February
Yesterday morning I worked with B. on adjusting the script; at night, Carlos Altamirano came over with a plan for an interdisciplinary work group centered on research into the colonial situation, seeking its relationship to literature. He suggests beginning with a discussion of my work on translation. (I’m not interested in that interdisciplinary horror or any issue as abstract as THE colonial or neocolonial situation.)
Praise for the Serie Negra in Panorama magazine, I can’t stand my own photo, I see my face and think: that isn’t me (and neither am I).
Tuesday, February 2
Last night in class I talked about Brecht but also about Karl Korsch, Walter Benjamin, and Lukács’s The Theory of the Novel. I see a line of continuity, there, of leftist criticism using the conjectures of the Russian avant-garde (particularly Eisenstein, Tynyanov, and Tretyakov).
I meet with Hugo K., who is interested, to my surprise, in the plot that I wrote yesterday in exactly ten minutes. They are flashes, done for the book, which I’m so far removed from that I can’t even remember the plot and will have to takes notes on what they tell me about the text so that I don’t lose it completely.
Thursday 4
A long conversation last night with Manuel Puig, multiple coincidences; he possesses what you could call a technical clarity, profound knowledge of the narrative art. He insists on his need for obsessive concentration and the rejection of everything that disrupts his writing; there is an iron will in Manuel to correct and to start over every time it is necessary. Total overlap in that area; of course, in my view of things, he’s too attentive to what happens to his books after he publishes them (public relations, controlling the reviews, working on the translations).
Miguel Briante called me under a trivial pretext as though he wanted to make sure of my admiring reading of his book Hombre en la orilla. We met at La Paz and I once again felt the ironic mutual understanding that has been with us since we were twenty years old. His book is extraordinary, and I published it at Estuario because Pirí Lugones rejected it at Jorge Álvarez when I recommended it, saying that they weren’t interested in rural stories. Blind to literature, just like her grandfather. Miguel grows bitter because he sees the incredible number of morons who are applauded while he sails adrift in loneliness and alcohol.
A time of confusion and dispersion, I try to complete the script I’m writing for money, the article for Pasado y Presente magazine, and above all there is my constant temptation to read everything that comes out to stay current. There’s nothing more ridiculous than that pretense, but in my case, it’s tied to my work at the magazine, where I have to review all of the books that are published in the month. The work that I earn my living from, reading, inevitably turns me into someone who is “informed” and can talk to any idiot about the literary news.
Friday 5
I work on adjusting the dialogue in the script. It is strange, but I have to find an effect of reality that can only be had by moving away from the visible hallmarks of speech. Because of that, the criminals in this story speak in an invented language, unconnected to immediate reality, and in that way it’s possible for their words to be believable. In film, in contrast to what is believed, everything becomes artificial.
Still under pressure from the lesson in professional rigor that Puig gave me—without thinking—the other night. He traveled from Italy to New York to settle himself down in peace and work on Betrayed by Rita Hayworth for three years in isolation. Unknown and unsupported, he sustained himself on his own obstinacy. Along with that, he is “unable” to read, which allows him to base any knowledge on what he is writing. “I can’t read novels, because I correct them,” an excellent definition of a writer’s way of reading, he reads every book as though it were his own, still unfinished.
Saturday, February 6
I see The Brothers Karamazov at the theater (director I. Pyryev): the figure of Smerdyakov, who “hated all of Russia,” and the line from Ivan: “Who has never wanted to see his father dead?” (I too have wanted to see my father dead, and I too have hated my country).
Wednesday 10
In a couple of hours today I wrote a chapter of the novel that doesn’t displease me: the woman in the room of the Hotel Majestic. It’s been a while since I’ve felt this good, confidence in the book after some months of uncertainty.
Yesterday at the publishing house I received a letter from Sartre: incredible. Addressed to me with compassion, he authorizes me to publish two of his essays and a long interview about literature in a book. With a private sense of irony, I imagine Sartre buying the paper he used to write to me. Obviously, of course, this letter didn’t come by way of the holy one himself but rather through his secretary.
Thursday 11
I end the day by seeing The Wild Bunch by S. Peckinpah in the 95-cent theater, where lonely men and women of the night go to sleep, to rest from the fatigue of the city, sheltered in the air conditioning.
I remember the carnival costumes from Casa Lamota: the Lion of Damascus, the Old-Fashioned Woman, the Pirate, the Zorro, precarious but brilliant fantasies. We chose our costumes from the illustrated page in Billiken magazine.
The empty city, beautiful in summer with a warm wind coming in from the river. I stand on the sidewalk outside the bar on Carlos Pellegrini as night falls, outlining the silhouettes of the buildings among the trees. A woman of uncertain age with pale eyes is talking to herself in the street, never moving from the wide sidewalks, and has a shouting match with a younger woman in a shiny dress who leads a bulldog puppy and a boy dressed in yellow. The older one wanted to kick the dog off the grass and was defending the pigeons. The woman in the shiny dress insisted on continuing the argument as though there were some logic to the delirious back and forth of the two among the flowerbeds.
X Series. At night, Elías and his family are going to Córdoba; they possess a quiet certainty and resolve in certain political convictions that I too would like to believe in. Memories of his stay in Tucumán: Don Arias couldn’t get any work and wanted to sell kisses “at night,” when his wife wouldn’t see him. Or the convicts sentenced to life for killing their wives, going out to work and coming back at night to sleep in the prison. The guy who sold ice cream because he didn’t have a job and took a taxi back home every time he earned a bit of money.
Monday, March 1
A meeting with León R. who comes over to eat, happy with his electric typewriter, but always devastated by periods of dark insecurity.
Tuesday, March 2
Roberto Fernández Retamar sends me a letter via Walsh, an invitation from Casa de las Américas to be part of the drafting committee for the magazine. It’s strange and comes at the wrong time; as they know, I’m less and less in agreement with the Cubans’ cultural politics, and for me everything has cooled down since Fidel Castro’s support of the Soviet invasion in Czechoslovakia. I write a cordial but distant letter to him, asking for details about the formation of this Extended Committee, and send it to him by way of Toto, who is traveling to Madrid. I find him in the afternoon, and he thinks Retamar’s sudden decision is strange as well. I talk with Aricó, who is overseeing the publication of the next issue of Pasado y Presente, and he tells me I don’t need to rush my article on translation, which he had asked for by the middle of this month.
Wednesday 3
At night Roberto Jacoby comes over, amusing himself with outrageous stories about J. Posadas, the Trotskyist director of Voz Proletaria: his infinite texts in all languages about all subjects. Roberto insists that J. Posadas is a working collective, which Borges surely must be involved with, and you too, he says to me. Aren’t you? According to him, everything that’s written in Argentina winds up in the writings of J. Posadas.
Thursday 4
As soon as I lower the drawbridge David calls and comes to see me: anxious and doing badly, no house, no work, trying to get accommodation in the tower on Cangallo and Rodríguez Peña.
Series C. At
night, while waiting for Julia to return from the College so we can go to dinner together, I reread my notebooks from the year ’65. At times my conviction has been psychotic. A character who gets tangled up in his own thoughts, drowning himself in a web of fixed ideas until he is completely paralyzed, face up on the bed, struggling to breathe.
Friday, March 5
The city destroyed, cracks and trenches in the street. We walked in single file along the wooden walkway that serves as a bridge over the deep wells that have been dug into Calle Florida, “unrepaired.” The humid sun, hot gas jetting from the exhaust of a little tractor that went along the sidewalk at walking speed, piling up hundreds of pedestrians behind it in a long line.
Saturday
I meet Ricardo Nudelman and the Chilean guy who sang boleros in the bar on Viamonte and Maipú. The Chilean uses saccharin to sweeten his coffee, a little white device that reminds me of the round containers of DDT they used to spray anthills when I was a boy. We travel all around the city by bus: he talks about playing a duet with Gregorio Barrios. Later, in a house in Belgrano, we spend three hours talking about the situation in Chile and about the world in general. A strong impression. Instant camaraderie, encounters that always seem to occur among friends who’ve known each other for years.
Tuesday, March 16
In the reading room of the library of La Plata. Difficulty writing with a new tip on my pen. I’m reading several works on Meyerhold.
I skirt around the plaza to get a malted milk at a kiosk that sells sandwiches to students; opposite, the diagonal street with blue flowers on the ground that I used to walk down to my boarding house on 17th and 57th.
“The aesthetics of our times will be seen forced to accept norms manufactured in other media of society. Our art is nevertheless something different to the art of any prior era,” Meyerhold.
Wednesday 24
I shut myself in, close the door, turn off my phone, ready to write all day. I go to the kitchen to make tea for myself, and the phone and the doorbell start ringing at the same time. I stay in the kitchen, in the dark, and the bell rings several times. After that it starts to ring every five minutes, but I don’t pay attention to it, determined to seize the day all the same, although I feel a strange, indefinable sensation that I’m making a fool of myself. Of course, literature is my excuse: what I’m seeking—the only things I’m seeking—are these flights from reality. Locked in, all of the blinds closed, with artificial light, it’s as though I were absent. Hence the impression caused by the weak ringing of the phone: as though I were besieged by an enemy tribe, trying to break through my defenses and enter. The funny thing—other than the anecdote itself—is that, while I’m hidden away, political reality continues its course: when I go out into the street, I find out that one military president has been supplanted by another.
Friday
The afternoon with Julia in La Plata, rowing in the lake among the woods and then pedaling some strange velocipedes that move like marine motorcycles.
Saturday
Notes on Tolstoy (14). Leo Tolstoy was the first writer to use the new invention of the typewriter, in 1855. “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” (1886) and his great final works were written in that way. “The Kreutzer Sonata” (1889), “Father Sergius” (1891), and “Hadji Murat” (1904) took his narrative capacity to its limit; formally, these nouvelles are very different from his novels, complex, direct, almost without description. He also allowed his daughter Alexandra to learn how to use it, and in time he dictated his works and correspondence to her, so that Tolstoy’s daughter became the first typist in Europe.
Tuesday, March 30
Nostalgia just from glimpsing vague silhouettes in the streets of the city where I was, remembering a hazy past, missing what I imagine I have experienced; an inversion of Borges’s line, which I will use in my novel: only what one never had can be lost.
I spent all morning finishing my delayed work: I wrote a review and several pieces about the books we’re going to publish; the usual stops in the afternoon, Galerna, Tiempo Contemporáneo, meetings with David, who is still obsessed with Cortázar, and then an interview about the publishing house with a stupid journalist for Siete Días magazine.
On Monday I meet León R. in the bar on Tucumán and Uruguay, a long conversation that veers toward León’s opinions about David, his compulsion that forces him to write one book after another at top speed, his rationalizations to compensate. You have to take León’s version with a grain of salt, in any case. Behind us, a girl who was reading Marechal said to the boy who was with her: “Normal people bore me.”
Wednesday, March 31
Series E. I feel certain that my entire life is a learning process, the rehearsal for a role I will never perform. The bench on Avenida 51 where I sat with Pochi F. one evening in 1963, waiting for the university dining hall to open, saying that it was essential to study for ten hours every day. A bench that I return to with Julia on Sunday, telling her that I sat in the same place ten years ago, talking with Pochi F., etc. This notebook is proof of the precarious nature of my attention: I take notes of confused feelings, writing them as I experience them in the context of the present; when I read them some time later, they must hold value for themselves and act beyond the circumstances they originally referred to. In that sense, a diary is a laboratory for literature, but in this case the writer is putting himself to the test.
A confusing, exasperating month, buried in ridiculous worries. I’m doing good work on the novel, which is now around a hundred pages. The same lesson as always: if I shut myself in and isolate myself, the novel moves forward, but if I get sidetracked, my progress halts.
Thursday, April 1
X Series. Ricardo N. recounts the years he lived in a slum, his own political choice. The smell that comes up from septic tanks in the summer, getting up at five in the morning in order to get to the factory at six, the cold, the journey by crowded bus. A need to converse with neighbors but an inability to read or write. To me, it seems like the experience of an ethnographer trying to assimilate into the culture he is studying and making it his own.
Thursday, April 8
I extended my rental contract for another year, so I’ll keep working in this apartment full of books for forty thousand pesos per month (one hundred dollars) until April of 1972.
Saturday
Today David appeared, surprised at the news he read in the paper announcing my course at the Universidad de La Plata; he thought I’d gotten a professorship and projected his own desires and fears for the future. Who, at his age, still goes to the theater to stave off his loneliness and writes a weekly installment about the people’s struggles at full throttle? Always obsessed with Peronism.
A good meeting in the afternoon with Elías, his ironic intelligence, his wisdom helping me to assess a proposal on social demand by Osip Brik, of the Russian avant-garde.
Monday 12
I spend half of the afternoon with the apartment’s landlord copying the rental contract for the next year, and his show of compassion and declarations of affection don’t prevent him from making me pay for the photocopies and the stamps, raising the deposit, etc. Meanwhile he talks to his wife, nervous, very sensitive. Reason: her father killed himself in front of her. He sends her to the United States to calm her, but as soon as she arrives, she endures an earthquake in Los Angeles; she returns the next day.
Wednesday 14
A strange time, an astronaut floating through space in his capsule.
Sunday 18
In the cold early morning on Monday I read Haroldo’s novel, En vida, which has an American tone, so to speak, written in present tense like Updike’s Rabbit, Run. Rather, the conquered hero, the loser, narrated in Conti’s “naïve,” spoken, and lyrical style, although he has grown tired of his overly “natural” form. I was with him all morning yesterday and he told me about his trip to Cuba, about Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, about the daughter of the philosopher V.; he’s going out with he
r and talks about her with “masculine” detachment.
Saturday 24
In these uncertain days, when things happen to me even though I don’t seek them, I visit polite English literary agents in a large Victorian house in Belgrano R. to negotiate the translation rights for several American novels.
The Diaries of Emilio Renzi Page 30