The Diaries of Emilio Renzi- Formative Years

by Ricardo Piglia

  [She was too dazzling and too intelligent for anyone to do anything but imitate her. First of all, her girlfriends, who held their cigarettes like her, with disdain, between index finger and thumb; they dressed like her, spoke in the same way. Despite her complex intelligence, Lucía could show a very convincing unaffectedness, which allowed her to do many things that others are unable to do with impunity. The very speed of her understanding seemed completely natural in light of her intense sincerity.]

  Saturday

  “An elegant woman,” my grandfather said today, “sliding a soft hand under my shirt… then I’d get back the memories I’ve lost.” He laughs with his sky-blue eyes. And after a while: “I can only be judged in the context of the idea I have of myself.” He speaks as though continuously translating himself from a forgotten language.

  Monday

  [While Gatsby holds a party and invites Nick, I went with her to the bus station because she was living in City Bell.]

  “I’m thinking about coming to live in La Plata,” she told me, “at my sister’s house.” She was separated, she said. Her husband was still living out in the country.

  After that, we started seeing each other more frequently. We would meet at El Rayo or Modelo; we avoided the bars downtown, passed the night away with friends, talking about things to come. She felt comfortable and happy in that environment. Lucía was the only one who had been born in La Plata; her family had been there since the foundation of the city. We were people passing through, students who lived in boardinghouses, professors who came in from Buenos Aires to teach.

  She came with me at noon and at night to eat in the student dining hall on 1st and 50th, at the Bosque entrance. She got in line and sat at the common table to talk about the Algerian War and Peronism, but her mind always seemed to be elsewhere. Sometimes, when we had to campaign for the elections at the student center, she appeared in her father’s car, a red BMW coupé, very expensive, and we would do our errands in that car and then have to go leave it for her father to pick up at the door of the Jockey Club or at the racetrack entrance.

  We were together all the time, but it was as though nothing was happening. It was not just that she was reserved (or that she lied). There was something she was hiding (something she hid from herself, of course). [For example, it took me a while to realize that she was going to a doctor or that she had stopped going and stopped taking her medicine, according to the husband.] And I found out what I did from what was said or whispered about her in the hallways of the College and in the bars.

  The pills. Equanil. To be impartial, she told me. (“They’ll have to invent Whipinol,” she joked, “so your friends can suffer deeply and be profound.”) Actimin, to stay awake all the time. Antidepressants, antipsychotics… (lithium). Her wedding ring with the black stone of insanity…

  She does not sleep. In bed, she gives herself up as I have never seen anyone give themselves up.

  Weak people make visible the weakness of others.

  [She took large amounts of pills, several per day. Once I noticed that they were antipsychotics.]

  “I don’t need to drink alcohol,” she said. “I’ll stop tomorrow.”

  She liked to retain information and her means of doing so was to share everything that held no importance. She took me to her house, presented me to her sister, her father. She even took me to meet Patricio, her husband (a fool, dressed in the typical suede jacket that country idiots wear). She told me her story many times; her grandfather had been one of the founders of the city.

  “Lucky the streets in La Plata don’t have names,” she said. “If they did, I would see my last name all over the place, and my father’s last name and my mother’s. Instead, they have numbers. They were restrained—oligarchs but calm about it, not like the porteños who only do things so that their names will be put on a plaza. I have, of course, gone off the deep end. The only part of La Plata I like is the racetrack.” It ran in the family; her favorite uncle was a well-known criminal attorney, who had a stud horse and had named him Mate y Venga…

  The symptoms had already started to manifest themselves, in what she herself called the broken cup.

  “Without a handle,” she said.

  One of those little porcelain teacups that has lost its handle and had it glued back on [and you can see the ceramic, white but fit together perfectly, only a groove remaining once you manage to stick it on, though you cannot pick up the cup of tea with that truncated arm].

  “I am broken and glued back together. Cracked. I have to conduct myself carefully.” She moved an arm, as if it were a little wing. “It could fall apart.”

  We are at a table facing the window at Modelo, a pub on Calle 59, spacious and calm, reading The Crack-Up and there, of course, that the metaphor of the broken china appeared. You have to handle the dishes carefully.

  But she had nothing to do with those images of domesticity (silverware, plates, teacups). In those May days, she was always at the student center, buried in discussions, in assemblies. Socialist politics, Peronism, the anarchists from Berisso.

  Friday

  At some point my grandfather stopped sending the letters, kept them in a maintenance chest and dispatched them surreptitiously to his house in Pinerolo, where my grandmother Rosa lived and where my father was born in September of 1915.

  Why? He did not explain it to me; it was a delirium like any other. He had lost his mind but concealed his actions with his brilliant aptitude for keeping up appearances.

  “Some soldiers hid money, others saved ration cards…” he said. “None think they are going to die.”

  One day in Turin, where he was working as an engineer for Fiat after the war had ended, he read in the paper that the Italian government was repatriating soldiers who had enlisted as volunteers in the exterior. He sent five chests to Argentina with the documents and objects that he had confiscated in the post office of the Second Army; no one checked him because he was a veteran and was dressed in his elegant artillery colonel’s uniform.

  [She came with me at noon and at night to eat in the student dining hall on 1st and 50th, at the Bosque entrance. She got in line and sat at the common table to talk about the Algerian War and Peronism, but her mind always seemed to be elsewhere.]

  [She was scathing. I felt injured. The frightening instinct women have for penetrating the masculine comedy.]

  [Relationship between the cracked dish in The Crack-Up and The Golden Bowl by Henry James. The material is not broken, it is only weakened “in fine lines and following its own laws.” A fracture is a fracture and an omen is an omen, it says in James’s novel. “I’m broken, pichón,” said Lucía. “I’m the one who’s cracking… The cracked.”]

  Thursday

  Today at midnight they called us on the phone. They had found my grandfather in Plaza Espora, sitting on a bench, disoriented, with a bag of garbage in his hand. He had gone out, dressed in his pajamas and his hat, but barefoot.

  “I didn’t hear him get up,” says Susy.

  “He isn’t crazy, just really old,” I tell the young nurse who takes him.

  “Calm down, Colonel,” the kid says.

  “I am calm,” he answers, and he turns toward me. “Look, hijo,” he says, “they’ve called me Nono since I was twenty, because I’ve always had white hair.”

  I write about Lucía in the room by the garden, where signs of the past persist: the perfume of jasmines from childhood, a bookcase with the large-format Mister Reeder police novels by Edgar Wallace that I bought in the kiosk at the station, the circular light on the table which comes from my father’s old desk lamp with its flexible arm.

  Saturday

  “Surely my father must have told me once,” said Lucía, “‘Daughter, you have to finish a degree,’ and that’s the reason you see me here, Professor, taking your course, so that I can graduate.”

  This was the way in which, toward the end of the course, Lucía had commented on the beginning of The Great Gatsby. We were in the great
hall of the College of Humanities at La Plata, one afternoon, in the course on American Literature. The professor was Ernesto Rovel; he was always seducing his most rebellious students, and upon hearing Lucía, I thought that she had entered the game.

  Standing on the low stage, to the side of the desk where Rovel sat, Lucía began drawing some diagrams on the chalkboard with the names of characters and arrows showing their relationships.

  “Pay attention to what happens with the women in the novel,” she continued. “With Daisy, with Myrtle Wilson—they’re a disaster, lost, stereotyped, they’re killed or they’re crazy or they’re ridiculous little chiquilinas.”

  Rovel looked at her, smoking, his face heavy, alcoholic, skeptical.

  “The women…” he interrupted her, and let the ellipsis hang in the air. “You are referring to the use of feminine pronouns in the book. There are no women in a novel, only words.”

  “Oh, if literature were made of words alone…” said Lucía, and could not find the words to continue and chose to smile with a fierce, stunning smile. “The men broadcast those idiotic suggestions to one another and the women are the ones who cut the leash.” She paused; now it was Rovel who smiled.

  “But Gatsby doesn’t follow any advice.”

  “For that reason, he’s a hero.”

  “Gatsby only tries to change the past. He wants to go back and pick up his life where he left it when he started to go wrong…” said Rovel. “Very well, Reynal,” he said then. “You can sit down. But tell me,” he looked at her ironically, “what other advice from your father you think you’ve lived out.”

  She stopped on the stage.

  “‘Daughter, you need to learn English,’ I guess he must have told me. ‘You have to study philosophy, you have to be a socialist.’ I say that,” she said, “because those are the things that I did do…”

  There was an instant of silence, as though something intimate had crossed into the classroom. Rovel and Lucía looked at each other for a moment, and then she—serene, unhurried—stepped down from the podium and came to sit next to me. Everything had stopped because Lucía was too beautiful and too dazzling, and even Rovel paused as if a light had interfered with the air.

  Lucía knew the art of interruption; just by moving her hand, she could produce a shifting of bodies. [She was like the heroine in a novel, brought along and carried by the movement of the plot. She was not, of course, the heroine of any novel, though I would have liked her to be, so as to change her fate.]

  She was older than us, had left and returned to the College many times. She had been married at seventeen to a distant relative, older than her, a cousin with lands in Pehuajó. She had had a daughter and lived in City Bell, and all of us walked around her as though she had a music of her own.

  “How was I?” she asked me.

  “First-class.”

  She smiled and lit a cigarette. Her hand trembled slightly, and she supported it with the other, as though not caring to hide her nervousness. Rovel had paused on the stage and was looking over some notecards.

  “Next time,” he said, “we are going to look at ‘Absolution,’ the short story Fitzgerald wrote as a prologue to Gatsby.”

  The students crowded around, asked him for clarifications. Rovel got down from the podium and approached us.

  “Do you want to get a coffee?” he said, speaking for everyone to hear but looking at her. “I have a while before the train.”

  “Yes, let’s go,” said Lucía.

  There were five or six of us, and Vicky, who was with me at that time, went off ahead. We went down Calle 6 and walked to the París station.

  Rovel lived in Buenos Aires and traveled back on the last train of the night. He was one of those men of a certain age who endure until the next generation because they are impervious to experience. He had published articles in Sur and was a good translator; his versions of Robert Lowell’s poetry are still legendary. “Better than Girri’s,” he himself would say. I remember how, on that night, he lifted the book I had on the table with disdain.

  “They read Gramsci instead of Montale. Are you sociologists?” He repeated the title of the book aloud and added, “There’s nothing more melancholic than the national way of living.”

  “Except the national literature,” said Vicky.

  The table was covered with cups of coffee, and Rovel had a second whiskey in his hand. Lucía had ordered a gin.

  “With ice, querido,” she said to the waiter. And then she looked at Rovel. “Excuse me, Professor, you criticize what we’re reading now… but you’re still stuck on what was in fashion when you were a student. Or wasn’t all that formalist horseshit of New Criticism a fad?” she finished with a sweet smile.

  “You’re married to a rancher, no?”

  “Doctor.”

  “Then say, ‘formalist disease,’” laughed Rovel.

  I turned sour immediately. In that time, I was unable to think about the nature of other people’s relationships because I only worried about the attitudes that others had toward me—and it upset me that Rovel knew she was married. How did he know she was married? That distracted me from the theories and jokes mingling around the table.

  “The rich are different from you and me,” Fitzgerald had written. “Yes, they have more money,” Hemingway had answered. According to Rovel, Hemingway’s response proved he was not a novelist.

  “Without social difference, there are no good novels,” he concluded.

  “But difference… what difference?” said the freckled, neurasthenic girl who studied classical languages.

  “Just name-dropping,” said Lucía. “Lists of places, clothing brands, jewelry, polo horses, European cars, luxury hotels. Experience as an advertisement.”

  Conversations at the dusk of a turbulent day. [We spoke like that back then] in the all-night bars, and Rovel entertained himself and provoked us; he was a cynic, the only person who—for the last two years—had been thinking the things that everyone else is starting to think now. And Lucía confronted him; she was a bit out of place herself, but out of place in such a way that she made all of us seem out of place.

  She was sitting in front of him and leaned in to ask him for a light. She held the cigarette between index finger and thumb—a certain affectation, which the other girls started to copy as soon as they saw her.

  Lucía was playing with Rovel (I then thought), but not playing with me (I think now), and between us was Vicky, a redhead from Entre Ríos, petite and energetic, whom I liked very much and whom I probably would have married if Lucía had not crossed through. Vicky was intelligent, optimistic, serene, direct, and always ready to experiment with any of the sexual fantasies that could have occurred to her (or to me). But one never stays [we never stay] with the person who makes sense for them, or else life would be much easier. Vicky was so bored that night in the bar and so tired of Rovel’s affected enthusiasm that she drifted to sleep, and he looked at her, uneasy.

  “But that girl fell asleep,” he said.

  Vicky awoke immediately and smiled, without defending herself or anything like that, simply opened her eyes and said, “I have literary narcolepsy, Professor; I fall asleep when I don’t like the style of the conversation.”

  Vicky was like that; she laughed at herself and at all of us, but after that night she wanted to have nothing to do with me.

  We were in the bar until Rovel started putting away his cigarettes and called for the waiter. We went out to the street in a group. The night was crisp, the lights from Plaza Rocha illuminated the trees, and the lindens had already bloomed. Vicky had held back and was lighting a cigarette against the wall, taking care that the wind did not put out the flame. Lucía was beside Rovel.

  “Will you come to the station with me?” he said, speaking for all of us to hear but looking at her. “I have some time before the train leaves.”

  Lucía pulled herself to me, her body warm.

  “We have to go,” she said, and took my hand. Then she sque
ezed herself against me; she was a little shorter and had an agile and firm body.

  Vicky came closer, and seeing us she turned around and moved away without saying anything, without saying goodbye.

  [Through the glass of the lit window of the bookshop in the corner of the post office I saw Vicky leaving, calmly, forcefully, decidedly. Further off, I saw Rovel, surrounded by some students following him to the station.]

  And that was the night that Lucía came to bed with me for the first time.

  Sunday

  My grandfather is sitting in the sunlight once again and in a low voice keeps singing the same song, like a mantra (“Bella ciao, bella ciao, ciao…”).

  “I don’t believe I’ll go back to living out in the country,” he tells me now. “I don’t like it here, but I don’t want to live in the country any longer. Last night I got lost [‘went astray,’ he says]. Don’t think that I don’t realize… I have lapses,” he says, and touches his forehead. “How is your father doing? I don’t talk to him either. I don’t like doctors, and I don’t like direct children either, you know; I prefer indirect children. Your father spends his time giving me medical advice. Can you believe it? He gives me advice, gives me free samples he carries in his pockets; the medical visitors present them to him, that breed of beggars and servants with their briefcases full of samples, tranquilizers, vials of morphine. We didn’t have morphine for injuries; they’d ask you to kill them. These visitors are domestic traffickers. They stop in rural hotels. I’ve seen them in the country, in suits and ties among the farmhouses, traveling salesmen in their rusty cars. He doesn’t know what to say when he’s with me because of that, your father, but he surely knows what I think, and, since he knows, he can’t speak and chooses to give me recommendations as if he weren’t a doctor, but a medical visitor instead,” he laughs. “I take it as an insult… You realize, the worst part was seeing the horses and mules dead, strewn along the side of the road, and the scavenging dogs that ran between barbed-wire fences eating the dead flesh of animals and Christians…”