The Diaries of Emilio Renzi

by Ricardo Piglia

  Monday, October 11

  I’ve been alone since Friday, Julia is in La Plata, she comes back tonight, perhaps that is the reason for this melancholy, a sadness without substance. I go to Los Libros, meet Carlos Altamirano and Mario Szichman, come back, and walk around the city like a ghost.

  Saturday 16

  X Series. I continue my research into revolutionary politicians’ ways of life. They are professionals; the group decides how much money they will receive every month, which is always a small amount and works as a moral example. They carry out covert activities and divide their lives between a visible surface and a hidden area, about which there is conflicting information. Roberto tries to deny in me what exists in him, for example—and most of all—the will to create a personal work. He pays tribute to the intelligentsia. We talk about my letter with advice about cultural work. According to him, I use irony to keep myself at a distance. In the middle of that, Juan Carlos M. dropped by, so I followed him to his house to get away, and he brought me the Salinger stories I’d loaned him.

  Lucas had stopped by earlier, another professional revolutionary who comes to see me in order to recover something of his previous life. He also has plans to rent a house on the Tigre and spend the summer near me. I’m always on the point of asking him if he’s killed anyone, but it is never the appropriate moment. He talks to me about the past and the future but says nothing about the present, “for security reasons,” I can’t know anything that might place him in danger. He lives with a mixture of ironic skepticism and naïve weakness, fantasizing about a woman who lives two thousand kilometers away, whom he has barely seen once. She is a clandestine militant, and he doesn’t know her name but spent a night with her after a meeting of his organization’s political leadership. He thinks she’s the widow of a dead man, a hero. With force and candor, he builds up a myth of impossible love and, after looking for the weapon he’d hidden under a seat cushion when he came in, he tells me: “I want a dominating woman. To love her, I need to be afraid of leaving her for someone else.”

  Yesterday morning I came to the bar to read the papers and found Beatriz Guido, miserable, dressed in red, recovering from the failure of her novel Escándalos y soledades. “We’re professional writers, not authors of a single book.” She made me think about how it’s true that the great writers that one admires are authors of a single book, that other novelists incessantly produce works that are immediately forgotten, yet they make a living on them. Authors of a single work (even if they have written many others) lie outside the economic circuit. That’s the difference between authors from the nineteenth century (Balzac, Dickens) and those from the twentieth century (Joyce or Musil). Beatriz is the same as always, harried, funny, always gracious to me. She asks me about my novel, and I tell her it’s almost ready.

  Series E. It costs me more and more effort to narrate events and situations in these notebooks; there is a tendency to think before acting, to forget the body and its displacement. And so, what I want to do here is to describe the mental state and history of a captive soul (caught in the nets of language). I have already filled fifty notebooks, in which I have written the series of my encounters with reality.

  Monday, October 18

  David stops by and doesn’t find me. I set a time with him on the phone, and we go for a coffee at the bar on the corner of Tucumán and Uruguay. He was too euphoric when I saw him arrive, greeting Roberto, who joked that he’d gotten fatter. In the bar, I realized that euphoria is David’s way of covering up his angst, a kind of excited theatrical performance in which he plays a character with comedic aspects. A crisis because they rejected the script about Juan Moreira that he’d written for Ayala, fear that they might back out and not produce his play about Lisandro de la Torre. He put aside three million pesos, which gives him a feeling of vertigo. He keeps himself going as best he can, setting himself against Jitrik, clinging to the memory of a lecture that he gave in Bahía Blanca, which was attended by five hundred students. He thinks about his father, a judge in Patagonia, who turned down all bribes. And, conversely, he talks about his age and fears for the future. While he was at my house, he left me a book with a touching inscription and “wellsprings of weakness.”

  I argue with León on the way out of a meeting. First, he tries to make excuses for Jitrik to me. Straight away I try to make him see his own vacillation. “Fear of thinking,” I tell him, and he accepts it. He accepts everything and talks about misunderstandings or recalls that our friendship only progresses because he takes the initiative. I am, according to him, categorical, aggressive, and see no nuance. I’m pleased, I tell him.

  Wednesday 20

  Always arguing with Roberto, who accepts criticism, and we generally agree. The issue is thinking about the place of the culture of the left in politics, rather than thinking about the place of politics in the culture of the left.

  The side entrance—on Calle 50, I think—to the post office in the Galería Rocha, in La Plata. I had to go up a staircase that led to the telephone office, from where I sent out telegrams notifying students that they had passed and giving them their grades (which were almost all tens).

  Thursday 21

  Restlessness pursues me as though I could never overcome it. It is “that damned feeling of anguish” that Roberto Arlt speaks of, a dangerous relationship with the future and its alternatives. Within me we are many (though the expression may seem strange): there is one who covers himself up like a thief in order to seize any certainty. Someone I can’t overcome, an enemy who shows me the fragility of my certainties and erases the force of reason, which is one of the last allies on which I place my trust.

  Again, I talk to Haroldo on the phone; I’ve created the myth of my journey to the island. Everyone treats me as though I were going to go to Havana. I think: that’s why they call me. I think: I have to write to Retamar and make my position on Cuba clear. I also think: I don’t want to go; I’d rather not go. Stay and finish the novel I’m writing once and for all.

  Sunday 24

  Only Brecht’s prose saves me from the tension of this unease inside, a sort of restless catalepsy. Maybe that’s what is hell for me: paralyzed, unable to move, but not peaceful and calm, instead uneasy, anxious, always on the point of leaping to one side. I cling to some Brechtian maxims (the way Alonso Quijano would cling to the novel of chivalry to forget reality), for example: “Do not bind yourself to the good times past but to the bad times present,” Brecht says, and I add: “Nor to the bad times yet to come.”

  Subject. A short story about the history of Blanco, married to the daughter of the mayor of the city, and R., married to the daughter of the president of the republic. Both are handsome, fair-faced, rather similar physically, blond, refined, artists of the left and nationalists respectively. The upstart who ascends by seducing the daughter of a powerful man. A Stendhal atmosphere. Here, the hero—a kind of Julien Sorel and Fabrizio del Dongo—was not fascinated by Napoleon as a model for audacity but rather by Perón as an astute negotiator. Stories that will end badly, if my novelistic intuition is working well.

  Wednesday 27

  Lots of news. The main thing was the intervention of the leftist unions of SITRAC-SITRAM, in Córdoba, the city occupied by the army. David brings me a document to sign. Amid the series of political events, I try to return to the novel. I have a fantasy of escaping to the Tigre and spending the whole summer on Haroldo’s island.

  Julia’s birthday; we go to the woods of Palermo, walk in the sunlight, eat chorizo sandwiches beneath the trees arranged in a grid beside the river. We take photos together next to the lake with a street photographer who has an old box camera. I read a book about Salinger, sitting on the grass, my back against a tree.

  Sunday, October 31

  Several meetings with David, who is obsessed with Ricardo Monti’s play at the Payró. “A populist avalanche,” he calls it.

  Wednesday, November 3

  The story of Nacha, Julia’s friend. Rather schizoph
renic, she attempts suicide twice, unsuccessfully, but putting herself at risk. She wanted to go back to her first husband, whom she has been separated from for years. Before that she had broken up with her boyfriend, who hit her and broke her nose on the night she left. She is in the hospital with her face disfigured and bandaged, aching and under the effects of ether. He ex-husband looks after her and then literally rapes her in the hospital bed that morning. Days later, a sort of intellectual working-class guy with a goatee “picks her up.” He invades her house, which is “luxurious” (Nacha’s father is a general and has a lot of family wealth), along with his minions. Julia finds them there on Sunday: all gather, they talk about the objects, the paintings and decorations of the place while drinking whiskey. Julia leaves, and Nacha finishes telling the story of that night. She goes down to buy a bottle of whiskey, and “the one who broke her nose” sees her, the one she left because he was inflexible, jealous, and he starts calling her on the phone. Eventually the ex-husband stands guard outside, and, when someone opens the downstairs door to leave, he goes up and finds her in the apartment with the whole working-class gang. It seems like a nouvelle by Salinger.

  Many discussions at Los Libros, the positions will have to be imposed by force.

  Friday 5

  I set out for the house on the Tigre with Haroldo, we drive to the boat station and then, at the rowing club, Haroldo rents a boat and we go along the river together to his place on the island. He shows me a copy of his novel En vida published by Seix Barral. An impression of being in another world, the Delta has a magic of its own. I prepare to spend the night on the island.

  Saturday 6

  I get up very early and walk around the place. The shop owned by Tito, a rower who won the Olympic medal for double sculls with Tranquilo Capozzo; the shop has photos on the walls showing his victories and pages from the newspapers celebrating him. He had rowed on the Tigre ever since he was a boy and naturally became a great rower. “It’s natural,” he told me, “country people know how to ride on horseback, and we islanders learn to row before we know how to walk.”

  Little by little I grow accustomed to the place. The swelling of the river isolates us, and we can no longer get to Tito’s shop. I settle myself calmly into the house with many windows through which the sun comes in, mixing with the foliage of the plants that surround the park.

  Sunday 7

  The beating from the motors of boats that cross the river, at the far end among the trees, last night. Early this morning I went downstairs and prepared myself a Nescafé, adding a spray of whipped cream. Now I sit in the open air on the veranda of the house. Yesterday afternoon, on the balcony with a view over the Rama Negra, some slight ideas about what I want to write.

  The language of technicians has always fascinated me. The way they talk about the tides and the river’s changes, the crewmen who live on the Tigre with their little motor boats that carry them to the sand barges on which they cross over to Punta Lara, or the fisherman who give detailed accounts of how they put bait on the hooks and the way the pole should be cast (half squatting to get the buoy to reach near the middle of the river). There’s a certain practical ability in the way they verbalize the action.

  Unfortunately I’m a city man, tired of the Tigre, the mud and mosquitos, and tomorrow I’ll go back home.

  Monday 8

  At noon we literally fled from the island covered with bugs. Tito brought us a rowboat and we crossed the muddy rivers with him to return to the city by train.

  I rediscover all of the problems that prevent me from thinking.

  Thursday, November 11

  Each day I’m further removed from these notebooks and from myself. On top of that, I meet with David, obsessed with Peronism and Sabato. The next day, after thinking about writing a note on the book as a short piece for Los Libros, I was sitting at La Paz reading Steiner’s book on Dostoevsky and Tolstoy when I saw Sabato passing. I had to come and go many times because, even though I gave him time, I found him yet again on my way back home, looking in the shop window on Plaza and Janés. I turned back and crossed. This morning, David was also particularly obsessed with Machi, who presents him with versions of his play Lisandro, which he hopes to premiere at the theater in January.

  Saturday, November 13

  Otherwise, this morning, I’m certain that I’ve failed with the novel I’ve been working on uselessly for four years and am tempted to throw in the trash. A mountain of papers written and rewritten over and over again.

  Completely immersed in Flannery O’Connor’s short stories, I come back to my ideas about writing my family stories.

  Tuesday 16

  I meet David at La Paz and he gives me a copy of Lisandro, his play that just came out. We walk toward the Congreso post office, great agreements in the sunlight, while I send a letter to my mother.

  Thursday 18

  I get lunch with Altamirano and David at the restaurant on the corner and we talk about the possibility of the military government led by Lanusse. David is as obsessed as ever with Perón. Then I find Eduardo Menéndez at Los Libros; I like the calm way he handles his anthropology studies, avoiding, to all appearances, any of the competitive turmoil of academia. I go to Gente magazine with Alberto to offer an advance for José Giovanni, and, after half an hour waiting in a dark room with beautiful women waiting for their turn to be photographed, we leave, fed up. Finally, Francisco tells me about his misfortunes, discouraged at age thirty-two, all of his hopes have died. In the end, he unexpectedly presents me with the book Claves de la Internacional; surprised, I get flustered and don’t know how to respond.

  Saturday 20

  While I am reading and taking erratic notes at a table in La Paz, David appears, standing at the ice-cream shop across from Ramos on Corrientes and Montevideo: he starts to wave at me, dying of laughter, while the cars pass on the street, and he gesticulates, gesturing to himself and pointing at me, happy about the piece on Sabato in La Opinión in which Carlos Tarsitano defended David.

  A while later, drinking a coffee, I tell David my idea to extract a one-hundred-page novella from my unfinished manuscript that I’ve been working on for years. Unexpectedly, he reaffirms the seriousness of my work, one’s right to take time, and talks to me about Ulysses and Adam Buenosayres, and so I embark once again on a project without end.

  Wednesday, November 24

  He turns thirty years old. The virtue of hitting rock bottom and being alone, so far down, with no discomfort other than a shortness of breath. Lost, he walks through the city at the start of summer, dubious, learning to recognize his own limits. I am dead, he says, nothing of me now remains. What has become of his old delusions and blind confidence in the future? Defeated, he has nothing to say; it has all been said before.

  I went out for a walk in the afternoon and saw Inés on Lavalle, near Florida. Nothing there, we are two strangers. Of course, she doesn’t remember that today is my birthday. I remembered “The Sojourner” by Carson McCullers. Sad, etc. LSD, gold from Peru, living in France.

  It is midnight, I am listening to Duke Ellington, I am broken up, I no longer believe, and I expect the worst. A name that echoes inside me. Penny Post, Fournier, Eva.

  Saturday

  Rubén K. comes over, the professional revolutionary, always skillful, always convincing. We have a drink at Ramos and go to the movie theater: Easy Rider, the world of the Beat Generation, the road, rock music, powerful motorcycles crossing the country from east to west.

  Tuesday, November 30

  A stupid joke: the guy from downstairs, who lives on the third floor, complained to the porter because I write on my typewriter at night. That can’t be, I tell him, I don’t write anymore, I wrong. The porter looks at me to see if I’m messing with him, and then I give him two hundred pesos and ask him to tell the downstairs tenant to come see me, if he wants.

  Friday 3

  I spend the afternoon going through the process of renewing my credit so that I can buy an air circu
lator to let me work at night with the window closed in spite of the neighbor, nervous and idiotic.

  Saturday 4

  My true discovery this year has been Bertolt Brecht. I’m very interested in his prose, the way he thinks narratively and constructs plots to deal with multiple issues. He has a “Confucian” side: he likes parables, epigrams, allegories.

  Sunday, December 5

  The strategic discussion today revolves around one issue: is there popular support for the armed struggle? The ones who think so are the armed groups, who above all denounce the State’s repression of popular forces. But the problem is that the political organization of those who act is defined by Peronism, and it’s a delusion to think that Peronism has revolutionary tendencies.

  In La Paz, an effusive guy with a Mephistophelean goatee who shouts out about the virtues of living in the country. He is a photographer and shows landscapes of the province of Buenos Aires to the waiter, who listens to him indifferently. A striking older woman with a hallucinatory look gets hooked on the photographer’s monologue and the two get caught up in a “conversation,” shouting from one table to the other, full of erotic connotations. I, he says, spend three thousand pesos per day, I go to Victoria Plaza, which is the best hotel in Salta, and drink two pitchers of beer.