The Diaries of Emilio Renzi

by Ricardo Piglia

  So, I’ll try to make a survey—or an encyclopedia—of the figures and figurations of the author in contemporary culture. Not an artist but a witness, a chronicler, whose life—real or imaginary—is an attempt to justify—or understand—why one would dedicate oneself to literature. Meaning that, in this era, literature is not justified for itself alone and must be legitimized.

  Tuesday 15

  Another image survives and comes to me from my past self, seeking some meaning that I can’t decipher (because I don’t know or can’t remember what comes before that scene). Mom carries me in her arms along the path at my grandparents’ house (which will later be ours), along the hedge with white flowers and round leaves (and edible fruits, I think). She cries and moans, asking me if I’m not sad about Uncle Eugenio who was just killed in an accident. Then, in that moment, as an effect of my mother’s crying, I sense the presence of a truck parked at the entry door, loaded with bricks in a kind of pyramid, where he fell. Much later, I understood that he was an alcoholic and died because he was drunk.

  They’re holding a wake for my mother’s father, my grandfather Antonio, I’m playing soccer in the street, and my father comes out of the house, calling me and reprimanding me for my lack of seriousness. Then I see everyone dressed in black, in mourning, and I’m ashamed about my colorful tie. I am, if I remember right, thirteen or fourteen years old.

  That German restaurant with cane chairs on Calle Rivadavia, one summer in Mar del Plata, we ate sausages with fries and drank beer (which woman was I with?), we saw Dipi and acquaintances from La Plata, and, sitting at one of the tables by the window, we talked about Braudel and longevity. What is it that lasts and survives? Or rather, what will it be? Braudel talks about geographical spaces (valleys, rivers) that change so slowly that there hasn’t been time to think about their presence in history. What will longevity mean in literature? The gesture of drawing signs for an unknown recipient. The pose survives, the good hand is used to write.

  In reading Barthes’s “The Discourse of History,” I confirm the truth—or the true path that opened that realization—of my insight in 1963, in the apartment I shared with Oscar C. on Calle 1 in La Plata, while I was studying American History: viewing history as narrative, studying the methods, the techniques, etc.

  Series E. Julia takes refuge in La Plata and I, alone, sit down at Pippo on Calle Paraná to read the paper and eat a steak with salad. I think about the grand theme of my life: the solitary man (what he sees, what he can see, how he thinks, etc.) is the basis and condition of the writing of this diary. Thus the hope to discover an individual form and a private language. That style—if it exists—has no recipient, and therefore nothing that is known needs to be stated. The prose tends toward the present tense and toward description, a radical exteriority of the person writing—the imaginary subject, or rather, the conceptual writer—in his relationship to language as his own material. An object that tends toward the unsaid, toward psychotic laconicism (that’s how the prose appears) and toward hermetic non-communication.

  Thursday

  Notes on Tolstoy (12). A deal with the devil. (Faust.) Chekhov perceives it. He writes to Suvorin in the spring of 1895: “The devil take the philosophy of the great ones of this world! All the great sages are as despotic as generals, and as ignorant and as indelicate as generals, because they feel certain that they can’t be touched. Diogenes spat in people’s faces, knowing that he would not suffer for it. Tolstoy abuses doctors as scoundrels, and displays his ignorance in great questions because he’s just such a Diogenes who won’t be locked up or abused in the newspapers. And so to the devil with the philosophy of all the great ones of this world!”

  Friday, September 18

  In the late afternoon Néstor G. comes over, back from France, the same as always. He saw, he tells me, Muriel by A. Resnais, he went with Diana Guerrero, who gave a simplistic and damning analysis of Arlt. I went to the magazine and found David, euphoric about his conversations with D. Stivel, who proposed that he write something for his TV program Historia de jóvenes. A writer like him feels accomplished if he can imagine a massive audience.

  My strange behavior in Havana in January two years ago, affected by my encounter with Virgilio Piñera. I brought him a letter from Pepe Bianco. V. P. came to see me in the hotel; he was a lean, lucid man, someone I admire very much. He said to me: “Let’s go to the garden, there are microphones everywhere in here.” Out in the open air, he quickly told me that he was being harassed by the political police, they had isolated him, he had no work, they were spying on him, etc. A fragile person, amiable and very sophisticated, he was only interested in literature but happily accepted the revolution and didn’t go into exile. Why is he being pursued? “Because I’m invested,” he said with a smile, appealing to an old-school term. Invested, inverted, a person turned around. They see him as a political danger, a delusion generated by those who believe that history has imbued them with political truth. Then, at Casa de las Américas, I asked for G. Cabrera Infante’s story collection In Peace as in War. There was vacillation, some detours, but they must have preferred to avoid the scandal that could have come if they’d refused me access to a book published by the Revolution. We went down an endless staircase that sank into the bowels of the earth and finally, down below, they found the book and gave it to me with a discreet and reproving look. In the Casa de las Américas library there was a notebook with a pencil attached, hanging from a cabinet. You had to leave your name and information there if you wanted to read Three Trapped Tigers, G. C. I.’s novel, published in Spain in 1967. Many readers ran the risk of showing their faces in order to read a novel they admired. Apart from the discussions and meetings, I imagine that all of that brought me to a state of great nervous excitement that lasted until the end of my stay in Cuba. It had to do with the brutal presence of a reality that I wasn’t prepared for. Me caí de la mata, the penny dropped, as the Cubans say.

  Saturday 19

  A visit from David; Stivel rejected his proposal to do a self-critique as a condition for staging Lisandro. Then Rubén K., who defends the linear novel and hates intellectuals out of pure anger toward himself. The anti-intellectualism of the left replicates the position of the mass media. Mistrusting any analysis or position that poses complex questions, they think that everything is simple, that the people don’t understand them because they lack social consciousness. Dramatic and sad.

  Later, I went to the magazine, the issue with my long article on American literature came out. Extreme positions that help me survive. I pretend I’m invisible. I go to León’s course on Marze to air out some of the heavy feeling of recent days. We read Pre-capitalist Economic Formations. Asian means of production tied to Eastern despotism. León quotes Hegel from memory.

  Sunday, September 27

  A summary of my excursion that began on Friday and ended early today. I took the train to Rosario at seven in the morning, an experience of simultaneity; I heard Beat music, in the railroad car, I heard a group of furious people talking about money without pause, and I mentally tried, as if I were someone else, to explain the term bibliotherapy to someone by transmitting my thoughts, saying to myself: it is healing through reading. I was going to a conference of librarians, I imagined, and everything discussed there would reveal the truth of a particular reading. At the same time, through the little window, the city ended abruptly and the country began, a barren, flat land, and in the background, against the horizon, I saw a little village, the last populations, and then, in the desert, a shanty town. “A Pampa Indian camp,” I thought, that’s how one would see the tents and huts of the nomads on the plain, leaving the fortified positions “of civilization.” I thought: “The height where I am, sitting by the window of the train, is the same as the perspective a man on horseback would have.” What can be seen is at once distant and near, silhouettes sketched out from afar, looming in the void.

  In Rosario the cavalcade began; Nicolás was waiting for me and immediately fi
lled my hands with his writings, hopefully I’ll be able to practice my obligatory reading, but I react in opposition and can’t read in these cases. Articles and papers from many origins and with no “personal” interest, institutionalized, neutral writing. “On top of that,” he made it clear to me that he too was working on the problem of translation, which for me, I told him, wasn’t important because we all write the way we see fit. His response was to not leave me alone, even for a moment, as though he were monitoring me or following me. I found, then, that mixture of arrogance, perversion, and provincialism, ways of differentiating oneself in bureaucratic spaces.

  At night I gave my lecture, very lucid, but in a bad place even at the best moments. I took Borges as an example of double enunciation, or rather, of the double text. Quotation, plagiarism, and translation, examples of one writing inside another, which is implicit. An outside text is read in writing, and the appropriation can be legal (quotation), illegal (plagiarism), or neutral (translation). Borges uses his personal mode of translation to appropriate all of the texts he quotes or plagiarizes: his “unmistakable” style turns everything he writes into his possession. He also uses erroneous, outrageous, and manifold attributions with great skill: he habitually attributes his own lines to others but also takes others’ phrases as his own.

  Throughout the entire talk I was distracted by an open door to the right of the stage where I sat speaking to that clever audience: I thought that the listeners weren’t following me because they were waiting for someone to arrive (and that was why they had left the door open). Who could be coming? Whose specter? And, while trying to work it out, I “heard” myself talking. When I was about to give some explanations, applause and praise broke out, following me into the next day.

  Novel. The point isn’t to try to turn the document into fiction or to explain where the truth is in what I’m writing, it’s to define fiction in the way real materials are enunciated. For me, fiction is defined by the formula “the person speaking does not exist,” even if he says that his name is Napoleón Bonaparte and everything he says or relates is the truth. The readers’ beliefs are in play, they decide whether to receive the story as true or false or, rather, as real or imaginary.

  Curious behavior during the lecture: first in the office, while I was waiting, I felt an emptiness in the air as if I was no longer there: I imagined myself—saw myself—losing my thread. As soon as I sat down and began to talk, my attention was displaced toward the right, toward the door that led to the patio. There were silhouettes in front of me, empty faces, and my words sounded hollow, I felt I was moving too quickly.

  That night in the vast and empty restaurant with an open-air patio in the middle of the room, everyone—except for me—ordered pork chops. Sitting next to me, Juan Pablo Renzi talked to me ceaselessly, half drunk, and asked me if we were relatives. He had seen the name in a detective anthology that came out, signed and translated by someone who had the same last name. “We’re nothing,” I told him.

  Monday 28

  Notes on Tolstoy (13). Art as temptation. While writing What is Art?, he takes notes in his diary. “I do not cease to reflect upon art and upon every form of temptation which obscures the spirit: art is certainly one, but I do not know how to express my thoughts.”

  Tuesday 29

  I feel like I’m living in a house without walls.

  Successive visits and meetings. At Los Libros, a plan to attend a conference in Córdoba. I refuse to go, which causes a great disturbance. We’ll see; if I do go I’ll have to travel on Friday. They offer me tickets, lodging, etc. Yesterday I saw Beatriz Guido and Leopoldo Torre Nilsson; I found them frivolous, ingenuous, a bit cynical, with the certainty that comes with money. She was worried about the publication of her novel Escándalos y soledades. Lots of exposure, articles in all of the magazines. She gives me the manuscript to read: I’m the young one, a prodigy, and I’m on the left, so she expects me to write the review of her book in the magazine. While Nilsson stays apart, he shows a childish eagerness when talking about “his literature.” He gives me two stories to read and tries to steer the conversation toward his writing. I like what he does, a certain criminal tone, a spoken prose that isn’t bad, fairly personal. Meanwhile, he’s putting together his next movie, another historical one, based on the life of Güemes and his gauchos, who defended the northern frontier from the Spanish. He talks and describes the millions he made with his movie about San Martín. He has an incredible certainty that the triumph of socialism in Argentina is imminent, and he tries to be as close as possible to people like me, imagining that we can protect him from being killed and give him time to go into exile. During that historical-political-artistic-personal conversation, we drank Scotch whiskey and French wine, and we ate delicious empanadas, cooked by the maid from Corrientes.

  A single man cut down the familes of the manager and two treasurers of a bank, passing himself off as a member of an urban guerrilla group. The thief made them travel in a van from one end of the city to another while he waited for them in the bank watching television. Using only his intelligence and the power of collective fear, he made off with eight million pesos after five hours of work.

  A long discussion last night with Schmucler about their interview with me in Uno por uno; I immediately move toward an extreme position (the same I took in the interview) while he, intelligent and sensible, argues scientifically (repeating Roland Barthes without quoting him), he defends “writing,” non-representation, and even hermeticism as cultural alternatives, and I—in line with Tretyakov, Brecht, Benjamin—defend nonfiction, writing that doesn’t depend on the book form and circulates socially, and thus deny the possibility of committing fiction in an impactful way. Only if we write parables and fables with morals, in the Chinese style or with the form of allegorical stories from the Bible, can we use fiction as propaganda. We were crossing Calle Paraná, arguing about the avant-garde and unrest, when a car almost crashed into us.

  Wednesday 30

  Ismael Viñas cut my afternoon short, we concocted an apocryphal political inquiry that sparked his voracious sense of competition with his “intellectual friends.” All disguised with lines about the communists, but based on conservative positions. Then David dropped in, insecure and ridiculous in the eyes of his brother, who always sparks theatrical behavior in him. They joined forces to insult Perón; they’re still liberals on the left, psychologizing history just like the most obstinate populists, making Perón the axis of political reality for the last twenty years (something which is true). I feigned a compromise to get rid of them; we walked down Corrientes (empty, with the shops shut down because of the census) and then I got on the subway at Uruguay, got off at the first station and left via Callao, making a large circle around Riobamba and Sarmiento so as not to be seen. A thief protecting “the treasures” of his private thoughts.

  Thursday, October 1

  In the afternoon I watch Godard’s Weekend, a loose adaptation of Cortázar’s “The Southern Thruway” that turns into a tribal journey on the road with catastrophes, cannibalism, and delirium. I work with some ideas from Tretyakov’s position for my statement at the conference in Córdoba on the avant-garde and politics. Then I started reading and the calls began. Luna also wants to travel to Córdoba and offers me collusion and money. I already see the dubious reactions that David, León, and Toto will provoke in him. I’m “his friend,” and he will want to prove it constantly. He offered to get my ticket so that we could travel together, pay for my lodging, and extend our stay. Then León also offered to pay for my transportation so he wouldn’t have to travel alone, followed by David, who wanted to invite us to dinner. Their persistence eliminated my desire to travel.

  Friday, October 2

  I reread my notebooks from 1968, an aggressive and solitary character throwing punches in the air and fighting blindly against reality. Those were the days when I was working on the story about the trip to Italy with Pavese’s diary and the obsession over a lost woman.
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  Monday 5

  A weekend in Córdoba, open discussion on Saturday afternoon and all day Sunday with Oscar del Barco and his acolytes (Marimón, Dámaso Martínez, Giordano, etc.); in the line of Bataille, they defend a version of the autonomy of literature with its function explicitly tied to the poetics “of desire” and transgression. A kind of politicized mauditism, very French. For my part, I went back to insisting that a political literature must go beyond the book as object and circulate as an open practice of manifestos, photocopied stories, life stories, based above all in nonfiction. In the midst of that aside, numerous assemblies, posters with Che’s photo, slogans, speeches by radical workers from the factories of Córdoba. No one talked with anyone else, there were only firm positions, declarations that never intersected one another. On the way back, David came over to rationalize his silence in Córdoba. In reality, neither Del Barco nor I kept David’s theory of commitment or his social novels in mind. We commented on Toto’s letter to Cortázar with reproval and praise.