurès, finally taking a taxi back an hour later with the fifteen liters of fuel I need to warm up. I leave the fuel and go out again, stopping by Premier bookshop to get Camus’s Notebooks, talking on the phone with China Ludmer (about her piece on Heartbreak Tango). Nicolás Casullo calls me about the meeting of young writers planned for Thursday night at nine o’clock at 1560 Gallo, and I sit down to write these notes before I resume reading the book about Joyce until midnight, when Julia will come, bringing the passion I need.
Tuesday, June 30
David dropped by at noon, as he always does when he’s broke, inviting himself over to eat. He’s engaged in a delirious project: he has to write three hundred pages per month to fill the seven volumes on Argentine literature that he sold to Siglo XXI for seven hundred thousand pesos, which he already received. In reality all he sold them was the index, which David usually comes up with euphorically in ten minutes: according to him, the book will be called De Sarmiento a Cortázar, and I don’t expect he’ll leave anyone unscathed. Then I went to Abril publishing to meet with Cozarisnky, the manager of the magazine’s film section, who seems more intelligent every time I see him. There I ran into Osvaldo Tcherkaski, and, in the editorial office, everything was revolving around the insubordinate policeman in Rosario who occupied the headquarters demanding a raise. I found the notes I was looking for about Larry, the Chinese bartender who was murdered in Bajo (Issue 143 of Siete Días), and then I let go with Lafforgue, Rozenmacher, and José Speroni, a Trotskyist worker who worked with me at the Revista de la Liberación in 1963 and these days writes columns about himself. Editing as cynical theater: skepticism, frivolity, and coarse humor.
The Chinese bartender will be the person whom Almada kills in the detective story I’m working on; I’m going to connect the crime to the deranged woman I saw a while ago who was raving in the door of a luggage store. She will be the witness to the crime.
Wednesday, July 1
Series E. I am always confronting false dilemmas and symbols or signs and signals that justify inaction. Today I took a piece to the newspaper and then went around the English bookshops on Florida to buy the notebook I’m now writing in, here in a religious bookshop on Viamonte, where I once bought another, one afternoon in ’65, having just arrived in the city, and started it, sitting in the Florida bar… Ridiculous rituals that mysteriously accompany life.
Julia and I had lunch at Pippo and then went out into the cold of the city. I stopped by Signos, where Aricó gave me the recording of my feature on Walsh. At Los Libros, Toto and I made progress on putting together an issue about American literature. I brought Updike’s story collection The Same Door, with includes the story about a deceased champion that was the initial seed for Rabbit, Run. The character is there, the family, a certain squalor that adds to nostalgia for the “paradise lost” of adolescence. I want to work on stories that were the initial seeds for novels; there are several short stories by Faulkner and a couple of stories by Hemingway, and they could be used as examples of the germ of a narrative.
Suddenly I remembered Joyce writing Finnegans, with all of his friends trying to dissuade him so he wouldn’t squander his talent with those incomprehensible obscurities. “I might easily have written this story in the traditional manner. Every novelist knows the recipe. It is not very difficult to follow a simple, chronological scheme, which the critics will understand. But I, after all, am trying to tell the story in a new way. Only I am trying to build many planes of narrative with a single aesthetic purpose… did you ever read Laurence Sterne?” Joyce says something along these lines in a letter to one of his friends. Chased by his debts and economic difficulties, Joyce got Miss Weaver to finance his book and continued writing it, although she quickly tried to dissuade him because she didn’t understand it. We could call that a writer’s drive.
A Montonero commando group occupies La Calera in Córdoba (military zone). They take over the police station, the post office, the city hall, the telephone exchange, and the bank (from which they took ten million). They communicate among themselves by radio. They force the police to sing the “Peronist March.” They escape in a car, a Fiat, it won’t start, so they steal another car and are pursued. They stop the car, there’s gunfire and two casualties. Luis Losada smiles at the photographers, argues with the policemen who curse and kick at him. That night, forced entry. Gunfire. Several women. Two serious injuries. The army occupies the area. The colonel in command of the operation is the same one who suppressed the situat
ion in Córdoba in 1969. (Narrate those incidents starting with him… )
Friday, July 3
He invents dreams of the future for himself and in their place has catastrophic landscapes. Better to forget.
I spent the afternoon at Abril publishing, where many magazines are produced, and had lunch with Tcherkaski, who works at Siete Días, at a restaurant in Bajo where the waiters were obsequious and welcomed him jubilantly. He gave me an interesting story to read, a sort of inferno with an ex-communist and a Polish worker in a foundry. Then long Faulknerian stories that he’d gathered in Buenos Aires: Wassermann, the owner of San Blas island, who made the police stop the traffic when he got off the boîte; the nineteenth-century player piano which played “The Internationale”; the French millionaire who came to nothing and got drunk on whiskey every day, alone; the old market with the story of two guapos who talked and then left together and were lost forever.
Saturday 4
At noon I meet Schmucler in the empty footpaths of Retiro while waiting for Nicolás Rosa. From that moment a cavalcade began: successive discussions, lunches, dinners, visits (China, Jacoby, David); sociability and friends make life possible, but I’ve always preferred to be alone.
Monday, July 6
I rose at seven and got in line in the fog to buy what I need to make the heater run. When I stopped working and lay down to rest a while at five in the afternoon, I thought about how, paradoxically, writing is an experience that erases all others, so that I have the feeling of an uneventful day. The most striking thing was that I discovered the ending for the story I’m writing. Rather, I thought about how there would come an afternoon—or morning—when I would see a binder containing the finished novel.
Tuesday 7
Today at Lorraine I saw Strick’s film adaptation of Joyce’s Ulysses. With the plot laid bare, the weight of the novel’s prose is clearly visible. The events become blurred, ill-defined; the film is centered around Circe, that is, at the end with Molly Bloom.
Wednesday 8
In the afternoon I stopped by Jorge Álvarez; the publishing house is going downhill. Germán and David take one hundred thousand pesos worth of books, trying to stop Germán’s eviction; on top of that, his wife is eight months pregnant, and we’re all taking up a collection for her.
Thursday, July 9
A tenacious nightmare, with several horrible plotlines. I was coming back home, unable to find my way, and I met Kafka at a kiosk. Even in dreams I keep going in circles around literature. An indescribable relief when I woke up.
Saturday 11
Soot-black my heart (he had dreamt that phrase a few days before). Plummeting toward the deepest underworld, he wonders where a pursued man can flee.
Sunday 12
Series E. Copying a page of my notebooks from ten years ago every day, always keeping that distance, never letting it advance to the present, so that in ten years I can write a page about this page.
Literary history is always a prison sentence for one who writes in the present; in it, all books are finished and function like monuments, placed in an order as someone might walk through a plaza at night. A “true” literary history should be made for the books that have never been finished, failed works, the unpublished: that would be a way to find the truest atmosphere of an epoch and a culture.
Artificial Respiration. In what I’m writing, I would like to elevate this project, which I don’t talk about, even here. For now, I keep going with the story about the deadly violence of the men trapped in Montevideo, and sometimes the story develops through dialogue alone.
Monday 13
I walk around the city, moving distractedly, and pass by the house of Aramburu, who was recently kidnapped, with photographers, police, onlookers. At night with Andrés and Carlos, their gangster stories in a new style: wearing trench coats to assault hotels, gunfire with the police, ambiguous graffiti on the walls.
Tuesday 14
I woke up at midnight thinking it was six in the morning and got up to record the story of the failed kidnapping of a notary who had acted in the Vallese case. The voice of that man recounting how he had managed to escape through the window of the apartment next door; I didn’t quite know where I was.
I got in line with disappointed older women who live in misery, wanting, like me, to feed the fires in their freezing homes. I spent my last three hundred pesos on kerosene, and now I’m going to sit down and write in a lukewarm room with no money.
I’ve always rejected the opposition between feelings and ideas because that is the classic mode of thought held by the anti-intellectuals who abound in the cultural world. Everything that is considered external to literature seems to me to be the only interesting material: intellectual dramas, dead time, arguments, etc. Writing must be sustained on the things that everyone leaves out of a story. Showing, on the one hand, the absurdity and the rhetoric of narrative in the strictest sense and the “well-crafted” story and, conversely, strengthening the impact that can be achieved with materials considered “cold” and anti-sentimental. In that way, the narrative world opens to areas usually classified as outside of the story. That’s what Joyce and Puig have done.
Desolation when I stopped by the Jorge Álvarez bookshop and saw the empty shelves, no one—except for Marita, the forty-year-old virgin with her face white as though powdered—no one in the place, the lights shut off. I remembered that afternoon in ’63 when I discovered the bookshop and stopped in front of the display window, facing the newly published books.
Wednesday 15
A walk with Julia around the College of Philosophy, now located in the old neighborhood on Calle Independencia, transformed by the frivolous and intellectual presence of the students who gather in bars and pizzerias around the area.
Thursday 16
I write to Onetti, imagining the letter I’ll send him when Artificial Respiration has been published. It makes me happy to know that this novel has made it into his hands because I know well how much of it is owed to his books.
Saturday, July 18
Through the wall of the house next door comes the voice of a TV presenter narrating Aramburu’s funeral. That is how the news of history must come.
As always, I feel distant from the writers of my generation, as though I were living in a time prior to theirs. I think about this while writing the essay on contemporary American narrative for the magazine. I see the most advanced work coming from writers who have set aside their confidence in literature.
“Sense of inner opposition to friends and enemies; no desire to be either here or anywhere else while still complaining of being rejected both here and everywhere else,” R. Musil, Diaries, 1939.
“The story of this novel amounts to this, that the story that ought to be told in it, is not told,” Musil II.
In Joyce, I’m interested in the change of technique with each chapter, as well as the form; in Borges, the rupturing of genre, the scattered and persistent use of the detective; the treacherous use of the conventions of reading.
Tuesday 21
All day yesterday in La Plata, Calle 7 in the sun, the trees beginning to flower, the places from my childhood. Perhaps, then, this crisis is the beginning of a repetition in which the awareness of my “lost past,” nostalgia for myself ten years ago in the same place, was bursting with grand ambitions, founded on the future tense.
All modern novels (since surrealism) tend toward poetry; see Cortázar, Néstor Sánchez, Sarduy, Saer. For my part, like Macedonio or Musil, I see the path toward renovation in the essay; that is, I aspire to an approach that coheres several styles, articulated in a novelistic manner, even if they don’t come from narrative forms.
At his house, David did a reading of Lisandro, his play, in front of Cossa, Rozenmacher, Talesnik, Halac, Somigliana. Very good, written in five days, great verbal register and technique, excellent control of tension. The device of the chorus gives it a great freedom and synthesis. A declaratory theater, tied to the current situa
tion, very demagogic and dramatic.
Wednesday 22
I come and go through the Bajo area, down Calle Florida, down Viamonte, and stop at the Biblioteca Lincoln to take notes for my essay on American narrative. Yesterday was the end of Jorge Álvarez publishing; the legal team shut down the bookshop. The same as the feeling I had when I went to Elena’s house and she no longer lived there. The house was abandoned, and I thought about all of the feelings I had left inside it.
Friday 24
Andrés has a theory that Guevara tried to incite an American invasion in Bolivia and thereby start a new Vietnam. It could be. The curious thing, for me, is that the Cubans didn’t rescue him alive.
At the publishing office, I receive several books of American narrative: Pynchon, Barth, Barthelme, Vonnegut. At Signos with Toto and Pancho Aricó, news about Borges’s divorce (?). It seems he left without saying goodbye, helped by his lawyer.
The Diaries of Emilio Renzi Page 25