The Diaries of Emilio Renzi

by Ricardo Piglia

  Penniless, pressed by need, I decide to write some essays and set the novel aside for a while. As a way to distract myself, I read a novel by Mary McCarthy in one sitting, drawn to her narrative mode, intelligent, traditional, in a fast and enticing third-person. The novel is called A Charmed Life.

  Monday 26

  I go to see León but first repeat my old tricks; penniless, I count coins before I go out into the street; these tricks are old because I have aged and have nothing to lose.

  Tuesday 27

  At home, Luna brings money after five days of destitution. Vague news from Córdoba, including the honoraria for my courses and plans for teaching there again in the future. We end up drinking whiskey at Ramos; I haven’t eaten anything since the day before, and I order some cheese, but the whiskey still makes me float away.

  Thursday 29

  An overcrowded dinner to inaugurate the main office of Siglo XXI in Argentina. Orfila Reynal was forced to step down from the Fondo de Cultura for having published The Children of Sanchez by Oscar Lewis, considered to be anti-Mexican; he immediately organized a new publishing house with great international support and headquarters in Mexico: a great catalogue that starts with The Order of Things by Foucault and the novel José Trigo by Fernando del Paso, highly praised by Rulfo. Bad food and many speeches at the dinner. Varied and fleeting meetings: Briante, Jitrik, Altamirano, Mario Benedetti, et al. A myriad of circulation, ending up with several friends at La Paz bar, Schmucler, Tandeter. On the way out, Federico Luppi praises my script about the criminals’ standoff.

  Friday, April 30

  At noon walking around the city with Nicolás C., bound to the past, trying to get me excited about a new meeting of leftist intellectuals…

  Saturday, May 1

  A visit from David, this time because of the Peronists’ review of the movies he made with Fernando Ayala in Envido magazine; he reacts like a liberal, but he’s intelligent and is working on anarchist texts now.

  Series B. Earlier with Carlos B. He goes back and forth about the movie, wants to wait until January of next year so that he can make the film with Luppi. Sitting at the beautiful bar on Corrientes and Callao, La Ópera, which I’ve only just discovered: vast, empty, and bright, ideal for meeting friends or sitting down to read.

  Monday 3

  A series of calls makes me get out of bed, dead tired, freezing, to hear about my friends’ outrage at Fidel Castro’s speech against the intellectuals. The Padilla affair is at the center of it, and Fidel’s use of description (rats, etc.) is in the classic Soviet tradition. Everyone knows the model, an administrative dictatorship tries to impose a single type of thinking, eliminating any possibility of criticism.

  Dinner at the house of Juan M., a poet and tango pianist. An old apartment, elegant, with a patio and an entryway with large art deco doors. M. reads me a strange story with an algebraic logic of the absurd, with surrealist devices and pornographic images. It is articulated in an archaic voice, propped up on alcohol. At times, while I listened to him reading it amid the suspicious and offended indifference of the others (his wife, his brother), I thought that he reminded me of Malcolm Lowry and that his text had the visible mark of Kafka. He is one of those men who goes onward with his work with a stubborn will, in spite of everything, as though he could do nothing else. In M.’s case, I find out that he has three novels, a book of short stories, two works of theater, and a book of poems. All unpublished. Where does he draw the conviction from to keep writing those paralyzed stories, outside of any accepted conventions, abstract, symbolic? On the other hand, he is a recognized tango pianist who has played with great orchestras, has enjoyed the Buenos Aires nightlife, and is now the pianist in the Sexteto Mayor, playing special concerts in Buenos Aires and traveling around the world. Always half-drunk, loquacious and charming, dressed with an old-fashioned elegance (he wore a velvet robe de chambre), yet the only thing that mattered to him was finding a reader for his secret work, which no one around him has any interest in.

  Tuesday 4

  Various sources of distress among the intellectuals on the left, faced with Padilla’s ridiculous Stalinist self-criticism and Fidel Castro’s police speech. The convention that the Cuban leaders use to justify themselves is based on the idea that intellectuals must have no privilege, but one thinks straight away that, if they treated a poet who posed as a dissident as they did, it’s easy to imagine what will happen to opponents of common origin. Or should we think that they don’t exist, that Padilla is just a solitary madman imagining critiques of the system? On the other hand, the working of the criticism is, in itself, proof of Soviet influence: the conscience that Padilla seems to have acquired while in prison (solitude, isolation, introspection, police pressure) is totally opposite to what we might imagine socialist democracy to be; that is, no one from his field argues with him, only the police, and they convince him and take him to the stand so that he can play the role of the repentant clown, telling off and questioning the writers present, as though he were now an example. In fact, the administrative methods of the Cuban leadership are visible: they never open the discussion until the issue is closed, and then everyone can be in agreement with the decision they’ve made in secret. Otherwise, the content of the self-criticism that I read today in Marcha, while drinking a coffee at a bar on Viamonte and Uruguay, is shameful: anyway, the worst part isn’t the content of what Padilla says, but rather what we on the left call the conditions of production of his little discourse (which seems to have been edited by the political police).

  Wednesday 5

  Decrepitude of old texts from the sixties, magazines, statements, news pieces that were alive in those days and caused argumentation and suspicion. Today, for forty pesos, I bought an issue of Eco Contemporáneo, a magazine in a complaintive style: “lyrical” sadness, depoliticization, and “poetry” of experience. Its greatest merit was that it dedicated an issue to old Gombrowicz.

  I came and went along the streets, swept by the freezing wind, crossing the city to Fausto on Santa Fe in search of the diary of Ernst Jünger. On the way back along Callao, pausing on every corner, disoriented as in old times.

  A gray-haired man in Pippo restaurant was giving cigarettes, medallions, and foreign coins to a platinum blonde in hot pants. She was provocative and had come accompanied by a young man; the gray-haired man—dressed in a buckskin jacket, seemingly friends with the two—was getting hot with the woman and started to touch her skin, gave her a pack of Camels. She touched up her makeup in her little hand mirror and showed off her breasts squeezed into her sweater. When the young man went to the bathroom, the gray-haired man moved his hands to his neck, detached a little gold chain with a cross, and handed it to the woman. She shook her head, the gold chain in her right hand, maintaining the same hard and cold expression. When the young man who was with her came back, he made her stop resisting and she accepted the little chain, put it around her neck, and buried the silver cross between her breasts, under the sweater.

  Thursday 6

  I will never be able to help Julia with her fears (a brutal summary: the daughter of an unknown man, Julia herself abandoned her own newborn daughter for the father to take care of). I can’t come up with any real solutions (find her father, whom there are some traces of, recover her daughter, who is now three years old). Instead of these possible actions, all I do is embrace her and console her, uselessly. Then, in my despicable style, I rationalize, give definitions, talk about codes, talk about Kant, trying to cover up her mantra.

  New rituals, I go out at dawn (five or six in the morning) and walk down Montevideo to Corrientes to buy La Opinión (Le Monde, translated). The frozen city gray under the white lights, and in bars, in restaurants, nocturnal people crowding in to survive, trying not to lose the night.

  Friday 7

  I am alone (Julia is still in La Plata), I get up at three in the afternoon, my mouth dry from working all night, and write these notes. Then I cross the gray city in the light rain, g
o to the publishing office, find Eduardo Menéndez and Eliseo Verón, and we talk about books in translation, collections, and new projects.

  I try to free myself from the stupor of last night’s alcohol and work on the article about Brecht.

  Saturday 8

  I am at home, it is raining outside, an invisible chill in the early morning (six thirty). I reread my notes and old notebooks, in which I envisioned glorious futures.

  In a veiled way, he schemed faint suicides, letting himself fall, coming undone. Murder inside me, he said.

  Monday 10

  I go to sleep at seven in the morning on Sunday, worried about my lack of money, after feeling my way forward with the essay. In the middle of that Roberto Jacoby visits me, conversations about the possible influence of La Opinión on the culture of the left. Will it come to have the influence that Primera Plana had in the sixties? The avant-garde today defines itself as an alternative to the media; it infiltrates them, criticizes them, and ignores them.

  I want to see whether, by sleeping very little (today I got up at eleven, after four hours of sleep), I can “reverse” time and start to work during the day.

  Tuesday 11

  An hour and a half waiting to negotiate a (“universal”) loan that I need in order to make it through the year without economic problems. The episode has the effect of plunging me into reality (which I always deny), making me see the weight of money. As I say, so as to put my aristocratic relationships—and wasteful spending—in jeopardy, it will be enough, with the money I make.

  Thursday, May 13

  My reading in the last few months (especially Joyce and Brecht) confirms to me that I am (at least) five years “behind” with respect to the rest of my generation. I’m always reading out of sync, and that reading is more productive; I always work on books out of context, in different relationships tied to my own rhythm and not to the atmosphere of the times. For example, with Brecht I’m interested in the essays and not the theater, and in Joyce I look for his classical forms and want nothing to do with the stream-of-consciousness writing that wreaks havoc among my contemporaries. Being at the vanguard is being outside of time, in a present that is not everyone’s present.

  Saturday, May 15

  I’ve already wasted the night, it is four in the morning on Saturday, and I have been working uselessly on an essay that seems to have no end: I accumulate notes, outlines, scattered ideas, trusting in my ability to structure them later.

  I don’t manage to “flip the day around.” I start working at ten at night, and dawn is already coming by the time I realize it.

  Wednesday 19

  A roundtable about literary criticism for the cultural section of Clarín: Jitrik, Romano, Horacio Salas, Schmucler, and me. I talked about criticism as the writer’s way of reading, using the example of Brecht the Marxist and—for provocation—Pound the Peronist: both are anti-liberal and therefore readers of the avant-garde, etc. Paradoxically, the discussion “organized” itself: Romano and Salas vs. Schmucler and me. Noé Jitrik in the middle.

  Sunday 23

  X Series. Rubén came over, always the same contagious and gentle conviction. A curious simplicity that lets him elucidate the most complex issues and, at the same time, ferociously defend his political, voluntaristic, and minoritarian line. His group seems to be the only one that opposes Peronism while still being populist and that criticizes the militantism of the guerrilla groups while also defending some revolutionary violence (of the masses). I talk with them, listen to them, collaborate on their clandestine publications under a pseudonym, and stop there. Rubén and Elías laugh at me a little: I’m a theorist who never reaches practical reality. But what they see as a flaw, I cultivate as my finest quality. It rains ceaselessly. It is four thirty on Monday morning, and I listen to the latest news on Radio Mitre.

  Monday, May 24

  Exhausted, dead tired, he is surrounded by sinister ideas, moods of escape: locked up in this house with the windows shuttered, he sleeps badly, sits down at the table at eight in the evening, and the fatigue makes him suspicious of everything, himself most of all. He prepares for the classes he will teach at the College in La Plata, writing notes, making summaries, diagrams, etc. Such is his life in this dull time, working without pause or happiness. He envisions glorious futures, just as gray as this afternoon, and he is breathless yet again.

  Friday 28

  All of the intellectuals on the left are stuck on the Padilla affair. A meeting at Walsh’s house to discuss a possible statement. There are the liberals, horrified at the Stalinist violence against human dignity. “So, life is better under capitalism” (Rozitchner). The anti-intellectual populists with their opportunism, pragmatism, fetishization of strength. “The one in power is always more legitimate than any political legitimacy that isn’t in power or has no power” (Walsh). Viñas stays in sullen silence the whole time. Urondo yields to Walsh’s position. For my part, I argue that politics is leaving its own sphere and that we, as writers, must therefore politicize ourselves: the incarceration and subsequent self-criticism of a poet—whose poems we all value—is something we must use to think about our relationship to the Cuban leadership, speaking generally about all of the problems, taking positions on any issue that doesn’t follow the path we consider correct. We have to start from what we know and, in this case, we have a fairly clear idea of what happens in the literary sphere in Cuba and so can talk about that. It seems impossible to criticize the liberalism of intellectuals, who want to be the protagonists of history, and the Cuban revolutionary leadership at the same time.

  I met Heberto Padilla in Havana at a bar in El Vedado with tables on the terrace. He recited fragments of a novel by Mallea to me, as though he admired him or was making fun of him and laughing at Argentine literature in passing. There are those who make history and those who suffer it, he said with a smile. A friend of Cabrera Infante, he published a laudatory essay on Three Trapped Tigers in which he made fun of Lisandro Otero and his novel Urbino’s Passion, but Otero is an official writer, and so an obscene letter threatening Padilla appeared in Verde Olivo, the army’s magazine, signed with a pseudonym but surely written, according to Padilla, by Otero himself. Literary enmity under socialism turns into a State matter (remember Pasternak’s reaction to Mandelstam’s imprisonment).

  I listen to music, Schumann, Mozart, Schubert… in the night. It is four thirty in the morning.

  Saturday 29

  Classes in La Plata, a divided audience: my old friends (Sazbón, García Canclini, Schmucler, etc.) and the young professors of letters, poorly trained and very attentive. I established some good relationships between Tynyanov, Tretyakov, Brecht, and Benjamin via Asja Lācis.

  Once more I found the city where I had lived for five years just the same—sophisticated, welcoming a legion of students from all over the country every season. I remembered that day in 1959, shortly after arriving, with Alvarado, happy to be starting a life far away from everything.

  On Thursday, eating dinner in a strange restaurant with a family room, I see Pola again, now foolish, a beautiful and decadent actress in the style of T. Williams’s heroines. Who ever changes?

  Sunday, May 30

  Maybe I should bring this notebook to a close by saying that, today, I have an almost absolute certainty that the novel I’ve been writing for three years isn’t working. We’ll see what I do.

  Consecutive and undifferentiated nightmares. I wake up at dawn with a clear feeling of horror, my body sweaty as though I’d been swimming in contaminated waters.

  Tuesday, June 1

  I load myself down with books (Bryce Echenique, Mailer, Beckett), something done thoughtlessly amid a series of distractions set off by the four-class course I taught in La Plata on Marxism and literary criticism for the series organized by Néstor García Canclini (in which Nicolás Rosa talked about psychoanalysis and literary criticism and Menena Nethol about linguistics, etc.). Preparing the course took me two months, and everythin
g was centered around Brecht and Benjamin’s essays and their polemics with Lukács. In Marx, the most interesting thing is his concept of art as unproductive labor for capitalism (it doesn’t produce surplus value). Benjamin and Brecht developed the consequences of this opposition.

  I see Marta Lynch at La Paz; strangely, she arranges to meet me for no clear reasons, and I see she is afraid of not being involved with the possible statement we are making about the Padilla affair. Dressed in gray, aging but attractive, as soon as she sits down she tells me about her ovaries getting inflamed because of her appendix. I look at her with a resigned expression.

  Wednesday, June 2

  I slept for twelve hours straight.

  Thursday 3

  I stopped working at night. I got up at ten in the morning and revised the article on the situation in Chile with Lucas. Then David came over, still vacillating: a letter to Fernández Retamar about the Padilla affair, centrist and ambiguous. We already know, as Barthes said, that the neither-nor is the key to middle-class thought; he called it thought scales. David has always been the opposite, although he does like binary oppositions too much; but, in this case, he’s clouded by the possibility of making things bad with the Cubans or with us.