The Diaries of Emilio Renzi

by Ricardo Piglia

  Monday 13

  Yesterday on the journey, the sun in my face, the train stopping in towns buried in the plain. The empty station, locals hanging around to watch the train pass. Julia was annoyed because there was no room in the dining car, and the little window wouldn’t stay open, and the sun was in her eyes, so she closed in on herself, seeing the failure of her hopes to make the journey an adventure. Meanwhile, I read Friedman’s short stories, many very good ones, his ironic handling of black humor and the absurd.

  As soon as I get up in the morning the phone starts ringing to announce the visits: Szichman, Marta Lynch. Aníbal Ford, David, Schmucler. I enter the state of vertigo that both attracts and frightens me. With David, an entertaining talk at La Paz; he was euphoric, as intelligent as in his finest moments. I walked down Corrientes, trying to figure out the political situation from the headlines on copies of La Nación hanging from clips under the roof of a kiosk, burning up in the noonday sun in the aching suburbs, and David smiled at me through the window over the sidewalk, seeing my “neurotic expression.” Then, with him, the same old refrain: Perón, Getino, Solanas, Jitrik, Cortázar, his phantom rivals who manage to renew themselves without leaving the threatening circle that, according to him, condemns him to being forgotten, and at the same time he is euphoric about the periodical La Comuna, which he is managing, excited about its third issue.

  Some news from Schmucler. He proposes (after an intimist prologue about how he needs to write and use his time better) that I co-direct Los Libros with him, and I suggest that he add Carlos Altamirano as a third director. The proposal is attractive to me because of the new political image of the magazine, which participates while still remaining centered in cultural life, and also because I have a desire to fight (reasons: arguments with my friends from Vanguardia Comunista, new references to the opinions that I raised in El Escarabajo de Oro, they can’t deal with the fact that I raised them and have followed my own path without needing to protect myself in the progressive cave they’ve courteously constructed, and also my polemics with Walsh, Urondo, and other new Peronists. Although I’m worried about losing my rhythm of working on the novel, scattering myself, etc.).

  Finally, at night, I go to the theater with Julia and Ricardo N. to see an excellent adaptation of Musil’s The Confusions of Young Törless: the violence of the future Nazi officials, who are, in the novel, young pupils in a military academy, also showing the viewpoint of a Nietzschean philosopher who seeks to reconcile mathematical precision and practical efficacy. A beautiful ending, with Törless expelled and leaving in a car, “he considered the faint whiff of scent that rose from his mother’s corseted waist.”

  Tuesday 14

  I spend the day putting away the books that covered the floor of my study. New shelves on the wall open up the space I need to settle myself in.

  I walk through the city carrying a lamp with a metal stand on my shoulder. I try to go back to the Pavese story, seeking the syntax and tone. Two hours after I start, David comes over, and from that moment I can no longer concentrate. Ideas of escaping to the Río Tigre, to an island, to the country, to a provincial town, to a hotel, to an anonymous room in the center of the city, and spending one or two weeks isolated, with no interruptions, writing.

  Wednesday 15

  X Series. Ricardo furiously tells me the story of the revolutionaries (Peronists) who are seduced by Guevarism, opposed to those who, like him, are trying (reluctantly and without much conviction) to raise up the line of the masses, laborious, gray, and humble (nothing epic). The girl from his political group who breaks contact with her ex-compatriots because it’s becoming “tedious,” and whom he finds at a showing of The Hour of the Furnaces in a very elegant apartment in Barrio Norte. Or the guy with a mane of red hair who pontificates about revolutionary violence while dressed in imported designer jeans with leather sandals, disguised, Ricardo says, as a revolutionary mystic.

  A little while after noon David visits me and I listen to him without enthusiasm, lost in my own haze. A curious sensation of seeing my body floating in the air and hearing my voice coming from an unexpected place, as though it were being transmitted from a tape player.

  Thursday 16

  Notes on Tolstoy (15). Relationship between language and ways of life. Big Typescript 213 (1933). In the chapter “Philosophy” (86:2), Wittgenstein reflects on Tolstoy’s opinion, according to which the significance of an artistic object lies in its general comprehensibility. Tolstoy reflects in What Is Art?, an extraordinary text that must be reread in order to understand some of Wittgenstein’s positions. Tied to the issue of private-esoteric language (as anti-Tolstoy). Wittgenstein says that the slow movement of Brahms’s String Quartet no. 3 has brought him to the brink of suicide twice. What happens with this quartet? Can we use it to kill our enemies? Mandelstam said that an artist thinks about the meaning of events and not about their consequences. Philosophy is an activity and not a doctrine, and its primary sphere of application is language. Tolstoy maintained a direct relationship with his literary work, but he took it one step further; he sought not an ideal, but a pure language (direct and sincere), faithful to events. A language in its uncorrupted form, capable of representing the world as it truly is (in its implicit and simple purity). Tolstoy imagined that it was possible to find that language (which would serve as the foundation and starting point and opening for the creation of an ideal world: not an Esperanto, but rather a simple tongue). In this sense, Tolstoy’s conversion signifies the abandonment of literature in favor of a more advanced form of verbal practice. At some point, he understood that the form and content of “pure” language were ineffable. The gospels he wrote are proof of his attempt to use a new language (he studied Aramaic, Greek, and Hebrew and wrote them in Russian). Tolstoy was in search of a perfect language and considered literature (Shakespeare included) to be a corrupted version of that attempt. From some indications in his Diaries, it is possible to confirm that Tolstoy was in search of an impossible language (a “never-never-language”), an absolutely hypothetical language. A language as removed from what we use to write as was the simple and uncorrupted life (a “never-never-land”) from the corrupt society in which he was fated to live. In that way, a line could be established between the first and second Tolstoy, between ostranenie and engagement. Abandoning literature was an extraordinary sacrifice (“To write is easy, to not write is what is difficult,” Tolstoy said), but he had still not reached the level of sacrifice that he must achieve. In that way, Tolstoy’s works propose the theory that pure language postulates a reality (does not only refer to it), and therefore it can be claimed that the world this language must represent is an ideal world, postulated, which language can create. And what language is that? (prayer). And what world is that? (the peasant world). He sought, then, a language in a natural state (a natural state of language), and he sought it beneath the stunning mask of ordinary language. It lay in some place deep beneath the surface of everyday language, but he never found it. And he reached the conclusion that it was not there where he could find it. He thought, first, that a natural way of living was necessary, that pure language would spring forth from that way of life.

  Friday, September 17

  Series E. I am writing here now because I am disoriented, and these notes are like a map that I sketch, trying to follow the most direct route to an unknown place. Bad or good, with my usual slowness, I am writing the novel with energy, at the very limit of my abilities, settled into what I call the “psychological frontier of society.” I send back messages and news from that place but also suffer the consequences of a prolonged stay in an inhospitable no-man’s-land. I don’t know whether the effort of my search for concentration is justified. If the story advances toward the void and opens new paths to me, I can’t even consider the possibility of failure to be a loss.

  To the dissatisfaction born of unaccomplished plans, of unachieved expectations, must be added social demands. For example, my newly realized participation in
the leadership of Los Libros, which means both a political gamble and an agreement to travel to Córdoba, which I can no longer postpone. I could trust in my capacity for work, in my good economic situation, and think: I have many projects (as a publisher and director of a magazine) that I can carry out without neglecting my personal work. Being in the action, inside of reality, is one of the many things I have always sought. In summary, I earn my living by reading and am present in the world without being forced to publish according to the publishing market’s rhythms of visibility. My intellectual situation demands rigor and effort. My passion for literature makes me think that, in effect, I am in no position to withstand so much exposure.

  “Money turns the lives of men into fate,” Karl Marx. This line gives a good definition of the pathos of the detective novel.

  Tuesday, September 21

  I return home, where Manuel Puig is waiting for me; he’s about to go to Europe, obsessed with the translations of his books, which are untranslatable because of his oral style and the effects of David’s thesis on “the generation of ’66” (Viñas names it that after the year of Onganía’s dictatorship, since he divides literature into periods with sequences directly defined by political events), which he characterizes as depoliticized (a trivial cliché that has been taken up in Spain and France to characterize the new Argentine writers), also worried because the mafia of the Boom forgets about Manuel and raises up Bryce Echenique. Anyway, he has his novel number III almost ready (a detective story about the artistic world of Buenos Aires in the era of Di Tella and the legitimizing power of Primera Plana). His position as a writer transforms him, for me, into another one of my “body doubles” (as they call the anonymous actors who replace the stars in dangerous movie scenes, inserting their bodies without recognition), and he provokes deep worry and envy in me.

  Wednesday 22

  I go back to the idea of writing a family novel based on the stories and myths that circulate in my house. Many characters and many plots, I have to find an ironic tone to tell that epic. Curiously, when I am making some notes, I can’t remember the name of Luisa, one of my mother’s sisters who was married to Gustavo, a failure of a man, close to the conservative caudillos. Among the women who told stories in my house she was the only one who died whose funeral I didn’t attend. Perhaps I should set aside everything I’m doing to write the family saga, my own, with the stories I know better than anyone else.

  Those stories are the material of my dreams and have settled into the depths of my life. They are rumors, clear situations, unforgettable characters that I’ve buried in my subconscious with its melodramatic structure of great passions and great crises. “I know no better advisor in art than the subconscious,” says Puig.

  Thursday 23

  A failed meeting with Haroldo Conti, who arrives late, by which point I had set up an appointment with Osvaldo Tcherkaski. Anyway, Haroldo takes the time to tell me the storyline of his next novel with the Príncipe Patagón, ailing León, and Raymundo writing letters to his dear Lu. As always, Haroldo has a great feeling for telling stories about underdogs, common people who resist and always have some illusion that sustains them, but now I fear that he may have added to it the tyrannical lyricism of magical realism, García Márquez’s rhetoric of using poetic situations as a manipulated escape to a new reality in the rural world. Then I have dinner with Osvaldo, who tells me about his trip to Madrid to interview Perón while insisting on talking about my novel as though it were already written.

  Thursday 30

  Meetings with Luna, who talks about Córdoba and the fluctuations of his ever-changing enthusiasm. Discussions at Tiempo Contemporáneo about the project of publishing Sartre’s Flaubert, hundreds and hundreds of pages of turbulent prose that require readers who are either addicted or condemned to read that book.

  Summary of a short season in hell. My pessimism: doubts about the novel I’ve been working on for years, still stuck on the situation of the confinement of the criminals, surrounded by the police in an apartment in the center of Montevideo. I’m unable to maintain the tone because the structure leads to nothing more than a long short story. I’ll have to open up the story to what happens beforehand: the plan for the robbery, the attack on the bank truck, the violent escape, how they break their agreement with the police and escape to Uruguay with all of the money. A casual incident with a policeman forces them to flee, and they lose the contact who was going to guarantee them passage into Brazil. They get an apartment with the help of a streetwalker one of them picks up. But the place is burned, and the police surround it. I don’t like what I’ve written so far; it is disorganized and confusing.

  Friday, October 1

  Fantasies of escape, of spending the summer on Haroldo Conti’s island in the Río Tigre and finishing the novel there, as though my problem were geographical, and I only had to change locations.

  Let’s take a look at yesterday. I got up at ten in the morning, as I always do these days, had a cup of black coffee, and sat down to work. I ate lunch alone because Julia had gone to the College, fried myself a steak and ate it with a salad that was already prepared. When Julia came back I went to Los Libros, where I found Carlos and Marcelo arguing about Borges. At Tiempo Contemporáneo we made progress on the project of publishing Sartre’s Flaubert; we’re going to entrust Patricio Canto with the translation. I went back to Los Libros to look for Schmucler. We had a coffee, talking about television and its effects, always digressing, and then we walked to La Paz together, where Gusmán was waiting for me, hoping to see a short story published in Casa de las Américas, and we talked about Conti, who has grown stagnant and has been repeating himself since Southeaster, about Díaz G.’s project, how he won’t publish his volume of short stories and is dropping the story he’s been working on (more than fifty pages) because he doesn’t like it. He wants to make some money before he goes back to writing. Later, at home, I met Andrés and ate dinner with him and Graciela and Ricardo N. I insisted on the plan to rent Haroldo’s island in the Tigre. And we didn’t go to the theater because Julia has a damn midterm to study for.

  Analyzing Guerrero Marthineitz’s very influential radio program: dialogism, folklore, politics in support of Lanusse in the specifics, proof of a new form of politics based on journalists as shapers of opinion (replacing the intellectuals).

  Thursday, October 7

  Last night a new catastrophe, a violent (recorded) argument with Kaplan, Jitrik, León, and others. They all set themselves against me as soon as I questioned the autonomy of literature, or rather, the illusion of autonomy in literature. The classic premature reaction of the liberal left, which considers culture as a neutral field of abstract positions. Any discussion of the concrete conditions of intellectual work makes them unite in defense of their personal smallholdings. They’re accustomed to arguing with Peronists and defending high culture, but they’re not prepared to face an avant-garde strategy that seeks to intervene on art’s relationship to society (and not the reverse: the way in which society is viewed in art), or rather, the function of art in society.

  Short Stories

  1. Suicides: the father who fails.

  2. Pavese: the woman who refuses to see him.

  3. The jeweler: he carries a revolver.

  4. Mousy Benítez, told as a reconstruction.

  Friday 8

  I excitedly come across my thesis and notes on Borges. All the same, I’m still in the gray area, an effect of yesterday’s argument with the group of intellectuals from the left in Nuevos Aires. I separate myself from them in the same way that I separate and distance myself from the writers of my generation. My way of defining the public figure of the writer leaves me alone (proof that I’m right), but I’m still stuck on yesterday’s argument, which was very violent. Some sentences come back to me, situations, I come up with answers that I should have given. Distance between what I want to do and what I really can do.

  X Series. I see Elías S., always intelligent, similar to Jose
́ Sazbón, with several simultaneous conflicts against reality; he tells me about his fantasy to sell books door-to-door in Córdoba. The discord of political practice, militancy is always difficult for an intellectual.

  I know of no other heroes than these anonymous friends who change their ways of life and put themselves at the service of the revolution.

  Saturday 9

  I go in circles around the empty house. Julia is in La Plata with her daughter, and I go down the street, as far as Corrientes, people walk from one side to the other, it is Saturday night, they are enjoying themselves. I am alone in the world, I think. I need to go into a bookshop to confirm which books are there and that there are readers who buy them; you can flip through them, always the same titles, reviewed twenty times in a week. They are real objects, and so it’s possible to think that it makes sense for you to waste your life on them. And so I go into the grand used bookshops, Dávalos or Hernández, where you can always hear protest songs and there are crowds of young people from the left. A single glance is enough to check whether any new books have come in from Spain or Mexico, the only ones that can surprise me. Then I go back home and heat up some coffee.