Thursday, July 15
If no one knew anything about him, he would be happy. To live in secret, to walk through the city, forgotten, convinced of his future glory. That’s all he needs these days: today, for example, a long process at the publishing office to get his salary check so he can pay the rent. I’ll be at peace until the middle of August at least, with no need to think about money, he said, disillusioned.
Friday 16
I run into David on Corrientes at noon today when I go out to have a coffee at La Paz and read the newspaper. Instantly we turn to Peronism: he criticizes La Opinión, which plays the game of the current way of living with Perón. It’s almost a personal matter to him. It feels like David and I are patrolling the area (from Corrientes and Callao to 9 de Julio), two solitary wolves in the city, and that’s why we meet each other so often in the street. Before that, I had spent half of the morning with Vicente Battista and Goloboff, who are writing an editorial about Padilla for the magazine Nuevos Aires. They critique the politicians’ harshness toward literature and defend the autonomy of art (as if that were the issue).
Last night I meet Manuel Puig, anxious around each translation of one of his books, as though he were always writing them for the first time in another language. Very wise, with a fine professional awareness and a great sense for detecting “what” is a good piece of writing: he critiques the monotony of Conti’s style, “always the same for any subject,” the sloppiness of Mailer, “who doesn’t write anything well.” His knowledge is very instrumental, as a writer’s training must be: he has a great ability to find what he needs quickly. For example, he tells me: “I looked over Joyce’s Ulysses a little, saw that every chapter was written with a different style and technique, and that spoke to me.” When I asked him how his relationship with Spanish had survived, given that he had lived in New York for many years immersed in another language, he answered me with a smile: “Spanish, for me, was my language in bed.” All of his grace and charm are mixed in with the drama of his personal life: tempestuous love with a Brazilian journalist, unexpected and casual romance with a taxi driver who picks him up on the corner when he’s on his way to spend the night in the underbelly of Palermo. A strange and very friendly relationship with me: he is suspicious of my “merits” for reasons inversely proportional to my suspicions of his own.
What is the cause of this winning streak I am sinking into? Invitations to give lectures, offers for anthologies, magazines, theater projects. Of course it doesn’t mean anything, but where is it coming from?
Monday, August 2
Julia studies for whole nights, preparing for three subjects in turn. I use the day to wander around the city, visiting bars and bookshops, and end up at the cocktail party at Siglo XXI, where I find Sazbón, with his usual irony, and some other inhabitants of the world. Among them B., who insists on having me work with him on a documentary about the student movement. At one point I am cornered among books, armchairs, and the wall, and I drink whiskey ceaselessly while simultaneously talking with Eliseo Verón, José Sazbón, Luis Gusmán, and Manuel Puig, who in his turn comes with a professor from Yale: I talk to everyone at the same time about different things.
Tuesday 3
I work for a couple of hours and then go to the theater to see Little Big Man by Arthur Penn, and when it ends I go for a pizza at Los Inmortales.
Friday 6
I am writing at six in the afternoon when I find out on the radio about the death of Germán Rozenmacher, a great friend and companion whom I met at the beginning of everything, in 1962, when we, along with Miguel Briante, won a short story competition in El Escarabajo de Oro. He was in Mar del Plata, spending a few days with his wife and son, and died because of a gas leak from the heater. I remember that night in the bar on Córdoba and Reconquista, or the last time in the bar on Córdoba and Callao; I was sitting out on the sidewalk, and he stopped to say hello.
Sunday 8
Yesterday I went to the funeral service for G. R., in which each of us saw our own death.
Wednesday 11
A meeting at Pirí’s house with Walsh, Briante, and Conti to discuss the political situation and to see how we can participate in everything that is happening. No clear conclusion, Rodolfo thinks it would be best for us to all collaborate on the CGT newspaper, but I’m not a Peronist and don’t like to pretend such things.
I find David in the early morning in the bar on Cangallo and Rodríguez Peña; he wants to write a novel, which he has started to outline, about anarchists and the attack against Ramón Falcón. So far, the best part seems to be the real police report that he’s thinking of inserting into the book.
Friday 20
X Series. Lucas is still despairing because of the death of his friend Emilio Jáuregui; he was his supervisor at the time of the action in Plaza Once, and he shouldn’t have let him carry a weapon, shouldn’t have let him go alone. The police ambushed him and killed him. After six months, Lucas slept with Ana, the widow, and signed his notes as Emilio Vázquez. A year later he is alone again, stunned by the pain; today, he stayed over with us because it was raining, and he told Julia about his desolation. Ana lives with a painter, and he has to move on from one day to the next. What makes the story most tragic is his idiotic need to deny the legitimacy of that pain.
All afternoon I read Carlos Baker’s biography of Hemingway.
Tuesday 24
Last night a dinner at Osvaldo T.’s house with him and his wife, listening to their stories: the guys from the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias, who leave him a message in the hotel when they find out that he’s in Córdoba to write a piece about the death of the chief of police. They call him on the phone, and when he crosses the hall to answer, a stranger appears: “Just answer, then come with me.” On the phone a woman calms him down, tells him to follow the stranger to her room. There they do the interview, right in the middle of the city, and they show him the cartridge used to kill the policeman while all of the security forces are looking for it.
Friday, August 27
I decide to tell my friends that I’m traveling but then actually stay in Buenos Aires, shut in at home for three days, to see what happens. I was sitting at the table from ten in the morning until nightfall. Doubtless this too is a kind of “artificial respiration”; I invent my father’s illness in order to justify my absence and so find, in a way, a chance for happiness, shut up in this dark and silent house, reading and writing as though I were a survivor.
Saturday 28
I am now writing on the round table that Julia painted orange; I’ve sequestered myself at my desk, calm in my second day of total seclusion (with three more days of not leaving the house ahead of me), isolation that promotes a dubious peace, some confidence in my personal future (despite all of the omens). I work according to my plan, finishing chapter two and getting the third ready.
A second day of seclusion that I withstand very well, a certain torpor, a vague sensation of strain and a slight dizziness that causes me to look at the walls that box me in. Besides that, a certain restlessness comes over me when I think about how I keep gaining weight by staying shut in here, nourishing myself with cheese, potatoes, and bread, a lack of exercise to such a point that I sometimes get cramps in my feet. And so, except for the miserable thoughts that make me think I’m going to become “un gordo,” the rest is fine.
Sunday, August 29
Third day of seclusion. As long as I keep filling my time with work on the novel, I don’t think I can write anything worthwhile in these notebooks. Especially if I try to narrate my reclusive state.
Monday 30
I get up from the table to celebrate these days of isolation, during which I saw no one and was as happy as I am capable of being these days. I go out to the street and have the feeling that everyone is moving at a speed unknown to me, the cars shine too much under the lights and the noise bothers me. And so I turn down Paraná and enter the restaurant on the corner of Sarmiento. The spacious pl
ace, the tables with white tablecloths, the mirrors on the wooden walls, and the motionless waiters in the back calm me down at once.
I have ventured into the street after eighty hours of voluntary reclusion, so I immediately prepare a story about my father, who is “doing badly.” Earlier, Julia, whom I let come in, cut my hair too short, causing a certain dark unease within me, strange ideas regarding my face, as though it had transformed in my solitude; I also realize the weight I’ve “gained” in my stasis while being shut in. This feeling of bodily failure “helps” me to achieve a sufficient tragic atmosphere and theoretical air necessary to make my father’s sickness seem realistic. And so I go around the city, repeating my habitual circuit: Los Libros, Galerna, Tiempo Contemporáneo, and a long walk to the Galería del Este and the Di Tella, down marginal streets of the city. The curious thing is this: my story awakens an instantaneous solidarity in the others. Natalio, Luis, Alberto, and Toto tell me about some personal tragedy of their own, conflicts with their wives, their parents, to maintain the climate of sincere tragedy that I have established by talking about my father, hospitalized and ill. In this way, the fiction guarantees me a friendly relationship with everyone after a week’s solitude.
September 1
Today is already the next day, but I don’t want to leave this notebook without having recorded my current situation: I am waiting for Luna, who arrived this morning and is bringing the money that I need for this month (we have less than three hundred pesos, and I haven’t even been able to buy the next notebook). I have to move with great caution to prevent Luna from encroaching on and destroying my plans. He comes with the intention of accompanying me back to Córdoba, but if I don’t travel with him he will no doubt change his mind. These details matter little, at least until he arrives in the next hour, when I can better understand his intentions and so prepare “my version.”
At noon, while having coffee at La Paz and reading Libre magazine, someone tapped on the glass of the window on the corner; it was S., whom I’ve known since ’62. That year when we went with Miguel Briante to read texts by Avellaneda in Vuelo magazine, and S. told me that Rozenmacher repeated Rulfo’s atmospheres, and I was amazed because I’d never thought of that before. Now he sat down with me and went into the megalomania that is familiar to me; he talks about himself as though there were no other subject. He tells me about some short stories he has written, novels he is about to write, with the certainty and confidence needed for him to believe everything he says.
Luna came, bringing me the money for my classes in Córdoba. He was invited to Vietnam, and he will leave in October and return at the end of January. All of my friends are traveling: Osvaldo T. is traveling to Madrid to interview Perón, León R. is going to Paris, Eliseo V. is traveling to the United States; immediately I think: “Everyone is leaving except for me.”
My economic situation has improved. Along with the sixty thousand pesos that Andrés brought for me, I can add the fifty thousand from Tiempo Contemporáneo publishing: with these I’ll have the next two months secured.
Julia stopped by Tiempo Contemporáneo to get the check for fifty thousand pesos and also brought a letter from José Giovanni. He is a writer who works on detective films and is also the author of Le Trou and Le Deuxième Souffle, which I’ve admired for years. He used the genre to construct an epic based on honor among the marginalized.
Thursday, September 2
I see David; he calls me on the phone, and we meet at La Paz. Worried, he tells me that he was at my house, ringing the bell, knocking on the door. “The bucket and the newspaper were there, I thought something had happened.” Just like Andrés, that afternoon when I met him in the hall and he thought I’d committed suicide. David tells me about his project, writing a piece about Dorrego’s executions (in plural, the story repeats itself). He sees Dorrego as fat, expansive, demagogic (similar to him), dressed in white, showing his face on the balcony and moving to and fro, swinging around to receive the applause.
Friday, September 3
Perón has received Eva’s body. I listen to the story of the events on Radio Belgrano transmitted from Madrid. “The cadaver presents some marks and bruises on the face. Except for that, the body is found to be in perfect condition.” I think about Perón, who opens the coffin and—sixteen years later—“finds himself” with the image of Eva and her body before him. “One of the witnesses of the burial ceremony stated this morning that, at the moment the coffin was opened, the ex-president looked for a while at the woman who was his wife and said: ‘Eva… , Eva.’ Perón was very moved, and his face was cut up with tears.” The remains of lady Eva Perón were transported inside a coffin of dark wood in a van with an Italian license plate. In order to guarantee discretion and the secrecy of her passage through Italy and Spain, the van was switched three times.
In that story, there appears a side character who could be the basis for a novel: Colonel Héctor Cabanillas, head of the Secretariat of Intelligence under Aramburu, who was tasked with taking the body to Europe in 1956 and, five years later, was the only one traveling in the van. Finally, of course, the body of Eva Perón herself: most reviled by the bourgeoisie, who were the least accepting of her (calling her a “whore,” an ambitious second-rate actress, viewed as amoral). She was an axis and a symbol with her social ascent and her union with Perón. She is redeemed and exists as the mythical figure who returns in a kind of “journey of the dead,” something that is present in all cultures, which she embodies as a new metamorphosis of her brilliant presence. Eva crosses the ocean and has her most consistent enemy as a deluded guardian for sixteen years (given that the colonel was the one tasked with making her disappear). “Colonel Cabanillas silently carried out his mission to deliver Eva Perón’s remains in Madrid (just as, before, he had discretely carried out the mission of shutting her in an anonymous tomb in Rome with a plaque bearing another name).” He, who had been tasked with making her disappear; he, who was the only one who knew the key to unlock the secret that the whole nation pursued. His whereabouts are unknown. What became of him, after having kept the very symbol of the working class as his charge? A condemned man, it’s enough to think about how he was never promoted in the last sixteen years.
Saturday, September 4
Series C. Suddenly, without any prior warning, the sensation of being absent from life returns, and he moves like a ghost, uncertain. Everything he touches dissolves and is lost, and he no longer has confidence in what he writes, and he thinks it makes no sense to create literature without conviction. Certainty precedes writing, it is its condition. He is at the nerve center of the story of his life, which has turned into an initiation story. When Murray comes in while Greta is naked, all of his poetics of subtle atmospheres and elliptical prose fall down.
Friday 10
Last night we met M., who goes to the plaza every week to give music classes at Fine Arts and walks lost through the city. With him was F., who seems like another man after having been imprisoned and tortured; he seems nervous, brusquely deciding that we should go to the bar, where we had a few drinks (Llave gin). He recounted his experience in prison with humor (and despair), how he went ten days without eating, “the grill” (the metallic bed where they tied him naked and applied electric shocks with a prod), the commissioner who cocked his .38, a non-regulation caliber, and threatened to kill him and throw him into the Plata river since no one knew he was a prisoner. An extreme experience that you can notice slightly in certain abrupt gestures, the eager way he lights one cigarette after another. Otherwise, Eduardo M., half mute, hiding his terror, his paranoia, which has been building for months, with people who follow him and friends who betray him.
I read the short stories by Baldwin that I’m going to publish at Tiempo Contemporáneo and the stories by Bruce J. Friedman that I will have translated and published by Fausto. I am with Julia in Mar del Plata, a quick visit. Forgotten images awaken me. Now the sun is shining in this frozen city.
We return
by train, having café con leche and croissants in the almost empty dining car, illuminated by the sun and the always-lit lamps with glass shades. Earlier, in the afternoon, we saw two Billy Wilder movies for one hundred pesos.
“I am not a realist, I am a materialist… I get away from realism by going to reality,” S. Eisenstein.
In B. Brecht, it is understood that the opposition between thinking and feeling, or between intelligence and the heart, or between rationality and emotion, leads toward a very dynamic tension between the unconscious and the fictitious self; there is no equilibrium between those two fields, which are present in all practice (even in pure theory and in politics). Brecht changed the axis of the discussion on creativity by accepting that this overlooked force is the key to the artistic worldview.
Sunday, September 12
I am in Buenos Aires once again after a couple of “family” days during which I neither read nor write: I go to the theater, watch television, wander around the city, and stop in front of the sea (empty as an empty oyster shell), struggling with the conflict between my childhood memories and reality, which shows my inability to control the situation. We drove in the rain to the Balcarce space center, where inscrutable white cones receive and transmit images from satellites: an oneiric landscape. The route passes among the dark hills, which delight Julia. Halfway there I leaned back in my seat and slept for half an hour, not dreaming, my mind a blank.
The Diaries of Emilio Renzi Page 33