Friday
A walk with Toño. A sad role, the young lover of his friend’s wife, a friend who is, on top of it all, his mother’s first cousin. Advice, vague praise. “Alcira is sure life will be very good to you.” The two of us looked indecisively at one another, playing the game. He suddenly began telling me about all of the women he “decided” not to sleep with because he “couldn’t have done it, couldn’t have done it” (he repeated the phrase twice, trying to seem sincere). Women who would call him over the phone to be met with his iron refusal. At times, we are inside the melodrama. “You know, I left everything for Alcira.” We were on the corner of Luro and Hipólito Yrigoyen, and he invited me to have a coffee. We sat down at Ambos Mundos. A tense and murky atmosphere settled around us, the confidences and sincerity “between men” (he, who could be my father). He spoke to me as though he were past the events, was talking about Alcira, about the ways she could help him if I was a friend (to her). “The thing is, she isn’t my friend. You know she never believes anything I tell her.” I thought I had gone crazy, that Antonio was about to murder me but first wanted to see how far I would go. A double metaphor for that tense reality, in which I entertained myself—as always—by revising my best performances. I said nothing because I had nothing to say that was not an insult, and I left without meeting the Colombian wholesaler who, according to Toño, was going to take him and his wife to live like kings in New York.
Best of all is that, after our deranged walk together, I will write a letter to Alcira asking how far the game will go. We left. He paid (he was ill, but ill from some illness I never knew). “Fine, I’ll pay next time,” I told him. Everything seemed to hold another meaning; any sentence I said could be interpreted as a slight. I think the problem is too much for me, I write to her; I love this man and respect him, and if it were someone else… But if it were someone else, you wouldn’t have done anything.
A strange nightmare last night, in which I was struggling to make it on time to a place where they were going to arrest me. At night, I went for a drink with Horacio, my cousin. He is my brother. And he knows about the turmoil and the family epic as well as I do. I told him about everything that was happening with Antonio; he looked at me calmly, unsurprised, as though what I was saying was something commonplace. He simply reminded me that he, Antonio, had to face the entire family because of Alcira, a lady of the night (according to the aunts) who had a son with a man who was in prison. At first, Toño boasted about his conquest, but he later fell in love with her, abandoned everything he had always wanted, and went to live with her and her son in Mar del Plata, protected by my father, who found him a place to set up his jewelry workshop. Seen in that light, my part in the story looked even worse. But that was not what Horacio wanted to say to me; instead, he pointed out that Toño was not exactly a clean character himself. “You know, he always was a womanizer,” as though he meant to point out that, in fact, it was Antonio who was controlling the situation. Then we changed topics and remembered the good days of childhood and the bad days of adolescence (so nearby).
Eternal recurrence, in Nietzsche, is an attempt to establish an immanent ethics. You would live each day of your life cautiously if you knew that it would be repeated eternally. He inverts Kant’s categorical imperative and says to make each day into a perfect day because you will repeat each day infinitely. It concerns a moral postulate: it does not matter whether Nietzsche does or does not believe in eternal recurrence; what matters is that the risk of repetition would obligate us to be careful in how we live each moment. Freud, following Nietzsche, based the death drive on repetition—the absence of memory. He betrayed Nietzsche, who had based the drive for life—the pure will to power—on eternal recurrence. Apart from that, Nietzsche posits memory as the site of blame and remorse upon which Christian morality is based—a morality of slaves, according to him. Nietzsche’s subject has no memory and therefore knows no blame; he lives in the present, convinced that each consummated action will be repeated in the future, circularly.
Wednesday
Alcira called me and we met at Hotel del Bosque. We spent the afternoon together. She assured me that she had never loved Toño and had told him so. She knows I am returning to La Plata in a couple months. “The summer can be endless,” she said. She sent her son off to camp, and so, from what she said, she is as free as in her youth.
Thursday
Toño called me on the phone and we met at the Montecarlo. He was calm, told me that she couldn’t adjust to living outside Buenos Aires and that she still might decide to return. “Why are you telling me these things?” I asked. He smiled. “Because she fills your mind, you are the only friend she has here.” We were silent for a while and then parted. I think about her, and my chest hurts. I have to see her tomorrow and tell her I am leaving.
Tuesday
A frenzy renewed by family invasion, the Maggi clan’s plot to rescue Antonio from his difficult situation. None of them say what is actually going on, and if they discuss it in front of me it is because they do not think I am involved in the problem. The only one who seems informed is my mother. The other night, when I was leaving to go see her, my mother said she was waiting because she wanted to tell me something. I know her style: she never says anything directly, everything is implicit. She talked about the grief that my return to La Plata causes her (as if I had gone off to the Congo), and, after beating about the bush for a while, she said, as though we had been talking about nothing else, “Better if you don’t go. You know Antonio is in Buenos Aires…” She looked at me in such a discerning way that I stayed with her. She seems to perceive, to read my thoughts. We do not speak any further about the issue. My mother began playing a very difficult solitaire with English cards and I helped her get through it.
The family is supportive as long as you share the common space. Very good management of the presence and operation of the tribe’s subjects, which always paints the absent one as guilty. Constant tribunals, summary judgments, conclusive truths. But my mother has a moral guideline that I admire. She never judges anyone who is a member of the family, or rather, she always absolves and understands anyone, provided they belong to the clan. For example, if there were a serial killer in my family, my mother would say, “Well, he always was an anxious boy.” I learned from her that narrators must never judge the characters in their stories. And for my mother, and for her brothers and sisters, it is essential to go back, again and again, to telling the family stories. It is impossible for me to synthesize all of the stories accumulated from the tribe’s many witnesses. But perhaps it is from there, deep down—the clear water—that all of my books issue forth. For example, Marcelo, who fell in love with a woman he met as a dance partner, a way also to forget the specter of his first wife, a fragile and neurotic woman who died without seeing darkness because she slept for her whole life with the light on the nightstand lit. A woman whom death canonized with a motion symmetrical to the rejection of the intruder, to whom all of the women in the clan—except for my mother—have given the cold shoulder. Or I myself, for example, had begun a triangular relationship with the wife of my heroic distant uncle, Antonio, who left everything for the call girl who immediately betrayed him with his closest friend. So that I, too, have come to be a (minor) figure in the family saga.
Therefore, the story of Alcira, a girl of the night, as Toño called her, who married her nevertheless (maybe because of that) and who has been condemned by the furies, including his own sweet mother, and who received help from Ida and my father and moved to the city so that she might, as they say, initiate a secret relationship with her husband’s nephew (who is the one writing the story).
Tuesday
I went out with Toño, and we walked around the city until sunrise among unsteady tourists dreaming of winning big at the casino. We sat down at a table in the Montecarlo, where Antonio seems like the owner, and gradually an assorted and fascinating ensemble of men and women of the night approached his table. Of course, Toño p
lays games by initiating me into life’s truths without ever mentioning the detail that I have been sleeping with his wife for almost a month. Last night, along with one of the casino’s croupiers, they invented an infallible trick. It was almost two in the morning, so there were only two hours left to play in the casino, but all of us in the bar with Antonio followed him. He paid the admission from his cut, waited for the bellhop to get me a rental suit and tie so that I could go in “dressed like the people.” (I had to show my national identification papers so they could see that I was older than eighteen.) We went to a heavy table at the back where they were playing baccarat. Antonio gave someone cash to get a seat and then sat at the table and started playing hard, following both his intuition and “scientific” plays, as he would say. By four in the morning he had won four hundred thousand pesos. He gave tips to all the employees at the casino and left like a king, accompanied by his procession, and we went to wait for morning in the bars along the boulevard, sitting under the parasols of tables in the open air to watch the sun rise over the sea, drinking champagne.
He was writing down these slightly imaginary versions of his life, Renzi told me, and at the same time reflecting in the notebooks, or rather, trying to think about the experience of being captive to passion. And so his history with Alcira began, from what he had recorded in his notes.
January 8, 1962
A great meeting at home to celebrate the holidays and also the arrival of Antonio and his wife Alcira, who came to live in Mar del Plata, along with her little son Camilo, escaping from Buenos Aires and the condemnation of the family; my father helped them, supportive as he always was toward expelled members of the Maggi clan. We were there at the party, at home, and I went up to my room for a brief escape and was still there when Alcira, who must be thirty and is beautiful, with very black hair and white skin, appeared at the edge of the stairway and looked at me with moist eyes and a smile on her lips, as though she had something to tell me. Her smile was incredible, a little suggestive I think, looking back, but in that moment I thought she had come up to look out on the night from the terrace. As I stood there next to her, she took my hand and pressed it to her chest, my hand between her breasts, and said, referring to her heart, “See how it beats.”
We kissed, and I was excited and slightly confused because there were always people on the terrace on this night, watching the fireworks burst in the sky. We had seen each other very rarely. I had come to Mar del Plata a month before and went to their house and spent several days with Antonio, who is devastated and has not adapted to the change of place. He had lost everything, his contacts in the jewelry stores of Buenos Aires, his place as head craftsman in the Ricciardi workshop, and had moved here with her to start over. “You’re just like Dante when he was young.” Dante is her ex-husband, a prisoner in Sierra Chica, and that was why, she said, she “fancied” me. Because I was like him (I always seem to be like someone else).
We began an affair that lasted the whole summer, Emilio summarized, and was important for me because she was a very worldly woman, with a slightly cynical and cruel side that fascinated me. We would get together anywhere—in the bathroom at their house, say, while Antonio polished his jewelry and listened to music on the radio in the attic where he had set up his workbench. It excited her, I realized, the sensation of danger, the imminence and risk, because we could have been discovered at any time. She would touch me with her bare feet under the table, with Antonio right beside her. He had given up everything for her, met her while she was a working girl and for months had paid her to sleep with him. And he had fallen in love and brought her to his friends and family but had been condemned, and now she, placing her life in jeopardy, was sleeping with her husband’s nephew. I was always astonished at women’s audacity in gambling everything for passion or a whim, without taking into account the consequences of their actions. And I realized, with her, that it was precisely this risking of everything for a clandestine relationship that made her feel alive (as she would tell me), because, for her, to live was to be in danger.
In that time, apart from my parallel lives, I also found a friend with whom I would undergo many decisive trials during those years of learning and (emotional) education. I was advancing smoothly in my degree, and in the following year, 1963, I found work as teaching assistant in two subjects and, for the first time, began earning my own living and even—maybe as the result of having a job—lived with a Uruguayan woman, Inés, which I have called my “first marriage,” although of course not because we married or anything of the kind, only because I established a stable relationship for several years with a woman.
10
Diary 1963
July 10
I am worried about my tendency to speak about myself as though I were divided, were two people. An internal voice that soliloquizes and digresses, a sort of soundtrack that always accompanies me and sometimes filters into what I am reading or what I write here. Yesterday, I thought I would have to keep two separate notebooks, A and B. A would contain the events, the incidents, and B the secret thoughts, the silent voice. For example, today on the tram I started thinking that I had to get off and escape, far from here; I have the wages from my grandfather in my pocket, could go to Uruguay on the ship Vapor de la Carrera, rent a room in a cheap hotel on 18 de Julio, and get lost forever, never having to be held accountable to anyone for the things I do or stop doing. None of it was as coherent as what I have just written; in the thought, there was no syntax, only blocks of words. For example, run away, a few days, Hotel Artigas, a girl from Uruguay, low class, an Asian girl, Calle 18 de Julio, CX8 Sarandí, Montevideo, from the press box at Centenario stadium. Would it mean I’m crazy?
Instead, I attend the “Argentine History 101” class. Advancement without an exam, nothing to miss, and I’ll have to write a monograph at the end.
July 12
With her, the girl with the dark hair, Graciela Suárez—very Joycean. I started seducing her, or trying to seduce her, never remembering, never realizing that she was going out with my friend Yosho, and when we had our first date and I took her to Adrogué to meet my grandfather and to sleep together, she asked me, “How are we going to tell Yosho now?” And only then did I realize that I had snatched away a friend’s woman. I call that the suicidal act; I see nothing, see only the object of my desire.
Maybe there is a time when one does not retreat but grows stronger, lives with back turned to the exterior world. As though we were on a train traveling to La Pampa—I say La Pampa because there is nothing to see on the plains; I have sometimes thought that I must write a novel without descriptions, and that would suffice to create the velocity that I rarely achieve in my stories.
Saturday, August 3
I am going to a meeting for the magazine. These days I have forgotten to record anything, or maybe it was a precaution or a way to continue my clandestine politics: in the movement, I am editorial secretary for Liberación magazine. Led by José Speroni, a unionist who attempted “enterism” within Peronism and reached the level of secretary-general. There is also Carlos Astrada, the greatest Argentine philosopher, a disciple of Heidegger.
August 6
It is worth noting the experience of temporality that arises from any history book you stop to analyze. The classic problems of all narration appear: the preambles required to explain events taking place in the present and to reconstruct their conditions. On the other hand, the need to describe events that transpire in the same time but in different places. Finally, the decision to pause the reconstruction of events in order to develop some hypotheses. Analytical interpolations form a part of the story. A book of history is always pure. These ideas derive from my experience of narrating some events that took place in Banda Oriental based on certain documents presented by the historian Pivel Devoto. Even a history as abstract as that of the transition from feudalism to capitalism can be seen as the epic tale of a cosmic catastrophe.
Thursday, August 8
A beau
tiful sentence written by Sartre in Being and Nothingness, p. 630: “Thus death is not my possibility of no longer realizing a presence in the world but rather an always possible nihilation of my possibles which is outside my possibilities.”
Friday 9
In a bar on Calle Suipacha.
My best writing so far has arisen from a minor autobiographical reality transformed into a different story, wherein the lived experience only persists in the form of the feelings and emotions expressed in the story.
Monday 12
In the days when men—and sometimes women as well—were armed, social relationships were friendlier because the risk of conflict was excessive. In nineteenth-century Argentina, duels were common events. A bad mood or misunderstanding would transform suddenly into drama.
A beautiful poem from the popular tradition: “Dispossessed of dagger by the badges, he remained confined to dance the milonga, and was sad.” The way of telling how the man was disarmed by the police is based on a prison language and an almost inscrutable slang (although the verb that opens the poem is a wise and perfectly fitting choice: “dispossessed” is perhaps the best verb that could be employed to remove any subjectivity from the event being narrated). From then on, the poem adopts a classical form: the malefactor does not enter the dance but is confined (“remained confined”); the scene is described with a word that condenses multiple meanings (“milonga”) and then closes with a melancholy and beautiful conclusion. Constructed with a suspended verb (“remained”), which seems to sustain the man’s sorrow through the night (because he is no longer armed).
The Diaries of Emilio Renzi- Formative Years Page 16