The Diaries of Emilio Renzi

by Ricardo Piglia

  Sunday

  I can’t find myself inside this luxurious, empty apartment, floating in the terrible world of the city. At three in the morning last night, I stood in the corner with my briefcase, ready to leave. Lunch with José Sazbón, we talk about the translation of Sartre’s Flaubert, which he edited. José, lucid and shy, is humble despite his brilliant potential. A doctoral fellowship in Paris, a guaranteed career as a researcher, etc., free to study for his whole life. By contrast, I see myself up in the air, without a future. Let’s imagine a person who goes along making choices and suddenly suspects he has taken the wrong path, but he doesn’t know how to turn back or where to go.

  Detective genre. Anonymous craftsmen who habitually write under pseudonyms, acutely aware of the market and the price they are paid per written word. Their stories first circulate in cheap magazines and then in books at kiosks. Demand that is not very diversified and undergoes sudden jumps: from the mystery novel to the thriller to the spy series. Often the same writer will write books in a variety of registers under different names, J. H. Chase for example.

  At night in the publishing office, we have a conversation about the complications of publishing Sartre’s monumental Flaubert. We will get it done, but there’s a great deal of difficulty with the translation.

  Monday 7

  A beautiful landscape, the city in light rain, the river in the background. Airplanes taking off from the airfield nearby. The only color that of posters for 7 Up.

  Wednesday 9

  Julia to has started to separate herself from me. She sustains herself as best she can in the midst of this absurd chaos.

  Yet another move, and now I’m in Tristana’s house, closer to civilization.

  Yesterday David signals me from a bar across from San Martín as I am passing on the way to meet Ricardo at El Foro. Overblown greetings and promises to meet soon. Ricardo and I have lunch on Calle Paraná and walk around the whole city, the French bookshops, Hachette, all of the books double the price of a year ago. At the end, there was a drunk who insulted the waiter, and then he got punched and cried in humiliation.

  Later with David, who has finished the first draft of his work about Dorrego. He leads me off to a room with a view over the rooftops and talks to me, downcast, about his psychotic outburst with Schmucler, blaming himself without conviction.

  Thursday 10

  Well, last night was the end with Julia. I meet her in Galerna and we walk to El Toboso, have dinner, and say goodbye as though we didn’t know each other.

  No one has ever been as alone as a lover saying goodbye forever to the woman he has lived with for five years.

  I sustain myself in the void, not even dreaming of writing or reading. My friends are charitable, and I affect a stoic pose. I meet Ricardo and wait a half hour for him, stunned, dead. I rediscover the exercises that I learned in my youth for how not to think; I hadn’t practiced them in six years. In a while, the predictable conversation continues. The kind of lines like “all relationships end, etc.” Almost without a word, he brings me to his clandestine house, where I have lunch with him and we talk about the political future. Finally we hug, somber.

  I have nowhere to work except for friends’ houses. I have no idea what I can do to get my books without having a run-in with the police.

  Thinking about what is to come weakens me so much that I can only cling to the moment. If I want to avoid spectacle, complaints, it will be best for me to stay shut in alone, waiting for sorrow to pass and become dulled.

  Friday 11

  Aside from matters of passion, I was with Szichman and Germán García yesterday. Germán says that I’m the hinge between Marxism and the avant-garde in Argentina. David reiterated to him that I’m the best essayist of my generation.

  Sunday 13

  I try to erase last night’s dream: the police were in my house and destroyed everything, I regret not having left during carnival. Why are they looking for me? There’s always a motive.

  Wednesday 23

  Series C. Maybe I must ask myself why I’ve stopped writing here in recent days, so full of events, but maybe that is the reason. Maybe I don’t want to “see them” as they are. Last night, for example, with T. until five in the morning, the games I lost. We had dinner in Taormina and, after having a whiskey at El Blasón, sat down in the plaza of Las Heras and then walked through the empty city until dawn, making it to the large house with a thousand rooms on Calle Arenales, where we listened to Schumann and continued drinking alcohol under the Flemish tapestries; I didn’t know what I could do to cut the night short without sleeping with her or at least trying. Today I am still overwhelmed, and I call her and cannot reach her.

  Earlier, dinners and walks with the gang from Los Libros, Germán, Marcelo, and David.

  I’m trying to figure out how to get into the apartment on Calle Sarmiento. At night, or would it be better in the middle of the day?

  Julia and I come and go, carried by the wind. Resolution to live separately. Days without seeing each other and then she appears, beautiful as a stranger, subdued by herself.

  Thursday

  What a time this is, solitary as a cat and lost in strange houses. Surprisingly, waiting on a woman I never would have reconciled with three months ago.

  March 4

  I should have at least tried to record this frenetic period of time day by day: I wrote an article on Brecht in ten days, without my library, lost in this house on Calle Uriburu where the sun hits my face at seven in the morning; along with that, my affair with T., born amid the chaos while Julia was leaving, has started to grow and is now another unresolved issue.

  We went out together several nights in a row to eat dinner, to drink whiskey until four in the morning. Feeling my way around in the darkness, fascinated more and more by her way of being. Finally, on Saturday, February 26, I am lonely and feel so bad that I tell Ricardo about it, having gone to the theater with him, and then I call T.’s house and Julia is there. The three of us playing this ridiculous game. I go out again the next day and stay the night with her until eight in the morning. I accept that the issue revolves around the axis of whether to “tell Julia or not,” as she is her friend. I see T. again the following afternoon, and she actually insists that we continue. At noon on the 27th I run into Julia in Pippo and play her and T.’s game of being “sincere.” But as soon as I say that I’ve been with T. for the last few days, Julia runs out of the restaurant. I try to talk to T., but all of the public phones on Corrientes are out of order.

  I meet David in Ramos at three in the afternoon and then Julia appears, along with T. I go to the Politeama theater and tell T. that I’m going to call her. She can’t look at me and lowers her eyes. “What for?” she asks me. She backs out, will not take it any further, in fact has chosen Julia.

  On March 1 I had a hellish night. “Goodbye” from T. and also distance from Julia; in the morning I go back to Ramos, where Julia has plans to meet David. She comes and tells me that I can’t be with “her friend,” but yes with another woman, etc.

  And so, I kept my distance at Ricardo’s house today; yesterday I met T., who respects the decision and is beginning to understand.

  I walk home along an empty Calle Santa Fe at around four in the morning, with no transportation because of the strike, and suddenly a block of cars shoots around the end of the avenue. When they get closer, I can make out a patroller and two army trucks chasing a Torino: on the corner of Suipacha, twenty meters away from me, they cross in front of the escaping car, forcing it to stop. Men in civilian clothes and soldiers with machine guns step out and make three young people get out with their hands up, vulnerable. I cross toward Charcas trying not get myself involved in the matter and return to the empty house, tangled up in all of my catastrophes.

  As has happened to me at other points in my life, I find Julia’s handwriting when I open this notebook. I want a word, she has written. You knew I would be your first reader, but you didn’t know how astounded I woul
d be when I realized that, in a few years, you would reread the notebook and would really believe what it says, and it’s this astonishment that drives me to the sacrilege of writing in your notebook so that, one day, I will be something more than a vague presence that structures your story. A strange case, this novel in which a character who has been killed off comes back to life and talks back to the author, telling him he didn’t understand how to read my signals, and saying that this dead man was an absurd Dostoevskian who talked about “fantasy,” meaning reunions of those distant adolescent friendships he once cultivated. Maybe one day you’ll begin to remember that, the way I was, I was always too brutal for little emotions, because (with you!) I never wanted to use big words. That’s why I’m trying now to make you understand what you did wrong, that, to me, your relationship with Tristana was too commonplace. For my part, I haven’t been with anyone and, if I had chosen anyone, I would have chosen your brother, or maybe even your father, something a bit more unthinkable because, as you know, that would fit my style better. The rest was as miserable and shameful as your interest in that poor, crazy little millionaire who found a chance to be reborn with the man who had been with her friend. A sad little bourgeois girl whom I helped you to invent because, to stand up in front of you (terrible and brutal child), I needed to exploit someone who believed she was with me. My style lies in actions that are terrible, beautiful, cruel, but a bit more generous.

  March 25

  Finally I return, and for the first time am writing in an apartment on Canning and Santa Fe that I managed to rent a few days ago.

  It’s impossible to write in these tumultuous times. As I read what Julia had written, I once again understood that no one ever says what they should, that everything is a disastrous misunderstanding.

  And yet I still moved forward with the things in my life. I wrote two political articles for Desacuerdo, but I couldn’t write an assessment of these two eternal months when my life changed its course. Where will it go?

  Moving was the hardest thing, a fantasy of the police coming to my hideout; the day before, baskets to carry my books, papers, a chaos that mirrored my soul: old notebooks, photos, shoes, letters. A new chronology. Sitting on the floor, surrounded by all of the objects I’ve managed to accumulate. The next day the electricity in the apartment was shut off, and I lit candles at six in the morning. The incredible feeling of being forced to abandon a place where I’ve been happy. Then, the landlord, who understands the clandestine nature of my move, charges me twenty-five thousand pesos (instead of the fifteen we had agreed on), insinuating that he has to sort things out with the police.

  A feeling that I am moving in leaps, here now in this empty place where I will bring abandoned remnants and settle myself in to survive.

  Tuesday, March 28

  I saw Andrés yesterday, his book has been seized. He hopes to be able to shut himself in for the winter.

  Go back over these impossible months. See what I am capable of.

  March 29

  A meeting for the newspaper Desacuerdo, nothing but good intentions. Oscar proposes that I direct it, but I decline with the politest firmness possible. I listen uncomfortably to the conversational discussions about my merits for the position. In short, I’m unable to accept what I myself have chosen. This legal newspaper, which comes out in the kiosks and discusses the politics of the dictatorship, is my chosen political work, but I can’t devote all of my time to it because all I am is a friend of my friends who have dedicated their lives to politics.

  I see Andrés, ceremonious, weak underneath his aggressive exterior. With each of my friends, there’s always something that separates us.

  There is little to be said about me at the moment, three packages tied up with sisal twine holding my notebooks. I untie them, again find what is written here, and avoid talking about saying goodbye to T.

  A man who finds himself cornered, his face to the wall, realizing that the wall is a mirror.

  April

  I have discovered Charles Ives. A good time to come across this music.

  I’ve been built by certain readings; let’s remember Pavese’s puritanical voluntarism, it’s as though I found in that the written prophesy of my life.

  At night I listen to Ives under the lamp that silhouettes me in a circle of light, alone with this perverse feeling of estrangement that I always confuse with loneliness.

  “What the subject seeks in a prostitute is the phallus of all the other men; it’s the phallus as such, the anonymous phallus,” J. Lacan.

  Tuesday, April 4

  Perhaps I’ve made a mistake yet again (it’s always the same, we always come back to the same place) in choosing solitude as a way of breaking ties. An effect, but of what? Arguing with León, watching television are only weak consolations. I never could escape this obsession in which I live. What I mean is that my absurd argument last night with León left me disoriented because, as always happens in such cases, I’ve discovered some incompetence, weak in a way that no one knows better than I.

  “The style of sentiments is the Baroque,” G. Rosolato.

  None of what I’ve written in the last five years is working; I just reread drafts of my novel with a fatal indifference. It tells the story of a gang of criminals who attack a bank truck in collusion with the police and then escape to Montevideo, breaking their agreement. A few days later, because of a betrayal, they are traced to a downtown apartment. They decide to hold out until morning even though they know it will be impossible for them to make it out alive if they don’t give in earlier. They make this heroic, unexpected decision, which in fact turns them—at least for me—into tragic heroes. To complete the circle, at dawn, when they can no longer defend themselves, they decide to burn the five hundred thousand dollars from the robbery. I’ve put together the story here so that something will survive of a novel that I’m going to throw out the window (if I can bring myself to do it).

  Now I’m listening to Alban Berg; musicians are doing the same thing as Joyce. I’m sitting in a leather armchair, facing the window with a view over the river, in a curious state of mind, euphoric to realize that I’ve managed to find a place to live in spite of everything. A feeling of unexpected faithfulness to decisions made at age eighteen, which are also being validated in this dark time as I test my limits.

  Saturday, April 8

  Arguments at the newspaper Desacuerdo, casual meetings with friends at the Galerna bookshop, and I went to Los Libros; the magazine just came out on Monday. I came back home, worked on the notes for Desacuerdo, dropped them in the mailbox, walked around Plaza Lavalle, and ended up having dinner alone at Dorá.

  Sunday 9

  Opening the package with original versions of the novel I’ve been working on for three years is enough to make me feel a sort of deadly chill. I think about setting it aside, doing something else, or starting it over.

  Wednesday 12

  I sleep for ten hours, the same as in my best times. Before that I walked around the city all day trying to get some air and ended up watching Murmur of the Heart by Louis Malle in the theater.

  Police sirens while I write. The ERP killed Sallustro, the director of Fiat, when he was discovered by the police. An ERP-FAR unit killed General J. C. Sánchez, Lanusse’s second-in-command in the Gran Acuerdo political plan. He was the strategist for the anti-guerrilla struggle.

  Saturday 15

  I’m reading biographies (C. Baker on Hemingway, E. Jones on Freud) the way people read escapist novels as an attempt to get out of their own heads.

  Yesterday I visit David and find him doing well, tense at the prospect of the Lisandro premiere and yet calm, as though he found a way to relax himself. The possibility of economically securing this year and the next calms him. Germán is with him and we argue about Peronism, amicably. They say Perón is going to establish himself in Europe in order to confront the United States. A kind of pro-free trade version of the struggle against monopolies. For his part, David is very attracted
to populism and, presented with the fait accompli, thinks with the same mechanism of fascination. Realistic criteria; what is present and visible forces him to fantasize about a reality that the left is far from attaining. Later, Germán and I walk around the city, he wants to work on “the institution” of psychoanalysis because the Mannonis spent a week talking about it during their tour through Buenos Aires.

  Wednesday 19

  X Series. I meet with Rubén K., intelligent, wise. With him there is no need to insist on my confidence, which vanishes as soon as he leaves anyway.

  “Theatre takes place all the time wherever one is and art simply facilitates persuading one this is the case,” John Cage.

  A meeting for the magazine; Schmucler goes on about Perón, I grow bored.

  April 24

  Both here and everywhere else I’m writing less and less. Some incidents happened in the last few days. David, for his part, premiered Lisandro on Friday to quite a mixed audience. We’re all there, everyone on the cultural left and the liberal right are also there. A kind of internal X-ray of David. The mise-en-scène is good, adding to the outrageous “sacramental” quality, and for what it loses in political potency, it gains in rhythm and sculptural quality. Applause at the end, and David goes on stage to receive the gratification he needs.