The Diaries of Emilio Renzi

by Ricardo Piglia

  The little red notebook holds the truth, only numbers and days of the week; I started taking notes of my actual working hours so that I don’t delude myself. Calculating my hours every month, I get an average of 50 hours, less than two hours per day. That explains why the novel is going along so slowly. Over twenty days in July I worked 53 hours, and so far, I’ve done 53 hours in fifteen days in August. The least I can allow myself is 90 hours per month, that is, three hours per day, so I have to try for an average of 20 per week. Let’s say I worked for 14 hours this week…

  Monday, August 31

  Last night, not knowing why, we picked a restaurant that we never go to and there was Helena, sitting at one of the tables at the end. It was very painful for me to remember her (despite how much I once loved her). We each went our own way after eating, without saying hello.

  I see sickness growing within me as happiness grows in others. Trapped in my own delirium, I spend the days bound to diversions dictated by the fever in my soul, not worrying about the consequences that this disease may bring in the future.

  A visit from Roberto Jacoby, unforeseen, in the middle of the afternoon; he wants us to work together on the review of the play El avión negro by Cossa, Rozenmacher, and others. The idea doesn’t attract me because we would establish ourselves in—or from—different areas. For me, it’s an effect of populism; for him, a critique of Peronism. Then Boccardo arrived and David came at midnight, and we all ate dinner amid the tensions, very entertained.

  Today with David, we viewed Trotsky as a myth, a tragic character of Shakespearean stature. By contrast, Pavese is a failed hero for me, a lonely man who can’t solve his passion for women.

  When I think nostalgically about the past, I should recall that conversation with Pochi F. on a bench beneath the trees on Calle 51, near the start of the summer of ’63, killing time before going to eat at the university dining hall. At the time, F. was full of righteousness due to the piece of knowledge he was showing off (he was the first to tell me about Sciarretta’s courses and private lessons in philosophy and logic). When I ran into him the other day, F. looked at me skeptically, completely detached from my literary predicament, more interested in getting into the university dining hall with my ID card than anything else. Now he is working at La Prensa and Confirmado at the same time, where he will doubtless be successful. I write in these notebooks because I trust that, one day, it will make sense to type them up and have them published, because my work will have justified the reading of these daily personal notes.

  7:30 a.m. I get up.

  8:00 a.m. At La Paz, I read the newspapers and write in this notebook.

  9:00 a.m. I work on the novel.

  2:00 p.m. I have lunch.

  4:00 p.m. Tiempo Contemporáneo, Los Libros, Luna, work.

  8:00 p.m. I go back home, varied readings.

  11:00 p.m. I eat dinner at Claudio.

  12:00 a.m. I go to bed.

  September 1

  I go for a coffee at La Paz to read the papers and clear my head. I sit down at a table by the window over the corner of Corrientes and Montevideo and watch as the city changes, in a manifold process, according to the time of day. Once again, as often happens to me these days, I think about the life that I could have lived but lost, something inside myself that I’ve killed in order to become who I am (“If it is true that I am someone”). Little imperceptible choices, sometimes making me think that my laziness has taken precedence over the conscious decision to construct a particular way of life. I return home along the walkway through the market, avoiding people of my own age who lift boxes of fruit, their hands in gloves. I enter a shop that opens onto the street, stop in front of the counter—which is a cooler—and buy bread, milk, and Chubut cheese to eat at noon without having to interrupt my work.

  Wednesday, September 2

  I spent two hours with Roberto C. transcribing the recording, slow verbal work. The tape reel rotates and so does the language; you have to know how to scan what you hear, capturing the style and power of the testimony. The usual misunderstandings with Luna, we agree but are speaking different languages. I often see him nodding at what I say with a stunned look on his face, not understanding a word. Two friends who work together at a newspaper and talk to each other every day for years, never understanding what the other is saying. Finally, at the magazine, the artificial euphoria of F., too conscious of his extreme passion for professional transgression (via Del Barco); Artaud is Allah and a number of people from Córdoba are his prophets.

  In Turin. The character doesn’t flee or take flight; he breaks apart. Like The Golden Bowl and Fitzgerald’s china plate. I’ve cracked, he says. It means “I’m cut up” (broken), and he shows the scars on his chest (he opens his shirt, a theatrical and ironic gesture). Possible title for the story: Rajado or El rajado.

  “In my early days I was too demanding with the form, I would write sentence by sentence and correct those sentences again and again until they satisfied me. Now I work in a different way. For while I think about everything, then I write about it almost any way I can, and finally I correct it,” J. L. Borges.

  Thursday, September 3

  Yesterday at Tiempo Contemporáneo they rejected Andrés’s book (which I had presented to them) “because the stories won’t sell.” On my way out, Andrés was sitting in a chair against the wall, in a suit and tie, waiting. A sympathetic meeting with Schmucler, who is seeking “legal counsel” because police from the Coordinación Federal “visit” him. At Signos, José Aricó, a great publisher, uses his information to put together excellent books, very useful works of dissemination in the cultural conversation. Proof of this is the Cuaderno de Pasado y Presente, dedicated to Trotsky, which I read a hundred pages of in one sitting yesterday. I try to convince him to approve a volume dedicated to Brecht, but he smiles, it doesn’t excite him, he doesn’t want to dedicate his publications to literature.

  At times, I fear that the amphetamines are ruining my mind, that I’m becoming an addict, that I can’t think without their help. Fifteen-year-old kids these days take LSD and other stimulants like candy. At least we’ve broken out of repression in that area and use the drugs to move forward.

  I write fifty pages of a story that I call Soundtrack, which is an oral account that I attribute to a recording. An effect of truth in the process more than in the content or referent. It is real given that—as I stated—I’ve recorded and transcribed it; within that frame, I can say anything, and it will always be read as truth. I call this “textual realism.”

  Friday 4

  In B., I see approaching dangers that I avoid without realizing it: cynicism, fatigue, the conviction that only one’s talent matters, no need for substantiation. His juvenile hopes slowly fall away, and meanwhile he dedicates himself to earning five hundred thousand pesos per month, buying a large apartment, getting married and having kids. Because he views me as what he was when he was young, it’s only with me that he dreams up ideas for films he wants to make, talking about nothing else. Apart from that, his sensational book covers (for example, one for the Serie Negra, envisioned as a screen showing a violent scene) show his quality, his skill, but being an illustrator doesn’t seem like much to him; luckily, he’s preparing an exhibition of his sculptures, envisioned not as objects but as crystallized narrative situations, that is, installations connected to cinema, storyboards with volume that exist in space. It isn’t a bad idea, a sculptor as a failed filmmaker who creates films fragmented into “sculptural” scenes. I make a note of this because he’s a friend and also because, like me, he experiences the difficulties of being an artist (pardon the word) in these times, in this country.

  Strange, forgetfulness erases a sentence from my mind just at the point when I’m about to write it. In place of that lost line comes another phrase that I can’t recall or recognize. Absent writing.

  David stops by at three, comes and stands in the doorway with a guilty and theatrical air, pulls me deep into his projects
and obsessions. I take him to La Paz in order to get away, and there (after talking about Trotsky, fighting with a guy who talked too loudly, criticizing Jitrik, and watching as Murena walked past and sat down at a table in the back to write and drink 7 Up) he tells me about Miguel Briante, his face disfigured by a car accident. I inevitably return to my ideas about fragmented and fractured destinies, which makes me think, yet again, about the life I could have lived. David can’t be anyone else, and he ends up acting as a partenaire to his invented public persona. “David,” I tell him, “shave off your moustache and change places, that’s the way you’ll find new paths for your literature.” He looks at me in surprise and defends himself with his Sartrean theory of authenticity (he’s been reading it for so long that it’s become incarnated so that he thinks he came up with it himself).

  Saturday, September 5

  Allende’s victory in Chile (“the first Marxist in the West to take power through an election,” according to the papers) suggests several interpretations: on the one hand, the communist parties’ traditional stance on taking power through peaceful means has triumphed; on the other hand, a warning light has gone off on the right. Since they don’t pay attention to whether the socialist government’s new position was won by guns or votes, they’re going to attack it and try to eliminate it without fair play, through—no doubt—the use of weapons. Che’s death and Fidel’s support of the Soviet operation in Czechoslovakia frame the situation. In Chile, reformism is a politics of the masses and the left may perhaps gain what they really sought with the vote. The armed forces’ line appears to be discredited in this situation, strengthening Peronism’s negotiating position in Argentina (it also supports itself on the masses and unions).

  Sunday 6

  The meeting at Alberto S.’s house had a merit other than wine, whiskey, and food. As always happens in social encounters, I split into two and see myself acting, always at a distance. Arguments with the girl who came with Casullo, stupefaction at the political analyses made by the comfortable young people of the left. Whenever I go to those places I swear that I won’t ever go back, but I do. I came and left with León, who lost interest when he entered because there were no single women there, but he had five brilliant minutes, which confirms for me that he’s the most intelligent one in the whole gang. Then he withdrew, as he always does, and dozed off for a while, maybe thinking nostalgically about how he could have accepted the invitation to travel to Chile for Allende’s inauguration.

  Series E. In rereading my notebooks, the continuity from 1958 to 1967 appears clear; that part would be Volume I of my written life. The solidification of a young aesthete who comes back down to reality, lives alone, earns his living, and begins to publish. The second volume starts in 1968 and is still in progress.

  Monday, September 7

  I’m writing at the table on the street corner, in La Paz, facing the city, the fragment of the city where I live; a cat circles its territory, marks out the place where it goes to hunt for news of the outside world. I’m doing a translation of Fanon for Cuadernos Rojos. When is violence legitimate? That is the current question. Since no one now believes that the masses will act for themselves alone, Fanon associates violence with the individual actions of a new subject, who often functions suicidally.

  Tuesday 8

  An absurd discussion of literature and politics at Los Libros with Funes, Germán G., Toto, and David; how can we get out of the merely testimonial position of writers, only displaying their agreement with good causes. For me, it must begin with a renovation of artistic technique, putting art in service of action; first and foremost, it means changing or expanding the concept of art itself.

  Wednesday 9

  Working on implicit poetics, not what is said about literature but rather how it is made. The avant-garde refuses to enter the circulation as it is and seeks to open new channels for the diffusion of the art; it must invent a new territory in the same way that the political avant-garde must abandon the parliamentary struggle and find different forms of expression.

  I work on the lecture that I’m going to give in Rosario. Thinking about examples for my argument.

  Thursday 10

  The wooden table, painted yellow, that Uncle Luciano and I carried on a bicycle, turning like a ship. The rubber mat of the kitchen table at the house in Bolívar with lines intersecting each other as on a map and a hole on one side that I opened without being noticed. The time I was going to my room and saw my cousin Lili naked, walking (she covered her breasts with both hands).

  Friday 11

  Close to noon, I ran into David, who wavers between seduction and madness. I spoke with Willie Schavelzon about a collection of writers’ essays and got him to give me a check for five thousand pesos as an advance for the article I’m writing for Los Libros. David picked up a package from the bookshop with copies of his novel The Owners of the Land, which was just republished, and he went to the bookshop opposite Dávalos, on Calle Corrientes, to sell them himself, trying to fish for a bit of money. “They’re the author’s books,” he tells me, smiling, “they give me ten copies to give out as gifts and then I get rid of them at the cover price.” I stopped by Tiempo Contemporáneo, a variety of conversations with Casullo; when I got back home, Ismael Viñas was there and then my brother came over. When I finally went to bed, I felt like the day had begun a month before.

  Saturday 12

  A true story. The siblings of Natalio W.’s father tried to move from Poland to Russia after the revolution. The group attempted to cross the border but ran into the police. Only the guide, a deaf-mute, made it back, and he used signs to communicate that they’d all been murdered, all except for a woman with very long hair (he spreads his hands behind his head and moves them down to his waist), it was Sara, the youngest sister, her aunt, her father’s twin.

  Polish Jews can’t get onto the trains full of fleeing people, so they go down onto the tracks, slowing them down enough that they can jump onto the running boards and make it to Warsaw.

  The Red Army, the soldiers dying of hunger, ragged, passing through the town and singing “Warszawianka.”

  Series E. I keep looking for a structure with which to publish the diary. The material will be real, but the form of its presentation must have a tone that allows it to be read as an autonomous story, that is, with its own laws.

  Later, David came to see me and we talked about his book of essays on Argentine literature (which I don’t like). Then Dipi Di Paola came over and we walked around the city until mid-afternoon.

  Sunday, September 13

  My decision to involve thinking (still not thought out) and narration creates multiple problems for me. The tenuous solution that I have at hand is to argue with examples, that is, with stories, or rather with plotlines. The concept must be made narratively visible without having to be uttered. I call that conceptual writing.

  Visual artists are closer to reality than writers. They don’t face the—miraculous—hindrance of language. They can use what they find and turn it into a work, and they can erase the artist and turn him into a figure that could be confused with anyone. At seven in the afternoon Roberto Jacoby came over, long and violent political arguments about possible characterizations of the Montoneros group. They’ve all become Peronists now.

  Monday 14

  In “Strange Comfort Afforded by the Profession,” Malcolm Lowry works on the construction of an imaginary writer. It’s about Sigbjorn Wilderness; in the story, he visits Keats’s house in Rome and recalls his encounter with Poe’s grave. “What is it to be a writer?” is the question of the story. Alcohol is one of the answers and, in the story, the fictional writer drinks five glasses of grappa, taking them as if they were water. And that seems to be his natural talent.

  The character of the writer lies at the center of a web of stories. “Besetting fear, as a writer taking notes, of being taken for a spy,” writes S. W. in his diaries (“Through the Panama”): you have to remember that the consul in Under
the Volcano is killed because he is accused of being a spy. The figure of the writer as a spy in enemy territory was Benjamin’s definition of Baudelaire as a bad poet who refused the morality of capitalism.

  In the series of novels and stories that have Sigbjorn Wilderness as their protagonist, the issue is twofold. On the one hand, he finds himself “in the middle of the street with a notebook in his hand” and fears that he will be taken for a spy because of that. On the other hand, the issue is that the things he’s written in his novels come to pass in his life. Fiction is an oracle that determines his experience. Alcohol is there to support that double punishment.

  In my eyes, David is an imaginary writer. I think about him as a kind of Silvio Astier in the midst of life. His uncomfortable—for him—and inauthentic dedication to literature gives him a sort of handicap, as though he were a martyr who is entitled to everything, and so he calls on the phone, begging, tempting, and if I refuse to see him he drags Julia off to a bar, forcing her to listen to his obsessions, imposing his problems as though he were the center of the world. I see in this an attitude, not to call it a pose, that I often find exhibited in stories with imaginary writers as their protagonists. Thus, I see David as an actor who is playing a writer, but at the same time he hates that figure, believing him to be a fraud who must be criticized by the action, that is, by the empirics that wipes away all illusions. There’s also something of that in Walsh, who feels uncomfortable about his literature (because it’s also very hard for him to write) and decides to become a political militant.