Sunday 11
I lock myself away in my writing like the hero of the novel I’m writing. Any idea scrapes against my skin, I’m raw as though suffering the consequences of a fire. It costs me something to write in these notebooks because my work is going well, but in the diary I’m always the other person, the one who writes in order to survive. All I have to do is turn on the light or plug in my phone to have everybody straining to come inside.
The narrator returns to the places of his childhood to reveal himself to his new woman.
Everyone takes me for a human until I start to talk. My head floats like a balloon in the air.
Saturday, October 17
A decision, let’s call it, to get rid of my beard and enter age twenty-nine next month “with another face.” I see condemnation in age.
Sunday 18
A party at Alicia’s house, an argument with Sciarretta and Malamud that leaves me feeling bad. On one hand, it repeats my argument with Del Barco (impossibility of a critique of literature), and in that sense I’m sure of being right. But, at the same time, I once again encounter the use of a culture that comes up more and more with these almost lumpenproletariat intellectuals who aggressively exhibit a closed-off knowledge that they’ve settled themselves in. On that side I have a feeling of competition, my own desire to seek the support of a theory that can be recited confidently and yet, at the same time, I’m certain that refusing to be a passive consumer, a repeater, is the only way to produce a “work.”
Monday, October 19
Series E. The stylistic effects in these “diaries” derive from one fact: I’m trying to explicitly reproduce my hidden life. Which would that be? Not so much the events that lie behind the most visible things, but rather the bond that unites people and places. I must narrate the nexus even though I can’t perceive it now. I write in a more representative prose in which the threads are missing; I deliberately move away from interpretation and approach pure description. I seek a writing that has value in itself and that accurately reflects my current state (fear of surmenage).
Wednesday 21
Schmucler talks to me about the letter that Del Barco is thinking of sending to Los Libros discussing my article on American literature, to which I will have to respond. Dinner at Ramón Alcalde’s house, boring and with no explanation or motive.
In reality, the polemic with Del Barco began in Córdoba. He lives under the delusion that a dead language is the fabric of literature: a language “without society,” without ways of life, empty. It concerns a rhetoric of perversion as creative force: thus, there is a monotony and repetition of methods in the writers who respond to that logic. For example, Osvaldo Lamborghini, or Del Barco’s good story “La Señorita Z.” On the other hand, in El Escarabajo de Oro Liliana Heker critiques my statement in Uno por uno. I am, as I might wish, at the center of the storm: Castillo, conservative in literature, and Del Barco, the marginal, join together to discuss my attempts to find a way out of the debate of realism vs. delirium. An old settling of scores, but of course I won’t get into an explicit polemic, I’ll answer in passing, we’ll see.
Wednesday 28
Despite the psychosis that I experience after doing something purely for the money, I managed to put together the storyline for Hugo K.’s script. A media tycoon, the president of a soccer team, who also manages a TV channel, is threatened with death. They want to kill him, he doesn’t know who or how. A descent into hell; he feels himself pursued, feels there was something in his past that got him involved, but he can’t recall or doesn’t know what it is (that is key: he did something but has managed to forget it completely). Everyone, especially his bodyguard, thinks he is delusional; they show him that there’s no danger. The viewer has to believe the same thing, that is, that he’s having an attack of paranoia. He convinces himself and organizes a party to show that he isn’t afraid and that the signs that made him think they were going to kill him were just bad thoughts. Then, on the night of the party, they kill him.
The history he has forgotten: a group of adolescents, one of them finds his father’s revolver. One night they go out and head to the Parque Japonés in Retiro, and on the way back they get on la vuelta al mundo (a large Ferris wheel that revolves high above the amusement park), and up there, sheltered by the darkness and the mass noise of fireworks and raucous music, they fire randomly into the crowd. Panic, running, no one notices the middle-class kids who move calmly through the place after killing a stranger. She has two children who decide to take revenge. Hugo K. gave me twenty-five thousand pesos in advance for this plot.
Saturday
A feeling that I’ve made it very far by leaving things along the way: a person who never pauses, who cannot pause, who advances into the darkness because he doesn’t want to think. Above all, he doesn’t want to know or find out (and that preoccupation is abstract, not knowing what it is that he mustn’t know, the pure and empty form of a pursuit of ideas and thoughts).
I make a balance sheet for this month as it is ending. Liquidation and balance are the formulas of the neighborhood shops, especially at the end of the year. I’ll use this method in my personal life. I quite like the verb to liquidate; it means, of course, to sell for cheap, but also to kill. I’ve written sixty pages of the “true” novel based on real events, with the escape to Montevideo and the subsequent trap into which the “lowlifes,” as they say, fall. (We’re all lowlifes, he said.) Moreover, along those lines, separate from that plot, is the story of the magnate who threw a great party to defy his pursuers, who of course kill him (for Hugo K.’s script). Echoes of my new positions on the political role of literature (excluding fiction): a long piece about the Black Panthers’ writing in response to William Burroughs’s reflection: painters have left the canvas, but when will literature be able to leave the page? I investigate in that area: fragmented writings, often recorded, life stories, pamphlets, poems, complaints that circulate from hand to hand, outside of the commercial circuit of books, publishers, booksellers, critics. A world of great freedom opens, a prose tied to what the Russian avant-garde called “social demand.” It advances along those lines during the debates of the left in Córdoba. I posed the example of Walsh’s stories of denunciation and nonfiction, as opposed to the idea of taking an existing form like the novel and changing its content. It is the form, the fiction, which must be reformulated: it has its own mediated system of reception, and we must seek an immediate and urgent prose that disputes the endless cycle of news on radio and television, inventing the news, as Walsh says. Documentary prose liberates fiction and allows for experimentation and private writing.
The reactions and criticism prove that I’m moving in the right direction. At the same time, financed writing: here too is a direct and unveiled relationship between writing and money. The hundred thousand pesos that I’ll make for inventing a plot. Everything is going well, I can say. My fantasies from ten years ago are being realized. We’ll see how far I can go.
Tuesday, November 3
In the French bookshop Galatea, the salesman, so dapper and elegant, who cultivates a James Mason look, thought I’d stolen a book and checked my hands, and—since I wasn’t taking anything today—I could insult him, making him step back and beg forgiveness.
Using lines from tangos as referents for the narrator.
Lunch with Vicente Battista, who publishes Nuevos Aires, a magazine; I try to convince him not to include an article about Sabato as a kitsch writer.
Saturday 7
Once again—for the second time, from what I remember—I refuse fatherhood; once again, literature is my substitute. Maybe that was why I caught myself writing words with the letters out of order, an elegant and incomprehensible prose. Disjointed, I’m a broken mirror, the sun shines in every direction, and it’s impossible to reflect the reality (of this room).
Pavese is connected to certain women’s writing. I never realized it before. What defines that touch? Extreme sensitivity for detail and atmosphere, anec
dotes always announced but never narrated. I see him as connected to Silvina Ocampo, Katherine Anne Porter.
Series E. The only way to save these notebooks is to trust in the pure surface of the prose: not trying to record my life, but rather creating a homologous space that serves as a mirror.
A true story. Caught after an anonymous tip just as they were about to rob a pharmacy, Guillermo P., 22 years old, and Miguel R., 18, together are charged with assault, attempted forced entry, etc. R. had been the winner of a contest organized by the Club Alsina in Villa Urquiza after having stayed awake with no rest for one hundred seventy (170) hours, a performance that he almost followed in another contest at the Club Cabral in Villa Adelina with one hundred hours awake. Both events were reflected on television and in the papers. He was acting on drugs. His partner, for his part, who also competed in the first event, took such a disproportionate amount of those marathon drugs that he suddenly suffered an attack of madness and tried to throw himself off of the balcony of the club’s second floor, for which reason he had to be detained (La Razón, 11/6/1970).
Monday 9
The powerful distributor of newspapers and magazines, who runs the stand where the papers are distributed and controls all the kiosks in the city, makes millions and receives his payment in bills and petty cash, protecting himself with a team of bodyguards. He’s so used to handling money that he leaves a package with two hundred thousand pesos on the roof of his car, where he had put it down to free his hands and open the door of the car. The money flies like confetti down Calle Corrientes.
Tuesday 10
A strong feeling of failure at times, as though the novel were lost and I were insisting (without any real conviction) on making it survive. I hold myself up on writing to save myself from drowning.
Thursday
Today a general strike. In Tucumán, the students took control of the city for two days in a row. David comes over in the afternoon, just back from Chile, euphoric, thinking that Buenos Aires “smells like shit”; he blames the city after checking that the smell isn’t coming from his armpits or his shoes (he’s only wearing socks, and he bends down in his chair to smell his feet), now he has to write a book about Chile for Galerna; they already paid him the advance.
Friday 13
Unexpected arrival of Jacoby, who’s excited about mobilizing a group of artists to create images and cartoons in support of the workers on strike. In some way, I take this year to be finished and thus my lack of enthusiasm, insensibility before a critical date: I’m going to turn twenty-nine years old. Dead time, as though I were on the eve of a great journey. I live ahead of myself, not giving myself time, hurried.
Sunday 15
Yesterday the FAL liquidated the deputy chief of the Coordinación Federal; he was a torturer. It takes effort to criticize them, but I, knowing them, criticize them. Recalling the strategies of masses to argue with small elitist groups of visionary guerrillas.
Monday 16
“Why repeat the awful custom of considering people who wear elegant clothing to be cultured, instead of considering the ones capable of making that clothing to be cultured?”
Tuesday 17
Cortázar has been around Buenos Aires for the past week without showing himself. Rather, only showing himself to his bodyguard, eschewing any kind of literary and/or political discussion. David V., by contrast, desperate, euphoric because he got money for something that he promised to write after he’d gone two days without eating. He invited me to dinner to fight off his ghosts (among them, Cortázar’s fame).
More and more, I need less money and more free time.
Wednesday 18
To discuss Peronism is to discuss union structure, which is, by definition, based on negotiation and only mobilizes itself and fights as a last resort, for concrete reasons. Therefore, attempts to create strike groups that designate themselves as revolutionary Peronists, an expression that sounds like an oxymoron to me, seem illusory.
“We cannot leave unobserved, in the first place, that the citation and installation of foreign pages in a proper context is common in Brecht,” Paolo Chiarini.
My bedazzlement with Brecht or, put better, with Brecht’s prose, is growing. A perception as well founded as the knowledge of Pavese, Hemingway, Borges, or Joyce.
Thursday 19
I continue passionately with Brecht, I find my intuitions confirmed, the work that I’ve called “double discourse,” for example, putting one text inside another, not through allusion, but through double inscription of what is written. Essays must also be seen according to their second meanings: attempts, experiments with forms of argumentation.
Saturday 21
I decided to set aside the novel and finish the script and the stories that I have in progress. A confusing time with no pauses, vertigo that doesn’t end, no chance to sit still and think (for me “stopping to think” comes before knowing what to think about).
I go to the cinema and see a retrospective of Argentine film. Deliciously Amoral by Julio Porter, with a script co-written by César Tiempo, starring Libertad Leblanc. The mother, obsessed with Gardel, goes to the theater every day to see him singing in his old films that play as reruns in a theater in Almagro. The father destroys himself because he wants to sleep with the daughter, dedicating incestuous songs to her.
Sunday, November 22
Everything comes from the fact that I don’t recognize this other person who lives within me, the fear that he will betray me and prevent me from reaching the place I want to go. Mistrust between him and me, many surprises at once, doubts about what I’m looking for. A whole life to live.
Tuesday, November 24
I enter the age of reason, slightly sentimental, like an amateur who avoids all social responsibility and knows less about himself than he does about any other close friend.
Thursday 26
Yukio Mishima, a very good writer (Confessions of a Mask), committed hara-kiri screaming “long live the Emperor” and was broadcast on television. Modern society turns medieval rites into happenings and spectacles.
In the afternoon I run into Bernardo Kordon, and he proposes a trip to China next year. The idea amuses me, but I don’t take his proposal seriously. Then I see Beatriz Guido and Leopoldo Torre Nilsson at their house, agreements and differences.
Friday 27
I meet Walsh at Tiempo Contemporáneo. I’ve put him in charge of the translation of Chandler’s stories. We shoot the breeze, which always happens to me with him, too aloof and populist (and anti-intellectual). He isn’t above trying to sell me his old Antología del cuento extraño for ETC. He tells me: “This is one of only two anthologies that cites Roger Callois.” A pause. Then in a low voice: “The other is Borges’s.” I smiled: “Of course, they’re the only two.”
It is clear that I don’t want to go to China now, I’m not “prepared,” it would be like going to the moon, plus I want to finish the novel. Always the same surreal feeling, I watch myself from the outside as though it were happening to a stranger.
A pair of scissors on the desk causes a pain in my throat: it’s as though someone were pulling them from my body after sinking them deep inside. A damp, hollow sound, like a basin draining.
Saturday 5
I finish the script of Cinematógrafo for Hugo K., forty pages to tell the story of the mogul holding a party where he will be killed. I have fifteen days to rewrite and adjust B.’s script. I’ll see if I can take some vacation days and then return to the novel.
Sunday 6
Let’s say that with too much free time I go astray: I sleep too much, shipwrecked among the little details—I have to go out to buy maté, have to pick up my clothes from the dry-cleaners…
To escape the feeling of being an amateur, I should systematically study the books of essays by the writers I admire (Brecht, Pound, Pavese). I will look to ideas as a means to break free of the idiocy of literature.
4
Diary 1971
For ye
ars, Bianco was our Rulfo. He wrote two short masterpieces (or two masterful short pieces), and then kept silent for close to thirty years. One of those masterpieces is, of course, The Rats. Aside from the pleasure derived from reading the smooth quality of his prose, elegant but never affected (never affected by the deliberate elegance of those who have copied him, trying to exhibit the features of great literature), there are different ways to read this book: we can read it in the context in which it was written, and also in the space of the present.
One must recall that, when The Rats was published (in 1943), it was Borges who paved the way for Argentine literature: the short stories he had started publishing in 1940, which he later assembled in Fictions, had caused a domino effect, the clearest example of course being The Invention of Morel, a Borges novel, we would say today, a novel that Borges “wrote” in poor prose, in Bioy’s prose. For his part, Bianco, very close to Borges, took a different turn (as Onetti did years later): he sought the great path to the renovation of contemporary narrative in the psychological novel, a genre despised by Borges. And so the point was not a novel with a rigid plot, bound to a genre, as the writers whom Borges called his masters had taught (Chesterton, Kipling), but rather the other great path of renovation, started by Henry James, which had continued with Julien Green, E. M. Forster, and Ford Madox Ford. A very subtle kind of work with an abnormality on the part of the narrator, an abnormality tied to the terror and awe generated by an unstable world. That narrator saw reality as an impenetrable fog. Read today, Bianco’s book is enriched by the development of some contemporary literature: Nabokov, Auster. “Every time I sit down to write,” Bianco said with an ironic gleam in his eye, “I feel like Borges is watching over my shoulder.” Today, however, there are many who think it is Bianco who should be looking over Borges’s shoulder.
The Diaries of Emilio Renzi Page 29