The Diaries of Emilio Renzi

by Ricardo Piglia

  I go to the publishing office and spend several hours reading and answering letters, sorting through reading reports and magazines with international information about books and translations. Then I stop in Galerna to look at books and kill time, and Sebreli comes in; we study each other cautiously, and finally he approaches. His book about the Anchorenas is about to come out, and he talks about it emphatically, but at the same time he gives off an impression like he’s just gotten out of jail or is about to go back there. He talks about the Trotskyists, the political essayists. “Milcíades Peña plagiarized everything from Nahuel Moreno,” he says. “Nahuel Moreno is sensational, but he doesn’t write anything: he, Ismael Viñas, El Gordo Cooke, and Abelardo Ramos are the only political essayists in this country.” Then, a while later, he talks about Peronism: “The students are always wrong. They were wrong in ’45 and they’re wrong now. Back then they compared Perón to Hitler and now they’re comparing him to Mao Zedong.”

  Earlier I had written a letter to Andrés; if I’m clear about the people I converse with and know what they expect of me, I can be a very effective writer. Virtue or calamity? First of all: knowing the audience and yet not knowing it at the same time. Friends are writer’s audience; beyond that circle, there is darkness.

  David turns up at my place depressed, apocalyptic, as in his best times. He is hung up about a critic from Entre Ríos who accused him in the newspaper El Litoral of being a totalitarian because of his essays. He is also hung up with himself because he has to set up his apartment again after having just organized the one in Cangallo. Loneliness, no doubt, lies at the root of everything. She finds him in the street, tells him that she’s in love with someone else, and he knows he can’t go after her again and feels lost. As he is leaving, he asks me for a thousand pesos even though he’s making a million and a half per month from his play. A clear metaphor, taking something from me since I wouldn’t have dinner with him, like a boy stealing an apple at the fair.

  Thursday 8

  A dream. An altercation with a social democrat taxi driver, we argue, actually there are several of us traveling in the car but I’m the one who confronts him. I feel that I haven’t made it to the root of the argument but, nevertheless, they take me to court a few hours later. Everyone accuses me, even the people who were traveling with me. Someone, a fat guy, says “he’s the one,” and he points at me, saying “both of us are just as fat.” Everything takes place in a courtroom, and I’m convinced that they’re going to sentence me, and then the dream is in color (it’s the first time in my life that I have dreamed in color, at least that I can remember). On the sea, crossing the Mediterranean, there is a party. From one of the boats that have gathered in the place, I see three or four sailors coming toward me, pushing a globe of many colors as they swim. “This is the festival of the cross,” they tell me, “you have to celebrate, it’s like losing your virginity.”

  I stop by Galerna to use the telephone and find Vicente Battista, who now has a beard, and who, as always, laughs uproariously when he has nothing to say. He tells me about a roundtable organized for Nuevos Aires about popular culture and populism. With Getino, Villarreal, Puiggrós, and China Ludmer: monologues, indecision. This makes me remember China so I go over to see her; she’s working on a good project about Onetti and tells me her version of the roundtable, sharing her idea to attempt a dialogue with the Peronists instead of always confronting them at the table in the way that David or Villarreal do. I have to think more about this and decide a strategy. We agree about confrontations and immediate definitions.

  Monday 12

  I write to Andrés and prepare the jacket copy for the Chandler book. In La Plata, they’ve offered me twenty-five hundred pesos for the course to talk once per week for a month. I work at home and David comes over in the middle, furious about Granica. As for me, I go to the publishing office and Centro Editor and manage to get seventy thousand pesos for a variety of work and then get “stuck” with Germán García, over dinner, talking about Lacan and his followers.

  Saturday 17

  I spend two hours at the College of Architecture, first contact between “artists” and writers. The distinction is clear, the difference is that we—the so-called writers—have language as our material. That is the only thing that unites us. The artists are a more varied gang that also includes architects, which is no bad thing. We discussed commitment and practice. This argument is always the same; for me, politics is internal to artistic activity, while most of them think about politics as something toward which they must go. Basically, for the majority of those who were there, the point was to talk constantly about torture and repression, subjects that seem to guarantee an art of denunciation. For my part, I tried to recall some experiences from the avant-garde that were closely connected to determining a specific language for the left’s slogans, newspapers, manifestos, and declarations. We came back by train at four in the morning when today’s papers were being distributed in Retiro. I go to Pippo before sunrise and watch the nocturnal people celebrating, up all night.

  Monday, June 19

  David stops by at eleven in the morning looking for me and makes me get out of bed. I make him come up, he whistles on the balcony while I get dressed, and then he takes a book from the shelf and finally we go down to have breakfast together. We walk down Santa Fe to Coronel Díaz and, in Tolón, after the basics, David asks me: “What are you up to?” I give him a drowsy version of the state of the novel I’m writing and tell him that I’ll probably end up throwing the whole thing in the trash. “You know,” he says after some hesitation, seemingly touched, “from a competitive standpoint, it made me feel satisfied to see that you have limits; I on the other hand am omnipotent.” I saw red and, after that, after a few exchanges of words, I said to him: “Look, old man, let’s leave things here and talk again in ten years. Remember what I’ve said this morning, and pay attention to how each of us has turned out then.” We each went our own way, and I had the feeling that my friendship with David was in danger, at least from my angle.

  Tuesday 20

  Ricardo comes over, and we go to see Boccardo and get tickets to go to the movies tonight. Throughout all of that I show no enthusiasm. I eat a steak at Pippo in front of them while they try to turn back to the subject of the script. On the way back we run into Viñas, tension between him and me. He greets everyone ceremoniously while I stare down to the end of the street, and he talks without pause, trying to find some way out. “Give me a call,” he says to me in an aside as he leaves, trying to affect the pose of a beggar. “Stop by and see me,” I say in my best indifferent tone.

  Some writers who are “politically” reactionary, so to speak, are at the vanguard in everything else, as though their archaic political position afforded them a critical view of the modern world. Examples: Borges, Céline, Pound, and along the same lines but in an opposite political spectrum Brecht and Benjamin. One outlier case is Gombrowicz; I particularly like this quote of his: “Everyone is a writer. The writer does not exist, everyone in the world is a writer, everyone knows how to write. When one writes a letter to his girlfriend, that too is literature. I would go even further: when one converses, when one tells an anecdote, one creates literature, it is always the same thing.”

  Series E. In reality, these diaries should be used in order to search, in the monotonous plot of days, for the turning points, the differences, things that are not repeated, things that persist in themselves beyond habit and are unique, novel, personal. Do such things exist? That is the question of literature.

  Saturday 24

  Tied up with a series of projects. A prologue for Luis Gusmán’s book El frasquito. I have to reread the book so that I can think about what I’m going to write (starting this weekend). A report about the meeting of artists and writers at the College of Architecture to submit to Desacuerdo on Wednesday. A meeting with Germán García to put together the survey on criticism for the special issue of Los Libros; I have to write the int
roduction. Script for B., for the film El atraco, which must be finished before the end of the month. A class for the group of psychoanalysts this coming Thursday about negation in Freud. Starting the course on Borges at the University of La Plata, four classes that begin the day after tomorrow (give them the syllabus). Otherwise, various projects for the publishing house: notes, copy, reading reports, a prologue for Chandler. I make lists because it lets me delude myself, thinking that by making them the things will get done, when in reality all I’m doing is enumerating them.

  Sunday 25

  I meet Julia, taking notes on Gusmán’s book while I wait for her at her house. I eat with her at Pippo, and she tells me about her encounter with David, who seeks her out so that he can cry about our schism.

  Monday 26

  Andrés drags me out of bed in the morning; we have lunch and say goodbye to each other in the mid-afternoon in front of Tribunales. He reads me an excellent story, lyrical, epic, with a Faulknerian tone, long (at some points, we might say, it’s a bit too rhetorical and literary in the bad sense). Then a meeting at the publishing office with the habitual misunderstandings; the Serie Negra is selling twenty-five hundred copies on average and, in spite of that, they’re resistant to expanding it.

  I meet with the group from La Plata, we put together the classes on Borges in exchange for twenty-five thousand pesos. Then I say goodbye to León R. with a certain nostalgia. I meet with Héctor, a good conversation about theater; he’s planning a show in a circus, and I suggest an adaptation of the novel Hormiga Negra by Gutiérrez. After leaving Pippo we go for a coffee at Ramos. David comes in with Daniel Open. Tension, furtive glances. On the way out, I pass in front of him: “Salud, David,” I say, and he looks at my face, solemnly, and stretches out a hand to me. A ceremonial, “significant” handshake. We turn down Corrientes toward Callao, they tease me a couple times. It is Julia, coming from Sciarretta’s class. Next to her, more present than my denial would have given credit for, also bearded, was Pepe. Introductions, greetings. I insist on having a coffee with them, but they refuse because they’re on the way to dinner. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” I say. A situation in a tedious atmosphere that overwhelms me.

  Wednesday 28

  Just now, at four in the morning, with the gas burners lit to stave off the cold, I’m starting to write about Gusmán. First notes center around organizing the “excess” of meaning that the story brings. Everything is stated, and if it seems strange to some, it’s because they lack the context on which it was based.

  All of the difficulty with the prologue for El frasquito lies in the fact that I don’t want to write a “Freudian essay” but rather organize the excess of meaning, showing what literary writing is there.

  Friday, June 30

  Suddenly a clear vision, an epiphany, an unexpected, photographic memory: I see the street, or rather, the sidewalk parallel to the plaza by the cathedral in La Plata. A wall with concrete balconies, a portal with an inner door, trees, the empty plaza on the other side, to my left, and, most unsettling of all, I see myself from behind, walking toward Calle 7. Every time I see myself clearly in a memory, something has happened that I can’t remember, but the image, without saying anything, points to the existence of an event. In the memory, I am concurrently the person recounting the event and its protagonist.

  July 1

  I spend a while working on Borges for the course on Monday and then meet Julia, and chaos is unleashed. Always the same turmoil when she’s there. I head home and run into Juan De Brasi on the way, and I spend three hours with him, none of which I remember. I get home at midnight, and it’s impossible to work, impossible to sleep either. I go out, take the bus, go to Julia’s apartment. She isn’t there. I stare into the void until five in the morning, but she doesn’t come home, so I go back down to the street and return here.

  Sunday 2

  After my Dostoevskian attack last night, I am calmer. I don’t really know what I’m looking for, since I was the one who separated from her. The illusion of a woman who’s always there when I go looking for her. For reasons like these, Raskolnikov kills the money-lender.

  Monday 3

  I find Sazbón and Marcelo Díaz in Galerna; the crisis at Los Libros because of Carlos Altamirano’s article continues. A violent argument on Thursday, Toto travels to La Plata with me, taking precautions in the face of Carlos’s dogmatism. The issue remains unresolved.

  Melancholia on the diagonals of the city. I teach my class, and everything turns out alright. Then we all have a coffee together in the bar at the station. I come back, like so many times before, on the dark bus, an hour and a half of thinking in the same way as ten years ago.

  Tuesday 4

  After some back and forth I write the prologue for Gusmán. A six-page draft titled “El relato fuera de la ley.”

  Saturday 8

  On Thursday an argument about the composition of Los Libros until three in the morning, first at Germán’s house, then at my place. Schmucler decided that Altamirano’s article won’t go out. His “passage” toward Peronism is not explicit and the debate is circular, elliptical. What space does the magazine occupy? The issue remains unresolved; in Peronism, Toto seems to have found the same path as many other intellectuals close to him, basically the group from Pasado y Presente. The general turn toward Peronism is growing immeasurably, and anyone who opposes it is isolated. It would seem that Toto wants the magazine to follow that path.

  On Friday a meeting for Desacuerdo with Roberto C. Maybe I’m too sensitive, but I see traces of political pedantry, and I react. I don’t believe politics should be the thing that directs all spheres of reality. Let’s recall Roberto C.’s behavior at the roundtable of politicians at Philosophy and Letters. The issue has not been resolved and everything stays the way it is at Los Libros, up in the air.

  Sunday 9

  In the afternoon Beatriz comes over and we work on publishing the magazine, pessimistically, sure of failure. Some fantasies about Nené on my part, but who could blame me in the middle of this situation? She suffers from a mimetic impulse, she saw Hiroshima mon amour and got married to a Japanese architect. Then she enrolled herself in a speed-reading course; such is the critic who writes.

  Tuesday 11

  Nothing can happen to me at three in the morning, alone in the city, like a sleepwalker who is losing everything he has, struggling to gain freedom of movement as though he were on another planet.

  Wednesday 12

  I sleep for four hours and then at noon walk in the freezing wind to pay the electricity bill at a bank with a very high ceiling. Then I have lunch at Hermann, alone in the empty room. I live like someone who is carrying out a delicate and secret mission in a foreign country. Unknown, lost among the people, expecting nothing from anyone, learning to survive on his own resources, with no contact with the country that has assigned him the mission, and with the sole objective of carrying out a plan that he only half understands. The life of a spy in enemy territory. That has been my identity—or my conviction in the world—from the beginning, and the signs are here in these notebooks, written in a coded language whose real meaning I alone can understand. Since 1958, so many years ago now, I have persisted in my attempt to build for myself what is usually called a “normal” life. If I resist, that is, if I manage to remember my reflections from those years, I will be able to break free; in the meantime, I’m on a road with no exit.

  “The position of the artist is not wagered on the materials made use of, but on the process of elaboration of those materials,” Sergio Tretyakov. I find this quote in the excellent issue of VH 101 dedicated to the Soviet avant-garde. I find a photo of Tretyakov there, and I take apart the frame that held a photo of Hemingway and put it in on top, a sign of my changes.

  Subject. A gang of superstitious gauchos, gathered around a medicine man who claims to be the son of God, sent by the eternal father to Buenos Aires province; they decide to steal the Virgin of Luján to establish a sanctuary and col
lect donations. They enter the Basilica at night, take it from the altar, put it in the car and drive to the country, and in a forest they take one look at it and then kneel, spellbound. (It would be interesting if the Virgin performed a miracle—for example, stopping the car from starting.)

  Friday 14

  Series E. For almost fifteen years I’ve pursued a writing that I hardly understand sometimes, letting myself be guided by a certain impulse, talking about myself in notebooks with black rubber covers, not really knowing the meaning of what I’m trying to capture. In order to better understand what I’m saying, it’s best for me to try to explain what was (what is), for me, this thing we’ve agreed to call literature.

  Tuesday 25

  At night I return home, and Roberto Jacoby comes over soon after; he’s intelligent, funny, and the conversation flows as it always does when I’m with him. Then I walk around the neighborhood to find a mailbox where I can drop off the letters I’ve written. At home, the electric doorbell rings: David Viñas, aged, white-haired, weighed down, but after some tension, we go back to our cyclical conversations. David tells me about his project of a novel (Pueblada) with a tone like Payró: a soldier in a country town who has a “great love” with a gay barber, and at the end a popular revolution arises. Then he describes his argument with a kid who criticized him for his liberalism during a lecture. As he is leaving, I say: “We have to talk.” He smiles, nods his head: “Didn’t I come?”