The Diaries of Emilio Renzi- Formative Years

by Ricardo Piglia

  His life could be narrated following that sequence of meetings or any similar one. The films he had watched, the people he was with, what he did when he left the theater—he had recorded everything in an obsessive manner, incomprehensible and foolish, with detailed and dated descriptions, in his laborious handwriting. Everything was notated in what he had now decided to call his archives: the women he had lived with or the ones with whom he’d spent a night (or a week), the classes that he took notes for, the long-distance phone calls, annotations, signs. Wasn’t it incredible? His habits, his vices, his own words. Nothing of his interior life, just facts, actions, places, circumstances that, once repeated, created the illusion of a life. An action, a gesture that persists and reappears, saying more than everything that I could ever say about myself.

  In El Cervatillo, the bar where he settled in the evening, at a corner table beside the window, he had placed his cards, a folder, and a couple of books, Painter’s Proust and The Opposing Self by Lionel Trilling, and to the side a book with a black cover, a novel from the looks of it, with quotes of praise from Stephen King and Richard Ford in red print.

  But he had realized he must start with the leftovers, with what had not been written, to move toward things that had not been recorded but persisted and twinkled in his memory like dying lights. Minuscule events that had mysteriously survived the nighttime of forgetting. They are visions, flashes sent from the past, images that endure, isolated, without frames, without context, cut loose, and we can’t forget them, right? Renzi laughed to himself. Right, he thought, and he watched the waiter crossing between the tables. Another glass of white? he asked. He ordered a Fendant de Sion… it was the wine Joyce drank, a dry wine, which had made him go blind. Joyce called it the Archduchess, for the amber color and because he drank it like someone—like Leopold Bloom—sinfully drinking the golden nectar of a nubile aristocrat girl bent low, crouching, over an eager Irish face. Renzi came to this bar—which used to be called La Casa Suiza—because, in the cool air of the cellars, they kept several cases of this Joycean wine. And with his customary pedantry he quoted, in a low voice, the paragraph from Finnegans celebrating that ambrosia…

  The diary was an X-ray of his spirit, of the involuntary construction of his spirit, to put it better, he said, and paused. He didn’t believe in such nonsense (with emphasis), but he liked to think that his life was made up of small incidents. In this way, he could finally begin to think about an autobiography. One scene and then another and another, no? It would be a serialized autobiography, a serial life… From this multiplicity of senseless fragments, he had started to follow a line, to reconstruct the series of books, The defining books of my life, he said. Not the ones he had written, but rather those he had read… How I Read One of My Books could be the title of my autobiography (if I ever wrote it).

  The defining books of my life, then, are not simply all of the ones I have read but rather those for which I clearly remember the setting and the moment in which I read them. If I can remember the circumstances under which I was with a book, that proves to me that it was decisive. They are not necessarily the best or the ones that have influenced me most; they are the ones that have left a mark. I am going to follow this mnemonic criterion, as if I had no more than these images to reconstruct my experience. A book only has an intimate quality in memory if I see myself reading it. I am outside, at a distance, and I see myself as though I were someone else (always younger). Because of this, I think perhaps, now, that image of myself reading on the threshold of my childhood home is the first in a series, and here is where I will begin my autobiography.

  Of course I remember these scenes after having written my books, and therefore we could call them the prehistory of a personal imagination. Why, after all, do we apply ourselves to writing? Well, because we have read before… The cause doesn’t matter, of course, but the effect does. More than a few should repent, myself for one, but in any bar in the city, in any McDonald’s there’s a fool who, in spite of everything, wants to write… Really, he doesn’t want to write: he wants to be a writer and wants to be read… A writer is self-appointed, he self-promotes at the flea market, but why does this position occur to him?

  Delusion is a perfect state. It is not an error; it cannot be confused with a mistake, which is involuntary. It is a deliberate construction conceived to deceive the very person who has constructed it. A pure state, maybe the purest of all the states that exist. Delusion, like a private novel, like a future autobiography.

  At first, he declared after a pause, we are like Valéry’s Monsieur Teste: we cultivate nonempirical literature. A secret art whose form will not allow itself to be discovered. We imagine what we are trying to do and live under that delusion… In short, these stories are what everyone tells themselves in order to survive. Thoughts not to be understood by strangers. But is a private fiction possible? Or must there be two? Sometimes perfect moments only have the one who experiences them for a witness. We can call this murmur—illusory, ideal, uncertain—our personal history.

  I remember where I was, for example, when I read Hemingway’s stories. I had gone to the Ómnibus terminal to say goodbye to Vicky, who was my girlfriend at the time, and on the side of the platform, in a glass-enclosed gallery, on a bargain table, I found a used copy of the Penguin edition of In Our Time. How that book happened to end up there I don’t know; maybe a traveler had sold it, an Englishman with an explorer’s hat and a backpack traveling south had exchanged it, perhaps, for a Michelin guide of Patagonia—who can say? The truth is I went back home with the book, threw myself down in an armchair, and began to read. I went on and on as the light changed, and finished it almost in darkness, late in the evening, illuminated by the pale reflection of the light from the street that entered through the window’s thin curtains. I had not moved, had not wanted to get up to light the lamp because I was afraid of breaking the spell of that prose. First conclusion: in order to read, one must learn to keep still.

  The first reading, the notion, he stressed, of first reading is unforgettable because it is unrepeatable and unique, but its epiphanic quality does not depend on the content of the book but on the emotion that remains fixed in memory. The associations with childhood, for example, in the Combray section in Swann’s Way; Proust returns to the forgotten landscape of his childhood home, transformed once more into a boy, and revives memories of the places and the delightful hours dedicated to reading, from morning to the moment he went to bed. Such a discovery is associated with innocence and childhood but lingers beyond them. It lingers longer than childhood, he repeated; the image lingers with the aura of discovery, at any age.

  Argentine writers always say, well, the defining books of my life, let’s see, the Divine Comedy, of course, the Odyssey, Petrarch’s sonnets, Livy’s History of Rome. They navigate these deep ancient waters, but I am not referring to the importance of these books, I refer simply to the lived impression that is there, now, picked up without a return address, without a date, in memory. The value of reading does not depend on the book in itself but on the emotions associated with the act of reading. And often I attribute things to those books that really belong to the passion of that time (which I have now forgotten).

  What is fixed in memory is not the content of memory but rather its form. I am not interested in what can obscure the image, I am interested only in the visual intensity that persists in time like a scar. I would like to recount my life by tracing these scenes, like a man tracing the markings on a map in order to guide himself through an unknown city and orient himself within the chaotic multiplicity of streets, not really knowing where he wants to go. In reality, he only wants to get to know that city, not to arrive at a certain place, to mingle with the whirlwind of its traffic so that one day he may remember something of this place. (“In that city, the names of streets reference the martyrs who died defending their faith in primitive Christianity, and as I walked down those alleyways, I imagined a city, this one perhaps, with streets that bore the n
ames of the activists who died fighting for socialism, for example,” he said.) I was there, I crossed a bridge over the canals to the zoo. It was a light spring afternoon, and I sat on a bench to watch the polar bears’ circular pacing. That, for me, is constructing a memory, being open and surprised by the fleeting gleam of a reminiscence.

  Primary School Number 1 in Adrogué. A lecture class. Miss Molinari has created a sort of competition: we read aloud, and whoever makes a mistake is eliminated. The tournament of these readings has begun. I see myself in the kitchen at home, said Renzi, the night before, studying “reading.” Why am I in the kitchen? Maybe my mother is helping me with the lesson, but I don’t see her in my memory: I see the table, the white light, the tiled wall. The book has illustrations, I see it, and I still know the first sentence I was reading by heart despite the enormous distance: “Ships arrive at the coast, bearing fruits from beyond…” The fruits from beyond, the ships that arrive at the coast. It seems like Conrad. What book was that? The year was 1946.

  “We learn to read before we learn to write, and women are the ones who teach us to read.”

  It is my birthday. Natalia, a friend of my grandfather’s, Italian, has recently arrived. Her husband died “on the front…” Beautiful, sophisticated, she smokes blond “American” cigarettes, speaks with my grandfather in Italian (Piedmontese, really), about the war, I imagine. As a present, she brings me Heart by Edmondo de Amicis. I can clearly remember the yellow book from the Robin Hood collection. We are on the patio of the house, there is a canopy, she is wearing a white dress and hands me the book with a smile. She says something affectionate to me that I don’t quite understand, in a deep accent, with those burning red lips.

  What struck me in that novel (which I have not read again) was the story of the “little Florentine scribe.” The father works as a copyist, the money is not enough, the boy gets up in the night, when all are sleeping, and without anyone seeing him copies in place of his father, imitating his writing as well as he can. What fixed the scene in my memory, thought Renzi, was the weight of this unwitnessed goodness, no one knowing that he is the one writing. The invisible nocturnal writer: he moves in the daytime as if sleepwalking.

  There is a series with the figure of the copyist, one who reads foreign texts by writing: it is the prehistory of the modern author. And there are many imaginary amanuenses in the course of history who have lingered until today: Bartleby, Melville’s spectral scrivener; Nemo, the copyist without an identity, whose name means “Nothing,” from Dickens’s Bleak House; Flaubert’s François Bouvard and his friend Juste Pécuchet; Shem (the Penman), the delusional scribe who mixes up letters in Finnegans Wake; Pierre Menard, faithful transcriber of Don Quixote. Wasn’t copying the first exercise in “personal” writing in school? Copying came before dictation and before “composition” (theme: The defining books of my life).I study English with Miss Jackson, the widow of an upper-level railway worker from the south, who lives alone in a two-story house and has published two or three translations of Hudson in La Prensa. She gives us private lessons. (She earned her living in this way, because the pension, she complained, comes to her reluctantly.) The first thing we read with her was Hudson’s book about the birds in La Plata. One afternoon she took us to visit Los Veinticinco Ombúes, the author’s birthplace, which was a few kilometers away from Adrogué. We rode on bicycles; she, in her pretty skirts, seemed to move in profile, as if she were riding a horse sidesaddle, her dark mourning overskirt flapping in the wind. Oh imagination, oh memories, Renzi recited, already slightly drunk by this stage.

  The Englishwoman is nostalgic for London, but most of all for South Africa (Rhodesia, she says), where her husband was for a couple of years. The infinite savanna, the white-faced monkeys, and the pelicans with graceful reddish feet. She showed us photos of her large house built of logs close to the river, beside a pier; we had to describe what we saw in English.

  She was a kind woman, but irascible and not at all conventional. If one of us passed wind (sorry), she would make us stand in line and smelled our arses. One by one until she discovered the culprit, who was immediately led into the courtyard by an ear. It seemed like a scene from Dickens, a sudden change of tone in a Muriel Spark novel. I still have the old edition of Birds of La Plata, with notes written in the margins by Miss Jackson. A circle surrounds the word “peewee” and beside it, in her diminutive, ant-sized writing, she gave the definition: “A person of short stature.”

  I’m on the train and have the book open on a little table beside the window. I’m reading Jules Verne’s The Children of Captain Grant. I don’t remember how I managed to find this novel, which describes a voyage through Patagonia, just as I was voyaging across the same Patagonia.

  At the end of primary school, my grandfather takes me with him on a long journey to the south. We take a sleeping car, the bunks convert into seats. There is a little sink that folds down from the wall, silver-plated, tiny, with a mirror. In the neighboring compartment, alone, travels Natalia. A sliding door connects the two cabins. We have breakfast and lunch in the dining car—English silverware, silver tureens.

  Natalia caresses my hair in the dizzying corridor of the train. An unforgettable scent comes from her body; she is wearing a flowered sundress and her armpits are unshaven.

  In Verne’s novel, Scottish aristocrat Lord Edward Glenarvan discovers a message in a bottle, thrown into the sea by Harry Grant, captain of the brigantine Britannia, which was shipwrecked two years before. The main difficulty is that the information in the message thrown by the castaways is illegible except for the latitude: 37º South.

  Lord Glenarvan, the children of Captain Grant, and the crew of the yacht Duncan leave for South America, since the partial message suggests Patagonia as the site of the disaster. In the middle of the voyage they discover an unexpected passenger: French geographer Santiago Paganel, who has come aboard by mistake. The expedition circumnavigates the 37º South line and crosses Argentina, exploring Patagonia and much of the region of La Pampa.

  As we crossed an old steel bridge over the Colorado River, I read in the novel that just as Patagonia began an old steel bridge crossed over that mighty river of reddish waters.

  Verne’s book explained to me what I was seeing. The erudite French geographer classified and defined the flora and fauna, the waters, the winds, the geographical phenomena. Popular literature is always educational (that’s why it is popular). Meaning proliferates, everything is explained and made clear. On the other hand, what I saw through the window was arid, windy, scrubland, crushed weeds, volcanic rocks, emptiness. There will always be an insuperable rift between seeing and describing, between life and literature.

  “We must remember,” said Jean Renoir, “that a field of wheat painted by Van Gogh can arouse more emotion than a field of wheat tout court.” It may be so, but it depends what you’re doing in that wheat field…

  At night I leaned out of the window and saw, in the shadows, a car’s headlights on the road, the houses illuminated in the towns passing before me. I heard the slow and anguished sighing of brakes in barely visible stations; the leather curtain, once lifted, revealed a deserted platform, a porter pushing a luggage cart, a circular clock with Roman numerals, until finally the pealing of the bell announced the train’s departure. Then I lit the little light at the head of my bunk and read. My grandfather was in the compartment next door.

  The fleeting vision of Natalia alone, at dawn, digging among glass objects in her nécessaire on the plush gray cloth of her illuminated compartment, is unforgettable.

  We traveled two days and two nights to Zapala and from there took a rental car to a house on a ranch in the desert. We visited one of my grandfather’s friends who had been with him in the First World War. He was a tall and ungainly man, with a burning red face and pale blue eyes. He called my grandfather “the Colonel,” and together they remembered the slippery combat positions on the frozen slopes of Austrian mountains and the interminable battles in the tren
ches. The man had a large mustache, like a Cossack, and was missing his left arm. “This guy,” said my grandfather, “is a hero; he saved me, wounded, from no-man’s-land and lost his arm in the attempt.”

  Several times I’ve thought of going back to the ranch in Patagonia to see the man who had lost his arm. “Well fine,” he might have said to me, “I’m going to tell you the true story of your grandfather in the war.” But I never went and have only isolated traces of that personal war: a photo of my grandfather dressed as a soldier and the papers, books, maps, letters, and notes that he left me as his only inheritance when he died. Nevertheless, sometimes, I can still hear his voice.

  In 1960, 1961, when I was studying in La Plata, I spent a lot of time with my grandfather at the house in Adrogué. He even hired me, which was in a sense both comical and touching. I had no money at the time, and he thought I could help him organize his papers and recreate his experience in the war. He was afraid of losing his memory with age, and he had organized his documents spatially: in one room there were the maps and drawings of the battles (“The Map Room,” he had written on the door); in another, he had the glass cabinets and tables covered with letters from the war; in another, hundreds of books dedicated exclusively to the worldwide conflagration of 1914–1918. He had fought on the Italian front; they’d hit him in the chest, and his friend and companion (whose name I don’t know; my grandfather sometimes called him “the African” because he was born in Sicily) had saved his life at the price of losing an arm. My grandfather had a deep scar on his chest from the war. He spent three months in a hospital tent, and then he was sent to the Second Army’s post office (because he knew English, German, and French) to the section for letters from soldiers killed or missing in action. His work consisted of gathering personal effects—watches, wedding rings, family photos, unsent or half-written letters—and sending them, along with letters of condolence, to their relatives.