The Diaries of Emilio Renzi- Formative Years

by Ricardo Piglia

  Sunday

  In Mar del Plata the theaters stay active out of season, and to attract the public they show three different movies every day at reduced prices. I take the bus, see one at Gran Mar on Colón Avenue at two in the afternoon, another in Ópera on Calle Independencia at four, another at Ocean on Luro at six, another at Atlantic at eight, and another at ten at the Belgian Theater, on the same corner as our house. I spend all my time at theaters from Monday to Friday, as if I were a madman who had been deprived of movies, a beggar who just wants to sit quietly in the dark rooms, or a nomadic film fanatic. Saturdays and Sundays the program doesn’t change, so I stay at home. Theater is faster than life, literature is slower.

  Over the course of those weeks I saw: OSS 117, based on the spy novel by Jean Bruce; Barabbas by Alf Sjöberg, based on the novel by Pär Lagerkvist; Behind a Long Wall by Lucas Demare; A Hole in the Head by Frank Capra; The Hidden Fortress by Kurosawa; O.K. Corral by John Sturges; Ugetsu Monogatari by Mizoguchi; The Set-Up by R. Wise; I Vitelloni by Fellini; The Burmese Harp by Ichikawa; Roman Holiday by W. Wyler; Rear Window by Hitchcock; Citizen Kane by Welles; Tiger Bay by J. Lee Thompson; Prawdziwy koniec wielkiej wojny [The Real End of the Great War] by Kawalerowicz; The Quiet Man by John Ford; Picnic by Joshua Logan; Little Fugitive by Morris Engel; Wind Across the Everglades by Nicholas Ray; The Barefoot Contessa by J. Mankiewicz; A Man Escaped by Bresson; The Nights of Cabiria by Fellini; The Informer by John Ford.

  Monday

  At the high school we’re on strike against the repeal of Article 28, which gives free universities the ability to award degrees of professorship. They’re all Catholic. Secular or free.

  Tuesday

  I discover that the greatest elegance of style depends on the invisible precision of prepositional constructions. According to my mother, Arlt always messes up. Defects are virtues, I tell her. The inverse is true, says my mother, as long as you “drive” at the speed limit and stay consistent. I spend the afternoon at home inventing phrases. The knock made my binoculars fall to the floor. The postman had one of those noses, the end of which always seems to be on the point of dripping. Not only did my father find success without knowing it, but it was also useless for his life. Elena was horrified by the murky water. She and her sister were horrified at the filthiness of the pernicious puddle.

  Thursday

  The school is still taken over. I spend the night in the chemistry classroom, watching over Calle Hipólito Yrigoyen. No police or Tacuaras of the Catholic right wing can be seen. We sleep in the hallways, some drink yerba maté, there is discussion going on all the time. Weapons I didn’t see—slingshots over there, Molotov cocktails. The girls are with us. What do those gorillas believe? asks Elena (another Elena), buxom, with braids, legs like a goddess, wearing a tartan skirt with a large safety pin just at the height of her groin.

  Saturday

  I went over to Julio’s house. We discuss Secular versus Free. What Secular? he says. The Russian shit? I’m a skeptical freethinker, he says. A contradiction, I say. Well, I’m an anarchist then, and what’s more I think there’s some higher power in the universe. Ah, well, I say, an esoteric anarchist. We listen to The Student Prince, by Mario Lanza. We like operettas. Alejandra Achipenko will lend us The Threepenny Opera by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill sung by Lotte Lenya. In the afternoon, at the theater with Julio and Jorge, we saw The Cranes Are Flying by M. Kalatozov—Russian, Walt Disney style but with soldiers returning from the war.

  Wednesday

  I went to school and refused to go up to the flag. In French class, the professor lent me Sartre’s Nausea. I read it halfway through, all in one go, after classes, in the bar. What stands out is the scene with the door knocker. Roquentin watches it as if it were a creature: it is both alive and inanimate. He can’t bring himself to touch it.

  Sunday

  Steve takes an interest when he learns that my father is a doctor and has been to prison. Only someone who has been in prison can speak of sicknesses, he says. He wants my father to be his personal doctor. They start up a fantastic conversation about alcohol. Incidentally, says my father, everything that has been written about the drink is ridiculous. You have to start at the beginning again. Drinking is a serious activity and has always been associated with philosophy. Someone who drinks, Steve says, is trying to dissolve an obsession. You must first define the extent of the obsession, says my father. There is nothing more beautiful and unsettling than a fixed idea. Motionless, constrained, an axis, a magnetic pole, a psychic field of forces that attracts and devours everything it encounters. Have you ever seen a magnetized light? Steve asks. It swallows up all the insects that approach it, treats them as if they were made of iron. I have seen a butterfly fly ceaselessly in the same place until it dies of exhaustion, my father says. Everyone speaks of obsessions, says Steve, but no one explains them quite as they are. Obsession builds itself up, says my father. I have seen obsessions build up like castles of sand. One incident alone is enough to alter our lives drastically. An incident or a person, says my father, the kind where we can’t distinguish whether our lives have changed for good or bad. The structure of a paradox, Steve says, an incident that is doubled or doubtful in its being. It marks us, but it is morally ambiguous. People move toward the future, my father says, off-center, disoriented, off the road they followed in the past. An amputation, says my father, of the sense of orientation. Obsession makes us lose our sense of time, you confuse the past with remorse.

  Prison is a factory for stories, my father says. Time and again, they all tell the same tales. What they have done before, but most of all what they are going to do. They listen to one another, compassionately. What is important is the narration, no matter if the story is impossible or if no one believes it. The opposite of the art of the novel, says Steve, which is founded on the hope of converting its readers into believers.

  You would have to be outside of the world of the prison, my father says, to be interested in the prisoners’ stories. But those stories are intended precisely for the others who share the prison. They also differ from the art of the novel in that way, Steve says; the personal stories must be told only to strangers and unknown people.

  Someone does something that no one understands, an act that exceeds everyone’s experiences. That act does not last, has the pure quality of life, is not narrative but is the only thing that it makes sense to narrate.

  In the high school, on strike since Wednesday, all are coming and going, furious over Frondizi’s (unexpected?) attack on Article 28 against the public school, bastion of the liberal past. A kind of insult to Sarmiento and the other founding fathers, which none of us seem willing to tolerate. Where did this decision come from? From a pretense of “modernization,” which has always been the argument of the right wing in Argentina. A way of burying a culture and making another, more “realistic,” more “modern,” and, above all, more cynical.

  Friday

  Last night I argued with a communist and Julio until two in the morning. The communist, an industrial student, kindhearted, rejects all art that does not come from or go to the people. And who decides where the people go? I say. Julio dodges the question; it’s all the same to him, he’s a nihilist. I didn’t do anything in particular, just wrote to Elena (the one from back there). The other one, the one from here, is Helena with an H.

  ‌3

  First Love

  I fell in love for the first time when I was twelve years old. In the middle of class, a girl with red hair appeared, and the teacher presented her as a new student. She stood at the side of the blackboard and was called (or is called) Clara Schultz. I remember nothing of the following weeks, but I know that we had fallen in love and were trying to hide it because we were children and knew that we wanted something impossible. Some memories still hurt me. The others stared at us in line and she turned redder and redder, and I learned what it was to suffer the complicity of fools. When school got out I would fight with kids from the fifth and sixth grad
es who followed her to throw thistles in her hair, because she wore it loose, down to her waist. One afternoon I came home so beaten up that my mother thought I’d gone crazy or had been gripped by a suicidal mania. I could tell no one what I was feeling and appeared sullen and humiliated, as though I was always exhausted. We wrote each other letters, even though we barely knew how to write. I remember an unsteady succession of ecstasy and desperation; I remember that she was serious and passionate and that she never smiled, perhaps because she knew the future. I have no photographs, only her memory, but in every woman I’ve loved there has been something of Clara. She left as she came, unexpectedly, before the end of the year. One afternoon she did something heroic and broke all the rules and came running onto the boys’ courtyard to tell me they were taking her away. I carry the image of the two of us in the middle of the black flagstones and the sarcastic circle of eyes that watched us. Her father was a municipal inspector or a bank manager, and they were transferring him to Sierra de la Ventana. I remember the horror caused in me by the image of a mountain range that was also a prison. That was why she had come at the start of the year and that, perhaps, was why she had loved me. The pain was so great that I managed to remember my mother saying that if you loved someone you had to put a mirror on your pillow, because if you saw her sleeping reflection you would marry her. And at night, when everyone in the house had gone to sleep, I walked barefoot to the patio out back and took down the mirror that my dad used to shave in the morning. It was a square mirror, with a frame of brown wood, hung from a nail in the wall by a small chain. I slept in intervals, trying to see her reflection sleeping next to me, and sometimes I imagined I saw her at the edge of the mirror. One night many years later, I dreamed that I dreamed of her in the mirror. I saw her just as she had been as a girl, with her red hair and serious eyes. I was different, but she was the same and came toward me as if she were my daughter.

  ‌4

  Second Diary (1959–1960)

  November 2, 1959

  We go to the sea while summer still has yet to begin; there is no time like the end of spring, when the dark days of winter have gone and the beach lies empty. I always go to La Perla, take Independencia straight all the way to the coast. I became friends with Roque, an ex coastguard, a retired lifesaver who keeps coming to the beach and watching to make sure no one is in danger. He has a slight limp and totters a bit when he walks, but when he’s in the water he swims like a dolphin, graceful and fast. “We should live in the water,” he tells me, and muses on this for a while. “We came from there, and sooner or later we’re going to go back to living in the oceans.”

  He runs an empty hotel, which stands on a hill, facing the park, a great building painted in blue: Hotel del Mar. I went to visit him a couple times; there are rooms upon rooms, unoccupied, down the length of a hallway. He sleeps in different beds—so that the rooms stay aerated, he says. He always keeps a portable Spica radio with him and listens to it all the time. He tells me that he was a singer in his younger days. He shows me a card with him dressed as a gaucho, wearing a sombrero and plucking a guitar; above, in the left corner, there is a little Argentine flag. The inscription reads, “Agustín Peco, National Singer.” This was in the forties, when they had “live numbers” in the movie theaters, and artists from a variety of genres entertained the public from the stage in the interval between one showing and another. Roque sang the repertoire of Ignacio Corsini, milonga dances, and folk songs with lyrics by Héctor Blomberg, describing the era of General Rosas. One time at the beach, a little drunk after lunch, he sang, under the sun, unaccompanied, “The Barmaid from Santa Lucía,” which is one of my father’s favorite songs.

  The other day I went far out into the sea, and as I was on the way back I got into a riptide and the current wouldn’t let me advance; the high waves before the first breaker threw me out to sea. I wasn’t frightened or anything, but my breath failed me and Roque guided me to the shore with shouts and waves. He did not get into the water, but he helped me make it out by motioning for me to swim diagonally, distancing myself from the line of cold, and to keep moving toward the long jetty. Once I was within range, he dove in and pulled me out, swimming with one arm.

  November 4

  Yesterday a girl, lying on a yellow sailcloth on the empty beach, was watching me. She is from Buenos Aires, came with her mother for a few days. We understood each other immediately. Her name is Lidia; she is beautiful and kind. I kissed her on the staircase leading to the house, where we had sat down together. “Don’t worry, pajarito,” she said to me afterward, as if talking to herself. “No one gets pregnant from a kiss and a hug.”

  Thursday

  I was with Lidia constantly during those days at La Perla; we find each other in the morning and stay together talking until the sun sets and she leaves. She is staying in the Saint James building on Calle Luro. She is intelligent and entertaining. I told her we had come to Mar del Plata to escape from the police because my father was in debt. I could, in that way, speak very openly with her because I was not talking about myself; I am someone else when I am with her (I feel like someone else, a stranger, and that feeling is priceless); I told her I was a writer. That I wanted to be a writer, anyway. She laughs with a cheerful and contagious laughter, and she made me promise to take her to the alumni dance at the Hotel Provincial.

  December

  Those final weeks I spent with Lidia; I introduced her to Roque so that we could go to bed in the empty but furnished and mysterious rooms of the hotel. She left at the end of the month and, before leaving, she said that she loved me, that we had spent unforgettable days together. And then, with an enchanting motion, she brushed her hair from her eyes and told me that she was going to Buenos Aires to get married. I was crushed. She was getting married soon and had come to Mar del Plata in search of an adventure for the final days of her single life. You don’t know my name or who I am; you told me that your name is Emilio and that you are a writer. One lies while infatuated and living out a fleeting adventure. I was paralyzed. She left on Monday and did not let me go to say goodbye to her in the station. I’m going to miss you, she said, and I’m not going to forget you. She was lying. But it doesn’t matter; lies, she told me, make life easier to bear.

  Sunday

  A rendezvous in a bar with tables on the sidewalk, across from the Hotel Nogaró. She, tender and compassionate, tries to find a way to get rid of my pain, without seeing that for me it is a leap into the void, returning home or going to the beach in the afternoons, hidden behind a novel.

  An intense rendezvous with the woman, serious for me and like a game for her. She will be married in March.

  Now as always, I wait for her. “I’ll come back. I’ll call you. Wait for me.” Empty words to alleviate the goodbye. She does not know what this has meant to me. If I look at things indifferently, I say: What can you expect? Unexpected summer passion with the first guy to appear on the empty November beach. Three months before her marriage to an attorney, a friend of her father’s.

  So as not to put her under pressure, I did not ask for her real name or her address in Buenos Aires. Very gracious, but really I didn’t ask because I didn’t want to her say she wouldn’t tell me.

  Wednesday

  Roque laughs when I tell him the story of my romance with Lidia. Women are more fearless than men, they are faithful to what they desire and not concerned with the consequences. Nothing of her was left to me, not even a photograph or a memory. I was fond of the way she would brush her hair from her face with a motion that seemed to illuminate her. I gave her my phone number and she hid the paper inside a powder compact. Strange, but, of course, she doesn’t want her husband to find proof of her adultery.

  “Adultery” is an intriguing word.

  Wednesday

  Things are becoming clear in my other life. By chance I went with the Mar del Plata students to a talk at La Plata, where I understood immediately that this would be my point of escape. They rent cheap rooms in st
udent hostels, and you can eat in the university dining hall for five pesos per meal. Now it is decided that I will go to live in La Plata, but I still do not know what I will do there.

  I bought the three volumes of Sartre’s The Roads to Freedom for two hundred and sixty pesos at the Erasmo bookshop. I went to the courts with Cabello and Dabrosky to watch the Boca Juniors game. I went to the movie theater: Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot. Marilyn Monroe’s body, singing with a tiny banjo in the corridor of the train. Two men disguised as ladies in a band of women.

  Helena (with an H) gave me an Aktemin, an amphetamine that kept me up all night with extraordinary thoughts that I forgot immediately. I’m studying trigonometry.

  I bought new shoes and went out in them to walk down Rivadavia, all self-assured. A half-hour later I started to come to my senses and closed myself up in a theater so as not to think. I saw High Society, a musical.

  A penchant for positive forecasts, blind confidence in the future. I expect to break expectations, to spend the summer in peace.

  Last night I read “The Overcoat” by Gogol (“we all come out of Gogol’s overcoat,” Dostoevsky said) with his tone of rabid orality: unforgettable. But Kafka comes out of there, too: his comical drama revolves around a coat. It is similar to dreams, where an insignificant object—lost, found, glimpsed—produces devastating effects. The minuscule cause creates brutal consequences. A great narrative strategy: events do not matter; their consequences matter. Here, waiting in a public office takes on the fear and excitement of an epic tale.